From: Unleesh-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 22:45:18 EDT
Subject: initiating schiz-flux


 INITIATING SCHIZ-FLUX
      by (un)leash

 One initiates a schiz-flux through midwifing one's multiplicity, through
discovering and activating one's desiring-machines. One uncovers the different
"personalities" beneath one's apparently unified self. One identifies
particularly poignant metaphors and models in one's speech, and then enacts
them in a sort of psychodramatic way, names them, discovers what they do, and
how they interact. What are the inner "characters"? But some of these are not
characters at all ; they are substances, machines, partial things, slime
molds, other organizations of matter. Each of them may have a different
interaction with a different element of the world towards which they are
partial ; they respond to other "machines" or arrangements of matter and
process in particular ways. You may tell me that lately you've been feeling
paralyzed, and you go on speaking, but I stop you. I tell you to enact the
paralysis, to walk and then to freeze, to really feel that frozenness. I ask
you if you feel like there's anything actually retarding your movements. You
tell me there is a putty-like blob around you. I have you explore that blob,
let the blob speak through your mouth, let it move around the room, discover
its blobbish intentionality. Gradually in time we begin to understand how it
interacts or slides across the other figures who populate this landscape in
shifting configurations. How does the blob (-machine) interact with the
lightning bolt (-machine) interact with the cave man (-machine) we've
identified as functioning amidst you? And then -- how does your blob,
lightning bolt, and cave man interact with my crow, swamp thing, and giant
stapler?
  Let's ground this a little bit if it sounds abstract. We begin with a sort
of game. In Gestalt Therapy, the therapist has the client enact every aspect
of the dream. In a dream about a chair at the bottom of a cliff during a
thunderstorm, the client enacts and becomes the chair, the cliff, the
thunderstorm. This can be done with a dream as well as the etymological flow
of metaphor beneath speech that, lifted up, yield figures inhabiting our
speech ; and we discover that speech is an epiphenomena of "inner", lumbering
animal, mythological, and machine-like figures. I put the word "inner" in
quotes because in fact these aren't "inner" but interactions between our
dynamical physiological-neuronal system and the dynamic energy systems of the
milieu, of the surrounds, the environment.
 So these can begin seeming like theatre games or therapy exercises, but we
gradually discover how much these figures or desiring-machines are really
pulling the ropes not only in our speech but our everyday actions, and we try
to free these up to be able to do what they can do, and we openly identify
them, and when we hook up with another, we become capable of sharing which
figures are interacting with whom in our multiple interresponsivity. We
discover that these "fantasy" figures aren't fantasy at all but deeply
ontological, real, "personifications" or "machinifications" of very real,
molecular, fractal processes within our developmental / dynamic neurological-
energetic interresponsiveness with the milieu. Creativity passes between the
interresponsiveness of our multiplicities to create something that would not
be possible on a solo schiz flight. The creative genius going off on his own
line of flight by himself producing generation after generation of ideas, each
of which spawn a new set of ideas or experiments, all of this wild set of
inventiveness, in the past could not be tolerated as much, but capitalism is a
very resilient machine, and can tolerate this, because that creative line of
flight and those iterated generations of inventiveness are happening in
isolation, perhaps in the person's room or lab, and we get the results later,
after the fact. But it is a different thing altogether if each one of those
generations is an interactive effect. It is a different thing altogether for
me to proceed from one state of mind to another to another than for the two of
us to get together, interact, and form a progression to next generation of
interaction to the next generation of interaction to the next generation of
interaction, and that is only a dyadic situation of two people.
 The more people who engage in this, the more of a flux there is jumping back
and forth within each generation and between generations. This sets up the
schiz-flux. When enough people are juxtaposing together like this in flux, a
catalytic reaction occurs, and things begin to change. This is often described
as a situation of revolution. This is what capitalism tries to contain. Sure,
you can print your little book or books, but those will probably will remain
isolated, and a few people will learn about them, but that can be controlled.
Put all these processes together in tandem with others, and there's the
problem. Which is why the internet represents a threat to the system, because
all these ideas are simultaneously juxtaposing in coordination with each
other, but at least they remain on the level of concepts or ideas. What is
most dangerous is when people begin living in this way, because when they
begin living this process together, then their actions will change, and
suddenly new actions and behaviors and modes of dress and modes of being and
modes of culture erupt, and this could completely undo the system. This would
be another 1960's or another May '68 in a sense, which capitalism wants to
prevent. So in a sense, the internet may be its last attempt to prevent that
from happening by channeling that process into mere ideas and thoughts. We
will have to see whether it succeeds. In the meantime, we can initiate fluxual
relations amongst ourselves, where it's not just "you" and "me" engaging in an
interactive wild, creative line of flight, but all our desiring-machines, all
our interfigures developing wildly in inventive interventions in culture and
everyday life. Schiz-flux.