In an article for Aeon, written 7 years ago, Edward Thornton wrote of the partnership between Guatarri- who had broken with Lacan- and Deleuze- who, I suppose, wanted to be Sartre's successor. The problem both faced was that the world had moved on. In Psychiatry, medication was improving by leaps and bounds. Philosophy, meanwhile, had not been able to keep up with developments in Mathematics and Physics and Computer Science. France had made a mistake in retaining Philosophy as a mandatory subject in the final year of High School. The thing was stupid. It was a waste of time.
The truth about Guatarri & Deleuze's collaboration was that it was a Folie à deux- a shared mania. Thornton takes a different view
The answer to this question – and the secret to their alliance – was their mutual distrust of identity. Deleuze and Guattari were both resolutely anti-individualist: whether in the realm of politics, psychotherapy or philosophy, they strived to show that the individual was a deception, summoned up to obscure the nature of reality.
They were rebelling against the 'methodological individualism' or 'positive economics' which had transformed Western Europe into a peaceful, affluent, increasingly liberal 'welfare state'.
From their first collaboration, the pair would go on to develop various strands of anti-identitarian thinking, imagining a future in which the individual no longer reigns supreme.
as was the case in Hitler's Reich or that of Mao or Pol Pot. Why did they think this was desirable? Perhaps they believed, as De Gaulle did, that France had too many varieties of cheese. Its people were too individualistic. Yet, such individualism was 'high value adding'. It raised affluence and increased the quality of life.
This ethos was evident not just in what they said, but how they said it – writing, editing and rewriting in a strange and unusually symbiotic dialogue.
Schizophrenic dialogue. They harkened to voices babbling modish nonsense. Maybe Maoism is totes cool? Sadly, it wasn't. It was a fucking disaster.
The duo worked in a fashion that presumed ‘a community of being, of thinking, and of reacting to the world’, as Dosse put it.
Two nutters don't make a community. Perhaps they tried to recruit the neighbour's cat but it scratched them and ran away. That's what happened when I tried to increase membership of the Institute of Socioproctology.
Instead of pushing for historically subjugated identities to be reclaimed,
like that of the serial killer or guys who ate their own shit
Deleuze and Guattari tried to dissolve the distinctions that defined and delimited the individual subject itself.
Did they sew themselves together? Sadly, no.
The result was a progressive, Marxist-inspired, anti-capitalist politics of joy
Did people who read their work experience intense orgasms? I doubt it. People pay good money for joy. Capitalism knows well how to cater to the market for it.
– one that sits uncomfortably with some forms of identity politics prevalent today.
Like having the identity of being a guy with a healthy financial portfolio who is fine with having a body which isn't sown to the body of everybody else.
Guattari’s first exposure to the problem of the individual came from his early education in political organising. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Guattari was only 15; but he was already attending meetings of the French Communist Party and participating as a member of the Student Hostel movement, which had close ties to the French Resistance.
The French Communist Party was a serious contender for power. There was a sound careerist reason for attending its meetings.
He spent the rest of his adult life as a militant, constantly pushing at the fringes of established political programmes. He set up Trotskyist splinter groups and edited breakaway newspapers that challenged the Communist Party leadership.
Again, this may have seemed a smart move at the time. The Americans might want to promote Trotskites so as to cut the Soviets down to size.
The reason for Guattari’s perpetual agitation can be summed up with a single phrase: ‘the threat of Stalinism’.
Which the Russians preferred to the threat of the 'Napoleonic' Trotsky who believed in 'Perpetual Revolution'- i.e. trying to invade Poland and Germany and getting the shit kicked out of you.
Guattari saw how the collective will of the Russian Revolution had collapsed into the hierarchical power structure of bureaucratic state communism.
Which Trotsky had greatly helped.
Now, he saw the same process occurring in miniature in every group he joined. No matter how communal the initial struggle, sooner or later the collective will dissolved into a competition between individual desires – with one person eventually emerging as the leader, at the expense of the others. Why do collaborations always collapse into hierarchies, he asked himself?
Efficiency. Rather than talking endlessly, you have good enough decisions which can be implemented. This was also the problem with 'Worker's Control'. After everybody has had a chance to voice their own view, darkness has fallen. It is time to go home for dinner. The problem is that if the workers don't do any work, they may get no dinner.
Why does the group get atomised, rather than retaining a unified voice?
It only gets 'atomized' if people like Guatarri keep splitting it. I recall a College friend who had formed his own Anti-Hoxa faction of the anti-Lin Biao Marxist-Leninist Party of which he was the sole member. Later, after a period working for Maxwell's Pergamon Press, he got a job with Phillips & Drew.
From 1953, Guattari also worked as a psychotherapist. Once again, he found that he couldn’t stand the discipline’s obsession with individuals.
Why are Doctors required to treat individuals? Why are they not allowed to prescribe suppositories to distant stars?
He completed his training with Lacan, one of the most influential psychoanalysts since Sigmund Freud – but rather than remain in private practice, Guattari plied his trade at a large public hospital, where he worked with institutionalised psychotic patients.
In other words, he worked with those who were in no position to complain that he was a fucking lunatic.
La Borde was an experimental institution run along communist lines: doctors would help with manual labour, and patients and staff worked together to maintain the hospital.
Did they grow cannabis? There's money in cannabis.
Here, Guattari began to believe that what made patients ill was not their particular pathology, but a form of social alienation – a problem made worse by the dehumanising activities of doctors, nurses and traditional medical systems.
If you are being treated by a nutter, your psychosis may indeed worsen. The brilliant Robin Farquharson suffered from mania. I believe R.D Laing tried to treat him. Sadly his habit of running full tilt though walls- he was powerfully built- made him an unwelcome guest at even the most progressive 'commune' for crazy people. This was a case of 'Lithium's failure' being 'Lethe's opportunity'. With the right medication, he may have returned to mathematics. Instead he burned to death in a squat. Sadly a couple of Irish vagrants- who may have been innocent- were prosecuted for arson and manslaghter.
This view ran against the therapeutic mainstream.
It ran against common sense. Doctors get paid to cure patients not to prescribe suppositories to distant solar systems.
Traditionally, psychoanalytic techniques were designed for one-on-one conversations between an analyst and an analysand.
They were designed to relieve 'neurotics' of their cash. The problem with psychotics is that they seldom have cash. Also they might decide to run through your wall.
Psychosis was therefore seen as basically untreatable,
save by medication, electric shock, lots of rest in a scenic location, etc, etc.
because those suffering from it couldn’t maintain the necessary contractual relationship with their analyst.
They couldn't pay.
To counter this problem, Guattari reformulated psychoanalytic methods for groups, trying to turn the whole hospital into an instrument of treatment.
Group therapy was cheaper. Also, fellow patients can be sympathetic and insightful. You discover you aren't the only person who 'hears voices'. You learn 'coping mechanisms' from your peers. Best of all, you make friends. You become more sociable. Your problems weigh less heavily upon you. The boy with no shoes felt very sorry for himself till he met a beggar with no feet.
If psychosis is actually a form of alienation,
and cancer is actually a form of embarrassment caused by Beyonce failing to turn up for your birthday party
he saw, then it can be fought only with sociability
Beyonce should come to my birthday party. Rihanna will be totes jelly. Also, I will be immune to cancer.
– which relies not on the formation of a strong sense of individuality, but on the ability of a group of people to work together.
Being mad tends to reduce your ability to contribute to team-effort. But medication and plenty of rest can work wonders.
As a political organiser and therapist, Guattari concentrated on fostering cooperation. At La Borde, his techniques included encouraging patients to participate in ‘therapeutic clubs’ for arts and theatre, where they could forge lasting relationships.
This could be done under 'care in the community' more cheaply.
When trying to give people the tools to reintegrate into society, Guattari said it was necessary to ‘build a new form of subjectivity that no longer relies on the individual.’
We want subjectivity without any actual subjects. The dream is a medicine which doesn't have to deal with bodies. Also, teaching wouldn't be such a drag if there were no students.
In the political arena, Guattari claimed that the ‘centralist disease of communist parties is due less to the ill intentions of their leaders than to the false relationships they establish with mass movements’.
The French Communist Party had pursued quite a successful 'Popular Front' policy in the late Thirties and had worked with other groups within the resistance. Its leader had been the Deputy Prime Minister immediately after the War. It was respectable and did have about a 20 percent vote share till the 1970s when it fell behind the Socialists. It has subsequently participated in Governments. What gave it legitimacy is the fact that top leaders had been coal miners, metal-workers, pastry-chefs etc. I suppose, it was the Soviets who wanted the French Communists to stay out of governing coalitions. Ultimately, the priority had to be containing Germany just in case it returned to its bad old ways. Still, one can understand why intellectuals of more cultured backgrounds might be resentful of the rather stodgy leadership of the Party. In particular, the older Trade Unionists seemed ambiguous on issues like the Algerian war. The final straw was George Marchais denouncing Cohn Bendit as a 'German anarchist' in 1968. Its own contradictions meant it would play second fiddle to Mitterrand who promptly abandoned Leftist policies after gaining power. It must be said, French technocrats and economists- like Malinvauld- were eclectic rather than ideological in their approach. This meant that an intellectual like Kojeve, regardless of his supposed orientation, could serve the State at the highest levels.
His problem was never a particular person – be they schizophrenic or Stalinist – but the process by which groups break up into discrete units, detached from one another, and from their own lives.
He himself represented the 'splittism' at the heart of Communist Schizophrenia.
In the spring of 1968, far away from La Borde at first, a revolutionary fervour was sweeping across France. Students and factory workers staged demonstrations and instituted massive general strikes in response to the destructive forces of consumer capitalism.
No. They wanted more consumer capitalism. Also students wanted to be able to sleep with the girlfriends in nice College dorms. The fact is, France had secured nuclear weapons and thus had an effective offensive military doctrine. It was time for the workers and the students to taste the delights of Americanism.
The uprising was spontaneous and not supported by either the established Leftist institutions of the workers’ unions, nor by the French Communist Party.
In the early Sixties, there was still the fear that Nazism might rise again. But there was also the fear of 'American hedonism' destroying the cultural heritage of ancient European civilizations. It turned out that both mass market hedonism and high culture could make money and that more money meant more tax revenue and thus a better civilization. Still, there were concerns about immigration which, a little later, Deleuze recognized in a discussion with Foucault.
Guattari was a central protagonist and organiser, but his mentor Lacan dismissed the demonstrations as mere hysteria. For Guattari, this was a moment of betrayal: if the Communist Party couldn’t recognise when a revolution was happening under its nose, and if Lacan refused to comprehend the force of collective desire when it was pouring through the streets, then something had to be done.
At one point De Gaulle had been preparing to flee the country. But timely concessions by Pompidou meant that it was the conservatives- with their good economic record- who won. De Gaulle proposed a referendum which would have permitted greater decentralization but lost the vote and resigned. The message was clear, behind the romanticism and 'counter-culture' of the students, there were genuine bread-and-butter issues. Similarly, the American anti-Vietnam protests did not signal disgust with the system. Young people simply wanted to have better material standards of living and more personal freedom.
It was around this time that Guattari first encountered Deleuze’s work. Finally, he was convinced that he’d found an intellectual complement to his therapeutic and political aims. At this point, Deleuze’s scholarly output included studies of key Western philosophers, such as David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Since that stuff was taught in High Schools, there was a demand for such textbooks. The bright kid bluffing his way to a place at an elite institution would show his familiarity with the most up-to-date nonsense being written about some deeply boring nutter who died long ago.
He had also written two more ‘original’ works, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). Deleuze argued that the history of Western thought, at least since Plato, was in thrall to a number of illusions about the nature of thought itself.
Plato didn't matter. His wizard idea was to get rich kids to learn a bit of Math. Math turned out to be very very useful. There was a guy named Husserl who had started off looking quite Mathsy. Sadly he wrote nonsense. Meanwhile guys like Norbert Weiner and Alan Turing were laying the foundations for the digital computer.
First, contrary to the assumptions of most philosophers, thought isn’t representational –
representational thought is representational. Speculative thought in useful fields has a verifiable representation. All expressible thought can have some representation- it just not be very coherent or signify anything in particular. This was certainly the case with Deleuze & Guatarri's 'Capitalism & Schizophrenia'.
which is to say, it doesn’t function by making pictures of the world, which can be judged as true or false depending on their degree of accuracy. By contrast, said Deleuze, thought is creative, and always connected to that which it thinks about.
It may be creative. It may not. My thought isn't. I can't be connected to the flying unicorns I think about though, no doubt, they would compliment me on the profundity of my farts.
Second, Deleuze claimed that because the canon of Western philosophy has judged thought on its ability to represent the world, it has taken sameness and accuracy to be paramount.
Philosophy didn't matter. The plain fact is those who could produce a more accurate representation of something useful got paid more than those who talked bollocks.
Plato and Descartes provide two good examples.
Plato did well for himself as a pedagogue. He had a charming literary style. Descartes contributed to mathematics. But, his work had long been superseded. It was foolish to require High School kids to pretend to know about him.
In his philosophy of forms, Plato said that any particular entity gains its qualities by reflecting its idealised, abstracted form.
It 'participates' in them. Perhaps this was in line with the 'doctrine of signatures' or whatever nonsense passed for profundity at that time.
This form – which is identical only with respect to itself – is taken as the ground of knowledge.
Nonsense! Knowledge of a thing is a description which allows it to be picked out. Moreover, it involves predictions about the behaviour of a thing. If someone asks you if you know John Smith you don't say 'I know John Smith is identical to John Smith and thus do know John Smith'. You say 'actually, I don't know John Smith personally but I know his friend Bob. Bob says John is a keen squash player. If you want to find him, your best bet is to go and ask for him at the squash court.' This is helpful.
A man is a man only insofar as he represents his own ideal form; and to know what a man is, is to know the form of ‘man’.
This is empty verbiage. My 'ideal form' according to my Doctor would not feature a huge big pot belly. Yet, I am a man and because I eat too much I will never 'represent' my own 'ideal form'.
Similarly, Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ championed the centrality of identity and the individual.
He was merely saying that if he thinks he is thinking then he must also think that he exists. This did not in fact follow.
A person’s ability to know herself is what facilitates all further knowledge,
No. An amnesiac may not know who she herself is. Yet she can tell you in which direction you will find Dr. Smith's office.
the argument goes. In both cases, the basis of understanding arises from something unique, individuated and unchanging. In other words, the individual is the paradigm for truth.
No. The individual is merely a person who may have some useful information to impart.
Not so for Deleuze. He argued instead that thought is not grounded in identity; rather, it is generated out of difference. ‘
Thought is a feature which some organisms have for evolutionary reasons. What generated it was 'selection pressure'. In our species, it obeys the law of increasing functional information. Thought which fulfils a useful function is selected for. That is why there has been so much progress in STEM subject. If the thing does not fulfil a useful function, it is likely to degenerate. That is what happened to Continental philosophy and French psychoanalysis.
Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference,’ he wrote – so we need to find a new way to think, a new way to philosophise, that does not take identity as its foundation.
Buddhist philosophy took 'Nothingness' as its foundation. But it was 'observationally equivalent' to Hinduism and Jainism. The dogma (matam) was different but the praxis (vigyan) was the same. Reichenbach had made a similar point back in the late Twenties or Thirties. Two scientific theories may not currently be point to any 'crucial experiment' such that the 'dogma' of the one is affirmed and that of the other is rejected. But, they may do so in the future. Meanwhile we have to make do with 'phenomenology'.
In fact, what appears to us in experience as an individual – be it a single stone or an individual person – gains its identity only as an effect of diverse forces that are in constant tension with one another.
Salva veritae we could see that nothing appears to us as experience- least of all the experience of being an individual. Moreover, all things that are only subsist as such because of the fart of a hyperdimensional cat which gave up a promising career in Actuarial Science so as to concentrate on playing the ukulele. Not the sort of ukulele you are thinking of. It is a very special kind of ukulele.
There is no such thing as an abstracted notion of a ‘stone’,
sure there is.
only multiple stones that are arguably as different from one another as a bird is from a tree.
equally arguably they are just stones.
The world is composed of differences, not individuals,
The world isn't composed. It just is. It may be that there is nothing but just the one elementary particle shuttling back and forth across time. The reason Philosophy stopped attracting smart people was that Mathematicians and Physicists had greatly expanded the range of what was thinkable- and not just thinkable but highly useful.
even though representational thought can make it appear otherwise.
To whom? Anybody who matters? Why bother?
Spurred on by the events of May 1968, Guattari wrote ‘Machine and Structure’ (1971), an essay on Deleuze’s books. Here, he turned Deleuze’s arguments against Lacan, in an attempt to describe what was really happening in the streets.
Nothing. Pompidou won. De Gaulle had to resign after failing to push through de-centralization. Cohn Bendit turned to sexually abusing kids. The Soixante-huitards got jobs and raised families and took the kids to Disneyland Paris.
While Lacan had defined a set of structural rules, apparently determining the relationship between any individual and her object of desire, Guattari wanted to show that desire is a collective and productive force.
Deleuze drew attention to Tarde's mimetic theory in this regard. But, in a different manner, so did Girard.
Instead of Lacan’s commitment to the unconscious as a kind of theatre, where individual desires are staged, Guattari took up the idea that it was more like a machine or factory, constantly producing desire.
Factories are Socialist. Proletarians work there. Management sodomizes them incessantly. Foucault has described the manner in which the Pope, dressed in a gimp suit, shoves pineapples up their rectums while the Sun King stands by laughing maniacally.
Lacan recognised Guattari’s article as a threat to his authority, and tried to prevent its publication. Unperturbed by his master’s snub, Guattari sent the article directly to Deleuze – the catalyst for the fateful meeting.
The French are terrible hypochondriacs. The more Doctors you are on friendly terms with the more suppositories they will prescribe for you.
The initial months of their friendship produced a wild array of original ideas.
Which were the reverse of suppositories.
Deleuze suggested a strict routine for Guattari: he was to wake up and write first thing in the morning, mailing the drafts directly to Deleuze without any revisions or reconsiderations.
In return, Deleuze sent him stool samples.
‘Deleuze said that Félix was the diamond miner and he was the polisher,’ said Arlette Donati, one of La Borde’s nurses.
The writing of nonsense can be outsourced. Polishing turds, however, is not to most people's tastes.
The collaboration mostly took place via correspondence, although the pair met every Tuesday afternoon at Deleuze’s house, to discuss and dissect the work.
They made a bit of money out of it. There were some credulous American Grad Students who thought their shite was the next big thing.
The notes from these fevered first conversations formed the basis of their first book, Anti-Oedipus (1972).
By which time, many Doctors felt that Freud was a fraud. He should have stuck with pushing cocaine. Seriously, cocaine is the cat's fucking whiskers!
Here, Deleuze and Guattari set out to explain the relationship between desire and reality, connecting the pitfalls of psychoanalysis and philosophy with the current state of political affairs.
The French desired economic growth and voted for Pompidou who had delivered exactly that.
They wanted to show how desire interacts with the material world,
e.g. by eating a burger rather than talking to it about how you really really love your Mummy and want to marry her.
and to examine how it was entwined with politics.
Politics is about solving collective action problems- like how we can all have more money and nice things to eat.
In particular, the men wondered: why do revolutions fail?
Because those involved think they will be worse off if it succeeds. Pompidou can run the economy. Cohn Bendit can't.
Why do people fight for their own servitude as if it was their freedom?
Why do people not just eat their own shit? Don't they understand that they have been brain-washed by 'Big Food'? Mummy didn't let me eat my own shit. I hate her and will write a book called 'Aunty Oedipus' so that she feels sad and cries and cries. As for Daddy, he wanted me to study Accountancy. He too will cry and cry when he reads my dissertation.
Why do mass movements end up damaging the interests of the masses?
Because the masses can demand stupid shit.
Hitler and Mussolini had both come to power through populist movements.
No. They came to power with the backing of the Army because there was a clear and present Communist threat. It must be said, the French Communist party was quite sensible.
So, Deleuze and Guattari reasoned, to understand Fascism, we must explain why people desired Fascism.
It was better than Communism. The fact is Russians who ran away from Stalin were very happy if they could get to Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy.
‘Hitler got the Fascists sexually aroused.
No. It wasn't the case that Germans dreamed of fucking him in the ass. The English- maybe. A lot of the Brits of that period were as queer as fuck.
Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused,’ wrote Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.
Not British Banks. I used to work in the City of London. The people you see walking around there don't exhibit raging boners. The French may be constituted differently in that respect.
Central to Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis is the claim that desire is not individual;
some is. Some isn't. Sexual desire tends to be 'individual'. Few are happy to share their spouse with hobos.
desire runs through people, and drives people, but is not always aligned with simple self-interest.
Perhaps, what these two nutters are commenting is 'the madness of crowds'. I suppose 'suggestibility' may increase if you are in a big crowd. You succumb to the 'herd instinct'. I was once caught up in a crowd outside Lord's cricket ground and ended up watching a Test Match. It was as boring as shit but, strangely, I didn't think so at the time.
When you try to analyse the way that desire functions in large groups, one sees that it is neither unified nor easily divided.
It may be unified enough or easily divided. Everybody laughs together when the comedian tells a joke about his mother-in-law. Then he mentions how much he hates niggers. Some are still laughing but some are silently getting to their feet.
Desire, they said, is essentially ‘an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity’.
Nope. It is something of interest to guys in the Marketing Dept. That's why, you hire a sexy model even though you are selling widgets.
It can be understood only via what they called a ‘multiplicity’ – a multitude that can’t be sliced up into component entities.
People in Advertising earn very good money by doing this sort of statistical 'slicing up'.
But while desire is not necessarily aligned with the individual,
the people of a particular City may want a statue or public building that looks really nice.
capitalist society does its best to make all desire run by way of the individual.
No. A lot of sales pitches are directed at Corporations or other collective decision making bodies.
Freud was among the first to dissect desire
Nonsense! The thing was old when the world was young.
– but his work looked at the maladies of his individual patients, and did not examine them through a properly historical lens.
He was a quack. Still, he made a bit of money without actually pushing cocaine.
The neuroses that Freud diagnosed, and that continue to plague society in the 21st century, were not ahistorical pathologies.
They were nonsense. To be fair, there were plenty of surgeons, at that time, who performed wholly unnecessary procedures. At least Freud didn't cut up his victims.
Rather, they were products of how capitalism had developed through time to constrain and order desire into a restrictive set of patterns.
Why won't Capitalism let us eat our own shit? The answer, obviously, has to do with the corrupt machinations of 'Big Food'.
Take the nuclear family – a historical construct that fashions people via a process of Oedipalisation, according to Deleuze and Guattari.
They were French and thus only about 50 years behind the times.
Children are taught to direct their desire at a love-object, namely the mother, which is kept out of reach from them by a powerful law, embodied by the father.
Daddy didn't let us rape Mummy. When I grow up, I will kill him and marry Mummy. After that, it will be Granny's turn.
The result is the passive individual subject, who will turn up to work, obey the boss, compete with the neighbours, and consume an endless stream of commodities.
Unless the dude can make a bit of money by writing nonsense.
Psychoanalysis plays the role of the police force of capitalism, tracking down psychological deviants and reforming them in the image of the good child and the good worker.
Nope. You have to pay those cunts out of your own pocket. They are more like prostitutes than policemen.
In one way, Anti-Oedipus can be read as a Freudian critique of Karl Marx.
No. That was Marcuse. These guys were too stupid.
Marxist discourse had failed to account for moments of catalytic collective action
Marxism had gained total power over half of the inhabited surface of the globe. It had succeeded.
because it did not understand the mechanics of desire – but perhaps it could be reinvigorated by introducing the Freudian concept of desire.
which these two nutters thought involved eating your own shit.
However, the book simultaneously cut in the reverse direction, as a Marxist critique of Freud – aiming to rejuvenate psychoanalysis with Marx’s historical understanding of labour. The resulting Freudo-Marxism is a kind of psychoanalytic anthropology that the duo dubbed ‘schizoanalysis’: a narration of the history of desire, as a productive and impersonal world-creating force.
It could be no such thing because these two nutters knew no history or economics or political science. Deleuze, for some reason, pretended to understand Math. Maybe, Grothendieck, in his madness, was saying something similar to Deleuze? No. Though mad, Grothendieck wasn't ignorant and stupid.
Enter the schizoanalyst, somewhere between a psychoanalyst and a political agitator.
Or, in England, Laing & Cooper. Exit chased by a bear- or Robin Farquharson or some other such lunatic. It must be said, Laing and Szasz wrote more clearly. Farquharson's book 'Drop Out' was influential. He had the merit of being genuinely bright and also genuinely mad. Guattari & Deleuze were merely stupid and confused.
The role of this figure was to decode the unconscious processes of desire and identify their revolutionary potential. Deleuze and Guattari advocated a three-stage practice for bringing about political change through schizoanalysis. First, find those processes of desire that deviate from capitalism; then follow each to their most extreme conclusions, to allow them to escape from the restrictions of capital; and finally, align these different processes to create a ‘molecular revolution’.
Cohn Bendit and the Paedophile Information Exchange took a more direct route- fuck kids. But Tim Leary was already more influential. Take LSD. Go crazy. Eat your own shit. -
What, exactly, does that mean? Deleuze and Guattari argued that it was impossible to know in advance what such a revolution would look like. Instead of fomenting one according to a pre-ordained plan, they proposed a politics of experimentation. The bodily ordeals of the French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’, and the drug-induced adventures of the American writer William S Burroughs, were two of Deleuze and Guattari’s favourite examples of how one might explore alternative organisations of desire.
Sadly, they didn't chop each other up probably because of something mean Descartes said to Freud.
The duo took a broad view of who might be involved in this enterprise.
Very good of them I'm sure. If you are inviting people to banquet on their own shit, it doesn't do to be too picky with your guest list.
Rejecting the traditional Marxist idea that the working classes were the seedbed of change, the authors wanted a broader umbrella under which to unite all marginalised groups.
Let the rapists unite with the arsonists to fuck everybody to death and then burn down Civilization.
They claimed that those oppressed by patriarchy (women), racism (people of colour) and heteronormativity (what we’d now call the LGBT community) were all suffering thanks to the same machinery of despotic and imperial capitalism.
They should unite and chop off the dicks of all heterosexual white men.
It’s only by bringing together these ‘minoritarians’ that an anti-capitalist revolution could succeed.
In places where heterosexual white males would stand by patiently as their dicks were being chopped off.
Because the philosophical image of the individual is based on the apparently autonomous figure of the white male subject, it is through a process of ‘becoming-woman’, and of ‘becoming-minoritarian’, that the spectre of individuality can finally be banished.
This is why it is so important that Donald Trump identify as a young Chinese Lesbian Ayatollah.
Anti-Oedipus ruffled a lot of feathers.
Because France was parochial and fifty years behind California.
Lacan was furious, and forbade any discussion of the text in his seminars. Many political Leftists, while sympathetic to Deleuze and Guattari’s aims, admonished their recklessness and heterodoxy. Despite (or perhaps because of) these criticisms, the book was a runaway success, selling out in a matter of days and attracting a two-page review in Le Monde.
It appeared 'American'- i.e. cool. But it wasn't really. Disneyland Paris- that's cool.
It wasn’t just the content, but also their form and working style that defied convention. Deleuze and Guattari’s books speak in a multitude of voices, not easily reduced to either of the two authors.
Elias Cannetti's 'Auto da Fe', written forty years earlier, had shown that both the scholar and the psychiatrist might secretly envy the glorious fate of the coprophagous maniac.
‘Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd,’ they say in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the sequel to Anti-Oedipus. This sentiment was later echoed by Guattari: ‘We are very different … I’m more attracted to adventurous things; let’s call it a conceptual commando who likes to visit foreign lands. Gilles, on the other hand, is a philosophical heavyweight, he has a whole bibliographic administration.’
Deleuze, oddly, had actually read some books. This is what you have to keep in mind when it comes to French savants of the period. They may have written nonsense but, as students, they had actually sat quietly in the library reading nonsense and underlining passages and writing 'how true!' in the margins.
‘We didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make a third’
a bigger stream of piss is still just a stream of piss.
By working in this way, they tried to combat the tendency towards a sterile, deadening individuality, in a practical as well as a theoretical sense.
Actually, both helped each other 'individuate' within their own field. Guatarri could be seen as part of the anti-Psychiatry movement and, perhaps, Deleuze was the successor of Sartre or Bataille or Giles de Retz or somebody equally crazy.
A Thousand Plateaus contains 15 chapters that range over a dizzying variety of topics, from geology to linguistics, molecular biology to painting, poetry to political economy.
They are wrong about everything. Still, you can understand why crazy people studying nonsense at Grad School might be taken with them.
Here, their critique of identity splinters into a thousand smaller appraisals. Instead of treating different fields of enquiry as cut off from one another, Deleuze and Guattari tried to show where one discipline seeps into another, challenging the centrality of any one of them.
To challenge the centrality of a discipline, you have to show that you have something which does the job better. Thus, if these two nutters had come up with a theory which better predicted the behaviour of financial markets then and only then would they have 'challenged' the centrality of the Black-Scholes-Merton model. Similarly, if they could point to a cheaper and better way of curing Schizophrenia or alleviating its effects, then they would have 'challenged' the centrality of modern Psychiatry.
Ultimately, they aimed to open thought onto its outside, pushing against the tendency for theoretical work to close in on itself.
Theoretical work in useful disciplines does no such thing. It provides a 'structural causal model' which enables the provision of better outcomes. Just saying 'boo to Neoliberalism! Everybody should fuck their Mummies and eat their own shit!' isn't subversive of anything. It just confirms the general perception that some branches of the Academy have turned to shit and should be defunded.
Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus were not Deleuze and Guattari’s only collaborations, and each continued to work on their own projects. Deleuze also wrote extensively on the potential of cinema,
Why bother? If you can make a good film, do so. You'll get lots of money.
and on the philosophies of Gottfried Leibniz
for which you need to be well up on category theory
and Michel Foucault,
for which eating your own poop is an adequate preparation
among others; Guattari argued for a new kind of ecological thinking that could
reverse Climate Change? Don't be silly.
explain the interactions between our psychic ecology, our political ecology, and the ecology of our planet. Their last collaboration took up the question of What is Philosophy? (1991). Sadly, Guattari died from a heart attack a year later,
he was a shit Doctor. Had this not been the case, he'd have sought preventive treatment sooner.
and Deleuze was too sick to attend the funeral.
Sadly, he gained nothing by being a pal of a shit Doctor.
He was plagued by breathing problems, and too ill to work; in the end, he took his own life by jumping from his flat in Paris, three years after Guattari died.
Death is all the theodicy we need. God is good. Our lives, however miserable or useless, will end sooner or later.
‘We didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us,’ Deleuze had said. Or, as Guattari put it, there was ‘a true politics of dissent between us, not a cult but a culture of heterogeneity that makes each of us acknowledge and accept the other’s singularity’.
Strangely, all relationships- including ones with the neighbour's cat- operate in the same way. You wipe your own asshole not that of your collaborator even if what both of you write is shit.
The duo worked not by asserting their identities in conflict with one another, but
like partners. So what? The question is whether they had anything interesting to say. They didn't. Philosophy is adversely selective of imbecility. Smart peeps study STEM subjects.
by acknowledging themselves as a space in which differences could flourish. From the kernel of that initial meeting at Limousin, a multiplicity was born.
No. There was merely a partnership of a stupid and useless kind. Still, if it had really been the case that 'Capitalism' created Schizophrenia or that everybody would gain perfect health and longevity by eating their own shit, then this pair of nutters- had they been able to write clearly- would deserve some measure of recognition.
One final point. Capitalism merely means the way in which markets allocate investible resources. But lots of investment is done through non-market mechanisms. It is possible that global capital mobility will decrease over the next twenty years. This has nothing to do with 'resistance'. It may happen for prudential reasons or be part and parcel of a Coasian 'internalization of externalities'. However, purely mathematical phenomena- e.g. volatility of various sorts - reappear at the heart of economic problems regardless of regime type. In that sense 'convergence' of the sort witnessed from the Thirties onward in Cowles Commission America and the Soviet Union of Kolmogorov will continue. The vocabulary of Philosophy- because of its initial intersection with Category Theory- will continue to have resonances. But that is all they are. It is not the case that there was some philosophical original sin which caused the West to become very evil and Fascist and minatory towards budding savants who just wanted to eat more and more of their own shit.
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