razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: schizoanalysis

  • Reading ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ #1 – ‘rhizome, root and radicle’

    Reading ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ #1 – ‘rhizome, root and radicle’


    A new year and a new reading for the London based group, with ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (ATP from now on) being this years choice. I skipped most of last year when they were reading ‘Difference and Repetition’, mainly because I’m very familiar with that book but also because it doesn’t currently play a central part in my research, so it’s interesting to be back in the space of that reading group.

    I haven’t read ATP in a group setting before but as Guattari has increasingly come to be central to my own thinking, taking over from Deleuze in many ways, ATP and Anti-Oedipus have obviously begun to play more central roles in my work. These posts will aim to contain my notes and reflections as I work through the text.

    For information I will be referring to the 1996 Athlone edition of the text.

    Introduction: Rhizome

    This first chapter took us a couple of weeks to work through, in part no doubt because the first week was given over to introductions, some reading out loud and some ‘set-up’.

    D&G begin the book with self-reflection and methodology, most noticeably with a discussion about what a ‘book’ is. The very first line of ATP refers the reader back to Anti-Oedipus, but also to the multiple authorship of that text. Unlike the other chapters of ATP, this one has no date, reflecting the methodological role it plays with regard the other ‘plateaus’ or chapters.

    Methodologically D&G reject both the unified authorial role and what might be thought of as an established image of what a book is. The book is an assemblage (ATP: 4) but that’s hardly surprising, since assemblage seems such a generic term at this point that anything previously called an ‘object’ is now going to come under the term ‘assemblage’. What is specified is that assemblages have two sides, one that faces ‘the strata’ – which I suppose I read as that side of ontology that focusses on the more stable, fixed sense of things, where we can find ongoing identities and meaning – and another side that faces the ‘body without organs’ (BwO), that rather beautiful concept, derived from Antonin Artaud and developed in Anti-Oedipus. I suppose I read the BwO as something like that side of ontology that focusses on the more changeable, fluid sense of things, where we find something that has not yet entered the realm of identity but which is still fully material, real, bodied (my route into this was though the concept of ‘affect’ in D*G’s text ‘What is Philosophy’, so that’s the colour or tone to this sense of the BwO that I have). The assemblage is that nexus where flux and stability, BwO and Strata, are producing specific forms. Assemblage, then, becomes a concept in some sense analogous to ‘form’, although maybe more like ‘formation’. Perhaps we might substitute salva veritate ‘formation’ for ‘assemblage’.

    One important principle, however, derives from the thought that the book is an assemblage, which is that assemblages are to be specified not in terms of meanings but in terms of ‘quanta’ or function. As such trying to understand some core ‘meaning’ to ATP would be a little bit like trying to describe the deep meaning of a Haynes manual, which is a category error. The Haynes manual either functions well, by enabling someone to fix an engine, or it doesn’t. In practice, however, Haynes manuals tend to be useful to a degree. If you have enough basic knowledge, if you have the tools, if the vehicle or engine you’re working on hasn’t been modified, and if you don’t have any problems in understanding the manual itself, then it is quite probably going to be useful – but that’s a lot of variables to consider. On the other hand, there are often few options available for the person wanting to fix their engine themselves rather than employ a mechanic, although the advent of YouTube tutorials has expanded those possible options. If the analogy is to be pursued, it’s not immediately obvious what role ATP is to play nor what variables are at work in enabling it to be successful.

    Very soon after this first methodological point about books has been made D&G claim something which appears to many people to be problematic. They connect their comments on the book as an assemblage to the wider practice of literature – not, it’s worth noting, the wider practice of philosophy – and say the following:

    “A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc – and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticised for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine … (What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?). Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.”

    The thing that is often picked up here is the last couple of lines, in particular the claims about ‘ideology’, but this is to miss the far more curious claim at the heart of this passage. To begin with, ideology is simply not a concept D&G think useful and it’s discarded in Anti-Oedipus as a mistaken notion of truth imposed on the reality of desire. For someone who takes classical Marxism (particularly Frankfurt School stuff), Lacan or Zizek as their touchstone for radical politics this denial of ideology should indicate clearly why D&G are in many ways radically distinct from such positions. As a sidenote, this denial of ideology should also point fairly clearly towards why any ‘political theory’ that might arise from D&G is going to differ from the recent fashion for accounts that come under the framework of ‘political theology’.  Explicating and understanding this denial of ideology would go a long way to clarifying the major differences in position and method between D&G and those other political-philosophical trends. Yet for me it would also miss that curious claim which is far more interesting than worries about political theory, the claim that is framed as a rhetorical question, viz. “Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?” In the context of the passage in which this question arises it is literature, or the literary machine, that is a rather important piece of the puzzle.  I’d go so far as to think that the ‘literary machine’ is the most important methodological framework for understanding ATP.

    If this sense of the literary machine is the core methodological mode of ATP, then I think it makes it clearer why the development of the concept of the rhizome, in contrast to the root and radicle, is first explicated in terms of forms of books. If the root book constrains multiplicity by fixing it to a single ‘root’ principle or unifying concept, producing the ‘classical book’, the arborescent model of a literary machine, then the “radicle-system, or fascicular root” (ATP: 5) continues to constrain multiplicity by maintaining this root through a process of withdrawal or supplementarity, which presents as fragmentation but which hides its unifying concept in the depths. This supplementarity is the place where D&G try to distinguish the rhizomatic literary machine from the most ‘radical’ forms of the book, those forms offered by Burroughs, Joyce and Nietzsche, forms where we might suggest that the ‘deep unity’, the ‘spiritual root’ is language itself. “A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented” (ATP: 6).

    The next couple of moves lead up to the listing of the ‘characteristics of the rhizome’. The first move, having distinguished the rhizome from the root and radicle, is to claim that “the multiple must be made.…”, and this process of construction is described as ‘subtract the unique from the multiplicity’, which isn’t particularly helpful for me.  I don’t have much of a response to this. After this claim regarding the necessity of construction, however, there is another curious move, one in which plant and animal life are brought to the fore, with some sense that the choice of the rhizomatic is one that intends directly to draw upon or learn from the ‘natural world’. There is a deeper problematic here, one which I’ll no doubt return to, but it would form around something like the following question: do D&G use the rhizomatic mode in ATP because they think this is a more ‘natural’ mode, that it somehow has less distortion effects on our understanding of the world? The root and radicle modes of the literary machine are rejected because they constrict multiplicity, with the rhizomatic presumably therefore allowing such multiplicity greater freedom – but does enabling multiplicity this greater freedom somehow better ‘reflect’ reality? Now this imposition of the problem of ‘reflection’ is a huge mistake as it seems clear, even at this early stage in ATP, that any understanding ATP can offer will not be through producing an ‘accurate’ picture, model or reflection of reality, rather it’s going to have a use in so far as it’s productive of becomings we wish to engage in (becoming animal or becoming plant for example). Those ‘becomings’ displace the need that underlies the question of reflection with an alternative route to solutions through the problem that ‘accuracy of reflection’ is trying to overcome. This maybe enables us to refine the question: is the rhizomatic literary machine capable of producing a greater range of becoming-X than the root or radicle literary machine? D&G seem to think so. It’s interesting to wonder why, however, because I think answering this question enables us to understand the role of ‘deterritorialisations’. Roughly, a rhizomatic literary machine, with a greater degree of freedom in its possible connections, a greater degree of freedom as a multiplicity, presents a higher number of vectors of connection with other multiplicities / assemblages, a higher number of lines of flight. This production of a greater range of lines of flight constitutes a better way of connecting (rather than reflecting) the world around. Connection rather than reflection is the mode here. Not ‘is it true’ but ‘is it a good connection’.  After all, truth, if it isn’t simply deflated into triviality, is presumably just some kind, one kind, of ‘good connection’.

    I’ll pause here and take up the ‘characteristics of the rhizome’ (ATP: 7) next time.

  • Capitalism and the schizoanalytic unconscious.

    Capitalism and the schizoanalytic unconscious.

    (These notes provided the basis for a talk I gave to the A2Z group in London, March 31st 2017.  I have uploaded the fuller set of notes as a PDF here)

    Capital and the schizoanalytic unconscious website PDF October 2017Download

    “I am interested”, Guattari says, “in a totally different kind of unconscious. It is not the unconscious of specialists, but a region everyone can have access to with neither distress nor particular preparation: it is open to social and economic interactions and directly engaged with major historical currents”.  It is useful to think about Guattari’s interest by considering what he says in another essay – “molecular analysis is the will to a molecular power, to a theory and practice that refuses to dispossess the masses of their potential for desire”.  The schizoanalytic practice is thus a means by which desire is brought front and centre without it being subsumed under the priests of interpretation.

    This desire on the part of Guattari, to liberate the role of desire from the prisons of interpretation, is no doubt tricky to embrace.  As he notes in the essay ‘Everybody wants to be a fascist’, the core of this problem lies in the collective reality of desire.  At one point he reflects on the performative contradiction that might be thought to exist in the situation of an individual lecturer offering this schizoanalytic account – “in reality, everything I say tends to establish that a true political analysis cannot arise from an individuated enunciation” because “the individuated enunciation is the prisoner of the dominant meanings.  Only a subject-group can manipulate semiotic flows, shatter meanings, and open the language to other desires and forge other realities”.  

    This problem, of the individuated enunciation in relation to the group ear, becomes clearly visible when Guattari remarks, in the same essay on fascism, that “what’s the use of polemicising: the only people who will put up with listening to me any longer are those who feel the interest and urgency of the micropolitical antifascist struggle that I’m talking about”.  This acute sense of the limitations of those who will ‘put up with’ him appears to echo the actual practice of engagement with strange and psychotic discourses, no doubt reflecting Guattari’s continual concrete engagement with psychotics in institutions like La Borde.  The difficulties of dealing with the repetitions of psychotic language or behaviour often express themselves in terms of precisely this capacity to ‘put up with’ things, a capacity that the wider socius – outside of a clinical setting – generally lacks.  One of the main difficulties someone with a ‘mental health problem’ encounters is the wearing down of their personal relationships as people refuse to ‘put up with’ behaviours and language that disrupts the smooth functioning of the social machine, a difficulty that is shared by anyone who speaks, writes or thinks in a way that doesn’t conform to the easy-mode game of social cues and interactions.  Most people prefer their games set to easy-mode.  So when Guattari  – who is often identified as one of the ‘deliberately obscure’ thinkers – acknowledges that he is difficult to listen to it might be thought that he is acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of his style.  It is, however, not simply the style of his language but the content of his thought that is what becomes difficult to listen to.

    The relation between the specific enunciator and the group ear, constitute the real terms of actual enunciation.  It stands in contrast with the “universal interlocutor”, that great imaginary face of reason in front of whom every rational speaker is supposed to stand, awaiting judgement.  Analysis, reason, explanation, all operate, for the most part, inside this system of the ‘judgement of God’, in which the particularity of the statements are meant to be swept away in favour of the universality of the supposed ‘truth’ they attempt to articulate.  Yet this strange, abstract model of reason hides in plain sight a simple lie, which is that what is said is what matters.  This lie, that it is what is said that matters, removes that crucial and seemingly incontrovertible reality of the ear.  In practice the users of language constantly negotiate with the ear, constantly re-speak their words as they negotiate with the ear of their interlocutor, a negotiation that constitutes the basis of ‘personal relationships’.  The to-and-fro between one individual and another in an intimate relationship reveals the reality of the ear in the word – what the other hears matters more than what words were used and the words are highly fungible in the struggle to make oneself heard or to hear what someone means.  Anyone who fails to realise this will have many failed relationships.  What you think you said matters less than what they know they heard.

    Whilst this problem of the ear is acute in the relations people have with the ‘psychotic’ individual, it is prevalent to one degree or another in all talk, in all discourse.  It’s not a clean problem, however, not an error that can be corrected.  Rather it’s a dirty problematic, one that refuses to be washed away and which calls for other strategies, ones that cannot be prescribed but which must be acquired.  When Guattari says that the ones who will put up with him are the ones ‘who feel the interest and urgency’ of the problem he is addressing it is crucial to hear this emphasis on feeling.  The collective conversation, this coming together of mouth and ear, is grounded in this ‘vague sense’ that we ascribe to feelings.  It may be true that I feel before I think but what is forgotten is that I don’t stop feeling once I begin to think.  Thought is only ever alive and real, actual, when it is within a specific network of feelings.  There is no actual thought in the pages of a book left on the shelf, at best only virtual thought.  There is no thought without a tone of existence, without an ‘affect’ within which it is both produced and constrained.

    It’s easy to find much talk of ‘affect’ in modern philosophy and critical thought, although it is perhaps waning as the flavour of the month.  Yet the connection between ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’ is strong and thinking them together can amplify their capacity to be useful tools in making the world thinkable.  In the contemporary world the problem of a political future distinct from the one we live in is deeply constrained by the problem of ‘thinkability’.  We hear the idea that “a radically different future is unthinkable”, a point that has been made enough times now to become almost second nature to many.  Yet the problem of the unthinkable future is best encountered not through pessimism but through a kind of joy, a joy that rests in the fact that thought is explosive.  What I mean by this is that thought operates not in a causal sequence but in terms of excessive moments, those breakthroughs, sudden glimpses, the shifts and slides of the ‘aha!’ moment, what sometimes goes under the name of ‘insight’, a term not without it’s own difficult implications.  In this situation if the problem of the moment is that the future is unthinkable then, at the same time, this blockage is deeply fragile.  All it takes is for the thought of the future to arrive for the damn to burst.

    This ‘all it takes’ is not nothing, however, it is not there to suggest an easy way to thinking the future but rather to indicate that peculiar fragility which perhaps cannot be perceived in the present but that, nevertheless, we can wager exists.  The wager becomes easier to make if the stakes are placed on the right horse and it is in this that the role of ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’ can help, predominantly by replacing the ‘cognitive priority’ conception of consciousness.  Within this conception of consciousness thought is conceived as a series of moments,usually moving from starting point to conclusion, whereby an ‘input’ is transformed into an ‘output’.  This model of transformation is deeply delusional and massively idealistic.  It assumes some kind of autonomous module that exists within the ‘mind’ and which mediates the input/output relations, relations in the broad sense between ‘world’ as input and ‘behaviour’ as output.  Instead of such an abstractly autonomous module, consciousness is instead a kind of shape, one that exists within a network of relations and which possesses only as much autonomy as is possible within the particular state of relations.  That network of relations which places limits of the amount of autonomy possible is what can be thought with the concepts of ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’.  The material body that thinks exists inside the social relations it is organised into, which it expresses as a particular set of affects (feelings) that in turn constitute the landscape of its possibilities, it’s ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’.

    These four elements – the material body that thinks, the social relations, the sets of affects and the landscape of possibilities – all operate to constitute a world and each is malleable to a greater or lesser degree.  A political thought which takes each seriously and which understands them to be moments of the articulated whole needs to think of causality less as a sequence of temporal moments and more as a fluid articulation of complex connections between points, as a set of vertices and edges.  The shape that is constituted by the vertices and edges is the contemporary world of the subject, it is, in effect, the shape of consciousness at any particular moment.  Within contemporary capitalism the shapes of consciousness continually undergo a set of pressures that attempt to ‘push’ such shapes into a particular mould, that attempt to fit square pegs into round holes, or more exactly that attempt to fit variable pegs into round holes.  The round hole is constituted by ‘capital’, by an abstract, non-conscious yet non-material force – a law of production – that is capable of direct effect on the points and lines that form the shape.  It’s capacity to deform the shapes of consciousness rests in the force it brings to bear on the shapes of consciousness, forces which produce, amongst others, the idea of the ‘wage labourer’, but which operates, fundamentally, as the primary force acting on contemporary consciousness.  To that extent our problematic can be stated quite clearly – capitalism and contemporary consciousness are connected, but is the connection contingent or necessary?.

  • Molecular revolution – on the question of organisation

    Molecular revolution – on the question of organisation

     

    I gave this paper at a recent workshop in London organised by a seminar of philosophers, psychoanalysts and artists.  It’s a para-academic space that I’ve been attending for a while now and which has proven to be one of the most open and constructive intellectual places I’ve know in recent years.  To that end it enabled a little ‘loosening up’ of the academic rigmarole which meant some slightly more experimental, ‘in formation’ thought could be articulated.  I’m still working on Guattari and will no doubt have to continue for a lot longer, but the interplay between the machinic or algorithmic, the potentials of big data, the impacts on subjectivity and revolutionary desire and the possibility of perhaps escaping the liberal individualist mode of political thinking is what lies behind the work here.

    thumbnail of MolecularRevolution -draft two

    There’s a copy of the paper on my Academia page as well if you happen to be on that site.

  • Reading Notes 29 8 2015

    Reading Notes 29 8 2015

    (Caveat – reading notes are NEITHER summaries NOR commentaries, they operate as individuated sets of connections and references, individuated on my own research paths.)

    Gary Genosko, A-signifying semiotics, The public journal of semiotics II (1), January 2008, pp 11-21

    (I’ve been struck by the a-signifying and machinic recently, so this is part of some research into that area.)

    The essay is short and tight, with the use of ATM / magstripes to illustrate the role of a-signifying semiotics (ASS).  ‘Reorientation’ argument, attempting to place AAS on the table for semioticians.  (1) suspend hierarchy of sign/signal, where signal is lower in status because of capacity to be “computed quantitatively irrespective of their possible meaning” (def. Eco), (2) quantitative / machinic aspect of signals to be theorised as positive, not negative.  Signals as subset of ASS, the latter theory being what underpins the retheorisation of the signal.

    Signals are ASS to the extent they transmit information.  But ASS [“non linguistic information transfer” (p12)] fundamentally are: non-representational, non-mental, strict and precise.  Operation through ‘part-signs’ (aka. particle-signs, point-signs).  No ‘lack’ of meaning in ASS (not “denying something to someone” p13) and not reducible to a behaviourist model.  ASS part of the route by which the Ucs. can be theorised outside structuralist and psychoanlaytic models.  (The ‘exit from language’).

    Signifying semiologies (SS) form on “the stratified planes of expression and content” which are “linguistified”.  The SS structured by “the axes of syntagm and paradigm” (syntagmatic = series of terms (c0-present), paradigmatic = constellation of terms, indeterminate (lacking co-presence).  Bosteels suggests ASS ‘add a third, diagrammatic axis’ but “this is a conservative maneuver, at best” (p14).  Nor enough to take ASS as ‘disturbing’ binary of SS, as this still allows despotic signifier to reign – “It would be easy to trap a third axis in the prodcution of a certain kind of subjectivity if it was always linked to a specific expression substance like a despotic signifier.  This despotism may be deposed if it is linguistic, but it’s relation to power, even the power of the psychoanalyst, is not vanquished” p14).  [The despotism that comes to mind here is that of the therapist, guru, ‘master’, even if they use extreme non-linguistic forms (Primal therapy perhaps as an example here?  What about art therapy, eg the LSD therapy with holocuast survivors, or ‘art brut’?  A connection with the logic of sensation here perhaps but a very different ‘tone’ in that concept compared to ASS?).]

    [ASS deployed in ‘cultural’ analysis would appear to be strictly opposed to the Geertzian model but would they ground an ‘experimental science in search of law’?  That seems unlikely, but if not then what prevents law- or function-procedures from operating or being established?]

    ASS ” ‘automate’ dominant significations by ‘organizing systems of redundancy’ on the levels of expression and content: automation entails normalization, invariance and consensus” and also “stabilization”(p14) and as such are inherently political (micro-p) rather than ‘scientific’.  (The ASS ‘operationalise local power’ and such operations are ‘encoded in the magstripe‘.)

    SS in fact rely upon ASS, the former being deployed as ‘tools’.  [Is there here an ‘ideology’ type idea of the SS as ‘illusions’ benefiting, for example, class interests.  The central difference being that there are no ‘ideas’ necessary in this type of activity, no ‘ideology’ is needed for ‘ideology’ to operate.  Ideology, itself, as a kind of SS, deployed by an ASS.  Is this a latent / manifest divide again?]

    ASS is machinic, machine is not limited to technical devices but despite this Guattari’s “repeated description of how the a-signifying semiotics trigger processes within informatic networks highlights the interactions initiated with a plastic card bearing a magnetic stripe in activating access to a bank or credit account, engaging an elaborate authentication process, makes it clear that we are dealing with a complex info-technological network.” (p15)  [This does sound as though there is something specific to modern capitalism with regard ASS, but even if ASS derived from or depended on ‘complex info-technological networks’ (ITN) it would seem appropriate to describe the brain as just such an ITN, particularly once engaged in technics, particularly if that technics is one of things rather than ideas (here I’m thinking of Barad – “Apparatuses are not Kantian conceptual frameworks: they are physical arrangements” – Barad, 2007, 129).  There is something in the ‘trigger’ that makes me think of neuro-biological structures as well.  This would push ASS into a space where they might perhaps be able to ground an Ucs on something other than meanings / language.  Still, even if an ‘extended’ brain (via technics), how far would this be capable of being operationalised?  Into the Earth itself?  Or stopping at the World? (ASS of evolutionary dynamics, extended phenotype perhaps, pushing into the Earth and beyond the World?)]

    “Triggering is the key action of part-signs”. (p17).  Guattari cited – “algorithmic, algebraic and topological logics, recordings and data processing systems that utilize mathematics, sciences, technical protocols, harmonic and polyphonic musics, neither denote nor represent in images the morphemes of a referent wholly constituted, but rather produce these through their own machinic characteristics” (p18).  Constraint does not close the machine but is the condition of its productivity within the space of ‘machinic potentialities’.

    The role of triggering – Guattari “extricates himself from the Piercean trap of subsuming diagrams under Icons” (p17), distinguishing between the semiotic regimes of the image (symbolic) and the diagram (a-signifying).  This is a “relatively straightforward … splitting of diagrams from icons and substitution of reproductive fro productive force” (p18).

    Brief paragraph on the Hjelmslevian form/content appropriation that Guattari makes (p18-19).

    Final section (V) on the connection to politics (an ‘essential’ connection) via the role of information and organisation.  “Repetitive machinic signaletic stimuli are the stuff of the info capitalist technoverse” (p19).  The ‘means of escape’ [always this question] – “the key to overcoming this straightjacket of technological deterministic formal correspondence would be to look at the alternative ontological universes opened by a-signifying semiotics and the kind of subjectivities attached to them” (p20).

    Other references:

    Karen Barad, Meeting the universe halfway, Duke 2007.

  • The class war in our heads

    The class war in our heads

    1469799942301.jpg_5631408793549855746Why bother with Freud today, a century after his work and ideas first began to have their effect?  Is psychoanalysis really taken seriously anymore?  Isn’t the whole dirty, sorry, splintered image of psychoanalysis something to be forgotten, something to put behind us as one more moment of false enlightenment?

    The image of psychoanalysis within the Western intellectual realm is deeply problematic, rejected by many as inherently unscientific, accused by others of being little more than charlatanism and self-serving duplicity and yet the practice remains, indeed it often appears like it is increasingly called for by health practitioners and state services.  If the intellectuals tend to relegate psychoanalysis to curious theory, the state and capital still find it to have some place in the tools of modern governance.  Why bother with Freud today?  One answer is that we have no option to consider Freud again and again because in modern capitalist society, if we are to think against the stream, against the state, against capital, then we are faced with the effects of Freudianism, of psychoanalysis, in the very tissue of our lives.  In the realm of advertising and public relations we encounter the legacy of Edward Bernays and the tradition of manufacturing consent, in the clinical practices of everyday life we find human lives can be affected, often positively, by psychoanalytic techniques and in the malaise or revolutionary politics we re-encounter – time and again – the problems of self-repression group psychology that Reich so notoriously placed centre stage.  The fact that Freud still haunts our streets and minds might, however, suggest a more radical surgery is needed, that we need to redouble our efforts to unmask the charlatans, convince others of the unscientific nature of the whole practice and finally eject the psychoanalysts from polite society.

    A lingering doubt remains, however, that this is not the right course of action.  Not least this arises because of the peculiar polarisation of positions that can be encountered in modern debates about agency, politics, the mind and consciousness.

    On one side we find the neuroscientists who increasingly develop their capacity to understand the wiring of the brain as well as their skill at re-engineering the mind.  There is no avoiding the fact that neuroscience is rapidly developing into one of the most fascinating and powerful new tools in the human arsenal of war against the given, a war led by science, which finds wonder and joy in the subjugation of nature and the extension of the possibilities of human life.  Neuroscience does already and will increasingly offer new possibilities for liberation and yet this is not its central purpose and it has equal potential to provide weapons of mass subjugation.  Neuroscience is powerless to answer the question of who rules the technology, who wields the policies and potentials of the capacities it will unleash.  It will no doubt produce those who cry out at the conversion once more of ploughshares into weapons but it has no inherent capacity to prevent such conversion and the likelihood of those who rule successfully using such tools as weapons is, as always with any technology, bordering on the absolute.   Nor does it have any power over the risks of the profit potential of the mass deployment of neuroscientific techniques, the insidious conversion of yet another piece of knowledge into a simple means of extending the range of exchange values regardless of the consequences.  Neither the state, nor the capitalist, care much for ethics, empowerment or human extension other than as means to their own inherent goals – those goals, as always, being distinct from often humanistic concerns that might motivate the neuroscientists.

    On the other side, however, we find too often the simplistic claim that no matter how much the physicalist tells us about the psychical, there will always remain some leftover capacity to choose, to act against our natures, to make ourselves differently in the face of our biological destiny or structure.  We can affirm, in the face of the physical, the irreducibility of the psychical, although this crude dualism is often couched in far more sophisticated terms nowadays.  The realm of freedom, of self-giving laws, of loyalty to the idea, of choice, this, we are told, trumps the scanners and chemicals and scalpels.  If only that were so but who, today, can seriously hold to a concept of some mysterious power that appears to resist the physical in a simply willful way.  We can no more avoid our brains than we can gravity.  And yet…

    It is not for a middle path that we need to look again, yet again, at Freud.  It is, instead, because of a completely different option opened up by Freud (and by Marx and Nietzsche), one that is not inherently fixed on the often unthought assumption that the goal is to determine the way things are determined, by reasons or causes or a mixture of both perhaps.  Freud offers one of the routes to the senses of production within which we might find both the production of determinations and the production of indeterminations.  These senses of production, modes of production, are more than simply determinations because they are the conditions of any concrete determinations.    They are – and this cannot be avoided – far more complex processes than any to be found in either the physical or the psychical.  The very distinction between a mind and a body is resultant from, grounded in, such modes of production and is no more a natural fact than the division between the ‘races’ or ‘genders’ or ‘classes’.  To put it crudely – and with a view to shunning away from this text all who are already inherently agents of capitalism – there is a class war in our heads.  Freud is worth turning to again because he was perhaps the first to encounter this, even if he distorted it as he did so.  To fight this war we cannot simply discard those tools of the enemy that work, they must instead be turned from weapons back into ploughshares.

    If this emphasis on the class war suggests a partisan relation to the material at hand, then so be it.  Only those who are too stupid to know that tools need to work no matter what task they are used for would think that such partisanship perverts enquiry.  This emphasis is, of course, one that places universal abstractions and absolute truths in the service of some wider goal, the goal of the liberation of the working class and the oppressed from the disgusting spectacle of capitalism.  This language, however, is riddled with connotations that have little practical use any more.  The days of the Communist Party – official or otherwise – are over, the mass party having given way to the mass movement and thence into the mass war.  We have been living in the Third World War for the last twenty years at least, probably longer, a war not amongst nation states and the capitalist class but a war against the working class and the oppressed.  Yet the greatest single fact of this war is it is always ‘over there’.  If the front lines of the war ever reach you in the form of guns and bombs and drones this is just the particular technology deployed in specific geopolitical spaces.  At all other times the war ‘over there’ goes on everywhere and nowhere and the casualties mount up in so-called ‘symptoms of modernity’ – mental health problems, curious behaviours, collective impotence and the failure of politics as a place of solutions.   At one point the class war occurred in the factory and the streets.  Now it has occupied the mind.  There is a class war in your brain.

    This is to state baldly, polemically, what needs to be argued for, it is little more than assertion at this stage and the task at hand is to offer some insight into this war and some tools with which to fight it that are not already in the hands of the enemy – and there is without doubt an enemy.  We are not ‘all in this together’ nor have we ever been.  We may only hope that if we fight and win we might be able, at some point, to remove the enemy from reality and consign the very concept to what will eventually become a pre-history of the new earth.

    The cards are on the table.  Our first question arises from the basic problem, which is not an intellectual one, abstract and polite, but a problem of determinate social production.  The question is then, what, in the face of the onslaught of a capitalist society, can Freud offer us as tools of understanding and weapons of survival?  If you want the polite, but insidiously abstracted version of this question, we might naively say something like “In the face of life, how can Freud offer us means of coping, or helping others cope?”  If we did, however, use such insipid words then we would, at once, be complicit with the very problem that forces us to find weapons of survival in the first place.   This thus brings us to our second question – does psychoanalysis offer us the means by which we might arm ourselves?  The response to this is firmly, hysterically, negative.  The prison warder is no friend, even if the prisoner must at times smile and say “yes sir”.  We are not left with a simple rejection, however, and it is because of a curious problem that arises – we are not the first to note this of course – between Freud and psychoanalysis as an institution that we will explore whether the tools are instead to be found in schizoanalysis.  We think schizoanalysis might offer weapons of liberation – and we say ‘might’ very consciously and explicitly because we are not yet, perhaps never will be, certain of this.  The ghost of Freud will therefore be joined by those of Deleuze and Guattari.  Hopefully we have, at this point, driven away the last of the readers we wish to avoid.

     

     

  • City psychosis.

    City psychosis.

    The twentieth century witnessed the rapid urbanization of the world’s population. The global proportion of urban population increased from a mere 13 per cent in 1900 to 29 per cent in 1950 and, according to the 2005 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, reached 49 per cent in 2005. Since the world is projected to continue to urbanize, 60 per cent of the global population is expected to live in cities by 2030. The rising numbers of urban dwellers give the best indication of the scale of these unprecedented trends: the urban population increased from 220 million in 1900 to 732 million in 1950, and is estimated to have reached 3.2 billion in 2005, thus more than quadrupling since 1950. According to the latest United Nations population projections, 4.9 billion people are expected to be urban dwellers in 2030. – Source: World Urbanization Prospects: the 2005 Revision

    Inspired by a reading of Lewis Mumford’s ‘The city in history’ I’m currently beginning a slow process of thinking about the role of the City in the human ecology.  I turned to Mumford because of the scattered references to his work in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project, and that has already proved productive, not least because of the realization that the ‘paranoid/schizoid’ poles that run throughout that project seem to have some roots in Mumford that I had not registered before.  In Chapter Two, for example, Mumford develops his idea of the City as an ‘implosion’ event in human culture that arises from a dynamic between neolithic ‘villages’ and paleolithic ‘hunters’ which gradually produces the role of Kingship, the catalyst for the implosion event of the City.  With this implosion event, dominated by a central authority, a new  “collective personality structure” (p.60) develops.  The idea that this new collective personality structure is one that connects a paranoid to a schizoid position is clear, for example, in the following:

    Not merely did the walled city give a permanent collective structure to the paranoid claims and delusions of kingship, augmenting suspicion, hostility, non-cooperation, but the division of labour and castes, pushed to the extreme, normalized schizophrenia; while the compulsive repetitious labour imposed on a large part of the urban population under slavery, reproduced the structure of a compulsion neurosis. (p59-60)

    Mumford is enjoyable to read, so far at least, because of his richly interpretative and evocative approach.  He develops a very broad synthesis of ideas and histories in order to tell something like an ‘origin myth’ and this is both the strength and weakness of his book so far.  At times he seems to be simply telling a story, at other times attempting to synthesise existing knowledge, always hovering on the edge of actually showing anything to be the case, instead maintaining this suggestive dynamic, hence why it seems akin to an ‘origin myth’ that is being presented.  That said, this is only the initial impression from the first couple of chapters of the work and is something that I hope changes as I work through his large text.  It would be disappointing to find that ‘origin myth’ style continues for all 650 or so pages, which I doubt it does, but it’s still interesting to encounter it.

    Reading Mumford prompted me to look at some of the data regarding urbanization and some very limited research brought up the recent ‘transition point’ shift taht made the news around about 2006.  The shift from rural to urban world population crossed the 50% urban population mark in 2006-2007 and is still climbing. Using data from the World Bank, as presented by Google, this shift can be seen in the following:

    (UPDATE: missing graph it was here once but got lost in server migrations at some point and reconstructing it now would be a right pita, ML 2022)

    Although a more interesting graph is the one that represents this growth in terms of regions, as follows:

    (UPDATE: again, missing graph it was here once but got lost in server migrations at some point andreconstructing it now would be a right pita, ML 2022)

    In the regionally differentiated graph it’s clear that all areas of the world are subject to the same basic direction of urbanisation, although unsurprisingly it is North America that has the highest ratio of urbanised population.

    Now graphs are terrible things in many ways, delusion engines of the highest degree if taken uncritically, and so I’m not exactly sure quite what these graphs show and wouldn’t want to make any claims about what’s really going on behind these data sets. However, graphs derive their delusionary capacities from their ability to present ‘seemings’, that is, to show how something seems to be operating. Given this rather large caveat, one of the things that seems to be shown in these graphs is that there is a rather uniform and reasonably drastic increase in urbanisation between the years of 1960 and 2012. It also seems that the data within this particular window is a little odd. I haven’t been able to find an easy source for data that goes back, say, to 1860, let alone 1760 or even earlier but one of the things that seems rather obvious is that whatever the function that is operational within the 1960-2012 framework, it must be a different function from that which was operating, for example, between 1760 and 1960 and that seems to be the case for one very simple reason. If we were to take the left hand side of the graph and simply push the numbers down to zero on the basis on some sort of pattern available from the snapshot in the graphs (Rational Health Warning, see footnote *1), it would seem that such a ‘zero urban population point’ would occur around about 1850. That seems a little odd, not least because the City is a function of human life for far longer than the last 170 years. In fact it might reasonably be thought that the City has been one of the central, perhaps even the most central, feature of human life for anywhere between the last two to four thousand years (cf. Mumford). Of course, ‘urbanization’ and the ratio of the urban to rural population is a different phenomena from ‘the City’ so it might be wrong to conflate the two and in addition the ‘1850’ origin moment points towards something like the heart of the industrial capitalist revolution.

    What this data suggests to me is two-fold.  Firstly, that it seems like the urbanization dynamic is strong and rapidly transforming the social relations of the world on a grand scale.  Secondly, more speculatively, that this is a new dynamic.  It’s this second point that interests me after beginning the Mumford and in particular after encountering his idea that the City itself is an implosion event, one that operates like a threshold moment the effects of which are a rapid development of productive forces.  If the new rise of the city, the rapid increase in urbanization, is a contemporary event then one thing that suggests itself is that a new ‘implosion event’ might be on the horizon or – more likely – might be the horizon within which we are living.  Whilst this is deeply connected to capitalist social relations, in may ways it’s also a separate and autonomous dynamic.  If the first implosion event of the City brought forth, as Mumford suggests, a quite radical development of the productive forces then it seems reasonable to think that a new implosion event might do something similar.  Given that the first implosion event also involved some shift in the collective personality, it would again seem reasonable to extrapolate another such shift.  The question that suggests itself, then, is what sort of city psychosis is developing?  If the Kingship role is no longer dominant and the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ spectrum that goes with it is perhaps being superseded, what is the city psychosis of the future?

    (Citations from Lewis Mumford, The city in history, Pelican 1984.)

    *1. I’m talking, very very informally, about interpolating the data in the graph, which would perhaps best be done with some statistical analytical tools. I’m not equipped to do this but just using data points taken at decade long intervals and noting the difference between one decade and another there is, very roughly, something like a 3% increase from decade to decade, although this does increase in more recent decades reaching 4.92% difference between 2000 and 2010. On the basis of a 3% increase decade by decade, and working back from 33.51% at 1960 gives us a 110 year span for the subtraction to hit zero. This is pretty crude and may well hide some obvious problems, so large pinches of salt please, this is just idle speculation on my part at this moment. For example, the difference in growth between decades from 1960 to 2010 increases each year, from 3.08% between 1960 and 1970 to 4.92% between 2000 and 2010. If I were to look at the pattern of this increase, rather than stop at 3%, then I might find that the increase decreases each decade as we move back in time. The increase would then ‘disappear’ at some point, possibly well before 1850, and a ‘stability’ arise in which urban populations remain steady, or relatively steady. This, intuitively, seems far more likely to be the actual case. It seems, intuitively, that there is some point at which urbanisation moves from relatively stable population to relatively dynamic growth, a point which I would imagine coincides somewhat with the rise or industrial capitalism, but I need to find more data sources (and develop my statistical analytical skills) before I could say anything about this. No doubt there is a lot of work already done on this within geography and so I’ll be looking around in that area for some more material.  The ‘World Urbanization prospects’ report linked above notes that in 1900 the world urban population was around 13 per cent in 1900, which would still, very roughly, fit the very rough ‘3% of total per decade’ increase model, since that model gives 15% at 1900.