From: dionysus-AT-bway.net Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 16:33:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Deleuze & Guattari's schizophrenia & its relevance today (fwd) It may be more interesting, motivating, and practical to seek out alternative collective formations for the creation and transformation of new subjectivities outside the pre-defined roles of schools, hospitals and other institutions - what Guattari was looking for at the end of his life. Why not try to develop ideas - and get funding - for retirement homes, hospices, juvenile homes, prisons, asylums, and other alternative collective assemblages in which the movement of life could be restored. I recently read about a retirment home that tried to introduce "chaos" into its daily routine. Of course its not that simple, but why not experiment and find what works. It's time that the formation of our subjectivity through biological and social means was grasped more clearly and that people took responsibility for it outside of official institutions. >This was a very interesting post. What I'm trying to say in conjunction >with these fine desiderata is that simply going "outside" (where, >outside?) is not adequate, that what is needed is something >*enstitutional*. For a "nonviolent thoughtaction" "academy" or something >like that, the kinds of projects you mention would be ideal. But for me, I >should say that virtually *every" "pheme" you have here is problematized, >rather than being marshalled to the beat of a new, outside drummer. Obviously simply going outside is not enough and that's not what I am advocating. In any case one must always go inside, but if for some reason you care about bringing others inside you might have to find some means outside the normal channels which continue to produce dead subjectivity. What I referred to were unproblematized institutions which already exist which could be transformed from the inside which seems to be what you are saying. In reality this might be futile. The absolute outside may be the only thing which takes you inside. >Psyche? Biology? Subject? Subjectivity? Chaos? The last is quite the dream >of a total outside, and largely an illusion, and get real (2), the fact is >that people gain competence for reading Guattari through the most >traditionally articulated institution: under- and ubergraduate education. I don't know about you, but I learned very little of what matters from my elaborate schooling and everything I learned about Guattari,etc. was outside institutions in which I had to risk my survival. Yes there is a total outside and the fact is that competence for reading depends more on a variety of accidents relating to family, friends, and fortunate connections - which might occur in schools or institutions sometimes. >There *is really little authentic chaos*. Chaos is an abstract ideal, >order's dream of an other. This dream of the "outside" is what isn't >working. It's naive, it fails to reckon with the *truth* that any >organized effort is going to have to have various modes of organization, >even hierarchicalization at times, etc. >This stuff isn't happening becuase of these commitments and the necessity >to go *through* them and to really "deconstruct" and enconstruct them, I >think. Chaos is neither a dream nor an abstract ideal. In fact it is quite real and not very exciting. Entropy itself is nothing. What is something is deconstructing form into chaos in order to reach further levels of order. This is always relative to one's own journey. Coltrane sounds and means something different to different people. >By the way, if you want to see an interesting book on anti"psychiatry", >check out Breggin's _Toxic Psychiatry_. Not philosophical, by the way. >Incidentally, the usual speculations and dreams of anti-"psychiatry" in a >more mainstream sense tends toward a somewhat sad concresence (is that a >word?) of things like new ages stuff, Native American Indian stuff, >chakras, and what not, while the likes of Guattari are bound to be >virtually unreadable. Why would Guattari be unreadable? Is Russian unreadable? Is sign language unreadable? Is calculus unreadable? Is a dolphin unreadable? Are the actions of De Sade, or Christ, or the "unabomber" unreadable. It only takes an open mind and desire to learn a new language. It is condescending to feel that "the masses" cannot understand something like Deleuze and Guattari. Transversality seeks to communicate across different symbolic, noetic, ontological, and linguistic maps of experience without reducing them to "common sense" or "normal language." >Also, a comment on the "image of the 'schizo'" in Deleuze. Doesn't this >capitalize to some extent, presenting a "nice", liberatory image at the >expense of conditions of anguish, psychical rupture, terror, etc., >experienced by many who are called "schizos"? Is this the personification >of domesticated chaos? > >Regards, >Tom B. This is exactly the fulcrum around which we hover. For D&G and Bateson and Laing what produces schizo breakdown also produces schizo breakthrough. Those subjected to contradiction, double binds, koans, and other ordeals end up in different places depending on the circumstances. As I said in the previous post, the ability to liberate subjectivity through reframing, decontextualization, and consciousness resulting from learning or trauma can leave one in the realm of anguish and depression and this is exactly the growing state of the contemporary psyche. Bataille and Lacan make this confrontation with unknowing, unworking, and unbeing the limit of existence. Foucault and recent narrativists and social constsructivists advocate the building of the self. Deleuze and Guattari try to bridge these two moments in the movement of the psyche. It's true that they do not acknowledge the desperation of those who have not previously had the benefits of a stable environment to deconstruct, but maybe there way of turning breakdown into breakthrough short-circuits the psychotherapeutic dwelling on trauma which becomes a theology of weakness rather than a mysticism of power in Bataille, Genet, Duras, Blanchot. It is the symbolic insinuation which produces the way in which trauma is experienced. Children often do not cry when they fall down until they see the "empathy" on the adults' faces. Do we traumatize orphans by not giving them the power to be superhuman through their freedom from oedipalization. (See Guattari's article on Genet in "The Guattari Reader"). "Schizophrenic" or "depressive" or "perverted" experience is an ethical-aesthic question: how do we respond to desires, demands, and needs which are different than the socially organized modes of thought, feeling, and action which we have decided on. We do not presume the other's subjectivity - either as ill, or as suffering, or as revolutionary. We listen and respond - according to our own experience.
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