It’s difficult to imagine the practice of a philosopher without it involving some moments of teaching. Within these moments of teaching it’s difficult to imagine it taking place without, at some point, the philosopher having to offer some kind of account of philosophy. What is philosophy? That might be a bad question, or at least a question liable to too many answers to help us much. Still, some kind of account of philosophy is demanded. What exactly do you think you’re doing if you say you are doing philosophy?
When I try to explain philosophy to a new group of students one of the things I emphasise is that it’s an activity, that it involves argument and reason, that it has tools it uses regularly and that it relies upon texts and the study of texts. Almost without fail, however, there appears the question of progress. The idea of progress in a discipline, of something like an accumulation of more knowledge, of better refined knowledge, comes into play one way of another, usually through a students question. Increasingly over the years I have come to respond to this idea of progress with the idea of conversation. The response takes the form of something like the following claim: with regard to philosophy it is a category mistake to evaluate it in terms of the idea of progress, it is more appropriate to conceive of it in terms of an idea of a ongoing conversation which has moments and dynamics but which has no external goal towards which it aims.
This idea of philosophy as a conversation is not unique by any means, although it may well be quite a conservative image of thinking. What I mean by this is that it is generally encountered as a liberal political idea, almost inherently opposed to any degree of radicalism. For example, in the essay The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind by the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott we find the following definition.
conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure … properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires not forecasts their being assimilated to one another
Voice in the conversation of mankind, in Rationalism in Politics, London 1962, p198-199, available online here.
Here we can see an almost classical liberal ideal world, one in which all questions of power have disappeared in favour of something we might call the liberal ‘image of thought’. This is the world in which conversation is implicitly held out as the most ‘human’ or ‘civilised’ mode of politics, despite its all too obvious mismatch with actually existing political conversation. There is no extrinsic goal, there is the necessity of diversity and there is the absence of ‘assimilation’, all of which produce, supposedly, a respect for the individual within a collective social situation. The radical in me, the part of me that has learnt about suplus value from Marx for example, or the impact of colonialism from Fanon, finds this naive in the extreme, but the part of me that is a philosopher finds something that should be right within this idea. It’s this conflict or tension that I’m thinking about here.
The tension is between two different orders of things. On the one hand there is a tension between the conversational model of philosophy and the conversational ideal of the human. For Oakeshott, for example, conversation is not the model of philosophy but rather the model of the human. Philosophy is, he suggests, “the impulse to study the quality and style of each voice, and to reflect upon the relationship of one voice to another” and “must be counted a parasitic activity; it springs from the conversation, because this is what the philosopher reflects upon, but it makes no specific contribution to it” (ibid, p200). Again an apparent confusion might be suggested, here between what is needed in order todo philosophy and what philosophy does. One of the conditions of philosophical work is close reading and attention to both the said and the unsaid within a work. The unsaid is encountered in rhetoric, style and relationship – how something is said, to whom is it said, in what tone is it said, who is it that is doing the saying – all these issues matter in trying to understand what is being said. To that extent the claim would be that to do philosophy one must study the ‘quality and style’ of a voice and ‘reflect upon the relationshiop of one voice to another’. And yet there is no need for there to be a conversation that pre-exists this reflection, not only because the philosopher can and should reflect upon their own work, but also because much of the time the study is not of conversation but of talk. It might be true that philosophy is parasitic on the existence of talk, but it’s another matter to suggest that talk only exists in conversations. Indeed it might be more likely that conversation itself is parasitic on philosophies reflection on talk.
Talk and conversation are quite distinct. Most of the time human language is in the mode of talk, not conversation. It implicitly and explicitly imposes itself on an audience, often with an extrinsic goal and commonly in an attempt to assimilate the audience. Talk is, to this extent, something like the opposite of conversation as defined, and more importantly it seems that it is prior to conversation, both in practical terms (conversation presupposes a capacity to talk) and in conceptual terms (conversation diverges and is distinct from talk). Talk itself is a curious thing, more than mere vocalisation of common meanings or ‘communication’. Talk is a mode of relationship that is asymetrical and organises itself, when succesful, on the basis of an ear, a listener. Indeed talk becomes most interesting perhaps when the one that hears is at the same time the one that is talking. To hear yourself…
Kant’s great breakthrough is to redefine what it is to know something. In doing so he shifted the activity of philosophy, moving it away from what some might call wild speculation into the ways and things of the world that made up ‘metaphysics’, into a much more restricted world of ‘epistemology’. He is the key figure in a major turn in philosophy, the epistemological turn.
What is this epistemological turn?
It’s a response to a problem. What is the problem? Let’s call it ‘the scandal of philosophy’.
It’s sometimes claimed that philosophy never gets anywhere, that it doesn’t achieve anything. This claim is often one of comparison, comparing the huge achievements that have been obtained through the scientific method to the seeming emptiness of philosophy. The claim often says things like – philosophers keep talking about the same problems, philosophers can never agree on a solution to any problem, philosophers nit-pick and argue over trivialities. Often the basic problem seems to be that there is no way of learning the results of philosophical activity, there’s no-one there to, as it were, give us an answer to the meaning of life, even though philosophers have supposedly been working on this question for two and a half thousand years.
It’s a strange comparison and one that I would reject.
But of course, you would reject it, someone says, you’re a philosopher defending your futile exercise – you’re biased, you’re self-interested, you’re not being honest. There is, no doubt, a position that I speak from, one that, as a philosopher, as someone engaged in philosophical practice, is a position of the ‘insider’. From inside philosophy I claim that philosophical practice is worthwhile, productive, meaningful and even ‘socially useful’, whereas from outside this can easily be dismissed as self-indulgent hubris.
This is not a new issue, a new problem. Today we might find Brian Cox, or before him Stephen Hawking, decrying the uselessness of philosophy. In Kant’s time, however, a similar problem exists. In fact, we might even say that in Socrates time a similar problem exists. It might even be always the case that philosophy appears as a kind of strange and useless, even actively harmful, activity. The contemporary outcry over post-modernism, or relativism, or Derrida, or whatever, is in many ways just another incident in a long history dating back to the accusations of ‘corrupting the youth’ that were levelled against Socrates.
Kant, for example, is sometimes quoted in the following way:
“it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.” (CPR, Bxxxix)
This is in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in a footnote. Quite a long footnote. In fact, a footnote that puts forward an argument that tries to prove the existence of things outside us. Now Kant does hold that there is a scandal to philosophy. A few pages earlier, for example, he speaks explicitly of such a scandal (Bxxiv).
But it’s important to actually put things in context and read what Kant is saying, because there’s something interesting here that is one of the keys to both understanding Kant and to understanding why the Kantian problem – more generally, that is, the philosophical issues which Kant addresses – still plays such a crucial role in modern Western philosophy (to such an extent that modern Western philosophy might be said to be haunted by the ghost of Kant, or to pivot around his centre of gravity). Here is the more interesting point, more interesting that is than merely saying something like “philosophy is a scandal because it can never achieve any answers or results”.
Kant begins from the position that metaphysics is a “remarkable predisposition of our nature” (CPR, Bxxxii). We cannot help but wildly speculate, it is something in us that pushes us beyond experience into making claims about God, or morality, or the true. There is an innate metaphysical urge, a dynamic that pushes us to ask questions that go beyond the world. We are, we might say, born to transcend.
The problem is not in this activity itself, in this desire or urge to go beyond, to transcend, the problem is when philosophers think that this urge can be satisfied by reason, that rational answers to questions such as the existence of God are possible. Kant is direct – the issue is not with the “the great multitude (who are always most worthy of our respect)” (CPR, Bxxxiii) and their desires to go beyond what is in front of them – to find meaning, God, eternity, or souls for example – rather the scandal lies in philosophers who claim to do something that is impossible. Kants’ response is to try and lay out, with as much rigour as possible, exactly what it is that reason can do, and what it can’t. This exercise is logically prior to trying to answer any question. This exercise will produce limits to reason. If there’s a word that is central to Kant, it’s this, limit. What are the limits of reason? What can it do and what can it not do? Put more bluntly, what are the limits to knowledge – what can we know and what can we not know – what is possible, and what is impossible. This, in a nutshell, is the epistemological turn.
Now we have to back up a bit and distinguish two distinct components here – let’s call them the general desire towards metaphysics and the limit finding role of critique. It’s crucial to remember both these elements, in large part because in modern Western philosophy, when it comes to epistemology, the first of these tends to be forgotten. We tend to find a focus on knowledge, its limits and functions and various lines of dispute about possible ways to respond to the question ‘what can we know’? What is less thought about, written about and discussed is this first element, the general desire for metaphysics, ways in which we might respond, for example, to a question such as what do I want to know?
The tension between what I want to know and what I can know is important and runs throughout Kants’ works I believe. When, for example, he writes in the same Preface that he had to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (CPR, Bxxx), this is too easily read as simply religious faith, and in some ways dismissed for the vastly secular audience of contemporary philosophy. We don’t need to find room for faith, it might be claimed, so really all the matters in Kant are the ways in which he denies knowledge.
In some ways this is fine, it’s a partial reading of Kant, it adheres to the key ‘productive’ moment of his philosophy – the limits and arguments for the limits that Kant discovers. However, it’s neither a rounded account of Kant, nor one that is – outside philosophy – of that much interest. Maybe a little, but not much. Outside philosophy people are still most interested in those metaphysical questions – and the philosophers who have learnt from Kant simply respond with something like, well we can’t say anything about those things, we can’t know anything, you’ll have to just stick with faith. So, philosophy now becomes something deeply disappointing in a different way to the previous scandal of getting a different answer from every philosopher. Now philosophy becomes a source of almost arrogant disappointment, a little like the grinch adults who take pleasure in telling the young child that Father Christmas isn’t real.
Kant is more interesting than this. He has both components – knowledge and desire – and takes both seriously. When we approach Kant, when we try to get to grips with him, we need to hold onto that idea that both knowledge and desire are fundamental, and to be clear that desire is not somehow opposed to or inferior to knowledge. Both knowledge and desire are fundamentally important, the task is not to deny one in favour of the other, rather the job of the epistemologist (the speculative philosopher, the transcendental philosophy) is to try to diagnose bad mixtures from good mixtures. The transcendental philosophy is closer to the art of the poisoner than the skills of the scientific experimenter. It’s a matter of dosages, contexts, purposes. In particular the ‘disease’ to be diagnosed is called ‘transcendental illusion’. This wonderful phrase – transcendental illusion – is something to pay attention to as, in many ways, it’s the key problem that the Critique is aiming to overcome.
First let’s distinguish between empirical illusion and transcendental illusion. The former is something like an optical illusion. One of the things that is fascinating about an optical illusion is that, even when it is pointed out to you – in other words, even when you understand that it is an illusion – it can still operate. Illusion is not error, rather it is a particular way in which things appear. If you understand an optical illusion, for example, whilst you may not be able to not see it, you can correct for it in your understanding and in any implications you draw.
A transcendental illusion, however, is not quite so simple. Fundamentally, a transcendental illusion is not one located within the use of the senses, like an empirical illusion, but rather arises from an inherent dynamic in the use of reason. It is not a logical illusion, Kant claims (CPR A296/B353), because a logical illusion is dispelled as soon as attention is paid to the rules of logic that are being used. In other words, logical illusion is more like an error that can be corrected – we went wrong somewhere in our logic, and we go over it again and find our mistake, the illusion dissipates. Let’s quote Kant here:
“Transcendental illusion, on the other hand, does not cease even though it is uncovered (e.g., the illusion in the proposition: “The world must have a beginning in time”). The cause of this is that in our reason (considered subjectively as a human faculty of cognition) there lie fundamental rules and maxims for its use, which look entirely like objective principles, and through them it comes about that the subjective necessity of a certain connection in our concepts on behalf of the understanding is taken for an objective necessity, the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion that cannot be avoided at all, just as little as we can avoid it that the sea appears higher in the middle than at the shores, since we see the former through higher rays of light than the latter, or even better, just as little as the astronomer can prevent the rising moon from appearing larger to him, even when he is not deceived by this illusion.” (Kant CPR, A297/B354, emphasis added)
But if we cannot avoid it, then how do we deal with it? Like an empirical illusion, we can correct for it. This is the role of a major part of the Critique, called the Transcendental Dialectic, which aims to show us how to identify the differences between subjective principles (and necessities) and objective principles (and necessities). Whilst this is a complicated procedure in practice, the basic idea – that there is something that easily can go wrong with reason and that it rests on a confusion between the subjective and objective – is enough to work with for now.
This is the first session from my recent seminar course. Below the video are the notes from that first session. The seminar explored the ongoing project I’m working on with Dr Eric Harper called ‘The Freudian Spaceship’, an attempt to develop a Fanonian Schizoanalysis. The videos from the series, held during my Monday night philosophy session on Twitch, are being uploaded to my YouTube channel and Facebook page, so these notes are the text accompaniments to those video sessions. As part of the course, participants were reading through a text called ‘Breath’ that is part of the project. There are a few printed versions available, as well as a PDF, get in contact with me if you would like a copy.
TFS Session 1 – Thinking the World – notes
Session 1
Thinking the world as a Freudian Spaceship
What are we talking about when we speak of a Freudian Spaceship?
We imagine the Earth as a Freudian Spaceship – in other words, as the home of life moving through space and which is not just alive in its own right but which is also alive in a Freudian sense, that is, as ‘driven’, as comprised of drives and an unconscious formed by a moment of primary repression. It’s a working tool, one that we hope enables us to try and think beyond our own perspective as human, or animal and to try to become something other.
This use of an image or idea is also a key part of our methodology. We develop three figures (‘conceptual personae’) that we think offer modes of living that we affirm or that we can learn from – the revolutionary, the sorcerer and the psychoanalyst. We try to allow our intuitions and a ‘poetics’ into our thought as a way of allowing our bodies to speak as well as our minds. We pay attention to ‘signs’ or ‘symptoms’ and try to assemble them together into something like a ‘Body’ as a way of thinking that doesn’t dismiss rationality and yet doesn’t deny the irrational. Above all we try to find a way to respond to the world around us with honesty, knowing all the while that this is never a simple matter, bound up as it is within our own social, psychical and physical needs.
The ‘Freudian Spaceship’ is a name we give to the complex assemblage of the Earth, the World and the Planet. We might also call this our home. At the very least it is a home of life, and it is life that we pay attention to in thinking the world.
For example, the litany Earth – World – Planet (is greater than) the name ‘world’ (not just plural – but in each case there are different forms, perhaps even different laws (or at least, perhaps different ‘laws’ that matter – ie: that make a difference).
The struggle against bad abstractions. (The problem of scale – totalisations / universalities)
Concrete: Our thinking is prompted by the problem that presents itself in the conjunction of two ongoing situations, climate change and the Black Lives Matter struggle. (The problem of response – captured / freed).
Our primary resources are Schizoanalysis (Freud, Marx), the work of Franz Fanon (sociogenesis, colonialism) and our own biographies. From these we try to make tools to think with (The problem of ‘concepts’ or, toolmaking thought – ends / efficiencies).
Tools: multiple scales / forms / assemblages (Earth / World / Planet; One to One, Group, Community; Psychoanalyst, Sorcerer, Revolutionary) – Breathdrive (reconceiving the libido) –
The Interval (production of thought). We try to develop poetic formulas (comply or die) not to express something but to connect things (and see how they look, ‘in the light of…’).
Personification of processes
At what scale is the problem a problem, the event an event?
In what situation is a response capable of freedom?
With what tools does thinking operate?
Example – Michael Heinrich discussing Marx (YT Video – Karl Marx’s Monetary Theory of Value, https://youtu.be/gmYFtpfdVn4?t=2376 ) – just described a logic of capitalism where abstract processes dominate individuals, describes in terms of personification of processes – asked a question. ‘Choice of Marx to do science in this way, to start with categories, to imagine that persons are personifications of categories … what in Capital makes it right?’ – Heinrichs response: pragmatic, does it work (does the description from the logic of the categories map to the description from the activity of persons.)
Heinrich: “To justify this program we just have to see if the analysis works…” (eg: Chapter 2 of Vol 1, what commodity owners have to do, does this match to the ‘form determination’ in Chapter 1).
What scale do the ‘form determinations’ of Capital appear from? (History, Political Economy, Society, the Human). What ‘scale’ do my tools of thinking come from, work on? (This is not a ‘question to be answered’ but a kind of ‘methodological checking’.)
Philosophy often appears at a particular scale of thinking – one that is expansive, all-consuming, ‘universal’ etc – a grasping of the whole. Yet each time it’s also singular, specific, a grasping of the whole from a position. There is no ‘view from nowhere’.
This ‘nowhere’ – also no view from ‘no when’ – the sub species aeternitas of Spinoza as the final, complete position of ‘adequate knowledge’. The common tropes of philosophy – to assert the need for SSA, or the denial of its adequacy (the former, rationalism, necessity, law; the latter, empiricism, contingency, accident).
Rather than considering these as ‘opposed’, rather try think of them as ‘scales’ (this is the word I will be using, we may need to adjust/clarify).
Paying attention to different objects (different assemblages, different collections of things interacting). The scales multiply and can be multiplied, but the gamble is that of the triple or threefold minimum – at a minimum, think threefold (three folds). Think at three different scales. Why? Because it enables us to think at the intersections not the oppositions. Don’t need to think every scale possible (impossible) but rather the plurality of actual scales.
(This is not a law, it’s an attempt, an experiment, ‘see what happens’).
Training as a personification of process
Couch to 5k – personal example – at what scales does ‘the app’ appear, at what scale does it exist (be / be interacted with?)
(1) a political/social policy scale – health, well-being, medical support – limits to how quickly, for example, the training can be done, who can be reached by such a program etc – perhaps a social scale (World)
(2) in the encounter of ‘the person personifying the process’ – the runner – the decision to run, to use this app, familiarity with / access to tech, the encounter with the body as ‘running’, breath – perhaps an ‘embodied’ scale (Earth)
(3) at the scale of the micro-macro physical – gravity (space station running), perhaps the ‘hard science’ scale (Planet).
Which ‘process’ is being personified? (Which processes?). (Be careful of self-reference – ie when the process in question is personification (becoming persons) how do the process and the person fit together? (The process and the person and the ‘fit’ as a general theme).
It’s not a question of the ‘whole’ or of ‘holistic’ thinking, rather the interest lies in the tensions between scales (where one ‘scale’ operates against another, counter-acting, counter-vailing).
The ‘personification of processes’ as living the tensions.
ASIDE: But … Production / Anti-production
The example of the lock and key – the production of controlled connection dependent on the materials rigidity/solidity – yet this brings with it the ‘counter-acting’ process of friction.
Rather than a bad abstraction, which has ‘No where, No when, No what’ structure // Space and Place; Time and Process; Materials and Interactions.
We want to produce a dirty thought. (Ambiguity and Nuance, Vague edges and Cross-fertilisation).
Session 2
“Because of this the difference between Western and non-Western cultures is not the difference between civilized and primitive. That is an ideological reading. The difference is that between the first commodity-culture in the history of human existence and all other cultures. A mutation has occurred.” Sylvia Wynter, Ethno, or Sociopoetics?, p.12
(Part One of Session Two)
Breath (reflections on Part One)
Can the body host the breath?
What can be seen across the world is the problem of the breath, breathing. To explore this problem of hosting the breath we need to pause and reflect on the section called ‘Breath.’
In that section of this text we try to express our encounters with this moment, a moment we call ‘the time of the last breath’. It is not an analysis, but an expression of intensity, raw intensity and an attempt at honesty in the expression of an intensity, the effect of having had our own breath taken away when faced with what seems like a slow, horrific descent into the suffocating world our children are growing up into. Affected with anger, but also always with a hope and love that a thoughtful witnessing can embrace unforeseen connections which link to networks of resistance. The hope that the reader will be as enraged or even better, more enraged. The intention is the production of hope as enraged engagement with networks of action.
It takes our breath away to see the levels of violence against black lives. It takes our breath away to see the rise of resistance to this violence. It takes our breath away to see the forest fires, to know about the dying oceans, to listen to stories of disaster, death and destruction. All so unnecessary. It takes our breath away to see such deliberate disaster. This list could go on and on until we run out of breath. What takes our breath away perhaps most of all, what is almost too obvious to have to acknowledge, is that this is deliberate disaster.
Agasp that capitalist gain can bomb land. Profit obtained by not only gaining access to resources but letting the bombed citizens pay for the so-called rebuilding. This shock doctrine (Naomie Klein) is akin to the way the way police in some parts of Afrika will arrest sex workers, rape them and then get the sex worker to pay to be released.
In the face of this deliberate disaster, what kind of response can we cope with? Tears, anger, frustration, desolation, all these affects flow through us just as they also flow through our communities. Grief is perhaps the easiest way to describe this. Grief is also a troublesome idea however.
In grief we encounter the death of the loved one, whether they were family, or community, or even just an ‘image’. Yet in grief we encounter death as it is, arriving from the outside to cleave open the present, placing some into the realm of the ancestors whilst leaving others bereft of a future. As we move through grief we regain a future, this time reconfigured to include a new set of ancestors, where the people we grieve for take their place. This new future, with our new ancestors, re-organises us. We become a new person, perhaps a child without a parent or a partner without their companion. The grief recedes as the new future arrives.
It’s for this reason that grief, whilst perhaps the easiest way to describe our response to the contemporary moment, is insufficient as a concept. In grief, death has arrived. Yet in our contemporary moment death is becoming the horizon of life, no longer arriving from the outside but now embedded into the future of our present life. In grief death arrives and a new future is opened, whereas in our contemporary moment death is coming, always coming, and the future appears increasingly as forever closed.
When it comes to death the Western therapeutic cure is one preoccupied with letting go, moving on, but it is challenged. Narrative therapy, for example, invites one to talk to the dead. This is not about belief in an afterlife but a reframing of the process of mourning. The process of inviting our ancestors to bear witness alongside us through what’s been called a ‘critical melancolia’.
Ranjana Khanna notes that within the nation state there is something that cannot be mourned. For Khanna, it is impossible to totally digest the past, resulting in a critique of agency that engages us in what they call a ‘critical melancholy’ as the trace of trauma remains and its symptomatic embodiment is haunting. It presents an ethical, political and communal challenge to be present to that which critically insists. The strategy is to develop the persistence of the insistent, rather than its digestion or dissolution.
That strategy of dissolution is, in Philip Derbyshire’s reading of Khanna, ascribed to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who are described as having “revised Freud?s theory” and in so doing “Ferenczi?s distinction between introjection and incorporation as an underpinning to the distinction between mourning and melancholia, becomes central. Mourning is achieved through introjection, the full assimilation of loss; melancholia involves the incorporation of the unassimilable, which, encrypted, evades integration and entails a process of endless lament.” Derbyshire goes on to claim that “in opposition to Abraham and Torok’s therapeutic strategy, which designates melancholy as pathological and attempts to decrypt the buried loss and articulate the unassimilated into narrative, turning loss into ordinary mourning, Khanna holds that the unassimilable must remain as such.” There is an echo of Claude Lanzman here, who claims that there is an obscenity to understanding when it encounters the holocaust. To ask why is too easily a salve, aiming to explain, to assimilate, to quieten the body that is choking.
Extinction is not death, it is far worse, it is the destruction of the future and the loss of the ancestors. This transformation encounters death no longer as an outside that interrupts, rather death now becomes us in ways anticipated by Foucault with the concept of docile bodies. Is it any wonder that the fascination with zombies has grown so much in the last decade or two? Our ‘collective unconscious’ expresses itself in stories of a living death, and living with a living death. Given the weight of this terror, how are we to live?
We acknowledge that in expressing our encounter with the contemporary moment within the ‘Breath’ text we present yet another dying light. We might describe ourselves as ‘war weary’, having been trapped inside the class war all our lives, played out across multiple spaces, in multiple ways. We still feel, but we also know that to feel is to fear, and ‘fear is the mind killer’ (Bion).
How to deal with this? How is it possible to look into our contemporary moment and feel without becoming numb, without relying on some kind of ‘moral heroism’ where we force ourselves to ‘face things’? For the psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion, most famous perhaps for his work on groups, when the body is in pain but the risk to feel the pain is too dangerous, then experience is evaded. His call is to learn from experience, to be modified by the affective dimension of expression which becomes thought-feeling and feeling-thought.
The all too common strategies of ‘facing reality’ are presented as simple moral choices, but if we have learnt anything as psychoanalysts, philosophers or revolutionaries it is that the desire to live outruns any moral choices that might need to be faced up to. The difficulty is that this desire to live is too often channeled by capitalism in a self-destructive direction, either into individualism or into group dynamics that depend on a border or an ‘Other’ against whom the group defines themself. Information overload, forced habits that evade experience, thoughtless-ness prevails in the place of thoughtfulness and embodied thinking/feeling, touched by events
Whilst we would agree with the slogan “don’t mourn, organise”, quite what has to be organised is still unclear. What we think is that what needs to be organised is the interplay of new and old ways of coming to the support of life, becoming life. This is perhaps our ‘proposal’, if we had one, if we were able to make one.
It is to the question of life that we must turn our face if we want to think and live beyond the moment of the last breath.
How can we think about life? Perhaps here the breath plays its most interesting role as both a fact and concept, as a way of getting to grips with life. Life breathes but cannot breathe without a host, like thoughts cannot occur without a thinking apparatus (Bion). We might almost go so far as to say that life is primarily breath, the drive to breath, the drive ‘to breathe easily’.
The Earth breathes, the organism breathes, there is even a kind of historical or temporal breath, operating at a scale of the global climate and ecosystem.
Fundamentally breath is a metabolic dynamic, the core thread of changes and movements of energy that constitute life. Without breath, death. Without a host, no breath. The breath cannot be abstracted from the breathing bodies, as it entwines the corporeal and incorporeal in a process that produces the life that is both embodied and entangled, connected. Networks of bodies/hosts breathing into other bodies/hosts. In breathing the body is infiltrated by the world, no longer distinct but incorporated into a system, into a web and network of struggling, squirming survival.
To think about life, then, is to think about the breath as it is hosted within the system of bodies. Is the breath constricted, is it full, does it gasp or struggle, or is it easy and calm. From the panic attack to the dreaming body, the breath is hosted by the bodies it flows through, sometimes held, sometimes released. In our contemporary moment, we claim, the way in which the breath is encountered is quite specific, it is encountered as limited from the outside, in what we have called the choke-hold.
The breath is held captive, not hosted, not welcomed, not treated as the stranger that needs somewhere to rest before moving on. We live within a system that is a poor host to the breath, treating it like a slave or possession when it needs to be welcomed as our necessary outsider.
So our question, can the body host the breath, is a way for us to try and think about whether change, revolution, can be made real, whether and how we can become good hosts. Not you, not me, but us, for the emphasis is community. This plays out across the system as a whole as well as within the specific bodies each of us is that forms part of the global network. It ranges across the possibilities for climate survival as well as the breathing practices of the person attempting to find a way to live within a world of the choke-hold. It ranges from the figure of the revolutionary to that of the psychoanalyst to the sorcerer at the edge of the field, each of whom offers ways of breathing that have potential for loosening the grip of the choke-hold.
So it is through this question – can the body host the breath – and these conceptual personas, figures – the revolutionary, the psychoanalyst and the sorcerer and the children of the future – that we begin to try and think about a future beyond grief, beyond the choke-hold and within the present.
This post was recently found in the drafts folder, lost in the database for some five years. Meh.
1.
The image is already fading. This is perhaps the only thing we might want to accelerate within capitalism, although capitalism is not the source of the image, or the fading. Both image and fading have, however, been transformed and accelerated, in some sense, through capitalism.
It is not to excuse capitalism from any of its horrors to ask, as Marx clearly did, what is capitalism productive of? The horrors are the most important, the specificity of those horrors compared to analogous events in other socio-economic forms. Of less importance however, although still not without importance, there are numerous other effects of capitalism. The vampire is not without its virtues. The question is, is there some virtue of capitalism that we might want to increase in intensity, so as to provide a route through which to escape capitalism as such.
Roughly, the answer would be yes. Capitalism does something that must be acknowledged to be a virtue – it makes knowledge productive in a way that is unprecedented. Science, a concept that is highly charged, is internally compromised by the sheer voracity of the capitalist virtue of making knowledge productive. A limit is revealed, the limit of the transparency of knowledge.
The image is already fading. The image of the human, the image of thought, the image of the future. Walking down London Road, high on the walls, stands the reminder of a time before neon and the public relations industry, the ghost sign of W.J.Andrew, Family Grocer, Provision Merchant. Tomorrow someone will discover that the new filter setting on their phone is called ‘ghost sign’.
There’s a curiosity between generations in popular music. The eighties and nineties return, like the repressed, in something that might seem like nostalgia, as though there is no future for the past to fade away from. It cannot be nostalgia, since that would assume there was some time when today was listening to the past, when in fact today’s listeners hadn’t even been born. It isn’t nostalgia, or any other lack. It is instead the flatness of time gradually appearing, through the expanding database. Database flatness, edges of the former times now appear as ragged, those times now, those befores, are less partially inscribed in images and data than now. Yet it is a transition phase, towards the new database times. (Or barbarism). Forward or death, yet there will be no more forward in database time, simply coordinate space. Without the ‘forward’ it smells like death. The problem is whether the future is a future with or without temporality? The image of time is fading in the face of the database. Everything will be dated, but nowhere will time be found. (A new aeon).
“Is there not already in the Stoics this dual attitude of confidence and mistrust, with respect to the world, corresponding to the two types of mixtures – the white mixture which conserves as it spreads, and the black and confused mixture which alters? In the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the alternative frequently resounds: is this the good or bad mixture? This question finds an answer only when the two terms end up being indifferent, that is, when the status of virtue (or of health) has to be sought elsewhere, in another direction, in another element – Aion versus Chronos”. (Logic of Sense, 23rd Series of the Aion, p162).
The ‘black and confused mixture which alters’ has flown its flag, still flies it, yet indifference reigns. Even when indifference is not the order of the day, amongst those activists and organisers and leftists for example, their stance is now so hysterically moral and lacking any future as to suggest it is no longer actual rebellion but merely the inverse symptom of generalised indifference. Moral outrage infects what were once the ‘forces of the future’ with a proto-fascism that will spawn when the conditions call for it. The demand is to negate the forces of capitalism with the idea of the future, a conception of another world, a transcendence of property and profit, yet without weapons (not words) such negation is, like all negation, hollow. The candle in the eye of the cow.
Is this a good or a bad mixture? The image is fading, time is shifting, temporality undergoing a transition as fundamental as the introduction of clock time and Saint Monday may even make it’s return. The aion of capitalism has offered us a peculiar time, needs to offer us a peculiar time, at once Chronos crossing labour but simultaneously Aion forcing exchange. As each moment becomes measured and quantified, de facto, in labour time, each moment also becomes exchangeable, de jure, for any other. In this tense dynamic the image is already fading.
2.
How can we distinguish the image from the event? Through it’s fading. This intimacy of the paint peeling, the emulsion yellowing, the edges fraying, the memory failing, this intimacy of fading is in part the ground of the image. An image that never fades is simply no longer an image. Yet what if this fading itself was becoming ungrounded, fading out, as we cross-fade into the new form. The black mixture that alters has wreaked havoc (through the ‘digital revolution’) on the image, that black mixture made up of the bodies of cameras and lcd screens and red buttons, drifting across the earth and our eyes.
During the late nineties there was an argument amongst film-makers, particularly those who had come into the practice in part because of the digital revolution (the horrors of Blair Witch as symptom). The dominant position of this argument essentially claimed that emulsion-based techniques were little more than neutral tech that would soon be superseded by the CCD improvements. ‘CCD’ stands for ‘Charge Coupled Device’. Within digital cameras the CCD is often referred to as the ‘chip’ of the camera, although it is not the same sort of ‘chip’ that is found within a modern PC. A CCD essentially converts input into electrical charge, as distinguished from emulsion techniques where the film would converts input into chemical charge. The pro-digital proponents pushed the propaganda that the CCD process was, effectively, better than emulsion because it was more accurate. Arguing for emulsion was reduced to ‘clinging to a fetish’. The debate was framed into a ‘forwards/backwards’ push, the digital proponents akin to proto-accelerationists, the emulsion fans converted into something like a luddite technician.
The real question, however, was always the one of the virtues of the mixture. The real error was the functionalism of the proto-accelerationist pro-digital fans, the idea that image capture and production was a functional process. Like all good functionalists, if the process is a function then it is possible to instantiate it in multiple forms and, whilst these forms might have some specificity, this ‘idiosyncrasy’ of the technology was little more than noise in the functional process that could be eliminated in time. Given the right CCD and the right light the mixture would be functionally indistinguishable from emulsion based processes. Digital could be made to look like film. Except it couldn’t, not really, and once that was realised it was soon argued that such attempts to ‘make digital look like film’ were redundant aesthetically.
The real mixture into which the luddite emulsionites and the accelerationist CCD-lovers were thrust was not driven by image capture and production, it was instead driven by commodities, the basic cell of the capitalist body. The new digital cameras were a boost in commodity forms, a new gadget to get, crashing the actual cost of image production and capture. The ‘digital revolution’ occurred not because of the advance of digital technology but because of the cost of film-making. The debates about fidelity, dynamic range, colour constancy, focal depth and various other arcane aspects of the tech were all strange symptoms of a process that demanded the sale of camcorders.
It’s been another couple of weeks of silence from me, but I’ve been making some minor edits on the draft chapters for part two and have decided to try and get your weekly notes to you in the form of notes in this space. It was intended as a notebook and usually works as such, so seems appropriate.
The last two or three weeks as been odd. I had a couple of weeks of intense sleeplessness – a long story – and had drifted into that strange zone of indifference, lassitude, incapacity, operating on a daily basis through some kind of residual functionalism of everyday chores, but where thought had kind of slipped into the aether. Still, a few good nights sleep seem to have pushed that aside.
August began with a ritual fire and sweat session, a return to something I was doing more intensely last year but which I took a break from during the start of 2019. It’s harvest time, physically and (otherwise), and there’s a strong sense of growth. The ritual was interesting – they usually are of course – in that it slipped on like a cloak, settled and simple and ‘slack-handed’, or at least as near to that as I can get. This was a kind of relief, as I’ve been working to lighten the grip I often feel I need on things, particularly the sorcerous, in order to let them ‘do easy’ as Burroughs used to call it and perhaps for the first time in the recent phase on work with the dragon this lighter grip seemed in play. Harvesting the work, the intention, always brightens one up. At the allotment too we’ve been harvesting – potatoes, beetroot, courgettes, beans, kale, wormwood, tansy and yarrow. I’ve been pickling beets and have a load more to do, I’ll bring a jar next time we meet.
In terms of the work, I’ve been mulling over a couple of things in my mind, the first with regard the sense or role of scale, the second to do with the way in which this inflects, infects that movement from passivity to activity that seems core to the revolutionary movement. I spoke a bit about scale in the paper at the recent workshop on Guattari and the institution, drawing on Illich and his work aound ‘iatrogenic disease’ (doctor, or medicine induced disease).
The question of scale seems almost to be co-extensive with the question of politics – at what scale does politics operate? It’s not uncommon to come across the concept of ‘micro-politics’ nowadays, a concept of the 21st century – the ‘Deleuzian century’ as the joke goes – and the ‘micro-‘ aspect of this derives in large part from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, with flavourings of Foucault along the way. In some ways it’s easy to relegate the micro-political to a repackaging or renaming of what, during the 1970’s, was advanced under the slogan ‘the personal is the political’, a slogan that is strongly associated with feminism but is equally applicable to the rise of black consciousness movements. In fact the ‘micro-‘ in micro-politics often presents as being associated with the personal, the individual, with consciousness as a lived experience relation to the world, and to the political. All of this is important, without a doubt, but the ‘micro-‘ here appears a bit like a jargon, a kind of posh academic way of taking over talk about the role of the personal within the political. There also seems to be something lost in translation from the distinction within schizoanalysis between the molar and the molecular, which is often cited as one of the sources of things ‘micro-political’.
Very roughly the problem seems to be something like the following – much talk about the micro stops at the individual, and yet this is not a micro phenomenon. Too often talk seems trapped within this framework of the individual, within the I rather than the We, neither going behind the back of the personal nor producing a new formation of individuation, one that would have to speak as a We, one that would be incapable of even understanding what it was to really say ‘I think…’. Yet it is here, in that which is behind the back of the person and in that which is to be formed as a people, that the revolutionary movement must construct its presence. We speak of the three grids of relationship or connection – the one to one, the group and the community – as ways of being that intersect, overlay, intermingle within the person, within the specific entity. At what scale do these grids work?
Take the moment of transition – or call – from passivity to activity that is to be found as the question ‘what can I do?’ arises. In this formation it’s difficult to connect the movement to a revolutionary horizon, a communist horizon as the contemporary phrase has it, because that relationship is blocked by the form of the question. At what scale can the answer we found here? For the revolutionary the response must almost always be something like ‘join in’, but the act of joining in is deeply troublesome when each I joins ‘actively’, bringing themselves as they are into the connection. There is little more than a cacophonous howl that is produced, much like the world of social media and internet communication, where everyone has their chance to speak, but no-one gives a shit, no-one listens. The voice is nothing without an ear, it simply howls in its isolation. I’ve been reading Doris Lessings’ book The Golden Notebooks, prompted by a Jodi Deans lecture at Goldsmith’s this year, and one of the things that is striking is that the central character, a communist and a writer, is caught between what she perceives as the pointlessness of her voice as an individual in the face of the ‘big issues’ and the almost obsessive need to talk to herself, write to herself, simply in order to be able to hear, to be able to cope with and live in the midst of those ‘big issues’. There are moments when she has to find a way of hearing herself, of hearing what she thinks or feels, moments that presuppose a kind of deafness to ourselves.
No matter how much we speak, if there is no ear it is not speech. Nothing is said before it is heard.
The one to one relationship perhaps has as its image the psychoanalytic encounter and if this is of any value then it is because it’s a space for the production of an ear, of a hearing. We speak in sorcery of ‘listening to the body’, which involves something close to colloquial concepts of intuition in many ways but which is distinct in that there are techniques that can be deployed to get the body to speak, and it’s only through working to get the body to speak that a sorcerer can begin to move towards the point at which they can listen to the body. The body doesn’t know how to speak until it is plugged into an ear, no matter how much it whirs and screams and howls. To plug into an ear, to connect an ear to a mouth, this strikes me as more fundamental even than the mouth attaching to the breast. In the breast attachment the mouth satisfies itself once the conection is made, once the flow begins, it becomes pacified. In the voice, however, the breath is transformed into the active connective formation of ear/voice, at least if the connection is productive. Too often the becoming-voice collapses into exhaustion, not even an echo chamber, simply an exhaustion.
Nietzsche in Turin.
It seems folly to ask ‘what can I do?’ with regard politics, and the folly arises because of the scale at which politics operates.
I am a sorcerer in the chaos magic tradition. In a space where I was talking to other pagans and occultists this would be enough information for people to be able to locate much of my working model, although possibly not much of my day to day practice. It is a statement the function of which is equivalent, perhaps, to saying ‘I am an existential psychoanalyst’. This notion – of function – is what I want to try and take as a connecting thread in my comments. In particular the chaos magical tradition grounds much of their work on using the function of belief . The core idea here is that belief is a tool . But a tool for what?
First of all, some rules of thumb that underpin this talk of ‘belief’
(a) Belief is (primarily) an affective state, distinct from judgement.
(b) Trance is the function of production of belief . (Transference as a form of trance).
(c) ‘Knowledge’ (JTB or otherwise) is materialised, that is, made concrete and actual, only on the ground of Belief. (The condition of reality of knowledge is belief.)
With this very rough framework in the background, what is it that a sorcerer does ? The answer is, speaking generally, that the sorcerer does whatever is in their power and simultaneously takes responsibility for their capacities, which effectively means that they explore, deploy and increase their capacities when needed. Much of the time this looks from the outside like a form of self-development, and indeed it may be limited to this, but if the sorcerer continues in their practice the ‘self’ becomes something that proliferates.
Still, what is it that the sorcerer actually does ? There are perhaps three elements of activity that can be identified – trance, ritual and spell. We embrace and use trance – both deep trance and light ‘habituating’ trance; we enact and produce ritual, both highly complex symbolic theatrical ritual and empty-handed or near-empty-handed bodily acts; and we cast spells by embodying intentions into objects and actions. Above all, we practice. By this I mean something quite simple – sorcery is not something that can be done without practice. The sorcerer cannot know anything without enactment, even if the enactment is as simple as the muttering of a spell from a book, because the primary medium of sorcery is the body.
Sorcery is, above all, a practice and, moreover, a practice that needs no theory because the practice is the ‘theoretical’ work itself. The practice comes first. If ‘theory’ means something like contemplation, if it means something like ‘a way of seeing’ then there is nothing to see without first doing. Sorcery is thus highly experimental and exploratory, and someone interested in knowing what sorcery is can only fully encounter sorcery by becoming sorcerous, even if only a little.
In practice many of the techniques of the sorcerer may be quite familiar. Meditation and breathing techniques are almost ubiquitous and for many are some of the most basic everyday practices. Making objects and artworks – crafting – is again extremely common. Other widespread practices are theatrical activities (ritual); storytelling, poetry and music; training and knowledge sharing through workshops, lectures and seminars; the study of self-declared magical and sorcerous traditions and texts as well as the study of other disciplines when material of interest is found; the production and use of psychoactive substances (‘potions and sacraments’ and ‘entheogens’); an engagement with sexuality, death, bones and blood and the formation of communities, both formal and informal.
Sorcery makes use of anything it can find in the culture in which it operates to construct its practices and so, at its heart, reveals itself to be a human practice.
Whilst being a human practice, however, sorcery is above all directed towards developing an engagement with the non-human. Sorcerers do heal and curse but above all they aim to connect and above all to connect with that which is not human – animal, plant, planet, star and cosmos; angel, demon, fairy or goddess. It is for this reason, this imperative to connect with that which is not human, that we find sorcerers occupying a liminal, marginal position in human communities, in borderlands between this world and that world. The core function of the sorcerer is to build or create connections with that which is not human in such a way that a dialogue of some kind becomes possible, perhaps just between the sorcerer and the other but potentially (and in some places in practice) between the human community and non human communities.
All this, of course, is to spread a wide net, one which many sorcerers will quite reasonably declare doesn’t capture quite what it is they do. Maybe it’s easier to describe a little of what I do?
I meditate regularly, usually every day. I keep a diary that records much of my sorcerous work. I burn incense, light candles, draw sigils on objects and in the air, chant, whisper, mutter and mark spells. I go into the woods at the time of the pagan festivals, create circles where I make altars and light fires and sit or dance, sometimes robed, sometimes naked, sometimes in silence and sober, sometimes ecstatic and intoxicated, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. I make potions, grow plants, tend woodlands and allotments and organise communities. I make pacts and bargains, ask for boons and offer devotions. To use terms more familiar to chaos magicians, I evoke, invoke, divine, enchant and illuminate, to various degrees at various times. Most of all I work to organise connections and much of the time those connections then guide and open new spaces of exploration as new connections weave themselves into already existing ones – and in forming connections comes joy, so long as I take responsibility for the connections. This ‘taking of responsibility’ is crucial to the sorcerer. Making connections involves breaking connections as much as instituting them, it involves a responsiveness that must be developed in selecting those connections which aid and those which harm, and this cannot be restricted solely to that thing called the ‘self’ but needs to extend to that realm of the non human, not least because for the sorcerer responsibility involves acknowledging our role as a human assemblage within a universe of other assemblages.
To do this, to build connections, we sorcerers build beliefs, which we embody through practices of our body, often involving trance states or the re-machining of habitual assemblages of light trance in which the human perpetually lives most of its life. We build and institute states of believing which may be temporary or permanent but which we take responsibility for by reflection over time. Exactly what beliefs we build, however, depends on our intentions.
This interest in the technologies of belief, in experimenting with the production of beliefs, is resonant with a wider problem diagnosed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book What is philosophy? There they say the following:
“…it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today.” (WIP 74)
In many ways the fascination of the sorcerer with belief, now, in our world or in our multitude of worlds, arises from this problematic. The skill of the sorcerer rests on their capacity to believe without believing, to engage with the necessity of belief, its reality, intensity and productivity, without being drowned in its depths. Trance, as the function of the production of belief, thus rests at the core of what we sorcerers do and the capacity to deploy trance, in its full range of intensity, is perhaps what we attempt to develop above all else.
If it seems a little slippery, if I haven’t satisfied your curiosity as to what a sorcerer does, then this may be for reasons familiar to psychoanalysts. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud points out to his audience the difference between training in physiology or psychiatry and that in psychoanalysis. He first refers to the use of words and the way those who dismiss the possibility of the talking cure refer to ‘mere talking’ being involved in the psychoanalytic treatment. He then remarks, as if to clarify that there is no such thing as ‘mere talking’, that
“words were originally magic and to this day have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his knowledge to his pupils, by words the orator carries his audience with him and determines their judgements and decisions. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men”.(PFL 41).
After rejecting the dismissal of psychoanalysis as ‘mere talking’ by appealing to the ‘magical’ power of words he goes on to make the point that, despite this, despite the public nature of the words that are apparently crucial to the talking cure, it is still not possible to observe a psychoanalytic session. The session itself, the actual practice of psychoanalysis, requires privacy. Specifically he claims that “the talk of which psychoanalytic treatment consists brooks no listener; it cannot be demonstrated” and he goes on to explain that
“the information required by analysis will be given by [the patient] only on condition of his having a special emotional attachment to the doctor; [the patient] would become silent as soon as he observed a single witness to whom he felt indifferent”.
Just to emphasis the problem he goes on to make it clear that “in the strictest sense of the word, it is only by hearsay that you will get to know psychoanalysis”. (PFL 42). I would suggest that, for similar reasons, it will only be by hearsay that you will get to know sorcery.
(2) Experience/behaviour in Laing
Freud is of course not the only person to have ever referred, seemingly without irony, to ‘magical power’ within a rational discourse of understanding, where this magical power refers to something like an irrational element in our experience and behaviour. We find the same reference in Laing, in his book The politics of experience, when he talks about the role of creation.
“If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up new meanings and values, sustenance and succour out of nothing. He is a magician.” (PE 37).
Shortly after this passage Laing goes on to say the following.
“Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture personal meanings in personal time and space from out of the sights and sounds of a depersonalised, dehumanised world. They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection.” (ibid)
Laing himself goes on to say, in a very Sartrean vein, that the source of this creation is “from the Silence at the centre of each of us”(ibid) and there is a way of understanding sorcery that would happily align itself with the Sartrean existentialist emphasis on the power of the imagination and nihilation supposedly located within the human. The difficulty with such an understanding, however, is that its’ valiant efforts to defend a human specificity and value in the face of natural scientific reductionism ends up rending the human from the world. If, as I have suggested, the function of the sorcerer is to build or create connections with that which is non human then working within a theoretical paradigm grounded precisely in separating and promoting the human as distinct from the non human is problematic.
Laing, for example, suggests that different psychoanalytic theories can be understood as placing different emphases on the twin elements of experience and behaviour. In particular Laing wants to emphasise a ‘doubling up’ of the relations of experience and behaviour in his social phenomenology, which is focused on what he calls ‘inter-experience’, that is,
“It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it , and your behaviour and my behaviour as you experience it .” (PE 17).
He suggests, with regard this inter-experience, that the “idiom of games theory” has an advantage as “it relates persons together” and that “the failure to see the behaviour of one person in relation to the behaviour of the other has led to much confusion” (PE 43).
As a sorcerer, particularly as a sorcerer from the chaos magic tradition, I find myself in great sympathy with this notion of the game but I’m left wondering why it seems so artificially restricted to human persons? The most direct response, perhaps, is that there is a widespread restriction of the concept of experience to the human, a restriction that seems highly problematic. What the ‘game theory idiom’ allows, however, is for experience to be placed back within a complex and extended field of interactions, one that is productive of experiences but which itself is pre-subjective. To limit this extended field of interactions merely to the human seems arbitrary, inconsistent and unproductive. For the sorcerer the field of interactions, that space in which connections are built, broken and reconfigured, precedes any experience of subjectivity. In particular this field of interactions is populated predominantly by non human assemblages, by non human persons and non human interactions. Yet the more obvious reason as to why the field of interaction of the game is restricted to humans in Laing is that he was interested in humans . His passionate writings reveal a continuous cry against the pain humans cause each other and his work loses nothing for its focus on the human, apart from when he begins to offer accounts of the world, of being, of the ‘way things are’.
(3) The body, trance and transference.
If it is with regard this field of interactions of the inter-experience that the ‘idiom of game theory’ gains its advantage, it is with regard this field of interactions that the difference between sorcery and psychoanalysis is most explicit. For the sorcerer the body is their primary tool of art. It is through the body, through changes in the body-chemistry, the body-structure, the body-behaviour and the body-organisation that the sorcerer attempts to attune themselves to the connections they work with. It is through the body that we listen and with the body that we talk and it is perhaps for this reason that the body itself is the closest thing to what, in psychoanalysis, is called the ‘unconscious’. Yet the body of the sorcerer is a nexus of connections, not merely a physical organism. These connections occur with or without the sorcerer and are encountered in the habits and ‘light trances’ of the body, the way it settles into a rhythm, or finds itself unsettled into arrhythmias.
An example of the sorcery of the body might be seen in William Burroughs concept of the ‘do easy’. Burroughs strongly identified with chaos magic towards the end of his life, joining one of the few organised groups of chaos magicians, the ‘Illuminates of Thanateros’. Burroughs defines doing easy in the following way:
“DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way…” (Burroughs, Doing Easy)
This practice appears like a form of body mindfulness in that the subject begins to focus not on their experience or even, strictly speaking, on what we might be called behaviour but instead on the connections and flows of the body within a wider field of interactions, interactions with objects, things, people, ideas and other bodies. Interestingly the practice of doing easy also has the capacity to offer curious insights into those little mental loops and intrusive thoughts that can slide under our awareness until they produce something unwanted in our experience. As one practices do easy there are whole series of failures of the body, moments when the fingers slip, or the legs trip. At those moments something or someone that is disruptive to us is usually in our minds but not yet on our mind. In this way the body acts as a kind of ‘tell’, offering us a royal road to the field of interactions within which we are continually being produced, a field that – like the psychoanalytic unconscious – can never be fully brought into the light but the effects of which are crucial to the production of consciousness.
The other effect of something like do easy is of course to produce what I have been calling ‘light trance’. If heavy trance is close to the production of an altered state of consciousness, then light trance is the production of a habitual state of the body. The body settles into these light trance states to such an extent that it might even be thought to be the basic state of the body, to be entranced. Transference, the production of that ‘special emotional attachment’ that Freud spoke of, operates not simply – I would suggest – through the symbolic or affective relation to the master, the one who knows, the one who cares or can cure but also through the settling of the body into particular habitual light trance states formed by the analytic encounter.
To return to the brief rules of thumb I outlined at the start of this paper, I might suggest that the structure of the analytic encounter in terms of the way the bodies are organised produces an affective state of light trance, which is expressed in the particular mode of the ‘special emotional attachment’ of transference (trance as the function of production of belief). It is this that then enables the analysand to ‘come to know’. Analogously the sorcerer engages in constructing assemblages of bodies, organising and re-organising bodies with a view to experimenting with the form of light trance that the body will inevitably settle into or which will result from a particular way of unsettling the body through heavy trance. These experiments of the sorcerer, however, are not solely focused on cure or care, but depend only on the particular intentions of the particular sorcerer at a particular time. At the same time the practice of sorcery produces a continual engagement with the need to take responsibility for the intentions of the sorcerer, through the processes of making explicit and reflection, and in taking such responsibility the sorcerer encounters the potentials of their power, or if you prefer, the limits of their freedom. To that extent sorcery is simply a functional practice of body-organisation, developing and deploying techniques of attempted agency within a pragmatics of freedom.
A new year and a new reading for the London based group, with ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (ATP from now on) being this years choice. I skipped most of last year when they were reading ‘Difference and Repetition’, mainly because I’m very familiar with that book but also because it doesn’t currently play a central part in my research, so it’s interesting to be back in the space of that reading group.
I haven’t read ATP in a group setting before but as Guattari has increasingly come to be central to my own thinking, taking over from Deleuze in many ways, ATP and Anti-Oedipus have obviously begun to play more central roles in my work. These posts will aim to contain my notes and reflections as I work through the text.
For information I will be referring to the 1996 Athlone edition of the text.
Introduction: Rhizome
This first chapter took us a couple of weeks to work through, in part no doubt because the first week was given over to introductions, some reading out loud and some ‘set-up’.
D&G begin the book with self-reflection and methodology, most noticeably with a discussion about what a ‘book’ is. The very first line of ATP refers the reader back to Anti-Oedipus, but also to the multiple authorship of that text. Unlike the other chapters of ATP, this one has no date, reflecting the methodological role it plays with regard the other ‘plateaus’ or chapters.
Methodologically D&G reject both the unified authorial role and what might be thought of as an established image of what a book is. The book is an assemblage (ATP: 4) but that’s hardly surprising, since assemblage seems such a generic term at this point that anything previously called an ‘object’ is now going to come under the term ‘assemblage’. What is specified is that assemblages have two sides, one that faces ‘the strata’ – which I suppose I read as that side of ontology that focusses on the more stable, fixed sense of things, where we can find ongoing identities and meaning – and another side that faces the ‘body without organs’ (BwO), that rather beautiful concept, derived from Antonin Artaud and developed in Anti-Oedipus. I suppose I read the BwO as something like that side of ontology that focusses on the more changeable, fluid sense of things, where we find something that has not yet entered the realm of identity but which is still fully material, real, bodied (my route into this was though the concept of ‘affect’ in D*G’s text ‘What is Philosophy’, so that’s the colour or tone to this sense of the BwO that I have). The assemblage is that nexus where flux and stability, BwO and Strata, are producing specific forms. Assemblage, then, becomes a concept in some sense analogous to ‘form’, although maybe more like ‘formation’. Perhaps we might substitute salva veritate ‘formation’ for ‘assemblage’.
One important principle, however, derives from the thought that the book is an assemblage, which is that assemblages are to be specified not in terms of meanings but in terms of ‘quanta’ or function. As such trying to understand some core ‘meaning’ to ATP would be a little bit like trying to describe the deep meaning of a Haynes manual, which is a category error. The Haynes manual either functions well, by enabling someone to fix an engine, or it doesn’t. In practice, however, Haynes manuals tend to be useful to a degree. If you have enough basic knowledge, if you have the tools, if the vehicle or engine you’re working on hasn’t been modified, and if you don’t have any problems in understanding the manual itself, then it is quite probably going to be useful – but that’s a lot of variables to consider. On the other hand, there are often few options available for the person wanting to fix their engine themselves rather than employ a mechanic, although the advent of YouTube tutorials has expanded those possible options. If the analogy is to be pursued, it’s not immediately obvious what role ATP is to play nor what variables are at work in enabling it to be successful.
Very soon after this first methodological point about books has been made D&G claim something which appears to many people to be problematic. They connect their comments on the book as an assemblage to the wider practice of literature – not, it’s worth noting, the wider practice of philosophy – and say the following:
“A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc – and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticised for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine … (What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?). Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.”
The thing that is often picked up here is the last couple of lines, in particular the claims about ‘ideology’, but this is to miss the far more curious claim at the heart of this passage. To begin with, ideology is simply not a concept D&G think useful and it’s discarded in Anti-Oedipus as a mistaken notion of truth imposed on the reality of desire. For someone who takes classical Marxism (particularly Frankfurt School stuff), Lacan or Zizek as their touchstone for radical politics this denial of ideology should indicate clearly why D&G are in many ways radically distinct from such positions. As a sidenote, this denial of ideology should also point fairly clearly towards why any ‘political theory’ that might arise from D&G is going to differ from the recent fashion for accounts that come under the framework of ‘political theology’. Explicating and understanding this denial of ideology would go a long way to clarifying the major differences in position and method between D&G and those other political-philosophical trends. Yet for me it would also miss that curious claim which is far more interesting than worries about political theory, the claim that is framed as a rhetorical question, viz. “Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?” In the context of the passage in which this question arises it is literature, or the literary machine, that is a rather important piece of the puzzle. I’d go so far as to think that the ‘literary machine’ is the most important methodological framework for understanding ATP.
If this sense of the literary machine is the core methodological mode of ATP, then I think it makes it clearer why the development of the concept of the rhizome, in contrast to the root and radicle, is first explicated in terms of forms of books. If the root book constrains multiplicity by fixing it to a single ‘root’ principle or unifying concept, producing the ‘classical book’, the arborescent model of a literary machine, then the “radicle-system, or fascicular root” (ATP: 5) continues to constrain multiplicity by maintaining this root through a process of withdrawal or supplementarity, which presents as fragmentation but which hides its unifying concept in the depths. This supplementarity is the place where D&G try to distinguish the rhizomatic literary machine from the most ‘radical’ forms of the book, those forms offered by Burroughs, Joyce and Nietzsche, forms where we might suggest that the ‘deep unity’, the ‘spiritual root’ is language itself. “A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented” (ATP: 6).
The next couple of moves lead up to the listing of the ‘characteristics of the rhizome’. The first move, having distinguished the rhizome from the root and radicle, is to claim that “the multiple must be made.…”, and this process of construction is described as ‘subtract the unique from the multiplicity’, which isn’t particularly helpful for me. I don’t have much of a response to this. After this claim regarding the necessity of construction, however, there is another curious move, one in which plant and animal life are brought to the fore, with some sense that the choice of the rhizomatic is one that intends directly to draw upon or learn from the ‘natural world’. There is a deeper problematic here, one which I’ll no doubt return to, but it would form around something like the following question: do D&G use the rhizomatic mode in ATP because they think this is a more ‘natural’ mode, that it somehow has less distortion effects on our understanding of the world? The root and radicle modes of the literary machine are rejected because they constrict multiplicity, with the rhizomatic presumably therefore allowing such multiplicity greater freedom – but does enabling multiplicity this greater freedom somehow better ‘reflect’ reality? Now this imposition of the problem of ‘reflection’ is a huge mistake as it seems clear, even at this early stage in ATP, that any understanding ATP can offer will not be through producing an ‘accurate’ picture, model or reflection of reality, rather it’s going to have a use in so far as it’s productive of becomings we wish to engage in (becoming animal or becoming plant for example). Those ‘becomings’ displace the need that underlies the question of reflection with an alternative route to solutions through the problem that ‘accuracy of reflection’ is trying to overcome. This maybe enables us to refine the question: is the rhizomatic literary machine capable of producing a greater range of becoming-X than the root or radicle literary machine? D&G seem to think so. It’s interesting to wonder why, however, because I think answering this question enables us to understand the role of ‘deterritorialisations’. Roughly, a rhizomatic literary machine, with a greater degree of freedom in its possible connections, a greater degree of freedom as a multiplicity, presents a higher number of vectors of connection with other multiplicities / assemblages, a higher number of lines of flight. This production of a greater range of lines of flight constitutes a better way of connecting (rather than reflecting) the world around. Connection rather than reflection is the mode here. Not ‘is it true’ but ‘is it a good connection’. After all, truth, if it isn’t simply deflated into triviality, is presumably just some kind, one kind, of ‘good connection’.
I’ll pause here and take up the ‘characteristics of the rhizome’ (ATP: 7) next time.
(Notes primarily for the use of my 3rd year undergrad students on the Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy course, terms 2 and 3, in which we’re studying Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ and Deleuze’s ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and exploring the problematic of post-structuralism. Page references to the Continuum impacts edition of NVC).
The intention here is to follow a ‘reading strategy’ in which we acknowledge that the style of thinking that occurs within NVC (and perhaps more widely within post-structuralist thinkers) is that of a weave or tapestry, in which words and concepts are introduced without explicit definition and these words are then employed (used) within a line of thought. The meaning of the terms within the text is to be produced through the work of the text, such that the book will constitute its own context within which key terms can be thought through rather than simply argued about. This is not to say that argument is irrelevant, not at all, but rather to emphasise something like a principle of ‘meaning is use’ that underlies much of NVC. Structuralism itself made use of ‘binaries’ in order to begin its analysis with structures and not elements (employed/employer: man/woman: expert/amateur etc), for the simple methodological fact that a single term would be an element and if we are to begin with structures then this must mean, in terms of language and conceptualisation, beginning from relations between words or concepts (what for ease I will simply refer to as ‘terms’). Post-structuralism, then, will continue its emphasis on structures, and as such will continue to find much of interest in the technique of using binaries or pairings of terms although it will not want to presuppose a final and definite order that can be produced from such an analysis. Our reading strategy, then, works on the basis of trying to identify interesting ‘key-words’ that we then try to understand conceptually by examining their oppositional terms. Concretely this begins from finding something that we can identify as a claim and then working backwards and forwards within the immediate context in which the claim is made to try and clarify the relations at work in a particular space of the text. These ‘partial analyses’ will then enable us to begin to reconstruct something like a ‘line of thought or argument’ that is made by the text (or perhaps, better, one of many lines of argument that will be made by the text).
Beginning at the bottom of page 8 and going onto page 9, we find some of the central questions within the first chapter, ‘The combat against culture’, sitting at the head of a short (3 paragraphs) line of argument. Here, as part of that partial analysis just mentioned, I want to pick out four ‘key-words’: reciprocity, idiosyncracy, culture and objectivation.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 