Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia

BBC-podkast on suurin jälkeen. Tärhänjunklia. Löydät nyt yli tuhat pysyvästi edulista tuotetta korua kakaupoista. Mä, Matthew, ja on jälkeen. Katsomattaa, ja saa jälkeen. Täällä on BBC-sänsä. Täällä on BBC-sänsä. Täällä on BBC-sänsä. Täällä on BBC-sänsä. Täällä on BBC-sänsä. activity and its activity that is absolutely crucial to understand what he's up to was born in 1930. And I think one of the key things to remember about him is that from 1948 that is 18 years old till 1964 that's 34 that's a significant period of time and a significant period of his life. He was an activist in the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International. He was a militant involved in campaigns, in strikes, leading campaigns, traveling to Yugoslavia for example to support the Tito movement as it broke from Stalin at the end of the 1940s. And so his understanding of politics is framed through a version of Trotskyism, a version of Trotskyism that is quite libertarian, quite critical of the reigning power structures, especially in the the French Communist Party, which is so important at the time. So that's one strand of his work. The other strand which you mentioned of course is psychoanalysis and he puts psychoanalysis to work in a group setting in Labort Clinic which is three or four hours drive south of Paris and it's from Labort that he goes on his motorbike to the 1968 events arriving late actually. So those two strands are really important to him and the third strand is one that he does share with Delurs which is the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre is the space for him to reflect on his other activities. And I think one of the problems is that the three domains are woven together maybe too neatly by Delurs when a Gretari encounters Delurs and they start to write together. There is a sort of division of labor emerging here already in our conversation between the idea of Gretari being kind of this energetic and figure full of appetites and full of in a bursting with ideas and Delurs being as you put it sort of the weaver. It's absolutely. I mean when they start to work together Gretari wants Delurs to come to Labort and be involved in some of the group discussions and to be involved in producing a collective work. Well Delurs will have nothing of that. Eventually Gretari has to make appointments to go and work with Delurs at his home in Paris. Delurs is a solitary figure and he wants to construct the book in that kind of way. Gretari sends his scribbles, his ideas to Delurs. Sometimes has to wait months for a reply as Delurs is thinking about it and working through it and coding it in some way to put it into the form of a book. So they work in very different ways. Is there a story about their first meeting or is it something more kind of bumpy and administrative than that? Well you know I am going to push back because faithful to one of the lines in their co-authored book is we are a crowd right and one of their one of Delurs is even before he meets Gretari is when you read a philosopher you look at the text and not try and anchor it back into our subject right so it's significant for they say capitalism and schizophrenia. Schits, multiple split. If you want to look at their relationship and you look at the text what Gretari is handing Delurs these crazy, multiply-voiced, quoting from all these different discursive domains handing them to Delurs, Delurs renders them into something that looks a little bit more like philosophy. It's still to the standard philosophical eye. It looks a little wild but the idea is that instead of looking at Gretari as one type of figure the psychoanalyst versus the philosopher the whole point of bringing the two together was actually to create a multiple so that when you put a philosopher with a psychoanalyst you don't get philosophy and psychoanalysis you get multiple voices. I mean they're quoting lovecraft, they're quoting history, metallurgy, mala, Paul Clay, Virginia Woolf right so I'm going to insist that resisting biography is not it is not something that's just simply because we're not interested in it but actually what they are trying to achieve which is to look at what a text does as opposed to where you can anchor it in terms of its emergence. That's extremely co- you're a bit of a spoil sport but that is an extremely co-gent argument and let's try and let's try and hear what these voices are then in the first book that they write together which is anti-edipus of 1972 some years in the making but Ian can we learn what an edible structure is in order to be able to rebel against it? This is the narrative that Freud lays down for us. Yeah that's right I mean in stereotypical terms the edible structure is the relationship between the father and the mother and the child who comes into the world and has to make sense of that triangular relationship. In Lecanean terms it's the relationship between a caregiver who is often the mother but not always the mother and a third term who comes and intervenes between the two who is sometimes but not always the father who is seen as a rival or a threat but that third term is absolutely necessary for someone to appreciate the existence of other people in the world and so the edible structure is the structure of becoming social, of becoming civilized. Now that edible structure is sometimes used as a model in psychoanalysis and used to guide people through the treatment but most psychoanalysts would see it as just one way of organizing families the dominant way in the West and actually the argument in anti-edipus is very much in line with the developments that were happening in psychoanalysis at the time. I would see it as part of psychoanalysis rather than an overthrow of psychoanalysis. So what? Getting through it but they were doing something with Freud. So what's happening here Claire? Freud isn't being banished, he isn't being overthrown but some of the the institutions that he wrote about they want us to resist. Don't they principally the the family? Right, I couldn't agree more. It's a psychoanalytic text and if you don't buy into psychoanalysis or a conception of the unconscious you can't go anywhere near these books. The when you say the family their argument is that the edipus complex in terms of father, mother, child is a flattening and a depoliticizing of the edipus complex which needs to be historicised, politicised and placed within the history of capitalism. So let's say I have a dream, right? And I dream about Donald Trump and someone tells me well actually he stands for your father, right? They're going to flip that around and say the reason why your father has authority, the reason why that your father is in your unconscious is actually because a long history of authoritarian figures which would include fascist leaders, tribal leaders. So instead of taking political terms that we might dream of and saying they represent your father, your mother, they do the opposite. Your father, your mother open out to what they say is a racial and political history. So the family is actually the effect of a long history of colonisation which of course goes back to their French political context. So they want decolonising struggles. So they want to in a way take Freud out of that domestic context and see all the impulses that he recognised and registered crackling around inside the family as part of some much broader social process. Are they asking us to sort of take it out of the person as well and see these forces at work in society rather than inside individual psychologies? I would say yes except I wouldn't use the word 'society' because part of what they're trying to do is the reason why you have a family and the reason why you have an individual and the reason why you have something that we call society is because of far more interesting and intensive pre-social forces. You can only have a society with interests and desires and individuals if before that you have a long history of investments in images, figures, movements, patterns. So the unconscious is pre-social. It's political, it's global, but it's not it's not reducible to social terms. And what does schizophrenia have to do with all of this, Ian? I mean, that's a word that can be precise or it can be loose, and it's not much used at all these days. So what is it to them? - Well, for them, it's a political process. It's a process of opening up. It's a process of understanding the subject, not as the core of the human being as pre-existing us, but something that is produced as something that is constructed as Henry pointed out earlier. And so to skits something is to split it open, to understand it as split and divide it. And I don't think we should confuse it with the way that it's used in psychiatry. It's actually a critique of mainstream psychiatry rather than the use of a psychiatric term. They're using this in a quite different way. - Let's try and pull some of the key concepts out of this work because there are terms that float around in it that we need to allude to, at least if only to get a sense of how conceptually busy this work is. So let's have a go at this. Henry, what is a body without organs? - Gosh, I mean, it's a complicated term to get, but I think the best way of understanding what it is is to contrast it with what it's not, which is the organized body. And the organized body is the kind of classical notion of the body where the organs serve a purpose in terms of the whole and the whole is defined by the good functioning of all the parts together. Now, what Delos and Quattaria interested in is the idea that beneath this structure of organization is what they're called a kind of intensive field. There's a field of effects and powers that become, in a sense, sedimented on the surface in the organized body, but underneath that there's something that they equate more something to have the structure of an egg. So an egg is a gradient of intensities that can unfold itself in a whole variety of different ways. So what the body without organs is, is it's a kind of mapping of the intensive structure of the body once we step away from it being organized in terms of organs and totalities? It's a kind of point we reach through, I mean, they talk about massacism and drug addiction. These are all ways in which we can kind of de-sediment the structure of the body and return to this intensive field. It's quite a wild idea to get a handle on. Every metaphor leads to another metaphor, as is right, I mean, this is the nature of the writing, isn't it? But is it about trying to rewrite the body in some way? Yeah, I think so. They talk about the possibility of botching the body without organs. So one can go wrong and one can go wrong by sort of destractifying what the sedimenting body too far to the extent that it just becomes a player of forces. And there's nothing left of the individual type of eyes. But there's another metaphor that goes with this, is that there's more like a kind of, the idea of the body as a sort of recording device that takes in influences, takes in things from outside and lays them down in some ways. If we were pieces of tape, as well as eggs or river sediment or indeed a body. Well, absolutely. And I think one of the things then about the organized body, obviously, is that it's kind of self-contained. So this is one of the characteristics that is loved in the history of philosophy. If we want to find out what separates off objects from each other, and the organized body is entirely self-contained, it's got a clear insight and an outside because the inside serves the function that relates to the function of the organism as a whole. And that's great. But the difficulty is that we have a hard time explaining how things from the outside can interface and connect and be recorded on the inside of that body. So one of the things they're doing with the body without organs is trying to create a more open, intensive body that's open for encounters with the outside in a way that the organized body isn't. Having established that is a highly complex and kind of an idea with lots of pseudopodia to it, can we bring in the idea of the desiring machine, which is another key term from the book? Claire, you've already alluded to this. So can you tell me what that is? Right. So we could begin by saying a machine is something that operates by connection. So that's why every time one tries to explain one of these terms in Delozo Cotari, it brings in 10 others. So it's-- But I like this. You know, I think that we need to sort of stop and appreciate this in a way. Yes. Don't we? About how-- what a strange tango it is and enjoy that, rather than be scared of it. Right. And not to crush that enjoyment too much, I would suggest that that is one of the best things about Delozo Cotari, but also the worst, because once all the terms start to refer to each other, you can meet people. Of course, we are not those people who end up talking Indolors and Cotari. And then it has no reference point outside itself. And that might be when Henry says, it can be botched when you try and make new connections. And suddenly, they're only feeding of themselves and not producing anything new. The desiring machine, we could even go back to psychoanalysis, right? And what they do with psychoanalysis. So if you think of a child's mouth on the breast, right, there's-- first, there's the function of just food and keeping something alive, right? So-- but the mouth becomes what it is and the breast becomes what it is in that relation. And let's say the infant starts just enjoying, which, apparently, they do, sucking, right? So you take the nutrition away and you give the child what we in Australia call a dummy. It's about exercising a desire independent of any function, right? And so desiring machines are the more attachments one makes with the body. I add my smartphone to my body and I can either become more of myself, I'm constantly checking my profile on Facebook. I'm constantly checking everything. I'm turning in. But what happens if I connect to a smartphone and I start using it as a machine to take my body out of its normal function? So I start looking at maybe holograms and maybe start having optical illusions. Or I start listening to nidra meditations that take me into another space. The idea of the desiring machine is as opposed to a mechanism or an organism. So if I attach myself to something to simply remain within the organized body, that is not a good example of a desiring machine. Desiring machines work when they break down, when they break into our usual operations. Is the desiring machine a means of liberation or a form of imprisonment? That's a question that is totally out of the spirit of Deloza Gratari, because that's good and evil, right? That technology is good. Technology is bad. Psychonalysis is good. Psychonalysis is bad. What they're trying to do is, because they're, well, particularly delus, heavily influenced by nature, instead of good and evil, they're trying to look at what creates thresholds of intensity. So let's say I'm a good functioning subject. And I go to the gym every day because my doctor told me to, well, that's just a form of domestication and being an organized body. But what if I start going to the gym and start doing weird dance-like movements and that starts sort of hypnotizing the other people in the gym and all of a sudden we're becoming less functional? That's, they're both examples of desiring machines. But one is where it's creating intensities and transforming the space and connections. The other would be which it's falling back into organization. So instead of good and evil, you have more or less, but points at which a certain degree, right, the more and more you do something, might create something that's intense rather than something that's functional. - Okay. Deterritorialization, who would like to have a go at that? - Totally easy that one. - Go on, you do it, Claire. - In the beginning is territorialization. You know, you get formations of social groups or by bodies gathering together, you get the formation of the human body by organs gathering together. Territories produce points of relative stability. Deterritorialization is when one of those points creates a different register. One of their great lines, I think, is the hand, is the deterritorialized poor, right? 'Cause what happens with the human hand? Instead of just grabbing, it becomes gestural, it can write, it can have sign language, it can be. become something that creates art. So, de-territorialization is when one group of terms creates a different register. So, language is a form of de-territorialization because we're using sound in to create a different register. It's not necessarily good and it's not necessarily evil. Well, nothing, nothing is it seems. And in a way, I am having trouble kind of putting that idea to one side because of this idea of liberation. Do we have to do I have to abandon this idea? Aren't Delurs and Gatari suggesting ways in which one might liberate oneself from capitalism? They're not so concerned with liberation. They're concerned with construction. How we can construct alternative forms of relationship. How alternative forms of societal group collective organization can provide a place for us to be different kinds of multiplicity as subjects. So, de-territorialization is not so much about opening up and destroying all structures, but about opening up structures so that new structures can emerge. Okay, so this is new kinds of growth. And I think this moves us forward to their book from 1980, a thousand plateaus, and the idea of the rhizome is moving in here. Isn't it Henry? I think this is now the rhizome moment. Well, absolutely. I mean, I think just to disagree a little bit with Claire. I do think there's an ethics going on in the background here, and there is the notion of good connections and bad connections. The idea that we're better in so far as we're open more to encounters. Now, the danger is that we open too much and everything collapses because there's just a free play. But the rhizome really is a model of this openness, and they talk about a thousand plateaus itself as a rhizome book, and it's supposed to what they call the root book. The root book is once again an organized structure where each of the chapters serves a particular purpose. You know, so plateaus talks about the idea of a book as having a beginning, a middle, and an end in the same way that an animal has parts in a certain relation to each other. Now, the rhizome is a particularly difficult structure in the philosophy of nature because it doesn't seem to have any proper organization to it. If you cut a bit off a rhizome, if you cut a bit off a potato and plant it, you can get a new potato plant. So it doesn't have that same structure. Now, traditionally, that's been seen as a negative thing. But what delusant retiree do that's very interesting is they argue that the rhizome isn't a lack of structure. It's a different form of structure. What they're really interested in with the rhizome is that it's fundamentally open to new connections. And the thousand plateaus itself they talk about it as a book of planes of intensities, each plateau is an intensity, and they can be connected up in any particular way you like. There's no priority or no fundamental structure. And this notion of a kind of openness to new connections gives them a very different model of what the organism is, for instance. So rather than being defined by a central unity, it's to find more by the ability to form symbiotic connections with other things. There is a sort of ethical or moral idea in here. Isn't there? You know, they're offering as new structures, new ways of thinking, don't be like a tree. I think they said trees, we've thought about trees too much, trees are depressing. Be like a rhizome and spread out, literally. Be like a potato. Don't be like a tree. That's a moral idea. No, it's an ethical idea, not a moral way. And also just a word in my defense, I did not say they weren't ethical. I said, "Be on good and evil." Not beyond good and bad. And I think that is a crucial distinction, which is they're still not arguing trees are bad, rhizomes. Because that's another binary. It's the whole point of the rhizome is rather than we know what's good, we know what 's evil or this poisons me, therefore it's evil. Going back to, I mean, one of their thinkers, Spinoza, is if something appears evil to you, look at the connections and forces that compose your relationship to that thing. Rhizome is about adding different dimensions. So if you've got a condition that we have currently in the United States where migrants appear to be evil, right? They are threatening me. What happens when you start looking at the multiple forces, if you started looking at geopolitics and all the things that make migration possible and impossible? What looked like good and evil starts to be far more complicated? And what would be, what would enhance your relationship to those others that may have started to appear evil would not be to wall them off, or to simply, yeah, they're just like me. But to instead look at, add further relations and complexities that take conditions of good and evil and make them far more complex, right? So that you can then have differences of degree that will yield differences in time. So yes, it's profoundly ethical. It is about creating sites of connection, intensity and expansion as opposed to holding onto your organized body, your opinions, your morality, right? So it's ethical but not moral. That appeal to multiplicity and to connection is what makes them, you know, what makes them kind of textbook postmodern thinkers, I suppose, depending on Ruru Roo wrote the textbook, of course. But you mentioned, you brought Spinoza back in there, Claire. And that makes me want to ask, ask, ask, you Henry about whether or not, not underneath this, but attending this in some way, attending kind of the the rhizomes and the tendrils of this, isn't something that reaches back into that tradition of philosophy that, you know, that we began talking about where delurs is loyalty's lie. I mean, it's been suggested to me that a thousand plateaus is a sort of psychedelic version of Kant. Yeah, quite possibly. I suppose I would say that the psychosocial version of Kant would probably be different than repetition. But I think if you can read this text very much as Spinoza's text, but the difficulty with delurs always is that you can read it as a Spinoza's text because there's a theory of the apex and there all these structures that clearly come from Spinoza. But you can also read the notion of a field of intensity in terms of Bergson and you can read it in terms of Nietzsche. I think he's very much working in terms of the history of philosophy and presenting another iteration that. And in that sense, a thousand plateaus becomes the next text in that sequence as all attempts to understand the world as intensive rather than understand it in the kind of analytical terms we find in Sadekhar. Now, I want to spend the rest of this program talking about what people have done with the delurs and Gwotari and what we should do with them. Who else is using them clear? Well, who's reading delurs and Gwotari today and what are they using them for? Right. If you go to the annual Delurs and Gwotari Studies conference, I would say maybe 10% of the presentations are from philosophers. Then 90% of the papers are used by gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, animal studies, disability studies. I could go on. I do not I manage my studies like nothing has I mean they have a wider reach. I would claim them practically any other philosophy in terms of interdisciplinary reach primarily because of the way in which they use examples from architecture, music and so on. You simply break the barriers between the different disciplines and allow us to think differently about the relationships between subjectivity and social structure. So they've succeeded then. They've succeeded. Partly. I mean, they open the space. Yes. Yes, but someone in the US wrote a blog post called Peek Delurs and was saying that Delurs was like just the legitimation of anything goes. I disagreed with that. But there is an aspect in which what they were trying to achieve which was open nurse creativity license, not staying within the parameters of philosophy itself became a new form of laziness in thinking as opposed to disruptive. Probably anyone who is taught in a university knows that giving a student a copy of Delurs and Gwitarik and be a very dangerous thing to do. What are the dangers there? There was a reading of Delurs coming out of the UK that took my sort of beyond good and evil line maybe a little too far that the whole point of reading Delurs and Gwitarik was to find these points of destructive and expansive intensity. And that became came connected to what many people, including me, which refers to as a form of fascism, which I think there's the resources in Delos and Vittari to warn against, but they're always writing with a full awareness of the risks of every endeavor of thinking. If you're thinking, is it risky, you're not thinking. - I want to pick up something that Claire was saying earlier, which I think was very important as well, which is that there's an ethical project here of construction, which runs through their work and which we see in some of the recent take up of Delos and Vittari's work. Delos and Vittari became a theoretical resource in the foundation of the mental health system in Brazil, for example, of community mental health centers that will be alternatives to the old medical asylum centers, and Delos and Vittari have been a resource in family therapy in Australia, in the work of Marie, and Victor Lien, for example, who thinks about the way in which alternative forms of relationship can be formed in a kind of riser-matic way so that we can break through existing power relations, but create something new and more productive and more open. It's not like they haven't had critics, as they're in 1997, rather famously or notoriously, two physicists called Alan Socarl and John Brickmont, published a book called Fashionable Nonsense, in which they took several French intellectuals to test for their rather inaccurate use of scientific vocabulary as they judged it. Now, what do we make of that criticism, Henry? Those people who said the equations didn't make sense, but they just squares. When you read the criticisms themselves, I think one of the major criticisms is the text is incomprehensible. And I think that's always a problematic criticism to make, particularly because I think underneath this really vibrant vocabulary, there's a very strong coherent metaphysical view of the world, and they're very clear that they're metaphysicians. In much the same way that Kant provided a way of understanding the metaphysics behind Newton, I think what Delores and Gatari do that's really interesting is provide a way of understanding the kind of world in which things like nonlinear systems, dynamics, symbiotic relationships that form new forms of life, the way in which the notion of systems organizing themselves, which I think we take the granted in science now, we can understand the kind of deeper metaphysical nature of the world, the way the world has to be, in order to allow those kind of particular local discoveries to make sense. So they're not doing science, but I think they're providing a framework within which actually, now, I think a lot of the results of science actually make sense. So I think, on the one hand, so I just want to just, just, just, just, to, to see Delores and Gatari is kind of opposed to what's going on in science or to misunderstand it on this using it. Is it their playfulness, Claire, that despite the kind of the, the expansive nature of the writing, makes them like fundamentally quite accessible? You know, it's accessibility is both connected to the playfulness of the writing, but also to the rigor of the writing. So there's a reason why the writing is playful. The idea is if you want to think differently, you have to write differently. So if you don't want to look in terms, in the world in terms of good or evil, sub-jogger object, right? You don't want to think that humans are, come into the world as thinking beings and then just gather information. You use the different language. So you use something like the rhizome. It's not a metaphor. It's a method. It's to say, okay, to start thinking, you need to look at the connection, something makes possible. Look at the connections that bring something into being. If you teach Delores, it's not about pouring information into students' heads. And it's about making students capable of making further connections. So yes, the playfulness makes it initially appealing. It can also make it, I think, in the, in the case of people who claim that Delores and Gwattaria frauds, like the Socarlin Brickmore, it can also create resistances. But those are resistances to do with people holding on to the way they already think. If this doesn't look like the sort of thinking I do, therefore it's not thinking. The playfulness is there to create quite rigorous and careful forms of thinking and to make you think about the way you think. Thank you all so much. Let's go from here and be more a rhizome like in our thinking. And thank you so much, Claire Colbrook, Henry Somershall, and Ian Parker. Thank you, technical producer Matilda McCarrie. Thank you, producer, Luke Mulhall. And thank you, Delores and Gwattari, Giel and Felix, still on their trip. Oh, that Samsung Galaxy Buds Nelly Pro naptikulokket. 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