File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-10-27.132, message 138


Date: 	Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:18:46 -0700
From: afavell-AT-direct.ca (andrew favell)
Subject: Re: Deleuze & Guattari's schizophrenia & its relevance today (fwd)


Dionysus wrote:

>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

I agree. The difficulty that I find in terms of securing funding for work
inside prisons and with probationees and social services and the like is the
demand for clearly articulated methods and predictable results.
'Experimentation' is not really something many institutions go for, and
moreover there are always questions of ethics when the experimental subjects
are humans! This does not mean that experimentation is to be avoided. Far
>from it! I'm considering and playing with ideas about how to do this 'from
the inside', and have experimented in verbal therapy groups & individual
sessions with establishing the operationality of--say--violence for the
perpetrator, what worlds it enters him into in terms of relations with his
partner, with himself, how he speeds up the event of violence, how it can be
slowed down, etc. but seem unable to break out of my *own* 'institution' of
thinking to experiement with other approaches. The emphasis on language
'transactions' as therapy is a restraining factor as well, but short of
integrating a body-work/verbal therapy synthesis I find that I am stuck in
my own little rut as much (or more?) than the institutions to which I direct
my frustration. Micromolarization?

>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.

I'm not entirely convinced that they (the narrativists)do advocate the
building of the self. They do advance the idea that the self is narrativized
meaning, and any liberation of the self is from the discursive restraints
that they identify as the source of problems. They do this via
'externalization'. Michael White, for instance, seems to grant credence to a
shadowy agent that moves behind the scenes but is never really acknowledged
to any extent (imho). Yet, of the therapies in fashion currently, White's
ideas show the most promise of political deconstruction of problems. My
micromolarities described above are in large part due to trainings in
narrative. I still find it hard however to picture a Guattarian-inspired
*practice* of therapy with persons who are not residing at La Borde. A
person who comes into an office as an individual because the courts have
told him to take counselling is unlikely to be willing to assume a
transversality by doing pottery (or plastic arts) and practically,
encouraging him to do 'community' 'work' would be immensely hard to
supervise or even to arrange. 

>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.
"Theology of weakness": I like that phrase. Mind if I quote you on that? I'm
thinking of the 'recovery movement'--the dysfunctional family routine, and
that stuff that TV land likes to dish-up in its excuse for 'talk-shows'. I
despise the idea of 'damage'!!

>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. 
Emotions and the specific expression of them are 'social rituals' that are
forms of content and expression structured by the Other's presence (D's
beautiful work on Tournier in 'Logic'). Castenada writes of obtaining
'membership' (to society) when he was able to recite back 'the way things
are'. Organizations, etc. So, yes I agree.

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.
And, I would add, our prevailing theories. We can map out abstract machines
until the cows come home. My question is how do we make the DG 'pragmatics'
and make it work? Any ideas?

Andrew
Van cda




   

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