razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: schizoanalysis

  • As an introduction to schizo-analysis: responding to ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (unfinished notes)

    As an introduction to schizo-analysis: responding to ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (unfinished notes)

    (First published Jan 1st 2007, minor edits made.  Republishing Oct 3rd 2019, as I start my second run of the course ‘Schizoanalysis for Beginners’).

    There is a background to every text, a life, a thought, an obsession, a spilt cup of coffee on papers badly placed on a temporary desk. Good sex, drunken rants, flirtatious concepts, all of these form part of that which will never be said within the text, only ever sensed, occasionally and differently, by the readers and writers who follow the words along the page. This, maybe, is why people want to read biography, interviews, trivial detritus from the lifetimes of another, the writer, the author, the proper name appended to the title. When the text is one within philosophy there’s this sense that somehow knowing about the brandishing of a poker or the peculiar arrangement of garters, socks and toilet habits, somehow knowing this will help know the concepts. This betrays a latent humanism, most often, where we want to know what the author thinks, we want to discern accurately, so we think, the moments that occurred in someone elses’ mind and re-occur them in our own. There seems no reason to assume this humanistic notion of a transport of ideas from one mind to another as the central task of reading and interpreting a text. There seem many reasons to assume that a text is in fact nothing to do with an author to the extent that the act of reading occurs without any author and if the text works it works without an author other than the reader. Would it matter, say, that the images and ideas drawn from a book that had been read under one name suddenly found themselves shifted to another name? It might matter in terms of understanding the author but surely the point of reading is to understand the ideas and images not the author? Otherwise I would always be in a better position to understand an author by talking directly to them and not reading their work? The author really does seem somehow redundant, theoretically, since it is the ideas and images that we are interested by and in.

    Despite this, those texts that occur on the margins of ‘real’ texts, authorised works, always seem to have a strange, uncanny necessity to them. This is no less the case than in ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ by Felix Guattari, a collection of strange and varied notes and jottings produced in the course of writing, jointly with Deleuze, the work ‘Anti-Oedipus’, the first volume of ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. When I first acquired this text a few months ago I read through it quickly and briefly, finding it strange and impenetrable, dismissing it as a rather weak and perhaps idiotic collection put together more as part of an attempt at hagiographical recuperation than intelligent concept creation. Guattari is increasingly viewed as an aberrant force on Deleuze, the ‘wild’ infecting the ‘pure’, lunacy implicating itself into rigour. Zizek is no doubt the main location of such a view (in his ‘Organs without Bodies’) but it’s not isolated to him alone and the increasing interest in the central and more ‘classically philosophical’ work such as ‘Difference and Repetition’ also appears at times, justifiably or not, as the result of an attempt to subtly, perhaps even subconsciously, purge Deleuze of Guattari. In this context ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (henceforth AOP) might be thought as an attempt to regain the crucial duality or pluralistic-monism of the name ‘Deleuze-Guattari’. All this, however, would be to miss the point or purpose of the AOP. There is no hagiography here, nor any attempt to somehow provide evidence for the absolute necessity of the double name. Instead there is a kind of compassion.

    The AOP is first of all material. There is an introductory essay but I will ignore that, as though it doesn’t exist, since the papers themselves need to live. This time I decided to re-read the text during the xmas holiday break. I had picked the book up again a few weeks ago and for a while it sat, barely touched, on the bedside table where an ever shifting pile of texts moves through the dream-world of evening reading. These texts are usually chosen through a kind of intuition, something hinting at their interest, some curious phrase, name, image or event suggesting that, for some reason not yet clear, they will be of interest. Commonly this is the place for poetry and novels, my work-desk covered in philosophy texts, administrative bureaucracy and the portals to technological otherspace (internet, psp, mobilephone, digital camera). The bedside table texts slip inside the peripheral boundaries of reason, occasionally exploding into an event, text, lecture or image. They are the necessary distractions, the differential grenades.

    As I skimmed across AOP this time I came across the odd phrases, lines and words that seemed incomprehensible and instead of dismissing this as something for which I had no time instead felt comfortable in a language of sense beyond sense. It was clear as I read that there was this enormous production of words and the further I read the more I returned to my time of reading Artaud. That was a time, during the writing of my doctoral thesis, that lasted about 6 months, when all I did was read words of Artaud, about Artaud and with Artaud. It produced almost nothing of use in the thesis, no chapter, no ‘theses’, no critiques or necessities or tools or arguments or images but instead it provided a massive affect of wonder, joy, sadness and life. Resonance. There is no reason for resonance, though it may be analysed and its genealogy traced. The production of resonance, however, is a moment of beauty in the encounter, the moment when something contracts and forms itself as a crystal of thought to be taken and warmed during the course of the following times. A quote, a phrase, an image, these are usually the tokens of such resonance, tokens that we then exchange in the snake-oil discourse that surrounds and constructs our sociality. The resonance itself is, at its purest, something that cannot be contracted, something that resists being repeated through tokens and calls, instead, for a loyalty or trust, a kind of honouring of its existence. This is the case with Artaud and it is no surprise that the doorway into Artaud led through the Deleuzian phrase ‘bodies without organs’, which I took as a token of the ‘Artaud-encounter’ and which proved no mere token but rather an introduction, in the sense in which Heidegger introduces us to metaphysics. AOP, in this sense, produced a resonance, a kind of material space of encounter in which Anti-Oedipus is introduced as no mere text but as a production of newsense, an introduction to schizo-analysis.

    I am not writing a review then. A response perhaps. Last night, for example, as I sat with a friend of mine whose currently training in clinical psychology having completed his MPhil in philosophy a few years ago, we were discussing the practicalities of schizo-analysis. There is, I said to him, something that must be irresponsible in schizo-analysis. The analyst must act responsibly to achieve the state of power that constitutes ‘being an analyst’ but from them on, if they are to engage in schizo-analysis (and if they don’t then they essentially fall into the power relation they’re constituted by, with its attendant inevitability of having ‘power-over’) they must allow the irresponsible in, for this is the condition of experimentation without theory, the condition of being able to analyse without the oppression of the imposed theoretical construct enforcing a rigid and static meaning on the analysand, converting, at that point, the therapist as the rapist. To break theory, the flow of theory, and intersect instead with the actual, with the presented as presented flow, requires some irresponsibility. There is no way of being accountable for the break with theory, there lies within it a kind of megalomaniacal belief. This, I said, was found in the repetitive trope of ‘fuck it’ found in AOP, the way Guattari releases a frustration through this language. Fuck it, fucking hell, what a fucker. It’s akin to the exclamation mark, the mark of passion, another frequently used mark or word in AOP.

    Then there’s this sense of Guattari struggling with words – words, words, more fucking words. The same thing that animates any writer, something that occurs in the nomination of oneself as writer, that desperation, the fact that, as Deleuze says somewhere, we only write about that which we don’t know. I write and then I read what’s written and try to understand why I wrote that, how I wrote that, who wrote that because it wasn’t me. As the project nears its formal completion and ‘Anti-Oedipus’ is finished Guattari cries that he will be held to account, people will ask questions, he will be thought to be, somehow, responsible for the words and that he has tried hard to avoid this previously. Before ‘Anti-Oedipus’, he wails, he was able to walk away, turn his back and say nothing, say something else, explode irresponsibly as a flow, rather than an in-dividual, as an endpoint to flow.

    There’s this strange relation to analytic theory as well. Guattari take liquid ecstasy and tells his partner that he wants to fuck around. His molecularisation concepts impinge themselves and he holds to the delirium of the drug as a truth, somehow revealing the real Guattari, the liberated flow, when as we all know, the drugs flow, not you. That which is said on drugs is nothing other than the drugs. There is no ‘real flow’ unblocked by the chemical, just another flow which we’ll be attached to through a kind of family resemblance or filial link. “It came from mymouth thus it’s affiliated with everything else that comes from mymouth”. The reality, of course, is that a thousand angels speak through mymouth, the hiss and buzz of the goetic hordes, the insectoid machines of signification bubbling over desires incarnated in chemical interactions.

    The same imposition of theory onto flow occurs as he analyses his relations to fanny and gilles, the former who he wants to fuck, and the latter whom he seems to conceive as someone he must want to fuck even though such a desire is inapparent, hence, obviously, repressed. Fucking is taken as somehow meaningful in itself, as revealing something, other than the chimplike movement of bloodflow, hormonal interaction and a remarkably sophisticated antenna for opportunity. Everyone would fuck everything if they had the opportunity. The interesting thing is not why they do, but why they don’t. The break is the point of creation in the fuckflow. Guattari appears in these texts as classically heterosexual, for whom opportunity is inscribed in woman and not man and yet whose theories tell him such inscription is after the fact, that desire is genderfree, polymorphic. If the fuckflow is polymorphic, the breaks reveal the creation of something, indeed, but not necessarily a repression – it may as likely be a compression. That the opportunity is inscribed in woman more than man for the male heterosexual is no different, no more repressive, then if the fuckflow is inscribed predominantly in the same sex. It’s simply an asymetry. Nothing more. Where is the repression? Nowhere other than the theory, deriving its values from pre-theory, from a systemic asymetry that is no longer part of the fuckflow but which predominantly presents powerflow.

    My response to AOP then is a reponse to a text that is not intended simply as the presentation of ideas, content separable from the presentation, but like poetry or novels, contains a production that is entwined in its presentation. It’s the material for a schizo-analytical re-reading of ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and schizo-analysis itself, the non-existent form of analysis, the peripheral possibility of revolution rejected by the analytic community almost everywhere. As such, perhaps, it offers once again the glimmer of the possibility of revolution in the practical work of desirefuckedup that is the condition of possibility for analyses as a practice. This glimmer can be named; compassion.

  • Notes for Eric #2

    Notes for Eric #2

    The scale of things, to come back to that word, is still troubling my thoughts. The inhuman scale of politics operates at the scale of population, community and beyond, but appears in the face of the individual, whether that individual be Trump, Johnson or Corbyn – or any number of other figures. Underneath that ‘face’ we find the ‘faceless masses’, a phenomenon not of minor or major forms but of the everyday life we lead in which we’re anonymous.

    This was one of the things that was fascinating about the masks of the Anonymous movement or the Zapatistas. This displacement of the face brought to life the communities’ face, not as some kind of strange void or absent presence but precisely in the only form it could take, as a shared face. The mask forms a face for the faceless, and is deeply hated by liberal politics. It produces a community of faces, and brings with it all kinds of possible fascisms and archaic dominances – as the Anonymous ‘movement’ proved in many ways, drawing in a wide range of people who had to put a ‘face to the name’ of their oppression, too often in the form of the racialised other. Despite these possibilities, the mask also forms the community, it operates as that abstract machine that Deleuze and Guattari go on about, the crystal that co-ordinates a range of forces into an assemblage. The assemblage, the community, is never static of course, and can become something reactionary as well as revolutionary. The danger is always there, but the real question is whether the escape can take any other route? Can the revolution take any other form other than that of a mask? Does it not need to abolish the face of the individual?

    You can almost hear the squeals of the liberal individualist, or the liberal socialist. No, no, never that, never the loss of my individuality. Quite right my dear. We must remain in defence of the individual and their face, or their car, or their right to eat meat, or their rights in some form or other, right up to the end, which is already upon us and which will never be allowed to stop our right to consume.

    I’m being sarcastic of course, but it’s such a chore to have to extract something real from the collapse of politics into the rights of the individual that I find myself becoming irritable.

    What would it mean, to abolish the face of the individual? What it doesn’t mean is to superimpose a new face onto the individual, a new totalitarian dominance. Rather, it might better take form of the short circuiting of the connection between this me here and that me there. The mask forms something like a machine for such a short circuit.

    Within political life the mask has been prominent within the Zapatistas, the Black Bloc and the Irish republican struggle. The Zapatistas have no doubt articulated it in its most sophisticated form in many ways, as a form that enables participation and which challenges anonymity – the imposition of the ‘faceless mass’ – but its role as tactical necessity for the Black Bloc or within the Irish republican struggle also produced a vibrant revolutionary imaginary that short circuited the face of ‘the great leader’. It’s this thread that connects the mask to this problematic of scale, connecting the ‘community of action’ that operates at the scale of politics to the ‘practices of ethics’ that operates at the scale of the personal. The moment of ‘masking up’ shifts the person from one scale to another.

    There is a curious experience that runs analogous to this but which takes it into another form, which is the motorcyclists full face helmet. As I pull my helmet over my face there is this curious movement of recombination that simply doesn’t take place when getting into a car or onto a bus or train. It’s part of a ritual that takes place before riding where the body is shifted from one set of connections into another. As I pull on my jacket, helmet and then gloves – almost always in that order, because putting a helmet on with gloves is awkward – the body slips into becoming-biker. Here too, there is an anonymity and perhaps for some a kind of threatening presence, but also a community formation. As I ride, particularly if I’m riding rather than simply going somewhere, I acknowledge other bikers as I pass them, we nod at each other, offering a gesture across the tarmac and through the speed, a gesture of connection to a face I most likely will never see. It’s one of the small joys of biking and arises from a shared need to acknowledge that what we do escapes the lines of car and carriage, at the cost of a vulnerability that is irrational and yet, for all that, deeply personal – not individual, but personal.

    There, in that curious word, ‘personal’, there’s perhaps something that might enable a connection between the scale of this me here, this ‘individual’ and the me there, at the scale of the ‘political’. What is personal provides a thread through the various relations of one-to-one, group and community since the person involved in each relation is always personal. Talk of ‘the personal’ seems to fail at this point and transform something intimate into something ‘theoretical’ once again, something depersonalised. It’s always personal. This perhaps is the real thread of connection, from dreams to actions, that it’s always personal. No doubt this is such an obvious point as to seem trivial, yet my reaction to political theory, to political talk in general, still pushes me to want to stop at this point, at this point where it’s always personal.

    In one sense it’s vital to a revolutionary community that the individuals involved go beyond their reactions and move towards a commons of connection that, by definition, does not yet exist. We cannot but act from the positions we are in, with all the shit that the social has burdened us with, and this involves acknowledging that those very ‘personal’ responses often don’t express much more than the social constructions of which we are part.

    These social constructions form layers of complexity, as the revolutionary moves from a moment of escape from large scale social constructions into the new social construction of the revolutionary community. How much that community itself can escape is difficult to say, usually less than it believes. The single most difficult encounter for a revolutionary is with others in the revolutionary community, with the little fascisms, failures and fuck-ups that it consists of, that we are. Partly this is because the revolutionary community is, inevitably and without blame, a bad mixture of escape and retreat, variation and homogeneity; partly it is because it must impose its sociality (its’ borders and exclusions) or it dissipates within the scale of the political communities.

    Within this situation that which is always personal is often a poorly masked ego that cannot but protect itself with falsehood and illusion. The ego cannot abolish itself any more than the capitalist. Thus that which is always personal is the ego, that self that has been formed if we are to avoid the asylums. Yet that which is personal beyond the self, beyond the individual, still operates as the connecting thread between the various relation formations of one to one, group and community, because the revolutionary is engaged in a transformation of that which is always personal. In some sense we are incapable of yet taking anything personally and that, perhaps, is the challenge: to take it personally, beyond society, towards community.

  • Notes for Eric #1

    Notes for Eric #1

    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.

  • What I do as a sorcerer

    What I do as a sorcerer

    What I do as a sorcerer? (PDF version of the paper available here)

    Presented to the seminar, ‘Sorcery and Trance’ at The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, as part of their Post-Psychoanalysis series of seminars – 22.2.2018.

    (1) Trance, ritual, spell. To what end?

    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.

    Razorsmile, 21 Feb 2018

  • ATP reading notes 7 – the constraints of the constants

    ATP reading notes 7 – the constraints of the constants

    Continuing with Chapter 4 and the third and fourth postulate of linguistics, I’m trying to find a position from which the ‘problem’ that chapter addresses can be understood. As I mentioned in the previous post, the chapter reads in large part as a criticism of linguistics, in a semi-polemical tone, and perhaps because of this its positive content is not always easy to pick out. There are, however, some key notions, such as the role of the order word (the mot d’ordre) and the idea that language operates as a constraint. Taking this as the opening move of the chapter enables us to suggest something like the following: if language is first a form of constraint and because of this is bound up with power and dominance, with policing, then what strategies must be developed to prevent the constraint from becoming restriction. Constraint and restriction are different things. One can be constrained by rules and in so doing participate freely in a game, without restrictions. Alternatively one can be restricted to a particular way of playing and blocked from innovations even if such innovation doesn’t break the rules but re-organises them. In terms of politics and subjectivity this takes on wider ethical and normative connotations. If language constrains and yet at the same time is intimately connected to the very possibility of subjectivity (being able to say ‘I’), then the claim might something like ‘within a dominating normative framework language forms a set of internalised chains’. In this context it is not ‘ideas’ that lock people up – not ‘ideology’ that maintains ‘hegemony’ – but rather the mode of the policing of language, what we might call the operation of the constraints of the constants.

    Whilst the constraint of the constants might be a feature of linguistic practice the operation of such constraints is not but is rather one mode of understanding language. Here we perhaps begin to see the strategy of the chapter. D&G argue throughout Chapter 4 that another way of conceiving language is not only possible but necessary, both politically and theoretically. ‘Linguistics’ is the target of criticism via the four postulates ascribed to it because it fails to understand the constraints of the constants as themselves derived from continuous processes of variation that form the site of political selections. We can accept that language is a practice of constraint organised by the set of constants without falling into the trap of assuming that those constants are ‘natural’, innate or fixed. Chomsky is obviously and clearly one of the key targets of the polemic in the chapter and is the figure of the ‘major’ mode of understanding language in which the constraint of the constants is taken as a kind of fixed or stable feature of linguistic reality. Yet,

    “You will never find a homogenous system that is not still or already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent process of variation (why does Chomsky pretend not to understand this?). There are not, therefore, two kinds of language but two possible treatments of the same language. Either the variables are treated in such a way as to extract from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as to place them in continuous variation. … Constant is not opposed to variable; it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules correspond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules concern the construction of a continuum of variation.” (ATP 103)

    From this we find the following important implication being drawn:

    “Moreover, there are a certain number of categories or distinctions that cannot be invoked, that are inapplicable and useless as a basis for objections [to the claim that language is a regulated, continuous, immanent process of variation] because they presuppose the first treatment and are entirely subordinated to the quest for constants: for example, language as opposed to speech; synchrony as opposed to diachrony; competence as opposed to performance; distinctive features as opposed to nondistinctive (or secondarily distinctive) features.” (ibid, emphasis and possible ‘object’ added)

    These two different treatments of language are explicitly defined a few pages later as the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ modes of treating language (ATP 106) and the fact that these two modes exist is itself to be accounted for in turn by the order word as the “variable of enunciation that effectuates the condition of possibility of language and defines the usage of its elements according to one of the two treatments” (ibid). To try and state this less formally, what makes language possible are things called ‘order words’ that organise our ways of speaking and this organisation of our ways of speaking can be done in a ‘major’ mode or a ‘minor’ mode’. In the major mode restriction to a norm is the way of organising language whereas in the minor mode creation from a norm is the way of organising language. The major constrains to restrict, whereas the minor constrains to create. What is crucial here is that it is not the order word itself, it is not the constraints, that are the problematic feature, rather it is the operation of the constraints that matters. The ‘major’ or ‘minor’ here are not, then, quantifications but refer rather to major standards or norms and minor deviating practices. Importantly the deviating practices of the minor are identified as the location of autonomy. “Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy” (ATP 106). Becoming-minor, however, is never a fixed constant position, but always something that operates as a flight from ‘the standard’ (deterritorialisation) where ‘the standard’ is part of a process of variation.

    After making this point with regard the order word there is a strange turn in the text that occupies the last three or four pages of the chapter. D&G make the odd statement that “the order word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence” (ATP 107). They go on to say that “death is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bodies from the standpoint of their forms and substances” (ATP 108). Earlier they argued – as I noted in the first post about this chapter – that the collective assemblage of enunciation organises or polices a set of incorporeal transformations. From this we might assume that different assemblages have varying sets of incorporeal transformations. The example given is of a judge sentencing a convict and maybe it’s possible to imagine a collective assemblage of enunciation that did not have this particular incorporeal transformation as an element in its set. With death, however, we seem to find an element that any set of incorporeal transformations must contain – “Death, death; it is the only judgement, and it is what makes judgement a system” (ATP 107). They continue “in effect, death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or state” (ibid).

    In this ‘death’ then we find not simple expiration in the colloquial sense, mortality or termination, but something that seems instead closely connected to borders, thresholds, change, transition. The subject here is entwined in a kind of relationship to a ‘death sentence’, to a line it must obey if it is not to ‘die’. The ‘father’s orders to his son’ that they refer to contain within them the possible expulsion of the son from the relationship, the ‘death of the son’, even though this death may not involve the death of the material body that the attribute ‘son of…’ was ascribed to. Father to son: You’re dead to me. This example of a relationship problem, the fact that a relationship can break down in such a way that someone might say “you’re dead to me”, seems to be written into the very operation of language in so far as language is organised through collective assemblages of enunciation that operate on the basis of the capacity to exclude. It’s this capacity to expel the body that underpins the order word.

    At the same time this inherent death sentence within the order word sits alongside the capacity to flee. So the order word contains both expulsion and escape, the former imposed like death and the latter taken up as autonomy. Escape is not simple autonomy however but seems intricately bound into a more complex process of creation, which is perhaps why it is possible to closely align it with autonomy. Escape must avoid ‘black holes’, veering off into some ‘imaginary’, they suggest (ATP 110) and they go on to offer an example from a Herzog film where he says “Who will answer this answer?”

    “Actually, there is no question, answers are all one ever answers. To the answer already contained in a question (cross-examination, competition, plebisicite, etc) one should respond with questions from another answer. One should bring forth the order word of the order word. In the order word, life must answer the answer of death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create. There are pass-words beneath order-words. (Il y a des mots de passe sous les mots d’ordre). Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organised, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other – to transform the compositions of order into compositions of passage” (ATP 110)

  • ATP reading notes 6 – first two postulates of linguistics

    ATP reading notes 6 – first two postulates of linguistics

    The postulates of linguistics (Chapter 4) have sub-headings that at first sight are a little confusing. To begin with, all four of the postulates have sub-headings in quotation marks, which immediately makes one wonder who is speaking, which ‘position’ is being articulated. Next, the first of these – “Language is informational and communicational” – is something that is clearly not in line with much of what either Deleuze or Guattari say in many places. The first, hesitant, conclusion then is that the sub-headings of the postulates articulate positions that are to be opposed. This suggests that the ‘postulates of linguistics’ are targets of polemic and that this chapter offers a counter to a number of ‘accepted’ (one wonders by whom) postulates. During this counter-argument we may find some kind of ‘linguistic theory’ that we can attribute to D&G but if it is offered in the form of a counter-argument or polemic this does make it necessary to be cautious about positive content since anything that appears positive is so within this context of argument.

    The first apparently positive content comes in the form of the ‘order word’. The example of the school teacher giving commands and orders in a scene of ‘compulsory education’ and the translation of le mot d’ordre as ‘order word’ gives a connotation in English that is odd, and perhaps a little disorientating. It produces a sense of ‘command and control’ and slips into the background someone, something, with power that issues orders. There is a translators note here (fn1 ATP 76) touching on the other connotation, that of the slogan and what is called the ‘military password’, or what is perhaps more colloquially called a ‘watchword’. Mot d’ordre was also one of the communards newspapers during the Paris Commune of 1871. The translators note this and go on to say that “Deleuze and Guattari are also using the term literally: ‘word of order’, in the double sense of a word or phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order” (ATP 523, emphasis added). This latter sense, being ‘creative of order’, strikes me as the stronger side of the concept.

    Having said that it is worth saying that even if ‘command’ is perhaps problematic, obedience is not. ‘Obedience’ is at the heart of the Social and the Law, two structures that impose conditions of life on the subject. When it comes to a ‘mot d’ordre’ I find the work of someone like shepherd fairy to be cutting a line of subversion and so the connection between the deployment of ‘OBEY’ as a slogan, connected to the eyes of surveillance offers a potent articulation of the operations of the order word. It’s interesting, in this respect to hear fairy talk explicitly both about the connection to those surveillance images of ‘Big Brother’ that Orwell made famous as well as to recount how his own work arose as a re-territorialisation or re-organisation of graffiti, punk marketing and propaganda, in the midst of an attempt to escape the constraints of ‘art history’ as taught in the art school.

    We find then that this first claim, that “the elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order word” (ATP 76) needs to be connected to the first ‘problem’, which is that “the hard part is to specify the status and scope of the order-word. It is not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word is only a language-function, a function coextensive with language.” (ibid). Thus language appears here as a constraining practice, organising and ordering and doing so with an implicit call to ‘obey’. Yet who is it that must be obeyed? The next move that D&G make seems important here. If we slip into transcendental conditions of ‘law’, such that language demands obedience as its condition of possibility, then we can become too quickly involved not in a constraining but in a constrained. We can become part of a discourse that claims that we ‘cannot escape’ language and it’s vital, in this regard, to orientate ourselves in terms of the drive to ‘exit language’. In contrast to this the next claim, that “the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor, but indirect discourse” (ATP 76-77) or what they call ‘hearsay’. The use an example here, that of the communication practices of bees. Here they argue that bees do not have language but not because they don’t have ‘tropes’ or coding but rather because they operate within a direct discourse, such that one bee might communicate what they have seen to another, but no bee can ‘pass on’ that transmission successfully. Language thus becomes a kind of ‘passing on’ and this ‘passing’ connects with the idea of the watchword or password in that language becomes that which needs to be said to pass through the social, as it is ordered, without disruption or arrest. Whilst this is both a pragmatics and a performance it is, at the same time, a policing.

    One way of perhaps thinking this ‘policing’ function is to contrast the role of the performative and the illocutionary in two different situations. D&G sit unhappily in any analysis which tends to describe them offering a ‘performative’ account of language, or more exactly in any account of the order word which reads it as a performative function alone. After discussing speech acts and performativity (ATP 77) they go on to say the following:

    “It is true that it is still difficult to see how speech acts or implicit presuppositions can be considered a function co-extensive with language. It is all the more difficult if one starts with the performative (that which one does by saying it) and moves by extension to the illocutionary (that which one does in speaking). For it is always possible to thwart that move.” (ATP 78)

    They then go on to refine their definition of order words in the light of a comparison between Benveniste and Ducrot, who appear as though two sides of a similarly failing coin.

    “We call order words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word of every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a ‘social obligation’. Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly.” (ATP 79, emphasis added)

    In this context, they argue, it is the collective assemblage of enunciation that then accounts for the social character of language. If we refer back to our notions of ‘performative’ and ‘illocutionary’ we can see that it is this collective assemblage of enunciation that offers a way to grasp how the performative can fail and yet, why there is always an illocutionary force. For example, struggles over gender pronouns are only struggles because they often fail, with people refusing to comply with requests or ‘tripping up’ in particular contexts. The performative role of the gender pronoun is distinct from the illocutionary force, since refusal or failure to use the appropriate pronoun can display variable illocutionary forces, from outright refusal to ‘innocent’ failure. On the other hand, the illocutionary force of speaking is always present, for example marking the child and woman’s voice, the immigrant and the working-class accent, as ‘Other’ to a dominant bourgeois social. There is no escaping illocutionary force whereas the condition of performativity is that it can always fail. It is the collective assemblage of enunciation, the policing function, that can enable this radical distinction to be understood, since this collective assemblage ascribes values to illocutionary forces and authority to performance sources via the function of policing.

    The collective assemblage of enunciation polices a series of ‘acts immanent to language’ (ATP 80) and “these acts seem to be defined as the set of all incorporeal transformations current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society” (ibid). Body here is explicitly defined in the ‘broadest sense’. We are asked to distinguish between the “actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only non corporeal attributes or the ‘expressed’ of a statement” (ibid). (The use of ‘noncorporeal’ here might seem to be odd given that we’ve just been using ‘incorporeal’ but in looking at the French text it seems that it’s simply distinguishing between that which affects bodies and that which doesn’t.) They then use an example of a judge sentencing a convict to try and show what they’re referring to by these ‘incorporeal attributes’. The judges sentence transforms the accused into the convict and involves, in terms of bodies, that which took place beforehand (the crime), that which takes place after (the imprisonment or punishment) as well as the bodies involved (the person who is convicted, the victim, the prison etc). The sentence itself, however, takes place instantaneously and can be dated (if you ever wondered why the chapters of ATP have dates, this is one of the primary reasons it would appear, in that they ‘name’ incorporeal transformations). Moreover, it is the particular collective assemblage of enunciation and the order words that they constitute that produce the conditions for these instantaneous transformations. Only some things can be said, because the very function of a collective assemblage of enunciation is to police what can be said by whom with what effect. (Here I feel like offering as a slogan that ‘Language is a prison and the first rule of the prisoner is to escape‘.)

    “We have gone from explicit commands to order-words as implicit presuppositions; from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal transformations they express; and from there to the assemblages of enunciation whose variables they are. To the extent these variables enter at a given moment into determinable relations, the assemblages combine in a regime of signs or a semiotic machine.” (ATP 83)

    These regimes of signs are plural, mixed and changeable. Yet it is these collective assemblages, these regimes, are vital to the conception of language that D&G want to develop, not least because the last move in the first section of this chapter is to claim that these regimes are the condition of possibility of actual language. There is an attempt to produce something akin to a transcendental structure at this point (ATP 85). I’m not entirely clear how this structure is to be argued for but, very roughly, it seems that they claim the ‘pragmatic variables’ that constitute the collective assemblage / regime form this condition of possibility by forming the limits and conditions of effectiveness of language and it is this capacity to effect, to produce ‘incorporeal transformations’, that make language actual rather than virtual. Whilst this is still, clearly, a pragmatics, it is a pragmatics not of use but of the conditions of usability.

    Moving to the second section of this chapter, the postulate of linguistics presented as “There is an abstract machine of language that does not appeal to any ‘extrinsic’ factor”, once again it seems that this is a postulate to be opposed. In particular we find, towards the end of this section, this highlighted claim:

    “If the external pragmatics of non-linguistic factors must be taken into consideration, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal pragmatics involving its own factors.” (ATP 91)

    There seems some ambiguity in the English here which may or may not be in the French. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s best to read ‘linguistics’ here as referring to a particular discipline of academic activity or to any account of language. One of the implications is that ‘linguistics’ as a specific object of investigation, or any study of language that takes it as an autonomous field with ‘immanent laws’ or something akin to such, is already on the wrong foot as it cannot take seriously the non-linguistic factors that are the condition of possibility for actual language. Here, on this reading, the implication is, effectively, that ‘linguistics should be abolished’ but there is also a strong implication for practices such as psychoanalysis where language is the primary mode of relation. The ‘talking cure’ might be though, for example, to rely upon the ‘talking’ when in fact it relies upon the conditions of ‘curing’. If this is the ‘strong’ reading of this passage I confess to be somewhat sympathetic but the weaker reading would only imply, perhaps, that linguistics must take account of non-linguistic factors.

    It’s late and I’ll have to catch up on this a little later.

  • ATP reading notes 5 – the three types of strata

    ATP reading notes 5 – the three types of strata

    Picking up the 3rd chapter, the ‘geology of Morals’, from roughly midway through (from the paragraph that begins “Most of the audience had left…” – ATP:57) we find a typology of strata being outlined. Three primary types of strata are posited. These are what I would call (1) the ‘simple’, (2) the organic and (3) the alloplastic or linguistic (I will return to the ‘double naming’ of this last strata). Towards the end of the chapter the difference between these three types – D&G refer to them as ‘major groupings’ (ATP 60) – is identified as located in the particular organisation of the relation between content and expression. D&G claim the following:

    “What varies from stratum to stratum is the nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative movements. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude, with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the real-real distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a superlinearity of expression (translation).” (ATP 72)

    This presents as a highly technical definitional framework and unpicking it should give some insight into the line of argument in Chapter 3. This line of argument has implications for at least two major problems that are more generalised and by placing ATP into relationship with those problems it should be possible to locate its specific contribution as well as its difference form existing responses. The first problematic is the human/animal distinction, which in many senses is a new kind of ‘humanism’ problem, whilst the second problematic is, broadly speaking, the nature of language. Both problematics are often addressed, albeit somewhat obliquely, through discussion of ‘normativity’ or a ‘nature / norms’ or ‘facts / norms’ distinctions. How so? Roughly and crudely, there’s often a sense of distinction between ’causes’ (facts) and ‘reasons’ (norms), a distinction that can be drawn as a dualism when these are posited as distinct phenomenal realms with their own laws. Similarly, there’s often a distinction drawn between ‘behaviour’ (animal) and ‘action’ (human), which is also a distinction that can be drawn as a dualism, one which often appears as a new form of the Cartesian dualism of minds and bodies (res cogitans versus res extensa in Descartes terms) relocated into the ‘political’.

    When these dualisms appear, it is not usually in a ‘flat’ form but with an inbuilt hierarchy and transcendence, one which places the language user, the thinker, res cogitans – or whatever else, in effect, that we have used, since Aristotle, to name the human – above those who aren’t allowed to speak, think or have a mind ascribed to them. This is part of what D&G call ‘the State’ and in part motivates their attempt to produce a ‘rhizomatic book’. “The state as the model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject.” (ATP 24). The State, in this sense, is not simply the political formation but a broader concept that often seems to be close to ‘dominant state of affairs’. Within such a dominant state of affairs, particularly in philosophy and psychoanalysis, we commonly find the supposed ‘centrality’ of language. Guattari’s call to ‘exit language’ is one way of thinking a major dynamic of the schizoanalytic project and involves what Lazzarato calls a ‘double decentring’, which is constituted by “detaching subjectivity from the subject, the individual and even the human; while taking care not to turn the unique power of enunciation into the exclusive domain of human subjectivity” (fn1, emphasis added). Thus, there are two things to bear in mind – the first is that the typology of the three strata, the way that typology is drawn, has implications for the human/animal/language problematic and, second, that the direction of travel for these implications is to reduce, remove or counter the ‘dualism’ that results from an illicit human exceptionalism.

    Returning to the technical definitional framework in the quote given above, the three variables that are being deployed to construct the typology are (1) the kind of real distinction that exists between content and expression, (2) the kind of substances involved and (3) what are called the ‘relative movements’ of the strata. The first of these, the kind of real distinction between content and expression, is perhaps the most important to try and clarify precisely because it is the most obscure. The role of real distinction is integral to the description of a strata. “Each strata is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are really distinct and in a state of reciprocal determination” (ATP 72). ‘Real distinction’ is a curious concept, deployed by John Duns Scotus, whom Deleuze draws on heavily in Difference and Repetition, as well as by Descartes who uses it as a means of underpinning his ‘substance dualism’. In general, we might say that ‘real distinction’ is posited to enable ontological claims, claims about the types of ‘things’ (res) that exist, in contrast to distinctions in how we might know things. So real distinction in Scotus is contrasted to ‘conceptual distinction’, although Scotus also has two other modes of distinction (formal and modal) which fall ‘in between’ the real distinction / conceptual distinction divide.

    Scotus is concerned to work out the relation between ‘creator’ (God) and the ‘created’ and the relation of the Trinity to the unity, or singularity, of God. He adds to the real and conceptual distinction two other types, formal and modal distinctions, distinctions which are neither ‘real’ nor ‘mind dependent’ (i.e. conceptual). These formal and modal distinctions have some ‘degree’ of reality without producing separate things, enabling him to argue that God can be both a Trinity (formal distinction) and a unity. Without drifting too far into either the scholasticism of Scotus or Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, the role of ‘real distinction’ in Chapter 3 is similarly deployed to show how strata can be described through a ‘both-and’ strategy, that is, as both as a form and substance of content and a form and substance of expression. The thing we need to ask is (a) why do we need the content/expression double articulation and (b) why are different strata grouped according to different forms of ‘real distinction’?

    To the first question we find the following answer – “there is a real distinction between content and expression because the corresponding forms are effectively distinct in the ‘thing’ itself, and not only in the mind of the observer” (ATP 58). Here it appears that D&G are relying on the idea of a ‘formal distinction’, the distinction being drawn in term of real distinct forms in content and expression. How does this play out in terms of the three types of strata? If we begin with the first ‘simple’ strata we find that the molecular content and the molar expression of the strata are found “wherever the molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions” (ATP 57). It’s difficult not to read this as a kind of basic physical determinism that is being referred to, albeit one that is trying to avoid any physicalist reductionism. The molar level is real, even as a level of expression of the molecular, and is not merely an ‘appearance’. Specifically, this view would hold that holistic effects of emergence are real, not reducible to more ‘fundamental’ micro-level laws of interaction.

    ‘Emergence’ will play a role in the chapter on the refrain, where the moment of the “emergence of expressive proper qualities” (ATP 322) is discussed. Overall, however, the concept of ’emergence’, understood as the arrival of a new level of ‘macro’ level properties and laws that are irreducible to the molecular level, does not figure explicitly as the motivating factor in the argument of ATP. Despite this, the problematics of emergence might be a useful way to understand the dynamic of the typology, the way that the three strata are laid out. There seems a prima facie case that what is being sketched out in chapter 3 is a system of emergence that accounts for both the organic and the linguistic as distinct from the ‘simple’ physico-chemical. There is a difficulty as the chapter progresses, however, which is that it seems we are presented with a story that goes from the ‘simple’ physico-chemical realm, through the organic to the linguistic. The problem of the chapter can perhaps be identified by suggesting that this story is difficult to grasp precisely because it misses the discontinuities it supposes to explain. In other words, simply restating or re-describing three different ‘realms’ of the physical, organic and linguistic in terms of strata and double articulation fails to account for how the difference between these realms arises. Is the real problem not how the three strata differ but that there are these three radically different strata formations? Is there some genesis of the one from the other or not? If there is, how does this genesis produce radical discontinuity? If there is not, why are there these just three strata and not ten, thirty, an infinity of strata? There is some possible response made to this problem when Challenger discusses the last of his ‘three problems’.

    It’s worth remembering at this point that it is Challenger who is presented here as offering this account, and he is presented in such an ambivalent manner as to make it difficult to pin down whether the account is to be advocated for or against. The opening lines of the paragraph we began with this time, the paragraph that begins “Most of the audience had left…, reset the scene of the lecture the account of which comprises this chapter. It will be reset again, very briefly, once we’ve had the first outline of the three types of strata presented (ATP 63), next when Challenger moves to discuss his ‘three problems’ (ATP 64) and then finally as a coda to the chapter (ATP 73). Each reset operates a little like a ‘section break’, where the discussion moves to another line of thinking or another move in the argument.

    In his discussion of ‘three problems’ Challenger offers some possible means of responding both to the problems of ‘why content and expression’ as well as to the need for the variable mode of real distinction in each strata. The three problems he wants to discuss are (i) the problem of the ‘sign’ (ATP 64-68), (ii) the problem of ‘base-superstructure’ (ATP 68) and (iii) the problem of ‘cosmic evolutionism’ (ATP 69). Taking the last first we read the following:

    “It is difficult to elucidate the system of the strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual evolution from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and ascended degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different figures of content and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere.” (ATP 69, emphasis added.)

    On the face of it then if we were to read the account of the three strata as describing a kind of ‘development’ or progress we are being called to account. The claim appears to rest on this use of the concept of ‘mechanosphere’ – machines everywhere – as an all embracing ontological category so that we can then, presumably, assert formal distinctions without positing any kind of substance plurality. In other words, everything is ontologically part of the same world (in so far as everything is machinic, part of the mechanosphere) and yet real distinctions exist between the simple, organic and linguistic, real distinctions that derive form the organisation of the machines, the forms. Here we encounter that curious concept of the ‘plane of consistency’. “The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor: all that consists is real.” (ATP 69). What is it for something to ‘consist’?

    I never quite know what to make of the ‘plane of consistency’ since it is used with abandon so often I can only wonder whether I’ve simply missed something everyone else understands. The cake consists of…the human consists of… In these instances, the elements that are combined are obvious perhaps. The working image I tend to fall back on is one in which what we call ‘objects’ or ‘subjects’ or ‘life’ is driven by a continual process that flows between the unformed through the formed and then back into the unformed as that which has form in turn deforms and reforms. The plane of consistency in this sense would be that which is ‘prior to’ the formed yet which is always there, surrounding formations with blur, fuzzy edges, decomposing lines. When the strata decompose, that which has become organised now becomes disorganised into the “unformed, unstable matters” that Challenger begins with (ATP 40). The trouble with this image is it smells too neat, it’s too ‘cyclic’ and subsuming, so there’s something a little revolting about it.

    If we continue to read we can find D&G making clear that “we cannot content ourselves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency“, rather “the strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritorialisation” (ATP 70). They go on to say that strata are “thickenings on a plane of consistency” (ibid). This ‘thickening’ is a fascinating way to grasp stratification processes. I’ve argued, since my Phd research, that Deleuze operates with an ‘oceanic ontology’, one where ocean currents and formations such as the ‘plastic island’ offer the best model for understanding individuation through difference rather than identity. In such a situation there is a pluriverse rather than a universe, which is to say, multiple worlds entangled by power relations, not forming a singular whole but intimately connected or connectable (fn2). In this sense the ‘mechanosphere’ would map to the ‘pluriverse’ under the reign of the machine.

    So, this realm of the mechanosphere, this reign of the machine, is a continually moving, breathing, heaving world of shapes, forces, objects, subjects. Multiple interactions at varying speeds and directions (vectors) producing specific forms, in different ways. This, the variable production of forms from within a seething movement, constitutes the process of stratification/destratification. Rather than a base / superstructure model with a relatively simple flow from base to superstructure (even if we allow for feedback effects) we instead have a collapse of such directionality of determination. Instead of ‘cosmic evolution’ which again posits relatively simple flow from past to future, from less to more, we again have a collapse of such directionality of determination. Yet as this story begins to seem clearer, the very individuations it supposedly accounts for – in particular, the individuation of language and norms, reason not causes – seems to slip away. Is there any space left for this distinction?

    Here we can begin to see why there are three factors mentioned in the quote which started this section – “the nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative movements“. This last factor – the ‘nature of relative movements’ – makes more sense if it’s a mode of distinguishing types of flow or types of ‘dynamic’. The three types strata in this sense become three types of flow, and the typologisation of flows can be found all over the place – river, ocean, whirlpool; pahoehoe, aa, pillow; trains, planes, automobiles. The importance of the ‘directionality’ of the organic and then the alloplastic / linguistic strata begins to become clearer. In the organic stratum the “essential thing is the linearity of the nucleic sequence” (ATP 59, emphasis in original) and in the alloplastic / linguistic it is the fact that “vocal signs have temporal linearity and it is this superlinearity that constitutes their specific deterritorialisation and differentiates them from genetic linearity” (ATP 62, emphasis in original). Yet we’re still left with this nagging doubt, this worry that this story misses the discontinuities it supposes to explain, a discontinuity that might be located at the alloplastic/linguistic, but which is clearly indicated with regard the organic. I’ll finish this section by just indicating this worry.

    As Challenger/D&G begin to explicate the organic stratum they specify that it ‘amplifies’ the relation between the molecular and molar that exists in the first ‘simple’ strata and that this stratum must have a ‘unique character’ that will account for this amplification. They locate this character quite dramatically. In the organic stratum, “expression becomes independent in its own right, in other words, autonomous. Before, the coding of a stratum was co-extensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches as much as possible from the second and third dimensions.” (ATP 59, emphasis in original). Here, when this sense of ‘autonomy’ is deployed with regard expression on the organic stratum, is where there seems this problem – is it enough to simply assume such autonomy? Do we not need to account for it? And what, really, can be meant by ‘autonomy’ at this point? It seems hard to imagine how it could mean ‘self-giving lawmaker’, an auto
    nomos, yet that is plainly what we are to conceive in some form (fn3). The difficulties of doing this take us directly into those problematics of nature, of animal/human/language and of norms and facts with which I started this section, but it’s still, as yet, unclear quite how to formulate and respond to the philosophical problematics presented in the descriptive framework offered by D&G.

    References:

    1. Maurice Lazzarato – ‘Exiting language’, semiotic systems and the production of subjectivity in Felix Guattari in Cognitive architecture: from bio-politics to noo-politics. Architecture & Mind in the age of communication and information, Rotterdam 2010, pp.502-521, accessed online.
    2. The ‘pluriverse’ is a concept that in large measure is taken from Walter Mignolo, see for example his brief note ‘On Pluriversality‘.
    3. The idea of ‘biological autonomy’ is strange but not absurd, as might be witnessed by its existence in contemporary scientific discussions, cf. Biological autonomy – a philosophical and theoretical enquiry, Moreno and Mossio, Springer 2015.
  • ATP reading notes 4 – milieus and abstract machines

    ATP reading notes 4 – milieus and abstract machines

    I missed the reading group on October 13th, when they discussed Chapter 2 (1914: One or several wolves), and so I’m turning to the Chapter 3 10,000BC: The geology of morals. I will return to Chapter 2 when I have time. We read the first half of Chapter 3 on October 20th, up to but not including the paragraph that begins ‘Most of the audience had left…’ (ATP 57) and will continue with the remainder of Chapter 3 next week. As a reminder, these notes are in no way a report of the reading group, rather they are my notes and thoughts which will be informed by the discussion there, but all mistakes and errors are my own.

    The ‘double articulation’ that is the focus of this chapter is that of the ‘codes’ and ‘territories’ that are probably quite familiar to readers of D&G. The processes of code and territory produce many of those curious ‘jargon’ terms so hated by critics, terms like decoding, overcoding, surplus value of code, deterritorialization, reterritorialization. At heart, these two processes, of code and territory, involve processes and because of this the dynamics of those processes, whether they are opening or closing dynamics, are central to D&G’s discussions. What purpose do these processes have in the analytical model of schizoanalysis? They are replacements or alternatives for more traditional philosophical concepts of ‘form’ and ‘content’ and are intended, I think, to transform the analytical categories that are used to understand specific ‘objects’ (concepts) of discussion. So, when talking, for example, about the ‘nature of subjectivity’, we could analyse it in terms of codes and territories rather than in terms of language, experience, ideology, genealogy or substance. We might presumably do something similar for concepts such as ‘nation’, ‘class’, ‘freedom’ or ‘truth’.

    There is something more than merely a ‘model’ at stake, however, at least the opening of the chapter appears to pose the problem in more fundamental terms. The double articulation of codes and territories – for which the Lobster is an image – is presented as a way to understand the process of ‘stratification’. Stratification arises ‘simultaneously and inevitably’ (ATP 40) alongside or within the ‘unstable, unformed matters’ that constitutes the Earth. Stratification consists “of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organising them into molar aggregates” (ibid). In other words, stratification – operating through the double articulation of codes and territories – is the process through which something like a ‘primal flux’ comes to be ordered, a process through which the dynamic flows of matter form something like ‘objects’ or ‘substance’.

    Immediately, however, we must double the doubling, specifically we have to take into account the pairing of ‘content’ and ‘expression’ and the fact that each of these terms is, again, doubled. If ‘matter’ is the “unformed, unorganised, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows”, then ‘content’ refers to “formed matters, which would now have to be considered from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are ‘chosen’, and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order (substance and form of content)” whilst ‘expression’ refers to “functional structures, which would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organisation of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds (form and content of expression)” (ATP 43).

    “Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualised (substances). In a geological stratum, for example, the first articulation is the process of ‘sedimentation’, which deposits units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the ‘folding’ that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from sediment to sedimentary rock.” (ATP 41)

    The first curiosity here is this use of such a ‘geological’ model. It seems, on the face of it, that a model derived from a natural science such as geology is going to produce category mistakes if we deploy it in analysis focussed on the ‘human’. Aren’t issues of meaning, signification, sense and intention more relevant to political and social analysis? Such an assumption begs the question, despite it’s apparent obviousness to many people who are happy to merely assert some human exceptionalism as though it were incontrovertibly the case. Even if we don’t beg the question, however, there seems something a little odd about deploying ‘geological’ models in a text that purports to be about ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’. How might we connect a ‘geological’ concept of stratification to something ‘human’? Whilst this question already assumes too much importance for the human, it might be useful as a way of being able to understand what political or social implications there are in ATP, and that itself might be necessary because I’m assuming that – broadly speaking – most of the people interested in ATP are interested in such ‘human’ issues rather than in subjects such as geology, which is not to deny that there is also possible interest in the text for geologists.

    There is a second curiosity, however, which is that the specific ‘stratum’ that is addressed in the chapter is not geological or even human but the organic. The chapter is staged as a lecture being delivered by Professor Challenger, a character from Arthur Conan Doyle stories. At one point there is clearly a sense of a merging of Challenger with the authors of ATP, most notably when Challenger is described as having “invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities.” (ATP 43). Amusingly the text continues as follows – “Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, method, or principles of this discipline were.” (ibid). To return to the discussion in the chapter/lecture hybrid, what we’re reading soon moves from the rather abstract account of double articulation to something more concrete – “the question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what does not? What accounts for the unity and diversity on a stratum?” (ATP 45) and this question focusses on the ‘organic’. At the heart of this is a discussion (ATP 45-49) that begins from a staging of the debate between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier. An account of this debate is given – “Challenger imagined a particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theatre style” (ATP 46) – the purpose of which, however, is to present the ‘paradigm shift’ introduced by Darwin. At the end of the staged debate we find the following passage:

    “We have not even taken Darwin, evolutionism, or neoevolutionism into account yet. This, however, is where a decisive phenomenon occurs: our puppet theatre becomes more and more nebulous, in other words, collective and differential. Earlier, we invoked two factors, and their uncertain relations, in order to explain the diversity within a stratum – degrees of development or perfection and types of form. They now undergo a profound transformation. There is a double tendency for types of forms to be understood increasingly in terms of populations, packs and colonies, collectivities or multiplicities: and degrees of development in terms of speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations. A double deepening. This, Darwinism’s fundamental contribution, implies a new coupling of individuals and milieus on the stratum. (ATP 47-48)”

    It is this ‘new coupling of individuals and milieus on the stratum’ that is the link between ‘geology’ and ‘morals’ and through which the first curiosity I mentioned is in some sense made clearer by the second. It is this ‘new coupling’ that offers a productive and ‘transferable’ set of categories, ones that can move across the analysis of the processes of geological sedimentation into the analysis of the processes of individuation more generally, although quite how generally is still up for question as there is plainly no direct and obvious route from Darwinism to politics or sociology, or at least no direct uncontested route since at the very least we can find ‘socio-biology’ suggesting one, albeit highly contested, possibility of generalisation. The route to generalisation taken by ATP, however, is distinct from any socio-biology I’m aware of, primarily because it’s primary category of generalisation is to be the ‘abstract machine’.

    The problem that is posed as the motivation for Challenger’s discussion is the “unity and diversity of a single stratum”, what is it that enables a single stratum to have a “unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum” (ATP 49). This problem directly arises from the ‘science of multiplicities’, what I called the ‘method of the rhizome’ in my discussions of the first chapter of ATP. If ‘multiplicity’ is to be taken as a substantive and in doing so replace problematics involving a ‘dialectic’ between the One and the All, then the ‘problem of individuation’ can be posed in terms of how it is possible to call something a thing in the singular, in this case, how is it possible to discuss a stratum from within a model of the double articulation of stratification, where at any moment there is always more than one involved – the double bind of double articulation.

    In the paragraph that starts “To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition…”, just following a brief remark re-emphasising the staging of the chapter as a lecture by Challenger, an initial move to introduce the abstract machine is made. Here the process of individuation of a stratum is posed in terms of “a change in organisation, not an augmentation” and the factors involved in a relation between a stratum and a substratum are reciprocal rather than hierarchical, hence why D&G declare that “we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolution” (ATP 49). A substratum is posed as a milieu, as an “exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum” (ibid). They try to illustrate this reciprocal relation of exterior / interior in the composition of a stratum by first offering the example of a crystalline stratum developing from the seed and medium and then move to claim that “the same applies to the organic stratum: the materials furnished by the substrata are an exterior medium constituting the famous prebiotic soup, and catalysts play the role of seed in the formation of interior substantial elements or even compounds” (ATP 49-50). Crucially there are three elements at work here, viz. (1) the (exterior) milieu, the molecular materials (2) the (interior) seed, interior substantial elements, and (3) the limit of exchange between the two, the “membrane conveying the formal relations”, or surface. The abstract machine is the ‘synthesis’ or result of the reciprocal relations between these three elements and is given the name of Ecumenon in contrast to what they call a Planomenon.

    Before moving forward it’s worth considering why this abstract machine is important. It offers us the mode of individuation that is going to be able to explain the existence of organisation from the background of a disorganised flow of matter, although ‘explain’ might be too strong here – it offers an account or descriptive framework. It’s worth noting that the whole discussion of stratification within which this existence of the abstract machine plays its role is offered from a factical staring point, that is, the ‘simultaneous and inevitable phenomenon of stratification’ is simply offered alongside the account of the ‘body without organs’, “…the Earth, – the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule…” (ATP 40). Putting aside the status of the description one thing we can note, however, is that the discussion of abstract machines, the production of an ‘Ecumenon’, is a positive account that in many ways can complement the dissolution that is often associated with D&G. Quite commonly we come across an emphasis on ‘how to make yourself a body without organs’, which might be read as a way to ‘liberate’ oneself from having been organised behind our backs by culture or social norms or ‘ideology’, or some other mode of social construction. The discussion in this chapter, however, offers an account of “how to ‘make’ the body an organism” (ATP 41), which offers itself immediately as a compliment, almost as the other side of the coin of that process of ‘making yourself a body without organs’. As such, for those interested in how D&G or schizoanalysis might offer a route to resistance or revolution and who might be left wondering where the constructive or productive process might be discussed, this is one place to look, at how one might conceive something like the abstract machine of revolution.

  • ATP reading notes 3 – mapping and tracing

    ATP reading notes 3 – mapping and tracing

    Turning to the 5th and 6th characteristics of the rhizome – the principle of cartography and decalcomania – we move from discussions of the book, of evolutionary science, of music, to discussions of psychoanalysis, the first real moment in which a continuity between ATP and Anti-Oedipus really makes itself felt.

    First, a brief note on that strange word ‘decalcomania’, and an even briefer note on ‘cartography’. Cartography, or map-making, involves the active ‘making’ of maps and that active ‘making’ element is important here, which is why it is not the principle of ‘maps’ but of ‘cartography’, or more colloquially, of ‘mapping’. The productivity of cartography is put in relationship to the practice of ‘tracing’, which is a restrictive, constricting practice. In one sense we can understand cartography as producing openings and decalcomania as producing constrictions. Decalcomania itself appears to refer to a practice of tracing that developed in the 19th century as a form of decorating pottery. It involved a process of producing a ‘decal’ that was then laid onto pottery or glass and the Wikipedia entry also indicates a couple of other fascinating connections, first to some surrealist practice and second to some work with regard fractals. I’m not sure why D&G would use the idea of ‘decalcomaia’ rather than simply ‘tracings’ here if it wasn’t to at least allude to these particular forms of tracing, since the actual discussion – at least in the English translation – reverts to the term ‘tracings’.

    In terms of the actual principles themselves, it’s important to note that they are not claiming that maps are simply better than tracings, even though at one point they say “the rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing.” (ATP 12). In the very next paragraph they attempt to make clear that they do not intend to “revert to a simple dualism” (ie, of the form maps=good tracings = bad). Rather the tracing has the danger of ‘neutralising’ the rhizome and in particular “what the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration” (ATP 13). Therefore “it is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map” (ibid).

    The map, in this situation, is an open, experimental and productive process, hence why it is possibly better thought of as ‘mapping’ rather than ‘the map’. In one of the most interesting lines, they claim that “the map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency” (ATP 12). In the discussion that follows the concrete examples they draw on come from psychoanalysis – Freud on Little Hans and Klein on Little Richard – and here the rhizome connects clearly to the thematics of Anti-Oedipus. In their criticism of psychoanalysis they say the following:

    “You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.” (ATP 14)

    It becomes increasingly clear that the rhizome is being developed as a method because of it’s political (micro-political) implications. In this situation, the reference made to the relationship between mapping and tracing as involving a method makes more sense – it is a question of method assuming that we wish to liberate desire, it’s a question of a method for the schizoanalyst. In this context, one small reference stands out and that is to the work of Fernand Deligny. As the discussion on psychoanalysis comes to an end D&G refer to “Deligny’s method: map the gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the same child, for several different children.” (ibid) Deligny’s work appears to have become a focus for research in recent years and in particular he seems closely connected to the idea of ‘lines of flight’.

    (Here’s a short essay on what Deligny called ‘wander lines’ that gives a brief introduction to him and his work and have a look at this Google search for recent researches and connections.) Deligny will return in Chapter 8, the ‘Three novellas’ chapter, at an important moment in the discussion of lines of flight, as a key positive source of inspiration (ATP 202-203), and again at the beginning of Chapter 11, ‘Of the refrain’, once more in a positive ‘opening’ moment (ATP 311-312, fn.1).

    After having given these 6 characteristics we find D&G moving the discussion through a kind of loose comparative analysis, whereby they look at the possible understanding of an arborescent/rhizomatic difference in specific fields, primarily in a discussion of a debate from within information science that they read in terms of an arborescent/rhizomatic difference, but there are also comments on the nature of  the difference between West and East in terms of the role of the tree, as well comments about America and bureaucracy. After 4 or 5 pages of this kind of discussion they again summarise the ‘characteristics’ of the rhizome (ATP 21) and then explain their use of ‘plateaus’, which is derived from Gregory Bateson’s work and deployed in order to subvert the book having a beginning, since each plateau is always ‘in the middle’ (intermezzo). Even in this closing discussion, however, we again find a kind of quick, rough and ready comparative analysis being deployed when they briefly discuss history, making the claim that ‘what is lacking is a nomadology’ (ATP 23).

    What we find by the end of this first introductory chapter is a baroque and convoluted form of philosophy, one in which a methodology is put forward (the rhizome) as the means by which a particular practice can be developed (schizoanalysis) but where this is done almost in a performative way, as thought it were presenting an example of the kind of rhizomatic practice being articulated and advocated for. Reading through ATP I am reminded of how often I have spun off into one of the references, such as the Deligny, not in order to simply understand what D&G are saying but because the connection offered through that reference opens a whole new world of possibilities. This ‘opening of a world of possibilities’ is, I think, one of the most important ways of encountering the rhizome, the lines of flight, the multiplicity that is schizoanalysis. It is at times intensely infuriating, particularly if what you want to do is ‘understand’ D&G quickly (usually in order to be able to dismiss it in favour of some preferred model). If, however, the goal is to develop what we might call a ‘schizoanalytic’ method, then this first chapter offers a clear example of both the possibilities and problems involved.

    One final note – the ‘philosophical’ background to much of the discussion of the rhizome – from within the work of Deleuze – lies in the problem of ‘multiplicity’ and at the heart of that are a whole bunch of interesting discussions regarding space and time, discussions that move from Kant’s account of the pure intuitions, through Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger up to the work of Deleuze in his Bergson book and elsewhere. I haven’t really noted any of this in any detail but wanted to leave a couple of references here for when I return to these notes:

    This extract from a lecture by Deleuze on Bergson’s theory of multiplicities, and this useful summary by John Protevi of Chapter 2 of Deleuze’s ‘ book Bergson’ on ‘Time and Free Will’.

    There is also this interesting connection to Anti-Oedipus and what is said about multiplicity as a substantive there:

    It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring-production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity. (AO Ch1, Part 6 end of first paragraph: Athlone 42).

    This obviously connects closely to what is said in the 3rd principle of the rhizome (ATP 8).

  • ATP reading notes 2 – the first 4 principles of the rhizome

    ATP reading notes 2 – the first 4 principles of the rhizome

    There are 6 principles of the rhizome that are outlined in the first chapter of ATP. They are introduced as ways of characterising the rhizome, although these are only “approximate characteristics” (ATP 7). There is something a little incongruous about the way they are introduced. The function of these characteristics, approximate as they may be, is to give a definition for the key methodological framework of the book, the rhizome, but the way that D&G introduce this set of defining principles is by saying that “we get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome” (ibid). The element of this that strikes me as incongruous is this way of phrasing things – “we get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one…” – which sounds almost patronising or dismissive. On the one hand, presumably, they are acknowledging an intention to ‘convince’ but on the other hand the ‘distinct feeling’ reads as though it were a kind of realisation that the people they are trying to convince would fail to follow along if D&G were to simply do their own thing. It’s as though these principles are offered as a kind of sop to stupidity, as though the need for a clear definition cannot be avoided, even though such a definitional mode is itself almost inherently non-rhizomatic because it presents itself as a foundational moment, a root or radicle.

    This performative paradox of a text that advocates rhizomatic readings having to begin by defining what a rhizome is as its foundation is most likely what underlies this odd way of introducing the principles of the rhizome. Despite what they say later in this introduction, that “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (ATP 25), the book has a physical front and back, it presents in a linear fashion, it builds upon itself as it progresses, it’s a tree, not a rhizome. Advocating for a rhizomatic book inside a book that is classically formed is most odd. In a time of non-linear text functions, with hyperlinks and e-books offering all range of possible horizons of reading, ATP feels a little old-fashioned and incongruous in many ways, advocating for a future in a form from the past that seems almost childishly limited in its possibilities. At the same time, the worry is that something deeper than mere form is the source of the problem here, something closer to the very function of philosophy, reason, argument and ‘convincing’ intellectual positions. Is it, in fact, possible to conceive a rhizomatic thought, one that can begin from the middle? Doesn’t all thought get structured by the fact that it always must begin somewhere and that this beginning is never, can never be, a middle? The problem of the ‘beginning’ of thought would take us right back to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and their obsessions with beginnings, and perhaps it’s as an attempt to break away from this that best accounts for the move towards the rhizome.

    The six principles are as follows:

    • 1 and 2 – principles of connection and heterogeneity
    • 3 – principle of multiplicity
    • 4 – principle of asignifying rupture
    • 5 and 6 – principles of cartography and decalcomania

    Some simple observations to begin with. There are supposedly 6 principles but as can be seen the first and last pairs are linked together. It’s also worth noting that in the discussions of both P1&2 and P5&6 the work of Chomsky is in the background as a contrasting perspective. The longest single discussion of any of these principles is of P4, where 3 paragraphs are devoted to it. In comparison P1, 2, and 3 get only a single paragraph each and P5&6 gets 5 paragraphs. It’s also worth noting that the famous example of the wasp and orchid is part of the discussion of P4, asignifying ruptures, not as one might assume from a lot of pub conversation, part of the map/territory discussion of P5&6. Finally, it’s worth noting that P5&6 is not the principle of the map and territory, even though there is a discussion of such, rather it’s the principle of maps and tracings. This notion of the trace, a concept we might more commonly associate with Derrida, is what underlies that strange word ‘decalcomania’. Having made these simple observations, I will briefly work through each principle. Before I do, however, one impressionistic response, which is the following: the presence and centrality of Chomsky, asignification, abstract machines and the rhizome itself seem likely to be derived far more from Guattari than from Deleuze, whereas in Anti-Oedipus the role of the three syntheses, the 5 paralogisms and the general structure of the argument as diagnosing a post hoc ergo procter hoc fallacy within psychoanalysis seems far closer to Deleuze’s classical style of doing philosophy. Roughly and impressionistically speaking this would suggest that of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuzian influence is strongest conceptually in AO and Guattarian influence stronger conceptually in ATP.

    1 and 2 – principles of connection and heterogeneity – “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (ATP 7). This begins the attempt to ‘exit language’ that underpins the rhizome as a method, the attempt to break open the linguistic, language and speaking priorities that dominate philosophy and academic analysis more widely, opening our analyses of assemblages to “organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” (ibid). It is not meaning that matter but function, although this does not imply that there is no meaning, only that meanings and connections between meanings are little more than moments of wider, more diverse (heterogeneous) types of connections. In Anti-Oedipusthis is the first synthesis, the synthesis of connection, where desire is involved in ‘putting to work’ the body – its’ formula or mode would be = ‘and’, ‘and then…’ (production).  [Paranoiac machine] (cf. Anti-Oedipus, Ch1, S.1; Ch.2, S3). One of the most notable aspects of the discussion of these first two principle is the claim that their criticism of linguistic models “is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. (ibid)”. This is the first mention of ‘micropolitics’ to occur in ATP. It is, however, the second mention of these curious things called ‘abstract machines’ which are not to be mistaken for ‘abstractions’. I’m still curious about these ‘abstract machines’. They seem to be deployed against abstractions and universals, aiming to perhaps take over the functional role of those concepts whilst removing the recuperative and neutralising effect that Guattari thinks they have (cf. The Machinic Unconscious p52).

    3 – principle of multiplicity – “it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, ‘multiplicity’, that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.” The heart of this principle appears to be an attempt to avoid a series of philosophical problematics that produce paradox or capture arguments, traps that traditional philosophical argument lays for the unwary. In particular, the strategic core of this principle, registered in the phrase ‘only when … effectively treated’, is aimed at attempts to find the essence or unity behind an assemblage under analysis. The key claim here is that “unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding). The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded…” and the reason it can never be overcoded is that in the act of overcoding (as when providing a ‘unity’ through an explanatory essence or principle perhaps) the multiplicity changes its nature (ATP 8). It might be interesting to compare Derrida’s thinking about supplementarity and the quasi-transcendental at this point, but that will have to wait for another time.

    4 – principle of asignifying rupture – “against the oversignifying breaks separating structures of cutting across a single structure” (ATP 9). If there is one moment that indicates clearly why we might accurately describe the project of D&G as ‘post-structuralist’ it might be this. If there was one principle I think is most productive for the practice of rhizomatic thinking that is being advocated for in this first chapter of ATP then I think it is this one. Philosophy and academic thinking, in particular, is so heavily imbued with the need to find ‘dualisms’, dichotomies, structural significations (the ‘break’, ‘turn’ or ‘transformation’) that it runs almost counter to rhizomatic thinking. Instead, the ‘wisdom of the plants’ that we might find by apprenticing ourselves to gardening, growing, cultivation, particular on a small non-industrial scale, teaches us far more easily than intellectual chatter. I’m going to declare an entirely biased position at this point, because I’ve been spending the last few years developing an increasing interest in growing and cultivating but despite this rather comical self-bias I can’t help but shake the sense that there is something critical here, something in the messy, connected, dirty business of gardening that has an insight which might be crucial, methodologically, for grasping the rhizome. It is in some sense trivial, but if you want to know what a rhizome is, start growing potatoes and then try removing them – or simply try and deal with an active rhizomatic organism such as bindweed. It is perhaps no surprise that it is in the discussion of this asignifying rupture that we encounter the charlatan shaman Castenada, there is always a fine line between wisdom and foolishness in the words that come out of the mouths of the shamans, although usually, such distinctions disappear rather abruptly in practice. (The other major example of a rhizomatic practice that appears is that of music – this in part explains the image at the head of the chapter and will no doubt connect to the role of the ‘refrain’).

    Despite this strong connection to a non-intellectual ‘wisdom’ the core point of the rhizome and of the principles that D&G are outlining is still to provide a methodology for analysing assemblages (for analysing systems in the world) that is effective and useful, that is, we might even want to say ‘better’ (although that always depends on what it is better at). In particular the concept of aparallel evolution that is deployed at this point in the discussion connects strongly with debates, practices and possibilities for evolutionary science, in effect suggesting that one method for thinking about nature within an evolutionary framework is better than another, where better here would mean something like ‘having greater explanatory power’ (ie: it would be better abductive reasoning to deploy rhizomatic methodology). In terms of understanding schizoanalytic ‘jargon’, in particular, the concept of deterritorialization, the discussion of aparallel evolution is illuminating. As opposed to the model of ‘lines of development’ and the evolutionary tree, where the most complicated form might be something like co-evolution or forms of symbiosis, aparallel evolution posits a far higher degree of ‘flow’ and ‘conjunction’ – “evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another” (ATP 10).

    At this point I’ll take a break and return to this chapter, beginning from the last two principles, in the next post in this series. This week (13 October) the reading group was covering Chapter 2 (1914: one or several wolves) and next week will be starting on Chapter 3, so my plan is to catch up to where we are at in the group so I can write up my notes after each session.