Ecosophical Aesthetics: Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari

Ecosophical Aesthetics

Also available from Bloomsbury Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues Aesthetics of Ugliness, Karl Rosenkranz Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas The Animal Catalyst, edited by Patricia MacCormack Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova General Ecology, edited by Erich Hörl and James Burton The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari Ecosophy, Félix Guattari Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Félix Guattari Eco-​Aesthetics, Malcolm Miles Anti-​Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Ecosophical Aesthetics Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari Edited by Patricia MacCormack and Colin Gardner

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Patricia MacCormack and Colin Gardner 2018 Patricia MacCormack and Colin Gardner have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image © Mark Mawson / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-​party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​3500-​2619-​3 ePDF: 978-​1-​3500-​2620-​9 eBook: 978-​1-​3500-​2621-​6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Louise and James

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Contributors

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Introduction  Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack

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Part 1  Therapy/​Care/​Affect/​Poetics: Towards an Ecosophical Ethics 1

Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s Gift to Contemporary Clinical Practice  James Fowler and Patricia MacCormack

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‘An inside that lies deeper than any internal world’: On the Ecosophical Significance of Affect  Jason Cullen

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Care of the Wild: A Primer  Aranye Fradenburg Joy

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Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals and Invasive Species  Penelope Gottlieb

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From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to Post-​media Poetics: Pierre Joris’s Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj as Processual Praxis  Jason Skeet

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Part 2  Ecosophical Aesthetics, ‘UIQOSOPHY’ and the Abstract Machine UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-​Of)  Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni

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The Guattarian Art of Failure: An Ecosophical Portrait  Zach Horton

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Into the Zone: Affective Counterpoint and Ecosophical Aesthetics in the Films of Terrence Malick  Colin Gardner

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The Delirious Abstract Machines of Jean Tinguely  Joff P. N. Bradley

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Contents

Part 3  The Shattered Muse: Ecosophy and Transverse Subjectivities 10 The Shattered Muse: Mêtis, Melismatics and the Catastrosophical Imagination  Charlie Blake

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11 The Transversalization of Wildness: Queer Desires and Nonhuman Becomings in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood  Alexandra Magearu

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12 Doing Something Close to Nothing: Marina Abramović’s War Machine  renée c. hoogland

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Index

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Illustrations Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 7.1 7.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 12.1 12.2

Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Castilleja Cruenta Standl’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Hopea Shinkeng’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Otophora Unilocularis’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Valerianella Affinis’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Elaeagnus Umbellata’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Phyllostachys Nigra’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Rosa Laevigata’ Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Convolvulus arvensis’ Diagram of Integrated World Capitalism Diagram of ecosophy as integrative catalyst Jean Tinguely, ‘Sketch for the “Philosophers” ’ display in his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988) Jean Tinguely, ‘Hiroshima’ (1963) Jean Tinguely, ‘Tokyo Gal’ (1967) Jean Tinguely, ‘James Watt’ (1989) Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010) Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010)

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 167 168 195 198 202 206 263 264

Table 7.1 Dimensions of the three ecologies

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Acknowledgements ‘Of Being Numerous (#7)’ by George Oppen, from New Collected Poems, copyright ©1968 by George Oppen, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. The editors would like to thank Pierre Joris for his kind permission to cite from his published works. We would also like to thank Drew Burke at Univocal Publishing for permission to include a revised version of Chapter  6 which previously appeared in Félix Guattari, A Love of UIQ (The University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Copyright by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Many thanks to the following for permission to reproduce artworks:  The Museum Tinguely, Basel, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, for allowing us to use images by Jean Tinguely and Marina Abramović respectively, as well as the Artist Rights Society; and Penelope Gottlieb for providing reproductions from her ‘Extinct Botanicals’ and ‘Invasive Species’ series. Special thanks to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury for their enduring support in the project.

Contributors Charlie Blake is currently visiting Senior Lecturer in Media Ethics and Digital Culture at the University of West London. The founding and executive editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Blake is also a composer, musician and performer in the Manchester-based post-industrial cabaret ensemble Babyslave, who have recently released two albums Kill for Dada and Runt on Valentine Records. He has co-edited theory collections such as Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism, Masochism and the Philosophical Muse (2009), Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (2012) and Immanent Materialisms: Speculation and Critique (2017), and has published variously on Blanchot and music, Deleuze and angelic materialism, Bataille and divine dissipation, hypostitional analysis, death and xenosonics, art, paranoia and parasite capitalism, the topology of serial killing, a new history of the music of hell, and the greater politics of barnacles, bees and werewolves. Joff P. N. Bradley is associate professor in the faculty of language studies at Teikyo University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the co-author of Deleuze and Buddhism (2016) with Tony See, and co-writer of A Pedagogy of Cinema (2016) and co-editor of Educational Philosophy and New French Thought (2017) with David R. Cole. His book Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education is expected to be published in 2018. Bradley is a member of the New Tokyo Group in Japan, a committed group of language scholars working on critical pedagogy projects in the nation’s capital and beyond. Jason Cullen completed his PhD in 2014 and is an early career researcher. His thesis was concerned with Deleuze’s holistic ontology and he is currently working on building a bridge between this ontological project and a philosophical vision of ethology. He is interested in the history and philosophy of biology, as well as ecology, ethology and the ethics of humananimal relations. James Fowler holds a PhD in experimental psychology from City University London. He began working with families of adolescents with severe antisocial behaviour in 2006. Fowler has worked as a principal psychologist within the

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National Health Service in the UK, supervising a team of therapists working with this same population; he currently works as a forensic psychologist with violent adult offenders. Aranye Fradenburg Joy is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature, founder and former director of the English Department’s specialization in ‘Literature and the Mind’ and faculty at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, with a private practice in psychoanalysis in Santa Barbara, California. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia and taught at Dartmouth College before moving to University of California, Santa Barbara. Her particular interests are mind studies, psychoanalytic theory, and medieval English and Scottish literary culture. She is the author of City, Marriage Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (1991); Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (2002); Staying Alive: A Survival Guide for the Literary Arts (2013), and many articles on psychoanalysis, psychosomatics, and the relationship between contemporary thought and medieval studies. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of Art and Architecture. Gardner has published Joseph Losey (2004) and Karel Reisz (2006) as well as Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (2012), a critical analysis of Samuel Beckett’s experimental work for film and television and its relation to the philosophical writings of Deleuze and Guattari. His most recent book is Deleuze and the Animal (2017), co-edited with Patricia MacCormack. Penelope Gottlieb received her BFA from the Art Center College for Design in Pasadena, and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she currently lives and works. Gottlieb’s paintings appropriate a methodology common to both Surrealism and the Baroque, namely the linking together of heterogeneous, diverse orders of things – in this case the normally separate analytical syntax of Audubon and plant biology – in the form of a representational ‘mash-up’ or ‘heterotopia’. Painting directly over pre-existing Audubon prints, Gottlieb literally envelops the birds in a tightly woven braid of plant leaves, tendrils and tentacles, so that what would normally be part of the birds’ natural habitat has suddenly turned on them as a form of domestic colonization. Gottlieb thus raises implicit issues of power/

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knowledge in relation to systems of classification in addition to her more explicit ecological critique. renée c. hoogland is Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she teaches literature and culture after 1870, critical theory, visual culture, cultural studies, and queer theory. She is the editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and senior editor in chief of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender. hoogland’s most recent book is A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics After Representation (2014). Zach Horton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on the intersection of technological mediation, ecology and scale. His current projects include a study of the ‘cosmic zoom’ and the development of a transdisciplinary theory of scale, as well as a cultural history of geoengineering. Horton is also a filmmaker and camera designer. Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy in English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively on Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot, Serres, Irigaray, queer theory, teratology, body modification, posthuman theory, animal rights, human extinction and horror film. Her work includes ‘Inhuman Ecstasy’ (Angelaki), ‘Becoming-Vulva’ (New Formations), ‘The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin’ (Body and Society), ‘Necrosexuality’ (Queering the Non/Human), ‘Unnatural Alliances’ (Deleuze and Queer Theory), ‘Vitalistic FeminEthics’ (Deleuze and Law), and ‘Cinemasochism: Time, Space and Submission’ (The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy). She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008) and Deleuze and the Animal (2017). Alexandra Magearu is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a visual artist and writer. She specializes in postcolonial and diasporic literature, feminist theory and phenomenologies of embodiment. Her dissertation project engages philosophies of affect, feminist critiques of war and phenomenologies of racialization in order to read the work of Arab-American and Franco-Algerian female writers. Her creative work consists of video art and illustration with an emphasis on the relationship between dreams and memory.

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Jason Skeet holds a PhD from Cardiff University on ‘Writing the Real: Deleuze and Contemporary Poetry’. His research focuses on using the work of Deleuze and Guattari (both solo and in collaboration) for examining and exploring literature, particularly contemporary poetry and poetics. His publications include ‘Netting Fins: A Deleuzian Exploration of Linguistic Invention in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves’ (Deleuze Studies), ‘When Will We Leave the Twentieth Century? An Interview with Kafka’s Ape’ (Datacide) and ‘Applied Schizoanalysis: Towards a Deleuzian Poetics’ (Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics). Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni are filmmakers and artists based in Paris. Their practice interrogates potential forms and fictions emerging from the ruins of the moving image and includes shorts and feature films, installations, soundworks, film performances, works for radio, ‘vernacular technologies’ and books. Their work explores new configurations of image, sound and text, often using cinema in expanded form to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories in ways that foster alternative modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. Thomson and Maglioni’s films include Wolkengestalt (2007), Facs of Life (2009), Through the Letterbox (2010), In Search of UIQ (2013), Blind Data (2013) and Disappear One (2015). Their work has been presented worldwide at international film festivals and museums/art spaces. They are currently working on a new film, Common Birds.

Introduction Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack

There is a gift in the concept of transversality from Guattari that speaks to macro and micro contemporary issues. We are designated as living in a time of crisis which, although sounding too much like the same crises of old  –​what is the self/​citizen/​subject/​I, and what is a nation/​nationality/​border –​Guattari offers us deliverance from. While both posthumanism and the other fashionable philosophical turns of the past decades (from object oriented ontology to speculative realism; the critique of the Anthropocene to the reification of alterity politics based on identity politics –​and always about but never beyond the sexed, raced, sexualized, economic, labouring human) seem to repeat and reiterate the same crises with new, more cynical or more anthropocentric modes of navigation of the borders of self and world, Guattari offers ways out that are ethical and deeply rooted in aesthetic projects –​activism as artistic practice, the inspiration for intersectionality, eco-​thought. With grace and deftness, he defies the very concept of borders, like the rogue psychiatrist, turning the question away from the patient back upon the regime which imposes the question itself, and collapses the philosophical border that traditionally separates ethics from aesthetics, while always invoking the ways in which both are lived realities and explicitly material corporeal manifestations of thought. Through diverse modes of semiotization, systems of representation and multi-​ referenced practices, these assemblages [of enunciation] managed to crystallize complementary segments of subjectivity. They released social alterity through the union of filiation and alliance; they induced personal ontogenesis through the operation of peer groups and initiations such that individuals found themselves enveloped by a number of transversal collective identities or, if one prefers, found themselves situated at the intersection of numerous vectors of partial subjectivation. (Guattari 1995: 98)

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This form of filiation, incommensurable with filiation through assimilation or forced homogeneity, is natural in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of becoming as an unnatural alliance, which follows the laws of nature in that nature always operates against itself. Guattari invigorates and encourages the chaos and wild, elegant and harmonious randomness of nature which modern human subjectifying systems (capitalist and fascist, church, state, family, psychiatry) see as having been ‘overcome’ (positing them as a problem rather than a freedom) by human regimes of logic, science and ahistorical knowledge or universalism. From this we receive Guattari’s deep commitment to deep ecology and its emergence as an ecosophy, which is philosophy without borders, the very philosophy of relations themselves. If we do demarcate this as a time of crisis (and we must ask which time hasn’t?), then the paradigms which underpin it and the trajectories which return their vectors towards the same old patterns of enunciation and imposition of power are the structures which demand disruption, rather than content or singular manifestations of right and wrong, blame and celebration. Guattari asks the philosopher to think deeper into and ultimately beneath the structures by which they emerge, and forces philosophy (through this digging up of mapped territories) to become artistic. The freshly turned earth of semioticized subjectification of self and world is liberated from trying to renavigate the superficial but nonetheless strangling embedded lines of reification to benefit alterity which is an impossible and delusional project borne of false promise and false consciousness. Thinking earth and cosmos via anthropocentrism will never help. The raw earth of the philosopher (and all subjects) become artist also invokes art as a way to create lines of flight and activist, marked out areas which are emergent through relational and temporal necessity and ready to be dismantled at any moment without scarring the terrain to the point where thought is closed off. Thinking is the aestheticized philosophizing which challenges the ‘paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical and referential’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 89) operations that drive religion and are adapted by science and economics to limit territories and modes of expansion by demarcating knowledge as all that can be known and more importantly, how things can be known. Guattari posits transversality as an activist philosophy that projects possible variant futures and immanent present tactics to counter the issue of discrete authorized epistemes which essentially speak the same ideology that Foucault traced in The Order of Things. Epistemic discretion is as much about access, authorization, enunciation and power as about a perceived revelation of

Introduction

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knowledge, which is fixed as universal through its authorization as knowledge. Previously knowledge and its inferred immutable connection with truth had been critiqued by post-​structuralism. Now, in the age of ‘post-​truth’, much Continental Philosophy (a dubious ‘genre’ to fix as singular in itself), with its critique of universal truth and atemporal knowledge, is being blamed for assisting the post-​ truth agenda. Such critiques remain within the discrete epistemetic arboreal structure and fail to address the multiple (but no less materially actual for being so) truths that post-​structuralism expands. In ordering things, the content is worth less than the structure so that science, law and family speak differently structurally but their content is essentially homogenous  –​productivity, commodification of life, discretion in subjectification and conformity of ideology. The dissipation of a universal truth addressed and reified by diverse epistemes that aspire to confirm the same ideological goals is not a dissipation of lived reality but an address to the in-​between and the ablated in history and contemporary life. It multiplies speakers and speech so the singular content is unsustainable and new spaces for speech are available, new modes of expression, new openings for liberty, rather than an alternate content which fits within accepted discourse and can thus be argued against or assimilated depending on the augmentive quality it offers to dominant paradigms. In capitalism knowledge is conformity and post-​ truth is too often simply disagreement. These burgeoning buzzwords  –​post-​ truth, fake-​news –​are problematic because they belong everywhere –​to the left, to the right. There is no longer a demarcated enemy and the interchangeability of insults hurled between factions shows they are ultimately working along the same paradigmatic lines. For those activists and creators who seek to rupture the very paradigm with its limited and limiting capacities for expression it is easy to feel as if we have become paranoid. We believe in fake news that may be real, in post-​truths that are simply variations of a singular mode of expression, and we do so because perception of the material and the virtual is increasingly identical and heavily edited. In this way any ‘concerned citizen’ who seeks change (especially those minoritarians not yet or never were considered citizens) at this time finds themselves as the schizo-​paranoid actor. Guattari (2011:  173) suggests that deterritorializing vectors create fuzzy smudges in stratified layers, and that our goal in transversality should be to enjoy and exploit the inevitability of these fuzzy abstractions because ‘[n]‌o universal cartography exists’. However contemporary modes of expression, what he generally terms ‘media’, seduce us into believing what we have is, or describe, a universal cartography. Guattari both disinters the ways in which

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fuzzy deterritorializing information is presented as consistent logic, usually at an alarming velocity, in mainstream media, while showing that our goals should be similarly schizo-​transversive. Instead of concealing this constellative structure as a failure in logic, rather, we should be celebrating the critical and adaptive attention to all information being presented thus and utilize it to create as we deconstruct. Guattari here liberates post-​structuralism from being post anything. It is immanent and uses the tools dominant messages conceal in order to appear true. Through transversality Guattari shows truth was never true, only a motivated expression of an apparently immutable fact, and news was always fake, a similarly motivated ideological abstraction to placate or irritate the mind by overwriting the unconscious with a grid of expectation in lines of information. It is easy currently for activists to feel like paranoid patients. Guattari offers suggestions for modes of expression towards schizo-​activism which makes this sense of paranoia safe from turning into atrophy and despair. In a way the world has become the traditional asylum and activism is an international strategy of La Borde-​ism. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) shift their heavy criticism of dominant hegemonic ideological paradigms from the intimacy they see between semiotics and psychiatry as the destruction of the unconscious towards alternate modes of expression that also refute the idea that Continental Philosophy is relativist or purely virtual. Their main focus is of course the flesh, the ability for real, actual, lived bodies to abstractly express and speak through gesture, dance and ‘liberty of expression’ (153) as well as the absolute abstract, such as music and mathematics. Affect, what is produced by both the material and the abstract in a pre-​semiotic, pre-​personal and pre-​power metamorphosis, changes all, including all three ecologies  –​self, environment, relations. Minoritarianism is the only way to access these transformative modes of affect-​producing expression. Guattari, with Deleuze through literature, and singularly through cinema especially, sees minor art as a direct mode to altering our lived realities, our truths. Where major art is not art but is in the service of power (Guattari 1996: 180), minor art does not separate content from mode of expression, does not make an either/​or claim on being true or false, does not impose a singular meaning to affirm the trajectories of obedience already beaten into the world. It both seeks and accounts for the labyrinths it opens and creates new worlds within and between all perceptions, while allowing hitherto unthought entities and modes of being (as expressions) to flourish. The transversal dismantles the stratified order of things, and attends to the way in which all things operate ecosophically. All that happens affects all, and capitalism’s concealment of this beneath the hyper-​investment in human

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truth and the truth about human existence has made those of us who see affect of all lives and relations as detrimental appear the paranoid citizens in need of intervention. Ecosophy is the schizo-​therapy that can decentre the singular, dominant and brutal psyche of capitalism, which is currently considered the only mind of the Earth but which is simply a specularization of the traditional dominant human psyche projected upon and at the expense of all other life. The affective relationship between art (both major and minor) and ecology is both tenuous and ambivalent, particularly because of art’s own precariousness in relationship to capitalism and its general tendency to be easily appropriated as a commodity fetish on one hand, and as a convenient inoculation on the other. Indeed, in his groundbreaking 2014 book, Eco-​Aesthetics: Art, Literatures and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change, Malcolm Miles makes a key admission early on, stating that ‘I am cautious throughout this book as to what art can do’ (17). This is because [t]‌he relation between art and political, social or economic change is neither direct nor causal. Art cannot save the planet or the whale; it can represent, critique and play imaginatively on the problem, and picture futures not prescribed by money. Art is itself produced in this context, too, and always reflects the conditions of its production just as it usually goes beyond them. (3)

On this level, Miles’s book is invaluable as a catalogue of eco-​activist art interventions, ranging from exhibitions such as ‘Natural Reality’ (Aachen, 1999); ‘Groundworks’ (Pittsburgh, 2005); and ‘Radical Nature’ (Barbican Arts Centre in London, 2009)  to Liberate Tate’s 2012 infamous performance/​intervention, The Gift, whereby a giant turbine blade (bought from a decommissioned site in Wales) was ‘donated’ to the Tate Modern’s permanent collection as a protest against Beyond Petroleum’s (BP) sponsorship of the space and the reciprocal ‘art wash’ the Tate gave BP in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps more importantly, Miles’s account also serves as a critical analysis of different eco-​aesthetic strategies and their built-​in limitations as well as their practicalities for opening up possible, sustainable futures. At one extreme, which is about as far from Guattari’s ecosophical agenda as one can imagine, is the Frankfurt School’s advocacy of an autonomous art which is able to disengage itself from dominant social and political systems, thereby creating a critical distance so that repressive interpellations can be revealed and interpreted afresh. Unlike Brecht, who used distanciation and estrangement (as Verfremdungseffekt) in order to foreground the gestic qualities of theatre as an anti-​subjectivist,

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non-​psychologizing socio-​political art, Herbert Marcuse argued that art can never become political without destroying itself. It can never succeed as direct action (due to co-​option), only as an autonomous realm in and of itself. Theodor Adorno concurred, stressing the polar opposition of art and nature which allows them to be mediated in each other: ‘Art and nature, then, are poles apart or are taken as the polarities of an axis along which the work of art is done’ (Miles 2014:  53; emphasis in the original). Given his Marxist political persuasion, Adorno’s fervent defence of the ‘autonomous avant garde’ seems incongruous, especially as it is not that far from a traditionalist neo-​Kantian immanent critique. One explanation is that, as a composer, Adorno was less attuned (and sympathetic) to the mimetic qualities of art forms such as cinema and photography, famously declaring, ‘I love to go to the movies; what I can’t stand are the images.’ Like Barthes, Adorno’s (1981–​82: 202) aversion to the cinematic image was rooted in its radical insufficiency of abstractive power in the face of repressive codes of representation: The photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous techniques; this is the retarding aspect of film in the historical process of art. Even where film dissolves and modifies its objects as much as it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction: its elements, however abstract, always retain something representational; they are never purely aesthetic values.

Instead, inspired by Schönberg’s twelve-​ tone technique, Adorno advocated the immanent development of the artwork’s own formal laws whereby it is transformed into a technically planned work. It was this immanent process which, for Adorno, was successfully diminishing the mythical, fetishized qualities of avant-​garde production that Walter Benjamin dismissively dubbed as ‘aura’. The autonomous product reveals how it is consciously produced and thus has a transcending and progressive role in breaking down industrialism’s tendency to commodify the object, something which a Brechtian politicization of art (through its subordination to the external, popularizing force of the masses) would forestall. Art thus acts as a negation of the instrumentalized world, eroding it from within through its increasing technologization: ‘Only where art observes its immanence does it convince practical reason of its absurdity’ (Lunn 1982: 155). What Adorno conveniently ignores is Brecht’s rooting of political form less in ideology and ideas  –​typified by his Marxist Lehrstücke or ‘learning plays’

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of the early 1930s  –​than in bodily affect, specifically through gest. Much of Brecht’s work was marked by a dialectical impasse between instinct and reason. It is the central motif of Galileo, where the Cardinal Inquisitor observes of the astronomer that ‘[e]‌ven his thinking is sensual. He indulges in thinking bouts’. It is also the main formal device of Brecht’s (1964) first play, Baal (1918), an uncompromising portrait of a poet ruled by sexual and bodily appetite. ‘Don’t overrate the head’, warns Baal. ‘You need a backside too and all that goes with it’ (32). As Deleuze (1989: 189) rightly argues, The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life.

It’s through the body –​its attitudes and postures –​that the cinema, and indeed all art through the symbiosis it generates between singularities and the objective world, makes its alliance with the spirit and with thought. One obvious drawback of the ‘autonomous art’ strategy is that it too can be easily co-​opted. Indeed, Benjamin (1968: 242) vehemently opposed the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement as a form of ‘negative theology’, ripe for use for fascist purposes: ‘Its self-​alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’ In the ecosophical context, a modern equivalent would be what Miles calls ‘greenwash’, the ecological equivalent of a corporate appropriation-​ cum-​inoculation. As Miles (2014: 138–​9) states the problem: Is aesthetics greenwash? In corporate publicity it is, but I would differentiate that use of seductive images from a critical aesthetics which exposes contradictions and offers access to moments of wonder and glimpses of another world. But that world is this world transformed either in an imagined alternative scenario or practically, if as yet marginally, within the present ordering of society. Activism and aesthetics, then are connected, not as mutually excluding opposites, but instead as the polarities of a common axis of potentially creative tension.

A strategy far more in tune with Guattari’s three ecologies would be Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, where art is tied directly to political critique and cultural discourse, which includes fashion, design, architecture, social relations, ecology and an assortment of micro-​ narratives. For Bourriaud

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(2002: 112), relational aesthetics is an ‘[a]‌esthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-​human relations which they represent, produce or prompt’; while relational art is ‘[a] set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (113). Central to both Bourriaud and Guattari is the process of subjectivization in producing a new subject as a decentred singularity, a process that works, as it turns out, in a similar way to the creation of a new art form. As Bourriaud explains: The pivotal position given by Guattari to subjectivity defines his conception of art, and art’s value, from start to finish. In the Guattari order of things, subjectivity as production plays the role of a fulcrum around which forms of knowledge and action can freely pitch in, and soar off in pursuit of the laws of the socius. Which, incidentally, is what defines the field of vocabulary used to describe artistic activity. In it there is no hint of the fetishization that is common in this level of discourse. Art, here, is defined as a process of non-​ verbal semiotization, not as a separate category of global production. (88; emphasis in the original)

In the ‘Machinic Orality and Virtual Ecology’ chapter of Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995) makes a strong case for performance art in particular as a processual praxis that has much in common with what Bourriaud will later call relational art, largely because it defies conventional contexts of time and place (the confines of the gallery setting, the ‘completed’ artwork standing in for the absent artist) as well as the codified (i.e. fetishizing) language of the art establishment as a whole. As Guattari (1995:  90) describes performance art, ‘[I]‌t seems to me that this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities.’ This is an engaged art of the everyday (which brings it close to Situationism) rather than an autonomous ‘art for art’s sake’, an art that is able to catalyse affect and change the very nature of the subjectivities it comes into contact with through what Guattari calls a ritornello effect. In music, the latter (aka ritournelle) is the short return or repetition of a refrain in a work (e.g. the reprise of a symphonic passage between arias in an opera) and is an important motif in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of becoming-​animal in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Bourriaud (2002:  97) also adopts the term, noting that ‘[p]lural subjectivity here is “ritournellized”, “caught” by what it looks at, a prelude to the formation of an “existential territory” ’. It’s a thermodynamic

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process, condensing psychic energy on a particular motif with a view to generating a number of transformative actions: Art fixes energy, and ‘ritournellizes’ it, diverting it from everyday life: a matter of repercussion and ricochet. As a pure ‘clash between a will and a material’, art, for Guattari, might be compared with the thoroughly Nietzschean activity that consists in outlining texts in the chaos of the world. In other words, in the act of ‘interpreting and assessing’ . . . The ‘existential motifs’ offered for aesthetic contemplation, in a broad sense, catch the different components of subjectivity and guide them. Art is the thing upon and around which subjectivity can reform itself, the way several light spots are brought together to form a beam, and light up a single point’. (97; emphasis in the original)

In short, the combination of Guattari’s ritournelle and Bourriaud’s harnessing it for a relational aesthetics allows for a symbiotic relationship between art and nature that convincingly counters Adorno’s more rigid, dialectical opposition. Which is not to say that art and nature are equal parties, because as David Reason rightly points out, ‘The work of art is, unlike nature, incomplete . . . [It] is not self-​sufficient, and . . . inevitably tempts word and thought. The work of art is completed in interpretation, commentary, and criticism, not in the sense of being finished (off), but as an electrical circuit may be completed . . . so that energy may flow’ (cited in Miles 2014, 17). Taking David Reason at his word  –​that the work of art is ‘completed’ (as flow) in interpretation –​we have organized the book into three relatively loose sections grouped under the general headings of therapy and care, the abstract machine and transverse subjectivities. Thus the five chapters in Part 1 ground the ecosphere in Spinozan ethics, a speculative, practical mode of living, a joyful auto-​affection involving an enquiry into what a body (and therefore thought) can do in terms of its ability to affect and be affected in turn. Affect, and its corollary, care, thus become key elements in Guattari’s search for a post-​media poetics that can fully manifest an ecosophical, processual practice encompassing the three ecologies. In their opening chapter, ‘Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s Gift to Contemporary Clinical Practice’, James Fowler and Patricia MacCormack apply these ethical principles to contemporary clinical psychological practice (with its privileging of majoritarian subjects within homogeneous fields of power) in order to encourage the uniquely machinic characteristics of all individuals through a therapeutic reconfiguration of territories and relations so that each can thrive (in terms of Spinoza’s capacity to ‘express freely’) as heterogeneous singularities. Fowler and MacCormack tie this reconfiguration

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directly to Guattari’s three ecologies of subject (patient to person), relation (therapeutic hierarchy to ecosophy) and environment (the deterritorialization of constituting territories through creative transformation). Approaching ‘mental illness’ through the encouragement and development of singular unique assemblages, the authors examine three different strategic plans:  Plan A, Plan N and Plan AN. From a Spinozan point of view, Plan A is perhaps the least ethical of all as it requires no adaptation, no consideration of the other as multiplicity and is only as successful as the subject’s ability to thrive within an always already majoritarian system. In contrast, Plan N asks the individual to adapt to the Nth degree in order to participate as part of a unique machinic assemblage. The more the latter deviates from the majoritarian norm, the more the patient needs to learn new thinking skills in order to assimilate. However, this treatment still involves tests to determine how far a subject might deviate from normative values, during which they often discover that they have far more problems than they originally thought, indicating, as the authors put it, that ‘the patient has been more intimately interwoven within the reiterative reifying ecology of the homogenizing psychiatric territory’, a psychotherapeutic reintegration parallel to the signifying process of Guattari’s Integrated World Capitalism. As an alternative, the authors propose Plan AN, which is a patient-​ led plan that, taking its lead from Guattari’s transversal experiments with group subjects at the La Borde clinic, disengages the idea of problems from the individual altogether and in the process serves to deinstitutionalize both the symptom and the cure. It is here that aesthetics comes to play a key role, transforming both the clinician’s relationship to power and the patient’s relation to the symptom. Both are explored within and between the therapeutic relation but also exoreferentially through a redistribution of schizo-​intensities that serve to rupture homogenizing structures and micro-​fascistic operations. Taking as a given the interface between capitalism and ecological collapse –​ a central theme in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies –​Jason Cullen draws on the assertion of the British environmental and political activist George Monbiot that conspicuous consumption has nothing to do with fulfilling public need. Instead, it constitutes a fruitless attempt to fill the void and deep social disconnect produced by an affectless, atomized culture which chooses to manipulate and exploit the world as a collection of resources rather than recognize human and nonhuman embeddedness within it. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues instead for a new way of thinking, taking into account the global interconnectedness of things –​what he calls a ‘mesh’ –​as opposed to a greater-​ than-​the-​sum-​of-​its-​parts ‘holistic’ thought which subjugates individuals into a

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greater whole (in this case capitalism) that inevitably subsumes them. In his chapter, Cullen moves beyond both traditional holism and Morton’s ‘mesh’ by taking a detour via Deleuze’s ‘ecological holism’ that argues for a strict reciprocity between the whole and its parts. This is grounded in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza whereby intrinsic modalities of being are simultaneously intensive (constituting the essence of substance) and extensive, explicating the ever-​changing whole as pure expression, pure immanence. Cullen then takes a second detour through Deleuze’s appropriation of Henri Bergson to show how this reciprocity is activated by affective encounters. In other words, if nature is open and reciprocal with the subjects internal to it, it can only exist because of the inherent, ever-​ changing relations between subjects and their bodily forces (the very basis of Spinoza’s ethics). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 57) state, We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by, either to exchange action and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.

This affective groundwork enables Cullen to expand his reading through Guattari’s description of modes of being as ‘existential Territories’, whereby subjectivities constitute (and are in turn constituted by) a relational field. In this field becomings are inextricably tied to the becomings of other beings who share the field. This ‘gentle deterritorialization’ opens up broader, intimate relations that encompass the nonhuman and it is here that Guattari’s notion of ecosophy manifests itself as a science of ecosystems encompassing the three ecologies: the material (ecology, biophysical); the social (cultural and human); and the perceptual (human subjectivity articulated through images, sounds and hapticity). In short, ecosophy is politically regenerative, ethical, aesthetic, analytical and life-​affirming –​embracing but also generating difference. It is at this point that affect takes on a new existential import, for as Guattari notes, affects are not concrete entities but rather self-​ constituting interfaces that generate both interiority and exteriority through affective encounters. Cullen rightly stresses the ‘gentleness’ of such encounters in order to guarantee an equal reciprocity between actual individuals and the natural environment (including the nonhuman and ahuman) which they help to both constitute and transform. Cullen explicates this reciprocity through an analysis of becoming-​animal from A Thousand Plateaus. Drawing upon Spinoza’s distinction between affectio and affectus, he shows how affect has both virtual and actual expressions. It is defined

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by what actually happens in an affective encounter (my body involved with another body), but also a virtual expression of that encounter, in and for itself independent of the participants themselves. It is the latter affect that constitutes a world of sense and transforms bodily powers to the limits of their capability. This is manifested most affectively/​effectively in and through the pack, the individual deterritorialized according to its power as an assemblage –​subjectivity reconstituted as heterogeneity, a life as Life/​world, in short as immanence. In her chapter ‘Care of the Wild: A Primer’, Aranye Fradenburg Joy builds on Cullen’s argument by applying the principle that ethics are always affect-​ laden (for good or for ill) to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in an attempt to undo their preoccupation with a reductive, Oedipal-​based cure rather than an expressively transformative care. As Fradenburg points out, psychoanalysis privileges what she calls ‘third-​person’ ways of knowing whereby care (and its multiplicitous corollaries such as assemblage, networking expressivity and movement) is sacrificed for analytic ‘neutrality’ which can be reduced to a basic analyst-​analysand relationship (which Guattari, building upon his experiences at the experimental La Borde clinic under Jean Oury, counters with a non-​ hierarchical transversality). For traditionalist Freudians, care was far too affect-​ laden, a kind of acting out (through transference) that hindered the analyst’s ability to strip down the brain’s multiple connectivities to a single determining ‘symptom’. Instead, Fradenburg argues for an ethics of care that goes far beyond a narrow theory of mind and instead expresses and exploits endless complexes of sensations, affects, desires and ideas. In short, care is a work of intersubjectivity and encompasses a large range of ecologies through reciprocal participation. As she puts it, ‘The “self ” that gives and the “other” who receives are dynamic, co-​ constructing processions of states of mind with histories and geographies that go far beyond the “individual.” ’ More importantly, care is vitalistically autopoietic. According to the Chilean biologist Francisco Varela (1979: 13), [A]‌ n autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations . . . [F]or a machine to be autopoietic, its defining relations of production must be continuously regenerated by the components which they produce.

Fradenburg’s intention then is to reconceive expressivity as dynamic, transformative movement, so that thinking, acting and caring can function as

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co-​constituting forces and powers for the sustenance of a healthy territorial life. As a result, care’s intersubjective and transpersonal connectivity becomes the very matrix of how embodied minds are shaped and developed, whether through excitement, absorption, reverie or dream. For example, one of the most powerful affects is ‘disgust’ (both those who need care and those who give it are often deemed abject, contagiously co-​determinous), which suggests that care is far from being a ‘safe’ practice: it is always a care of the wild, ‘primordially affective’. In this sense, perception and expression (and their extension in and through art) are always-​already a function of organismic concern for one’s environment (and are thus innately ethical). For Gregory Bateson, the arts practice ecological thought because they promote and sustain shifts in awareness and perspective and generate new material connectivities, they ‘care’ by transforming embodied minds. Care thus becomes a means by which humans and nature materially ‘transcend’ their own boundaries to generate expressivity beyond language as mere information. Fradenburg concludes by noting that caregiving processes such as grooming (its tactility/​hapticity negotiates both nearness and distance as a form of healing) and gossiping are excellent examples of language as embodied relationality. Thus, the primary function of gossip is affective circulation, not the transmission of accurate information. It is a form of bio-​power that generates an open-​ended community through an ecosophical aesthetics that enacts, protects and preserves it against the restrictive structures of the Oedipal family, the state machine and commodity capitalism. Art’s ability to act as a reconstructive bio-​power is central to the work of the Santa Barbara–​based painter Penelope Gottlieb, the subject of the book’s photo spread, ‘Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals and Invasive Species’. In her extinct botanicals series, GONE, Gottlieb recreates a series of plants on the ‘confirmed extinction’ list that have no known visual reference by reconstructing them from often incomplete botanists’ descriptions, in effect constructing an actual image from a virtual, textual source. On one hand, while Gottlieb uses painting to ‘heal’ an ecological crisis by summoning the plants back to life as aesthetic objects –​as she puts it, the works are poetic investigations of loss that suggest an overwhelmingly frenetic imperative to ‘live’  –​on the other hand the visual tropes of GONE appear as if a bomb had exploded in the proverbial greenhouse. The plants are de-​centred through the centrifugal visual vocabulary of early Modernism, most notably Kandinsky’s animated, shard-​like forms and the Futurists’ lionization of speed and destruction. The result is a highly ambivalent tension between pastoral and still-​life painting as an objective

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rendering of the natural world (eco-​aesthetics as statically eternalizing) and the more problematic nature of ecological crisis and its scientific rationalization. Gottlieb’s implication is that Darwinian evolutionary theory is fundamentally flawed by identifying the unit of survival under the limited aegis of natural selection. All this produces is a destroyed environment which ends up killing off the organism itself. Instead, as Bateson (2000: 457) points out, ‘The unit of survival is a flexible organism-​in-​its-​environment.’ In contrast, the works in the Invasive Species series are more centripetal, underlining the fact that it is invasive plants rather than climatic change or urbanization that constitutes one of the top three reasons for native plant extinction. The question is:  how to represent this colonization of ‘nature by nature’ outside of the closed world of botanical expertise? How would we begin to know one plant from another? Gottlieb’s solution is to appropriate a methodology common to both Surrealism and the Baroque, namely, the linking together of heterogeneous, diverse orders of things –​in this case the normally separate analytical syntax of Audubon and plant biology  –​in the form of a representational ‘mash-​up’ or ‘heterotopia’. Painting directly over preexisting Audubon prints, Gottlieb literally envelops the birds in a tightly woven braid of plant leaves, tendrils and tentacles, so that what would normally be part of the birds’ natural habitat has suddenly turned on them as a form of domestic colonization. Interestingly, the works take on a strong erotic overtone, alluding directly to ‘Kinbaku’, the Japanese art of knot tying which plays a significant role in rituals of sexual bondage. Gottlieb thus raises implicit issues of power/​ knowledge in relation to systems of classification in addition to her more explicit ecological critique. In effect, whereas the GONE series was more Batesonian in its anti-​Darwinian outlook –​the survival of the fittest species is pitted against the overwhelming odds of more cataclysmic outside forces –​the new work is more Bergsonian, referencing the French philosopher’s creative and active notion of élan vital, a vital spirit or life force that opposes mechanistic theories of evolution with a more fluidly affective weave of bodily forces that constantly evolve and branch out in new, ever-​changing directions. This is of course the exact role of art itself:  the ability to create new forms, spaces and species in which the staid, studio-​bound analysis of bird and plant life can suddenly take on the erotic overtones of a perverse sexual act. In the final chapter of Part 1, Jason Skeet reconfigures ecosophical ethics using Guattari’s (1995: 125) three levels of processual praxis as a means of generating a transverse ‘politics of immanence’ that is able to resist the standardized mass-​media subjectivity manufactured by worldwide capitalism in favour of

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a transversally singular production. It’s important to note that singularity is not the same as individuality:  it actually operates at a pre-​personal and pre-​ individual level and serves to activate potentialities and virtualities (Universes of Reference) as creative heterogeneities. Thus, in Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995: 7) calls for ‘a processual exploitation of event-​centred “singularities” –​everything which can contribute to the creation of an authentic relation with the other’. This is where the micro-​political has a catalysing power, not unlike the patient who takes up driving again after a long hiatus, allowing her to open up new fields of virtuality, or the impact of the existential refrain in Proust (most notably, the powerful effect on Swann of the ‘little phrase’ from Vinteuil’s sonata) whereby the singular event exerts a re-​creative affect. More importantly, in The Three Ecologies, Guattari (2008: 35) also gives singularity an ecological function: The principle common to the three ecologies is this:  each of the existential Territories with which they confront us is not given as an in-​itself [en-​soi], closed in on itself, but instead as a for-​itself [pour-​soi] that is precarious, finite, finitized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis that enables it to be made ‘habitable’ by a human project. It is this praxic opening-​out which constitutes the essence of ‘eco’-​art.

Skeet connects this ‘fundamental right to singularity’ to Guattari’s call for a post-​media poetics via the radical modernism of the objectivist poet George Oppen (2008:  166), whose Of Being Numerous depicts the post-​modern era as the ‘shipwreck /​Of the singular’. Skeet uses Oppen’s poem to set the scene for an encounter between Guattari’s work and an ongoing current of radical modernism in contemporary poetry, a subject foregrounded by the Italian autonomist theorist and political activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, who argued that poetry  –​through its excess of sensuousness  –​could break open capitalism’s stranglehold on social life by creating a dehiscence of ludic interpretation/​desire, the foundation for a ‘common ground’ of autonomous understanding that may defy the dictatorship of the signified. With the audience now occupying equal ground with the poet/​artist, Skeet is able to connect this to Guattari’s search for a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’ whereby artistic practices are able to create ‘[u]‌niverses of reference and existential territories’ which extend directly into the politics of everyday life. All that remains is to overthrow the power of the signifier as well as the signified, whereby the shattering of language allows for the very re-​ singularization of subjectivity that we discussed earlier. Skeet accomplishes

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this task by bringing Guattari into direct contact with the work of Pierre Joris, specifically his Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj as a form of processual praxis. A critique of US imperialism during the Gulf War (and the resultant devastation of Iraq) the Meditations was inspired by the tenth-​century Sufi poet Mansur al-​Hallaj, specifically a list of forty concepts taken from his work. Joris starts by breaking down language into fragments which are then put into lines of movement and transformation, creating a rhizomic, ‘nomadic poetics’ which, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, always starts from the middle and works outwards. With this structure in place, Skeet then undertakes a close reading of the Meditations using Guattari’s three levels of processual practice: modular crystallizations (the set of procedures with which the poet tears language apart, all the better to rearrange it as continuous variation); polyphonic fabulous images (the expressive re-​mix of heterogeneous components); and existential operators (the production of new subjectivities). We thus move, via Joris’s deterritorialization of language, from the imaginary to the real, from a ‘derealizing fabulation’ to the creation of ‘fabulous images’ that produce a post-​ media poetics midway between the pragmatic and speculative trajectories of Guattari’s politics of immanence. ‘Orality, morality!’ proclaims Guattari (1995). ‘Making yourself machinic –​ aesthetic machine and molecular war machine . . . can become a crucial instrument for subjective resingularisation and can generate other ways of perceiving the world, a new face on things, and even a different turn of events’ (97). Ecosophical aesthetics as a form of abstract desiring machine is the subject of the four chapters that comprise Part  2, specifically in relation to the filmic apparatus (which, in Guattari’s case constitutes a post-​media ‘minor cinema’, a pluralist, collective enunciation analogous to his own Autonomist experiments in free radio) and Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures. Indeed, for Guattari (2008: 43) the machinic and environmental ecology are inextricably linked: ‘We might just as well rename environmental ecology machinic ecology, because Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines, even, dare I say it, of war machines. From time immemorial “nature” has been at war with life!’ In their chapter, ‘UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-​of)’, Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni describe their discovery of Guattari’s unfilmed screenplay, Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) in the Guattari archives and instead of attempting to realize it as a produced film they opt to make a film ‘around it’ in the form of In Search of UIQ (2013), a cinematic cartography of the script’s non-​realization in the form of a new, ever changing assemblage. Ultimately, their own film then becomes what they call a cinebacteriological vector, a transductive catalyst for a

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series of ecosophical workshops or ‘seeances’ where people gather to watch and discuss the film and the ever-​absent UIQ itself. In this way a non-​existent film becomes a polyphonic soundwork where visionary voices and spaces might feed off each other without the inevitable closure effect of a final product. It turns out that Guattari was no stranger to screenwriting, having written Projet de film au sujet des radios libres around 1977 in response to ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s free radio campaign, specifically his own Radio Alice’s guerrilla disruption of the state’s radio broadcasting monopoly during the Bologna uprisings (Guattari would begin broadcasting his own Radio Tomato out of his kitchen in late 1980). In true ‘minor cinema’ fashion, Guattari planned to appropriate semi-​ improvisational Direct Cinema techniques such as hand-​held video to decentre the authoritative enunciative power of film and mass media so that there is no clear-​cut distinction between diegesis and exegesis, sender and receiver, creating a machinic heteroglossia of conflicting voices. As the authors note, ‘The permeability of the schizoid body as an indeterminate zone between inside and outside already enacts one of the conditions of collective enunciation.’ Here is an early example of Guattari’s (2013) commitment to a post-​media poetics. Indeed, writing in 1990 he called for ‘a transformation of mass-​media power that will overcome contemporary subjectivity, and for the beginning of a post-​media era of collective-​individual reappropriation and an interactive use of machines of information, communication, intelligence, art and culture’ (27). Guattari subsequent project  –​a proposed film on the Italian Autonomia movement, Latitante –​is a logical movement towards a more molecular kind of political cinema. Harnessing tropes from microbiology and the search for a revolutionary genetic code, he reconstitutes the autonomist ‘cells’ of free radio into a mutant bacteriological strain, paralleling the biological contagion of the latter with the mass-​media contamination of the former. It was then only a short step to Un amour d’UIQ (Univers Infra-​Quark) where the ‘alien’ intelligence is already immanent as a limitless, invisible, infinitesimally minute universe, hyper intelligent yet infantile and regressive, able to ‘infect’ both the organic and machinic. Although Guattari originally wanted to make the film in Hollywood with Steven Spielberg’s then producer Michael Phillips, and later posited a possible collaboration with Michelangelo Antonioni (as if to subvert both ‘major’ and art house cinema from within), the script was originally developed through multiple drafts in collaboration with the American independent director Robert Kramer (Guattari’s co-​writer on Latitante), who is best known for his 1977 documentary, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal as well as Ice (1969) and Milestones (1975), all of which explore the subject of group micropolitics

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as creative singularities. As the script’s title suggests however, there is an added complication:  UIQ makes contact with a group of Frankfurt squatters which allies his alien machinic presence to the radical German underground culture of the 1980s. There UIQ comes into contact with Janice, a young DJ who teaches this contagious entity about human subjectivity and affect, causing ‘it’ to develop a sense of self to the point that it falls in love/​merges with her and starts to feel human traits such as jealousy (a case of the molecular becoming molar), producing catastrophic consequences for all mankind. As Thomson and Maglioni are quick to point out, one of the key facets of Un amour d’UIQ is Guattari’s ability to appropriate this ‘infected’ squat scenario in alliance with his own transversal practice, whereby the clinical, political, philosophical and aesthetic all converge in a multilayered fabulation not unlike the psychic economy of the La Borde clinic, whereby the dehierarchized collective milieu acts as a territory for creating singularities out of Oedipal subjectivities. By extension this scrambling of social and psychic codes extends to the language of cinematic representation as a whole. Indeed, just as the Infra-​Quark Universe exists between structures at multiple scales, constantly re-​composing itself as it is driven by rhizomic patterns of desire, UIQ as a scenario defies the stable confines of narratology, genre and auteurism. It can be classified, by turns, as science fiction, a love story, a political tract à la Godard, an existential meditation on the lines of Antonioni’s L’Avventura or, perhaps more pertinently, in light of Pasolini’s essay ‘The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to Be Another Structure’, an interactive genre of writing in its own right, one that prefers not to be filmed but strives to transmute itself into an endless chain of desires, not unlike Pierre Joris’s polyphonic poetry. Complementing Thomson and Maglioni’s reading of the non-​realization of the Un amour d’UIQ screenplay as the opportunity to create an alternative, even more creative line of flight, Zach Horton reads the film as the culmination of a string of ‘failures’ that plagued Guattari’s entire life’s work, from his experiments in psychoanalytic methodology at the La Borde Clinic (which led to the strictly codified, transverse but also absolutist organizational matrix known as ‘The Grid’), through his political activism in the abortive revolutionary events of May 1968 and the Bologna uprisings of 1977, leading to the ‘great winter’ of the 1980s, and culminating in his final ecological project when he was the losing candidate in the 1992 Paris elections. For Horton, however, ‘failure’ is a dynamic rather than static mode. As one line of flight is blocked or stunted, another opens up and forges new, hitherto unprecedented connectivities. Horton’s source here is Judith Halberstam, who, writing specifically about

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Antonio Gramsci, notes that the only viable political response to ideology and hegemony is an improvisational, performative mode as the only means of coping with the unstable relations between dominant and subordinate forces. She links this strategy directly to ‘failure’ (as a negation of neoliberalism) while ‘success’ is associated with interpellation (in Althusser’s sense) into dominant forms of subjectivity. Read in this way, Guattari’s ‘failures’ can be seen as strategic markers, creative catalysts for his ability to found new series and scales of expressive activity. As Horton argues, the more severe the blockage, the more Guattari was spurred to construct a new trans-​modal territory to ensure a greater degree of mobility between existential territories, producing multi-​scalar lines of flight that culminated in the founding of ecosophy itself. Thus a key component of Horton’s argument is that he views ecosophy in specifically scalar terms, as ‘an alternative logic of scalar integration’. Significantly, Horton analyses ‘success’ and ‘failure’ not as dialectical or binary oppositions but rather as interlocking machines, directly connected to concrete struggle and the politics of everyday life. First, we have the centripetal-​connection machine, a centripetal force, usually centred on Guattari himself (his patients at La Borde, his house as a gathering point for friends and comrades) capable of producing new collective assemblages. Second, Guattari was a peripatetic-​ disruption machine, a molecularizing, nomadic force with a deep distrust of the molar tendencies of the first machine. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s description of smooth and striated space, the two machines always work in tandem, although at times one tends to disrupt and stall the other. Thus, just as transversality at La Borde was both disruptive and connective, UIQ was both a deterritorializing contagious virus and a destructive force within the communal, group effect of the squat. Moreover, just as the script is about failure (as opposed to success), its own failure to be produced can be laid at the door of the exact same diagrammatic forces that it narrativizes: in short, far from being uncommercial, it produces too many of Hollywood’s standardizing codes, and overloads the culture industry’s circuits rather than by-​passing them. So what happens when the creative mutations within Guattari’s various domains –​the psychoanalytical, the political and the ecological –​‘fail’ or stall and no longer create new forms? For Horton, these blockages are a major symptom of Guattari’s own depression towards the end of his life and ecosophy was born as a direct solution to both the social and personal. Guattari solution of both fronts was to jump between domains in order to keep the machines productive. This, in effect, is the role of ecosophy, a creative process that evades the forces of capture –​that ‘monstrous system of “stimulation” that is Integrated

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World Capitalism’ (Guattari 2008: 21) –​by bringing all the domains together (in and through the three ecologies) and allowing the multiple dimensions of each to flourish. For Horton, this organized chaos (schizo-​chaosmosis), by avoiding ‘holistic’ thinking, generates an alternative integrative logic, an autopoietic system where multiple scales are able to act (and shift) together to produce new subjectivities. Colin Gardner’s chapter explores these new subjectivities in relation to the cinema apparatus as a form of co-​constituting machinic multiplicity. In his account, the ecosophical relationship between the spectator and the cinema screen takes the form of an affective encounter, what Adrian Ivakhiv, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), has called an entry into ‘The Zone’, the ever-​ shifting meeting ground of sounds, images, hapticities and affects as they are mediated specifically by the filmic medium. Like Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, Ivakhiv draws upon a triadic taxonomy derived from the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, who divided the world into Firstness –​the thing’s purely qualitative potency; Secondness –​its actual causal and existential relation with another thing; and Thirdness  –​first and second mediated by a third to form an observation or logical and relational pattern. Gardner uses this structure to highlight the dense texture of brut perceptual response, bodily affect, memory, desire and hermeneutic acuity that we bring to viewing a specific cinematic ‘event’. Terrence Malick’s films, from Badlands and Days of Heaven to The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, are particularly rich examples of this by-​play between connective and disjunctive syntheses, this simultaneous movement towards a subjective, finite inside and a deterritorializing, autopoietic outer trajectory, setting up what Carl Platinga calls an ‘affective incongruity’ between the natural and the man-​made as a unified ecological whole. Gardner thus explores Malick’s films as a type of ‘minor’ geography (as much imagined as real) that is structured around a journey from the striated, signifying world of everyday life  –​usually violent or cruel, as in the case of the 1958 Starkweather-​Fugate killing spree, the battle of Guadalcanal or the life struggles of a young Chicago couple or Waco, Texas, family –​to the immanent, ecological space of nature in-​itself, which is vicariously beautiful, sublime, toxic, abject, catastrophic and sacred. Far from creating a clear dialectic between subject and object, substance and representation, nomos and physis, Malick instead creates a liminal space of relational processes and encounters, veritable probe-​heads (têtes chercheuses:  primitive, pre-​signifying, pre-​subjective regimes) where virtual and actual events are connected by a series of folds and envelopments rather than clear-​cut breaks.

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A central theme of the chapter is how the zone of cinema as an affective and machinic body is produced by Malick’s use of various forms of what Deleuze calls ‘the encompasser’. Usually associated with the use of landscape in the classic Hollywood Western (most typically in the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks), the ultimate encompasser is the sky and its various pulsations of movement, light and shadow and subtle respiration. These envelop and enfold the milieu and the symbiotic relationship between the protagonists and the collective/​community as a correlation between action and situation (Noel Burch’s ‘Large Form’ S-​A-​S′ structure, where the (usually reluctant) intervention of the action-​ hero changes the situation-​ in-​ crisis to a more resolved and progressive denouement). In this sense, Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven are revisionist variations on the Western genre with the added wrinkle of an immanent violence that the milieu is ultimately unable to contain. Far more interesting for Gardner’s analysis however is Kenji Mizoguchi’s use of the encompasser in films such as The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939) and Ugetsu Monagatari (1953), which Deleuze associates with Burch’s ‘Small Form’ or A-​S-​A′ structure, where the situation extends and modifies the difference between two actions. This is more typical of Malick’s Tree of Life and To The Wonder, which start with the skeletal structure of everyday life (family crisis), then link fragment to fragment, character to character, space to space, as we move progressively from house to garden to landscape and ultimately to the larger vectors of the infinite cosmos, before returning to the small form at film’s end (while retaining the film’s heterogeneity). In this way, Guattari’s two main trajectories, the centripetal-​connection machine and the peripatetic-​disruption machine, come together in the zone of cinema as an affective body that discloses the full extent of life’s existential territories. In the final chapter of this section, Joff Bradley applies Alfred Jarry’s absurdist pataphysics (the pseudo-​science of imaginary solutions) to interpret the notebooks and drawings of the Swiss kinetic sculpture artist, Jean Tinguely (1925–​91), illuminating how they function as abstract machines which diagram the ‘techno-​scientific state of things’, expressions of, by turns, the uselessness, madness but also joy of life under capitalism. For Bradley, Tinguely’s abstract machines (in effect, the diagrammatics of the dreams and fantasies of ‘slightly mad inventors’) exhibit in blueprint form what Guattari describes as the ‘vital drives of modern societies’, a collective enunciation of deterritorialized mutations. More importantly, these singularities not only exist out of time –​they are always projections of something yet to come –​but they are also undergoing constant mutation, innately self-​ destructive and malfunctioning, their ‘uselessness’

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serving as a mental ecology/​critique of Integrated World Capitalism as a whole. In addition, using the example of Tinguely’s Philosophe, the machines serve as a diagram of the ethico-​aesthetic and ecosophical/​schizoanalytic relationship between the image of thought and the plane of immanence. Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) were critical of Tinguely’s abstract portraits of philosophers. In What Is Philosophy?, for example, they opined that ‘nothing dances’ in the Nietzsche and the Schopenhauer ‘gives us nothing decisive’. They even offered Tinguely sage advice: ‘Perhaps more attention should be given to the plane of immanence laid out as abstract machine and to created concepts as parts of the machine’ (56). Bradley counters their critique by connecting the Philosophe collection and Tinguely’s diagram of James Watt (1736–​1819), the inventor of the steam engine, to Guattari’s solo writings (specifically Schizoanalytic Cartographies and The Anti-​Oedipus Papers) to show how they share common ideas on issues of movement, speed and acceleration, whereby Tinguely’s junk machines create a kind of smooth space traversed by countless inhuman becomings, in effect laying down their own plane of organization. Bradley cites Karl Marx’s insight into Watt’s genius as a forerunner of Tinguely’s unique Dada-​ist vision, whereby the former’s abstract machine (a universal engine that acted as a self-​fulfilling prophecy for all heavy industry to follow) prepares the ground for the useless machines of the twentieth and twenty-​first century, Tinguely’s included. To write lyric poetry after Auschwitz may be barbaric according to Theodor Adorno, but to construct kinetic contraptions on a self-​willed path to annihilation could be read as a joyous (because creatively embracing one’s ‘mad fate’, in Nietzsche’s sense) schizo-​analytic antidote to a post-​Hiroshima nuclear age. Bradley applies this ‘kamikaze spirit’ (in the sense of a ‘divine wind’) to Guattari’s notion of the collective agencement of enunciation, whereby a machine such as the SST Concorde necessarily demands an ontological consistency through the machinic phylum of ‘all supersonics to come’, a collective imaginary tied inextricably to the financial markets of Integrated World Capitalism. Concorde failed commercially because it never reached its full existential potential, which ultimately torpedoed its global ontological consistency. In contrast, Guattari stresses the importance of the diagram, which allows the dreams of inventors to be incarnated in the ‘vital drives of modern societies’. Tinguely’s machines exemplify this existential ‘flow’ because they exist in the interstices between art and technology, aesthetics and technoscience. They are inevitably hamstrung by exhaustion and breakdown but at the same time hint at schizophrenic breakthrough because they constantly link up with new machines

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as an over-​ productive body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari’s non-​ dialectically creative ‘and . . . and . . . and’ as a combination of connective and disjunctive syntheses). It is here that, as Bradley puts it, ‘[t]‌he abstract machine of Tinguely takes on consistency, in a collective assemblage of enunciation; self-​ annihilating, self-​immolating to accelerate the schizophrenia of capitalism’. The book’s third and final section links ecosophy and aesthetics through a variety of transverse subjectivities, building upon Guattari’s revolutionary schizo-​analysis from the La Borde Clinic to construct different assemblages of enunciation (including hybrid genres, rhizomic mediations and shifting gender identifications) and related points of singularity. In his chapter ‘The Shattered Muse:  Mêtis, Melismatics and the Catastrosophical Imagination’, Charlie Blake fashions a ficto-​critical, hyperstitional text (complete with an exhaustive bibliography) that takes the form of an exegetical time-​machine, jumping from the classical Greek canon (Mêtis, the expression of intelligence and cunning, derives from Orphic mythology and in later Hellenic myth was the first consort of Zeus and mother, despite being eaten alive by her consort, of Athena), through Guattari’s career at La Borde to a post-​apocalyptic world where his visionary legacy of ecosophy, chaosmosis and molecular insurrection pave the way for a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’. Here, crystalline series of intelligences can travel from the finite to the infinite and back, defying both genesis and destination, genealogy and mappable cartography. The result is an emergent catastrosophy, whereby a combination of art and cunning begin to generate a catastrophic entity that will enable the (post) human to manufacture at least a modicum of creativity from these otherwise unfathomable and unrepresentable events –​what Blake calls ‘a shattered muse’. Blake achieves this task through a series of interlocking (and we suspect, eminently unreliable) meta-​textual narrations, each producing its own arcane literature as a means of recording an otherwise impossible fabulation, a transverse continuity that behaves a lot like melismatics, the voicing of a single syllable across a range of notes (‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, e.g., contains a melisma of thirty-​one notes on the ‘o’ of ‘Gloria’), whereby a machinic phylum is able, like a musical refrain, to connect a series of otherwise disconnected fragments without sacrificing heterogeneity. There is, of course, the overriding presence of Blake himself (but where exactly do we position his authorial ‘voice’?); but we also have the mysterious ‘curator’, writing from his study at Miskatonic University’s Museum of Lost Objects in Arkham, Rhode Island, who ‘presides’ over a disjointed unbound manuscript (The Shattered Muse?), itself divided into seven sections, which appears to be a non-​linear explication of Guattari’s

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teachings. This includes yet another embedded text in the form of a post-​ apocalyptic lecture in the ruins of what sounds suspiciously like Goldsmiths College in London by Zeno and Dionysia who address an audience from across time and space via a large ‘abductional chrono-​polymer screen’. Of course, this being a world of chaos, Peirce’s ‘place of no regularity and thus no existence’, the lecture, and the curator’s entire epistemological project, is prone to the vicissitudes of catastrophe, complexity and contingency. Sure enough, there is a bolt of lightning, the screen flickers, Dionysia is suddenly inaudible and a text appears: ‘Due to inclement weather, the resurrection of FG has been postponed.’ Like a typical game of cricket, rain has stopped ‘play’. We return you to the studio (or more accurately, the infinite dimension of the airwaves). Stay tuned. Through a close reading of Djuna Barnes’s groundbreaking 1936 novel Nightwood  –​a classic example of modernist lesbian metafiction  –​Alexandra Magearu takes up Guattari’s plea for a mental ecosophy that can express the ambivalence of desire through the transversalization of violence, which necessitates the aesthetic re-​working of phantasmagorias into quasi-​baroque renditions of different becomings, including becoming-​animal. In Nightwood, these phantasmagorias take the form of wilderness, animality and the abject, which Barnes uses to both reveal and recuperate the queer sexualities of her main protagonist, Robin Vote, as she undergoes a trajectory of depersonalization and the undoing of possessive, domesticated desire towards a more deterritorialized becoming-​ with-​ the-​ world. However, Magearu also sees Nightwood as a cautionary tale, for Robin’s indiscriminate openness to indeterminacy and the discovery of new intensities feeds her constant need to escape from the affective confines of her relationships, both human and animal. Her wildness thus becomes a lack of responsibility, endurance or care, a narcissistic indulgence that precludes the formation of a radical collective experience. That said, part of Barnes’s strategy is to foreground the radical unknowability of Robin’s animal becomings, which makes them less seductive for the casual reader. Indeed, they are expressed through a fluid but highly opaque style that flaunts its anti-​representational floridity through what Magearu calls an ‘abyssal, baroque structure’. The shattered muse in this case is designed to deliberately disorient the reader through a series of unrepresentable gaps which stand in for the nomadic trajectories of Robin, the novel’s central feminine presence. However, as Magearu points out, the novel is not strictly gendered:  its multiplicitous vectors function as refusals of immediate signification, majoritarian notions of gender difference, and the all too easy binary oppositions between human and animal, culture and wilderness. Barnes achieves this transverse shift towards

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minoritarian discourse through a strategy of semi-​parodic mimicry (bordering on mockery). This allows her to open up a space for otherwise marginalized queer sexualities to create and also exploit chaos and disorder as a means of liberating a more machinic desire, freed from the confining field of sexuality as an Oedipal (or even anti-​Oedipal) norm. As Magearu argues, ‘In this context, the queering of desire refers to the antinormative flow of life which carries bodies in multiple directions and assigns them to different configurations of human, nonhuman and inorganic actors. The process of becoming is pushed forth by desire on its trajectory towards the minority, towards the molecular quality of matter.’ In conclusion, Magearu argues that an ecosophical feminist aesthetics has to overcome the majoritarian bias against nature which is intrinsic to the sex/​gender split (whereby the feminine always plays the role of physis to the masculine nomos of law and culture) and instead establish an ethical and affective relationship to the vitalism of matter. At the same time, as we saw in Part  1, ecosophical aesthetics must also be constantly aware of the cultural structures of capture and mediation that typify the agenda of Integrated World Capitalism. In ecosophical terms, wildness would not only act as a counter to majoritarian discourses and fantasies about wilderness but also create a series of gaps and temporary ruptures in their planes of organization so that the indeterminacy of the affective body could flourish as a pure singularity; spontaneous, auto-​poietic and, most importantly (Robin Vote notwithstanding), collective. In the book’s final chapter, renée c.  hoogland brings together Guattari’s ecosophical project with the post-​media poetics of Marina Abramović’s 700-​ hour performance, ‘The Artist is Present’, which took place as part of her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work is particularly relevant to a Guattarian reading because on one level it sets up a subtle resistance to the striating codes of the museum space but also triggers a resistance to that resistance, necessitating a new form of praxis as a signifying rupture that might defy easy capture. Thus the artist constructed a stage-​like setting in the middle of MoMA’s Donald Marron Atrium, creating an intrusive presence at the heart of the building and immediately disrupting the flow of visitors across the space and into the surrounding galleries. However, Abramović scrupulously followed the museum’s dictates in terms of hours of operation: she entered the space at the exact same time as her audience and dutifully left the museum at closing time. The piece itself consisted of Abramović sitting for eight straight hours in front of an empty table while facing another empty chair. The piece was innately interactive as any visitor could sit opposite the artist and stay as long as they

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wanted. In all, the performance lasted seventy-​two days, during which 1,545 visitors sat in the chair while thousands of others observed the proceedings as spectators or would-​be ‘sitters’. The piece plays with multiple institutional and genre tropes, not least that performance art requires the presence of the artist and is invariably durational and spatially motivated. Moreover, Abramović reinforced several museum parameters and strictures: the piece continued for the full length of her retrospective, and ‘sitters’ were not allowed to touch the artist (as if she too were an artistic commodity, ‘branded’ like the rest of the MoMA collection as a postmodernist icon). Thus, by refusing to be precise in the work’s exact relation to environmental, historical, political and social concerns, Abramović, as Malcolm Miles (2014: 153) argues in another context, ‘[R]‌estates art’s autonomy but in terms of engagement with the tensions between different readings of a space or a situation, and of continuous critical reflection on the work’s limits and contingencies.’ So how does ‘The Artist Is Present’ work as a pièce de la resistance? First, hoogland reads resistance less as a politico-​aesthetic strategy than as a form of ecological praxis that proliferates across a wide variety of social and mental ecological planes. This is particularly pertinent to Abramović’s work, which took on new life far beyond its tenure at MoMA, whether as a major publicity event in the form of press and blogosphere coverage, a presence on Flickr and MoMA’s interactive website, documentation in books (most notably Marco Anelli’s 2012 Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović, which re-​mediated the real-​time contact zone between the artist and her ‘spectators’ as a series of facialities captured by the camera) and its eventual transformation into an eight-​ bit video game. hoogland interprets this rhizomic deterritorialization of the artist’s body from site-​specific presence to a shifting, post-​media matrix of intensities as a form of war machine. Innately rhizomatic and non-​hierarchical, Deleuze and Guattari associate the war machine with smooth space, where lines no longer delimit but instead function as nomadic vectors, intensive rather than extensive, a processual space of distances rather than a measure of sedentary properties. In this sense Abramović’s work acts as a ‘climate of infection’, whereby war-​ as-​becoming constitutes an affective encounter and multiplies itself through its very nature as a form of contagion. It is obviously close to Spinozan ethics and also, in this context, Guattari’s ethico-​aesthetics of the ahuman subject, a creative forging of new, transverse relations with others that both utilizes and resists the capture of current media technologies and their organizational matrix. However, as hoogland points out, this is also the catch: because the war

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machine and its aesthetic corollaries are irreducibly social in nature, ‘while not reducible to capture by the state, [they] can –​like anything else –​be captured by the state form: smooth space may transform into striated space’, so that even new modes of becoming may engender catastrophe, as we learned all too well from Charlie Blake’s cautionary tale that opened this section.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1981–​82), ‘Transparencies on Film’, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, nos 24–​5, Fall–​Winter: 199–​205. Bateson, Gregory (2000), ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 454–​71. Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction’, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., New York: Schocken. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland, Dijon: Les presses du réel. Brecht, Bertolt (1964), Baal, A Man’s A Man, The Elephant Calf, ed. Eric Bentley, New York: Grove Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel (1973), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books. Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Félix (1996), Soft Subversions, trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2008), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, London: Continuum. Guattari, Félix (2011), The Machinic Unconscious, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2013) [1990], ‘Towards a Post-​Media Era’, in Provocative Alloys: A Post Media Anthology, Clemens Apprich et al., eds, trans. Alya Sebti and Clemens Apprich, Berlin: Post-​Media Lab & Mute Books, pp. 26–​7. Lunn, Eugene (1982), Marxism & Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

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Miles, Malcolm (2014), Eco-​Aesthetics: Art, Literatures and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Morton, Timothy (2010), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oppen, George (2008), New Collected Poems, New York: New Directions. Varela, Francisco (1979), Principles of Biological Autonomy, New York and Oxford: North Holland.

Part One

Therapy/​Care/​Affect/​Poetics: Towards an Ecosophical Ethics

1

Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s Gift to Contemporary Clinical Practice James Fowler and Patricia MacCormack

This chapter will explore the contribution a Guattarian ecosophical facilitation of any individual’s unique machinic assemblage can make to contemporary clinical psychological practice. In the spirit of extending Guattari’s clinical experiments to current and future practices it will build in US and primarily UK clinical therapies to suggest ways in which Guattari can assist in reconfiguring therapeutic relations which are often still enforced. It will interrogate the presumptions the field currently holds which privilege majoritarian subjects within majoritarian fields of resonance, behaviour and patterns of power while pathologizing others who exhibit identical behaviours (identified as modes of production within their assemblages) due to the way in which territories are made clinical or ‘free’, dependent on access to power by the subject. Currently certain behaviours within certain individuals are seen as ‘problematic’ and this chapter seeks to develop a workable, ethical means by which such individuals (and obviously ultimately all individuals) can have their unique machinic assemblages encouraged in order for them to thrive (via a Spinozan understanding of thriving as the capacity to express feely) through a reconfiguration of the therapeutic demarcation of territories and relations. This roughly translates to Guattari’s three ecologies of subject (patient to person), relation (therapeutic hierarchy to ecosophy) and environment (the constituting territories which engender clinical practice within larger social territories which privilege majoritarian homogeneity to heterogenous singularities and alterities in expression, leading to deterritorializations and creative transformation and mobilization of territories). While adamantly resistant to traditional and contemporary practices of psychological clinical intervention, we seek to explore ways in which the

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therapeutic understanding of assistance can alter territories of the normal and the pathological, in the spirit of Guattari’s own anti-​psychiatric psychiatry, through reimagining the three ecologies of subjectivity, environment and relation and recognizing the sickness of majoritarian homogenizing forces and the creative liberation afforded by unique assemblages currently constituted as needing ‘rectification’. Further, aligned with Guattari’s critique of capitalism as its own fiercely adaptive form of homogenizing assimilation, we will explore how identical behaviours in the pathologized subject (the ‘mentally ill’) are proliferative, celebrated and currently forming the basis of the oppressive regimes of political power in contemporary culture when expressed by majoritarian individuals as leaders of capital regimes. Both micro and macro majoritarianism behaviours which repudiate singularity, difference and unique machinic assemblages are themselves operating through perversely oppressive assemblages which consume all individuals that express alterity, and this form of majoritarian assemblage can be aligned with what is currently termed ‘privilege’. Thus the ecosophical territory constitutes the licit or illicit apprehension of behaviour rather than the subject, yet much contemporary clinical practice reconstitutes the ‘problem’ in the subject. Altering the ecology of power to open up diverse and unique paths or plans for the formulation of multiple trajectories of expression and affect can assist in fostering the workability of assemblages within a differentiating social terrain, while challenging the homogenizing and increasingly oppressive repeating patterns of power into which majoritarians are forcing all alterity. The assimilation of alternate machinic assemblages is not the purpose of a Guattarian driven clinical practice. Rather, the deassimilation of all subjects in (increasingly fascist) late capitalism is needed, so this chapter posits quiet interventions or ‘soft subversions’ for all subjects and their unique assemblages while seeking to dismantle the dominant territory and its catatonizing patterns. The role of spectacle, media and truth as simulacrum at the expense of the volatile and repressed creativity of the unconscious brings the ethical into the aesthetic realm, as does the suggestion that the clinician must enter into a becoming-​artist. The teeming spectacles of alternate assemblages found in art and imagination can also be extended to therapeutic practice, so the Guattarian psychologist can both facilitate the art of the ‘patient’ and redress the way in which society refuses to see certain behaviours and perceptions as themselves unconscious artistic expressions. In the spirit of Lotringer’s schizo-​ culture field of reimagining clinical practice and ‘the patient’ this chapter will offer an example of how soft subversions can be put into contemporary clinical practice



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33

in an effort to strip away toxic practice. This will be done through suggesting ways to cross lines, complicate conceptualizations and occupy simultaneous, multigeneous positions of availability to individuals in need without creating need. Can we develop a reconciliation of Guattari’s (1996) paths of power, knowledge and self-​ reference with systemic contexts of psychotherapeutic intervention? Can we even say such intervention is still relevant? Each of these paths/​voices are forces driving mental ill health through systemic factors. Each of these paths/​voices can also be understood via therapeutic methodologies or intensities within the therapeutic agent: First:  paths/​ voices of power circumscribing and circumventing human groupings from the outside, either through direct coercion of, and panoptic grip on, bodies, or through imaginary capture of minds second: paths/​voices of knowledge articulating themselves with technoscientific and economic pragmatics from within subjectivity third:  paths/​ voices of self-​ reference developing a processual subjectivity that defines its own coordinates and is self-​consistent (what I  have discussed elsewhere under category of the ‘subject-​group’) but can nevertheless establish transversal relations to mental and social stratifications . . . though inscribed in historical time and rigidly incarnated in sociological divisions and segregations, are forever entwining in unexpected and strange dances, alternating between fights to the death and the promotion of new figures. (114)

As said by Guattari (2000: 35): For its part, mental ecosophy will lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries’ of life and death. It will lead us to search for antidotes to mass media and telematic standardization, the conformism of fashion, the manipulation of opinion by advertising, surveys etc. Its way of operating will be more like those of an artist, rather than of professional psychiatrists who are always haunted by an outmoded ideal of scientificity.

Throughout our environments lines are drawn  –​the line between home and school, between school and work, between work and death. Authorities and clinicians determine, from a system described through majoritarian-​ driven psychological and psychiatric guidelines, what constitutes abnormal behaviour –​and do so by observing that the behaviour is out of line. The terms ‘developmentally appropriate’ and ‘environmentally invalid’ are rife within today’s

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clinical climate. In the pharmaceutically driven United States, individuals with behaviours not in line with majoritarian trajectories are medicated (heavily), and from a young age. In the National Health Service in the United Kingdom medications and psychiatric interventions are far less common, and instead of the medical ‘solution’ to ‘problem’ behaviours, individuals are compelled (usually through statutory, local authority powers) to have clinicians and authority figures in their homes, often using coercive methods to ensure that problem behaviour is corrected. Any individual unwilling to participate in that system is labelled as ‘difficult to engage’, and is often pushed deeper within the system. These same behaviours, were they present in a board room, a sporting event or a political rally, might be considered noble by these same authority figures. Yet, we all have mental health in the same way that we all have physical health. If someone has a cold one day, they are typically not labelled as physically ill forever. If someone feels depressed one day, it is extremely common practice for that person to be labelled as clinically depressed, which often does follow them for the rest of their lives. These occur via the three series of subjectivization Guattari (1996:  114) demarcates: Paths/​voices of power, paths/​voices of knowledge and paths/​voices of self-​reference, roughly translating as the imposition of the subject’s pathologized label, its articulation within specific technoscientific epistemic discourse and its self-​internalization by the subject who then acts according to their label. Today’s definition of mental illness, provided by the Mayo Clinic in 2015 (in the United States) and adopted internationally (as evidenced by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, in the United Kingdom), is ‘disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behaviour’. This establishes in no uncertain terms that there is a majoritarian mood, a majoritarian thought and a majoritarian behaviour to which we must all prescribe or be perceived by those trained in a mental health profession as mentally ill. Homogeneity is the territory upon which the three paths/​voices are inscribed. Heterogenous intensities are quashed by these paths. The demarcation points between mentally ill and mentally stable where behaviour is identical occurs due to the field of consistency within which the subject is constituted. The majoritarian who creates connections along a homogenous plane which connects business with media, capitalism with state and religious institutes, and ablates all punctuating or ‘aberrant’ (understood only as dissonant or disjunctive) intensities is not subjectified as in ‘need’ but rather as facilitating the smoothness of the enforcement of the mythic universals Guattari (2011: 32–​5) critiques. In both cases, however, the materiality of the subject as embodied, Guattari’s first call to de-​psychiatrization, is denied. For the majoritarian, intertwining



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and resonating all semiotic systems with one another to create a conformity of ‘logic’, ‘common sense’ or ‘truth’ is the creation of what Guattari (2011: 35) calls ‘ “extra-​human” semiotic machines’. The balance of different legitimizing systems with seemingly different relations to truth  –​capital, religion, the science of psychiatry –​even out due to their identical relation with power. Their discursive epistemic differentiation is a masquerade, as is their claim to knowledge as ‘therapeutic’. Retail therapy, redemption and clinical cure are the same thing. Access to power is what differentiates the docile body from the ‘extra-​human’ machine operating majoritarian. The majoritarian machinic assemblage is vast and homogenous, the so-​called mentally ill machinic assemblage is unique, singular and driven by the unconscious which for Guattari, especially in his late writings, is no longer opposed to, or differentiated from, the conscious or preconscious but is the limitless chaosmotic cosmos of the subject and their flesh that drives all constructed assemblages and produces new relations, assemblages and affects –​the moment where behaviour and the subject are the product of, and available as, art rather than scientific discourse. This reflects the Semiotext(e) cited Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression’s anti-​psychiatric human rights renegotiation of language where behaviour is exchanged for conduct, trait is preferred over symptom and, perhaps most ecosophically important of all, mentally ill is corrected to inmate and hospital to institute (Boston Declaration 2013: 35). This mapping of identical behaviour along different territorial planes leads to the unchecked privilege of the majoritarian leader destroying liberties en masse and simultaneously for the ‘ill’ individual the pervasive and ongoing issue of unwanted help (see the Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression (Boston Declaration 2013: 34) for a comprehensive list of objections to imposed psychiatric or psychological intervention). This oppression can be found in every system one encounters from peers, family, schools, employers to corporate (e.g. hospital or pharmaceutical) and government (e.g. social services and police) through power of personal emotional, economic, legal and physical leverage over individuals. It is still entirely possible to be sectioned and detained in a hospital setting due to a display of behaviour even when that behaviour is not a crime. When behaviour is a crime and legal measures are taken, it is still common practice for a judicial system to sentence one to psychiatric or psychological measures, which effectively write blank checks for clinicians to attach any number of diagnoses to an individual in accordance with their own majoritarian system. The specialities of the experts are neither special nor unique to their episteme but rather resonate around the rectification and assimilation

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of the individual’s unique desiring machines into the homogenous operations of the larger institutes, which distribute power away from creativity towards production as part of state and capital. Covertly, Françoise Peraldi’s (2013: 22) adoption and expansion of Guattari’s schizo-​ clinical practice emphasizes the role of connectivity as territory of enfleshed subject, as it is primarily a project of displacement: The main principle on which the functioning of the institute was based was displacement. There were few permanent places or functions but rather temporary preferential zones and occupations between which everybody moved and functioned in a more or less disconnected way . . . The main point of these ‘assemblies’ was, to use Guattari’s word, to unyoke (désassujettir) the existing groups in such a way that language and all forms of semiotic systems could circulate through the institution independent of any hierarchical relationship. (Emphasis in the original)

The privilege of the expert, and especially the structure within any institute –​ family, court or hospital  –​collates all experts with one another on the upper stratum and the object of analysis beneath, atrophying the position and thus the subjectivity of both, to the point where the relation of knowledge as a social corpus directly reflects the organized body which opposes the Body without Organs. This reflects the third change for which Guattari (1996: 263) calls in his new truths for psychiatry: transformation of ‘the wide range of mobilizations of social partnerships’. The space or ecosophy of relation between clinician, social arena and legislature, and patient itself is currently a signified, subjectified, catatonic body –​perhaps even its own form of ‘heavy’ facility, which is Guattari’s first site of new truths for psychiatric transformation (263). The reduction of relation to one of pure position in space also denies the crucial role in assemblage making of movement, which Peraldi highlights and which Guattari’s advocation of unyoking facilitates. Movement can occur quietly and imperceptibly or on a grand observable nomadic level but it is still movement because the body is not incarnated via the semiotic structuring of institutionalized and institutionalizing language but only tactically by the connections and circulations it makes. Here the reinvention of clinical practice via Guattari has as much use for the way we globally think human movement, displacement of populations and ‘migration’ as for the clinician’s office. Extending this, the operation of ecosophy as a sensitivity to infinite interconnectivity or deep ecology, from whence it received its inspiration, is both infinite and radical when circulation of all intensities, affects and expressions (elements of relation



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inspired by a Spinozan understanding of interaction) replaces hierarchies and the destructive forces of anthropocentric colonization of the world, materially and semiotically (and never extricable from each other). In contemporary social science it is common practice to discuss the relative ecological validity of a particular experiment, intervention or clinical practice. This ecological validity can be scribed as the ease to which a given practice translates, generalizes or otherwise relates to the patient or subject’s state outside of the practice. Case in point is the heterotopic white padded room, which does not typically exist within a patient’s ecology, and within which the patient is placed in order to buy time for clinicians to conceptualize treatment and for the patient to exhaust their reserve energy in a space more easily measurable as futile than the space outside. The behaviour demonstrated in a white padded room, and in fact any clinical progress made within that space, is less likely to be transcribed to, resonant, persistent, adapted to liberties of expression in the outside world than clinical progress made outside of the white padded room. This environmental context of ecological (in)validity represents an aesthetic disjunction incommensurable with a therapeutic relationship, and instead signifies the therapeutic hierarchy. This hierarchy is demonstrated easily within the physical white, padded space, but is also prevalent within any clinical encounter in which the therapeutic relationship departs from a joining assemblage and is reified as an exercise of power. The question of use here diverges from traditional productivity towards reassimilation or criminal or psychiatric exclusion, and what is sought is the usefulness defined by the willing recipient of clinical input, rather than the use of a majoritarian assimilation or will to enforcement of proscribed behaviour. Use in a Guattarian (2000: 34–​5) perspective refers to the creation of new ways of living together through communicational interventions, existential mutations to form a social ecosophy through the implementation of experimental micro-​ practices and institutional level practices. Conversely the ideal treatment environment is an ecosophically valid one, and the ideal treatment is one which liberates the ecosophical experience of the patient within their systemic confines, whatever they may be. Confinement via institutionalization operates the mass media manufacture of mental illness, aberrant behaviour and consumption into a homogenizing system. Guattari states: At every level, individual or collective, in everyday life as well as the reinvention of democracy (concerning town planning, artistic creation, sport etc.), it is a question in each instance of looking into what would be the dispositives of the

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It is worth positioning or operationalizing what this chapter will refer to as mental illness –​in this case a general failure to thrive –​with the definition of failure and the definition of thrive being that which pertains best to the individual on the day from a Spinozan perspective as the capacity for expression without affects dampening or killing off liberty. In this way mental illness can only be defined within context. The machinic environment of structures and systems operating around us, which Guattari (1996:  113) groups as ‘collective apparatuses of subjectiviation’, are constituted in part by aesthetic groupings which generate contextual cues. Those cues generate physiological and psychological states of intensity powered by the unconscious. These are adaptable as they relate to the conscious through skill and, effectively, mental health. The behaviour generated by one set of cues can only be scribed by the homogenizing majoritarian as symptomatic of mental ill health if it appears grossly out of context for that individual, and that individual’s ‘appropriate’ context is defined by the majoritarian. Mental illness can also be defined as the lack of ability to adapt psychologically to contexts, and to thrive as a result. The lack of a need to adapt at all could be a clinical definition of privilege. Illness is defined by frequency and consensus not by qualitative specificity. The urgent and imperative need to adapt within the power to do so could explain, in of itself, a significant amount of the common labelling of individuals by mental health professionals as ‘mentally ill’ or having mental health needs. In this way mental illness can be approached through the trajectory of an encouragement and development of singular unique assemblages  –​what for clinical shorthand we shall call plan A. ‘Plan A’ is defined as the plan that requires absolutely no adaptation at all in order to succeed. If plan A is to take the world by force and ensure that it bends around a subject, then it is only as successful as a subject’s level of majoritarianism. Plan A  requires no consideration of the other, or of ethics at all. Individuals with the privilege to be successful in plan A will rarely be considered mentally ill, due to their great success –​that is, no failure to thrive. However, such an individual’s plan A may, through the amount of signifying systems they control or patterns they create with which the populace are forced to resonate, establish a homogenizing territory that imposes its assemblage upon many to which they are forced to adapt yet through which they cannot thrive. Yet, an individual successful at plan A may be as unable to adapt as someone who, effectively due to a lack of privilege, would then fail to



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thrive and be considered mentally ill (think, e.g., Men’s Rights Activists or All Lives Matter proponents). Most of us find ourselves somewhere in between –​a space constantly fluctuating between successful force and necessity to adapt, this all taking place within a vast field of behaviours within a subject and as a group where traits and qualities become aesthetic techniques for survival that define the multitude of drifting contexts of our lives, the openings and capacities for creativity and the enforcement of totalizing regimes.

Multisystemic intervention Psychiatric and psychological intervention has changed significantly over the past forty years. Far fewer people are treated as individuals with problems in isolation than they once were. A  clear example of this progress is the spread of Multisystemic Therapy and similar programmes. Multisystemic Therapy represents a dramatic departure from seeing problem behaviours as isolated within problem individuals through its defining behaviours as multidetermined and bidirectional. Multidetermined, as a clinical term, refers to the theory that any behaviour is a culmination of multiple driving factors. In reference to the reconfiguration of the ecology of the subject this foregrounds the multiplicity and/​as assemblage that is the subject while also combining that subject with their drives  –​a teeming multiple desiring-​machine. ‘Bidirectional’ refers to the theory that the response to behaviours from others (both through choices, actions, intensities or other, rippling effects and affects) influences the likelihood of another iteration of that behaviour. Therefore repetition as repetition of relations of power, of expected outcome, of affect as an example of an atrophying ethic produces a subject whose behaviour is not driven by an aberrant desire, but a result of the closing off of liberty of expression through the repeating of patterns of response that dampen any expressions of becomings into articulations of being, closing off the BwO, closing down the unique assemblage machine. Alterations in response open escape routes for alternate behaviours and developments in becomings, the production of unexpected behaviours and heterogenous trajectories of expression. The multiple systems described in Multisystemic Therapy are the individual, the family, the peer group, the neighbourhood, the school and the place of work –​ the environment. The theory of change in Multisystemic Therapy emphasizes that the clinician intervene within all of the systems around the individual rather than focusing on the individual as problematic. Within Multisystemic Therapy

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it is theorized that when a failure to thrive is occurring it is explained by a systemic failure rather than an individual failure. The question then becomes, are these systems divergent on their trajectories of responsorial affect or are they resonant with one another and thus enforcing a homogenizing response which risks the relation that produces reiterations in behaviour? Further, Multisystemic Therapy operates within the community and demands that all involved persons are living in their homes and are not required to visit offices to receive the therapy –​the clinician comes to the individual’s home, school, place of work, community and so on. In contrast to imprisoning or hospitalizing a patient, or even to requiring that an individual be seen for outpatient treatment (i.e. an individual comes to an office to see the clinician, effectively removing the individual and their ‘problematic’ behaviours and thoughts from society for the purposes of treatment momentarily), Multisystemic Therapy is ostensibly political in its formulation. This formulation is political through appearance alone  –​as the clinician involves themself with the multiple systems around the individual, intervening in the collective power structures surrounding the individual, disrupting the individual diagnostic process through attributing responsibility to powers outside of the individual and crossing lines of machinic operation. However, Multisystemic Therapy and similar methods of working belong to traditional patterns of social formalization in a number of areas. We focus on the following: (1) that the therapy is evidence-​based, indicating that as part of the therapy it works to a majoritarian standard of normative behaviour and towards ensuring that service users (or patients) ‘achieve’ as close as possible to normative behaviour standards by the end of treatment, measuring this success empirically and thus for both the subject and the therapist behaviour measured by outcomes is not a creative expression but a capital production of ‘work’; (2) the therapy identifies systems around the individual, but only one step away (e.g. the individual’s family, the individual’s school), rather than societal, cultural, political or economic influences surrounding those systems; (3)  the onus for behaviour change, including systemic change, is placed on the individual on whom the therapy is focused. In this way the individual must address the paradox of recognizing that their difficulties are driven by multiple factors outside of themselves while being asked to accept responsibility for that. This reinforces the docile body in the courtroom, the prison, the confessional, the clinic who must reintegrate themselves rather than critique the homogenizing forces of social territories or celebrate their heterogenous escape trajectories as artistic expressions.



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The happy prisoner What we seek in any continuation of clinical practice would be the creation of (all) individuals and collectives who thrive on what Guattari (1996: 111) calls their ‘existential chemistries’ –​aesthetic ecologies which are non-​dogmatic and deprogramming. Analysis again. But where? How? Well everywhere possible . . . It can be individual for those who tend to lead their lives as if it were a work of art; dual in all possible ways including, why not, a psychoanalytic couch, as long as it has been dusted off. Multiple, through group, network, institutional and collective practice practices; and finally micropolitical by virtue of other social practices, other forms of auto-​valorizations and militant actions leading through a systematic decentering of social desire, to soft subversions and imperceptible revolutions that will eventually change the face of the world, making it happier. (111)

Contemporary clinical practice seeks to alleviate the symptoms of majoritarian oppression without treating the cause. An individual’s behaviour being seen as problematic is, in of itself, a cause of the behaviour. A person struggling with anger will continually be blamed for being angry. Factors driving that anger include social, economic and political forces outside of the individual. The angry patient, in the absence of the majoritarian privilege of acting aggressively, will be asked by clinicians to adjust their thinking in order to change the way they feel and ultimately the way they behave. This angry individual, effectively a prisoner of minoritarian circumstance if decentred would become the creative revolutionary in the quietest or loudest way, is being asked to be happy in spite of their circumstances rather than happiness being seen as a distribution of complex affects different within and between individuals. Happiness as conformity dampens desire to enforce a belief in happiness through conformity in too much clinical practice. The quelling of desire for alternate modes of happiness that come from the liberty of a decentring of power is crucial to power in order to revalorize its own importance. Happiness comes both from the realization that one is free from the enforcement of regimes of psychological mapping but also does not need them in the first place. The perceived need for these forces becomes the desiring machine that produces catatonic capitalism and contemporary media systems. In this way, just as false democracy demands a choice between the unchoosable at the risk of non-​ democracy, capitalism demands work at the risk of uselessness, contemporary media demands belief at the risk of no information and subjectivization is

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demanded otherwise you are depraved, deviant, tramp (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:  159), contemporary clinical practice hides the effects of injustice. Imagine a child being abused by a parent in their home. The parent tells the child, ‘Don’t say anything to anybody. Act happy even if you aren’t happy. If anyone finds out about this you’re gonna be hurt in ways you can’t imagine.’ Zones of majoritarianism from family, to state, religion, media and our own internalized regulating systems, operate desire through the demand for a state of affect abstracted from qualifying intensities. Majoritarian oppression abuses any individual, and then sends in a clinician who effectively says the same thing –​ be happy and content or things will be worse for you. Hitch your desire onto us, you need us, not your desire –​what Guattari (1995: 54) calls the rhizome of reciprocal dependence:  ‘Structure implies feedback loops, it puts into play a concept of totalization that it itself masters’ (37). ‘Be happy’ has nothing to do with the happiness Guattari calls for in the world. Both have no signified and both are not translatable. However happiness in clinical practice is catatonic complacency, while for Guattari it is infinite cosmic distribution of various intensities. The former is a being that has nothing to do with the being it is, the latter is a becoming that has no outcome or destination and is thus antagonistic to both contemporary clinical foci on both outcome and identity as an enunciation of normativity.

Dispersion of symptoms How clinicians, peers, family or any encounter respond to individuals displaying symptoms of distress will immediately influence whether the distressed individual is able to thrive. A  distressed person can in fact be thriving if that distress is their expression and they are exercising their capacity to express. Symptoms need not be problems but may indeed, after the Boston Declaration, be traits or characteristics, and may only be problems if the individual defines them as problems in the absence of a coercive influence. Symptoms spread and intensify through encounters. If someone goes to their friend and says, ‘I’m feeling depressed’, and the friend responds in an attempt to help, that attempt could be restricting the depressed individual’s capacity to express, preventing them from thriving. The help typically takes the form of ‘what can I do to make you happy’, or ‘what do you need to say to get that out of your system’, and through either activity or catharsis the depression is expected to disperse into the aether. The cause will not have been treated. The symptom, or the momentary intensity of that affect,



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will have been dispersed through a (socially acceptable) expression or relation. Any artistic or heterogeneous affects which could have been produced from the expression of a trait is reorganized into a symptom of psychological mapping of subjectivization. The trait as symptom could in fact become a distributing entity entirely liberated from its enunciator, an existential chemicality. This generation/​transformation relation seems in my view at present to be a particular case of the molar/​molecular relation. The difference is that we no longer come to the politics of machinic choices from the point of view of assemblages of enunciation marked in one way or another by human components, but from the point of view of the things themselves, so to speak. (Guattari 2011: 154)

Addressing the ecology of relation yet simultaneously doing away with all subjectivities, patient and therapist, who are already far beyond hierarchy in their relation of feedback exchange of expressions, Guattari apprehends what he tentatively suggests as the metaphysics or metasemiotics of the thing itself –​the intensity, the expression, independent of speaker or hearer and thus independent of subjectivization and perceived pathological genealogy from the patient, power and epistemic function or designated programme of treatment or outcome from the therapist. The question becomes ‘what can this thing do, what can we do with it?’ demanding creativity on both sides and from the entire world within which this metasemiosis is expressed. Thus the unconscious former-​symptom of the patient becomes a catalyst for new creative navigation of a produced intensity let loose on the world.

Plan N When an individual is asked to adapt to the Nth degree in order to participate, we refer to this as Plan N.  Clinicians typically utilize Plan N.  This is done through asking the patient to learn new thinking skills –​to think differently in order to feel and act differently, and to adapt. The more an individual’s unique machining assemblage deviates from the majoritarian imposed expectation, the more adaptation is needed in order to assimilate. We note here that the therapeutic relationship is an intimate one between people previously unknown to one another and as such, it is practical for a trained professional to rely on their training to identify issues which people typically report, and then provide solutions that typically work for others. However, this identifying of problem, solution and evidenced result is intensely problematic to the capacity to express

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or exist outside of the majoritarian schema. Plan N typically involves an assessment in which an individual is subject to various tests which determine the extent to which they deviate from normative values. Examples of this include the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (e.g. Goodman 1997), which defines all of the Strengths (i.e. closeness to majoritarian quality) and difficulties (i.e. deviation from majoritarian quality) of an individual in just twenty-​five items (five for emotional symptoms, five for conduct problems, five for hyperactivity/​ inattention, five for peer relationship problems and five for prosocial behaviour). It is common for someone to seek help from a mental health professional due to distress that they would rather live without, only to find after such a questionnaire that they have many more problems than they originally thought. In actuality what has occurred is the patient has been more intimately interwoven within the reiterative reifying ecology of the homogenizing psychiatric territory. This reflects Guattari’s (2000: 47) critique of post-​industrial capitalism (what he calls Integrated World Capitalism) which ‘tends increasingly to decentre its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and  –​in particular, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls etc  –​ subjectivity’. Reintegration in contemporary clinical practice isn’t even about forming a subject able to become a productive worker or operational family member but a signifying point within a discursive regime that evinces either a success or failure within outcome targets and goals set by government health authorities. Arguably the more creative and expressive the patient, the more their creativity is destroyed and converted into despair via these totalizing discursive imprisonments. ‘While the logic of discursive sets seeks to completely delimit its objects, the logic of intensities or eco-​logic, is concerned only with movement and intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here only to system or to structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deteritorialization’ (44). In a tragic turn, a patient who has come into being within an exhausting system or structure not only finds themselves atrophied into a particular kind of clinical subject inundated with additional ‘problems’ to exacerbate their sense of self-​pathologization but also the very symptoms or traits that could have been utilized as workings towards becomings have had their processes truncated with an outcome goal of extrication. Thus the means of liberty found in the symptom are also designated the reason for initial pathologization and cure is amputation of these means. The clinician then goes about their business of utilizing this hierarchical power dynamic to resolve these issues by delivering the patient from



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their means of processual becoming by robbing the patient of the intensities which could have (if detrimental) transformed themselves into something otherwise and creative or remained as catalysts towards different trajectories of experience if not detrimental. This is as true today of Multisystemic Therapy, similar community-​ based systemic therapies, family therapy or individual psychotherapy as it has ever been (see, e.g., Holmes et al. (2006: 181) for a Deleuzio-​Guattarian based critique of discourse and outcome in contemporary clinical practice. Thus the authors state:  ‘While EBHS does acknowledge that healthcare professionals possess discrete bodies of knowledge, EBHS advocates defend its rigid approach by rationalizing that the process is not self-​serving because improved healthcare and increased healthcare funding will improve patient outcomes.’).

Plan AN As a soft subversion we offer plan AN, a patient-​led plan which refuses to identify problem or even consider the idea of problems within the individual. Plan AN only seeks to provide the service to which the individual has consented to receive before encountering the clinician. Plan AN seeks to complicate rather than reduce the conceptualization –​this is done through the repudiation of any normative data, questionnaire or scale, and through the inclusion of patient-​led analysis and deconstruction of relationships that extend into the political strata around the systems, the relationships between systems and the individual’s position within the flow of power. Plan AN involves providing the individual with thinking tools to alleviate symptoms when such a trajectory is invited by the individual, and conversely to embrace symptoms when the individual’s machinic assemblage is served by those symptoms coming through loud and clear –​it is then the role of the clinician to either help the individual position themselves for the most effective presentation of their symptoms to the powers that drive them or to help that individual opt-​out in whatever way and to whatever degree best matches their assemblage by transforming their symptoms into liberating affects. The role of aesthetics comes both in the clinician’s relation with power, which must be transformed, and the patient’s relation with the symptom, which is exploited within and between the therapeutic relation, as well as beyond it in order to distribute the schizo-​intensities that remodulate the world and offer despotic ruptures which challenge homogenizing operations. Guattari offers the following for how to navigate any concept of workability, from therapeutic workable assistance to the way we must work ethically and

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politically in the world to afford alternatives. This quotation could not be more timely at the moment of writing (late 2016): The ecosophical perspective does not totally exclude a definition of unifying objectives, such as the struggle against world hunger, and end to deforestation or to the blind proliferation of the nuclear industries; but it will no longer be a question of depending on reductionist, stereotypical order-​words which only expropriate other more singular problematics and lead to the promotion of charismatic leaders. (Guattari 2000: 34)

Each age has examples of urgent objectives and the risk of such leaders. What is interesting is that both radical protesters and the charismatic leaders are seen and feared as mentally unstable or unsuitable for citizenship by their counterpoints. Within this environment of oppositionality of technique of dissemination of thought versus imposition of power, various factions form groups which express their own micropolitical mental ‘madnesses’, from racism and terrorism to minoritarian politics such as feminism. Madness is in everyone and the naming of such is exerted by antagonists as a means by which any capacity for creative mediation is disengaged. Guattari taught us to love our madness in order to artistically recreate territories where it can be fostered and proliferate newness in a way only the unconscious and a loosening of the will to power for a desire for unlimited imagination can afford. Clinical practice overhauling is also an overhaul in dialectic approaches of all kinds which theorize the in-​between, the interstitial and the desperate need we have not for exchanged politics, exchanged ideas and exchanged mad subjects for normal subjects but rather for the possibility of spaces which allow difference to open infinite new trajectories towards ways we don’t yet know we can think. The therapist must become artist to elicit the artistry from the subject ‘patient’, and in our varying roles and their varying relations of power which alter multiply over the course of an hour, a day, a year, we must also be citizens which exhibit the same artistry when finding ourselves in power in order to exorcise our micro-​fascisms and disassemble the hierarchical strata, and the creative patient when faced with oppressive challenges that produce symptoms which can so easily fall into a general social or political despair.

References ‘The Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression’ (2013), in Schizo Culture: The Book, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., New York: Semiotext(e).



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Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: The Althone Press. Goodman, R. (1997), ‘The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: A Research Note’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38: 581–​6. Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Baines and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Powerhouse. Guattari, Félix (1996), Soft Subversions, trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Athlone. Guattari, Félix (2011), The Machinic Unconscious, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e). Holmes, Dave, Stuart J Murray, Amélie Perron and Geneviève Rail (2006), ‘Deconstructing the Evidence-​Based Discourse in Health Sciences: Truth, Power and Fascism’, International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 4: 180–​6. Peraldi, Françoise (2013), ‘A Schizo and the Institution’, in Schizo Culture: The Event, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., New York: Semiotext(e).

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‘An inside that lies deeper than any internal world’: On the Ecosophical Significance of Affect Jason Cullen

Introduction In a recent piece for The Guardian, George Monbiot articulated an increasingly common theme among those interested in environmental conservation:  the ecological crises with which our culture is currently faced are not an unfortunate correlate of twenty-​first-​century capitalism; rather, the crises which confront the Anthropocene are a direct product of the contemporary, intensified form of capitalism that is grounded in constant consumption. This consumption, Monbiot contends, is the expression of a bizarre belief in the possibility of endless economic growth. From the point of view of consumers in this culture, consumption has nothing to do with their needs; this consumption, Monbiot argues, means ‘developing ever more useless stuff to meet ever fainter desires’. Consumption is, thus, a way to gratify increasingly trivial desires with trinkets that will hold the consumer’s attention only briefly. Unfortunately, trying to respond to our desires with plastic baubles produces an ineluctable ennui which drives continued consumption, and the cycle intensifies. As Monbiot (2014) puts it, ‘We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless, grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created.’ While the interface between capitalism and ecological collapse is certainly an apropos issue –​it is, after all, a central theme in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies –​ this chapter is not directly concerned with describing this interface and the broad relationship between the two. Instead, I am interested in one of the factors that Monbiot suggests contributes to this malaise: a culture that produces atomized, and increasingly affectless, subjects grasping at trifles we hope will fill a void

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left by a deep disconnect between ourselves and our environments. Our world becomes, to use Heidegger’s (1977: 17) phrase, ‘standing-​reserve’; our world –​ ourselves included –​becomes seen as a collection of resources to be cultivated, manipulated and traded, as we fail to grasp our embeddedness within it. In keeping with this theme, Timothy Morton, in his recent The Ecological Thought (2010), argues that, if we are to develop a way of thinking that can respond to our current ecological crises, we can only do so if our thinking is grounded in a global point of view on the interconnectedness of things. Thinking from the point of view of this interconnectedness, what Morton calls a ‘mesh’ is opposed to holistic thinking which he suggests maintains that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ (35), and so subordinates the particular individuals which fill out the world to a whole which subsumes them. Morton wants to articulate the necessity for a new perspective on the interconnectedness of things, on the coexistence of all beings. However, even as he argues against the futility of a holism which subjugates the parts of the whole to the whole itself, he insists that the form of coexistence he is interested in ‘means nothing if it means only the proximity of other machines or sharing components with other machines. Upgraded models of “post-​Nature” deprive us of intimacy. The ecological thought must think something like Georg Hegel’s idea of the “night” of subjectivity, the “interior of nature” ’ (77–​8). I want to argue in this chapter that Gilles Deleuze’s ontology offers us a picture of a form of holism where, rather than the whole supervening on its parts, they are reciprocal insofar as individuals express the transformation or modification of the whole of which they are parts; however, these expressions are double insofar as they simultaneously express the constitution of the whole. In short, Deleuze’s ontology is holistic in a perverse, distributive sense that concerns ‘the “each” rather than the “all” ’ (Kerslake 2002: 13). There is a good reason for treating Deleuze as a counterpoint to this conception of greater-​than-​ the-​sum-​of-​its-​parts holism; he offers a picture of the ‘interior’ of nature that Morton gestures towards, while actively resisting the totalizing interiority and negativity of Hegel’s metaphysical system. However, because this picture is not immediately apparent, I will attempt to elucidate two of its crucial moments: the first is the claim that individuals are parts of, and participants in, a whole whose constitution they express, and, second, that affective relations are the mode of their participation and belonging. Deleuze initially works out the logic of this idea in his first major work on Spinoza; in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze (1990: 38) describes individual modes as ‘intrinsic modalities of being’. That is, following Spinoza’s



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famous portrayal of individuals as internal to God, or nature, Deleuze characterizes the modes as facing in two directions: a mode is simultaneously a degree of the intensive constitution of the essence of substance  –​a degree of power or modal essence, to use Spinoza’s terminology  –​and it is also the expression of this degree in an ensemble of extensive, material parts. Importantly, because its essence describes, explicates, the constitution of God, or nature, a mode is intrinsic to the latter; however, because this constitution simultaneously complicates God, that is, the essence of God is transformed through this expression, there is no supervening whole which catches and contains all the parts. As Deleuze (1990:  175) puts it, ‘Things remain inherent in God who complicates them, and God remains implicated in things which explicate him.’ The second moment concerns a shortcoming of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza that he outlines in Difference and Repetition, something of a ‘Deleuzian companion’ text to Expressionism’s historical concerns. However, rather than focus on Difference and Repetition’s attempts to outmanoeuvre this problem, I  will turn to the first of Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema, Cinema 1:  The Movement-​Image (1986), where, among other things, Deleuze takes the lesson from Difference and Repetition’s confrontation with Spinoza back to his reading of Henri Bergson and describes affect, or, more precisely, affective encounters, as the relational mode by which beings, qua parts, are not only internal to a distributive, open whole, but reciprocal with its constitution. The lesson we should take from this discussion is, I believe, that if we are to try and describe subjects as internal to nature, there are two conditions we must fulfil. First, we must conceive nature as open, transforming and reciprocal with the subjects internal to it; that is, subjects acquire their substantive content, their power, from their belonging to nature, but nature only exists –​only is, in the strongest sense –​because of the relations between subjects. Second, these relations must be affective; affection must be the mode of subjects’ interiority. If, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 256) suggest, ‘affects are becomings’, subjects are in nature precisely because nature is the systematicity immanent to the reciprocity and continuity of subjects’ becomings. Within this context, I will turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) collaborative conception of ‘becoming-​ animal’ that appears in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to consider the ecosophical significance of participating affectively in the constitution of nature. This is particularly significant with regards to Guattari’s emphasis on the role of environmental conditions in the production of subjectivity. This significance is in the way the two of them pervert Jakob von Uexküll’s gift to ecology –​the discipline of ethology –​into an ecosophical

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project; ethology defines or characterizes an animal by counting the affects of which it is capable. That is, ethology asks what a body can do, and treats this definition as the basis for our entering into a transformative relationship with that body (257).

Affective encounters with nonhuman animals In The Three Ecologies, Guattari (2008: 35) describes the possible modes of my being a being as ‘existential Territories’; a mode of being is not a mode of myself, but a relational field in which my becoming is tied into the becomings of those beings with whom I share this field: The principle common to the three ecologies is this:  each of the existential Territories with which they confront us is not given as an in-​itself, closed in on itself, but instead as a for-​itself that is precarious, finite, finitized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis that enables it to be made ‘habitable’ by a human project.

Even though Guattari asks after human projects and their potential relations with existential Territories, I would argue that one of the most vital projects we can undertake –​a project that Guattari approvingly calls a ‘gentle deterritorialization’ (30) –​is an opening up of our relationship with those lives that are, unfortunately and reductively, called ‘nonhuman’. Too little is said to acknowledge the possibility that the philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari encourage a gentle –​a kind, considerate or, qua Morton, intimate –​approach to those beings with whom we share our worlds; however, it is precisely that point I wish to emphasize here. As Guattari (1995: 91–​2) puts it, ‘[G]‌eneralised ecology –​or ecosophy –​will work as a science of ecosystems, as a bid for political regeneration, and as an ethical, aesthetic and analytic engagement. It will tend to create new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a new gentleness between the sexes, generations, ethnic groups, races’ (emphasis added). Guattari (1995) is quite specific in his conception of affect; it is not a question of the discursive circulation of representation and meaning, but of existence. Even though both philosophers use affect as a noun, we must remember that affects are not entities, ‘[t]‌hey are limitless interfaces which secrete interiority and exteriority and constitute themselves’ (92) and, thus, the entities are produced through affective encounters. Affective encounters are ones in which



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we are ‘contaminated’ by the existential modes –​the ‘aesthetic machines’ (90), or ‘assemblages of aesthetic desire’ (92)  –​that synthesize the content of our lives and constitute us as subjects. If this ecosophy is to be a positive project (positive in the broadest sense), we must emphasize the importance of retaining a certain gentleness in our encounters; I will argue in this chapter that an open and amiable attentiveness to the subjectivity of the objects of our encounters is a necessary condition for a generalized ecology that is instructive (instructive, rather than prescriptive) as well as descriptive. If we take the ellipsis in the above excerpt from Chaosmosis as an invitation to broaden the discussion, I  would add ‘other species’ to Guattari’s list; that way we can frame this discussion with an encounter with a nonhuman. I  am interested in asking how I  would encounter a being that is more alien to me than it is familiar. Regarding this issue, I regularly reflect on an encounter I once had while surveying the footpath at a bus stop when I realized that I was being seen by a bird whose gaze alternated between me and a piece of discarded bread halfway between the bird and my seat. At first, watching this bird’s attention flit back and forth was both charming and fascinating. However, it soon became unnerving because I realized that I was clearly a significant object in another being’s world, but my significance was inaccessible to me. Faced with the gaze of a magpie, I felt acutely aware of the presence of an alien intelligence. Indeed, it was an intelligence that was simultaneously alien and familiar; it was familiar insofar as I recognized the presence of intelligence, but it was alien to the extent that I could not guess at its content. Whenever I reflect on this experience, this tension seems crucial because, if I emphasize its familiarity I risk seeing it as a diminishing of myself and so trivialize it as part of a world filled with diversely diminished versions of myself. If I  push too far in the other direction and emphasize its alienness, I will fail to hear its call. Whenever I  recall this experience, I  always imagine that this magpie was trying to get the measure of me, and evaluate whether I was significant enough a threat to deter it from trying for the bread; indeed, I  have often felt that interpretation is bolstered by the fact that it eventually snatched the bread and flew off to enjoy the spoils of its adventurousness. But the simple fact is I did not, and do not, know what significance I had for this being. As such, it seems that my capacity to recognize this being as a being depends on the common ground where I recognize this bird, and yet, the familiarity of this recognition yields a realization of the inaccessibility of the content of its being. At no point is the content of this bird’s alien world ever accessible to me. To think of it another way, this bird has phenomenological content. As Thomas Nagel (2002) famously

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put it, there is something that it is like for this particular bird to be the bird that it is. Now, obviously, the phenomenology of the bird’s experience is beyond my capacity to grasp (it would always be filtered through the phenomenology of my experience), but this is quite a separate issue from the realization that the bird has such an experience that I  am, if only temporarily, significant for its experience, and that this realization affects my experience of my encounter with this bird (220). Consequently, inaccessible though the bird’s world is, it is never merely adjacent to my world. The intensive world constituted around the bird flows into and through my own; in the midst of an affective encounter –​an encounter in which I am affected by the bird and it is affected by me –​my body is redefined, and its boundaries are partially determined by my contact with this bird. The issue, then, is how to think through and orient myself towards the relations which constitute my world? How do I make sense of a world –​my world –​that is constituted and transformed through relations whose participants are so alien that they refuse reduction to the sense I make of them?

Individuals as intrinsic modalities of being That Deleuze’s project is heavily indebted to the work of Benedict de Spinoza is no doubt clear to any reader with a passing familiarity with both philosophers (cf., Piercey 1996). Indeed, this debt is also a crucial element of his collaborations with Guattari, particularly the chapter ‘1730:  Becoming-​Intense, Becoming-​ Animal, Becoming Imperceptible’ in A Thousand Plateaus, and not merely those sections dubbed ‘Memories of a Spinozist’. There are two key themes to Deleuze’s Spinozism that are important here. The first is the process of attribution by which substance, God or nature is constituted in the same event that individual beings are produced as modes, or modifications of substance. The second is Deleuze’s famous and oft-​cited insistence on the [Duns] Scotist theme of the univocity of Being. The heart of the simultaneous constitution of the whole of nature and the production of modes is differentiation; that is, the differentiation of power, and the attributes through which this power is predicated of God and beings. This differentiation, importantly, generates qualitative differences –​the magpie and myself as different species  –​from quantitative differences  –​we are both expressions of transformations intrinsic to a common, univocal, sense of Being. This is what Deleuze (1994:  38) means in Difference and Repetition when he says that ‘[u]‌nivocity of being, in so far as it is immediately related to difference, demands that we show how individuating difference precedes generic, specific



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and even individual differences within being’; generic and specific difference –​ the diversity among species, genera and so on –​is preceded by, is grounded in, a univocal being  –​a sense of Being which is common to all beings  –​whose existence is constituted by the differentiation of the attributes of its essence. The shortest route into these themes is a telling tension between immanent and transitive causation in the first book of Spinoza’s Ethics, ‘Of God’. At proposition 18, Spinoza (Spinoza 1994:  16) argues that God is an immanent cause ‘of all things’; indeed, he situates this status as being opposed to transitive causation: ‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things.’ A mere seven propositions later at proposition 25, Spinoza appears to contradict himself when he says that God is the efficient cause (efficient cause being, more or less, a synonym for a transitive cause), ‘not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence’ (18). The ostensible conflict between these two propositions is in fact the simultaneity of constitution and production. In the first instance, God is a substance, ‘a qualitative multiplicity’ (Deleuze 1988a: 109), which is predicated univocally of beings, the whole whose modification they express. At proposition 11, Spinoza (1994:  7) modifies and deploys the classic ontological argument to argue that God is a cause of himself; that is, that God’s existence follows necessarily from his essence. And because, as Deleuze (1990: 102–​103) argues, the modes which populate the world are produced in an event simultaneous with God’s self-​causation, God is the immanent cause of all things. Key to Deleuze’s interpretation is the nature of the world’s inherence in God: it ‘does not ground between God and world an identity of essence, but an equality of being’ (176). In other words, beings do not inhere in God because they share his essence; they inhere in God because the constitution of God’s essence, the constitution explicated by the production of beings, implies a common, univocal sense of being –​a univocity through which all beings are beings in the same sense. This process of production accounts for the determination of the essences of the existing modes; it does not, however, account for the fact of their actual existence. This is why Spinoza has to posit God as an efficient cause. For Spinoza, the essence of an existing mode is a degree of power, and Deleuze (1994) interprets this as an argument that a modal essence is in fact a degree of the constitution of God. While this accounts for the inherence of beings in God –​ they are ‘intrinsic modalities of being’ (36) –​it falls short insofar as the existence of a mode does not follow from its essence (Spinoza 1994: 18). Consequently, the actual existence of a mode must be accounted for. In the second scholium to proposition 17, Spinoza argues that ‘a man is the cause of the existence of another man, but not of his essence’. On the one hand is the obvious distinction

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between the cause of existence and the determination of essence, and this distinction follows simply from Deleuze’s interpretation. On the other hand is a subtler point; if a being is defined by its essence, then it will not be defined as this or that mode, for the distinction between modes is numerical, and not real. If it is defined by the substantive content of its essence, then it is, in reality, a degree of power which expresses the constitution of God. This is the case even though, in fact, the being in question is an ensemble of material parts which, taken together, correspond to that degree of power which defines it as a mode. Of course, the degree of power is caused by God (insofar as it is a degree of the essence of God, existence belongs to it); however, that the ensemble actually exists at a given moment is a consequence of the beings with which it relates. For example, if, instead of claiming a piece of bread, the magpie had encountered a cat that attacked and disemboweled it, the ensemble of material parts which constitute its actual existence would be destroyed. In this sense, a being’s existence follows from the conditions in which it lives and relates to other beings. But since the essence of this cat would also be a degree of power which explicates God, then it can be said to be in God in the same sense that the magpie and I are in God. Thus it is a being who is the cause of the existence (or, in this case, the end of the existence) of another being. But because it is a being qua modification of God who acts causally, God can also be said to be an efficient cause. God or nature is thus a causal agent in two senses. On the one hand, to say that God is an immanent cause is to affirm a method of causation that is distinct from transitive causation. That is, insofar as he is an immanent cause, God is not a being whose causal influence is carried over from himself into the object of his influence. Indeed, as an immanent cause, God is not so much a causal agent as a substance from which follows modal essences qualified as this or that degree of power. God as an immanent cause is thus the substantive content of the actually existing modes. On the other hand, to call God an efficient cause is to affirm that, since all actually existing beings are qualified by their expression of the constitution of God, they are called modifications of God, or modes. Spinoza (1994:  18) is careful to observe that the actual existence of a mode does not follow from God qua immanent cause, insofar as its existence does not follow from its essence. However, insofar as the modes cause the actual existence of each other  –​that is, they cause the existence of the material assemblage that corresponds to a modal essence –​God is still said to be their cause in virtue of the fact that what causes the actual existence of a mode is itself qualified as a modification of God.



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Crucial to this interpretation of Spinoza is the distinction between causation and the determination of essence that appears at proposition 17 of ‘Of God’. The determination of the essence of a being as this or that being follows from the degree of an attribute’s participation in the constitution and transformation of God; however, the cause of the existence of the material parts, which under a determinate relation and, corresponding to the modal essence determined by that participation, is the actual set of environmental conditions in which that essence is expressed follows from a set of actual, environmental conditions. In other words, a being actually exists because of its environment, but it exists as a being with particular substantive content and significance because it expresses the constitution and transformation of the environment that produces it.

Affection as the mode of interiority In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) issues the only substantive criticism he ever makes of Spinoza, although it is less a criticism of Spinoza’s own philosophy than it is Deleuze’s articulation of a shortcoming in his own interpretation. Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza brings him right alongside a relational ontology. Unfortunately, it does so by endangering the radical immanence of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In short, the relational ontology of Expressionism is holistic to the extent that all actual beings –​with the qualitative or specific diversity that characterizes them –​are expressions of degrees, that is, intensive quantities, of the constitution and transformation of the whole of which they are parts, but it is precisely this holism that Deleuze criticizes. Insofar as the production of the modes follows necessarily from the constitution of substance, they are, he argues, ‘dependent on substance, but as though on something other than themselves’ (40). That is, the degree of power which characterizes a given mode is always a degree of the power of the constitution of an ontologically independent identity; an identity in which the becoming of the mode is grounded. Nature would, in this case, be a totality whose identity precedes and transcends the existence of the parts who express this identity. Consequently, Deleuze argues that ‘[a]‌ll that Spinozism needed to do for the univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the modes’ (304). That these two works, Expressionism, and Difference and Repetition, were written concurrently is crucial because, taken together, they represent different moments in response to the same problem. Expressionism is concerned with

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the relational logic of modes as intrinsic modalities of univocal being, whereas Difference and Repetition works through the immanence and reciprocity of the modes and being. Indeed, Difference and Repetition’s discussions of the dialectic of problems in Albert Lautman, and the multiplicities of Bernhard Riemann, are focused in large part towards this problem of making substance turn around the modes. In Cinema 1:  The Movement-​Image, Deleuze (1986) suggests a transformative, ecosophically significant conception of this issue with his conception of an affection-​image. The affection-​image is the subjective experience of an environment en route to the determination of the subject’s response to its environment. In more appropriate terms, it is the way that I am affected by my environment, such that my environment is entangled in the determination of my capacity to respond actively to the beings that constitute and share my environment. In this sense, I  am interested to explore the significance of affect as the mode of the reciprocity between the becoming of an actually existing individual, and the environment in whose constitution and transformation it participates. The deep connection between Deleuze’s early work, and the ontology developed in Cinema 1 is evident in his description of the affection-​image in terms of the interrelationship between intensive series and individuation. This interrelationship is first elaborated in Expressionism where Deleuze presents Spinoza’s individual as the actualization of a degree of power, and it is this view of individuals that drives his interpretation of the reciprocity of substance and modes, of the whole and its expression in individuating events, and it returns in Cinema 1’s description of the affection-​image. Still, while there is a striking similarity between the way attribution works in Expressionism and the way affection works in Cinema 1, affection does not mediate the latter’s individual/​ multiplicity dynamic in the way that attribution mediates the dynamic between substance and modes. Difference and Repetition’s criticism of Spinoza would seem to amount to the discovery of a vertical organization of substance and modes: an organization where modes turn on an already given identity that is mediated by the doubly expressive operations of attribution. However, while affection has a similar, doubly expressive operation that relates the virtual whole to actual entities, it does so by flattening the relationship such that there is a horizontal reciprocity between a whole and particulars. Deleuze (1986) defends this reciprocity by arguing that insofar as it is an image with two distinct but interrelated senses, affection is bipolar. My body, insofar as it is an interval between perception and action, is ‘filled out and extended’ (124) by an affection-​ image that is simultaneously actual –​that is, it is the actual state of my body to



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the extent that it is entangled in an actual, affective encounter –​and it is virtual –​ it is the sense of this state of affection, abstracted from the actual encounter and expressed for itself. Following on from a Humean scepticism about causal relations, Deleuze does not suggest that the two poles of the affection-​image cause one another; however, this does not entail the claim that these two poles do not interact. Even though it is virtual, the expression of the affect as such is still the sense of the encounter and describes the encounter as an actual occurrence, and thus the virtual pole of the affect is determined by the actual. Similarly, the actual pole of the affect is determined by the virtual to the extent that the interval, my body, produces a sensible response to the encounter in which it is entangled. This is why Deleuze (1986: 102) describes the two poles of the affection-​image as the two sides of the expression of a power-​quality. It is not merely the case that the interval between perception and action is occupied by an image which is alternately an immobile receptive plate, and then the expression of a power in its passage from one quality to another. Both senses exist simultaneously; there is one pole of the affection-​image that is a receptive facet, but its relationship with the production of an action is a complex, double expression. In the Cinema books, Deleuze treats cinema’s techniques as ways to consider and describe the different types of images and their genetic conditions. Part of the appeal of cinema is its capacity for undertaking such taxonomy from a point of view that is immanent to the images and their relations. Such points of view, obviously, would not be bound to human points of view. In this context, Deleuze (1986) describes close-​up shots as constituting the faces which are their objects. These faces are not human faces; they are images wherein the two poles of the affection-​image are expressed simultaneously. The close-​up abstracts its object, the affect, ‘from all spatio-​temporal co-​ordinates, [and] raises it to the state of Entity’ (95–​6; emphasis in the original) and, by virtue of this abstraction, the affect is also the generation of an actual state of things. When the affect is taken as an entity torn from spatiotemporal coordinates, the ‘affection-​image is power or quality considered for themselves, as expresseds’ and, although its existence is not independent of the state of affairs in which it is actualized, ‘it is completely distinct from it’ (97). It is in this sense that the second pole of the affection-​image is expressed as ‘ideal singularities and their virtual conjunction’ (102; emphasis in the original). In other words, the virtual side of the affect circulates within a multiplicity of ideal events that is distinct from the actual states of affairs that respond to it. The discussion of the other pole, the actual side of the affection-​image, takes us directly to the action-​image; the action-​image is,

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after all, the actualization of a power-​quality ‘in an individuated state of things and in the corresponding real connections (with a particular space-​time, hic et nunc, particular characters, particular roles, particular objects)’ (102). Insofar as it is the expression of a power-​quality for itself, abstracted from an actual, individual state of things, it is clear how affection is doubly expressive. Expressed for themselves, affects are ‘ideal singularities’; that is, an affect is the intensity of a relationship distinct from the actual situation in which this relationship occurs, and it is the circulation of these ideal singularities that constitutes the whole of which individual beings are expressive members.

Conclusion: affect and becoming-​animal Armed with a provisional conception of the whole of which we –​the bird and myself –​are both parts, I would like to end this chapter with a consideration of the significance of Deleuze’s holism for Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous becoming-​animal. As Deleuze (1994) puts it in Difference and Repetition, a being is defined ecologically. That is, a living being is defined in terms of the movements and forces of its milieux; it is defined in terms of an entire ‘kinetics of population’ (216). In our affective encounter, I experience this being in terms of the history of its species and its development. This is not to suggest that I experience a type of organism, of which this particular bird is a mere token. Rather, the actual magpie and I  are inseparable from the various histories that constitute the conditions of our encounter. Deleuze’s distributive holism is significant precisely because of its potential for elucidating this theme; in describing the affection-​ image in terms of the interrelationship between intensive series and individuation, he is, in fact, describing the ontological reciprocity between the determination of an individual’s action (my observation of the magpie, or its scrutinization of me), and the transformation of the whole of which the individual is a part. The two are reciprocal insofar as the whole determines the capacities of the individual in any given situation (the individual is its power expressed for itself), and, yet, the whole is constituted as the substantive content of the individual’s action (its sense and significance), and thus transforms as the individual continues to live. It is important to note that Deleuze is not saying that the magpie and I are reciprocal with each other; the reciprocity here concerns the interaction between me and the whole, between the magpie and its virtual whole, and the way our respective wholes circulate within a broader whole –​a whole that is, as Morton put it, the



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nature to which we are interior  –​that is constituted as the expression of our actual encounter. In the terms of Cinema 1, my relationship with the magpie would be described as the continuity of movement-​images, and this continuity always corresponds to an assemblage, a multiplicity, of our respective wholes. Both the magpie and I have our own wholes (i.e. life worlds or soap bubbles, to borrow an Uexküllian image that clearly infuses this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus) that constitute our respective lives, and yet our lives are lived on a relational field populated by countless other lives which, to varying degrees, are continuous with ours and the encounter we have with each other. In Cinema 2:  The Time-​Image, Deleuze (1989), using Bergson’s vocabulary, describes the whole of durée as ‘the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change’ (82). While there is a career’s worth of complex, ontological argumentation in the background, we can still gesture towards an ecosophical theme; every actual being corresponds to a virtual world that expresses the sense and significance of its encounters, but expresses it as a degree of power. Each being carries with it its own world, a world that subsists in its encounters. But its every encounter implies another world. In my encounter with a magpie, our virtual worlds form a multiplicity in which our encounter becomes possible. It is not a world which exists before us –​ One which would subsume us both –​but a world immanent to our encounter, a world which never closes, is never finalized and which transforms as other beings come in and out of our lives. Deleuze begins developing the logic of this conception of the whole in Expressionism where the expression of a degree of power is an attribute’s expression of a degree of God’s power; that is, it is the expression of a degree of the constitution of the essence of God. This, however, is exactly why Difference and Repetition criticizes Expressionism. Insofar as this degree of power constitutes the essence of an individual being, this Spinozist theme means the being will always express a degree of power that belongs to something other than itself; where Difference and Repetition invokes mathematics (particularly differential calculus) to resolve the logic of this problem, the two Cinema books concretize this issue through a focus on affect. Even though it follows from a criticism of Spinoza, Cinema’s conception of affect is profoundly Spinozist; that is, the bipolar conception of affect owes tremendously to the Spinozist distinction between affectio and affectus. On the one hand, the affect is what actually happens in an affective encounter. It is the state of my body such that it involves another body. On the other hand, an affect is also a virtual expression of that encounter, for itself (i.e. without reference to the participants themselves), such

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that it constitutes a world of sense and significance and transforms the power of my body. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 240) mean when they say that ‘the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel’. The pack in this case is not simply a collective noun –​a group of animals; it is an individual conceived according to its power. A pack is an ‘entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate’; it is individuality as heterogeneity (262). This conception of affect, and the distributive holism that informs it, shapes how Deleuze and Guattari (1987) exhort their reader to reconsider what it means to sympathize with an animal. They insist that we ‘not imitate a dog, but make [our] organism[s]‌enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter’ (274; emphasis in the original). An organism is not merely an animal or human, in a physiological sense; in Difference and Repetition, the organism is the affect as the sense and significance of the animal’s or human’s perceptions and actions. The organism is an idea which characterizes the contingent assemblage of material parts that physiology calls a body (184). In this case, it is not my body which enters into a reciprocal becoming with the magpie at the bus stop, but my world, my power, that enters into this relation. It is difficult to think of this discussion in A Thousand Plateaus without also thinking of the criticism Donna Haraway (2008) makes of it in When Species Meet. Haraway takes Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments to be characteristic of an anthropocentrism that follows from their focus on the sublime. Because of this focus and its ostensible abstraction, Haraway argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to elicit any curiosity about, or respect for, actual animals and the encounters that people have with them. Consequently, Haraway believes that ‘[n]‌o earthly animal would look twice at these authors’ and that their philosophy is ‘a symptomatic morass for how not to take earthly animals  –​ wild or domestic –​seriously’ (28–​9). The crux of Haraway’s criticism appears to be a simplistic interpretation of the distinction Deleuze and Guattari set up between familial and pack animals. As Haraway sees it, the distinction is between ‘competent and skilful animal[s] webbed in the open with others [and animals] without characteristics and without tenderness’ (29). But an alien, ‘exceptional’, pack animal ‘is not merely an exceptional individual’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 243–​4); that is, a pack animal is not a type of animal that is simply opposed to familial, Oedipal animals. A pack animal is, as we have just seen, a mode of animality, it is the individuality of the animal such that it takes account



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of its heterogeneous constitution. Against Haraway’s suggestion that Deleuze and Guattari privilege types of animal for our becomings, their insistence on packs, exceptional and anomalous animals, is, in fact, an insistence on modes of being that open up our own individuality to the conditions of more powerful transformations in our relationships with our environments. Still, I suspect we might have to concede a point to Haraway’s criticism of Deleuze and Guattari; if the implication of species chauvinism, means that Deleuze and Guattari privilege human concerns, or that they suggest that our becomings-​animal can never reach far enough to capture the animals who infiltrate our becomings (little Hans’s becoming-​horse will always demur when it comes to the possibility of a becoming-​Hans of the horse he fears), then, perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is anthropocentric. But I wonder if there is a question that we might ask in response: when considering the animals that press upon our becomings (Haraway’s dog, my magpie), surely there must be a point at which philosophy must fall silent, unable to speak of anything except the need for experiential, affective, attention towards the profound resonance of these familiar aliens upon the constitution and transformation of our worlds.

Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988a), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, Gilles (1988b), Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1990), Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Urzone. Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987), Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Duffy, Simon B. (2006a), ‘The Differential Point of View of the Infinitesimal Calculus in Spinoza, Leibniz and Deleuze’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 37, no. 3: 286–​307. Duffy, Simon B. (2006b), The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity, and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze, Aldershot: Ashgate. Duffy, Simon B. (2009), ‘Deleuze and the Mathematical Philosophy of Albert Lautman’, in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, Graham Jones and Jon Roffe, eds, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Durie, Robin (2002), ‘Immanence and Difference: Toward a Relational Ontology’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 40, no. 2: 161–​89. Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Félix (2008), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum. Haraway, Donna J. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin (1977), ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. William Lovitt, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Iveson, Richard (2013), ‘Deeply Ecological Deleuze and Guattari: Humanism’s Becoming-​Animal’, Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/​Animal Interface Studies 4, no. 2: 34–​53. Kerslake, Christian (2002), ‘The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence’, Radical Philosophy, 113: 10–​23. Monbiot, George (2014), ‘It’s Time to Shout Stop on This War on the Living World’, The Guardian. http://​www.theguardian.com/​environment/​georgemonbiot/​2014/​oct/​01/​ george-​monbiot-​war-​on-​the-​living-​world-​wildlife?CMP=twt_​gu. Morton, Timothy (2010), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Naess, Arne (1990), Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, Thomas (2002), ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, in Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, David J. Chalmers, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piercey, R. (1996), ‘The Spinoza Intoxicated Man: Deleuze on Expression’, Man and World, 29: 269–​81. Plotnitsky, Arkady (2009), ‘Bernhard Riemann’, in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, Graham Jones and Jon Roffe, eds, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ryan, Derek (2013), ‘ “The Reality of Becoming”: Deleuze, Woolf and the Territory of Cows’, Deleuze Studies, 7, no. 4: 537–​61. Smith, Daniel W. (2003), ‘Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze Revisited’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XLI: 411–​49. Spinoza, Baruch (1985), ‘Letter 12’, trans. Edwin Curley, in The Collected Works of Spinoza: Vol 1, Edwin Curley, ed., 200–​205, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Spinoza, Baruch (1994), Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley, London: Penguin Books.

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Care of the Wild: A Primer Aranye Fradenburg Joy

Five Principles I. Thriving and surviving are interdependent aspects of living process (Fradenburg et al. 2013: 92–​3). Though downplayed by Neo-​Darwinists, this point has been made many times in the literatures of the life sciences. A. R. Wallace wrote in 1891 that ‘the popular idea of the struggle for existence as entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings about, is the maximum of life and the enjoyment of life’ (Dugatkin 1997: 7, citing Wallace 1889/​ 2007: 40). The evolutionary theorist J. Z. Young (1971: 360) points out that art is biologically significant ‘because it insists that life be worthwhile, which, after all, is the final guarantee of its continuance’. Not just laboratory or zoo animals require ‘enriched’ environments in order to thrive, prosper and work joyfully; so does homo sapiens. In promoting ‘existential values and the values of desire’, Félix Guattari (2000/​2010: 43, 26) implies much the same thing –​‘rhythms and refrains’, for example, are ‘the very supports of existence’. On the level of the organism as well as assemblage, group, milieu –​and note that the evolutionary importance of phenotypal experience is on the rise these days, versus the ‘selfish gene’ –​survival cannot be assumed to be the highest good; history is rife with examples of those who choose passion, ideals, death, a certain mood, over life. Recall that monkeys deprived of mothering prefer fuzzy blankets to food dispensers even when they are starving. Experiences of meaningfulness, of ‘freedom of expression and innovation’, of ‘creationist subjectivity’, must be the goal of ethical action (33, 41).

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II. ‘Nothing permits us to say what is needful to man’, as Marx and Bataille have argued; nor can we say what is needful to life in general (for discussion, see Fradenburg (1999)). Our needs are always context-​ dependent; I may hunger, but what for, where from? And if –​as a child, say –​I cannot fend for myself, who will feed me, and why? It is no easier to say what is ‘useful’ to man; if ‘utility’ is ‘fitness for some desirable purpose or valuable end’ (OED), what is the desire in question? Valuable for what, to whom? Our thinking about care must loosen the topic’s association with ‘needful things’ partly because we cannot divorce the satisfaction of a need from the enjoyment attendant on that satisfaction. It is always some kind of joy to satisfy needs, even if the process of satisfying them is never-​ ending. It can even be a joy to feel need; failure to thrive in infants can be caused by hyper-​attention to their needs, not just by neglect thereof. A lot of social and economic policy depends on the belief that we can and should distinguish states of need from other states like withdrawal, obsession, compulsiveness and urgency, but on what grounds are we to justify such distinctions? We cannot easily differentiate caring for basic needs (which we will perhaps agree to pay for) from caring for states of mind (which we really don’t like to pay for, but which are just as vital to our social ecologies). III. We must reclaim the discourses of craft, skill and even utility from their contemporary capture by capital and management, as concepts that honour the artfulness and busy-​ness of living process, and the enjoyment(s) entailed in its ‘praxic opening-​out’ (Guattari 2000/​2010: 35). Caregiving is an art and the arts are inherently careful. Now, ‘[i]‌t is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity’; but care practices can ‘target the modes of production of subjectivity, that is, of knowledge, culture, sensibility and sociability’ in resisting the capitalist demand that ‘all singularity must be either evaded or crushed’ (33, 29). Reading or writing a poem might do as much to release us from the kinds of stress cultivated by mass media as the work of any care organization, especially if that care organization fails to recognize that its raison d’ être is its participation in and enhancement of the autopoietic activities of vulnerable creatures in a vulnerable world. IV. The notion of the ‘individual subject’ is no longer relevant. Instead, we speak of processes and intersections of subjectivation, of ‘intersubjectivity’, of subjectivating ‘partial objects’ and events, including and especially expressive events. The consequences for our understanding of care



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practices, affects and organizations are considerable, embedded as they are in debates over competition and cooperation, altruism and selfishness. Darwin, who extended selection to the family and the tribe, was very aware of the importance of cooperation, but with the exception of Kropotkin’s 1908 book Mutual Aid –​A Factor in Evolution, neo-​ Darwinian idolization of competition and ‘survival of the fittest’ continued largely unabated until the 1950s, when critiques thereof appeared more frequently, and the 1960s, when research on group selection was able to give cooperation substantial empirical and statistical legitimacy (Dugatkin 1997: 7). Since then, research on the topic of cooperation has gathered considerable speed (particularly as a consequence of studies of ‘cooperative breeding’, i.e., the sharing of childcare responsibilities among kin). But even further, if intersubjective ‘becoming’ means that the self on whose behalf we might be selfish is always-​already full of other beings and ways of being, the distinction between altruism and selfishness on which so much evolutionary theory depends is far from secure. A man’s apparent selfishness might be a way of protecting his unconscious psychical encryptment of the mother he lost at the age of 4. It does not follow, however, that material distinctions between organisms are ethically meaningless; rather, the porosity of the organism clarifies the importance of the membranes, material and otherwise, that metabolize what is in us into what is outside us, and vice versa. V. Life begins with a sac that differentiates –​creates differences between, but never severs –​an inside from an outside. Jesper Hoffmeyer (2009: 26) writes that skin has both an inner side and an outer side and an asymmetry is therefore established between that which is inside and that which is outside. The self only exists [insofar] as that which is inside contains a . . . reference to that which is outside –​an aboutness, as it is often called. But this outward reference rests upon a corresponding inward reference.

We must understand the relations between Innenwelt and Umwelt generally as immersed in the workings of complex, open, networked systems. From this point of view, the importance of fragilization and integration in living process is enhanced, not mitigated. Fragilization and integration are not opposities (the radical binarization of inside and outside is not a biological phenomenon) but rather intimates. Ethical thought cannot hope to secure the one without the other.

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Why care? Care is a life-​and-​death matter. As a topic of inquiry, however, it has not been very close to the forefront of recent theoretical inquiry in the humanities. Many people who work on biopower, or globalization, or new media, for example, do not feel that the topic of care –​the abject dogsbody, it sometimes seems, of ‘precarity’ –​ has anything to offer them. We associate care (and its semantic neighbours ‘concern’ and ‘solicitude’) with discourses of pastoralism, philanthropy, hospital design, welfare, maternity and so on; more often than not, its affective burden feels, precisely, burdensome –​tiresome, counter-​passional, worthy. Care is good works, sacrifice or not care at all. Psychoanalysis has worked tirelessly to de-​ idealize care, beginning with Freud’s derivation of the superego from the id, and his critiques of Christianity (Civilization and Its Discontents (1961)) and the legitimization of statist violence as non-​partisan (‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’). I hold with Freud on these points, as with Lacan’s arguments about the aggressivity of charity in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992). As I have argued elsewhere, sacrifice is always already a mode of enjoyment (whatever else it may be; Fradenburg 2002: 2). But the exposure of hypocrisy is also a guilty pleasure, and equally caught up in the logic of the superego (Freud 1961: 62–​6; Lacan 1992: 186–​7). We have not understood the passional aspects of ethics if we simply insist that ethics be scrupulously passion-​free. Ethics are affect-​laden, for good and for ill. The problem with altruism is not that it isn’t pure enough; the problem is that, despite the best efforts of psychoanalysis, the mixed nature of altruism (like the mixed, inside-​out topology of the self on which it acts) is so often hidden, and therefore has not often enough been recognized as a principle crucial to its theorization. Care, like concern and altruism, emerges from complexes of sensations, affects, desires and ideas; it is a work of intersubjectivity and the larger ecologies in which intersubjectivity participates. The ‘self ’ that gives and the ‘other’ who receives are dynamic, co-​constructing processions of states of mind with histories and geographies that go far beyond the ‘individual’. The I that gives is an ever-​changing network of things that have (also) happened to ‘other’ life forms (and beyond), not a simple, autonomous, unitary self that could readily be imagined to be self-​ish. In fact the notion that if ‘one’ gets pleasure from helping ‘others’, one is selfish is intolerably naïve. Caring for can be enjoyable, passionately so, and this potential is, so to speak, part of life  –​witness the biochemistry responsible for ‘primary parental preoccupation’, paternal as well as maternal, and the plasticizing effects of oxytocin on the brain (oxytocin,



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released plentifully by, e.g., orgasm, enables the formation of new attachment bonds) (Doidge 2007: 120). Care experience has profound effects on the mind, in the forms of excitement, absorption, reverie, dream. This is because care experience is the matrix in which embodied minds are shaped. Biophobic responses both to the topic of care and to care practices derive from fear of our own creatureliness  –​natality, mortality, vulnerability, (inter) dependency, nonconscious mentation, abjection, helplessness, the fragilizing power of jouissance. Our always-​already post-​traumatic resistance to creaturely precariousness is currently symptomatized by the (paradoxically) ongoing millennial fall in the value of life and living things; by the stylized carelessness (e.g. cool indifference) of so many Westerners; by the special reluctance of the mighty, in any field of endeavour, to care about care, especially to show that they need it (cf. Roberto Esposito’s (2011) work on ‘immunitas’); and the increasing relegation of care work to disenfranchised and poorly compensated populations, like women, immigrants from poor countries, untouchables, animals and artificial intelligences; and by the parallel sequestration of the topic of care within the discursive fields of the academy. Feminist thinkers have long called attention to the depreciating effects of care’s associations with women, children, the aged, in short, the ‘weaker’ members of society; with the prison-​house of domesticity; with ‘mere’ maintenance, as though the dawn of another day were something to sneeze at; hence with repetition and boredom; with disturbingly mellow herbalists, culture mothers, retro-​technologies and bodily fluids. ‘Disgust’ is a powerful affect to contend with in the revaluation of care; in the United States, those who need care are abject, and those who care for them are also abject, ‘polluted’ by contagion (on abjection in nursing, see Evans 2010 and McCabe 2010). The obverse of this depreciation of care is its sentimentalization in US discourses on the family, its values, its endangerment and so on, a sentimentalization which protects our minds from the implications of the hostile and exploitive ways we routinely treat our caregivers, and hence from the realization that we have much more to fear from ourselves and our close kin than we do from terrorists. Care will not advance much as a topic for serious consideration by the many rather than the few until we acknowledge that ‘marked’ examples thereof  –​infant care, elder care, nursing care, counselling, teaching –​can so readily screen our constitutive, everyday, inescapable, lifelong dependency on others and on our environments. Epidemiological studies show that poor health in the poorer ranks of a population predicts poorer health in its richer ranks as well, irrespective of how much money the affluent are able to spend on sophisticated health care

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(Wheeler 2006:  108). No one prospers alone; even the most solitary habits, efforts, individuals and species are part of larger, co-​evolving environments. Both surviving and thriving are inescapably communal activities. The funereal bell that tolls for thee and me marks the dimension of discourse in practices of care, for us as well as for other animals: the outcry that warns of the approach of predators is one of the most common ‘signs’ of cooperation in the animal kingdom. This chapter functions in part as just such an outcry. If there is resistance to knowing care  –​to knowing that it is going on, that it is needed, that it is an intelligent practice  –​how can we undo that resistance, and make our wished-​for interventions more clinically and politically forceful? First, by recognizing that care is neither a safe topic nor a safe practice. Care is difficult, both to accept and to give, not just because of its capacity to exhaust our reserves of narcissism, but because it is one of the primary modes by which the bodies and minds of creatures shape and re-​shape one another. Care is always, in some sense, care of the wild.

Evolution of care The topic of care stands to benefit enormously from the increasing primacy of holistic and ecological perspectives in the life and psychological sciences. Top-​ down or prime-​mover models of change have largely given way to the influence of complexity theory. Many kinds of conjunctions and symbioses now appear to play significant roles in bio-​history. The findings of the genome project, for example, have put genetic determinism all in doubt. Not just genetic ‘expression’ but also the biochemical processes involved in the actual creation of genes are highly responsive to environmental conditions. The study of multicellularity indicates that both individuation and aggregation are fundamental to living process and interdependent rather than mutually exclusive processes. How and why does it come about that cells, ‘separated’ from one another by membranes, nonetheless are attracted to each other? Why do they gather together to form larger organisms? (Is it possible that membranes complexify and intensify influence, rather than simply limiting it?) Bio-​history and its territorial expressions are now seen to be created by mutually constitutive interactions between genotypes, phenotypes and environmental, including social, ‘affordances’. The causality involved is that of complexity; the ‘being’, and non-​being, of ontology turns into ‘becoming’. The organism is, as Hoffmeyer (2009: 72) puts it, no longer a ‘dead end’; its sensations and perceptions are directly creative. Evolution turns out to



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be a history of organisms+ecologies  –​Bateson’s ‘organism+’  –​rather than of genes bent on self-​replication. The notions of embodied, extended and distributed cognition that have emerged in the course of these developments have particularly important implications for our understanding of care, owing to their reduction of now-​ antiquated antinomies between mind and body, organism and environment, and matter and thought. Mind is now understood to be ‘distributed’ well past the brain, the nervous system and even the body, through, for example, ‘gut’ neurons, psycho-​endocrinological transmissions, paralanguage and the signifying extensions of mind celebrated long ago by John Milton and more recently by Gregory Bateson (1972/​2000:  xi).1 Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, Giovanna Colombetti’s The Feeling Body (2014) argues that a sine qua non of life is ‘primordial affectivity’. For Colombetti, care is linked to meaningfulness, insofar as all organisms ‘sense’ their environments (by whatever means) for signs of danger and plenty, familiarity and mystery, and co-​construct (with) those environments accordingly. Plant intelligence, for example, is not a New Age fantasy, but a complex distributed and networked phenomenon involving a wide variety of organisms and based on a wide variety of sensory capabilities (Mancuso and Viola 2015:  ch. 3). Though a more limited formulation, Gibson’s concept of ‘affordance’ makes a similar point about perception: perception is always-​already a function of organismic concern for (itself in) its environment, a fact which raises ethical problems about our treatment of objects because organismic concern is also the sine qua non of ethical awareness. Without concern, salience, value, significance, there is neither care nor carelessness. The idea of primordial affectivity also helps to broaden the reach of Jaak Panksepp’s (1998: 249) identification of CARE as one of the instinctual complexes shared by all mammals, and Wendy Hollway’s (2007) argument that the ‘capacity to care’ is our most significant developmental achievements, neither belated nor superficial but foundational with respect to all cognitive and affective activity. Care can no longer be thought as one of civilization’s thin veneers over ‘nature red in tooth and claw’; it goes hand-​in-​ hand with sentience. Likewise the experience of significance, of its creation as well as its reception, is not a belated evolutionary achievement but rather is inherent in (if not necessarily confined to) organic matter. The worlds ‘around’ as well as ‘within’ us are built by and on concern, and concern (part of the affective dimension of care) is what generates salience and significance. Art is already ‘in’ ‘Nature’, as Deleuze and Guattari noted long ago; ‘expression’ is a sine qua non of living

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process (Nabais n.p.). Artfulness, enrichment and play are functions and forms of metabolism; all are processes that ‘express’ the constitutive inside-​outness of the organism’s dependence for its existence on what it ‘is/​not’. Improvisation, creativity, experimentation are inherent in organismic life. As noted previously, toys, ‘hobbies’, absorbing work are not supplemental to survival; they are necessary to it (Jacobs 1984: 221). The lives of all organisms are experiments. The preciousness to organic matter of transmission at all levels helps to explain why so much of our work in and on care focuses on the ability of various rhetorics (chemical, electrical, gestural, alphabetic) to cross boundaries and foster relationality. ‘Beautiful words are already remedies’, writes Bachelard (1971: 31). All artfulness requires, and aims to design and sustain, attention. It therefore has the potential to modify sensation and the functional architecture of the brain. The arts’ striking and broad-​ranging use of sense perception (cf. synaesthesia, ekphrasis, enargeia) suggests that the arts heal because they transmit and amplify sentient experience, within and without the organism. Bateson (1972/​2000: xi) proposes that the arts shape and are shaped by connections between different aspects and functions of mind, most notably consciousness and subjectivity on the one hand, and the non-​conscious open systematicity of extended mind on the other. In his view, the arts practice ecological thought, because they invite, focus on and potentially sustain shifts in awareness and perspective and new (material) connectivity. The arts ‘care’ in part by changing (embodied) minds. Hence Alfred Tomatis (2004:  26) celebrates the connective effects of singing:  ‘[o]‌ne can never sing too much. It is one of the most complete modes of expression, involving mind, body, and emotions . . . One passes through different states of consciousness to reach a higher level of mind-​body integration’, including integration with the (sonic) environment and the listening ear/​body. Lucy Biven and Jaak Panksepp (2012: 307) tell the story of an encounter with a camel who had rejected her calf, but was persuaded to take her back after participating in a ritual conducted by one of the most famous (human) singers in her region. The ‘neoteny’ of our own species  –​our very long period of infantile dependency  –​would be impossible without care; neoteny and care practices necessarily co-​ evolve. In turn, the length of this period of dependency mandates the acquisition of relational and semiotic skills and knowledge:  the understanding of paralanguage, metaphor and analogy; the social and affective meanings of communication; the wider discursive contexts of particular utterances and gestures; joint attention; theory of mind and minds. As Lacan insisted, there is no ‘survival’ for the human infant that is not always-​already mediated by relationality, and hence by communication; we know nothing of



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food, clothing and shelter except insofar as they are first ‘given’ to us in the context of attachment. Lacan’s argument for the uniqueness of the human on the score of an extended neoteny notwithstanding, I believe it is right to say that the phenomena of attending and being attended to trump everything else in the dimension of organic life. Care is one of the means by which nature crosses its own boundaries, generates bounty alongside functionality, expressivity beyond information. ‘Even’ among chimpanzees, prosocial activity is ‘mediated by affiliative emotions rather than exchanged contingently on a tit-​for-​tat basis’ (Jaeggi et al. 2010: n.p.). Care takes place during the extended time of the gift, which differs from contingent exchange chiefly because the gift favours, for good or for ill, the formation of lasting affective bonds, and is itself a symbol of affiliation. Robin Dunbar claims that ‘social pressure, in the form of group size, drives brain size evolution’; advancements in the capacity for theory of mind appear to be more tightly correlated with enlargements of frontal lobe volume than tool development or ecological pressures (Dunbar et  al. 2010:  169–​71). Theory of mind, in turn, is necessary for ‘emulation learning’. In emulation learning, we interpret the intentions of others (that clever animal is digging a stick into the ground because she wants to find yummy things to eat), and we also learn how to do things from observing the actions of others (if I dig a stick in the ground, I may also find something yummy to eat), but even further, we must learn to put these kinds of learning together, to find out how others further their intentions by mentally strategizing about how best to achieve them. Tomasello (2000: 38) calls this ‘truly cultural learning, as opposed to merely social learning’ –​the sign of an emergent ‘form of cultural evolution’. ‘The most important artifact’ produced by this form of evolution, Tomasello claims, is language, and the ‘new forms of . . . symbolic cognitive representation’ enabled thereby (40). (The primacy of action in this scenario opens it to enactivist interpretation; see below.) Among the great apes, human beings are particularly good at ‘prosocial acts’ like food-​sharing, child care, care for the sick, injured and elderly, and teaching (Jaeggi et al. 2010: 2724). We are ‘cooperative breeders’, meaning that the responsibility for child care does not usually fall exclusively on the mother but is spread out to husbands, siblings, grandparents, friends and so on, with, of course, significant variations in the ways responsibility is shared. We also forage and hunt with a high degree of interdependence, which gives us further reason –​or vice versa –​to establish and maintain cooperative reputations. The corollary in our cognitive evolution is ‘an increased sensitivity to being watched by others’ –​a ‘concern for reputation’ and thus for audience (2725). This concern

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for reputation (which depends on theory of mind) is in turn associated with the high incidence of proactive prosocial behaviour among humans, meaning that we respond not just to deliberate signals of need, like begging, but also to signs of need not apparently directed at us –​like difficulty completing a task, or reaching for something hard to get, or faintness, or pallor. Once again we see how expressivity and interpretation function as means by which ‘bare life’ generates its own bounty, in the form of relationally motivated care. Grooming, one of organic life’s most important care activities, is generally peaceable and sociable. Since Dunbar’s 1993 report, there has been extensive research on grooming and its ubiquity among animal species. There are tropical undersea spas territorialized by small fish called cleaner wrasses, who eat parasites and scar tissue off other fish, including large predators who under different circumstances would be eating the wrasses. ‘[I]‌n the calming atmosphere of the cleaning station, the wrasses approach the bigger fish without fear, darting around their teeth and even into their gills’ (Natterson-​Horowitz and Bowers 2012: 165). This could be the salon in Bikini Bottom: fish settle down as soon as they start waiting their turn to be groomed. Grooming is also one of the most important means by which great apes, including ourselves, bind social anxiety and otherwise manage affect. I also start settling down when I walk into my hair salon –​a well-​known site of gossip, idle talk and grooming that extends from swaddling to eavesdropping to scalp massage. Grooming is a powerful antidote to the three most common factors contributing to self-​injury, namely, stress, isolation and boredom; it ‘alters the neurochemistry of our brains. It releases opiates into our bloodstreams. It decreases our blood pressure. It slows our breathing’, ‘regardless of whether we are grooming or being groomed’ (166, 174). I am particularly interesting in thinking about grooming in relation to care for two reasons:  because of caregivers’ perennial address to the membrane of the skin, the ‘semiotic bridge’ that co-​constructs the inside and the outside; and because popular utilitarianism construes grooming, like the arts, as ‘luxury’, failing thereby to take the full measure of its complex bio-​psycho-​ social significance. According to Dunbar, language evolved in order to manage the extra grooming responsibilities brought on by the enlargement of social groups; our species acquired a vocal tract capable of producing speech at the same time we acquired the neo-​cortical capacity for theory of mind. Though many of his peers have raised doubts about what causes what in this complex of relationships, the explanatory value of lineal causality has diminished somewhat post-​systems theory; and in any case few of Dunbar’s critics deny correlations among sociability, language and grooming. So far Dunbar’s (2010) argument still



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commands respect. Language, he proposes, is an extension of (not a replacement for) grooming, possibly evolving out of ‘increasingly extended vocal exchanges’ and ‘chorusing’, as well as wordless humming, singing or music (176). It allows us to offer soothing intimacies to more than one individual at a time, or while we are doing other things, like walking or foraging; and it informs us of things happening in our absence, which means that we can ‘track’ our lineages, and acquire ‘a better knowledge database on a larger social network than any nonhuman primate’  –​that is to say, larger mental maps of possible alliances and troublespots (174; cf. Slingerland 2009). Clearly grooming and gossiping are both effective, and complementary, means of fostering relationality –​which should caution us (should we still need reminders) against overemphasizing the differences between language and other forms of embodied communication. Infant research on cross-​or multimodal expressivity should also discourage us from driving wedges between touch and sound, gesture and symbol:  the human infant comes into the world ready to correlate sounds, images and textures. Human fetuses begin to hear at five months  –​in the United States, apparently, they favour Mozart –​and already know their families’ voices when they are born, including the dog’s bark. The important role of the caregiving voice in infant and child development seems now to be axiomatic; its metabolic power derives from its capacity to be here and there, inside and outside, at the same time. Sound waves cause vibrations that register on and in the body; hearing is our first ‘distance’ sense, but also an intimate, ‘haptic’ experience. The use of sound to evaluate proximity and distance is widespread in animal life; some of our most ancient wiring is designed to help us survive the vicissitudes of approach and avoidance. Further, as Slocombe et  al. (2001) point out, the many arguments about whether language has its origins in gesture, or facial expression, or vocal cries, all seem too atomistic. Not only is the language of homo sapiens ‘not modality specific’, but ‘primate communication [in general] is inherently multimodal, at both a behavioral and neuronal level’ (919, 923). Various brain regions, including the auditory cortex and the superior temporal sulcus, integrate visual and auditory signals. The brain also integrates right-​and left-​ hemisphere language functions  –​respectively, interpretation of the social and emotional contexts of utterance, and ‘plain sense’, grammar and logic. ‘Paralanguage’  –​ meaningful shifts in intonation, rhythm, facial expressivity and the like –​is part of primate multimodality; ‘[r]‌ather than representing emotional vestiges that need to be stripped from language in order to expose the fundamental cognitive components, these nonverbal signals are part of an important composite

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message’ (923). When we add to this already rich picture the ongoing olfactory, chemical and tactile transmissions of affect and meaning that accompany so much primate exchange, the power of grooming and gossip activities to integrate neuronal functions appears all the more impressive. Slocombe concludes ‘that communicating simultaneously through a range of modalities is the skill that truly occupies the functional niche of primate grooming, and not the cognitive aspect alone’ (923). Language is coeval with the robustness of human intersubjectivity, and can thus be understood as an emergence from care practices in more ways than one. Nature’s expressivity always exceeds our fantasies of ‘parsimony’ –​and thus is dispelled our fantasy of being able to strip care down to the level of bare life. Dunbar’s theory about grooming, gossip and the origins of language is consistent with modes of language acquisition in the human infant. Both grooming and idle talk, phatic communion (communication for the sake of bonding), chit-​ chat, are simultaneously pursued by infants and caregivers during the course of language acquisition and the signification (and hence passion) of the body. One of Dunbar’s early critics (Corballis) complains that ‘one is hard pressed to find any structural principles common to grooming and human language’ (Corballis 1993:  697). But in infancy, vocal sounds, facial expressions and touch are all integrated, particularly in those moments known to developmentalists as ‘active quiet’ or ‘proto-​conversation’, when infant and caregiver exchange gazes, stick their tongues out at each other, make faces at each other, make little noises, talk (on the caregiver’s side), babble syllabically (on the baby’s side), play peek-​a-​boo games and so on. Language acquisition is inherently intersubjective, a fact noted decades ago by Werner and Kaplan (1963), who proposed that infants were motivated to learn language and representation for social reasons; cognitive capacity develops within the context of social bonds. Call sounds or ‘grunts’ more recently have been seen as ‘a primary prelinguistic vehicle promoting the onset of language’ (McCune 1993: 716). There is significant evidence of grunt intelligibility among primates, for example, vervet monkeys, and of the ‘coordination of grunting with tongue and lip movements of grooming’ and McCune notes that ‘[i]‌n adult human conversation gruntlike vocalizations persist and are among the forms that indicate continued attention to the speaker on the part of the listener’, thus serving ‘a “cohesive” function’ (716–​17; emphasis added). Dean (1993: 699–​700) questions whether gossip could possibly be the ‘adaptation on which society rests’, since ‘much of the time [social information] “is wrong, sometimes intentionally, possibly leading to violent misunderstanding”. Dugatkin and Wilson similarly



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associate gossip with the “confusion” and “anarchy caused by cheaters” use of language’ (701). But the primary function of gossip is affective circulation, not the communication of accurate information. Proverbs like ‘where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire’ would seem to promote the suspicion Dean fears: ‘[a]s has been illustrated in every manifestation of the police state’, he continues, ‘vocal contact can devolve to pure suspicion. Foucault’s discussion . . . [of the] Panopticon . . . is relevant here’; ‘[i]n situations of decreasing job security we have reason to be suspicious of the large numbers of people with whom we interact daily . . . In situations where we need to talk yet say nothing, perhaps most of what Dunbar would classify as stress-​releasing endearment is simply white noise’ (700). White noise does, however, relieve stress for many people, and talking is significant expression irrespective of content. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire’ intimates that there is always already also a question about the validity of gossip. We have infinite cautionary tales about the bad things that happen to us when we take it too seriously, or overindulge in its guilty pleasures. Contemporary surveillance techniques may now occupy the functional niche of primate grooming and gossip, but so do many other activities of bio-​psycho-​ social significance, including caregiving and receiving. I believe that, in hospital, generous amounts of time should be devoted (depending on the condition and desires of individual patients) on social enrichment in general and grooming in particular. Nurses and technicians are trained to minister to the hygiene and comfort of the body, to wash hair, speak encouragingly, and massage inactive muscles, but they, like doctors, are not trained to recognize grooming as a discourse, to recognize its intersubjective import, so as to mitigate as much as possible the feelings associated with social death that many critical care patients experience. Tact is of the essence here; the patient’s readiness to let go of life must be treated with respect. But at least when it is possible to come back to life, the social dimension of the body must be reawakened too. In veterinary medicine, Natterson-​Horowitz and Bowers (2012: 171ff) cite the example of a gorilla who underwent a pacemaker operation. (I am aware of the ethical difficulties attendant on the medicalization of creatures who cannot consent to such invasive procedures). While the gorilla was under anaesthesia, his fingernails were painted a deep shade of red, and various trinkets and treats were embedded in his fur, so that when he woke up, he would be so fascinated by his new ornamentation as to be distracted from pulling out his stitches and possibly the pacemaker as well. Indeed he gazed at his fingernails and bijoux for hours, and groomed himself until he was feeling quite “himself ” again.

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Interlude

The ‘Matter of Troy’ (the medieval literary traditions that translated, literally and territorially, the epics of Homer and Virgil) gave the European nations genealogies paralleling Aeneas’s founding of Rome. Brutus became the eponymous founder of Britain. In The History of the Kings of Britain (twelfth century), Geoffrey of Monmouth’s divine honeybee scout, the goddess Diana, tells Brutus that ‘beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in the sea . . . and for your descendants it will be a second Troy’ (Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966:  65). Announcement is, of course, one of the central functions of territorial refrain. According to the behavioural ethologist W. J. Smith (1977: 53), ‘singing’ –​meaning the full, complex song, not simpler ‘calls’ –​occurs when a bird is at ‘important sites in a territory’, either the margins or the nest site; in fact Smith refers to this as ‘advertising behavior’, especially evident when the bird seeks a ‘high perch’ and makes himself visually as well as sonorously conspicuous, a ‘risk’ he will take in order to be found.2 Song is a means of ‘seeking opportunities for interaction’ (66–​7). Vocal display is part of territorial behaviour for many species, birds and people in particular; it tells you when and whether another creature wants to ‘go out’ with you, to play, to see and be seen, or to see where the sun sets, or whether said creature would prefer to be left alone, with or without you. Most calls and gestures signal uncertainty, when



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things are ‘up in the air’, ‘in process’; they are questions, requests, demands, descriptions and solicitations of affect, not (simply) means of conveying useful information about changes in temperature and the like. We mark becomings. ‘I love you and want to be near you, but I don’t know how you feel about me, so I’m approaching you, but sideways, with my neck bent in a certain way, my gaze oblique, to give you time to signal me back, since I’d rather we didn’t fight.’ This is a rough paraphrase of penguin courting behaviour. ‘Indecisive and vacillating behavior’ and the signalling thereof in fact make up most displays (Smith 1977: 71). Expressivity, as we know also from human infant observation, is as much for the purpose of being left alone as it is for the purpose of approach. Our most ambitious narratives about the thrivings and survivings of peoples foreground these uncertainties. In the Aeneid, Dido’s vulnerability to the influence of Cupid’s fire and, ultimately, to rumor and storytelling and song, is mediated by her embrace of Ascanius/​Cupid, by her ‘greedy’ consumption of his beautifully described beauty, their proximity, their inter-​breathing, the delivery of tender loving bodily care, the passional intimacy of which care is capable and, set suggestively within this intersubjective context, Aeneas’s own story-​telling, his re-​telling of a story the queen already knows, and which Aeneas knows she knows, and she can’t get enough of it. It is phatic communion. Venus plans to lull Ascanius to sleep and ‘hide him in my sacred shrine /​on the heights of Cythera or Idalium’, and appeals to Cupid: ‘imitate his looks by art, and, a boy yourself, take on the known face of a boy, so that when Dido takes you to her breast, joyfully, amongst the royal feast, and the flowing wine, when she embraces you, and plants sweet kisses on you, you’ll breathe hidden fire into her, deceive her with your poison.’ Cupid obeys his dear mother’s words, sets aside his wings, and laughingly trips along with Iulus’s step. (Vergil, Aeneid I: 680–​90)

Venus takes very good care of her grandson Ascanius, Pours gentle sleep over [his] . . . limbs, And warming him in her breast, carries him, with divine power, To Idalia’s high groves, where soft marjoram smothers him In flowers, and the breath of its sweet shade. (691–​4)

Meanwhile, back at the banquet, Cupid impersonates Ascanius: [T]‌he Tyrians . . . are gathered in crowds through the festive halls, summoned to recline on the embroidered couches.

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Peace is promised; new bonds are created, deterritorialization ensues and brings on the song of the cosmos. But hospitality, another major modality of care, is notoriously insecure, as Beowulf makes equally clear. Care is always a risk.



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Care addresses but also enhances our vulnerability. It draws near; it is intimate, and intimately related to the constitutive vulnerability of sensitive organic matter, which is why it can also impinge, intrude, violate. Care is both a mental state and an activity with the potential to confer and enhance organismic vitality and expressivity, to work against the confining and isolating effects of pain or helplessness or hunger. As noted, care arises from our ‘primordial affectivity’, hence from the vulnerability that is a necessary function of sentience. Care signifies the inseparability of vulnerability on the one hand and sensation, sensitivity and sensuality on the other. Hence we fear those who care for us, and those who need our care. When a population is stressed, even sometimes when it isn’t, the spectre of infanticide haunts its young. Tragedy always invokes the instability of care’s value and topology. Oedipus does everything he can, goes ‘outside’, to spare the life of the man he thinks is his father, but cannot save that man from man’s mortality, or fail to encounter and assume its meaning: the child (usually) outlives the parent. Medea has ‘a dread, not joy, to see /​Her children near’ (Euripides n.d.: n.p.). Saturn devours his children ‘newly born’ (Silvestris 1990: 100). P. B. Shelley’s (n.d.: III, 330) Giacomo puts it this way: ‘I looked, and saw that home was hell.’ Neglect, maltreatment, early trauma, marital discord and parental depression, insensitivity, dissociation and ‘frightening behaviour’ have all been linked to disorganized attachment in children (Van Isjendoorn et  al. 1999:  239). Not just pathology is involved:  D. W.  Winnicott (1953:  94) acknowledged the ‘good-​enough’ mother’s inevitable moments of hate for her baby, moments that are part of the baby’s everyday experience. The film Misery shows us (as Lacan might have put it) care from the standpoint of the Thing; the film ‘screens’ the aggressivity of charity and its derivation from the necessary interdependencies of organic life. Over-​attention can lead to ‘failure to thrive’ in infants just as surely as neglect or abuse. Ethical dilemmas abound whenever care is at stake, which, one way or another, is arguably most of the time, and this is because care enacts and embodies –​’substantiates’ –​relationality and its vicissitudes, and the inside-​outsideness of sentient experience more generally.

Does psychoanalysis care? There are striking instances of care in psychoanalytic experience and literature. An analysand dreams about having difficulty breathing shortly before his then-​ asymptomatic analyst is diagnosed with lung cancer. Another patient sighs ‘for’ his analyst, believing he can ‘air’ what he takes to be her fatigue and frustration.

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Another analysand dreams of being beaten, as a child, in a trailer, but having been beaten in a trailer turns out to have been the analyst’s (forgotten) experience. Care is uncanny, and that is one reason why the word does not inevitably take our cares away. But it is also one of the reasons for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. ‘Psychotherapy, the traditional . . . treatment for extreme self-​harm’, both provides a social link and functions as social grooming, calming and soothing the patient ‘through voice, language, response and presence’ (Natterson-​ Horowitz and Bowers 2012:  174). Language and paralanguage provide haptic experience, drawing on the multimodal capacities that allow us to link touch to voice and communication. It is crucial that ‘care’ offer the opportunity to speak and be heard, about nothing and everything, just as it must also offer the opportunity to disengage, fall silent, disassociate, because the speaking and hearing, the ‘expression’ and ‘interpretation’, are always phatic activities, whatever other acts they might be performing. Psychoanalysis is the discourse which, in my view, has the most to offer us when we are trying out –​ and trying to understand –​the transformative (creative, productive) power of expressivity. But it is not possible to theorize and practice psychoanalysis without risk and hence without dread and anxiety. Psychoanalysis itself is always ‘working through’ the histories and prehistories of primordial affectivity –​the experience of concern as necessary constituent of living process. Those who work at this edge, in the midst of the many forms of madness entailed in the transformations of living process, are always in trouble and will, could, never not be otherwise. The fragmentations and reconstitutions of psychoanalytic process itself are evident in the history of its positions on care, for example, our past sequestration of psychosis as ‘beyond transference’ and therefore impossible to analyse. In the United States, psychoanalysts have done little to set to rights Ronald Reagan’s dissolution of publicly funded inpatient-​care facilities in the 1980s, and have only begun to fight the often-​lethal resistance of medical insurance companies to paying for long-​term hospitalization (see Lazar and Yeomans 2014, especially Bendat 2014:  353–​ 75 and Lazar 2014:  423–​ 57). By contrast, GIFRIC, a psychoanalytic institute and clinic in Montreal, cares for persons experiencing psychosis not by locking them up but by locking out the impingements of uncomprehending ‘reality’, as indeed many rehab facilities in the United States now do. Unfortunately most of our rehab facilities are also severed from the communities nearby or surrounding them, whereas GIFRIC focuses on building ties with neighbourhoods and the local people who also need their services. GIFRIC’s community work exemplifies the kind of ecological thought espoused



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by Bateson (1972/​ 2000) and Guattari (2000/​ 2010) regarding the complex networks in which all mind(s) participate. As noted previously, Freud launched a powerful critique of caritas in Civilisation and Its Discontents. But the critique extended itself to psychoanalytic epistemology and technique in very equivocal ways. Psychoanalysis long preserved a reverence for ‘third-​person’ ways of knowing, and substituted for care the fantasy of analytic ‘neutrality’. Care was seduction, acting-​out, a threat to insight, at worst an obstacle in need of clearing away by means of deliberate reflection and analysis. ‘Transference’ was (in part) an affect-​laden, unacknowledged demand for care, and countertransference the analyst’s response thereto. Countertransference, however, was less and less seen as disruptive, and more and more seen simply as psychoanalytic process by another name. Heinz Kohut (1959) changed the scene by arguing that empathy was a way of, even central to, psychoanalytic knowing. What first-​or second-​person knowledge might entail did not, however, fascinate overmuch scientistic psychology, and many psychoanalysts responded unhelpfully to the latter’s assertions of ‘epistemological privilege’ by mystifying relationality. (This continues today in the form of psychoanalytic squeamishness about neuropsychoanalytic research. Hanging hats on scientistic beliefs about ways of knowing would indeed be a mistake; but the sciences, at least the life sciences, are not as scientistic as they once were.) As noted, dread and anxiety about the fragilizing powers of affect and non-​conscious ways of knowing isn’t just a psychoanalytic topic; it drives the thinking of the field. We continue, for example, to find unbearable the ease with which tenderness and the passional aspects of attachment cross over, as is symptomatized by the diffidence of the field’s responses to the figure of the pedophile and the phenomenon of sexual abuse. The idea of the linking of feelings of tenderness and erotic attraction makes us anxious. This fear of connectivity is one reason why so much affect theory prefers to focus on single affects rather than psychodynamics. But what we have learned about connectivity in the brain –​for that matter, what we learned long ago from Freud’s ‘associational pathways’ –​is that we always feel many different feelings and think many different thoughts at the ‘same’ time. Object-​relations theory critiqued Freud’s putative valorization of Oedipal dynamics over pre-​Oedipal experience and questioned the primacy of the drives over the importance to the developing subject of (caregiving) objects (all drives necessarily have objects). For Melanie Klein, pre-​Oedipal experience, in the form of the paranoid-​schizoid position, was constitutively split between love and hate, gratitude and envy, generosity and despoliation; infancy was a

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state of madness, made bearable by a growing ability to tolerate the monstrous power of feelings to fragilize the nascent subject. (Feelings can be terrible in their power, and have terrible qualities, apart from but also in addition to the destabilizing effects of their permutations and combinations, e.g., ‘ambivalence’). Kristeva (1980:  133, 283)  found further nuance in the Kleinian universe by sensing the chora’s pulsations and gurglings, and joining in its psycho/​socio/​ biological semiotics, which made passional attachment intelligible as a form of jouissance, and care capable of intense blissfulness, and therefore not, strictly speaking, in need of immediate hospitalization. Michel Foucault (1988) further assembled and disassembled care affects and practices by resituating sexuality within long genealogies of ‘bodies and pleasures’ and their ‘techniques of living’. Queer theory’s critique of idealizations of re/​production did not, as we might be tempted to imagine, devalue care; the insights of No Future, for example, are affiliated with AIDS discourses/​activism and their exposure of the care-​less, lethal projections of heteronormative necrophobia (Edelman 2004). Interest in early experience and the mother-​infant dyad, however, had the salutary effect of opening new portals between psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy, despite and because of the latter’s analyses of maternity as work and as fantasy. Carol Gilligan’s critique of masculinist moral philosophy’s fondness for transcendence has been taken up anew in contemporary French thinking about care (Paperman and Laugie 2005; Brugère 2014) and also in American political philosophy (Tronto 1993). Bracha Ettinger has advanced the concept of ‘metramorphosis’, of processes of ‘subjective distribution and diffraction rather than production of an object-​meaning’ (Pollock 2006:  19; cf. Ettinger 2011). Most recently, Mark Leffert (2015) asserts and explores the neurocurative effects of caring over insight in psychoanalysis as a material phenomenon; Joseph Dodds’s (2011) environmentalization of psychoanalysis invites us to consider a posthuman(ist) stance on extended intersubjectivity, stewardship and the active role of material ‘objects’ in our becomings. These initiatives (and many more) have all drawn fresh attention to the interconnectedness of all embodied practices and experiences, opening up possibilities for thinking about care that were tamped down both by Freudian distrust of sentimentality and the tendency of object-​relations and developmental theory to sanitize drive experience. Still, the latter have respected the blissful intensity and intense blissfulness of which the connectivity of care experience is capable. If there is no such thing as a baby, only a ‘nursing couple’, the ‘metramorphic’ nature of living process may be more readily imaginable.3 Yet we are –​necessarily –​still touchy about care.



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Enacting care Environments –​including the uterus –​are sonic. I am a clinical member of a group of analysts in Los Angeles, the THRIVE Infant-​Family program, which encourages talk as a substitute for touch in neonatal intensive care units.4 The skin of premature babies is painfully sensitive, but the haptic qualities of the voice, especially the familial voices most familiar to preemies, can provide them with a ‘holding environment’. The tact conveyed by so many birdcalls –​‘would you like some company, or would you prefer some alone-​time’  –​is enjoined on the physician by Hippocrates. (‘Tact’ is ultimately from Latin tactus, ‘touch, sense of touch’, from tangere, ‘to touch’.) The physician literally and figuratively crosses the threshold of the household into intimate space, licensed to receive confidences, hold the secrets of the family and speak sad truths when necessary, but always, in some fashion, with one foot out the door; care depends first and foremost on the physician’s ability to negotiate nearness and distance:  ‘[i]‌nto whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves. Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients . . . I will keep secret’ (http://​www.nlm.nih.gov/​hmd/​greek/​greek_​ oath.html). Tact is carefully tactile; impossibly, it holds distance. It is part of the arts of healing and living. Touch is taboo in psychoanalytic treatment, and like the incest taboo, its purpose is in part to safeguard the vulnerable. Simply refraining from touching is not an intelligent response to the instabilities of psychoanalytic process, because haptic experience exceeds concrete acts of touching, and psychological abuse can do just as much damage as physical abuse. We need a materialist psychoanalysis because the mind is embodied and because semiosis itself is a material phenomenon. But we need not be overly concrete about what a materialist psychoanalysis might entail; recognition of the mind’s embodiment does not enjoin upon us the laying on of hands. Our work can and should continue to focus on the signification (paraverbal as well as verbal) of non-​conscious experience as a means of enhancing connectivity and integration. Verbalization enables the cognitive working-​through of affect; it helps us, not just to become, but to experience becoming, and think about it; over time, it enables neuroplastic integration of affect, cognition and sensation. Verbalization has the power to link language and logic to the unspeakable. It enables multimodality, which in turn enables greater complexity and creativity. Over the airwaves of tone crowd

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messages from the wildness that is there but does not speak in sentences. The arts (of living) are vital to, and always present in, psychoanalytic space: we see, hear, smell, breathe and move. We are always already sense-​making, and need to become more aware of the wider semiotic networks within which language functions. Somatic symptoms and other forms of paralanguage are always signs that ‘it’ is trying to speak in any way it can, even if what it wants to say is ‘go away’. None of this, in my view, vitiates Lacan’s brilliant treatment of the structuration of human subjectivity through the intersubjective capacities of language; I  believe we still have before us the task of thinking through what happens to our capacities for non-​linguistic communication ‘after’ the entry into language (cf. Lacan 2006). The minds of infants are different from the minds of adult caregivers. Right-​ brain development is primary; the left brain doesn’t begin to develop rapidly until around the age of three. All of these developments result from interactions with caregivers and the environment more generally. To the extent that we understand the minds of others, then, it is because minds are always making and remaking each other. The formation of representations and the acquisition of theory of mind arise in the context, and as a consequence, of embodied enactment, and cannot properly be understood apart from it. But it is not always stressed enough that mind is enacted, especially in our early, critical years, through care and its vicissitudes. The kinds and modes of knowledge generated by making (each other’s) minds through caring for or about them depend on non-​conscious or preconscious patterns of connectivity, like procedural memories. The human brain contains enormous amounts of connective fibre (e.g. the corpus callosum, white matter), linking the archaic (brainstem) to the new (neocortex), the left to the right hemisphere, motion to imagination. Without the regulatory activities of the brainstem, our experience of self-​hood would not be possible; without our capacity to initiate and stylize movement, we could not develop theory of mind. Most importantly, care is how these interconnections are made, and not just in our early years. Care is thus, perhaps ironically, responsible for keeping aspects of the wild alive even in the midst of self-​reflection and metacognitive activity more generally. In this chapter, ‘wild’ thoughts and feelings are those unknowable to human consciousness, but they are not without organization or self-​regulation. All organisms depend on metabolic processes, for starters, and the concern for life necessarily entailed therein. Many species engage in theft, retribution, forgiveness, trying again. Inquiries are made before intimacy is initiated. There is display instead of bloodshed; species that rape and murder are extremely rare.



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With those wild-​ish creatures known as human infants, ‘towards’ and ‘away’ are also very basic and socially meaningful movements, embodied enactments of the rhythms of organismic living. ‘Active quiet’, the term given to the face-​to-​ face play that goes on between infants and caregivers, is followed by the infant’s turning away, a ‘down-​regulation’ of stimulation, a bit of ‘alone-​time’ that is not a harbinger of sleep. This turning away is the sign of the infant’s knowledge of his or her difference, and when that sign is not heeded, the results, as noted previously, can be just as traumatizing as neglect. Towards and away  –​here and there, or ‘fort’ and ‘da’, in Freud’s memorable formulations –​are the ‘prime’ gestures of social communication, analogous to ‘showing’ or manifestation, and hiding. Pace Lacan, I do not believe these are mere analogies; at least they are alternative ways of registering the power, the not-​nothingness, of certain absences. Psychoanalysis no longer confines itself to the psychodynamic unconscious, with its vertical splits and horizontal repressions. But it is still very much in process of taking the measure of the many more nonhuman, ‘undomesticated’, ‘common ancestor’ forms of experience that accompany  –​are networked with –​the specialized functions of the human brain, including the ‘primordial affectivity’ that is the basis of all attachment to life. ‘Autopoiesis’, in Maturana and Varela’s (1973) usage, is another way to formulate the organismic concern for specific ways of living, becoming and dying situated by Freud beyond the pleasure principle. ‘Autopoiesis’ refers to the organism’s constant remaking of itself in accordance with its particular potentialities, affordances and provisions. ‘An autopoietic machine’  –​for example, a cell  –​is organized ‘as a network of processes of production’ of components which, ‘through their interactions and transformations’, ‘continuously regenerate . . . the network of processes . . . that produced them’ and ‘constitute [the machine] . . . as a concrete unity in space’ (78–​9; emphasis in the original). At the same time, these reproductive processes constantly reproduce their own environments. Distinctive styles of living are not cut off from their surrounds; they make distinctive contributions to their surrounds. The animal is always on the move, seeking; for us, freedom is first and foremost freedom of movement. Even perception is far from still; we cannot see without performing innumerable micro-​ movements. Facial recognition is now understood to rely on observation and evaluation of the entire body and its gestural signatures. As noted, movement is critical to non-​conscious communication, especially the narrowings and expansions of distance that have meaning in the context of predation as well as gentler intimacies. Approach and avoidance are two of the most important organizations of mind and movement

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for vertebrates; agility has wide-​ranging significance not only for survival but also for the sociality on which it so often depends. Wildness is the principle of resistance, cellular and otherwise, not to aggregation or multiplicity, but to the loss of specific ways of becoming. Wildness maintains its difference, at whatever cost. Care can be frightening because it so often is an encounter with a difference of vital import. I once attempted to care for an injured feral cat and had to wrap both of my arms in towels to give him his food; I needed a lot of extra skin. When my father, who did not have dementia, lay dying, he needed to talk about his fear that being cremated would ‘hurt’, and I could feel, in my body, something of what he was talking about. Psychoanalysts work in this kind of matrix, trying to find the right combination of proximity and distance, often having to betowel ourselves or ‘metabolize’ extremities of grief and fear. Our patients all have wildness in them, and the effects thereof are recorded in the long lists of potentially injurious kinds of transference and countertransference to be found in the psychoanalytic literature on ‘primitive states’ of mind: feelings of helplessness, devaluation, hatred, sadism, masochism, weakness, incompetence. We fear the wildness in ourselves as well as in our patients; we fear ‘wild psychoanalysis’ (Freud 1910). And, analyst and analysand both, we will ‘walk’, or even run, in the face of too much impingement on our styles of being/​becoming. Flight is always an option, and again, in the hope of understanding that a materialist psychoanalysis need not be overly concrete in its formulations, if we cannot literally move, we can dissociate. ‘Dissociation’ refers to our capacity to retreat ‘into’ the mind when trying to outlast intolerable experiences. Heralded on occasion as the ‘best’ of all defences, dissociation is among the most widely attested of psychological defences among animals, especially captive ones. It is a way to run away when one can’t run away, the defence when there is no other defence; it’s how we find the distance we need to survive when we can’t move, and it is a regular part of, as well as a threat to, the experience of mind. There are heartbreaking accounts in the developmental literature of children suffering from ‘disorganized attachment’ who display inhibited motility, walking two steps forward and two steps back, or even spinning around, as enactment of the impossibility of finding any kind of direction when the protector is also the predator. The ‘borderline personality’ similarly enacts the impossibility of negotiating ‘here’ and ‘there’ by making this clear: ‘I hate you, don’t leave me’; or, ‘I’m leaving; why aren’t you coming after me?’ These phenomena are refusals of being, at least of being out in the open. They occur when being is too dangerous, too exposed, too difficult to make sense of;



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when one is presented with impossible choices, when autopoiesis is almost as dangerous to life as assimilation. We dissociate, de-​animate, become-​android, in a last-​ditch effort to protect the becoming of our being by negating it. But somewhere within is the implacable enmity of the cornered animal whose becoming has been interfered with. And somewhere in the analyst is rage over the way the analysand disturbs the analyst’s ‘life’, and threatens his or her livelihood even as he or she provides it. Psychoanalysis is anything but ‘safe’; but this doesn’t mean it does not care. This is the matrix of care. In psychoanalytic discourse, ‘enactment’ is something of a pejorative term. It refers to ‘acting out’ –​agieren –​what would be better off said and considered. But action is not without thought or deliberation; in fact, in some schools of thought, enactivism in particular, action is thought to be thought. ‘What is known is brought forth’:  in their 1992 ‘Afterword’ to The Tree of Knowledge, Maturana and Varela (1987/​1992: 241–​55) argue that we must understand how our existence –​the praxis of our living –​is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories . . . [We must] understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at any moment . . . without any point of reference independent of ourselves to give certainty to our assumptions . . . Indeed the whole mechanism of generating ourselves . . . tells us that our world, the world which we bring forth in our co-​existence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close.

Francesca Ferri and colleagues (n.d.) have suggested that our ability to represent to ourselves the inner feelings of our body has significant consequences for social behaviour. By comparing empirical measurements of heartbeat and respiratory sinus arrhythmia with subjective accounts of respiratory experience, the researchers have shown that ‘good heartbeat perceivers’ were more autonomically responsive in social settings than their less fortunate peers (1). By ‘social setting’ they mean an experimental protocol wherein a human hand and not a metal stick moves in a caress-​like motion at the boundary of the test subject’s peripersonal space (estimated to be 20 cm from the latter’s hand). Degrees and kinds of interoceptive sensitivity are operant in the recruitment of ‘different adaptive autonomic response strategies’ on behalf of effective relationality and interpersonal space representation (1). If a stick waving is not ‘as’ social as a hand, it is, however, not meaningless; our willingness to grant objects agency is not simply a mistake, because when we do so, real –​material –​consequences ensue.

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Let us, then, attempt –​however unlikely success may be or seem –​to transform our current (Western) preoccupation with cure rather than care. Our patients can only heal if they have some luxury of time and recursion, because trauma always involves not-​enough-​time to prepare. This then strikes us as extravagant in a world of such deprivation as is our own. But thriving is the goal of all living things –​and we do not have so very many counters to trauma at our disposal that we can afford to sacrifice any of them. Why should we not have ‘plenty’ in these regards as well as others? We merely assume, as a consequence of class prejudice, that therapy means little to the desperate, wherever and whoever they may be; but had we had the experience of working at a low-​fee counselling centre, we might think quite otherwise; and it is not difficult to imagine, in however limited a fashion, what the loss of the shaman or of elderly counsel might mean to those who are being ‘Westernized’, even to those who are already Westernized. Is there no point in dreaming of a therapeutic planet, in which we might do all we could to support all life forms and their freedoms? Biopower, some will say; but I am speaking of the open-​endedness of community, and of the ecological thought that enacts, extends and protects it, and specifically not of yielding to the family or the state or the commodity-​makers the authority to give me my life or my way of living it, including my way of dying. The value of care is indeed unsettled. But too many of us are sure of one thing: care is too costly, whether by that we mean that it is a privilege that should be reserved for dominance, or should be as cheap as possible, or is outright disabling in and of itself, or takes care away from everything that isn’t being cared for. But it is a waste of life to worry about when, how and where we should care. (We) just do it.

Notes 1 ‘Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them . . . We should be wary . . . what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed . . . whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason’ (Milton, Areopagitica). On endocrinological transmission, see Brennan (2004:79). 2 A number of cognitive humanists have suggested that the ‘costly signal’ as an explanation for artistic behaviour in general and poetic display in particular; cf.



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Winkelman (2013: 156–​7) and Boyd (2009: 10–​11). Despite their many merits, I find these approaches too often limited by Neo-​Darwinist functionalism (costly signals display fitness) and lack of interest in the importance of thriving in organic life. 3 Winnicott (1965: 138) refers to the baby as part of the ‘nursing couple’, and explores the concept (and importance) of ‘mental nursing’ throughout. 4 See www.thriveprogram.org.

References Bachelard, Gaston (1971), The Poetics of Reverie, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bateson, Gregory (1972/​2000), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bendat, Meiram (2014), ‘In Name Only? Mental Health Parity or Illusory Reform’, Special Issue of Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 42: 353–​75. Biven, Lucy and Jaak Panksepp (2012), The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, New York: W.W. Norton. Boyd, Brian (2009), On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brennan, Theresa (2004), The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brugère, Fabienne (2014), L’Ethique du Care: que sais-​je?, Presses Universitaires de France. Colombetti, Giovanna (2014), The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind, Cambridge: MIT Press. Corballis, Michael C. (1993), ‘A Gesture in the Right Direction?’, in Dunbar (1993). Dean, David (1993), ‘Vocal Grooming: Man the Schmoozer’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16: 699–​700. Dodds, Joseph (2011), Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze, Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis, New York: Routledge. Doidge, Norman (2007), The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, New York: Viking Penguin. Dugatkin, L. A. (1997), Cooperation among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective, New York: Oxford University Press. Dunbar, Robin (1993), ‘Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in humans’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16: 681–​94. Dunbar, Robin, Clive Gamble and John Gowlett (2010), Social Brain, Distributed Mind, British Academy. Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Raleigh-​Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Esposito, Roberto (2011), Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Ettinger, Bracha L. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ettinger, Bracha L. (2011), Art as Compassion, with Catherine Zegher and Griselda Pollock, Brussels: Exhibitions International. Euripides (n.d.), Medea, http://​www.gutenberg.org/​files/​35451/​35451-​h/​35451-​h.htm. Evans, Alicia (2010), ‘Strange yet Compelling: Anxiety and Abjection in Hospital Nursing’, in Holmes and Rudge, 199–​226. Foucault, Michel (1988), The History of Sexuality, Volume III: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage. Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye (1999), ‘Needful Things’, in Medieval Crime and Social Control, Barbara Hanawalt, ed., 49–​69, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye (2002), Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye, et al. (2013), Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts, ed. Eileen A. Joy, Brooklyn, NY: punctum books. Francesca Ferri, Martina Ardizzi, Mariana Ambrosecchia and Vittorio Gallese (2013), ‘Closing the Gap between the Inside and the Outside: Interoceptive Sensitivity and Social Distances’, PLoS ONE, 8, no. 10: e75758. doi:10.1371/​journal.pone.0075758, http://​journals.plos.org/​plosone/​article?id=10.1371/​journal.pone.0075758. Freud, Sigmund (1910), ‘About “Wild” Psychoanalysis’, The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud (Gesammelte Werke), VIII: 118–​25. Freud, Sigmund (1961), Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton. Gibson, J. J. (1977), ‘The Theory of Affordances’, in Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, R. Shaw and J. Bransford, eds, 67–​82, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlebaum. Guattari, Félix (2000/​2010), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, New York: Continuum. Hoffmeyer, Jesper (2009), Biosemiotics: An Introduction to the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, ed. Donald Favareau, Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Hollway, Wendy (2007), The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity, New York: Routledge. Holmes, Dave and Trudy Rudge, eds (2010), Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work, Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Jacobs, Jane (1984), Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, New York: Random House. Jaeggi, Adrian V., Judith M. Burkart and Carel P. Van Shaick (2010), ‘On the Psychology of Cooperation in Humans and Other Primates: Combining the Natural History and Experimental Evidence of Prosociality’, Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B, http://​rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/​content/​365/​1553/​2723.short.



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Kohut, Heinz (1959), ‘Introspection, Empathy and Psychoanalysis –​An Examination of the Relationship between Mode of Observation and Theory’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 7: 459–​83. Kristeva, Julia (1980), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1992), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Vol. VII, ed. Jacques-​Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques (2006), ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton. Lazar, Susan G. (2014), ‘The Cost-​Effectiveness of Psychotherapy for the Major Psychiatric Diagnoses’, Special Issue of Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 42: 423–​57. Lazar, Susan G. and Frank E. Yeomans, eds (2014) Psychotherapy, the Affordable Care Act, and Mental Health Parity: Obstacles to Implementation, special issue of Psychodynamic Psychiatry 42. Leffert, Mark (2015), Phenomenology, Uncertainty, and Care in the Therapeutic Encounter, New York: Routledge. Mancuso, Stefano and Alessandra Viola (2015), Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Bentham, Washington, DC: Island Press. Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela (1973), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realisation of the Living, Boston: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 42; Hingham, MA: Kluwer Boston Inc., 1973. Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela (1987/​1992), The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston: Shambhala. McCabe, Janet (2010), ‘Subjectivity and Embodiment: Acknowledging Abjection in Nursing’, in Holmes and Rudge, 213–​66. McCune, Lorraine (1993), ‘A Developmental Look at Grooming, Grunting and Group Cohesion’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16: 716–​17. Milton, John, Areopagitica, https://​www.dartmouth.edu/​~milton/​reading_​room/​ areopagitica/​text.shtml. Monmouth, Geoffrey de (1966), The History of the Kings of Britain, London: Penguin. Nabais, Catarina P. (2010), ‘Affect, Percept and Micro-​Brains: Art according to Gilles Deleuze’, http://​cfcul.fc.ul.pt/​biblioteca/​online/​pdf/​catarinanabais/​ affectperceptmicrobrains.pdf. Natterson-​Horowitz, Barbara and Kathryn Bowers (2012), Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us about Health and the Science of Healing, New York: Knopf. Panksepp, Jaak (1998), Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, New York: Oxford University Press. Paperman, Patricia and Sandra Laugie (2005), Le souci des autres: Éthique et politique du care, Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Pollock, Griselda (2006), ‘Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference’, in Ettinger (2006). Shelley, Percy Bysshe (n.d.), The Cenci, http://​www.bartleby.com/​18/​4/​.

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Silvestris, Bernardus (1990), The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, New York: Columbia University Press. Slingerland, Inge, et al. (2009), ‘A Multi-​Agent Systems Approach to Gossip and the Evolution of Language’, http://​csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/​Proceedings/​2009/​papers/​ 346/​paper346.pdf. Slocombe, Katie E. et al. (2001), ‘The Language Void: The Need for Multi-​Modality in Primate Communication Research’, Animal Behaviour, 81: 919–​24. Smith, W. J. (1977), The Behavior of Communicating: An Ethological Approach, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, Michael (2000), ‘Culture and Cognitive Development’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 37–​40. Tomatis, Alfred (2004), The Ear and the Voice, trans. Roberta Prada, Pierre Sollier and Francis Keeping, Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Tronto, Joan (1993), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Psychology Press. Van Isjendoorn, Marinus H. et al. (1999), ‘Disorganized Attachment in Early Childhood: Meta-​Analysis of Precursors, Concomitants and Sequelae’, Development and Psychopathology, 11: 225–​49; https://​openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/​bitstream/​handle/​ 1887/​1530/​168_​212.pdf?sequence=1. Vergil, Aeneid, http://​www.poetryintranslation.com/​PITBR/​Latin/​VirgilAeneidI. htm#anchor_​Toc535054303. Wallace, A. R. (1889/​2007), Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, New York: Cosimo. Werner, H. and B. Kaplan (1963), Symbol Formation: An Organismic-​Developmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought, New York: Wiley. Wheeler, Wendy (2006), The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Winkelman, Michael (2013), A Cognitive Approach to John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, New York: Palgrave, 2013. Winnicott, D. W. (1953), ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena –​A Study of the First Not-​Me Possession’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34: 89–​97. Winnicott, D. W. (1965), The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, New York: International Universities Press. Young, J. Z. (1971), An Introduction to the Study of Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

4

Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals and Invasive Species Penelope Gottlieb

My paintings explore the subjects of ecological crisis and botanical extinction through highly detailed, and densely rendered, paint and ink based works on canvas, panel and paper. My current practice continues an ongoing project of re-​imagining lost species and re-​appropriating existing historical imagery. In my ‘Extinct Botanicals’ project, I undertake a process of re-​envisioning lost botanical plant life through dramatic large-​scale paintings based on often sparse historical descriptions and accounts. I supplement these omissions and obscurities with extensive research and imaginative license to recreate a sense of existence in an attempt to retrieve loss. Often in the absence of any existing visual references for these lost species, I engage extinction in a literal way by summoning its subjects back to life through a series of imagined reconstructions. My work, while charged with timely environmental anxieties and a shared societal dread of ecological peril, is intentionally seductive and visually alluring to establish a prolonged exchange with the viewer. Upon closer inspection, the works reveal themselves to be more problematic and arresting than they had at first seemed. Once the seductive veneer of lush patterning and detail is critically eroded, the works reveal themselves to be emotive depictions of environmental crisis. This process of engaging assumption, and of ultimately stripping it away, is at the heart of my work. The large-​scale ‘Extinction’ paintings (Figures 4.1–​4.4) are formally dynamic and fraught with activity to convey an impression of desperate energy and struggle. The botanicals seem to defy the confines of their own image plane and reverberate as if untenably contained. They are poetic investigations of loss that suggest an overwhelmingly frenetic imperative to ‘live’. Through these works, I attempt to explore the dynamic shift in our relationship to the natural world in its current state of conflict and compromise. My works actively resist the calm

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and disinterested representation of nature we tend to associate with pastoral imagery, historical botanicals or still life, and instead seek to activate the subject matter as tumultuous, problematic and in need of cultural re-​examination. My ‘Invasive Species’ project (Figures 4.5–​4.8) evolved from this aforementioned re-​imagining of extinct plants, and continues my exploration of extinction and loss through appropriated, and revised, images by John James Audubon (1785–​1851). I intentionally take these historically iconic representations of nature and attempt to alter our perception and understanding of them through a series of interventions. ‘Invasive Species’ probes the exploitative nature of non-​native species once introduced into foreign ecosystems. In these works the subjects, Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’, are literally bound and suffocated by the presence of an invasive botanical growth. The creatures are visibly compromised in these images but the aesthetic remains serene and contemplative. By retaining Audubon’s visual language, and in fact by appropriating and emulating it as seamlessly as possible, my revisionist additions are intended to defer the moment of disjunctive realization. Indeed, by invading the nineteenth-​century taxonomies, the work in fact performs the exploitative relationship and attitudes the era epitomized vis-​à-​vis the natural world. We are not entirely sure if the images are beautiful or distressing, and in fact they are both. In both projects I  intend to augment and denaturalize the representation of ‘nature’ through a juxtaposition of dissonant techniques, signs and symbols to indicate the presence of a critical consciousness. The incorporation of intentionally disjunctive imagery is intended to convey an awareness of the ecological basis for the phenomena  –​invasiveness and extinction  –​and the work in fact performs the invasions it cites. Both bodies of work are intended to provoke a critical consideration of natural imagery in this problematic contemporary context, and do so in direct opposition to the historical tradition of its representation as passive and inactive. The works unfold gradually, with several competing layers of information, so that the elements of beauty, unease and surprise coexist and draw the viewer into an active reading of a literally colonized image space. The titles I have given to each of the paintings are simply the names of the invasive plant species, or extinct botanicals, depicted. In many instances in the ‘Invasive Species’ series, I  have painted the invasive plant’s name over the original caption on the print: literally overwriting the existing history as presented by Audubon. Through these bodies of work, I  attempt to create a sense of discomfiture and displacement in the aesthetic experience, in order to elevate the viewer’s engagement with the work’s subject matter.



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Figure 4.1  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Castilleja Cruenta Standl’. 50 x 40 in. Acrylic and ink on panel, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.2  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Hopea Shinkeng’. 78 x 66 in. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.



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Figure 4.3  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Otophora Unilocularis’. 50 x 40 in. Acrylic, oil and ink on canvas panel, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure  4.4  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals:  Valerianella Affinis’. 50 x 40 in. Acrylic and ink on panel, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.



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Figure  4.5  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species:  Elaeagnus Umbellata’. 38 x 26 in. Acrylic and ink over John James Audubon print, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure  4.6  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species:  Phyllostachys Nigra’. 38 x 26 in. Acrylic and ink over John James Audubon print, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.



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Figure  4.7  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species:  Rosa Laevigata’. 38 x 26 in. Acrylic and ink over John James Audubon print, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure  4.8  Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species:  Convolvulus arvensis’. 38 x 26 in. Acrylic and ink over John James Audubon print, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

5

From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to Post-​media Poetics: Pierre Joris’s Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj as Processual Praxis Jason Skeet

Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. George Oppen At the start of Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari (1995a: 1–​2) identifies three ‘problems’ that, he argues, confirm the need for a new account of subjectivity:  ‘the irruption of subjective factors at the forefront of current events, the massive development of machinic productions of subjectivity and, finally, the recent prominence of ethological and ecological perspectives in human subjectivity’. In response to these problems, and to resist the standardized, homogenized subjectivity manufactured by the media machines of worldwide capitalism, Guattari describes subjectivity as a singular production. Moreover, he conceives subjectivity as a process of production at collective and personal levels:  a problem also, then, of how social organization is bound up with the compositions of individual subjectivation (and vice versa). The schizoanalysis Guattari developed for mapping the production of subjectivity compels a double (and doubling) attention to critique as creative intervention, so that theory and practice form relays connecting with and into each other. It is alongside such

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creative theorization that Guattari (2013: 13) discusses an emerging ‘post-​media’ age and its demand for a ‘fundamental right to singularity’. This demand for a ‘right to singularity’ evokes the objectivist poet George Oppen’s (2008: 166) Of Being Numerous, which depicts the post-​modern era as the ‘shipwreck /​Of the singular’. This poem thus sets the scene for an encounter between Guattari’s work and an enduring current of radical modernism in contemporary poetry. This current has to be recognized as presaging concerns taken up by the generation of thinkers that Guattari belonged to:  the poet and critic Charles Bernstein (1992: 144) insists that ‘poststructuralism can be understood, but only in part, as a preliminary account of radical modernism, après la letter’. Furthermore, Bernstein describes a generation of poets born between 1937 and 1944 building on this radical modernism to create poetry he characterizes as ‘an intense distrust of large-​scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of public forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative/​authoritarian language structures’ (210). The idea of a post-​media poetics that I want to explore is inspired by the conjunction it discovers between this radical modernism and Guattari’s concept of processual and singularizing subjectivity. In what follows, the poetry of Pierre Joris provides the specific point of contact for an encounter between contemporary poetry and Guattari’s work. This encounter is prefaced with a rationale for bringing these two figures into closer proximity, after which the idea of post-​media poetics is developed by examining Guattari’s (2013: 221) theory of processual subjectivity (drawing on his later solo works), and from this moving into an analysis of Joris’s ‘processual praxis’, making particular use of Guattari’s reading of Genet’s work. It must be emphasized at the outset however, keeping in mind Guattari’s creative theorization, the intention in bringing Guattari and Joris together is always to maintain their interaction. That is, moving in one direction Guattari’s ideas expose what is at stake in the productions of subjectivity made possible by reading a poem by Joris, so that the concern with poetics is both a way of reading this work and through this thinking about the wider possibilities for poetry in the twenty-​first century. In the other direction, Joris’s poetry amplifies Guattari’s ideas. Post-​media poetics therefore seeks to extend Joris’s (2009: 43) definition of poetics as resource for writing poetry –​he states: ‘I always read the books of theorists for a poetics, i.e. for the use they can be for the practice of writing’ –​so that the idea of operating in these two directions at once underlines the exploration of Guattari’s post-​ media conception as a resource for both writing and reading and, moreover, as a relay or space between them.



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Preface to an encounter In his Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari (2013:  6) posits ‘three zones of historical fracture’ each related to ‘fundamental capitalistic components’: ●●

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the age of European Christianity, marked by a new conception of the relations between the Earth and Power; the age of capitalistic deterritorialization of knowledges and techniques, founded on the principle of generalized equivalence; the age of planetary computerization, which opens up the possibility that a creative and singularizing processuality might become the new basic reference.

These zones are not to be thought of merely in terms of historical periodization, although by using the term ‘age’ Guattari does have in mind a historical account of capitalism. They also overlap and have given rise to forces still at work within contemporary societies. It is within the third zone that Guattari (2000: 40) discerns an evolving post-​media era, made possible by a multitude of technological developments (Guattari refers to telecommunications and ICT, biotechnology, new energy resources and the invention of man-​made raw materials), as a result of which the media can be ‘reappropriated by a multitude of subject-​groups capable of redirecting its resingularization’. In the domain of poetry, the existence of small presses and independent publishing networks exemplify such a resingularization of media. There is, therefore, a politics involved in the distribution of poetry that is bound up with the poetics that I argue are relatable to a post-​media context. Guattari’s highlighting of technological developments is not naïve utopianism. A fundamental struggle is emphasized over the uses these technologies are put to, and a shift towards a post-​media period cannot be taken for granted. There are, then, three central concerns within Guattari’s (2013:  11–​15) depiction of the post-​media era: first, that it makes possible a proliferation of self-​referential and self-​sustaining processual subjectivities, capable, moreover, of connecting with wider social organization; second, it brings about a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and their environments (both technological and natural); third, it is associated with a politics of dissensus in contrast to ‘infantilizing’ consensual politics. We can find an elaboration of these three components of the post-​media age in the work of certain contemporary poets, including Pierre Joris. Joris’s literary output has encompassed a variety of activities and contexts over the past four decades, and moving between the United States, Europe and

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North Africa he has published over forty books of poetry, essays and translations. Born in Luxembourg, Joris grew up with several languages but as a poet writes in English. The idea of bringing Joris’s work into an encounter with Guattari is suggested by Joris’s own drawing on Deleuze and Guattarian concepts as elements of his ‘nomadic poetics’, in particular his use of the concept of the rhizome. According to Joris (2003:  29), nomadic poetics aspires to a state of continuous movement and transformation: ‘a between-​ness as essential nomadic condition, thus always a moving forward, a reaching, a tending. (I hear the need for both tension & tenderness)’ (original emphasis). This condition of between-​ness is also a fundamental feature of language. Joris (2003:  29) insists that language has ‘always to do with the other’ so that ‘language others itself always again’ (original emphasis). This process of language othering itself is relatable to Guattari’s (1995a: 14–​15) discussion of Bakhtin in Chaosmosis and the idea of a ‘transference of subjectivation’ that occurs across the text, from writer to reader, with the reader becoming a co-​creator by means of a foregrounding of language’s non-​discursive materiality, especially ‘the feeling of verbal activity in the active generation of a signifying sound, including motor elements of articulation, gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement in which the whole organism together with the activity and soul of the word are swept along in their concrete unity’. Guattari’s description here is echoed in Joris’s account of rhizomatics as the method for practising nomadic poetics. Insisting on a fundamental difference between the rhizome and a collage ‘aesthetics of the fragment’, Joris (2003: 38) explains how rhizomatics emphasizes movement by means of the ‘material flux of language matter, moving in & out of semantic & non-​semantic spaces, moving around & through the features accreting as poem, a lingo-​cubism that is no longer an “explosante fixe” as Breton defined the poem, but an “explosante mouvante” ’. This concern with movement at the level of language and the processual subjectivity this movement produces can be explored with respect to a particular work by Joris, his serial poem Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj, published in 2013 and written as response to war in Iraq. There is a potential for intersections between Joris’s nomadic poetics and the idea of post-​media poetics. However, Joris’s focus with nomadic poetics is the possibilities the rhizome offers for thinking about the organization of a poem, alongside a contesting of linguistic and cultural hierarchies. The post-​ media conception, and its related concerns found in Guattari’s later work, can be used to configure points of relation between the formal dynamics of poetry and a particular production of subjectivity. Joris (2003:  44) acknowledges the



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multiplicity of selves produced alongside the ‘manifold of languages & locations’ but his nomadic poetics is the investigation of the rhizome as stimulus for the production of poetry rather than the processual praxis of writing/​reading that post-​media poetics opens up. Post-​media poetics explores multiple relays in operation between the singular dimensions or levels of the poem and productions of subjectivity, and the particular political implications of these productions. On the other side of this encounter, Guattari’s work calls for contact with contemporary poetry. In Chaosmosis, referring to a production of subjectivity that is ‘auto-​enriching its relation to the world’, Guattari (1995a: 21) suggests that poetry may ‘have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined’. On the one hand, this claim can be seen in the context of Guattari’s broader argument that art offers a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’, since the ‘aesthetic power of feeling, although equal in principle with the other powers of thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, acting politically, seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our era’ (101). On the other hand, Guattari’s specific reference to poetry suggests that poetry could have something particular ‘to teach us’. To date, the prompting this gives for using Guattari’s work to engage with poetry has had little take up, although a notable start at doing so has been undertaken by the theorist and political activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. In his book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Berardi (2012: 168) develops Guattari’s reference to poetry and defines the extrication of social life from the mandates of global capitalism as a ‘poetic task’. On this basis, Berardi claims that poetry has to be understood as ‘the excess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitry of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite game of interpretation: desire’ (21). Moreover, this reactivation of sensuousness –​ Berardi also refers to this as a ‘singularity of enunciation’ (21) –​brings with it the possibility of ‘reactivating the social body’ (36). Berardi’s supporting examples are taken from Rilke, in whose work he finds a subversive force of irony that ‘suspends the semantic value of the signifier and chooses freely from among a thousand possible interpretations’ (168). Although Berardi rejects the possibility of any ontological foundation, he nevertheless insists on the possibility of a ‘common ground of understanding among the interlocutors, a sympathy among those who are involved in the ironic act, and a common autonomy from the dictatorship of the signified’ (168). It is at this point, however, that Berardi’s focus on Rilke, in contrast to an engagement with contemporary poetry, is significant. Berardi’s faith in a ‘common ground’ avoids the problem of language exposed and confronted by radical modernism, a contributing factor in the ‘shipwreck’

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identified by Oppen. Joris highlights Paul Celan’s work in this regard. Discussing the complex polysemous strata in Celan’s poetry, Joris (2009:  84–​5) describes how what Celan makes visible is ‘the possibility of the impossibility of the poem itself, and that possibility of the impossibility of the poem is the only possibility that Celan will grant the poem after Auschwitz’. This profound questioning of language in this context is for Joris related to a certain exhaustion of Eurocentric possibilities. Crucially, this questioning makes new possibilities arise. Oppen’s poem was published in 1968, a year with vital significance for the rethinking of resistance to capitalism. This year marked an important moment too for Guattari, out of which would develop his collaborations with Deleuze, beginning with the publication in 1972 of Anti-​Oedipus and a conception of processual subjectivity allied to an explicit political praxis. The affective force of Oppen’s (2008) poem, then, arises from a moment of transition, an experience of concomitant losses and gains. It announces the alarming fact that ‘[t]‌he isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted /​And he fails! He fails, that meditative man!’ (168) at the same time sensing in the ‘bright light of shipwreck’ a new art that Oppen terms ‘Dithyrambic, audience-​as-​artists!’ (167). The idea of ‘audience as artists’ foreshadows Guattari’s identification of a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’ and his emphasis on how artistic practices create unprecedented ‘[u]niverses of reference and existential territories’: a creativity extendible into everyday life in the ways that individuals resist the standardizing forces of capitalism. We can no longer think of language as rooted in a commonality, territorial or cultural. Language has been uprooted and torn apart, and there is no going back. As Joris (2009: 106) puts it: ‘to speak true now is to stammer, to fragment’. We need to incorporate into Berardi’s notion of a common ground the uncommon operations on language invented by contemporary poetic practices:  not only to escape the ‘dictatorship of the signified’, as Berardi argues, but further, to overthrow the power of the Signifier. The paradox that confronts us then is that it is precisely by way of a shattering of language that resingularizations of subjectivity are constructed. In contrast to the nineteenth-​century Symbolist poetry drawn on by Berardi, Joris’s work provides more instructive points of convergence with Guattari’s ideas. The level at which language is broken down and put onto lines of movement –​the effects this then has on the organization of the poem and its reading –​is an aspect of the way Joris’s work demonstrates how self-​enriching productions of subjectivity occur. By bringing Joris and Guattari into contact, then, we can explore the intersection between the pragmatic and speculative trajectories of Guattari’s project, which is where post-​media poetics are composed.



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Processual subjectivity In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 457) articulate a problem of subjectivity along the following lines: ‘[i]‌n effect, capital acts as the point of subjectivation that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the “capitalists”, are subjects of enunciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the “proletarians”, are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated’. It is significant that this passage links language use with an examination of how subjectivity is produced; this suggests that language carries political dimensions and potential to contest the terms of capitalist subjectivation. These politics of expression are pursued by Guattari (1995b: 194) throughout his later solo works, but here the analysis of A Thousand Plateaus is extended into a focus on how subjectivity occurs under specific conditions ‘and that these conditions could be modified through multiple procedures in a way that would channel it in a more creative direction’. Poetry can be understood as a construction of certain procedures and processes capable of modifying conditions in precisely the manner Guattari refers to. For Guattari, then, it is not only a question of analysing how subjectivity is produced in response to its context, but also how subjectivity outflows an initial territory so that, as Brian Holmes (2009:  372) puts it, individuals can construct ‘original expressions in problematic interaction with others on a multiplicity of grounds, so as to resist, create, propose alternatives and also escape into their evolving singularities’. A new conceptual apparatus is needed in order to distinguish between a conception of the individual and an account of the production of subjectivity. For Guattari (2000:  24–​5), the individual is understood as a ‘terminal’ or junction for processes that involve multiple elements (including, e.g., economic assemblages, technical machines, social groups) with the production of ‘components of subjectivity’ an effect of these processes. To explore the process producing subjectivity (including the significance of language in this process), Guattari developed his diagrammatic schizoanalytic cartographies, drawing on three important concepts that form the building blocks for this cartographical approach: transversality, autopoiesis and the schizo fracture. Early in his career, Guattari (1984: 18) introduced the concept of transver­ sality to counter the notion of transference in psychoanalysis: ‘[t]‌ransversality is a dimension that seeks to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere of horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is maximum

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communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings’. In opposition to the focus in psychoanalysis on the analyst-​analysand relationship (relegating to the background institutional context and practices), transversality enables Guattari to address the complex, non-​hierarchical connections between disparate elements (material and immaterial) that produce subjectivity, the distinctive value systems these linkages open onto and the social and cultural effects generated. Moreover, countering Lacan’s principle that the unconscious is structured like a language, Guattari maintains that, on the side of expression, different regimes of signs, discursive and non-​discursive, signifying and non-​ signifying are involved in the production of subjectivity. By insisting on these complex relationships, Guattari (1995a) opposes reductionist approaches. In Chaosmosis he outlines what is at stake: To speak of machines rather than drives, Fluxes rather than libido, existential Territories rather than the instances of the self and of transference, incorporeal Universes rather than unconscious complexes and sublimation, chaosmic entities rather than signifiers  –​fitting ontological dimensions together in a circular manner rather than dividing the world up into infrastructure and superstructure –​may not simply be a matter of vocabulary! Conceptual tools open and close fields of the possible, they catalyse Universes of virtuality. Their pragmatic fallout is often unforeseeable, distant and different. Who knows what will be taken up by others, for other uses, or what bifurcations they will lead to! (126)

Guattari’s diagrammatic cartography of subjectivity comprises four ‘ontological dimensions’ (124): ●●

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material, energetic and semiotic Fluxes; concrete and abstract machinic Phylums; virtual Universes of value; finite existential Territories.

What matters for Guattari is an awareness of the complex interactions and feedback between the four dimensions, while discerning ‘those components lacking in consistency or existence’ (71): that is, how these processes retain their processuality. It is a question of creating a ‘transversalist bridge’ (124) between diverse ontological components: social environments and territories; networks of flows of matter, energies and signs; machinic Phylums or the ‘conceptual realm of ideas (logic, diagrammatism, invention, reflexivity’ as Holmes (2009:  373) puts it; virtual Universes of value, examples of which Guattari (1995a:  125)



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lists as the ‘incorporeal Universes of music, of mathematical idealities, of Becomings of desire’. Further, there is the recognition, as Guattari states, that this transversality is never ‘given as “already there”, but always to be conquered through a pragmatics of existence’ (125). Crucially for a concern with poetics, Guattari (1995a: 59) insists that in the realm of expression any assemblage of enunciation (such as a poem) is always ‘chaotically determined’. Writing and reading thus remain open to on-​going experimentation. Drawing on a term adopted from Joyce and key to Guattari’s project, it is writing’s potentially chaosmic character that guarantees this openness. In Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995a) refers to Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) in his discussion of the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’. Guattari cites a section from the poem including the line ‘From the depths of a shipwreck’ (113) –​an allusion also significant to Oppen’s poem. Mallarmé expresses modernism’s ontological crisis, which has, according to Guattari, not only revealed the loss of any ontological ground, but also made possible a ‘plane of machinic interfaces’ (58) so that subjectivity can be conceived as the effect of arrangements between the interfaces that are, on one side, discursive and actual (Fluxes and Phylums) and, on the other side, non-​discursive and virtual existential Territories and Universes of value. This distinction between actual and virtual domains posits the need for transversalist bridges across which virtual chaosmic components with their ‘infinite velocities’ (59) slow down into actual psychosocial arrangements. Writing is a way to experiment with these bridges and arrangements, with interactions and feedback between components. In this regard Guattari (2000: 26) calls for a regeneration of radical modernism: ‘[f]‌rom now on what will be on the agenda is a “futurist” and “constructivist” opening up of the fields of virtuality’. A second important concept that Guattari’s schizoanalytical cartography draws on is ‘autopoiesis’ (from Greek auto meaning ‘self ’, and poiesis meaning ‘creation’). That is, a process capable of reproducing and sustaining itself. Guattari takes the concept of autopoiesis from the work of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela, who use it to explain the self-​maintaining chemistry of living cells. The concept is used by Guattari to counter approaches that seek to impose static, predefined stages onto subjectivity’s production. Autopoiesis highlights a creative process that creates itself, so that what emerges is a singularity out of complexity, irreducible to any preexisting, deterministic model. This autopoetic conception of subjectivity helps to understand why Guattari insists that his cartography of subjectivity keeps all elements involved in its production foregrounded, ensuring the process of production remains open and underway.

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By extending the concept of autopoesis into an analysis of human subjectivity and social relations, Guattari can then contrast different processes of the production of subjectivity. Capitalist subjectivity, in this regard, regulates the precarious, finite and singular nature of subjectivity. Guattari (1995a:  104) explains how this control is achieved through a standardization of ‘trans-​ semiotic and amodal enunciative compositions’ that results in the ‘progressive effacement of polysemy, prosody, gesture, mimicry and posture’. Thus, poetry can be understood as a means for reclaiming and resingularizing heterogeneous ‘enunciative compositions’, resisting the overcoding power of the ‘capitalist Signifier’, and opening up processes of the production of subjectivity in opposition to capitalist mass media that reduce human subjectivity to ‘so many pieces compatible with the mechanics of social domination’ (104–​105). A third conceptual component of Guattari’s schizoanalytical cartography is the idea of the schizo fracture. This concept was already a component of Guattari’s collaborations with Deleuze and the opposing poles they set up between process on the one side and organization on the other. In Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995a: 64) insists that ‘[t[he schizo fracture is the royal road of access to the emergent fractality of the Unconscious’. The idea of the schizo fracture is also relatable to Joris’s nomadic poetics of movement and transformation. According to Joris (2003:  26), the poem functions as a break in the flow of lived experience: ‘[r]‌efueling halts are called poases; they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on’ (original emphasis). This break is not a moment coming after experience (as reflection on experience) but rather a part of the process itself. Moreover, Joris (2013: 92) stresses the significance within the poem of the rupture, of how ‘it is probably in the fissures between miscounts, recounts, etymologies, misreadings, neologisms, etc. that much of the poetic force of language resides’. In Anti-​Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari (2004) define the break/​flow as the first of the three syntheses of the unconscious constituting desire as process of production. This connective synthesis works along the lines of a binary machine constituting a coupling that produces a flow, passage or circuiting between ‘partial objects’, or breaks the flow so as to produce other flows (Deleuze and Guattari (1983) refer to both material and immaterial flows). The connective synthesis is given the linguistic marker ‘and then’ as a mechanism of attraction (5). With regard to poetry, then, procedures that break language apart (with the poem, by extension, a break in the flow of the everyday), expose the connective synthesis and a ‘refuelling’ of the real occurs, an opportunity to access the ‘fractality of the Unconscious’ essential for a production of singular subjectivity.



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By way of these three concepts  –​transversality, autopoiesis and the schizo fracture  –​Guattari (2013:  3) develops his fourfold model for schizoanalytic cartographies, the application of which is defined as metamodelization, since what is produced is a singular mapping of subjectivity only relatable to its own reference points, a process of ‘self-​modelling’. A  singularizing and processual subjectivity becomes its own method of analysis and cannot be generalized or imposed on others; the metamodel provides ‘instruments for a speculative cartography, without any pretension with regard to universal structural foundation nor an on-​the-​ground effectiveness’ (5) –​this is a declaration for an encounter with the unknown that calls for a poetics!

Processual praxis In the ‘Postface’ to his Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj, Joris (2013: 91) explains the particular shipwreck that is background to the work: ‘I started this sequence of poems shortly after the US invaded Iraq, somehow wanting to ward off, or hold at bay, the utter destruction of the people and the city of Baghdad, one of the greatest old cities in the history of humanity.’ Joris states that he could only complete the sequence once US forces left Iraq. Guattari’s (1995a:  3) comments on the 1991 Gulf War conflict (an event he insists on comparing with the atomic bombing of Japan) are pertinent in this context, relating as he does the devastation of war to the manufacture of a homogenous, molar subjectivity: ‘what was at stake was an attempt to bring the Arab population to heel and reclaim world opinion: it had to be demonstrated that the Yankee way of subjectivation could be imposed by the combined power of the media and arms’. The construction of a singularizing subjectivity that resists these molar powers can therefore be regarded as a political project. Joris’s Meditations is inspired by the tenth-​century Sufi poet Mansur al-​Hallaj and in particular a list of forty concepts taken from his work. These concepts, Joris informs us, were found on the Internet and provided him with titles for the poems. This points towards a feature of the post-​media era as passage beyond exclusively Western contexts. For Guattari, this involved contact with Japanese and Brazilian culture and politics; for Joris it has included a sustained engagement with the literature of the Maghreb. It is the presence of the desert in Joris’s (2014: 222) work that expresses this possibility of movement outside the West’s cultural limits, as indicated, for example, in the poem Reading Edward Jabès:

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Here, the end of the word, of the book, of chance. Desert! Drop that dice. It is useless. Here, the end of the game, of resemblance. The infinite, by the interpretation of its letters Denies the end. Here, the end cannot be denied. It is infinite. Here is not the place Nor even the trace. Here is sand.

The reference to Mallarmé’s dice throw is significant. Rejecting the Mallarméan idea of linguistic play within the space of the page, Joris instead describes the poem as a ‘caravan that travels through time & things’, so that it is the continuous verticality of reading creating rhythm that interests him (Cockelbergh 2011: 134). The final ‘sand’ in the poem suggests that the limitless space of the desert constitutes a physical and metaphysical presence; it is echo too of Deleuze and Guattari’s first synthesis of the Unconscious they connect linguistically to ‘and’, intimating that this desert is a space of primary processes. It is just such a desert, backdrop as well to war, that Joris (2013: 13) inserts the reader into at the beginning of Meditations: ‘what is the manner /​I mean the matter /​with you standing /​there in the desert?’ In this infinite desert Joris puts into operation Guattari’s (1995a: 125) three levels of processual praxis and which engenders what Guattari terms as a ‘politics of immanence’. Included in Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies is an essay on Jean Genet’s novel The Prisoner of Love. For Guattari (2013: 215), this is a book of ‘images’ and ‘margins’ that give ‘space to a singular polyphony in which the most secret dimensions of the poet will be knotted together . . . with the “metaphysical struggles” conducted by the Fedayeen and Black Panthers in counterpoint to his perpetual wandering’. It is significant that Guattari describes Genet as a poet, and that the three levels of Genet’s processual praxis incorporate a close attention to language. These three levels are also present in Joris’s Meditations, so that exploring them provides a way to read the work. The levels can be approached in the same order Guattari does (they are not stages, Guattari emphasizes, but levels operating simultaneously). Following Guattari, a level of modular crystallizations comprises the set of procedures with which the poet tears language apart and converts it into units to be arranged and rearranged, thereby



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placing language onto lines of continuous variation. A second level of polyphonic fabulous images maps the generation of new forms of expression through the mixture and conjugation of heterogeneous components. At the third level of existential operators a new production of subjectivity is made possible. Guattari’s (2013: 221) three levels of processual praxis show the production of subjectivity as a process moving from the imaginary to the real, from a ‘derealizing fabulation’ to ‘ “fabulous images” that produce the real’.

Modular crystallizations At this level language constitutes an expressive materiality exceeding any communicative function. In the Meditations sequence certain procedures are used to create, as Joris calls it, ‘atomic constructions’ within language (Cockelbergh 2011: 129). Words inside other words are revealed, as in ‘the awe is in gawking’ (Joris 2013: 14) of the first line of the second poem in the sequence. Omission and/​ or addition of single letters can transform one word into another, so ‘scares’ in the third line of the same poem becomes ‘care’ in the fifth and ‘scars’ in the seventh. Rhyme and rhythm also foreground the relations between words, a relation, according to Joris, ‘that is not /​in the thing or the it /​but between the two /​it’s the relation a /​we can be’ (14). In the fourth poem of the sequence (16), this breaking of words is allied to a nomadic praxis that is also (paradoxically) a bringing together: search your words for the con of fusion. make letters stand out even if they shiver.

Enjambment between lines as in ‘the con /​of fusion’ introduces a ‘doubleness’ into the poem, a moment for reading to stumble over semantic shifts and double takes that are a way of ‘taking your breath away & making you stop and making you both hesitate & hopefully crack up with that kind of quiet laughter’ (Cockelbergh 2011:  129). However, in a further doubling (and troubling) moment, the thirty-​eighth poem in the sequence questions whether this enjambment actually amounts to ‘rules of engagement /​that invariably /​ tell me to stay apart’ (Joris 2013:  81). How, then, to ‘follow /​as fast as I  can /​the word form /​somewhere I  cannot /​see’ (82) so as to discover within the poem ‘something I  didn’t know, & that is a new meaning’ (Cockelbergh 2011:  193 original emphasis)? This question is tied to the fissures of Joris’s ‘atomic constructions’. These ruptures function as a problematizing in-​between,

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a questioning of thought/​opinion/​belief, a stammering of language that operates as a refrain across the entire sequence of poems. As Guattari (2000: 37) makes clear, this shattering of language is essential: The crucial point is to grasp the a-​signifying points of rupture –​the rupture of denotation, connotation and signification  –​from which a certain number of semiotic chains are put to work in the service of an existential autoreferential effect. The repetitive symptom, the prayer, the ritual of the ‘session’, the order-​ word, the emblem, the refrain, the facialitary crystallization of the celebrity . . . initiates the production of a partial subjectivity. We can say that they are the beginnings of a protosubjectivity. (Original emphasis)

Joris’s ‘atomic constructions’ treat words as asignifying material, plugging into and manipulating language as modular. As with the refraction of light through crystal that moves in differing directions at once, this modularity generates polysemous routes through the poetry, linking and relinking its parts in different ways. The idea of modularity is central to Guattari’s (2013: 2) concept of machinic subjectivity, operable across a range of domains: ‘technical, biological, semiotic, logical, abstract’. The machinic and its fundamental modularity is thus support for ‘proto-​subjective processes’ (2); that is, building blocks are exposed that put subjectivity onto new lines of transformation. The modular crystallizations identified in Joris’s poem likewise place reading onto lines of continuous variation.

Polyphonic fabulous images According to Guattari (2013, 225), ‘fabulous images’ form through dissimilar universes of reference colliding and (referring to Bakhtin) entertaining ‘dialogic relations’, their convergence ‘enlarging fields of virtuality’ and producing ‘a surplus value of sense, a supplement of singularity, an existential taking consistency’. In the Meditations sequence a notable example of this process is the fabulous image of the pocket. Through its mixture of heterogeneous components as it repeats in different ways across the series, the image of the pocket becomes a component of expression ensuring poems in the series constantly echo each other. These echoes take place across a spectrum of references generated by the image, transversally connected. In the first poem (Joris 2013: 13), what could be an address to the reader instructs take your hands out of your pockets



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the desert has no manners but many pockets which is no excuse for your lack of know-​how when it comes to sharing this last pinch of hot sand & mica hides as lint in the pockets of your heart

Different universes meet: the hands in pockets of bad manners and passivity, the desert’s enigmatic ‘many pockets’, the ‘pockets of /​your heart’ as space of compassion and care. In subsequent poems the pocket combines further elements; poem eleven (Joris 2013: 26) uses the image to consider comradeship, evoking Robert Creeley’s notion of ‘the company’: we will keep standing here our hand in your pockets always riffing even if some of us are spectral comrades now,

In poem twenty-​three (Joris 2013:  45), the pocket becomes an element of profound ambivalence towards the notion of isolation, with personal and geopolitical levels colliding: an I in iso elation plays with itself hands in pockets it stands, not yet endangered species, endangering isolato Americano on the corner

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of any desert-​ ed street between here & here the pocket billiards of empire: an isolation

The final poem in the sequence proclaims how Joris (2013:  87) ‘can finish what I began’, yet this is opposed by the disconcerting refrain ‘the troops have left /​have the troops left’ that in fact confirms how nothing ends for keeps except the lives of those killed by the bullets put money into the pockets of those who sold you the war, those who never had their hands in their (own) pockets those who never stood in any desert except their own hearts’ alkali wastes & the lint in their pockets soaked through with spent blood now pulled from pockets & flicked onto the desert’s face, thousands of lives stubbed out like Camel butts (87–​8)

The fabulous image of the pocket is a collective enunciation conjugating disparate points of reference:  the collective is understood not in terms of a social grouping but as a heterogeneity constituted by components transversally implicated with each other. An individual is composed of such arrangements, a collectivity that is always in production. This polyphonic arrangement is constructed from its own singular co-​ordinates that ‘anchors human realities in finitude’ (Guattari 2013: 5). At the same time, the arrangement is universal in its transversality, in the way in which it ‘brings about the most dazzling transversals between heterogeneous domains’ (5). However, Guattari insists that both the



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level of modular crystallization and the level of fabulous image do not yet give the subject ‘any hold on the creative process: neither from a position of passive contemplation nor from a position of active orchestration’ (227).

Existential operators At this level the poem becomes a process that ‘puts in place a new type of enunciation and, as a consequence, a new subjective production’ (Guattari 2013:  228). It is a process Guattari refers to as ‘synaptic’ since it operates at psychic and social levels simultaneously. According to Guattari, this process takes place in Genet’s work through the ‘narrative graft of a religious origin’ onto the fabulous image so that it functions autopoetically, entirely for itself, making available a surplus of ‘processual power’ (229). An existential operation, in this regard, marks an opening to the infinite; as synapse it ‘initiates a self-​enunciative procedure through its character as a caesura, as a-​signifying catalysis’ (189). Poem thirty-​ seven in the Meditations sequence functions as caesura, breaking with the condensed syntactical ‘atomic constructions’ of the other poems. In place of the prevailing two-​line stanza structure of the series, stanzas are longer and irregular in this poem, and the linguistic procedures and fabulous images of the other levels of Joris’s processual praxis are absent. The rupture in the dominant syntactical style of the Meditations marks the key synaptical operation of the series:  namely, the conjugation, which is this poem’s subject, of the so-​called strong criticism of medieval Arab literature with present-​day poetic concerns, which produces an opening to the maximum of transversality within the Meditations sequence. According to Joris, ‘[T]‌he first great Modernist push happened with the likes of Abu Nuwas in the 9th and 10th century in Baghdad’ (Cockelbergh 2011: 171), so that there are ways to connect cultures across time. This is a rejection of the Western narrative of progress; Joris states, in fact, that ‘there is no progress’ (Cockelbergh 2011:  171). The opening out of the poem (Joris 2013:  79) onto correspondences across geographical and chronological boundaries is the existential operation that simultaneously affirms the timelessness of the new: maybe this means that poetry is the beginning and can therefore always only be a break with what came before a new rule, another splendour,

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a lop-​sided vowel, hiatus of breath, slippery slope of creation, clinamen, I make a mistake means I made something, I made no mistake means I made nothing, slide down the sharp incline a universe comes into being where breath is altered, & criticism always late, behind the times, the dog that barks after the caravan has passed –​

This poem functions within the sequence of poems as an existential operation producing surplus value: attuned to the particular correspondence of cultures across time and space that Joris draws attention to, an opening is made to the infinite possibility of ‘a break with what came before /​a new rule, another splendour’ that affirms a power of construction, that is, the possibility to get a hold on the process of production of subjectivity. According to Guattari (2013: 189), the existential operator marks the point after which ‘[s]‌omething will never return’, the crossing of a threshold and institution of an irreversibility of the process. The poem ends by insisting on the enduring significance of medieval Arabic conceptions: ‘if you want to know how /​to evaluate the poem beyond the rhyme word’, the poem informs us, ‘turn to this verse /​(a line of poetry!) recited by Hassan ben Thabit’ (80). Significantly, the Arabic version is printed first followed by the caveat that, according to Joris, it is impossible to truly translate these words. Their directive takes us back to the material force of language as pure sound: ‘Sing all poetry you recite /​for singing is the test of poetry’ (80; original emphasis). Language produces the real: Guattari (2000: 25) insists on the inseparability between the ‘apprehension of a psychical fact’ and the ‘assemblage of enunciation that engenders it’. A principle of uncertainty is then integral to any discursive system, so that the truth or reality of any discursive claim is always authorized ‘secondarily’ and via what Guattari calls a ‘pseudo-​narrative detour through the annals of myth and ritual or through supposedly scientific accounts [descriptions] –​all of which have as their ultimate goal a dis-​positional mise en scène, a bringing-​into-​existence’ (25–​6; original emphasis). We need to recognize how poetry brings into existence a processual, singularizing, self-​referencing subjectivity. Guattari (1995a: 19) declares that



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the task of the poetic function, in an enlarged sense, is to recompose artificially rarefied, resingularised Universes of subjectivation. For them, it’s not a matter of transmitting messages, investing images as aids to identification, patterns of behaviour as props for modelisation procedures, but of catalysing existential operators capable of acquiring consistence and persistence.

The significance of such a task would not be lost on Joris. In his Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics he issues a warning germane to the demand here for a movement out of the twentieth century’s ecological and existential shipwrecks into resingularizations of a post-​media era. That the twenty-​first century must bring with it the development and sustainment of processual practices that incorporate, as Joris (2003: 55) puts it, the nomadic ‘art of moving & connecting all /​contents, all languages, all machines’ otherwise this century will amount to nothing more than ‘the tail of the 20C /​tail wagged by the 19C dog’. A central concern of Guattari’s (2000:  29) later work is how environmental devastation occurs alongside a narrowing of the production of processual and singularizing subjectivity: it is not only plant and animal species that are vanishing but also the ‘words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity’. Poetry and post-​media poetics has a role to play in resisting this destruction. Taken together, the levels of processual praxis in Joris’s poetry put into play all the components of processual subjectivity outlined by Guattari. Through the singular movements and moments within and across levels, each level discloses the possibility of the in-​between. Therefore, post-​media poetics can also be thought of as an articulation of Guattari’s (2000: 19–​20) ‘ecosophy’ put forward in his later work, and the emphasis this gives to the importance of moving ‘between the three ecological registers’ of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity (emphasis added).

References Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ (2012), The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Bernstein, Charles (1992), A Poetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cockelbergh, Peter (ed.) (2011), Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-​Between, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London: The Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004), Anti-​Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Continuum.

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Guattari, Félix (1984), Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Guattari, Félix (1995a), Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications. Guattari, Félix (1995b), Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum. Guattari, Félix (2013), Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey, London: Bloomsbury. Holmes, Brian (2009), Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum. Joris, Pierre (2003), A Nomad Poetics, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Joris, Pierre (2009), Justifying the Margins, Cambridge: Salt. Joris, Pierre (2013), Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj, Tucson, AZ: Chax Press. Joris, Pierre (2014), Barzakh. Poems 200–​2012, Boston, MA: Black Widow Press. Oppen, George (2008), New Collected Poems, New York: New Directions.

Part Two

Ecosophical Aesthetics, ‘UIQOSOPHY’ and the Abstract Machine

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UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-​Of) Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni

Philosopher? Kind of. Psychoanalyst? Don’t you mean schizoanalyst? Militant? When the occasion arises. Filmmaker? Sorry? How many Guattaris can the universe contain? Judging from attempts to pinhole him, fewer than one might think. Perhaps it’s better to ask how many universes there were (are, might be) in Guattari, how they are connected, what they can produce. Take a simple example: a patient in the course of treatment remains stuck on a problem, going around in circles, and coming up against a wall. One day he says, without giving it much thought: ‘I’ve been thinking of taking up driving lessons again, I haven’t driven for years’; or, ‘I feel like learning word processing.’ A  remark of this kind may remain unnoticed in a traditional conception of analysis. However, this kind of singularity can become a key, activating a complex refrain, which will not only modify the immediate behaviour of the patient, but open up new fields of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with long lost acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, regaining selfconfidence . . . In this, a rigid neutrality or non-​intervention would be negative; it’s sometimes necessary to jump at the opportunity, to approve, to run the risk of being wrong, to give it a go, to say, ‘yes, perhaps this experience is important.’ Respond to the event as the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference. (Guattari 1995: 17–​18) I am a writer and psychoanalyst, director of a psychiatric clinic that uses methods of Institutional Psychotherapy.

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Now I would like to direct what, at least in appearance, will be a science-​fiction film. This, no doubt requires some preliminary explanation. A Love of UIQ, the screenplay I present here, is neither an autobiographical film nor an essay film, though it closely relates to my conception of psychoanalysis. Years spent practising a psychotherapy of psychoses have led me to question traditional definitions of the unconscious, which treat it as a separate realm of the psyche, cut off from the social field or from artistic creation and accessible only to specialists . . . The key thing for me in an analytic procedure, therefore, is to forge an original system of expression, a specific cartography suited to the singular figure of a subjective problem . . . In this film I wish to explore a theorem about the current status of subjectivity, which posits that it consists of two kinds of components that are always intermingled: 1) An ‘ego’ subjectivity, crystallized upon individual characters living in a kind of commune and who, though apparently normal, might be regarded as castaways of a new type of cosmic catastrophe, one that is at the same time present and potential, imaginary and real, and whose current presence draws its strength solely from its ability to empty the future of all consistency . . . 2) A machinic subjectivity  –​hyper-​intelligent and yet irredeemably infantile and regressive –​framed in an entity called UIQ, Univers Infra-​quark (the Infra-​ quark Universe), that has no fixed limits and no consistent persona nor a clear psycho-​logical or sexual orientation. (Guattari 2016: 53–​8)

This story is pure science-​fiction, beginning with a seemingly inert object, a file, buried in a remote archive, miles from anywhere yet harbouring strange powers, emanating an eerie fluorescent light, an energy field that will contaminate the few who happen to lay eyes upon it, penetrate under the skin and work its way up into the brain, insinuate itself into neural networks and take hold of the decision-​making apparatus through sheer force of will. At least that’s how Félix Guattari might have imagined it. This is no doubt the effect he wanted the document to have when he presented it to the decision-​ makers at the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) in 1987, hoping for the state funding that would enable him to produce the film of which this screenplay was the blueprint, A Love of UIQ. Of course the idea that a militant schizoanalyst like Guattari might persuade a government funding body to bankroll a science-​fiction movie, a film that Guattari, with no previous



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filmmaking experience (in lieu of a filmography, the CV he attached to the application contained ‘references’ to his being under police investigation during the Algerian war, his involvement in free radio and the 1977 Bologna uprisings and his links with the Italian Autonomia movement), was proposing to direct himself, was in itself pure science-​fiction. To say nothing of the pitch for the film included in the document, which set out such goals as exploring cinema’s capacities as ‘a tool for producing subjectivities’ or bringing to the screen the complex relation between ‘individualized and machinic components’, filming the various ‘becomings’ (child, woman, animal, multiple, invisible) undergone by a group of characters who, despite their veneer of normality, were to be considered ‘castaways of a new cosmic catastrophe’ (Guattari 2016). A  catastrophe, Guattari specifies, ‘that is at the same time present and potential, imaginary and real, and whose current presence draw its strength solely from its ability to empty the future of all consistency.’ The funding commission might have been forgiven for confusing parts of Guattari’s director’s statement with dialogue from the script itself. As though, through a kind of semiotic seepage, Guattari the director had instead become one of the characters. The screenplay of A Love of UIQ had reached out to engulf its inventor, retro-​fictionalizing him, casting him in the role of visionary leader of this band of cosmic castaways. But how are we to specifically locate Guattari’s own interests in, and approaches to, science-​fiction? How might they relate to his other published writings and his multiple roles in post-​1968 French intellectual and political life? How can we contextualize his desire to be a filmmaker, his need to passer à l’acte? First, it’s worth considering that before Guattari began writing the first of several drafts of the UIQ screenplay, he had already made a couple of notable attempts at screenwriting. In the first of these, Projet de film au sujet des radios libres,1 written around 1977, the events shadow Radio Alice’s brief disruption of the state’s radio broadcasting monopoly in the year of the Bologna uprisings. In Guattari’s film, the action is shifted from Bologna to Turin, where Radio Galaxie is broadcasting in the midst of battles between protesters and police, relaying signals from the barricade strewn, tear-​gas stained streets of the city. The film follows the errances of Elena and her ‘schizoid’ companion Ugo as they try to reach the station headquarters, hitching a ride with a disillusioned stockbroker who quickly falls under the charming Elena’s spell. One interesting aspect of this short –​which Guattari imagined shooting on video in a loose, semi-​improvised style, akin to that of Alberto Grifi  –​is the resonance he sets up between Radio Galaxie and the mindset of Ugo, neither

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of which recognizes any clear boundary between the sender and receiver. The permeability of the schizoid body as an indeterminate zone between inside and outside already constitutes one of the conditions of collective enunciation. In his director’s notes, Guattari explains how he wanted to use one of the earliest portable video cameras invented by his friend Jean-​ Pierre Beauviala. This camera, he implies, would permit a light, ‘free’ cinema shot in the midst of events, capturing real-​life processes while allowing space for improvisation and simplifying the workflow from filming to editing. In Guattari’s film, the radio station becomes the polyphonic mouthpiece of a hydra-​headed movement that the state must try to frame as an alien invader to be repelled, sending tanks into the streets to crush the uprising in scenes resembling a War of the Worlds type scenario. Free radio was a potential danger that had to be suppressed (Radio Alice was violently shut down in a police raid in March 1977) because it interfered not only with the official narrative of events but with the discursive framework that assigned the positions that regulated the speech of the social body. What was at stake here might be considered a hegemonic struggle over definitions of the human and of the alien. One might think of the ambivalent strategy of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre enacting H.  G. Wells’s fable as though it were actually happening, insinuating its alien panic virus into a narcotizing stream of light entertainment by claiming to represent the voice of the nation under attack, seemingly defenceless against a superior power –​a form of subversive mimicry that proved to be extremely effective and would doubtless no longer be permissible. However, for Radio Alice and the free radio movement in general, the task was much more difficult. It is one thing to imitate or parody the state’s monologue, which ‘always has our ear’ in the sense that we are ideologically conditioned to orientate ourselves by its centrality. It’s quite another to reorient listeners and convince them that they (that we) were the embodiment of an autonomous, creative ‘human life’ that is effectively being assailed, controlled or suppressed by the cold, alien hand of the state’s ideological and repressive apparatus –​a scenario in which the army’s armoured personnel carriers might come to be viewed as invading spacecraft from a hostile planet. Autonomist politics, liberating itself from a crippling representative framework, was already a kind of science-​ fiction, since it concerned the emergence and nurturing of new forms of life, ways of speaking, producing and relating to one another. As a voice from Radio Galaxie declaims (quoting an actual transmission from Radio Alice), in an inventive sequence where the broadcast would be transmitted through the car radio while filming took



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place in the middle of urban riots:  ‘To con-​spire means to breathe together and this is what we are accused of. They want to stifle our breath because we have refused to breathe in isolation, each in their own asphyxiating workplace, their individualized family unit, their atomizing domicile.’2 The Bakhtinian polyphony of Radio Alice and other free radio stations resulted both from the fact that they were many-​voiced  –​constituting a media platform from which anyone could potentially speak –​and that they briefly fostered modes of speech and of DJ-​ing that were multiple, gleefully trampling on the fences erected by institutions and identitarian microfascisms between different discursive fields and areas of expertise. Politics, poetry, philosophy, rock, history, news from the street and from the factory floor, jokes, experimental music, erotic literature, militant songs, children’s games, fairytales, free jazz were brought together in a movement of what Guattari would later refer to as machinic heterogenesis. Could cinema, still a major force in the moulding of subjectivity with its mechanisms of projection and identification, attain a similar level of collective enunciation? Could one make a film on free radio that would also be a ‘radio film’, as well as a ‘radiology’ of society’s hidden, suppressed or divided forces, without falling into the trap of a hypostatized representation? Jean-​Luc Godard had already attempted something of the sort in Le Gai Savoir (1969) and Un film comme les autres (1968), both of which flirted with expanded notions of radio or TV broadcasting. In these films, footage of demonstrations, accounts of historical struggles, citations from writers and philosophers of different epochs and recordings of present-​day events are presented on a single plane of ‘current affairs’ reporting. In the former case these are intercut with the musings of actors (Juliet Berto and Jean Pierre-​Léaud, who would become a close friend of Guattari) set adrift like molecules of protohumanity in some pre–​big bang cosmic night or interviews with children (anticipating the format of France/Tour/Détour/Deux/ Enfants), while in the latter they form a counterpoint to protracted discussions between workers and students on the impasses of May 1968. Le Gai Savoir in particular, through the sonic persistence of burbling and buzzing short-​wave interference patterns, evokes the potentially intergalactic horizons of radio signals traversing space and time, secreting within their stochastic flux the alien tongues of revolutionary theory. However, these experiments, when not banned from wider circulation, were quickly ghettoized (even and especially by militant circles) as a type of eccentric and self-​indulgent intellectual posturing, destined for extinction. Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, they remain, like most of Godard’s experiments of the 1970s, as broken paths, untravelled byways of the history of cinema.

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Yet perhaps Guattari (1996: 262–​72), a stranger to the ‘auteurial’ prerogatives that continued to haunt Godard’s cinema even as he relinquished his own signature during the Dziga Vertov Group period, was more tuned into the collective dimension of enunciation to which free radio gave concrete form, and with this short film was already projecting an alternative destiny for a ‘minor cinema’ to come, as an affective relay of what he would later call the Post-​Media Era: An essential condition for succeeding in the promotion of a new planetary consciousness would thus reside in our collective capacity for the recreation of value systems that would escape the moral, psychological and social lamination of capitalist valorization, which is only centered on economic profit. The joy of living, solidarity, and compassion with regard to others, are sentiments that are about to disappear and that must be protected, enlivened, and propelled in new directions. Ethical and aesthetic values do not arise from imperatives and transcendent codes. They call for an existential participation based on an immanence that must be endlessly reconquered. How do we create or expand upon such a universe of values? . . . The suggestive power of the theory of information has contributed to masking the importance of the enunciative dimensions of communication. It leads us to forget that a message must be received, and not just transmitted, in order to have meaning. Information cannot be reduced to its objective manifestations; it is, essentially, the production of subjectivity, the becoming-​consistent of incorporeal universes . . . The current crisis of the media and the opening up of a Post-​media Era are the symptoms of a much more profound crisis. What I want to emphasize is the fundamentally pluralist, multi-​centered, and heterogeneous character of contemporary subjectivity, in spite of the homogenization it is subjected to by the mass media. In this respect, an individual is already a ‘collective’ of heterogeneous components. A  subjective phenomenon refers to personal territories –​the body, the self –​but also, at the same time, to collective territories  –​the family, the community, the ethnic group. And to that must be added all the procedures for subjectivation embodied in speech, writing, computing, and technological machines.

In another remarkable sequence of Guattari’s free radio script, where the car was to have become a sort of mobile camera traversing urban space –​as it does in the long driving sequences of Danièle Huillet and Jean-​Marie Straub’s History Lessons –​negotiating barricades and demonstrators struggling in a fog of teargas, Elena gets out of the car to look for a phone to transmit a report to Radio Galaxie. We see her silhouette from a distance, in a public phone box, as



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the sound of her voice comes through the car radio. The idea is again to film the street in real-​time with the radio as its soundtrack. In this way, the fictional scenario could potentially be insinuated directly in the flux of events, while the ‘industrial’ timescale of cinema production could be circumvented thanks to the lightness of the equipment and a crew working outside the structures of professionalization. Compared to the events of 1968, a wider ‘radiology’ of 1977 would have mapped a more disjunctive convergence of emancipatory energies. While in Italy the Autonomia movement was reclaiming life from the Fordist factory regime, in Britain, where molecular political shifts tend to find their most immediate expression (and recuperation) in pop culture, punk had unleashed the dystopian refrain of ‘no future’. As Berardi (2009: 93) writes: The 1977 movement  –​in its colourful and creative Italian version and in its British one as well, which was punk, gothic and disturbing –​was founded on one intuition: desire is the determining field for every social mutational process, every transformation of the imagination, every shift of collective energy. It is only as a manifestation of desire that we can understand the workers’ refusal of the wage relation, of conforming their lives to the timing of the assembly line, realized through absenteeism and sabotage . . . The workers’ disaffection for industrial labour, based on a critique of hierarchy and repetition, took energies away from capital, towards the end of the 1970s. All desires were located outside capital, attracting forces that were distancing themselves from its domination.

Yet perhaps it is overstating the matter somewhat to say that ‘all desires’ were outside of capital. Certainly the massive popularity in the same year of Star Wars would suggest otherwise. As well as effectively bringing to an end the political aspirations of the New-​Hollywood auteurs, this fable of supposedly popular rebellion against imperial domination was symptomatic of another more sinister ‘no future’ to come, that of postmodernism and its implicit rejection of modernism’s ‘progressive’ historical narrative. In the guise of science-​fiction, a genre for a long time allied to or foreshadowing the trajectory of modernity, Star Wars presented a retrogressive fairytale of the triumph of US-​style Western individualism and its harnessing of the eternal, immaterial force of capital, while the vaguely medieval aristocratic genealogy of the Jedi knights hinted at the emerging corporate neo-​feudalist aspect of its imminent restoration. Around 1979, two years after Projet de film au sujet des radios libres, Guattari began a collaboration with the independent American filmmaker Robert Kramer, who was later to become an important creative partner in the genesis

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of UIQ. Kramer had recently settled in France, after completing Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, and Guattari was a great admirer of his movies Ice (1969) and Milestones (1975), both of which resonated with what he had written on the subject of group micropolitics. While Ice posed the question of the potential molar rigidity affecting militant movements engaged in armed struggle, Milestones traced the mutation and dispersion of countercultural energies towards more molecular, intimate and self-​seeking roads of emancipation, while at the same time seeking to situate US freedom struggles within a more complex and contradictory historical framework. Together, Guattari and Kramer sketched out an idea for a film on the Italian Autonomia movement, Latitante, about two Italian women fugitives with a child in tow, gone to ground in France. The outline for the film drew upon Guattari’s ongoing involvement in helping radical Italian intellectuals find refuge in France after being scapegoated as the cattivi maestri of the movement. But equally important was Kramer’s desire to capture the day-​to-​ day reality of the Autonomists’ lived experience. With the mounting repression of protests and the arbitrary persecution of militant figures came a need for a more underground, molecular politics. The atmosphere of heightened paranoia, together with a growing sense of exhaustion and ambivalence towards collective action, not surprisingly gave rise to cinematic narratives of flight, dissembling and disappearance. But it was also a time of great solidarity and friendship, as a letter from a mysterious Jean in prison (possibly Genet), included in the Latitante film dossier, testifies: Resistance has isolation inherent in it. You are opposing yourself, your fragile mind and delicate body, to the enormous weight of things-​ as-​ they-​ are, conditions systematically defended by vast power. As an individual you crash into all the traditional bonds and codes and networks that are the matrix of things-​as-​they-​are. If you are alone (I’m sure we will be alone from period to period –​this right now is a lucky time!) it takes every ounce of will to survive, to stay sane, to not break (or foolishly try to break out!). And in this context the bonds among resisters grow and deepen. They have to, it is the secret glue, the secret fire, it is a source of energy that unites and sustains the strivers. Sometimes I feel the ideas as such are sitting on top of this volcano. We cannot as yet formulate and systematize the fires raging deep inside this land. They manifest themselves directly in the behaviour, in feelings. But the time will come when we understand what is happening here, and see that we



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have given birth to a whole, different way of seeing and experiencing things; that we have given birth to a new body of ideas. (Guattari 2012: 295–​311)

Promising an uneasy, yet alluring melding of fiction and documentary, Latitante, which was to star Pasolini’s icon Laura Betti as one of the women fugitives, with Guattari and Kramer themselves in supporting roles, would have an interesting addition to the cycle of films –​from Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979) and Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981) to Godard’s great sequence of Sauve qui peut (la vie), Passion and Prénom Carmen –​that was to mark a kind of drawn-​out Schwanengesang of post-​1968 political cinema in Europe. And indeed, perhaps at this stage Guattari and Kramer’s idea of a new kind of molecular political cinema was preparing its own flight, looking for a ‘safe house’ where it could go to ground and regroup its forces. In the poetically pragmatic opening notes to the film dossier (the style is obviously Kramer’s), Guattari and Kramer lay out their proposed approach to filming the fugitives’ world: This movie is not an exercise in search of an interpretation. On the other hand, its very basis is an assumption about the complexity, the very ambiguity of its subject. We can think of our approach to the subject as that of a laboratory technician taking samples of cells from different organs of the organism. Or as a radiologist taking X-​rays from each relevant angle: X-​rays of the chest show shadowy bones, a ghostly heart, all the strands of an organism of great capacity efficiently compressed into two dimensions. Only intimacy knows this thick blood forcing through its channel, livening, lightening human dreams, the hot secret food that carries in its spiral codes the lessons of all our striving ancestors.  (Guattari 2012: 295–​311)

Immediately striking are the references to scientific investigation and experiment, particularly in the field of microbiology, as well as the implied search for a revolutionary genetic code transmitted down through the ages. It is under these circumstances that we can imagine the autonomist ‘cells’ of a radio-​logical film begin to change into bacteriological ones, the chloroplasts of a mutant strain of phytoplankton functioning as a relay to what would emerge as the Infra-​quark Universe: UIQ.

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This genre shift was also symptomatic of a larger reorientation of the political imaginary between the late 1970s and early 1980s which, following the repression of social struggles on the ground, seemed to undergo a gradual detachment from the world and its material conditions towards more remote horizons of the possible. In many films of this period, the unconscious mourning and yearning for other forms of life briefly promised by the countercultural revolution, was re-​ projected in infantilizing, conservative terms of a transcendental, even messianic, horizon of benevolent extra-​terrestrial visitors and alien intelligences (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.) or more subversively transformed into horrified fascination, whether with a monstrous other (Alien), viral contagion (Shivers, Rabid) or mutations in subjectivity produced by technology and media (Videodrome). In A Love of UIQ, however, the alien intelligence would take the form of an invisible, infinitely minute universe that is already immanent, present as a potential force at the quantum level of the infra-​quark –​insisting as a kind of a dark matter that simply requires an adequate relay to be able to manifest itself and insinuate its way into the organic life and machinic arrangements of our planet. At the beginning of the film, this universe is no more than a faint signal in a sample of mutant cyanobacteria that chronobiologist Axel has managed to smuggle out of a laboratory in Brussels. Wanted for acts of ‘terrorism’ (the radio and TV interference caused by UIQ’s early signals are immediately identified as such), he escapes to Frankfurt with the help of an American journalist. The film’s opening scene sees their hijacked Piper Malibu touching down in a field, whose ‘blackened clumps of earth absorb the colour of the frost that covers them in patches’. The landscape is ‘glacial, bloodless, bathed in a strange inconsistency’. We are in the middle of the winter years. In a disco-​bar on the edge of town, Axel meets Janice, a punkish young DJ, who offers the two of them shelter in a squat she shares with a motley crew of outsiders. They help Axel re-​establish contact with the universe he has discovered –​from here on dubbed UIQ –​and following its instructions patch together a complex multi-​screen interface to translate its signals into words, sounds and images with which it can communicate. Part of the inventiveness of A Love of UIQ lies in the way Guattari deploys the squat scenario to recast his own transversal practice –​with its mix of clinical, political, philosophical and aesthetic components –​in terms of a multilayered fabulation. The disused factory/​squat where contact is once again made with UIQ, peopled by its odd mix of social outcasts (the aforementioned castaways of a new cosmic catastrophe), constitutes a heterogeneous, idiorhythmic milieu bearing certain similarities to the psychic economy of the La Borde clinic, while



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the disturbances that UIQ’s signals cause in Hertzian waves slyly reference the subversive activities of the free radio activists Guattari had met in Italy. In several virtuoso sequences, Axel, described as an amateur acrobat ‘whose body, when he launches it into the air, evokes the way UIQ turns towards humanity’, slips gratuitous gymnastic feats, reminiscent of those in Blade Runner, into his conversation in a manner that suggests a whole new possible cinematic choreography of body, voice and language.3 Then there is the question of UIQ’s own machinic ‘body’ and subjectivity which, having no form, no temporal and spatial limits, nor a stable sense of identity, tends to parasite existing forms of life and machines, infiltrating the minds and bodies of its hosts and plaguing communications systems with its interference and scrambling of codes. However, it isn’t long before UIQ begins to manifest itself as a disembodied proto-​facial diagram composed of three black holes, an image that haunts TV screens and can appear indiscriminately in the sky, pools of water, the movement of crowds or the flight of birds. The process of subjectivation it undergoes in the squat effectively lures UIQ into adopting more human personality traits. Though it continues to constitute a deterritorialized field of contamination, affecting machines, communications systems and living organisms, UIQ also acquires distinct characteristics, a bearing, a voice, a manner of speech (eerily close to Guattari’s own). Its discovery or invention of a sense of self, thanks to the nurturing guidance of Janice, who informs it about sexuation and identity, causes it to fall in love with her and provokes fits of jealous rage when she occasionally abandons her role as its teacher for more tangible physical pleasures with Axel. As Janice steers it towards a limiting, potentially dangerous sense of hetero-​ normative male self-​identity, the girl becomes the object of its fatal passion, an impossible love that will have catastrophic consequences for them both and for the planet. Its attempts to conquer her take on a surrealistic dimension when it/​ he tries to incarnate itself as a man, only to find the embodied self becoming a physical rival for her affections. In a sense, UIQ is nothing more than the formless betweenness that connects its numerous botched avatars and subtly alters relationships among the squat’s residents, many of whom develop their own singular rapports with the universe: Manou, a precocious and highly independent child apparently without parents; Steeve, a burnt-​out computer scientist; Eric, a schizoid young man (a development from Ugo in the free-​radio script) with a penchant for washing machines; and, crucially, Janice herself, who travels from a punkishly impertinent university dropout and amateur DJ to a figure of tragic grandeur, a cyborg Joan of Arc, the shell to UIQ’s ghost. Her sudden disappearance, following a raid on

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the squat by an anti-​terrorist task force, condemns the bereft UIQ to an infinite –​ because it is bodiless –​pain, and unleashes his rage in the form of a plague of genetic mutation, turning huge numbers of people into semi-​amphibians who are in constant need of watering. Only when Janice returns and agrees to have the UIQ virus implanted into her brain does the plague end. However, the cerebral merger with UIQ brings with it an undesired immortality, as she discovers when subsequently attempting suicide in the last scene of the film. But before this, much of the central part of A Love of UIQ explores the effects the Infra-​quark Universe and the squatters have on each other and on the outside world, an attunement process that gives rise to a bizarre choreography of inexplicable gestures, actions and micro-​events where we are never quite sure who or what is the cause, where one will or desire ends and another begins.4 Everything seems to take place in an elastic, indeterminate space of tragicomic burlesque where it is impossible to make any clear distinction between subjects and objects of perception, vision or sensation. Hence the film’s bizarre, unsettled tonality, the way it tries to release the semiotic delirium that subtends science-​ fiction cinema from the signifying structures (story, psychology, clearly individuated characters etc.) that reinforce normative patterns of desire. A number of the film’s elaborate set-​piece scenes enchain actions and affects that veer wildly across registers and genre boundaries and that, like UIQ, seem to have no sense of measure or proportion. A potential air disaster at a crowded beach resort, caused by UIQ’s interferences, is envisioned with the mixture of dreamy wonder and gleeful malevolence of a child’s game, only to then mutate into a mixture of surreal comedy and poetic suspension, as though a scene from Ivan’s Childhood had drifted onto the set of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. Elsewhere, sexual decorum is radically overturned when a traumatized UIQ’s disembodied black-​ hole diagram of a face, appearing on several different screens, assists like a disgruntled baby at a primal scene of ‘parental’ congress between Janice and Axel, and at the same time is wracked by their physical sensations, resulting in a desperate animal cry whose unbearable intensity is relayed through the petrified body of Eric, perched like a Greek statue on a chair, and the antics of a screaming monkey that in the end defecates on his shirt. In a later scene, we ‘see’ UIQ on one screen engaged in intimate dialogue with Janice, while on another it gives precise instructions to Manou on how to prepare a deadly cocktail to give to a tramp she is afraid of who dwells in the recesses of the squat, distantly evoking a scene in Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero in which Edmund’s unrepentant Nazi schoolteacher convinces him to poison his weak father.



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As the film progresses, we have the feeling of snatched intensive fragments from an eclectic repertoire of cinéphile references, from Close Encounters to Theorem, Blade Runner to Mauvais Sang, being re-​fashioned as components of a more unruly, deterritorializing machine, one in which the elements of voice, body and face undergo a startling recomposition, a world where Godard, Tarkovsky and Fellini trade ideas with Cronenberg, Carpenter and Lynch. Although we will probably never know what form A Love of UIQ would take on screen, it’s tempting to imagine certain sequences being close to silent cinema –​which, in Guattari’s view, was much more successful than sound cinema in expressing the intensities of desire in relation to the social field, since the signifying script (and with it the individualizing forces of capitalism) had not yet taken possession of the image  –​even within the spectacular tropes of a sci-​fi blockbuster. The relationship between different regimes of cinematic image is by no means clear. It is a question of how desire flows and is channelled both within and between the regimes. As Guattari (2009: 245–​6) wrote in 1977, in one of his most lucid texts on cinema as minor art: Desire is constituted before the crystallization of the body and the organs, before the division of the sexes, before the separation between the familiarized self and the social field. It is enough to observe children, the insane, and the primitive without prejudice in order to understand that desire can make love with humans as well as with flowers, machines, or celebrations. It does not respect the ritual games of the war between the sexes: it is not sexual, it is transsexual . . . I must say of cinema that it can be both the machine of eros, i.e. the interiorization of repression, and the machine of liberated desire. There is no political cinema on the one hand and an erotic cinema on the other. Cinema is political whatever its subject; each time it represents a man, a woman, a child, or an animal, it takes sides in the micro class struggle that concerns the reproduction of models of desire. The real repression of cinema is not centered on erotic images; it aims above all at imposing a respect for dominant representations and models used by the power to control and channel the desire of the masses. In every production, in every sequence, in every frame, a choice is made between a conservative economy of desire and a revolutionary breakthrough. The more a film is conceived and produced according to the relations of production, or modelled on capitalist enterprise, the more chance there is of participating in the libidinal economy of the system. Yet no theory can furnish the keys to a correct orientation in this domain. One can make a film having life in a convent as its theme that puts the revolutionary libido in motion; one can make a film in defence of revolution

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that is fascist from the point of view of the economy of desire. In the last resort, what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane is not the words and the contents of ideas, but essentially asignifying messages that escape dominant semiologies.

In this sense the script of A Love of UIQ constitutes a somewhat paradoxical, quasi-​object. Rather than providing the coherent structure required for it to be green-​lighted for production, it opens up a problematic field that promises to undermine the codes of mainstream spectacle while saving (or spending) the a-​signifying delirium that subtends it, which it hopes to place in the service of another economy of desire. But because of this wild semiotic expenditure, it can never settle upon a specific code of its own. Like UIQ itself, Guattari’s film resists hypostatization in a stable form or identity. This shifting, unsettled quality, figured in UIQ’s own problems of embodiment, of finding a form it can inhabit, traverses the development of Guattari’s script, which evolved through three very different versions. With UIQ, Guattari invented something that surpassed, or passed under, its proposed frame of representation, an infra-​cinema that despite, or perhaps on account of, its remaining unmade, insists by way of a kind of intermittent pulsation. In this sense, the three successive revisions of the screenplay can almost be read as records of an overall pattern of UIQ’s own manifestations and disappearances. In the first version, co-​written with Kramer, much of the action takes place in a hi-​tech hippie commune somewhere in the eastern United States. It appears that Guattari originally intended Kramer to direct the film, and that he wanted to produce it in Hollywood. The fact that Guattari sent a copy to the office of Michael Phillips, the producer of Taxi Driver and Close Encounters who, though intrigued by some of the ideas, deemed the project ‘too political’ for the United States,5 shows that his aim at this point was to make the film as minor cinema on a major scale. Perhaps he and Kramer were hoping to subvert the Hollywood machine from within, liberating spectacular images and sounds from the normalizing shackles of conventional narrative by pushing those narrative devices to an absurd extreme (and with the risk of falling into parody). Their differences in approach to the story are nonetheless striking. While Guattari insists on the importance of the collective milieu as a territory for experimenting with processes of subjectivation  –​a territory that would additionally enable him to further scramble the codes of cinematic representation through the insinuation of elements of performance, dance, installation and video art  –​ Kramer imagines the whole story taking place in flashback from the point where



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UIQ has already merged with the girl’s consciousness, as a kind of fragmented, psychogenic fugue. A second, unfinished version of the script transfers the action to a France of the near future, where an integrated Tativille-​style complex of shopping, media, banking, sports, entertainment and social rehabilitation facilities –​all accessed by digitally encoded personal swipe cards –​sets out the coordinates of a nascent control society amid the emerging networked infrastructures of Mitterand’s Paris, while as we have seen, the third and final draft –​the most underground in style –​set in Frankfurt, alludes to the TAZ and the squat culture of the 1980s Germany and to the dystopian post-​punk aesthetic of films such as Muscha’s Decoder (1984) or Ossang’s L’affaire des Divisions Morituri (1985). Nonetheless, more than to any specific cultural context or regime of representation, UIQ seems to pertain to the realm of contagion and contamination. Its existential dilemma lies in the continual translation of the unknown language of its universe into a series of unstable forms, none of which can be final. In quantum terms, wave function has it over particle, process over product.

Postscript: towards an ecosophy of the unmade It’s often the smallest scraps of evidence that are the most intriguing. The derisory, orphaned fragment is where desire is most likely to arise. Take this letter from Félix Guattari to Michelangelo Antonioni that we came across in the Guattari (2012: 319–​20) archives: Dear Sir, I asked our mutual friend Ugo Amati to send you the outline of a science-​fiction screenplay I’ve written, A Love of UIQ. I would really appreciate it if you had the time to read it and it would be a great joy for me if you should be interested in becoming involved. I’ve merely unfolded some key ideas that will have to be developed in more detail. Should the project be of interest to you I would be more than happy to meet you to discuss it in person. Yours sincerely, Félix Guattari

We don’t know whether Guattari ever sent the letter, nor when it might have been written. Why would he have kept a copy? But as Axel says in the UIQ screenplay, ‘What happens to communications isn’t necessarily the most important thing.’

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So we decided to treat it as a signal, a transmission from some far galaxy to another, possibly even more remote, that got lost in the quantum post. One thing is more or less certain. While Guattari began working on his screenplay, Antonioni was completing what would be his last major film for the cinema, Identification of a Woman. In the final scene we see the protagonist, a filmmaker navigating between a creative crisis and a stalled relationship, facing the sun, finally relaxed, dreaming of a science-​fiction film, an exploratory voyage into the heart of the solar furnace that, he hopes, will reveal mysteries of the universe. The idea is visually resumed in a deceptive lo-​tech special effects sequence showing the spaceship –​a converted asteroid –​being sucked into the sun’s pulsing, yellow-​orange deliquescence. As it recedes from view, the asteroid’s twin engines appear to stare back at us like two slightly comical black-​hole eye-​sockets that eventually solarize into what look like the slits of a settecento Venetian half-​mask. The asteroid-​ship then vanishes into the sun’s yellow core that gradually reveals itself as a ghostly impression of an eye in extreme close-​up. A meditation on the conditions, possibilities and limits of seeing and knowing, of vision and the visible, the film might well have struck a chord with Guattari and his ideas about an invisible alien intelligence from a subatomic realm smaller even than quarks, though he was likely also thinking of L’Avventura and the way its disappeared central character, the palindromic Anna, continues to dominate the film in her absence, like a kind of affective weather. The prospect of a collaboration between Guattari and Antonioni is tantalizing, opening onto yet another possible avenue of UIQ’s transformation. But fascinating as these lost horizons may be, it was the simple act of reading the screenplay, when we discovered it in the IMEC Archives, that made the film already exist for us, as though by a kind of contamination. And this was in a way entirely consistent with the nature of UIQ, an entity with no clear limits in time or space that comes into being only through its parasiting and imitation of already existing forms of matter and energy. By the time we published the script in France in 2012 with Éditions Amsterdam, in a volume we designed and edited ourselves and wrote in collaboration with psychoanalyst Isabelle Mangou, in which we also included the early film projects, as well as notes, production documents and fragments of Guattari’s exchanges with Kramer, we had projected the film in our heads countless times. Nonetheless the cineastes in us wouldn’t let it lie, even if we may have felt the script was inherently unfilmable. But how to convey something of this flickering vision and of UIQ’s own instability and intermittence? Perhaps by finding ways to ‘produce’ the film and manifest its universe without actually filming it.



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An essay by Pasolini (1988:  187–​96), ‘The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to be Another Structure’, suggests that an unmade screenplay can constitute a genre of writing in its own right, one that potentially offers the reader a more active and collaborative role than does the novel. But who is to say that a screenplay is merely a structure, or that its desire of becoming leans solely in the direction of the film to be? Especially in the case of a screenplay containing an entity such as UIQ, might it not also desire other forms of being? So instead of trying to film Guattari’s script, we set about conceiving a number of manifestations of the Infra-​ quark Universe (performance, radio trailer, installation, fabulation, rumour . . .) that would function through the years in the manner of a relay: each partially taken up by others and given a new twist. They eventually led to an experimental essay film, In Search of UIQ (2013), which formed something of a cartography of this spatiotemporal continuum of non-​ realization. As the title suggests, the film is a search, and as such it remains in that zone of uncertainty, in the towardness of what Pasolini calls the note-​book film. Not towards a film. However, the script still seemed to require further investigation, its almost thirty years of lost time called for a more collective vision of its infra-​possibilities (and perhaps still does). In a series of workshops held in seven European cities, to which we gave the name seeances, we extended the idea of the film as a process, looking at Guattari’s screenplay in a way that reflected UIQ’s own predicament as an entity whose becoming has to be negotiated through ongoing translation and transduction. We considered how the subject of A Love of UIQ folded upon the question of the script’s unending desire to become a film, or perhaps something else. Transduction can refer to any process by which a biological cell converts one kind of a signal or stimulus into another. More specifically, it concerns the transfer of viral, bacterial, or both bacterial and viral DNA, from one cell to another using a bacteriophage vector.6 The idea here was to make Guattari’s film exist by a process of contamination, with the screenplay functioning as a cinebacteriological vector, transferring the film and the Infra-​quark Universe in potentia to a community of seers or ‘envisionaries’. Rather than a cinematic production that would reduce the indeterminate matter of UIQ to a specific set of representations, exploitable as a spectacle, the film would come into being through its unworking or worklessness,7 as a living process of variations. These temporary communities (in a vague mirroring of the squat dwellers who make contact with UIQ) gathered around the screenplay and welcomed UIQ into their systems through the medium of the script, envisioning the film and the universe it unveils in relation to the specific cultural, political and linguistic

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context of their own existence and desires, their fabulated histories and futures, sometimes transposing the script’s characters, actions and events to the present day. The work of transduction added further complexity to the process by which a written screenplay is normally translated to the screen. By conflating the roles of writer/​director/​actor and viewer, the envisionary communities were able to expand the territories of the film both from within and without, multiplying its narrative and affective folds, blurring the borders between the actual and virtual projection. Which also meant that the UIQ effect might have been there in the room, with and between the participants. People would start to feel the space and each other’s presence differently, their tone of voice would change, something in the atmosphere shifted, though it was difficult and perhaps undesirable to identify exactly what this consisted in. Our sense of time, but also of purpose and of efficacy, would change during these sessions, which became like zones of autonomous temporality in which the unknown quantity and intensity of vision displaced and devalued the currency of knowledge. And as we went on with the seeances, we began to realize we didn’t need to rely so heavily on the script itself. Sometimes just the suggestion of a situation or scene was enough to set imaginations going. Plus there were aspects of the script that some people didn’t find particularly fruitful or that they wanted to take in another direction, queery, alinguify, defacialize, infrathin . . . With the sound recordings of these sessions, and bearing in mind the screenplay and UIQ’s potential desire for other becomings, we decided to make an invisible film by other means, a polyphonic soundwork where all the voices, visions and spaces of gathering could co-​exist, resonate, feed off and build upon each other. In the beginning, the idea was simply to ‘recompose’ Guattari’s film through glimpses of what had been evoked or speculated upon by the more than seventy envisionaries, but during the mixing process, when we started to work on spatializing the voices, we and our mixing engineer noticed another ‘film’ emerging in parallel to UIQ: the film of this scattered community coalescing across an acousmatic plane of collective enunciation and coming into some kind of being of its own.8 Perhaps this is what we would wish for Guattari’s film, that it keep on keeping on, existing in a quantum space, both wave and particle, process and crystallization, in an eternal return of nascence, but one that through its infra dimension may continue to produce a becoming ancestral, animal, vegetal, cosmic of the image, ‘collective entities half-​thing half-​soul, half-​man half-​beast, machine and flux, matter and sign . . . always to be reinvented, always about to be lost’ (Guattari 1995: 102, 116).



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Notes 1 In Guattari (2012: 284–​93). 2 See Collettivo A/​traverso, Radio Alice –​ Free Radio (2007: 133). 3 As well as the obvious reference to Pris in Blade Runner, here we can see (pre) echoes of Cronenberg’s The Fly. We can also assume that scenes like this were not a rare occurrence at La Borde, as the documentary Le droit à la folie (Igor Barrère 1977) testifies. In this observant portrait of everyday life at Cour-​Cheverny we see the methods of Guattari and Oury at work in the perpetual self-​invention of a collective, though heterogeneous machinic ecosystem. 4 Guattari’s abiding interest in the non-​linguistic components of semiotic polyvocality is also present in another film project he briefly sketched out in the 1980s, Project for a film by Kafka, a process in which ideas for the scriptwriting and filming, focusing on the gestures, postures and latent sounds of Kafka’s expressive machine rather than its more narrative elements, were to have been generated by a series of workshops involving participants from different fields including choreographers, actors, musicians and architects. See ‘Projet pour un film de Kafka’, in Félix Guattari Soixante-​cinq rèves de Franz Kafka, Stéphane Nadaud ed. (Paris: Lignes, 2007), 40–​56. 5 See letters, Hollywood synopsis and related production documents in Félix Guattari (2012: 215–​48). 6 See Gilbert Simondon (2017). 7 See Maurice Blanchot’s (1955) development of the concept of désœuvrement in L’éspace littéraire,. 8 The soundwork UIQ (the unmaking-​of) was first installed at The Showroom Gallery, London, in 2015 as part of our solo exhibition it took forever getting ready to exist, co-​commissioned by The Showroom and The Otolith Collective.

References Barrère, Igor (1977), La Borde ou le droit à la folie. 60m film. Berardi, Franco Bifo (2009), The Soul at Work –​ From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Blanchot, Maurice (1955), L’éspace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard. Collettivo A/​traverse (2007), ‘Radio Alice –​Free Radio’, in Autonomia: Post-​Political Politics, Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds, Cambridge/​MA and London: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications.

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Guattari, Félix (1996), ‘Remaking Social Practices’, trans. Sophie Thomas, in The Guattari Reader, Gary Genosko, ed., 262–​72, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Guattari, Félix (2009), ‘Cinema of Desire’, in Chaosophy –​Texts and Interviews 1972–​ 1977, Sylvère Lotringer ed., trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and Taylor Adkins, 235–​46, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2012), Un amour d’UIQ: Scénario pour un film qui manque, ed. Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Paris: Editions Amsterdam. Guattari, Félix (2016), A Love of UIQ, trans. and introduced by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, Minneapolis: Univocal. Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1988), Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Simondon, Gilbert (2017), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove, Minneapolis: Univocal.

7

The Guattarian Art of Failure: An Ecosophical Portrait Zach Horton

The Guattarian machines One might be justified in thinking it poor taste to highlight Félix Guattari’s failures in a volume celebrating his success as an ecosophical thinker. There are reasons to be wary of success, however; not least because success is a subjectivizing technology, a reterritorialization of heterogeneous forces into an author-​ function. Any success that Guattari met in his endeavours could only have been bittersweet to a restless cartographer of new subjectivities, an escape artist forever dodging the interpellations marshalled by the dominating and molarizing forces of psychoanalysis, axial party politics, neoliberal capital and mass media. I will argue in this chapter that one of Guattari’s unique attributes is his capacity to feed failure back into processes of intersubjective, theoretical and artistic production to ‘restart the machinery’ at new scales. Indeed, I will posit failure, along with trans-​scalar integration, as the central problematic of ecosophy. Guattari would certainly agree with Judith Halberstam (2011:  89) when she riffs on Antonio Gramsci, observing that ‘a radical political response [to ideology] would have to deploy an improvisational mode to keep pace with the constantly shifting relations between dominant and subordinate within the chaotic flow of political life’. Halberstam has influentially linked this improvisational, performative mode of de-​ interpellation with failure, the negative to neoliberalism. Queerness, for Halberstam, is most effective when it adopts a negative stance towards these dominating forces. To succeed is to be enrolled into dominant forms of subjectivity. We might put it thus:  if you succeed, you aren’t trying hard enough. Yet while Guattari shares the same project, it must be said that his means are quite different. Suspicious of negativity,

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Guattari actively sought to elude binary formations, Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, and, following Baruch Spinoza, negative affect. These refusals helped to propel him into wildly inventive periods of creation, but also allowed him to slip into a long, deep depression, with little prospect of being able to directly ‘use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life’ (Halberstam 2011: 4). I am not arguing, then, that Guattari embraced the notion of failure; in fact, failure was difficult for him to overcome in life and never directly confronted in thought. We must not be afraid, however, that speaking of failure will paint Guattari in a negative light. His life is his philosophy, and it is misleading to sanitize either. Together they form a machinic assemblage that is enormously productive in ways that either theory or praxis alone cannot be. Guattari’s philosophy is vexed, contradictory and tactical: it is designed to be deployed in concrete situations. This is part of what makes it susceptible to failure, and thus to creative reapplication. In the speculative biographical sketch that follows, I will trace several domains of activity that delineated the Guattarian territory of fluxes that emerged from their superimposition. Each was blocked at strategic points by failures, dead ends in which the desiring machines that comprised Guattari’s singularity found themselves at an impasse. Each failure ultimately led to the founding of a new series of expressive activity. As the blockages became more severe, the Guattarian machines eventually composed a trans-​modal territory in order to enable freedom of movement between them, and thus a multi-​scalar line of flight from any potential blockage, to which he gave the name ecosophy. In my processual reading of ecosophy, biographical narrative will prove integral to reconstructing its conceptual assemblage and evaluating its potentia as praxis. I hope that along the way we can dispel the suspicion, expressed by some casual readers of Guattari and Deleuze, that this abstract philosophical system is somehow impractical, or worse, disconnected from concrete struggle. Taking Guattari’s life as an example demonstrates the opposite to be the case. But what are these Guattarian machines that covered so much territory, dabbled in so many domains and ran aground so many times? Any individual is a vast collection of machines functioning at different scales and speeds, but I wish to focus on two machinic systems that seem to have been the primary drivers of the individual we know as Félix Guattari through the adventures that I am about to recount. The first of these is a centripetal-​connection machine. Guattari was a social creature, drawn to other humans. He loved to be near his patients at La Borde, loved to be surrounded by friends, was drawn to many lovers. His house was, for most of his life, an active hub of friends, who would drop by at all hours;



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some of them would be living with him at any given time. Guattari, drawn to others, almost manically pulled them inward, towards himself, connecting them together in vital rhizomes. As we shall see, in every domain of his activity, he acted as a centripetal force to produce new collective arrangements. And yet, despite Guattari’s singular desire and ability to attract others into new group formations, he was at his core also a peripatetic-​disruption machine. He could never stand still, never focus on only one activity at a time; he had a compulsion to keep moving, continually swim in new currents. This machinic desire expressed itself, in molar form, as a distrust and fear of structure, of stable formations with fixed values or circuits of exchange. He was driven to tackle these formations head on, to break them up, to molecularize them. This machine is not the inverse or opposite of the Guattarian centripetal-​connection machine. Often times these assemblages worked together, producing complex and unlikely results. At other times, as we will see, they would confront each other head-​on and stall. Neither are these privileged or universal machines; in their actual functions, they are particular to Guattari as a singularity. Gilles Deleuze, for example, was animated by quite different desiring machines, and that difference is the key to both his joint compositions with Guattari and to the lines of flight available to Guattari when facing failure.

Psychotherapy Jean Oury founded La Borde in 1951 as an experimental mental hospital. By 1955 he had recruited Guattari, then a student of Jacques Lacan, to join the staff. The young psychoanalyst wasted no time in getting to work. A devoted Sartrean and Lacanian, he was eager to engage patients and viewed their maladies as the manifestations of a desiring unconscious repressed and channelled by dominant social institutions imposed from without  –​what Sartre (2004:  319) deemed the realm of the ‘practico-​inert’. Liberation, and freedom, must begin with the individual, disarticulated from the serial forms of structure that collectivize subjectivity from without (capital) and re-​connected to an authentic, active self capable of forming positive, non-​inert collectives (what Guattari came to call the group-​subject). Guattari’s therapeutic praxis thus fused Lacan and Sartre in a potent mix of peripatetic-​disruption and centripetal-​connectivity: ossified (serial) groups were to be broken up at the same time that new groups were to be formed along lines of collective desire. Psychosis could be treated only through both interwoven movements. The goal was to free patients from normalizing

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interpellations and open up new avenues of unconscious expression, which were to connect them not to the individual therapist (classical Freudian transference) but rather to other patients and the entire staff of nurses, doctors and technicians at La Borde –​and then, ultimately, to society at large. Guattari’s institutional innovations at La Borde quickly became revolutionary. The traditional institutional hierarchy, with the director at the top of a pyramid that then incorporated the doctors, then nurses, then technicians and finally the patients at the bottom, would have to be short-​circuited. Guattari’s reforms were diagrammatically expressed as ‘transversality’. This concept, one of Guattari’s greatest conceptual inventions, was simultaneously disruptive and connective. Rather than completely abolish hierarchy in favour of a flat social field, transversality is opposed to both vertical structures (where commands propagate along a narrow, linear hierarchy) and horizontal ones (where difference is negated within a given hierarchical level by subjecting/​subjectivizing individuals according to a pregiven structure –​that is as a serialized collective, or what we might call an identity). In the clinical context, both verticality and horizontality reinforce an inward-​directed subjectivity: ‘So long as people remain fixated on themselves, they never see anything but themselves’ (Guattari 1984: 18). Accordingly, transversality short-​circuits hierarchy rather than breaking it down, preserving the intensities of difference but rendering them rhizomatic, opening pathways that route around linear circuits. Its goal is to form a network of connections among different institutional and social strata as well as through different codes of exchange. Transversality is achieved ‘when there is maximum communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings’ (Guattari 1984:  18). Guattari recognizes that verticality and horizontality are social functions, but also semiotic functions. The goal of transversal formations is to create new pathways and circuits for unconscious desire, still conceived in a linguistic register. ‘If a certain degree of transversality becomes solidly established in an institution, a new kind of dialogue can begin in the group: the delusions and all the other unconscious manifestations which have hitherto kept the patient in a kind of solitary confinement can achieve a collective mode of expression’ (20). Institutionally, Guattari’s connective/​disruptive drive ultimately leads to a strict codification of transversality in the form of ‘the grid’. Initially invented at La Borde’s spin-​off clinic La Chesnaie as a way of doling out communal chores, the grid was an organizational matrix that assigned individual staff members to particular tasks at particular times. When this method of bookkeeping and allocation made its way back to La Borde, Guattari took charge of the allocations.



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In his hands from 1957 onwards, the grid became an absolute instrument of transversal reassignment. Every day was divided into a series of time slots on the y-​axis. Every employee was listed on the x-​axis. At every gridded intersection, a task was entered by Guattari. All workers at La Borde were forced to perform the job assigned to them during any given slot. A  transversal instrument par excellence, the grid forced doctors to wash dishes, cleaners to attend to the mental health of patients, administrators to clean floors and so on. La Borde’s institutional hierarchy was driven to a state of permanent movement and disruption, with Guattari at the helm. At the same time, new configurations were continually coming into being as a result of the shifting matrix as Guattari drew them together in unexpected ways. As such, the grid was in some sense the perfect expression of the dual Guattarian machines. As must be clear, however, this systematic deterritorialization could not help but reify a new hierarchy, reterritorializing the forces liberated from the institution’s serial structures onto the form of the Guattari-​grid itself. Guattari occupied a somewhat Stalinist position as the dictator of labour roles, wielding absolute power over everyone else. ‘I was motivated by a sort of militant centralism’, he noted later (Histoires de La Borde, 266, quoted in Dosse 2011: 57). Here the Guattarian machines hit their first wall. The grid was a reification of Guattari’s desire, in which an ideal dynamic was implemented in one domain that served to disarticulate and elevate Guattari as an individual, molar subject. The grid accomplished his tactical goals, but only at the expense of a strategic loss that came, paradoxically, in the form of a strengthened individual identity. For some, the grid embodied the director, the supreme ‘grid maker’, a realization of the utopia; for others, it was a destructive steamroller crushing individuals and their desires in the name of some common interest. Those who were subjected to the work assignments typically overinterpreted them; they saw the grid as a way for Guattari to attack and test this or that inhibition or phobia . . . Over the years, the somewhat rigid system came increasingly under fire. (57)

The Guattarian centripetal-​ connective machine, manically drawing others together, had turned on itself and disarticulated Guattari from those whose schedules he dictated. The peripatetic-​disruptive machine, perpetually scrambling the occupational and social structures of others, found itself locked into an absolute structure, walled in by its own manic activity. The grid, then, was Guattari’s first true failure, not because it didn’t function correctly, but because it functioned too well, reifying and negating itself. A paradox: in content, transversal; in form, practico-​inert.

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The grid embodied, diagrammatically, the contradictions of early Guattarian psychoanalysis, as well as the contradictions between Guattari’s molecular forces and their molar reterritorializations. Ultimately, it would require a fresh perspective, a new deterritorializing force acting directly upon the Guattarian machines, to clear this blockage and move forward. Luckily, this was to enter Guattari’s life in the form of Gilles Deleuze. ‘Then there was the miracle, my meeting Deleuze, which opened the way to a whole series of things’, said Guattari (2009a: 83) much later. Their joint project, Anti-​Oedipus, would dismantle the diagram of the grid. The principal target was Jacques Lacan, Guattari’s teacher and personal analyst. Lacan’s structuralist interpretation of the unconscious was central to his theoretical and practical system of psychoanalysis:  the unconscious was a linguistic system, a structure defined by lack, composed of an endless chain of signifying elements directed towards that lack, the Other. The Law of the Father, or the transcendent law of signification itself, governed the unconscious just as Guattari governed the grid. The desiring subject, in endless pursuit of wholeness, was doomed to wander the halls of language like a forlorn Parisian after the last métro. Guattari’s experiments at La Borde, meanwhile, had accepted this structuralist view of the unconscious, but always revealed a remainder, a will not to wholeness but to flight, to disintegration; not to death (thanatos), but to a re-​singularized, pluralized life. Guattari’s therapeutics did not fit in the Lacanian box, but were packed there nonetheless. Deleuze, who ‘never took Lacan seriously at all’ (Guattari and Stivale 2009a: 166), deterritorialized Guattari’s thought, liberating its potentials from the structuralist grid. Anti-​Oedipus was ‘both a careful and scholarly enterprise and a radical and systematic demolition of Lacanism and all my previous references; clarifying concepts I had been “experimenting with” in various fields, but which couldn’t reach their full extension because they were too attached to their origins’ (Guattari 2009a: 84). Though at the time Guattari had told himself that he was merely pushing the general impetus of Lacan’s thought further than Lacan had dared, Lacan disagreed, and never spoke to his protégé again after reading Anti-​Oedipus (Dosse 2011: 185). For Guattari and Deleuze, the name of structure is Oedipus. Traditional psychoanalysis is a process of decoding, of reading semiotic patterns, of following the threads of the unconscious back to the structure of the family or of the Law. In the Lacanian version, this allows for infinite, never-​ending movement (this is why it interfaced so well with the Guattarian peripatetic-​ disruption machine), but only within a grid of differential signifiers. The subject never reaches the outside (the Real) directly; instead, she collapses ever inward,



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self-​referentially. For Guattari and Deleuze, this is backwards. Therapy should be about reaching outward, re-​interfacing with others, forging new connective lines and enunciative assemblages. As Guattari puts it, ‘The unconscious is turned toward the future’ (Guattari and Stivale 2009c: 177). Desire is not driven by lack but by creativity. There is no wholeness to seek because no conscious singularity lacks wholeness –​far from being 1-​, each ‘individual’ is a 1+, a multiplicity of fluxes. ‘Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 26). At the centre of desire is the machine, that which produces. Psychosis is the blockage of desire, the unconscious turned inwards on itself, stuck in repetition that is not symptomatic, but etiological. Psychosis is the Oedipalization of the desiring machine into a reified subject. Psychoanalysis, then, is a further technology of individuation, not a release or escape. A new conception of desire, subjectivity and therapeutics is necessary. Finally expressed in all of its delirious, de-​Oedipalized radiance, Guattari’s new machinic subject is the schizo. The process of freeing it from individuation, from Oedipalization, from the past, from inertia, from the counterflows of capital is schizoanalysis. In the world of psychoanalysis, which Guattari hoped to definitively disrupt and recompose, schizoanalysis was a failure. Lacan ordered that it not be engaged or debated within the respectable halls of French academic psychology (Dosse 2011: 209). Few practitioners knew what to do with the concept. In the United States, Freudianism was already dead, replaced by a behaviourism even more reactionary, infantalizing and hostile to notions of a desiring, productive unconscious. Schizoanalysis, as a therapeutic practice, never left La Borde. Guattari remained there with it. Curiously, for an analyst who militated so strongly against ‘the segregation that persists in various forms between the world of the mad and the rest of society’ (Guattari 1984: 11), he never left La Borde, remaining consumed by mundane, daily organization and group therapy until the day he died (Dosse 2011:  492). Success for his patients meant getting out, producing new assemblages in society at large, and there certainly were dramatic successes. Jean-​Baptiste Thierrée, a Parisian magician, came to La Borde in the dual role of performer and patient of Guattari. Guattari bolstered his confidence and creative potential to such a degree that he ended up contacting Charlie Chaplin’s daughter, Victoria, and convincing her to start a circus with him. They ended up marrying and weaving a wild, successful circus, curing a catatonic patient at La Borde in the process (63–​4). Only Charlie Chaplin came out behind, losing his starring actress in his planned but never realized film, The Freaks.

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Guattari, devoted to his patients, continued managing La Borde even as he slipped into a long, deep depression during the last twelve years of his life, a depression that schizoanalysis seemed helpless to cure. Guattari’s great travels, great adventures, would not be within the domain of psychotherapy. Schizoanalysis was ultimately a line of flight from psychology, leading away from La Borde only through the back door of politics.

Politics Driven to surround himself with others and compose endless groups, Guattari’s proto-​political organizing began in high school, when he organized a gang, then, unsatisfied, moved on to organize an opposing gang (Dosse 2011: 24). The centripetal-​connective machine would have been well suited for party politics, but the peripatetic-​ disruption machine wouldn’t have it. Decomposition, immanent opposition and continual lines of flight were always on Guattari’s political menu, from the postwar Youth Hostels to the Communist Party to CERFI (Center for the Study and Research of Institutional Formation), an organization created by Guattari that would eventually include Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Founded in 1967, CERFI represented an attempt to create a political group that would eschew the hierarchical structure of a political party, organizing leftists around particular intellectual projects and the formation of heterogeneous groups rather than homogeneous, united political action. Like many others in France, Guattari was surprised and delighted by the seemingly spontaneous eruption of militant action across many organizations and social strata in May 1968. While he had little to do with the initial student protest movement, led by Daniel Cohn-​Bendit, he played a significant role as the protests began to spread beyond the confines of the university. Guattari helped plan demonstrations and occupations, acting as a liaison between the various militant networks in France, with which he had long held ties (Dosse 2011: 173). Guattari was one of the key organizers of the occupation of the Odéon Théatre on 15 May, which transformed the space from a state-​sponsored theatre to a radical public forum. As the movement spread to workers across the country, Guattari called upon not only the doctors and staff of La Borde to join, but also its patients. Despite the objections of Jean Oury, the director of the clinic, Guattari had many of the patients shuttled on a daily basis to occupations and protests in Paris (172). Here politics afforded a connective ligament from the delimited space of mental illness to the large-​scale engagement of social illness.



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For Guattari, May ‘68 was ‘an amazing experience’ that seemed to materialize from out of nowhere (Dosse 2011:  171). Unfortunately, it dissipated just as quickly, having failed to convert its radical energy into concrete social change. Guattari’s entire political life up to that point was driven by a restless infiltration, rupturing and negotiation between various leftist groups. May ‘68 provided the ideal milieu for the Guattarian machines to leap into action, to drive to their limits. For this one brief moment, the latticework of French militant politics could fully harness its various intensities in an energized series of circuits that Guattari was uniquely situated to sail. The aftermath of this delirious two-​month period, then, was a severe let-​down to Guattari. Collective Marxist energies had finally coalesced into widespread revolutionary force, but this oppositional, negative libido had failed to dominate and redirect the capitalist forces that had so long suppressed it. Postwar European leftism had been animated by Hegelian dialectics, the energizing of the negative as the primary force for historical change, a movement towards truth –​understood as the liberation of a latent form of consciousness. From Adorno to Sartre to Marcuse, the historical movement towards truth is precisely the fulfilment of a subjectivity that arises in opposition to the given (apparent, structured) reality. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2008:  79)  –​Guattari’s later political ally and close friend –​suggests, this ‘dynamic re-​reading of Hegel filtered into the ‘68 culture’ and provided its internal understanding of its own energies. But by the end of 1968 this line of thought had hit a wall. The subject had awoken, had demanded the reform of the current status quo and had quietly dissipated. What was supposed to be the final stage of a world-​historical process had turned out to be worse than an intermediate step: it had been revealed as a dead end. But what had gone wrong? Guattari met Deleuze in late 1968, and the quiet philosopher, who had participated in May ‘68 only from the classroom, held the key to a new line of thought. It would take Guattari, however, to animate that line as a dynamic series. In Difference and Repetition, published that year, Deleuze had directly critiqued the Hegelian dialectic by suggesting that it was a mistake to characterize difference as oppositional –​the conceptual linchpin of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel fails to think difference in itself, subordinating it to the identical, ensnaring it as ‘the infinite circulation of the identical by means of negativity’ (Deleuze 1995:  50). In Hegel’s essentially theological thought, ‘difference remains subordinated to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude and analogy’. In contrast, Deleuze calls for a liberation of thought from the dialectic, the production of a philosophy of difference, which would elaborate

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difference as positive along Spinozan and Nietzschean lines, arising not out of identity or opposition but as a primary force of production in its own right. Just as Deleuze provided Guattari with a line of flight from Lacan’s understanding of desire as lack and the unconscious as a semiotic structure, his attack on Hegelianism cleared the way for Guattari to move beyond the political thought of the 1960s. The machines that composed Deleuze were quite different from the Guattarian machines: a solitary thinker rather than a peripatetic agitator, he was a sorting and mixing machine. He was a vital reader, a recomposer. He read thought as one might read, and then re-​interpret, a musical score. Consistency, the refrain, the circle, the rhizome: thought extended into space as lines, shapes, rhythms and networks. The Guattarian machines were more comfortable exploring the psyche, the forces that composed the individual and the social body. Politics, then, were the staging ground for these machines, the vital impulse of Guattarian creation. As we have seen, the centripetal-​connective machine necessarily made use of the latticework afforded by contemporary intellectuals, and especially Sartre, Lacan and Marcuse –​often leaving the peripatetic-​disruption machine nowhere to mobilize but inside, in the striated spaces of the institution and home. Deleuzean sorting and mixing had the effect for Guattari of philosophizing with a hammer, sounding out the hollowness and circularity of Guattari’s idols. This allowed new Guattarian forces to mobilize into a deterritorializing war machine. The resulting surge of ideas sent Deleuzean thought in an explosion of new directions, even as it dragged it into the realms of political mobilization and institutional psychoanalysis. Anti-​Oedipus, then, recomposed May ‘68 along new lines, liberating its potentials for a non-​Hegelian politics of the future. The book catalysed Franco Berardi’s political career, largely because it ‘does not interpret the consciousness that ‘68 had of itself, which was entirely internal to the Hegelian field’, but instead carries ‘‘68 beyond its consciousness . . . Anti-​ Oedipus works out this movement by abandoning the totalitarian frame within which the twentieth-​century social consciousness was determined’ (Berardi 2008: 82). Just as the individual is to be understood as composed by both social forces and a productive, desiring unconscious without reference to a lack or a missing whole, so too is historical consciousness to be understood as composed by machinic forces that have as their object only an immanent difference-​for-​ itself, a production of new singularities rather than a totalizing overturning of objectifying forces. Just as the unconscious lacks nothing, difference opposes nothing. May ‘68 was not a moment of total awakening in opposition to capitalist



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alienation, but a chaotic production of intensities, of momentarily liberated desires. The problem was that they had nowhere to go, and were dissipated when reterritorialized as the concrete demands of higher wages, union representation and so on. By articulating these desires to capitalist structures, they were not unified and awakened, as the neo-​Hegelian left had predicted, but rather dissipated and co-​opted in just the same way that psychoanalysis constantly re-​Oedipalized the subject. Thus, according to Guattari, ‘important things only started happening after that revolution, which was probably the last revolution in the old style’ (Guattari 2008b:  276; emphasis in the original). Deleuze’s diagrammatic analyses of the underlying refrains of militant thought brought this to light, while Guattari’s manic activism and multi-​scalar engagement with the libido energized it as a positive political program. Post-​‘68 politics would need to become a micro-​politics of desire, liberated from the quantitative demands of the capitalist subject and re-​directed towards creative compositions:  new subjects and new milieus. Anti-​Oedipus had a significantly larger influence on political radicals than it did on mental health professionals or academics. The new Italian left, in particular, took its primary message to heart. Beginning in 1975, a popular wave of militancy washed over the nation, the most Guattarian revolution Europe had yet seen. One early group, calling itself the Metropolitan Indians, or simply ‘Geronimo’, moved from town to town, demanding a quotient of green space for every citizen, the end of the nuclear family, the return of all animals held in zoos to their countries or origin, and so on. These demands, not merely unmet but unthinkable within capitalist logic, served to destabilize that logic rather than negotiate for a fairer deal within its structure. One member of the Metropolitan Indians later wrote:  ‘These were the great days during which marginals, autonomists from neighbourhood collectives and work places, footloose mavericks of every variety united in hot pursuit of pettifogging political parties, wresting from them any attempt to reduce the movement to a series of organs, reflecting in miniature, the institutions themselves’ (Anon. 2015). The influence of Guattari and Deleuze is clear: Political parties (including the Italian Communist Party, which had recently increased its share of regional and national seats) are unacceptable substitutes for the production of new assemblages and group-​subjects. Political action must be transversal, organizations non-​ hierarchical and heterogeneous. At the heart of radical militancy is creativity, the production of the new, starting with the body without organs as immanent ground for production: the body that doesn’t merely house functions, and in fact continually resists them. This body is not a container but a core, solid and whole,

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directed like a wrecking ball at the perpetually colonizing marches of capital –​ an “egg” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 19). This, finally, was a non-​dialectical May ‘68, a Guattarian-​Deleuzean revolution. In 1976, the monopoly enjoyed by the national RAI radio station ended, resulting almost immediately in a profusion of free, radical radio stations across the country. Providing commentary and news, these stations brought into being new group subjectivities capable of mobilizing massive protests almost instantaneously. As a technological-​ social assemblage, free radio sang the individual psyche into the circuits of an amorphous, virtual social body. Perhaps the most influential station was Radio Alice, started in Bologna by Berardi, who was determined to operationalize Guattari’s political concepts. In September 1977, Guattari and his large gang of militants travelled to Bologna, where 80,000 protesters filled the streets. He was greeted as a hero. Gérard Fromanger recounts the scene:  ‘When he walked down the streets of Bologna, everyone rushed to greet him, touch him, kiss him. It was crazy. Unheard of. He was Jesus walking on water’ (Dosse 2011: 291). Guattari’s photo was published on the covers of the local newspapers, which identified him as the force behind the gathering. This was the high point of Guattari’s political life, a concretization of his vision of a transversal, schizo politics. And yet it faded. The energies that marked 1977 were once again reterritorialized as party politics, recognizable blocs of interest groups, referendums and elections. Just as in May ‘68, no lasting political change resulted. Italy slid ever more towards the right. By the time Guattari and Deleuze had finished their magnum opus sequel to Anti-​Oedipus, a mere three years later, the Italian publishing house that had translated it decided that it wasn’t worth publishing at all. A Thousand Plateaus deterritorialized Anti-​Oedipus even further. If radical politics were to survive, they would need to morph beyond politics as commonly understood, into the intertwined realms of media and aesthetics.

Media and aesthetics Guattari always wanted to be a novelist. ‘He had an exaggerated lifelong obsession with Joyce’, claims Marie Depussé, a staff member at La Borde and editor of some of his writings. ‘He was born and died with Joyce’ (Dosse 2011: 51). Try as he might, however, Guattari couldn’t sustain his fragmented attempts at dramatic writing: flecks of novels, plays and memoirs. Depussé tried to dissuade him from



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such distractions, encouraging him to write in an academic and professional vein instead. When Deleuze met Guattari, he found him suffering from a debilitating condition of writer’s block. As they began to collaborate on Anti-​Oedipus, Deleuze set out to cure this Guattarian malady by subjecting him to a regimen of ascetic privation. Guattari was to write alone until 4 pm each day, without seeing anyone else, then mail his forced work to Deleuze, who would collect it and begin to refine it over a much longer period of time (7). Guattari suffered greatly from this forced separation from his friends: ‘He said, “We can do it together.” For a while it wasn’t very clear to me. Naively I thought “together” must mean “with my friends, the gang”. But that didn’t last long! I quickly understood that it would only be the two of us. It was a frenzy of work that I hadn’t imagined possible until then’ (Guattari 2009a: 83). Guattari’s writer’s block was cured. How did Deleuze, unexpectedly playing the role of doctor, do it? He forced the Guattarian machines out of alignment, intensified their differentials. Centripetal-​ connective:  cut-​ off, locked in a room  . . . it collects ideas, takes up weaving, spins a plane of consistency. Peripatetic-​disruption:  chained, rooted . . . it tears up the stationary, restlessly recombines ideas. Together they converge to a plane while generating difference, like a top that expends all of its radial energy differentiating itself from the floor. Guattari as top, as gyroscope? The Body without Organs as floor, as anti-​ productive surface of undifferentiated potential? Guattari’s thought is always a prelude to mobilization, to a headlong rush into the wilderness outside. But after Italy in 1977, Guattari’s writings are less primers for defeating the two-​headed hydra of capitalism (which always deterritorializes in order to reterritorialize as subjectivizing structuration) and more an experiment in thought-​aesthetics:  an engagement with artistic production in any potential domain, thinking that is itself art, a diagrammatic form of creation. A Thousand Plateaus is a deterritorialized novel (as well as an opera, a science lecture, a painting . . .). The Guattarian machines that could never finish a work of fiction tackled fiction itself, first with a call for ‘minor literature’ in Kafka, then with the BwO of A Thousand Plateaus, which has become less ground for political production and more artist’s palette. A  manual for artists, this work was the purest composition of the Guattarian and Deleuzean machines, all mashed up, put into nearly perpetual gyroscopic production. It wasn’t clear what one could do with this book/​anything. After A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze decamped to work out a new philosophy of cinema. For Guattari, the need to reinvest his energies returned. In the 1981 French presidential election, he took the opportunity presented

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by a joke in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo to back the French comic Coluche for president. Here the artistic imperative re-​energized the old political circuits that had for so long kept the Guattarian machines together as a composition. The form of politics would give way to the expression of theatre, of cinema. At the height of 1977, an arrest warrant had been issued for Franco Berardi –​the police had come to jail him and shut down Radio Alice. One step ahead, he fled to France, where Guattari put him up and they became close friends. Together, they collaborated on a book about Radio Alice (Guattari 1977). Now, inspired by the ability of radio as machinic medium to help compose new forms of subjectivity, Guattari decided to start his own version. Radio Tomato began broadcasting from Guattari’s kitchen towards the end of 1980, in support of the Coluche campaign. Its sociopolitical programming was confined to Monday afternoons. The rest of the programming was cultural: film, music and theatre (Dosse 2011: 304). The Guattarian machines were shifting gears. Centripetal-​movement converging to militant collectives became mediatized into technical-​social systems aimed at drawing in an ever-​ wider audience, composing it into an assemblage capable of expressing new subjective potentials. Guattari, inspired perhaps by Berardi, began to take media ever more seriously. The peripatetic-​disruption machine ensured, however, that all medial systems that homogenized their participants were targeted for dismantling. Television was the principle enemy here. Guattari (2008a: 238) had already made the stakes clear: cinema, television and the press ‘not only handle messages, but, above all, libidinal energy . . . they participate in the elaboration and transmission of subjective models’. Now, however, free radio had risen up as the medial war machine, opposing monolithic media primarily through means of collective enunciation: ‘Who is speaking in this assemblage? The radio hosts? It’s not clear . . . It perhaps betrays, first of all, a collective sense of being “fed up” with official media’ (Guattari 2009b: 49). But free radio, too, was easily appropriated by mass media, and when the radio waves were officially opened in France in 1981, the result was not a further proliferation of pirate radio stations like Tomato, but their drowning within the newly formed ocean of commercial radio, against which Guattari’s tiny transmitter could hardly compete. ‘On the surface of the aquarium there are radio-​loving minnows’, noted Guattari bitterly, ‘but below, there are fat advertising sharks’ (Dosse 2011: 304–​305). The neoliberal floodgates had burst, and as the 1980s inundated Guattari’s territory, he sank deeper and deeper under water.



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According to Berardi, Guattari’s friends called his depression ‘Joséphine’, after the young woman, a drug addict, he impulsively married in 1983. Guattari’s tumultuous relationship with Joséphine, which lasted until his death, increasingly isolated him throughout the 1980s. The centripetal-​connective machine stalled, shut down. Berardi (2008: 11) suggests that Guattari’s inability to recognize and find a place for his own depression was his greatest blind spot:  ‘Félix did not pay attention to depression, neither as a philosopher, nor as a psychoanalyst.’ He couldn’t see the negative; for him desire was always creative, always productive, repressed only when blocked. Ironically, he began to watch television continuously: ‘Guattari became catatonic, sitting with a pillow pressed to his stomach as if to protect himself from the outside world, watching television programs for days on end’ (Dosse 2011: 425). Guattari had previously denounced television as a tool of normative subjectivation, opposing free radio to its homogenizing reach. Even under conditions of depression, how could he allow himself to be mesmerized by its insipid structuration? I  suggest that during the Winter Years (his appellation for the 1980s), Guattari’s distinction between passive mass media and active, enunciative media began to break down. If subjectivity was constituted through the becoming and maintenance of intertwined biological, semiotic, affective and technological circuits, then none of these domains can be taken as structurally invariant; each is open to mutation. While it was certainly true that TV as a medial form tended to reinforce consumptive, reactive subjectivity, it was also true that it plugged the individual viewer into a vast network of hybridized exchanges, a seemingly endless medial milieu for Guattari to survey. Surely this is what mesmerized him, rather than the dull glow of the cathode ray tube. During this period, Guattari’s desire to become a fiction writer did not abate; he remained obsessed with Joyce, but couldn’t finish a novel, a book of poetry or a book of memoirs. His energies turned increasingly towards mass media production. His earliest known script was for a short film about free radio, set in Italy in 1977 (Maglioni and Thomson 2016:  18). He shelved this project, however, and began, in 1980, to write a screenplay titled Un Amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love). This project explored a fusion of spontaneous, polyvocal radio waves and the global totality of the TV milieu. The titular character of the screenplay, an “Infra-​Quark Universe” (UIQ), begins as a completely limitless, deterritorialized being that spans scales and domains. However, in its connection with others, in its interfacial endeavours, it becomes molar: it begins to feel jealousy, a desire to be materially instantiated in the human milieu, to have a(n) (inter)face. Eventually, UIQ satisfies this

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new, all-​too-​human need by manifesting a human form, Bruno, as an avatar for its love interest, Janice (Guattari 2016:  166–​7). The moment this form (initially identified in the script only as ‘Stranger’) is named, the building they occupy erupts in music: Chopin’s wedding march (168). UIQ’s tragic identity impoverishment (reduced to petit bourgeois desires) is also a scalar capture (an entire universe, yet smaller than a quark, re-​scaled to a human body). Capable of disrupting worldwide telecommunications and changing the human milieu (UIQ casually suggests curing AIDS and ending global pollution as potential courses of action), it here adopts an aggressive individualism that notably operates without Janice’s consent: she has not agreed to be Bruno’s lover, and isn’t even present in the scene that features “her” wedding march. UIQ, then, is something like a scale-​slippery Radio Alice, capable of signal jamming global capitalism from everywhere at once, and yet its medial conjurings end up confined to the manifestation of a phantasmic wedding with an uninterested bride. Centrally, then, UIQ is about failure:  the subjective capture and scalar reduction of its central protagonist, the failure of an alternative, radical politics to form around UIQ (the group of squatters who develop relationships with UIQ is ultimately disbanded by the police and seems to lose any interest in or hope for an alternative political movement), and even the failure of individual autonomy: in the end, millions of people are changed into mutants by UIQ, and Janice –​with intercerebral implants now delivering UIQ’s unmediated signals –​ unsuccessfully attempts suicide, convinced as the film ends that UIQ is denying her even that modicum of autonomy. Un Amour d’UIQ’s fascinating combination of potential and failure mirrors the techno-​cultural dynamics of the 1980s, during which the emergence of new technological potentialities of connection –​new milieus –​was accompanied by the resurgence of molarity: identity politics, neoliberalism, mass media, religious and social fundamentalism, heightened consumption and a resurgence of aggressive individualism. To move into an open future, to catalyse the production of mutant subjectivities, mass media itself would have to be transfigured into a tool. Guattari’s use of the epic science fiction film as paradigm for his most sustained and grand literary-​artistic endeavour acknowledges that the medial milieu is not about communication but rather the composition of territory itself. All media form circuits with one another and with the biological and semiotic systems with which they compose assemblages. Here Guattari’s depression likely opened a space for cartography, the patient act of charting the intensities of a deeply disappointing milieu.



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Published in 1989, Guattari’s (2013:  2) difficult book Schizoanalytic Cartographies asserts that ‘a double bridge will have been set up from human to machine and machine to human, across which new and confident alliances between them will be easier to foresee’. This does not imply that cartography is a passive exercise in plotting that which is already given. The medial milieu is characterized by ‘hyper-​complexity’, the interconnected flows of the radically different and yet inextricable domains of thought, techné, poiesis, biology and so on. In such a milieu, ‘the map here loses its primary vocation of having to represent the Territory’ (35). Instead, the map engenders new patterns of subjectivity by tracing connections through and between these domains. UIQ attempts to do exactly this, and like the catatonic Guattari, finds itself paradoxically entangled with molar forces. Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton (2012) has suggested that depression or melancholia may be the most proper mode of ecological thought. ‘It is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humor theory, melancholy is black, earthy, and cold’ (16). For Morton, ecological melancholia is not dialectical: ‘There is no negation in the unconscious and none in evolution. Things don’t disappear; they become vestigial or mutate’ (65). If Un Amour d’UIQ is an experiment in articulating medial cartography to mutant subjectivity, then it is profoundly ecological in sensibility. Like Morton, who opposes ‘dark ecology’ to happy, positive, consumption-​oriented environmentalism, and Halberstam, who opposes queer failure to the positive, normative narrative of success that sustains neoliberalism, Guattari’s dark script traces and opens new potential genera that it can’t concretely visualize. Seventeen million human-​amphibian mutants and counting, gills replacing lungs . . . what dark ecological intensities will be generated in this new, emerging milieu? Janice agrees to have electrodes implanted in her brain because UIQ will only speak to her, directly, and ‘without intermediaries’, remaining silent (catatonic) when faced with other interlocutors (Guattari 2016:  205), but this direct cybernetic connection between herself and the Infra-​Quark Universe has the effect not of immediacy –​the erasure of mediation –​but rather of medial multiplication, the production of a new medial substrate: Janice herself, or the radical punk formally known as Janice. In the end her thoughts multiply into a confused jumble, mixed with those of UIQ, while her battered body becomes a new transduction point, colonized by her infinite lover, mirroring the cybernetic substrate of 1980s corporate media. Janice has become schizoid, potentially opening to connections across scales and domains, and yet she is anything but

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liberated. UIQ, recapitulating in medial form the potentials that Guattari had striven for all of his life, becomes a conduit for capitalism, the negation of those potentials. As one character explains, referencing UIQ’s signature character trait, jealousy ‘always leads to the worst stupidities, starting with capitalism!’ (Guattari 2016: 204). I would like to suggest, then, that Un Amour d’UIQ is a re-​working of 1980s neoliberalism and cybernetic mediation through the lens of depression:  A machinic merging with a hybrid milieu, a retarding of the social circulation of humans and an accompanying opening to engagement with the nonhuman, with radical alterity. According to Morton (2012: 94), ‘[T]‌he ecological thought is intimacy with the strangeness of the stranger . . . Intimacy is never so obvious as when we’re depressed.’ The Winter Years marked Guattari’s engagement with ecology in all of its strangeness. Un Amour d’UIQ, however, was never filmed. Guattari collaborated with American director Robert Kramer, who was to direct the film, for years, but nothing came of the project, and Guattari eventually re-​wrote the script himself. He approached Stephen Spielberg, and Spielberg’s producer, Michael Phillips, in Hollywood, but no one wished to produce or direct a large-​budget science fiction film about an infinite being and its subjective mutations. Perhaps, as Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson (2016: 34) suggest, ‘rather than providing the coherent structure required for it to be green-​lighted for production, it opens up a problematic field that promises to undermine the codes of mainstream spectacle’. I think it is equally probable, however, that the film was rejected not because it appeared too radical but because it appeared too clichéd: UIQ’s infantilism and sterotypical character development, without the benefit of the proper critical context, may simply have appeared to be poor characterization. Even with the benefit of proper political context, the script’s juvenile dialogue remains difficult to digest. This is where Guattari’s script is at its most daring: not in its incoherence or its undermining of mainstream codes, but in its suffocating coherence, the overloading of their circuits with exactly those codes and no others. UIQ is infrastructural, its enunciative apparatus literally built (in an abandoned warehouse) out of the techno-​ detritus of corporate medial technologies:  computers, radios, screens, data cables, loudspeakers. The technology of mass media enables its occupancy (channel squatting) of capital’s amplificatory circuits, inaugurating its scalar jump from the atomic to the global, giving it a voice. This enables signal jamming at the global scale, but also induces feedback along those same channels. Ultimately, this playful encounter between the codes of capital and the codes of trans-​scalar alterity also enables the backflow



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of information, resulting in the re-​coding of UIQ as scale-​fixed subject. Guattari teases with the (always ongoing) production of mutant subjectivity, but his screenplay is not about its success. It is entirely fitting, then, that in charting the failures of human subjectivity and media culture, UIQ ensures its own failure as filmic production by overloading rather than evading the circuits of the culture industry. One and the same abstract diagram integrates the script’s diegetic failures with its production failures. If we are to offer a postmortem of the film, I suggest that the cause of death be registered not as monstrous mutation but as overdose on conventions ordinarily so beloved by studio executives. The script had little luck with independent filmmakers either, perhaps because it appeared too much like a Hollywood blockbuster. Guattari had a friend send Michelangelo Antonioni his script, and wrote him a letter imploring him to ‘become involved’, but the letter was never answered, and possibly never sent (Maglioni and Thomson 2016: 40). In any case, by the end of the 1980s, after several re-​writes, Guattari finally abandoned his great epic. He would never be a writer like Joyce or a filmmaker like Antonioni. Instead, he would return to philosophy and politics. This time, however, it would be ecology that served as the linchpin for his machinic rebirth.

Ecosophy And so we finally arrive at ecosophy! But wait:  We have been discussing it all along. Ecosophy, as I  treat it here, is a general problematic of integration across scales. It emerges as a fully articulated program for Guattari at the end of the 1980s as an integration of his previous domains of failure and gridlock. Psychology, politics and media-​art practice become the ‘three ecologies’ of the psyche, society and environmental milieu. Guattari calls these, variably, ‘existential Territories’, ‘types of eco-​logical praxis’ and ‘ecological visions’. This Table 7.1  Dimensions of the three ecologies Territory (space)

Praxis (liberatory procedure)

Vision (virtual horizon

Psyche

Individual

Schizoanalysis

Social body Global milieu

Nation/​party Environment

Politics (Cartography) Media-​art (Mecanosphere-​biosphere)

Mutant Subjectivities Cosmos

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is to say that as domains, they possess spatial, processual and virtual dimensions (Table 7.1). None of these dimensions can be reduced to the other, though each is a reconstitution of the domains encountered by the Guattarian machines up to that point. The purpose of articulating this matrix of domains and dimensions is not to produce a taxonomy, but to produce a rhizome. As we have seen, each of Guattari’s eventual failures within these domains was circumvented by a line of flight to another domain. These are transversal moves from one blocked domain to another open one, which must inevitably generate new blockages. Guattari’s indefatigable momentum always propelled him headlong into new territories of action, new forms of praxis and new virtual horizons. What he formalized as ‘ecosophy’ towards the end of his life was an articulation of all of these together into a rhizome, or non-​linear circuit. Its purpose is to catalyse a form of movement through scales and dimensions capable of circumventing not specific blockages, but any blockage (reterritorialization and structuration from without or psychosis from within) that could be imposed in the future. Guattari has now named his antagonist:  ‘Integrated World Capitalism’ (IWC). What he came to see during the Winter Years is that IWC already links these domains together according to its own logics of production: ‘Within a single world system it integrates all the different elements of class and caste societies based on exploitation and social segregation’ (Guattari 2009b: 230). IWC unifies and interconnects global exchanges of various sorts, thereby stabilizing the relationships between psyche, society and milieu (Figure 7.1). These relationships are formalized as nested scales arranged within hierarchies of extraction-​production. Late capital, then, produces endless circulation along both vertical and horizontal structures, a kind of planetary heat engine driven by institutionalized strategies of isolation, differentiation, sorting and asymmetry. Psychologists, political activists and artists are generally limited to working at one scale and within one domain at a time, and are thus consigned to endless cul de sacs when facing a globally unified structure. The psychoanalyst encounters psychosis in the individual psyche; the activist encounters the social reterritorialization of group energy into useless activity or fascist collectives; the artist encounters the aesthetics of the practico-​inert and mass media homogenization. We can also add that environmentalists face the accelerated degradation and toxification of natural ecosystems. Guattari’s bold claim is that these maladies are all manifestations of the same integrative diagram, symptoms of the same disease. Our failures to combat these problems in the domains of the commons, the psyche or the environment stem from our



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Figure 7.1  Diagram of Integrated World Capitalism.

failure to integrate them within a plane of consistency as broad and trans-​ scalar as capital’s. Against IWC, Guattari wishes to mobilize an alternative logic, a transversal set of connectives, a re-​wiring of these circuits. Gregory Bateson (1972:  498) had explored ecology via systems theory as the conjoined forces of natural populations, technological innovation and an ‘ecology of mind’ animated by a fundamental flaw in the Western cultural tradition:  ‘Our “values” are wrong.’ This integrative approach suited Guattari’s scalar concerns, and he increasingly looked to ‘ecology’ as the master circuit diagram within which diagnostic and autopoetic functions could be deployed. ‘Eco-​logic’, explains Guattari (2008c), ‘is the logic of intensities’, process opposed to structure. It ‘strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization’ (30). Ecology charts existential becomings, changes, immanent intensities as they proliferate difference. The paradox, for all knowledge systems, is that the virtual nature of this change, its emergent vectors, cannot be named, cannot be ossified as objects, or their essential natures (their becomings) are elided. Ecology, for Guattari, is the science, politics and aesthetics of change. Ecology must be more than a discourse about objects in the world; it must be a discourse about processes. This requires discourse itself to be rendered processual, contingent, deterritorialized. Change occurs in social ecologies, natural ecologies and ideational ecologies. To attend to that change is to participate in its flows. For Guattari, this process of engagement is itself potentially catalytic. Any engagement implies the mobilization of mental intensities; any shared engagement implies emergent social formations. Ecology, in this sense, includes

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the ‘mecanosphere’ of interconnected technological entities as well as human social formations, the milieu of thought and ‘natural’ territories produced by nonhuman plants and animals. ‘At the heart of all ecological praxes there is an a-​signifying rupture, in which the catalysts of existential change are close at hand, but lack expressive support from the assemblage of enunciation; they therefore remain passive and are in danger of losing their consistency’ (Guattari 2008c:  30). Ecology as a science of ecosystemic change defines the domain of milieu, but ecology as a general (abstract) diagram of change-​through-​ integration articulates the logic of Guattari’s overall project (Figure 7.2). Thus abstracted, ecology becomes ‘ecosophy’. Where IWC integrates the psyche, social strata and global milieu as nested scales of industrial extraction and production (Figure 7.1), ecosophy produces a transversal circuit between the same domains that short-​circuits this scalar hierarchy and catalyses a continual flow between them (Figure 7.2). Because this circuit is simultaneously spatial (it connects these spaces rather than isolating and structuring them), processual (it is animated by practices that continually renew these connections) and virtual (it is concerned not only with actual structures to be analysed but also with real potentials that have yet to be actualized), it produces continual ripples outwards towards as yet unknown integrative functions. Guattari calls this horizon the Cosmos. The movement towards it, through the integrative circuit of ecosophy, is ‘chaosmosis’. Chaosmosis is the process by which ‘existential Territories’ (spaces) are composed out of chaos. This is how new subjectivities arise (what Guattari calls ‘mutant subjectivities’), composed of different machines at different scales. ‘The chaosmic explorations of an ecosophy –​articulating between them scientific, political, environmental

Figure 7.2  Diagram of ecosophy as integrative catalyst.



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and mental ecologies –​ought to be able to claim to replace the old ideologies which abusively sectorised the social, the private and the civil, and which were fundamentally incapable of establishing transversal junctions between the political, the ethical and the aesthetic’ (Guattari 1995: 134). These new subjectivities will not be confined to precisely delineated scales such as the individual or various social groups. Like UIQ, they will exist between structures, at multiple scales:  infra. Because these subjectivities are explicitly understood as compositions and not as preexisting objects, artistic and medial practice remain central to Guattari’s (1995) program. The psyche, the social body and milieus, as continually composed and recomposed domains, all possess irreducible aesthetic dimensions to which IWC is blind. ‘My perspective involves shifting the human and social sciences from scientific paradigms towards ethico-​ aesthetic paradigms’ (10). The ecosophical aesthetic paradigm, ‘the creation and composition of mutant percepts and affects  –​has become the paradigm for every possible form of liberation’ (91). Here I  think that Guattari is thinking of the many failed forms of liberation that have come before:  psychoanalysis, which further individuates the psyche (taking it out of productive circulation and articulating it to the past); politics, which captures group-​subjectivity and reterritorializes it to concretized, structured ends; and medial-​art practice, which tends to reinforce previously defined structures through representation and homogenization rather than energizing a radical aesthetics of subjective production. Liberation from the planetary plan (grid) of IWC requires that the energies invested in these practices be liberated and catalysed in a new ‘virtual ecology’. At the end of the Winter Years, Guattari had a newfound hope that ecosophy ‘will tend to create new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a new gentleness between the sexes, generations, ethnic groups, races’ (Guattari 1995:  92). A  utopia, certainly. But a utopia that never rests as a static state, a single assemblage of objects. Guattari’s ideal ecosystem is not one that has been preserved in a pristine, past state, nor one that has been optimized in some ideal way. It is not a wilderness, and it is not a garden. It is an Infra-​Quark Universe, forever in the process of composing itself.

Conclusion Guattari’s ecosophy was born out of failure. This is a philosophical point, not merely a biographical one. The Guattarian machines were particularly suited to catalysing mutation within particular domains. Unlike the Deleuzean machines,

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those composing Guattari were prone to fixation on particular structures in thought and institutional practice. The peripatetic-​disruption machine would decompose them at the same time that the centripetal-​connection machine would concentrate forces around certain points of enunciation. This resulted in significant mutations within the field of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the monolithic structures in place in the domain of mental health institutions left these mutations nowhere to go but a different domain entirely; the result was a horizontal jump to translate these intensities into political praxis. Similarly, politics ultimately proved to be a dead end. This is not to imply that Guattari’s productive life can be periodized in a linear fashion:  he never ceased practising his version of psychoanalysis or abandoned his political activism; similarly, he had always nursed the dream of engaging artistic-​media production. I  am arguing, however, that the creative mutations catalysed by Guattari in these domains all failed, at some point, to continue to produce new forms within their original domains. It was precisely their jumps between domains that kept the Guattarian machines productive. The great insight of ecosophy is that this creative process, if it is ultimately to evade the forces of capture mobilized by late capital, must explicitly articulate these domains together in a new way, with a different scalar structure in order to sustain a non-​reductive engagement with the multiple dimensions of each. The ecological movement, which was continuing to gain momentum in Europe even during the triumphant rise of IWC (we can call it ‘neoliberalism’) during the 1980s, gave Guattari a model or diagram of an alternative integrative logic. Thinking the psyche in ecological terms, as an autopoietic system interacting at multiple scales with other systems, was consonant with Guattari’s understanding of subjectivity. Thinking the social body in the same terms would render its dynamics consistent with the psyche, integrating them in thought and praxis. The environmental degradation and pollution so evident to environmentalists seemed to Guattari to be directly tied to a larger ecosystem that included the forces of capital and technology rather than merely being acted upon by them. A  subjective, integrated, aesthetic ecology could act as a continually sustained line of flight from the integrating forces of capital, a toolkit for avoiding failure (blockage) in any single domain. Ultimately, chaosmosis provided ecosophy with a virtual horizon for the production of new subjectivities theoretically capable of outflanking IWC by continually shifting scales at the same time that it dismantled capital’s scalar hierarchy. In the early 1990s, Guattari began showing signs of recovering from his depression. He had formed alliances with the Greens and Generation Ecologie,



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which were starting to pick up seats in elections from the municipal to national levels. Though Guattari found their political objectives to be short-​sighted, this represented a line of flight from traditional political polarization, a new vector in politics –​without a past, and thus without a dangerously reactionary, oedipal structure. One of the central paradoxes of Félix Guattari was that the great philosopher and activist of the line of flight, of creativity and subjective production opposed to structure, who worked so hard to liberate the multiplicitous, molecular forces of desire, found his own desire constantly reterritorialized as monadic cathexis and repetitive action. He could never quite escape the structures and patterns from which his thought and action charted an escape for others. In 1992, Guattari ran as a Green candidate in the March regional elections. He had little support and lost. And yet this machinic being who couldn’t quite resist molar politics was never attentive to his own bodily singularities. After two years of neglected heart trouble, and a final ignored heart attack the day before, his body failed on 29 August 1992.

References Anonymous (2015), ‘Memories of a Metropolitan Indian’, accessed January 21, 2015: http://​www.revoltagainstplenty.com/​index.php/​archive-​global/​35-​memories-​ of-​a-​metropolitan-​indian.html. Bateson, Gregory (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Chandler Publications for Health Sciences, San Francisco: Chandler Pub. Co. Berardi, Franco (2008), Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2009), Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York and London: Penguin Classics. Dosse, François (2011), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman, Chichester, NY: Columbia University Press. Guattari, Félix (1977), Radio Alice, Radio Libre, J.P. Delarge. Guattari, Félix (1984), ‘Transversality’, in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, 11–​23, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, and New York: Penguin.

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Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Julian Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Félix (2008a), ‘Cinema of Desire’, in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–​ 1977, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., 235–​46, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2008b), ‘Molecular Revolutions’, in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–​1977, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., 275–​81, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2008c), The Three Ecologies, trans. Paul Sutton, London: Continuum. Guattari, Félix (2009a), ‘Everywhere at Once’, in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–​1985, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, 81–​7, Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2009b), ‘Plan for the Planet’, in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–​1985, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, 229–​43, Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix (2013), Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Guattari, Félix (2016), A Love of UIQ, trans. Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing. Guattari, Félix and Charles J. Stivale (2009a), ‘Lacan Was an Event in My Life’, in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–​1985, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, 165–​9, Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix and Charles J. Stivale (2009b), ‘So What’, in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–​1985, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, 64–​80, Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix and Charles J. Stivale (2009c), ‘The Unconscious Is Turned toward the Future’, in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–​1985, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, 177–​83, Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Halberstam, Judith (2011), The Queer Art of Failure, Durham: Duke University Press Books. Maglioni, Silvia and Graeme Thomson (2016), ‘UIQ: Towards an Infra-​Quark Cinema (Or an Unmaking-​Of)’, in A Love of UIQ, 13–​44, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing. Morton, Timothy (2012), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sartre, Jean-​Paul (2004), Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-​Smith, London and New York: Verso.

8

Into the Zone: Affective Counterpoint and Ecosophical Aesthetics in the Films of Terrence Malick Colin Gardner

The ecosophical relationship between the spectator and the cinema screen takes the form of an affective connection, what Adrian Ivakhiv (2013: 17), inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), has called an entry into ‘The Zone’, ‘the meeting ground of images and sounds, as they are organized for us by cinema, with the dense texture of perceptual response, bodily affect, and the multiple layers of memory, desire, and the interpretive capacity that we bring to viewing a film or artwork’. For Ivakhiv, writing in his groundbreaking book Ecologies of the Moving Image, ‘The Zone’ bears a certain affinity to Heidegger’s definition of ‘earth’ –​‘a materiality that gives itself to us as territory, as land, as nature, as resource, and that simultaneously takes away from us as time, as death, and as mystery’ (25). Terrence Malick’s films, from Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) to The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011) and To The Wonder (2012), are particularly rich examples of this by-​play between connective and disjunctive syntheses, this simultaneous movement towards a subjective, finite inside and a deterritorializing, autopoietic outer trajectory, setting up what Carl Platinga (2010) calls an ‘affective counterpoint’ or incongruity between the natural and the man-​made as a unified, albeit constantly changing, ecological whole. This chapter explores Malick’s films as a type of ‘minor’ geography (as much imagined as real) that is structured around a journey from the stratified, signifying world of everyday life  –​usually violent or cruel, as in the case of Malick’s fictional recreation of the 1958 Starkweather-​Fugate killing spree, the battle of Guadalcanal, the attempt in 1608 to establish the Jamestown colony in Virginia, the crisis of faith of an Oklahoma priest or the life struggles of a

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young Chicago couple or Waco, Texas, family  –​to the immanent, ecological space of nature in-​itself, which is vicariously beautiful, sublime, toxic, abject, catastrophic and sacred. Far from creating a clear dialectic between subject and object, substance and representation, nomos and physis, Malick instead creates a liminal ecological space of relational processes and encounters, a veritable probe-​head where virtual and actual events are connected by a series of folds and envelopments rather than clear-​cut spatial or temporal breaks. In this way, Malick’s characters, his audience and the encompassing space of the landscape come together in the zone of cinema as an affective body that, in Deleuze’s (1989: 189) words, ‘forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life’. For theorists like Ivakhiv, the foundation for this ecosophical aesthetic approach to cinema is fundamentally process-​ relational, supplementing Deleuze’s own method based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic taxonomy. For Peirce, Firstness is the thing’s purely qualitative potency; Secondness its actual causal and existential relation with another thing; while Thirdness mediates Firstness and Secondness to form an observation or logical and relational pattern. Building on this system, Ivakhiv stresses a more fluid relationship between the inside –​the way a viewer is drawn into the diegetic events as they unfold on screen –​and the extra-​diegetic world beyond that experience and the way each forms connections, encounters and foldings with the material, the social and the perceptual. The latter ecosophical milieux are derived directly from Félix Guattari’s (2008) seminal work The Three Ecologies, first published in 1989, where he challenges prevailing technocratic solutions to the problem of globalization and industrial pollution. He argues instead that ‘only an ethico-​ political articulation –​what I call ecosophy –​between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions’ (19–​ 20). Guattari, in turn, acknowledges his considerable debt to the works of the English anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, who was the first to break down ecology into three interconnected trajectories: the material (ecology, biophysical); the social (cultural and human); and most importantly for our purposes, the perceptual, which treats the mind as an interactive system characterized by an exchange of information –​images, sounds, looks and audibilities –​which are transmitted within and between the intra-​and extra-​filmic worlds. This allows us to transform the ecological into a machinic, decentred paradigm that completely befits the role of cinema as, in Antonin Artaud’s words, a spiritual automaton. In his discussion of the action-​image in Cinema 1:  The Movement-​Image, Deleuze turns to Noel Burch’s formula of the ‘large form’ to extrapolate Peirce’s



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Secondness as the foundation for cinematic realism:  a case of situation + character/​ action. ‘What constitutes realism is simply this’, notes Deleuze (1986:  141):  ‘milieux and modes of behavior, milieux which actualise and modes of behavior which embody. The action-​image is the relation between the two and all the varieties of this relation’. In this form, qualities and powers become forces within the milieu  –​they curve in on themselves, act on the character, throw him/​her a challenge and set up a situation in which he/​she is caught. The character then acts to respond to the situation, which in turn leads to a modification of the milieu, the situation and the other characters. This is what Burch calls the S-​A-​S’ formula, which moves us from situation to the transformed situation via the intermediary of action. This evolutionary shift is by no means guaranteed however, for there may be no development, as in the case of S-​A-​S, where the individual ends up in the same situation as before (e.g. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook, which presents a case of pure survival), or the situation may get worse:  S-​A-​S’’, manifested by the increased degradation of the individual instead of their improvement, as in the case of Howard Hawks’s Scarface. For our purposes, a key corollary of this formula is the particular use of mise-​ en-​scène, epitomized by the use of landscape in the classic Hollywood Western. For Deleuze, the latter is solidly anchored in the milieu as a form of ambience or encompasser, and in this respect Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven are revisionist variations on the Western genre. Here, the ultimate encompasser is the sky and its various pulsations of light, movement, shadow and respiration, which envelops the milieu and, in turn, the relationship of the protagonist and the collective. As Deleuze (1986: 146) argues, ‘It is as representative of the collectivity that the hero becomes capable of an action which makes him equal to the milieu and re-​establishes its accidentally or periodically endangered order: mediations of the community and of the land are necessary in order to form a leader and render an individual capable of such a great action.’ However, it is important to note that different directors use the immanent qualities of earth and sky in different ways. John Ford, for example, utilizes the encompasser to highlight the socially bonding agency of specific collective rituals –​marriage, festivals, dances, songs  –​under the watchful presence of the immanent sky, while a film such as Stagecoach uses its Monument Valley locations as both the domain of the Native Americans –​who are framed as if they were both of, and intrinsic to, the landscape –​and the terrain for the travelling probe head (with its rag-​tag assemblage of different classes and personal agendas) that is the stagecoach itself.

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At first glance the itinerant lovers Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Malick’s feature debut Badlands appear to fit two seemingly contradictory encompassing schema, one communicated by our perception of Kit’s actual on-​screen violence, which takes place against the breathtaking vistas of South Dakota and the Montana Badlands (actually shot in Eastern Colorado), the other expressed through Holly’s romanticized voice-​over narration. Deleuze describes the first use of the encompasser in terms of Hawks’s functionalism, whereby Ford’s unifying, immanent use of time and space to unite the individual and the collective is radically deformed. Here, locations lose their intrinsic organic life, so that far from being sanctuaries and safe havens against the outside world, homesteads become the site of violence, as in the case of Kit’s cold-​blooded murder of Holly’s father (Warren Oates) and his desperate killing of his work mate, Cato (Ramon Bieri). In contrast, the bucolic Eden of the Cotton Woods acts as both a temporary communing with nature but also the opportunity to establish a defence against outside attack. Evoking similar scenes in Vietnam War dramas, Kit builds a network of tunnels and uses the landscape to fashion deadly weapons, most notably a swinging bundle of spikes that can impale an intruder at up to ten yards. The larger landscape –​the Badlands themselves –​are both a means of itinerant escape (there is always another town to move on to), but also another chance of capture as the dragnet tightens around the couple and police helicopters swoop down from the sky like so many mechanical birds of prey. Any grandiose action is inevitably forestalled in this purely vectorial space:  the film’s ostensible ‘heroes’ are now reduced to the role of doomed desperados, with no advantage to be gained except for the necessity of staying alive. As in Hawks’s Rio Bravo, the broader community is reduced to a makeshift group –​Kit and Holly –​functional but no longer part of a larger organic whole. Unlike in Ford, where violence invariably enters from the outside –​the Native Americans, the outlaw gang –​it now comes purely from the interior, bursting forth unexpectedly as the principal impetus of the film’s action, much like the visceral brutality of Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah’s westerns. However, Holly’s running commentary and Kit’s own self-​narrativization serve to return the encompassing role of landscape closer to the Fordian ideal. Just as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance where the community constructs a myth to validate the newly forged collective based on the rule of Law over that of the gun in order to reinforce the necessary shift from S to S’, so Holly also constructs textual illusions about herself and Kit that are belied by what we actually see and feel affectively. ‘A community is healthy in so far as a kind of consensus reigns’, argues Deleuze (1986: 148), ‘a consensus which allows it to



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develop illusions about itself, about its motives, about its desires and its cupidity, about its values and its ideals: “vital” illusions, realist illusions which are more true than pure truth’. The American Dream thus draws all of its power from the fact that it is a dream: all change takes place within an encompasser which swaddles the protagonists with a healthy illusion  –​namely, the continuity of their own progress as individuals or as a community. Thus, in contrast to the Vietnam-​like affective suggestiveness of the forest scene that evokes films such as Apocalypse Now! and Platoon, Holly instead stresses its domestication and routine as the perfect idyll for young lovers: ‘We hid out in the wilderness down by a river in the grove of Cotton Woods. Being the flood season we built our house in the trees . . . We planned a huge network of tunnels under the forest floor, and our first order of business every morning was to decide on a new pathway for the day.’ While Holly acts out her teenage romance fantasies like a latter-​day outlaw Emma Bovary, Kit in turn is self-​consciously playing the role of James Dean, only this time he is a rebel with a cause, mindful of his own role in constructing the mediated myth of a doomed couple racing towards oblivion. Narrating his confession in a dime store recording booth, he declares, My girl Holly and I decided to kill ourselves. The same way I did her Daddy. Big decision, you know. Uh, the reasons are obvious. I don’t have time to go into right now. But, one thing though, he was provoking me when I popped him. Well that’s what it was like. Pop. I’m sorry. I mean, nobody’s coming out of this thing happy. Especially not us. I can’t deny we’ve had fun though.

If, as Deleuze argues, the action-​image is marked by a big gap between the encompasser and the hero, between the milieu and the protagonist’s modifying behavior which is only bridged progressively and incrementally as the film progresses, Badlands sets up a disjunctive synthesis between the two that is never fully resolved. Kit and Holly are only equal to the Fordian encompasser in their own self-​image, not through any organic envelopment of the protagonists by the surrounding milieu. Here violence remains arbitrary and discontinuous, as if on a parallel track to the ecosophical connections of the rest of the film, creating an affective counterpoint that we can only bridge mentally through a defamiliarized critique of the mythic function of the western and road film genres themselves. This disjuncture is both exacerbated and ultimately bridged in Days of Heaven, another revisionist nod to the western, this time with a more overtly pantheistic portrayal of nature which allows Malick to more acutely examine

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humanity’s uncomfortable place within the natural order of things. Structured in a similar fashion to Badlands, the film follows Billy (Richard Gere), his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and Billy’s young sister Linda (Linda Manz) as they flee Chicago after Billy appears to kill his factory foreman (Stuart Margolin) following a heated argument. With Billy and Abby masquerading as brother and sister and with Linda’s voice-​over providing an impromptu commentary that is equal parts meandering disengagement and poetic metonymy, the trio drift south to become migrant labourers on the land of a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard) in the Texas panhandle. Again we have a violent protagonist (Billy), and a seemingly indifferent nature –​represented by time-​lapse shots of growing wheat, extreme close-​ups of the locusts that feed on it, deer, bison, rabbits and so on –​that seems to act as a Hawksian encompasser ruled by pure functionalism. The latter is taken to cynical extremes when Shepard’s farmer –​who has a terminal illness –​ takes a shine to Abby; and Billy, anticipating a quick inheritance in the event of the landowner’s death, gives his blessing to their marriage. Unfortunately for his best laid plans, Shepard recovers and the increasingly jealous Billy knifes him to death in a fit of desperate panic, forcing him once again to go on the run. However, there is far more going on here that a simple repeat of the Badlands schema. Indeed, Days of Heaven seems to appropriate a third encompasser matrix typified by the work of Yasujiro Ozu. Dominated by opsigns and sonsigns  –​images and sounds that exist only for themselves rather than furthering the narrative thrust –​in Ozu ‘the action-​image disappears in favor of the purely visual image of what a character is, and the sound image of what he says, completely banal nature and conservation constituting the essentials of the script’ (Deleuze 1989: 13–​14). As in Ozu’s cinema, Days of Heaven is marked by weak sensory-​motor connections, long idle periods where work, leisure, play, love and death tend to be dehierarchized into a shared indifference and ordinariness. In short, Malick’s mise-​en-​scène is a pure any-​space-​whatever  –​ disconnected, vacuous, dominated by empty spaces, where character movement takes second place to a more cerebral encounter between ecosophical trajectories such as the life cycle of natural forms and the seasonal nature of farm labour. As Ben McCann (2007: 81) observes, ‘Placing the human protagonists within the widescreen frame, the subsequent dwarfing of their proportions by the natural surroundings is symbolic of their powerlessness against nature; the lack of human perspective and influence within the greater scheme of things.’ Instead of an irruption of the individual into the world of the encompasser, we have a dynamic juxtaposition of images of the natural world intercut with point-​of-​ view shots of the protagonists seeing that very world –​thereby cathecting nature



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in ‘both protagonist and spectator’ (81). On one hand this is a very Heideggeran notion (as is well known, Malick himself is a former Heidegger scholar and translator), concerned with the ‘illumined, radiant self-​manifestation’ of things; while on the other it has strong associations with Guattari’s notion of mental ecosophy, which is pre-​objectal and pre-​personal, much like Freud’s ‘primary process’. ‘One could call this the logic of the “included middle” ’, argues Guattari (2008: 36), ‘in which black and white are indistinct, where the beautiful coexists with the ugly, the inside with the outside, the “good” object with the “bad” ’. Here, between encompasser and subject, ‘[t]‌here is no overall hierarchy for locating and localizing the components of enunciation at a given level. They are composed of heterogeneous elements that take on a mutual consistency and persistence as they cross the thresholds that constitute one world at the expense of another’ (36). In this case it is cinema itself –​and Malick’s film in its specificity –​that allows for such creative connections to be made through the affect-​and mental-​images generated by the spectator. As Guattari (2008: 38) reminds us, ‘These focal points of creative subjectification in their nascent state can only be accessed by the detour of a phantasmatic economy that is deployed in a random form. In short, no one is exempt from playing the game of the ecology of the imaginary!’ More importantly, ‘[t]‌here is a principle specific to environmental ecology, it states that anything is possible –​the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions’ (43). Indeed, the famous scene when the farmer’s corn crop is attacked by a plague of locusts is exemplary in this regard. On one level the workers are powerless in the face of such a force of nature –​a case of encompasser turned contagion, framing sky re-​ materialized as a black cloud of immanent destruction enveloping the earth. On another their burning of the crop and the locusts along with it suggests a connectedness that extends far beyond particular individuals to more collective deterritorializations that take us to the wider world and beyond. We are also aware of the mutual enfolding of violence between the two –​these are real locusts being burned alive for the sake of cinema spectacle, giving us an affecting relationship to the immanent connectibility of a local catastrophe to the possibility of a global ecological holocaust. ‘Film objects of this sort are more than just mere objects’, notes Ivakhiv (2013). ‘They become carriers of affect, mediators of relations that both pass on an energetic quality or charge between humans and things and represent that quality itself. They are fusions of firstness (the things, the qualities, the feelings), secondness (the events connected by them), and thirdness (the interpretations and meanings we give them)’ (124–​5; emphases in the original).

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This series of foldings within and between Peirce’s triad is at the heart of Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), an account of the pivotal World War II Pacific Theater battle for Guadalcanal that defies all genre expectations. Like Malick’s more recent films, The New World, The Tree of Life and To The Wonder, The Thin Red Line proceeds through contrasting but ultimately complementary world views, which Malick unfolds in accordance with different trajectories to a broader, infinite outside rather than attempting a straightforward synthesis or overcoming. Although the film uses multiple voice-​overs as a form of dialogic heteroglossia –​often, because of the characters’ similar Southern drawls, to the point of indistinguishability (see Rothermel 2010: 97) –​Malick sets up a primary affective distinction between the interrogative role of Pvt. Edward P. Train (John Dee Smith) and the contrasting, somewhat self-​delusory philosophies of Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel) and First Sergeant Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) as a means of counterpointing the catastrophic reality of war in the context of such serene, natural beauty. Haunted by the tranquillity of his mother’s death, Witt is the film’s ostensible transcendentalist:  ‘I wondered how it’d be like when I  died, what it’d be like to know this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did, with the same . . . calm. ‘Cause that’s where it’s hidden  –​the immortality I  hadn’t seen.’ Then, echoing Jim Casey’s famous line in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, he muses, ‘Maybe all men got one big soul everybody’s a part of, all faces of the same man, one big self. Everyone looking for salvation for himself. Each like a coal drawn from the fire.’ In contrast, Welsh comes across more like a Hobbesian realist, resigned to man’s inexorable fate in a world that is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ and where everything is really about property, including war. However, Dennis Rothermel (2010: 95) makes an insightful point in arguing that Welsh is more of an affective pragmatist, for he ‘consoles his inability to save men from dying by repeating thoughts of not caring as a kind of reverse mantra. If he could assure himself of being divorced from attachments, he would not suffer the pain of losing men’. By comparison, Pvt. Train –​significantly the most timidly fearful character in the film and the least able to cope with the horrors of war –​faces his condition honestly, without illusion or self-​delusion: ‘This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doin’ this? Who’s killin’ us? Robbing us of life and light? Mockin’ us with the sight of what we might’ve known.’ Then as a GI heartlessly executes a Japanese prisoner of war, Train asks, ‘Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it



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help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?’ As Rothermel (2010: 97) notes, What makes Train’s central placement as the surrogate author of the film’s reflections upon violence crucial is that he is a man who is openly afraid, however much reception of the film will resist that association and attribute Train’s messages to soldiers who show courage. We have, in fact, no more reason to believe that the man who is afraid is any more susceptible to illusion and less inclined to wisdom than is the courageous man, which is a crucial lesson to underscore with regard to the horrors of combat.

It is his heightened sense of affect generated through fear that allows Train to confront the very nature of being itself. In voice-​over he muses: ‘One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain, that death’s got the final word; it’s laughing at him. Another man [On Pvt. Witt, blissfully asleep] sees that same bird and feels the glory, [On Welsh] feels something smiling through it.’ If one were to look for a common thread running through Train’s perspective one could argue that he owes equal debt to Heraclitus and Spinoza, both significant philosophical precursors to Deleuze and Guattari. Take, for example, Train’s (and, as it turns out, the film’s) closing lines, spoken over images of his comrades as they disembark in a troop carrier: Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I  lived with, walked with? The brother. The friend. Darkness and light, strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. [On the wake of the boat]. All things shining.

These words  –​as well as the final, ephemeral image of flowing water  –​are highly evocative of Heraclitus (1995:  35), particularly his dictum that ‘[o]‌ne should see that war is common and justice is strife, and that everything is happening according to strife and necessity’. Rothermel (2010:  98) also notes that Train’s words echo lines from William Wordsworth’s Prelude, whereby ‘[t]he substitution of “strife and love” for “tumult and peace” and Wordsworth’s subject of rain and wind instead of war invoke this well-​known metaphysics of Heraclitus’. Equally important is that Deleuze and Guattari associate Heraclitus and his famous dictum that ‘[n]o man ever steps in the same river twice’ with the absolute becoming of the abyss (what they subsequently call ‘the machinic phylum of becoming’), which unites, without judgement, the chaos of war with

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the cycle of the eternal return:  ‘Even among the Pre-​Socratics perhaps only Heraclitus knew that becoming is not “judged”, that it cannot be and has not to be judged, that it does not receive its law from elsewhere, that it is “just” and possesses its own law in itself. Only Heraclitus foresaw that there is no kind of opposition between chaos and cycle’. Train is thus the perfect exemplar of this unquestioning affirmation because he is totally innocent, lacking guile and its concomitant need for a judgemental alibi. In this sense his philosophy evokes Nietzsche’s association of becoming with chance  –​the pure luck of the dice throw  –​for ‘[t]he dice throw is nothing when detached from innocence and the affirmation of chance. The dice throw is nothing if chance and necessity are opposed in it’ (Deleuze 1983: 34). In turn, Train’s Spinozism evokes the always already embedded quality of both objectivity and subjectivity –​where the former always precedes the latter –​ which exist as a series of folds and lines of flight on a plane of immanence, thereby providing the springboard for Deleuze and Guattari’s passive synthesis of life as a form of joyful auto-​affection that encompasses a totalizing escosophy through different intersecting vectors of subjectification. This can only be effectively manifested through the guarantee of a continuum between the finite and infinite whereby the gap between them is gradually bridged as Train (and the film’s audience) move through Spinoza’s three levels of knowledge: from imagination (the immediate experience of effects based on crude sense perception, association and hearsay); through reason (knowledge of the universal laws of nature and reason through the application of ‘common notions’); and finally intuitive knowledge (the grasp of the finite body as it inheres in nature –​the infinite –​an understanding of its essence through an immanent chain of causes). It is only the third level that produces pure joy and necessitates a move from individuality to singularity, with its concern with pure intensities. This is why Train is able to bridge the affective counterpoint between fear and absurdity, nature and grace and fold the machinic horrors of war into nature’s own disinterested cycle of life. As Ivakhiv (2013: 111) reiterates, ‘Malick’s nature shots, no matter how skillfully arranged and carefully designed . . . are also reminders to us that there is a world out there that, while it may serve as a bottomless source of beautiful images, continues its autonomous existence alongside our own and ultimately dwarfs our own by framing our lives with the conditions of our mortality.’ Train’s immanent role of becoming is appropriated, but also expanded, in Malick’s The New World by that of Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), who acts in counterpoint to her colonial lovers, Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and John Rolfe (Christian Bale). As Ron Mottram (2007: 15) points out, the film reiterates



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many of Malick’s ecosophical themes, most notably ‘an Edenic yearning to recapture a lost wholeness of being, an idyllic state of integration with the natural and good both within and without ourselves’. Malick achieves this desire for integration by stressing the difference between the Hawksian and the Fordian encompasser that helps to visually define the settlers, who are presented as a filthy, bickering and alienated bunch, imbued with impulsive violence and ready to turn on each other at the first sign of a setback; and the Powhatan, who seem fully integrated into the natural world through their communal rituals, dances and haptic relationship to both each other and objective reality. This is established with Pocahontas’ first lines of the film, spoken over an upside down reflection in a body of water followed by a low angle shot of her raising her arms to the sky: ‘Come, spirit, help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother. We, your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.’ It is Pocahontas, through her love for both Smith and Rolfe, who extends this deistic world view to the Old World, enfolding both milieux into a state of potential rebirth. Thus, of Smith, she comments in voice-​over (once again evoking Heraclitus):  ‘You flow through me, like a river.’ Later, she says of Rolfe that ‘[h]‌e is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade’, while the latter acknowledges Pocahontas’s role as a forger of new connections: ‘She weaves all things together.’ It is in Pocahontas’s ability to embrace new deterritorializations that the true significance of the film’s title becomes apparent:  the New World is equally applicable to the colonists, signified by the early inter-​title, ‘A New Start’, which alludes to both Smith’s reprieve from hanging and his shipmates’ chance at a new life; but also to Pocahontas herself, as she becomes the queen of London society following her marriage to John Rolfe, her affirmative role as exotic ‘other’ suggesting the mutual benefits of reciprocal migrations. As Guattari (2008: 30) points out in The Three Ecologies, ‘Ecological praxes strive to scout out the potential vectors of subjectification and singularization at each partial existential locus. They generally seek something that runs counter to the “normal” order of things, a counter-​repetition, an intensive given which invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations.’ However, Guattari is also quick to warn us that such deterritorializations need to be gentle rather than violent, so that the assemblage may evolve in a constructive, processual fashion, a form of existential refrain that generates continuity through a series of catalytic focal points, much like the insistent reprise of Vinteuil’s sonata and the church bells at Martinville in Proust’s Récherche. Unfortunately, this is far from the case in The New World as the mutual suspicion between the colonists and the Powhatan degenerates into all-​out savage combat

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reminiscent of the worst carnage in The Thin Red Line. It’s significant that Malick exploits a different form of encompasser in these two films, closer to Kurosawa than to Hawks or Ozu. In this case it is animated by an almost asthmatic respiration which suffocates the duels and battles by enveloping and blanketing them in dense fog and mist, as well as a relationship between earth and sky in which the latter is invariably shot from a low angle upwards through a canopy of trees. This causes the sunlight to flash intermittently and strobe-​like through the gaps in the branches like so many pantheistic insights that are forever out of the protagonists’ conceptual and affective reach. Deleuze also notes a shift in the conventional S-​A-​S’ structure where the givens of the situation (in this case the transition of precolonial Virginia into a British settlement) are not completely disclosed but rather harbor a series of higher, perhaps unanswerable questions which the hero must extract in order to be able to respond actively to the situation. ‘What counts is this form of the extraction of an any-​question-​whatever’, notes Deleuze (1986: 189), ‘its intensity rather than its content, its givens rather than its object, which make it, in any event, into a sphinx’s question, a sorceress’s question’. In the case of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, for example, the obvious question is ‘Can the village be defended?’ In The New World it might perhaps be, ‘Will the settlement survive?’ The hidden question for Kurosawa would then be: ‘What is a samurai today, at this particular moment of history?’ Malick’s equivalent might be, in Guattarian terms, ‘What is the price of European expansion and its impact on the ecosophical connectedness between contrasting worlds?’ The implied answer is that both the Old and New Worlds have become ghosts of their former selves, and that their reincarnation on new lines is the imperative task of both the natives and the colonizers, while at the same time respecting their mutual differences. Deleuze makes an excellent observation that the discovery of such hidden questions can change the order of everything within a given situation, a malleability that is often manifested through visions and nightmares. ‘This is the origin of Kurosawa’s oneirism’, Deleuze (1986:  190) notes, ‘such that the hallucinatory visions are not merely subjective images, but rather figures of the thought which discovers the givens of a transcendent question, in so far as they belong to the world, to the deepest part of the world’. We discover a similar oneirism running throughout The New World (also, as we shall see, in To The Wonder) but one largely limited to the perspective of the colonists. Thus Rolfe, attempting to dig to the heart of Pocahontas’s identity asks, ‘Who are you, what do you dream of?’ Smith sees the Powhatan in similar terms, noting that ‘[t]‌hey are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting



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lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream’. Later, in England, Smith admits to Pocahontas that their whole affair now seems like a dream: ‘what we knew in the forest. It’s the only truth’. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 288) remind us, The secret is elevated from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy. This is the point at which the secret attains absolute imperceptibility, instead of being linked to a whole interplay of relative perceptions and reactions. We go from a content that is well defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a priori general form of a non localizable something that has happened.

It is this ‘something that has happened’ that anchors both The Tree of Life and its more sceptical companion piece, To The Wonder, cinematic theodicies that attempt to answer the question of why a benevolent God allows for the manifestation of evil in the material world. In this respect both films use a disjunctive movement across and between time frames and different worlds to create an eco-​philosophical meditation on human life, divine spirit and cosmic nature, creating an unresolved tension (but also a necessary correspondence) between ‘cosmodicy’ –​which affirms the fundamental goodness of the infinite universe  –​and ‘anthropodicy’, which justifies the inherent goodness of finite humanity. ‘Any present, any locale, has its own way of opening to the infinite’, suggests Claire Colebrook (2014). ‘The actual world never exhausts the truth of the world, even if truth as such is an eternal potentiality always disclosed in concrete time’ (174–​5). In the case of To The Wonder, Malick’s theodicy starts from the premise that human love derives from divine love, that fundamentally all things work together for the greater good. However, the film also expresses, through the various affective shortcomings of its characters, a strong sense of scepticism and doubt, grounded in the notion that mankind is, by its very nature, always in revolt against God. Malick expresses this antinomy through both secular and spiritual relationships, represented once again by a heteroglossia of competing voice-​ overs. Thus Neil (Ben Affleck), an environmental engineer based in Oklahoma, is the love interest of both the Russian-​born Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a single mother who he brings back to the Mid West after a whirlwind romance in Paris, and Jane (Rachel McAdams), a childhood friend and recently bankrupt rancher. Like the encompasser role in A Thin Red Line and The New World, Marina’s love is associated specifically with the oneiric, for as her free-​spirited Italian friend Anna (Romina Mondello) insists, ‘Life’s a dream. In dream you

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can’t make mistakes. In dream you can be whatever you want.’ For Marina, this dictum is ecosophically and spiritually related to Mont St. Michel, the island monastery off the coast of Normandy, which has been dubbed ‘The Wonder of the Western World’. It has obvious significance in terms of the film’s title, for it is not only the location where Neil and Marina first cement their mutual passion but is also the closing image of the film as a whole, taking the form of Marina’s projected dream-​like vision of immanent becoming as the abbey’s magnificent spire creates a symbolic bridge between the materiality of the island and the expansive vault of the heavens above. In addition, it is associated with water and tide pools, uniting the Heraclitan world of strife and necessity with the flow of becoming and return, for as Marina states at one point following an argument with Neil, ‘I write on water what I dare not say.’ In contrast, Jane’s love for Neil is far more grounded in the Oklahoma soil itself. Instead of a religious sanctuary, her relationship with Neil is symbolized by property (the very stuff of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream) and the desire to be a good wife, homemaker and mother. Her values are exemplified by a magisterial shot of the couple frolicking among a herd of buffalo on the prairie as the encompassing sky unites the human, the animal and the land in an immanent, multiplicitous whole. Perhaps inevitably, both of Neil’s relationships fall apart as he is too cynical and aloof to commit wholeheartedly to such an uncompromisingly intuitive faith in love, particularly a deistic love (‘What is this love that loves us?’ ponders Marina) rooted in the unity of God, nature and humankind. All of Neil’s faith in the latter has been shattered by his job as a soil inspector, which has revealed the catastrophic despoliation of the water table by toxic lead and calcium to the point that whole communities are being uprooted just in order to survive. In short, Neil represents the unresolvable divide between ‘cosmodicy’ and ‘anthropodicy’, and as such is unable to love ‘fully’ under the terms of the film’s idealized theodicy. As Jane bitterly puts it after their inevitable break-​up, ‘You made it into nothing. Pleasure. Lust.’ In short, with Neil affect is reduced to nothingness. The film’s spiritual aporia is represented by Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), a local Catholic priest who has undergone a serious loss of faith. Quintana is a hands-​on populist priest –​he gives the sacrament to local prisoners, administers to junkies and the homeless, who spill out onto the local streets from decaying suburban tract homes –​and this is both his saving grace (his higher calling) but also the source, as an unresolvable theodicy, of his crisis. In voice-​over, Quintana distils the problem into an existential question of choice. In other words, in Nietzschean terms, you must affirm the dice throw regardless of the outcome:



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We wish to live inside the safety of the laws. We fear to choose. Jesus insists on choice. The one thing he condemns utterly is avoiding the choice. To choose is to commit yourself. And to commit yourself is to run the risk, is to run the risk of failure, the risk of sin, the risk of betrayal. But Jesus can deal with all of those. Forgiveness he never denies us. The man who makes a mistake can repent. But the man who hesitates, who does nothing, who buries his talent in the earth, with him he can do nothing.

Ultimately, all of the characters in To The Wonder find some form of temporary solace independent of relationships either with God or each other. Quintana moves on to another diocese in Kansas, Marina returns to Paris, dreaming of Mont St. Michel as a Heraclitan ecosophical bridge to the divine, while Neil is seen in a flash forward as the patriarch of a new family, albeit rooted to a despoiled heartland which, like the Texas panhandle in Days of Heaven, will be inevitably buffeted by a combination of man-​made and natural disasters. In effect, Malick’s characters reach for and try to embrace the heavens but inevitably fall short because they are ‘all too human’, for as Nietzsche (1984: 266, §638) puts it in a famous aphorism, ‘He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer: though not as a traveler to a final destination.’ What is lacking in To The Wonder is, as Guattari (2008: 44) argues, A collective and individual subjectivity that completely exceeds the limits of individualization, stagnation, identificatory closure, and will instead open itself up on all sides of the socius, but also to the machinic Phylum, to techno-​ scientific Universes of reference, to aesthetic worlds, as well as to a new ‘pre-​ personal’ understanding of time, of the body, of sexuality. A  subjectivity of resingularization that can meet head-​on the encounter with the finitude of desire, pain and death.

If To The Wonder represents a cautionary critique through the defamilarizing effect of conflicting narrative threads, then Malick’s The Tree of Life might be seen to represent Guattari’s more affirmative corollary. Once again the narrative is marked by the affective incongruity of competing voice-​overs but is ultimately pulled together by the present-​day reminiscences of the film’s adult protagonist, Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), who looks back on his childhood in Waco, Texas, and tries to make sense of the family’s defining event, the death of his brother, R.L. (Laramie Eppler). As in most of Malick’s films, the director splits the narrative’s world view between two main characters, in this case Jack’s authoritarian father (Brad Pitt), and his mother (Jessica Chastain), who are loosely allied to the

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contrasting difference between Nature and Grace respectively. As Mrs. O’Brien states in voice-​over, The nuns taught there were two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace. Nature is willful; it only wants to please itself, to have its own way . . . It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. Grace doesn’t try to please itself, it accepts being slighted, accepts insults and injuries . . . No one who follows the way of grace comes to a bad end.

However, it’s important to note that these are not hard and fast positions. Jack’s father ultimately comes to question his rigid egoism, admitting that ‘I wanted to be loved because I was great; a big man. I’m nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn’t notice the glory. I’m a foolish man’. However, Jack’s mother is equally torn between the material and the transcendent, addressing her questions to both a Creator –​‘Where were you? . . . Who are we to you? . . . Answer me’ –​and her lost child: ‘Life of my life . . . I search for you . . . My hope . . . my child.’ Jack would seem to have inherited the side of Nature, accusing his God of neglect: ‘Where were You? You let a boy die. You let anything happen. Why should I be good? When You aren’t.’ However, the film’s point of view is not necessarily limited to that of Jack or the other members of his immediate family, for as Ivakhiv (2013: 316) rightly points out, ‘Where Malick’s earlier films embedded their human story lines in a world whose contours extended beyond the human –​to animals, insects, and the changing of the seasons  –​here that background encompasses the entire evolutionary movement of life, from the Big Bang onwards.’ Indeed, the film opens and closes with cosmic images of swirling gases and nebulae, and then intercuts scenes of dinosaurs, planets and asteroids with the O’Brien family’s domestic traumas which, like those of Neil and his lovers in To The Wonder, seem insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. But this is perhaps Malick’s whole point, because both micro-​and macrocosm each have their part to play in what Guattari (2008: 43) calls the broader machinic ecology: ‘The pursuit of mastery over the mechanosphere will have to begin immediately if the acceleration of techno-​scientific progress and the pressure of huge population increases are to be dealt with.’ As Guattari goes on to explain, To bring into being other worlds beyond those of purely abstract information, to engender Universes of reference and existential Territories where singularity and finitude are taken into consideration by the multivalent logic of mental ecologies and by the group Eros principle of social ecology; to dare to confront



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the vertiginous Cosmos so as to make it inhabitable; these are the tangled paths of the tri-​ecological vision. (44)

Malick achieves this infusion of the finite with the infinite through his adoption of a fourth kind of encompasser, that of Kenji Mizoguchi, which Deleuze associates with Burch’s ‘Small Form’ or A-​S-​A’ structure, where the situation extends and modifies the difference between two actions. As in the case of To The Wonder, where the unifying role of the encompassing landscape is reinforced by the film’s soundtrack –​a combination of diegetic industrial sounds (despoliation) and sublime romantic orchestral and choral music (cosmodicy) –​ Malick follows Mizoguchi’s tendency to start with the skeletal structure of everyday life. He then links fragment to fragment as we move progressively from house to garden, from character to character and then ultimately to the creation of a series of vectors that allows us to encompass an immensity of space, but one that is still grounded in –​and returns to –​the small form: in Malick’s terms, an envelopment of both Grace and Nature. ‘It was Mizoguchi who attained the lines of the universe, the fibres of the universe, and who constantly traced them in all his films. In this way he gives the small form an incomparable range,’ notes Deleuze (1986). It is not the line which unites into a whole, but the one which connects or links up the heterogeneous elements, while keeping them heterogeneous. The line of the universe links up the back rooms to the street, the street to the lake, the mountain, the forest. It links up man and woman and the cosmos. It connects desires, suffering, errors, trials, triumphs, appeasements. It connects the moments of intensity, as so many points through which it passes. (194)

For Mizoguchi –​echoed by Malick in the case of Jack’s mother but also Marina and Jane in To The Wonder –​there is no line of the universe which doesn’t pass through the women or issue from them, even if the social system oppresses them in the form of a rigid capitalist patriarchy. In this respect the film’s key univocal message is one of love and joy, for as Patricia MacCormack (2012: 146) points out, The cosmic both extricates us from the world we know and the knowledge that destroys the world while also placing us inextricably within that world, the world become the encounter with outside as we dream, sleep and imagine. Through managing what we have done to the earth while we live, in an attempt to further its freedom for expressivity, not with guilt but joy, allows us accountability with immanence and futurity rather than a constant address to the past. ‘Never forget

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the place from which you depart, but leave it behind and join the universal. Love the bond that unites your plot of earth with the earth, the bond that makes kin and stranger resemble each other.’ (Serres 2002: 50)

This ontology of futurity is one reason why The Tree of Life’s final scene  –​ controversial because of its seeming sentimentality  –​where Jack strolls along the wind-​swept shore and encounters all the long-​dead members of his family, as if frozen in time from his childhood memories –​is an extremely important ecosophical moment (because of its implied ‘cosmodicy’) in Malick’s cinema. Just as the primordial images of creation represent a kind of brut Firstness and the O’Brien family’s questioning of faith in each other manifests Secondness as a set of unstable relations, then this scene pulls tighter the entire ‘tree of life’ as a set of deterritorializing relational processes in themselves, for as Ivakhiv (2013: 318–​19) argues, ‘[N]‌nature’ is its arising as qualities and the wrestling between them when they are actualized; ‘grace’ is the dawning meaningfulness that emerges within the Open, the gap between one line and another, one image and another, one effort and another. Grace, meaning, thirdness, is out of our hands, yet strangely sensed if those hands remain poised to receive it. But it emerges out of a kernel that is traumatic at its core.

Note Many thanks to Dennis Rothermel for his invaluable insights into Malick’s The Thin Red Line, particularly the philosophical references to Heraclitus, and also for helping me clarify and identify the film’s different voice-​overs. I also owe a great debt to Silke Panse and Anat Pick for allowing me to present an early draft of this chapter for a panel entitled ‘Screening Nature: Life, Catastrophes and Eco-​sophy’, with Anne Sauvagnargues (University of Paris, Nanterre) and Gregory Flaxman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) at Queen Mary, University of London, England, in May 2014.

References Colebrook, Claire (2014), ‘Screen Truth’, in A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds, 167–​86, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.



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Deleuze Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guattari, Félix (2008), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum. Heraclitus (1995), Heraclitus: Translation and Analysis, ed. and trans. D. Sweet, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. (2013), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. MacCormack, Patricia (2012), Posthuman Ethics, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. McCann, Ben (2007), ‘Enjoying the Scenery: Landscape and the Fetishization of Nature in Badlands and Days of Heaven’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, 2nd ed., Hannah Patterson, ed., 77–​87, New York: Wallflower Press. Mottram, Ron (2007), ‘All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption, and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick, Poetic Visions of America, 2nd ed., Hannah Patterson, ed., 14–​26, London: Wallflower Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (1984), Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Platinga, Carl (2010), ‘Affective Incongruity and The Thin Red Line’, Projections, 4, No. 2 (Winter): 86–​103. Rothermel, Dennis (2010), ‘Anti-​war War Films’, in Positive Peace: Reflections on Peace Education, Nonviolence, and Social Change, Andrew Fitz-​Gibbon, ed., 75–​107, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Serres, Michel (2002), The Natural Contract, trans. E. MacArthur and W. Paulson, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

9

The Delirious Abstract Machines of Jean Tinguely Joff P. N. Bradley

Introduction By focusing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s appreciation of Swiss kinetic sculpture artist Jean Tinguely (1925–​91), this chapter will explore –​pataphysically and ecosophically  –​the relation between joy, uselessness and the madness of Integrated World Capitalism. Especial attention is given to Tinguely’s notes and drawings to illuminate how they function as abstract machines which diagram the ‘techno-​scientific state of things’ (Guattari 2012:  142), that is to say, the uselessness of concrete instantiations, and the futural becomings which gently mock the threat of total annihilation (Tinguely’s Suzuki/​Hiroshima 1963:  see Figure  9.2). I  shall contend that the ‘initial domain’ of Tinguely’s machines exhibit in germinal form what Guattari (2012: 142) describes as the ‘vital drives of modern societies’. It will be seen that Guattari finds in Tinguely the passage from a diagrammatics of the dreams and fantasies of ‘slightly mad inventors’ to existential mutations in general (142). Functioning within concrete assemblages, Tinguely’s hyperlogic abstract machines take on consistency, acquire a collective enunciation, albeit in a barmy way, to designate ‘the cutting edges of decoding and deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 510). Despite Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 55–​6) critique of Tinguely’s machinic portraits of philosophers in What Is Philosophy?, I  shall defend Tinguely on two fronts. The first regards the mad dance of his kinetic constructions –​their creative-​ destructive, function-​ malfunctioning tendencies. Here we find a powerful critique –​a mental ecology –​of the madness under which we live. The second looks at his Les Philosophes collection (1999) and the peculiar diagram of James Watt in particular. The Watt diagram will be read using the conceptual

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architecture of Guattari’s solo work (Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 2012; and The Anti-​ Oedipus Papers, 2006)  to highlight the shared common ground regarding facets of speed and acceleration in contemporary life. ‘They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization’ (Baudrillard 1983: 46). Upon reading the latter pages of What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) one finds the somewhat surprising claim that Tinguely’s kinetic portraits of philosophers are lacking in several respects. Discussing portraiture’s philosophical and aesthetic sense, Deleuze and Guattari insist what matters above all is the separation of the instituted plane of immanence and the new concepts created. The former is key to understanding the movement of philosophy. What I take from this is that Deleuze and Guattari think Tinguely’s portraits do not move or ‘dance’. Nothing ‘dances’ in the Nietzsche, something indecisive haunts the Schopenhauer, the Heidegger fails to retain any veiling-​unveiling on an unthinking plane of thought. The portraits do not quite get to the ‘thingyness’ of the philosopher in question. They do not quite draw the distinctive planes and concepts of each thinker. But perhaps we can put it another way. In the piercing sounds, lightning flashes, substances of being, images of thought of complex curved planes, in the ‘continual whirr of machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 2), Tinguely’s machinic portraits articulate an infinite movement, an absolute deterritorialization, a visionary even playful eskhatos. With the rather bizarre diagram of Kant in What Is Philosophy? continuing to confound, not least because the bepuzzlement begs the question what a diagram has got to do with the thinking of a philosopher and the question of what is philosophy, the above prompted a closer look at the Nouveau Realiste art of Tinguely, especially his notebooks, drawings and sketches, in which lo and behold diagrams do indeed dance and do get to the essence of the philosopher. In a certain pataphysical respect, Tinguely’s drawings diagram the ethico-​aesthetic and ecosophical or schizoanalytic dimension of the philosopher. Through a kind of absolute deterritorialization or utopian world-​building they map virtualities, they put into movement possibilities of existential assemblages and refrains. The proviso is that they dance to a different, dissonant tune. A  Tinguely abstract machine is a singularity manifestly out of time, signalling something yet to come, in constant variation, in perpetuum mobile, veering towards uselessness for any absurd purpose. In the becoming-​Tinguelyean of the machine and the becoming-​machine of Tinguely, a singularity pursues an ordinance of virtual possibility. Tinguely’s diagrams are ‘piloting devices’ from which it is possible to extract from the actual a virtuality of becoming. His numerous sketches,



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jottings and diagrams point to the orchestration of factory workers by Engels, the black soil of Heidegger, the wry smile of Bergson, the singular demand for freedom in Stirner, the Buddha-​machine of Schopenhauer, the eternal return of difference in Nietzsche  –​Kropotkin’s oil canister and arching crane thinks the future in terms of mutual aid without exploitation and greed. In his unique note-​taking style, Tinguely’s diagrams or abstract machines (see Figure 9.1) are an event, a creation, which if manufactured into kinetic contraptions, work in delirious connection with the plane of immanence and the collective assemblage of enunciation. So the critical remarks of Deleuze and Guattari are all the more perplexing when Guattari’s lifelong preoccupation with delirious machinism, Dada and the French avant-​garde (including Roussel, Duchamp and Tinguely –​see Doerr 1998; Violand-​Hobi 1990; Hanor 2003) is taken into consideration. Supporting this

Figure  9.1  Jean Tinguely, ‘Sketch for the “Philosophers” ’ display in his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988). 26.5 x 20.7  cm. Drawing (felt and colour pencil). Museum Tinguely, Basel. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New  York/​ ADAGP, Paris.

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view, Franco Berardi (2008: 34) insists that Guattari took as given ‘the becoming true of the Dadaist revolution, its definitive realization in daily life’. Moreover, it can also be argued that Anti-​Oedipus, a book infused with the spirit of 1968 was equally inspired by the kinetic energies of Tinguely machines. Indeed, Tinguely’s self-​destroying machines, according to Brian Holmes (2007), influence the overall flow of Anti-​Oedipus, probably ‘more than any philosophical or scientific source’. This is spotted too by Berardi who makes the connection with the event of Tinguely’s kinetic art and the événements of May–​June 1968. The year 1968 was Tinguelyian, Berardi (2008: 86) writes: ‘A gigantic mechanization of Tinguelyian cogwheels that together conjure up a universe of non-​necessary, but possible events. ‘68 was in this sense the first movement without necessity, without lack, without need.’ Entranced by Tinguely’s art at a Pompidou Centre exhibit, probably sometime in 1988 or 1989, Berardi says of Guattari that he discerned in Tinguely’s sculptures a metaphor of the ritournelle or refrain  –​ that is to say a process of creation, of new ways of living, breathing, being and thinking. In some way, the whirling rhythms of the cosmic cogwheels hook you into the chaosmosis (Berardi 2014: 85). Gushing through Tinguely’s spasmodic, self-​annihilating machines is a Dadaesque urge to accelerate the ripping and tearing away of sclerotic social institutions. Schizoanalytically or ecosophically expressed, Tinguely’s excessive and unrelenting machines deliriously desire the terrible curettage of the socius. On this account, the Dadaesque aspect of Tinguely’s early kinetic work is affirmed. Much like capitalism itself, Dada’s ‘only function is to have no function’, a failure or corruption of function. Like a Rube Goldberg machine, which functions despite having no goal, or relation, Tinguely’s machines so construed are constructed from heterogeneous parts with zero goal. They produce nothing for any absurd purpose. Yet, in their own inimitable Dadaist way, Tinguely’s delirious machines carry on the practice of ecosophical chaosophy by seeking out a ‘singularity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a fragmentation, the detachment of a semiotic content’ to engineer ‘mutant nuclei of subjectivation’ (Guattari 1995: 18). In Anti-​Oedipus, capitalism is depicted as a machine beset on a revolutionary journey. Its fuel is desire and with it the socius goes nuts, much like Tinguely’s self-​ destroying machines. This is Mumford’s megamachine  –​a pointless operation which propels itself forward –​in a mad dance or trance –​in elemental, disjointed terms. Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 373) write: ‘The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality.’ And again, on the other side of reason there is but lies, delirium and drift, according to Guattari



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(2008:  36):  ‘Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself.’ In the avant-​ garde kinetic designs of Duchamp and Tinguely, Guattari unearths a delirious machinic metamodelling (at odds with the normative universal diagrams of Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian structuralism). Less surreal, less Freudian, more Dada because: ‘Surrealism was a vast enterprise of Oedipalization of the movements that preceded it’ (Guattari 2008: 104). In Chaosophy, Guattari asks:  How does one obtain a functional ensemble, while shattering all the associations of Freudian psychoanalysis? His partial answer is to look to Dada, Goldberg’s drawings, and the machines of Tinguely, because in terms of the latter, Tinguely’s machines are consistent with the revolutionary trajectory of Anti-​Oedipus, which depicts desire desiring the destructive, deterritorializing processes of capitalism. Desire acts as a violence without purpose, or as Deleuze and Guattari (1983:  346) say, ‘[A]‌pure joy in feeling oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes.’ This is the joyful refrain which Guattari finds in Tinguely’s machines. With respect to this sense of the capitalist mindset, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the deadly cycle of repetition, those refrains which crystallize into ‘hardened’ representation, such as obsessive ritual. They add: Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system . . . Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where, according to the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose. (346–​7)

Despite the underlying serious and committed critique of the nature of capitalism, Tinguely’s work recycles absurdity, uselessness and waste in an affirmative sense because he makes everyday objects such as cogs, mannequins, wheels, drums and dolls exude a joy in their very malfunction. His is a joy which teases, prods and provokes the structural overproduction and emptiness of capitalism. His remedy is a healthy scorn, a mocking of grand plans and big ideas, especially that big red button to blow up the world. His machines ridicule the threat of total annihilation (see Figure 9.2). On the bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) by the American military, he tells Dominique de Menil: After all there was this fateful, extraordinary date which was 1945. After that moment when the atom bombs started falling on this world, that changed the world. Before or after the atom bomb, it’s different. Because it was the first time

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Figure 9.2  Jean Tinguely, ‘Hiroshima’ (1963). © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/​ADAGP, Paris.

that human beings had the chance to commit suicide as a collective body. This time humanity can do away with itself, if it wishes. It has the technology. (Klein et al. 1999)

For Tinguely, his kinetic contraptions are beset on a path of self-​annihilation. Yet, even here, Tinguely’s art remains resolutely liberatory, and especially Nietzschean, because as Nietzsche (1996: 178) says, in a letter to Peter Gast, marked 14 August 1881, on his ‘extremely, dangerous life’: ‘I am one of those machines which can explode.’ Like Nietzsche then, Tinguely’s art explodes everything, including the blackest melancholy. It is on this point which is important for schizoanalysis and where his ideas resonate with Deleuze, who finds a necessary joy in creation. In an interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Deleuze describes the essence and purpose of art as joyous. As such, Deleuze (2004: 134) argues, following Nietzsche, that there can be no ‘unhappy creation’: ‘There can be no tragic work because there is a necessary joy in creation: art is necessarily a liberation that explodes everything.’



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This is further ruminated upon in an interview with Jeanette Colombel (144), in which Deleuze discusses the nature of power and philosophy itself, again with a significant Nietzsche tone, and argues that the power of destruction in Nietzsche and Spinoza always emanates from affirmation, ‘from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life’. On this account, Tinguely could be distinguished from those whom Foucault famously labelled the political ascetics, sad militants and terrorists of theory in the preface to Anti-​Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xii), those preservers of ‘the pure order of politics and political discourse’, or ‘bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth’. The joy in Tinguely’s work is therefore Nietzschean. Contra the nay-​sayers, Tinguely’s self-​creating, self-​destroying artefacts convey a malevolent operation and activity but through a joy less to do with the morbidity of the anarchist’s desire, harking as Nietzsche (1974:  329) says from Book 5 of The Gay Science, from ‘the hatred of the ill-​ constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy’. Rather, the thirst for self-​destruction is Dionysian, the effect of an ‘overflowing energy’ pregnant with futural becoming. Exhibiting the sense of ‘little joy’ found in schizophrenia qua process, Tinguely’s notebooks diagram the nihilistic tendencies of the Cold War era and the widespread obsession with machines. In a word his notebooks and diagrams do ‘dance’. In the notebooks and scribbling, what inheres is a futural diagrammatics of auto-​destruction. Reading Tinguely’s diagrams pataphysically, that is to say, in the sense of their molecular (de)construction –​subject to chance, accident, haphazard happenings, flows and fluxes, the work of clinamen –​the unpredictable swerve of atoms, tychism or absolute chance  –​and in thinking his useless machines as a science of imaginary solutions (Jarry 1923), questions arise regarding the emergent properties which come into being when logic breaks down (Bok 1997: 99–​100) –​when the machine operates autopoetically (Bolt 2004: 83). Here he is in agreement again with Deleuze and Guattari who claim that the process of breaking down and malfunction through wear and tear, accident and death is part of the very functioning of desiring-​machines, or the ‘fundamental’ element of the machine, as Guattari says. The processual aesthetic of Tinguely is insinuated with, and affected by, the scientific and ethical paradigms of his day. His sculptures are traversed by machinic phyla. To account for the machinic phyla of sculpture, we can say the positive feedback from self-​immolating machines sustains the smooth functioning of the technical assemblage. His jarring contraptions crawl, whistle, whine, swing, twitch, rock and pulsate. And amid this universality of

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cacophonous malfunction, breakdown, collapse, confusion and crisis, machines dissonantly burp, ping, sing, screeches, tick, cry, ache and dance frenetically –​ all to the tune of an unpredictable telos. For example, in the rebirth, recycling and ‘explosive’ detritus in Homage to New York in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New  York in 1960, what comes into being in the mindless mayhem is the self-​orchestrated suicide of the machine. The Big Apple is designated a ‘city-​machine’, with destruction, planned obsolescence deemed the very fabric of urban life. Tinguely writes of his desire to explode the city. Amazed by the energetic mayhem of New York, Tinguely –​the co(s)mic artisan, the homemade atom bomb (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:  345)  –​finds in the skyscraper a microcosm of a little machine conceived like Chinese fireworks ‘in total anarchy and freedom’: The skyscraper itself is a kind of machine. The American house is a machine. I saw in my mind’s eye all those skyscrapers, those monster buildings, all that magnificent accumulation of human power and vitality, all that uneasiness, as though everyone were living on the edge of a precipice, and I thought how nice it would be to make a little machine there that would be conceived, like Chinese fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom. (Tomkins 1965: 166)

Art expresses this revolutionary aspect. Underscoring this point, in a radio debate for Radio Télévision Belge, Brussels, on 13 December 1982, Tinguely described art as a form of ‘manifest revolt, total and complete’ (Hultén and Tinguely 1987). The celebration of destruction is no surprise perhaps given the intellectual inheritance from the anarchist tradition of Kropotkin, Stirner and Bakunin, the latter of which famously invokes the slogan ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge’. This reckless spirit of destruction  –​contra Oedipus  –​is found in the revolutionary momentum which builds up in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983: 311) Anti-​Oedipus, an imperative, a malevolent one, to abolish conservative beliefs and theatrical scenes: ‘Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction . . . Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration.’ Elsewhere, for Deleuze, resistance to the intolerable is a matter of creation. In finding a great energy from the work of Gérard Fromanger, Deleuze concludes that the French artist loves the very world he wishes to destroy, adding:  ‘There are no revolutionaries but the joyful and no politically or aesthetically pleasing revolutionary painting without delight’ (Deleuze et al. 1999: 76–​7). Although Tinguely’s mechanical assemblages of irrational function are ‘anti-​ machines’  –​intentionally set on a course of unpredictable breakdown, and



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suicide –​it is through their humour and irony –​from thinking the involution of man and machine, the irrational and non-​functional –​that his art satirizes and mocks the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society. But it is from this perspective which allows Tinguely to engage in the dynamism and poetry of life itself. As he writes:  ‘I try to distil the frenzy of our joyful industrial confusion’ (Lucie-​Smith 1987:  87). Here Tinguely’s work trundles on alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines. Tinguely’s machines engineer difference in cycles and revolutions of repetition of which the end and outcome is never certain. The freedom for which Tinguely searches is precisely the escape from restrictive deadly repetitions, restrictive deadly ritournelles. So again his notebooks and diagrams ‘dance’ because Tinguely’s automata perform a joyful schizo waltz to the background noise of useless, incessant machines. His notebooks detail the senselessness of industrial world, and his sculptures prepare for the end of the world. They blow up. Burn. We find in Tinguely’s work, a sense of the kinetic movement of concepts  –​the free and joyous mechanic contra the dogmatic, nihilistic Stalinist. In his delirious machines, a creative spark, a joy irreducible to psychosis. As Tinguely says in a discussion of Homage to New York: ‘The machine is an instrument that allows me to be poetic. If you respect the machine, if you enter into a game with the machine, then perhaps you can make a truly joyous machine –​by joyous I mean free.’ I think Tinguely would find a great dance partner with anarchist Emma Goldman (2008 (1931), 56), who famously declared she did not believe that ‘a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy’. In other words, ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’ Both, one might surmise, would not wish to join a revolution which did not dance. Tinguely’s dance, one imagines, would be schizoid. Unbalanced, Stumbling. Frenetic. We can invoke Bergson’s (1911: 11b) theory of laughter here to explain the evocative gait of Tinguely’s Tokyo Gal in particular: ‘The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a simple machine.’ The frenetic body of Tokyo Gal is hooked up to the performance principle of ascesis and ecstasis. Like Baudrillard’s (1993: 47) description of the machinic comportment of the jogger in The Transparency of Evil, the body of Tokyo Gal (see Figure 9.3) is ‘hypnotized by its own performance and goes on running on its own, in the absence of a subject, like somnambulist and celibate machine’.

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Figure 9.3  Jean Tinguely, ‘Tokyo Gal’ (1967). © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/​ADAGP, Paris.

The perspective of Tinguely and Baudrillard who object to the death-​in-​life stasis of the frigid industrial body is shared by Donna Haraway (1999) in A Cyborg Manifesto, who claims that contemporary machines are ‘disturbingly lively’ yet masochistic bodies intoxicated with reification processes remain ‘frighteningly inert’. Tinguely’s machines certainly embrace this carnivalesque-​grotesque sense of laughter. They laugh at the laugh that laughs at its uselessness. But this is not so much a gleeful embrace of final planetary heat death as a joyful apocalypse, a positive affirmation of the madness of becoming-​other.

Ecology ‘yet to come’ Eco-​aesthetically read, Tinguely’s sculptural diagrams, jottings and sketches are bound for a new earth, people and ecology. In Deleuzian parlance, they bespeak of a world yet to come. And that is why the notions of the abstract machine and



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the ethico-​aesthetic paradigm are important for thinking Tinguely’s art. Indeed, it is vital for thinking ‘beyond the frontier of the possible,’ as Tinguely says (quoted in Lee 2004: 97). His art aims to meet the scientist and get a little ahead of him. As Tinguely says: ‘That’s the world I’m trying to live in.’ In listening closely to Tinguely’s schizo-​laughter, what we learn is a gentle mocking of our own schizoid lives. Such a joyful wisdom leaps over entrenched dogma and hearsay. In a discussion on the notion of schizo-​laughter in Balance Sheet-​Program for Desiring-​Machines?, Deleuze insists such revolutionary joy springs from great books. It derives not so much from the torture of a pathetic narcissism, or the fear of guilt, but the ‘comedy of the superhuman’, or the ‘clowning of God’. Deleuze (2004: 258) writes: ‘There is always an indescribable joy that springs from great books, even when they speak of ugly, desperate or terrifying things. The transmutation already takes effect with every great book, and every great book constitutes the health of tomorrow. You cannot help but laugh when you mix up the codes.’ This is a fabulation of the future, from which it is possible to think anew. Indeed, in this way and just like the great aesthetic figures of thought, Tinguely as kinetic sculpture artist produces affects that go beyond ordinary affections, perceptions and opinions:  they bespeak of a world yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:  65). All engineer their craft from sensations. As they say:  ‘We paint, sculpt, compose, and write with sensations. We paint, sculpt, compose, and write sensations’ (166). And sounding remarkably Deleuzian, Tinguely contends (Delehanty 1981:  2):  ‘everything changes, everything is modified without cessation; all attempts to catch life in its flight and to want to imprison it in a work of art, sculpture or painting, appear to me a travesty on the intensity of life!’ So Tinguely aims not to represent, or think with signification, but to enjoin with the intensity of flight, to follow the matter-​flow, and to contribute to its intensity. If Tinguely’s machines are idiotic, this is of little consequence as the ‘new idiot’ turns the absurd into the highest power of thought, namely, the compulsion to create. As Deleuze argues, those thoughts that are worth thinking always border on the stupid. Faced with the intolerable, the idiotic contraptions playfully contest the frustration with the encounter with the Real of capital, the event of the Cold War, nuclear bombs and the threat of the total extinction of the human race.

Abstract machines The abstract machines found in Tinguely’s wonderful notebooks and letters envisage sculptures yet to come. Non-​representative, and as a ‘science of the

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sensible’, they entrain a transcendental empiricism of sorts, that is to say, an empiricism that exceeds everyday experience to encounter the unknown. His notebooks thus struggle with the unthought (Parr 2003:  35). If they embark on an adventure of ‘disorder’ (2), to partake of ‘the wild production of difference’ (140), perhaps we can say Tinguely’s notebooks are thought-​ experiments embedded on the immanent plane of creative production, charting malfunctioning kinetic movements, and mapping a mobile machinic nature in constant variation. It is as if Tinguely, like Da Vinci, traces ‘the haecceities of molds and cracks’, which are the progenitor of form (Sauvagnargues 2013:  215). They themselves are a pataphysical solution to the madness of industrial machines. They rail against the fascism of the Cold War suicidal machine. In the orchestral din of machines thoroughly beset on malfunctioning, Tinguely’s dissonant machines connect trash with other trash to construct-​deconstruct useless megamachines. These useless, joyful contraptions disrupt the flows of consumption and overproduction. Their overriding organizing principle is the exposure of the madness of the desiring machines of the human unconscious and the schizophrenic leviathan under which we toil. Reaching an atonal screech, we can add Tinguely to Deleuze’s list of thinkers  –​Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson  –​who share a ‘secret link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power’ (Lotringer 1977). Tinguely the schizo is therefore a paragon of the irresponsible free man, at once ‘solitary, and joyous’, who given his nature is ‘able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 131). Tinguelyian sculpture machines ultimately disrupt the flows of use-​value and perform a détournement of our own barmy desiring-​machines. The task in the next section is to show how. Tinguely, like Deleuze, Guattari and indeed Marx himself, was fascinated by capitalism precisely because it worked by feeding back its breakdowns and malfunctions to ensure smooth functioning and repetition. In response to claims that his work is a dogmatic critique of capitalism, he tells Monique Barbier-​Mueller in 1993 (Perlmutter and Koppman 1999: 88): ‘How can I  reject a system that is so remarkably dynamic.’ When we consider his finished and unfinished sketches –​works which continue to inspire and intrigue generations of artists and thinkers  –​we can say they constitute and name an abstract machine (a Tinguely machine).



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It is through this abstract machine that we gain access to his thought-​ processes as a consequence, through the plane of immanence that links us with the joyful, deterritorializing machines, which trundle on without rhyme or reason. The abstract machine functions by placing variables of content and expression in ‘continuity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:  511), in constant variation. For example, with respect to the Galileo abstract machine, Tamsin Lorraine explains:  ‘It . . . emerges when variables of actions and passions (the telescope, the movement of a pendulum, the desire to understand) are put into continuous variation with incorporeal events of sense (Aristotelian mechanics and cosmology, Copernican heliocentrism), creating effects that reverberate throughout the social field’ (cited Parr 2005:  208). To rework Deleuze and Guattari a little, the Tinguely machine is abstract, singular and creative. It is real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated. Somehow ‘prior to’ history, the abstract machine does not represent the real, but rather constructs the real yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 142). The abstract machine pilots the flows of absolute deterritorialization (56). This piloting role of the abstract machine is explained in the plateau ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’: Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. (142)

The Tinguely machine joins the bunch of named abstract machines:  the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, the Galileo, the Bach, the Beethoven and so on (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:  511). The abstract machines –​not technical objects as such but diagrammatic as they are inhabited by diagrams, plans, equations –​transcend the names and dates of the inventor and refer ‘to the singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate’ (511). Abstract machines have proper names and are datable but this is not a question of possession but matters and functions. Deleuze and Guattari write: The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked by a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics and mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine, and in algebra of a Galois abstract machine (defined precisely by an arbitrary line, called the adjunctive line, which conjugates with a body taken as a starting point), etc.

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There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract machine functions directly in a matter. (142)

This point is expounded upon in Molecular Revolutions, in which Guattari (1984: 154–​5) claims that the blueprints for the SST Concorde relate to a mixed semiotics, a set of essential becomings, specifications and articulations, which activate negotiation between different semiotic and material registers. The Concorde abstract machine –​one more useless machine –​‘does not belong in some transcendent reality, but at the level of the ever-​present possibility that they may appear: the essence of the possible’ (156). On this level, the abstract machine of Tinguely unlocks the not-​yet, the emergent generative properties operative in the ‘virtual’ critique of capitalism. Tinguely’s sketches are chaotic and catastrophic but also contain ‘a germ of order or rhythm’ (Deleuze 2003: 102).

Figure 9.4  Jean Tinguely, ‘James Watt’ (1989). 59.3 x 42 cm. Drawing (felt aquarelle, gouache). Museum Tinguely, Basel. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/​ ADAGP, Paris.



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Buried in Tinguely’s sketches of philosophers and thinkers, we find the curious inclusion of a James Watt drawing, which was unconstructed as a kinetic sculpture. Thinking this in terms of the prism of metamodelization (Watson 2009), the Watt sketch, opposed to mimetic representation, consists of a cartography which does not merely illustrate, but also creates and produces. The Watt sketch (see Figure 9.4) evokes the invention of the steam engine, which did and continues to do so much to change the world, especially in the time of the anthropocene. Marx too has much to say about Watt. In ­chapter  15 of the first volume of Capital, Marx finds in the patents of the spinning jenny a premonition of universal capitalism. The notebooks of Watt’s diagrams summon forth the machine age. In terms of Tinguely’s diagram, we can say the Watt abstract machine prepares the useless machines of the twentieth and twenty-​first century. Marx (1981: 499) writes of the ‘greatness of Watt’s genius’: in Watt’s patent his steam engine is not presented as an invention for specific purposes only, but as ‘a universal engine for heavy industry’ (499). The patent is an abstract machine. A diagram charting what is to come. On the steam engine in particular, Marx writes: ‘The steam-​ engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period at the close of the seventeenth century, and such as it continued to be down to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam-​engines necessary’ (496–​7). This remark explicates on what Guattari designates as the collective agencement of enunciation. Concorde –​Guattari’s (1995: 65) example of a technologically dated model –​ has its ontological consistency formed through a point of constellation and pathic agglomeration of incorporeal Universes. It comes into being through ‘a diagrammatic Universe with plans of theoretical “feasibility” ’ (48). There are technological Universes transposing this ‘feasibility’ into material terms. These are as follows: industrial Universes capable of effectively producing it; collective imaginary Universes corresponding to a desire sufficient to make it see the light of day; political and economic Universes leading, among other things, to the release of money for its construction (47–​8). Yet, the final, material, formal and efficient causes are insufficient because a machine such as Concorde demands an ontological consistency vis-​à-​vis the machinic phylum of future supersonics, a collective imaginary and the financial markets of Integrated World Capitalism. Although a technological miracle, it failed in commercial terms. Why? Because it never attained its full existential potential, says Guattari (1995:  47), who writes: ‘The Concorde object moves effectively between Paris and New York but

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remains nailed to the economic ground. This lack of consistency of one of its components has decisively fragilized its global ontological consistency.’ Compare this to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches and plans, where we find dreams of flying machines. While such ideas are found ‘bubbling away’ in da Vinci’s head they have ‘no bite on the techno-​scientific state of things of his epoch’ (Guattari 2012: 142). Of course, in our time, such ideas have taken on ontological consistency in collective assemblages of enunciation. Guattari writes:  ‘Across chains of researchers, inventors, Phyla of algorithms and diagrams that have proliferated in technological programmes, books, teaching, forms of know-​ how, immense Capitals of knowledge have accumulated within institutions and apparatuses of every kind, now assisted with a formidable efficiency by computers’ (142). Diagramming flows from the dreams of inventors to be incarnated in the ‘vital drives of modern societies’ (142), Tinguely machines live interstitially between art and technology, aesthetics and technoscience. They hint at exhaustion and breakdown but also schizophrenic breakthrough. They present a new image of thought. His contraptions are not eschatological or apocalyptic as such but rather joyful, and affirmative of the deterritorialization of the machine. There is no idea of final heat death in Tinguely but rather an endless becoming-​other. In a discussion on the nature of the machinic phylum, De Landa (1991: 132) defines it thus: [T]‌he set of all the singularities at the onset of processes of self-​organization –​ the critical points in the flow of matter and energy, points at which these flows spontaneously acquire a new form or pattern. All these processes, involving elements as different as molecules, cells or termites, may be represented by a few mathematical models. Thus, because one and the same singularity may be said to trigger two very different self-​organizing effects, the singularity is said to be ‘mechanism independent’.

On this reading, a mechanical contraption  –​let’s say a Tinguely kinetic sculpture  –​reaches the level of the abstract machine when it becomes ‘mechanism independent’ because this takes place as soon as it can be thought of independently of specific physical embodiment. Like Marx’s idea of universal applicability with reference to Watt’s patent for the steam engine, De Landa argues that da Vinci’s invention of geared mechanisms became available for manifold applications when it was freed from specific embodiments. When Tinguely dreams of delirious machines, he sketches them out, makes plans of them. The contraption-​machines bubbling away in his head collude with the techno-​scientific state of things. Aided by the ‘formidable efficiency of



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computers’ (Guattari 2012:  142), they have taken on ontological consistency, acquired a collective enunciation. Across teams of cognitive workers (immense Capitals of knowledge), call centre staff, robots mesmerically producing mobile phones and cars on conveyor belts in manufacturing plants, machines produce machines for any absurd purpose. From dream, to fantasy, to the incarnation in the useless consumption drives of modern societies, the repercussions of Tinguely’s ‘meta-​machanic’ machines have become apparent, to the point that their ‘trees of implication’ constitute a veritable forest! (142). It is argued now that without the ‘the slightly crazy desire’ (Guattari 1996: 126) of US President John Kennedy, the Apollo program would never have got off the ground. While necessary, the political will is not sufficient. It also needs the universal dream of leaving the earth. The Apollo technical machine engages consensual machines that are semiotic, economic, political and institutional. Moreover, as Guattari says in an interview with Jacques Pain, before being technical, the machine is diagrammatic (126), hence abstract. Combining with, linking up with, coupling up with technical, chemical and biological machines are a myriad forms of semiotic or diagrammatic, theoretical and abstract machines, economic and political machines. It too is entrained in the passage from a diagrammatics of the dreams, fancies and reveries of ‘slightly mad inventors’ to existential mutations in general.

Conclusion The movement one finds in Tinguely’s machines engineers new existential assemblages within the world of work and reason, in everyday urban life. Machines are driven by flows: real or virtual. Desire in full flow is a runaway process which hurls the megamachine to its joyous end, to catastrophe. Much like the excesses of overproduction, Tinguely makes his barren machines run blindly, impotently:  a meaningless telos. Tinguely’s Dada-​machines desire the absurd. Partial objects connect and disconnect, build and collapse with other useless objects, the jetsam and flotsam of discarded objects. The recycled objects are held together by the absurd desire for the constant revolutionizing of the instruments of reproduction: a deadly repetition. Tinguely machines join with other machines AND AND AND, producing chains of anti-​machines, over-​ producing machines. The abstract machine of Tinguely takes on consistency, in a collective assemblage of enunciation; self-​annihilating, self-​immolating to accelerate the schizophrenia of capitalism. Pushing the system to the limits of its

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madness, forcing an amortization and excrescence of the system itself, absolute deterritorialization calls for revolution, a new earth, a people yet to come, in ‘total anarchy and freedom’. Let me explore the point about the suicidal tendency of the machine further. The kinetic reproduction of Kamikaze by Tinguely in the 1969  ‘Memorial to the Sacred Wind’ does not engineer sad affects as such but exudes joy in its becoming. In J for Joy in L’Abécédaire, Deleuze explains the point: The typhoon is a power (puissance), it enjoys itself in its very soul but . . . it does not enjoy because it destroys houses, it enjoys because it exists. To enjoy is to enjoy being what we are, I  mean, to be ‘where we are’. Of course, it does not mean to be happy with ourselves, not at all. Joy is the pleasure of the conquest as Nietzsche would say. But conquest in that sense, does not mean to subjugate people. Conquest is for example, for the painter to conquest the color. Yes, that is a conquest, there is joy. (Boutang et al. 2004)

As James Bridle (2001) puts it so poetically, it is worth quoting in full: Like a city at night, beautiful, terrible, it lies dormant, surges to life, shudders, roars, heart-​stoppingly passionate, cranks, gears, cams, shafts and axles rattle, rotate and grind. When it moves, I feel alive, I flush, blood rushes through my chest, my stomach flutters, vision jumps, temples throb. When it is at rest, so am I too, but still alive, still breathing, resonant with the machine, awed by its beauty. Having seen its power, majesty, sheer force of everything tearing itself apart, await its resurrection. It’s every machine that’s ever been built, every wreck and rusting heap, memorial to junkyards, destruction destructured, and yet inspiring, uplifting, impossibly alive, shockingly beautiful and godlike. When it moves it aches, cries out in pain, cackles with mirth, laughs loudly and at length and then is silent again. My heart aches with it.

The Tinguely machine –​Grabplatte für Kamikaze –​becomes typhoon –​a power (puissance), which enjoys itself ‘in its very soul’. It is not so much it enjoys because it destroys, but because it exists. To enjoy is to enjoy being what we are. Nietzsche joins in: become what you are, embrace your mad fate. In Japan in 1969 Tinguely creates Memorial to the Sacred Wind or the Tomb of the Kamikaze, a kinetic sculpture which thinks the figure of the kamikaze or ‘divine wind’, a term which was first used in Japan to describe a typhoon in 1281, which is said to have saved the country from invasion by the Mongol fleet headed by Kublai Khan. Kamikaze (神風) means typhoon in standard Japanese, while Tokubetsu kougekitai (特別攻撃隊) or Tokkoutai refers to the suicide corps. Tinguely’s ephemeral and self-​destroying machines are not sad or malicious as



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such, although they are bound for annihilation, but enthuse a machinic joy, the effectuation of a power of puissance. The work of the work of art is not memory but rather ‘fabulation’ or ‘the power of the false’. On this point, one perhaps may resist the claims of Emerling (2014) who argues that Tinguely’s philosophers fail in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? Instead, we argue that in a nutshell, and pataphysically put, Tinguely’s machines mirror the perfect reproduction of Japanese society, following Guattari, where the Japanese populace structures its universe and orders its emotions with ‘the proliferation and disorder of machines’ (Genosko 2002: 128). They are ‘crazy for machines and a machinic kind of buzz’ (128). In terms of schizoanalytic metamodeling, Watson (2009: 9) claims that to build new models is in effect to build new subjectivity. So subjectivity is a metamodeling activity, a process of singularization. Such a machinic version of subjectivity and singularization revolutionizes the world and completely recreates it, according to Guattari (Watson 2009:  161). This is perhaps the pataphysic solution to the madness of industrial machines. Thinking through Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 2002 documentary Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely we can determine that in Tinguely’s kinetic art is ‘an open, free spirit, which is the root of all creation’ (my trans.). The kamikaze spirit of his junk machines ‘returns a grand smoothness to movement’ in terms of smooth spaces traversed by all manner of weird becomings.

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Hanor, Stephanie Jennings (2003), Jean Tinguely: Useless Machines and Mechanical Performers, 1955–​1970, Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Haraway, Donna J. (1999), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., Simon During, ed., 271–​91, New York and London: Routledge. Holmes, Brian (2007), Escape the Overcode: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics. http://​brianholmes.wordpress.com/​2007/​07/​ 20/​escape-​the-​overcode/​ (Accessed 13 March 2014). Hultén, Pontus and Jean Tinguely (1987), Jean Tinguely: A Magic Stronger Than Death, New York: Abbeville Press. Jarry, Alfred (1923), Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustrol, pataphysicien, Paris: Stock. Klein, Yves et al. and Museum Jean Tinguely Basel (1999), Tinguely’s Favorites: Yves Klein, Basel, Switzerland: Museum Jean Tinguely Basel. Lee, Pamela M. (2004), Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960’s, Cambridge: MIT Press. Tinguely, quoted in William Byron, ‘Wacky Artist of Destruction’, Saturday Evening Post, 21 April 1962, 76–​8. Lotringer, Sylvère (1977), Anti-​Oedipus, New York: Semiotext(e). Lucie-​Smith, Edward (1987), Sculpture since 1945, New York: Universe. Marx, Karl (1981), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (1974), The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (1996), Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Christopher Middleton, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Parr, Adrian (2003), Exploring the Work of Leonardo da Vinci within the Context of Contemporary Philosophical Thought and Art, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Parr, Adrian (2005), The Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Perlmutter, Dawn and Debra Koppman (1999), Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art: Contemporary Cross-​Cultural Perspectives, Albany: State University of New York Press. Sauvagnargues, Anne (2013), Deleuze and Art, London: Continuum. Teshigahara hiroshi no sekai: DVD collection (2002), Tōkyō: Asumikku, Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely (Ugoku chokoku: Jean Tinguely, 1981). Tinguely, Jean and Musée Picasso (Antibes, France) (1999), Jean Tinguely: Les philosophes, Antibes: Musée Picasso. Tomkins, Calvin (1965), The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-​Garde, New York: Viking Press. Violand-​Hobi, Heidi E. (1990), Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic Art or a Myth of the Machine Age, Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Watson, Janell (2009), Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Lacan and Deleuze, London: Continuum.

Part Three

The Shattered Muse: Ecosophy and Transverse Subjectivities

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The Shattered Muse: Mêtis, Melismatics and the Catastrosophical Imagination Charlie Blake

The discovery of clockwork #1 All my devices are clockwork now –​even my nervous system. Even my endocrine system. Even my brain is ticking. We realized by around 2052 that the organic realm had been pretty thoroughly bugged or contaminated –​their tendrils, talons and tentacles were slithering and scraping everywhere by then, flailing wantonly in the datastreams, capturing and consuming our constellations of thought and affect, vivisecting our dreams and hungrily sucking out the soft, liquid futures within of any art or agency. But one realm the digital demonocracy and their fanged and feathered demonocratic engineers didn’t have under mass surveillance was the realm of clockwork, of the base mechanical, of the beautifully decelerated machine, of the skittering march of the cryptomantically augmented dolls and the (ec)static tension of the fully wound mainspring. So if we wanted to stay hidden and effective we had to detonate our pixilated zone clouds and make a zig-​zag move into the antiquated empire of automata. From the Diaries of K7~Kaj)1

Kairos in schizotopia: preface and enchantment So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Lem (1973: 204)

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Félix Guattari and Franco (Bifo) Berardi were both close philosophical friends and fellow cartographical visionaries in the often incendiary political landscape of late-​twentieth-​century trans-​European activism. Indeed, the title of Berardi’s posthumous critical memoir of his friendship and intellectual collaboration with Guattari is quite explicit about the many extra-​and intra-​transversal links between them as two productive subjectivities in time and as two conceptual constellations in flight across space and culture, as are the sometimes meandering yet often illuminating narrations and commentaries and conversations that follow that title to its conclusion. Central to these links and transversals made across, between, within and around various flights and meanderings is the act and force of connecting itself, and towards the end of that route from the title to the provisional eternity of friendship, as we approach the conclusion of a text that is, after all, and in fact, no conclusion at all, but rather an example of the mechanics of what might quite reasonably be called in this context ‘Kairos in Chronos’, Berardi (2008:  135) reflects on connections in general and how we make them: ‘The activity of connecting –​thought, creation, movement –​should not be conceived as the instauration of an order . . . In effect, the activity of connecting is the desire, the condition of an itinerary that is invested with sense solely for whoever undertakes the trip.’ While the metaphor of the ‘journey’ has been somewhat exhausted of its emancipatory power of late through its interminable iteration as cliché in both private discourse and public and post-​public relations –​ as an experiential enrichment for the neo-​liberal subject commodified in social media as ‘ownership’ or possession or ‘experiential property’  –​it nonetheless retains a potentially anarchaosophical emancipatory charge here as an aspect of their occasionally shared ‘visionary cartography’ and specifically, as a provisional record of a set of transitional maps of those fabulatory moments in which connection and movement might be illuminated as a sudden flaring of immanence, as a momentary perception of folds in the surface of being and more immediately, as an immanency of the fold in the map itself –​an apprehension and grasping of which is also and by extension an apprehension and grasping of the mechanically abstracted heart of any true ecosophical aesthetics: ‘Ecosophy, an environmental consciousness adequate to the technological complexity of late modernity, is based on the decisive character of aesthetics in the prospect of ecology. Aesthetics is the science that studies the contact between the derma and the different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic and informational flows’ (34). Aesthetics for Guattari, Berardi elaborates a few pages earlier, is ‘the science of the projection of worlds by subjectivities in becoming’ (32), and in this formulation along with the quotation given above may be located the aegis under



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which the following themes of mêtis and melismatics, chronoplasticity and resurrection, and the various other tropes and devices associated with the kind of writing often now described as ‘philosophiction’ or ‘theory fiction’ are to be deployed so as to convey the tone or mood in which the ecosophical aesthetics of Félix Guattari will be hereby treated. It is a mood or tone which is perhaps most swiftly conveyed at this stage by juxtaposition rather than exposition, thereby allowing, it is anticipated (and in deference to the memory of Guattari and his erstwhile collaborator Gilles Deleuze), the vivid lightning bolt of thought to rupture and illuminate the otherwise smooth surface of ratiocination that the word ‘preface’ so often portends. In keeping with this image of ‘rupture’  –​so central, as Stephen Zepke (2011: 209) has so eloquently elaborated, to Guattari’s later aesthetic thinking) –​there is a brief and notably ecstatic quotation in the latter’s Chaosmosis:  An Ethico-​Aesthetic Paradigm where he is considering the moment of aesthetic experience in the wake of an encounter with Debussy, Van Gogh or jazz and extrapolating from the concept of autopoeisis that he adapts from Francisco Varela  –​and in a manner that is, as Zepke has noted and contextualized in relation to notions of rupture and exodus in modern and more contemporary art, eminently modernist rather than conceptualist or post-​ conceptualist in tone and reference (213). This is a moment where Guattari (1995:  93) writes that ‘a block of percept and affect, by way of aesthetic composition, agglomerates in the same transversal flash the subject and object, the self and other, the material and incorporeal, the before and after . . . I find myself transported into a Debussyist universe, a blues universe, a blazing becoming of Provence’. This apparently absorptive and arguably nostalgic view of the aesthetic encounter as such, and particularly in relation to the potentiality for political resistance to what Guattari calls at this stage in his thinking Integrated World Capitalism, a potential that he wishes to extract from this encounter with figurative and performative art, might easily be dismissed as the retrospective daydream of an ageing Gauchiste intellectual for those pre-​conceptualist verities and simplicities in which experimental art and experimental politics could easily be entwined, were it not for the capacity for temporal dislocation and what I have termed chronoplasticity that Guattari also explores in relation to this hypothetical encounter via Marcel Duchamp and Michael Bakhtin, among others. This potential for temporal dislocation is touched upon by Zepke in passing and will be considered experimentally and otherwise in some of the scenarios encountered below, but is at this point best served by completing the juxtaposition of quotations indicated above through a combination of Guattari’s moment of rapt modernist ejaculation with a short scene-​setting instance at the opening of J. G.

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Ballard’s dystopian novel High Rise from 1975, which can then be triangulated by the reader so as to anticipate the mood-​to-​be-​synthesized in the scenes of a London-​to-​come in 2052, a chaotically ruined cosmoscape, a post-​anthropocene schizotopia realized –​and thereby both temporally and spatially dislocated from the ‘now’ of the activated text. But here first is the Ballardian modernist dystopia observed through the parallax of perception that drives into our own future(s): Each day the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind’ (Ballard 1977:  9). Both of these quotations will now be left ‘hanging’ for the reader to pursue as they wish (or don’t wish) within or beyond the contingencies of the account that follows. In effect, these quotations occupy the role here that the scholarly epigraph might once have enjoyed in a position prior to the text, but in this case they are within the text, at least spatially, and they are there for reasons that will, I hope, become clear as the text itself progresses to its ecosophically (and catastrosophically) perilous and tychean conclusion. The essential element to be retained at this point, however, as the reader enters in a moment or two (and ideally in the manner of a dolly shot in an old black-​and-​white movie) the inner sanctum of the curator of the Museum of Lost Objects, the nameless and reluctant editor of the account that follows –​its collector, collator, taxonomist and ultimately its victim –​is a certain quality close to that which the founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, once called ‘protention’  –​in this case, however, tactically extracted from its nexus of Husserlean procedures, a mode of protention extrapolated and understood primarily as a self-​generated mood of anticipation or even prolepsis: here a mood coloured and tempered by its unfolding affectively speaking between the quotidian ecstasy of Guattari, on the one hand, and the almost genteel violence and faded apocalyptic alienation of Ballard, on the other. It is a mood, effectively and affectively engineered to draw attention to what readers of a more pre-​theoretical or romantic or even occultic tendency might once have called an ‘enchantment’ or ‘spell’ or even a ‘sigil’, a statement of desire codified and then buried among the swirl of black marks that make up this preface, beneath the rustling of its textual surface, and activated unconsciously by the process of reading and thinking about what is being read, especially now, at this precise moment of reading and thinking about what is being read, at this moment, in this moment. Now. Can you feel it working yet? No? Good. For it is an enchantment or spell or sigil that, once recognized and dismissed and forgotten about, can be safely assumed to have been activated, as is the manner of these spectral machines in both art and life. As such it will later be quietly re-​triggered –​again unconsciously –​at the appropriate moment(s) as



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a way of opening up and slipping vertically or diagonally through the temporal gates of the text or falling horizontally or inversely through one of its various metafictional trapdoors so as to observe more directly, and I  would hope immersively, some of the reconfigurations of lives, loves and potential ecospheres, as well as the aesthetic-​ ethical-​ catastrosophical and more overtly political interventions, that these visionary cartographers have begun to sketch out for us. Having now rather hastily set up the scene ahead, then, and expressed also my immersive hope to the reader, and partly because I have an appointment of some significance for us all on a transatlantic liner that will shortly be leaving for New York and then from there sailing to Port au Prince in the Republic of Haiti, and partly I will concede in response to some rather unsettling ‘noises’ outside the frame of the preface itself, I will load up the camera on its dolly track, press the appropriate button to initiate movement and leave the remainder of this scene and subsequent document, a little abruptly perhaps (rather as the runic script in M.  R. James’s famous tale of textual transmission and contagion is despatched to its unsuspecting recipient), in the hands of the reader, and swiftly depart.

Part one: mêtis and melismatics [Varela] . . . distinguishes two types of machines: ‘allopoietic’ machines which produce something other than themselves, and ‘autopoietic’ machines which engender and specify their own organisation and limits. Autopoietic machines undertake an incessant process of the replacement of their components as they must continually compensate for the external perturbations to which they are exposed. Guattari (1995: 39) The contents of the skin are randomized at death and the pathways within the skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further transformation, may go on out in the world in books or works of art. Bateson (1973: 435) Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control. Deleuze (1995: 175)

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We live, it is often said these days, in an age of inhumanism, ahumanism, posthumanism, transhumanism and an increasing attention to the nonhuman and the nonhuman other or alien, the latter often considered as a kind of inverse correlative of the non-​animal-​human that many of our species have, somewhat arrogantly, identified as and with for some considerable time. Without going into the history of this concept, the human, and its diaspora and transitions, which has been adequately dealt with elsewhere (and without also going into the intricate (and undoubtedly Eurocentric, phallocentric and anthropocentric), genealogy of its invention and reinvention in the writings of, say, Albertus Magnus of Cologne or Faustino Perisauli of Tredozio or Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam on the capricious and hedonistic goddess of folly or Thomas More on Utopia or the essays of Michel de Montaigne, or the innovations of René Descartes in philosophy and analytic geometry or Christiaan Huygens in astronomy, mathematics and horology, and all that has followed from their innovations in the degenerate European consciousness), suffice it to say that for the purposes of the collation of these strands of text from various spatial, temporal and non-​ temporal or at least quasi-​temporal locations, and within the constraints of our present and chronic dispensation, some preliminary observations, at least, will need to be made on the synchronicities and contingencies of fortune which have led to and determined its curation here in my study at the Museum of Lost Objects, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Rhode Island, United States.2 Having established my location and context, then, at least in the broadly spectral sense, I  will now preface my more general observations on a meditation, at least ostensibly, on the twentieth-​century activist, philosopher and psychoanalyst  –​and some would say visionary  –​Félix Guattari, and his invention of the concept of ecosophy, by noting certain reservations I have been nurturing on some aspects of the document that you are about to read, as well as narrating, I hope, and if there is time, its rather curious provenance. Of its putative or at least potential effects on the reader I  will say little here, aside from mentioning in passing that some of the parerga and paralipomena that accompanied the set of loose but numbered leaves when, out of the blue, they fell into my hands from those of a passing and swiftly vanishing stranger of indeterminate sex (accompanied by a strange, whirring noise) on the deck of an Atlantic crossing  –​including marginal notes and supplements in English and Aramaic covering the central manuscript like a palimpsest along with a series of curiously alien hieroglyphics which are not reproduced here –​would seem to indicate that its consumption as text might possibly catalyse a delirium which is, in actuality, a mode of operative, futural technology, generating



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from there what the notes and supplements describe as a nexus of ‘chronical disruption’. This, so far as I can ascertain from the marginal ephemera, badly damaged as they were by age and acid rain and black oil and the carelessness of a hasty burial between a cemetery and an ancient woodland path next to a city on the southern coast of England3 (as I  subsequently discovered), involves what is described there as a disordering of temporal progression, a process allowing, that is, for communication and transport between and across decades, centuries, eras, aeons and epochs. A kind of time travel, in effect. That this image of magical enchantment and science fictional transition is not only absurdly fanciful but also entirely counter to the second law of thermodynamics and its necessarily unidirectional projection of time’s arrow towards entropic dissipation hardly needs technical elaboration here. Suffice it to say that the notion of time distortion or chronotopical or even chronotopological rupture, along with suggestions of the resurrection of the dead, through a style of narrative that bears a passing resemblance both to certain aspects of medieval Christian martyrology and the glossy and dystopian impedimenta of the so-​ called cyberpunk literary and cinematic vogues of the later twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, strikes me as a rather pointless distraction from the powerful underlying thesis that flows like a hidden river with many branching tributaries beneath the geotraumatic fragments of text and imagery that follow. Evidently the writer or writers of these fragments thought otherwise, but having made my disclaimer I can move on. So, having got that out of the way, allow me, my dear reader, to return to more scholarly matters, specifically the terms with which the text elaborates its conceptual and experiential landscape as coordinates in what one might describe, in an adaptation from Guattari’s conceptual efflorescence, as an exercise in schizotopian cartography. The document as here curated is formally divided into seven sections (not including this preface, which may be considered as a meta-​textual or higher dimensional commentary and supplement, above and beyond the closed set of the manuscript’s contents that comprise the sections of the document entitled  –​by implication  –​‘The Shattered Muse’).4 Neither does it include the title, and that precedes this preface and the brief quotation on existence, mechanism, automata, surveillance, control and becoming-​ imperceptible that rests like a hinge between the two. Nor does it include the notes which may or may not have been appended to this document in certain dimensions if not in others, and these are not my responsibility anyway. Indeed, the endnotes, should they have been added to this document by the time you reach the end, may be treated as similarly higher dimensional (though not

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necessarily of the same order of higher dimensionality), as the words that you are reading at this very moment. Of the sections themselves, the second, fourth and sixth are essentially discursive, though the form that this discursiveness takes moves between narrative, the formal lecture or presentation and peripheral notes scattered like time crystals at the end of an adventure, presumably to indicate the underlying perspectivism required by the concept of chaosmosis, to which I  shall return in due course, if time permits. (I should, perhaps, mention at this point that my possession of this document has led to my being threatened, I believe, by non-​locational voices and sounds, projected, I  also believe  –​and somewhat paradoxically, considering its almost infinite improbability –​from the future, and this is why both its digital and textual and indeed lateral dispersal is so urgent, chronically rather than aionically5 speaking, and why I may have to depart from this preface immediately via a trapdoor in the text if these phenomena return). Anyway, for now I will continue by noting that these sections are interspersed with shorter narrative fragments which may be considered as serving the same purpose as, say, the cells on the outer frames of old tapestries or the panels at the edges of stained glass windows: as supplements, that is, that make potentially infinite adjustments to the stories within the central frame by virtue of the hermeneutic mutations of the consciousness that apprehends them. Of the broader concepts in the main title of this curation, the first Mêtis is a relatively obscure deity from the classical Greek canon (who in Orphic mythology was born of Night, and in more general Hellenic myth became the first consort of Zeus and gave birth to the goddess Athena in a thunderstorm, at which point she was swallowed by Zeus, as was his wont), as well as being a form and expression of thought and activity. In this expanded sense, mêtis is a kind of intelligence in design as well as a form of cunning, a notion and an activity which both complements and subverts the more commonly known ancient Greek concepts/​ activities or actualizations, techne and poiesis. Indeed, as the design strategist Benedict Singleton has so economically expressed it in a discussion of artifice, ingenuity and the creation of traps in relation to speculative design, as a shorthand:  ‘it’s the intelligence implied when extraordinary effects are elicited from unpromising materials. It works with situations that are volatile, slippery, stubborn, or some combination of the three, and it find ingenious ways to transform their current arrangement into a new one’ (Singleton 2014:  24; emphasis in the original). Within this text, and I  must be brief here, both Mêtis as personification and mêtis as ingenuity in creativity (the two expressions of form treated as



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interchangeable in this context depending on perspective, like Wittgenstein’s duck-​rabbit and similar optical illusions) may be considered as a kind of refrain or ritournelle, travelling like a series of waves and reverberations through the underground river system of conceptual, potential and virtual activism that flows beneath the sheets of the text. It is for the reader to determine how or when she, he or it might be operating, actively, passively or through some rare form of abduction. Of melisma and melismatics, suffice it to say that the general sense of melisma is of the voicing of a single syllable across a range of notes, and was central to the Eleusinian mysteries as a way of achieving a trance state, but I must concede that I remain somewhat mystified by the role of melismatics in catastrosophical thinking. It seems to have something to do with phonemic, euphonic and metonymic coincidence in that it resembles in some ways the word ‘mellifluous’ –​the honeyed sweetness of song –​and this is turn indicates apian politics, but in some newly mechanized or cybernetic form. Catastrophe and catastrosophy themselves are terms best left to the narrative itself, but suffice it to say that the terms bear an intimate connection with both the idea of ecosophy and the shattered muse of our title, as they do also to the possibility of complete human extinction as the end of art as artifice (in both senses of the word ‘end’). Finally, and traditionally, at least in that tradition established by Hesiod, there were nine muses, born from the union of Zeus and Mnemosyne or memory. Our lady of the title may be taken by extrapolation as the initially imperceptible tenth muse of this divine coupling, ‘shattered’ both in the sense of a shattering of the gauzy hexagonal mirror of provenance and divination, memory and mimesis, abyssal time and virtuality, and in its more delirial, intoxicated, chaotic, schizotopian and Dionysian sense also –​hence her name (or at least one of them): Dionysia. That she is a creature also of repetition and return is a refrain or ritournelle in the fragments below and in those texts, tapestries, etchings and stained glass windows that they connect with across space and time will, I  hope, become evident both here and in the notes that some if not all readers may discover at the end of the document. Of ecosophy itself it is fair to say that before Guattari becomes characteristically abstruse in his second consideration of the theme in Chaosmosis (1995), his initial outline in The Three Ecologies (2008) was unusually straightforward and developmental. Indeed, in its division between the three kinds of ecology  –​ existential, sociopolitical and environmental –​it acts to expand upon the idea of transversality that he began to shape at the clinic of La Borde where I first met him back in the 1960s.

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At this point the curator paused, his fingers frozen in mid-​air above the antique keyboard as, evidently alarmed, he listened to a rustling in the bushes outside his study in the snow-​covered garden illuminated by an all too pellucid moon which sent shafts of lunar light through the window and the open curtains, a rustling which was followed by an inexplicable thump just above and to the left of his head, somewhere between the fireplace and the Chinese room. He stopped breathing for a moment and looked nervously to the ornate, Venetian mirror over the library fireplace, which appeared to be bending unnaturally in the firelight. After a few moments and as nothing further had happened, sonically or otherwise, he resumed breathing and continue to type.

Though I do sometimes wonder whether I was ever really at La Borde, whether I imagined the whole thing and never actually met Félix. Fiction, fantasy and imagination have a way of intervening in our desultory lives, after all, sometimes as hyperstitional substantiation for sure, as a move from the imagined to the imaginal to the actual and material, but more often, it has to be said, as pure delusion. He paused once again. Looked at himself in the second mirror over the occasional table upon which he had set two silver candelabras from his Russian collection, a pack of cards and a gun, his reflection flickering in the firelight. Looked away. Continued.

But be that as it may, in terms of The Shattered Muse, which is undoubtedly intended as a hyperstitional text rather than a source of passive reflection or exegesis, what is most important is that it at least begins to indicate ways in which ecosophy and chaosmosis and molecular insurrection can continue to be honed as significant conceptual instruments in the production of new subjectivities in and after the age of catastrophe. What is important also is the relation between ecosophy, the various assemblages that evolve and mutate in response to or ahead of ecosophical transitions, and the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’, as Guattari describes it, that will enable creativity to organize from primal chaos new forms of expression that both respond to and in some small way reorganize these assemblages, travelling like angelic or daemonic crystalline intelligences from the void to the plenum, or as Guattari prefers, from the infinite to the finite. For as Guattari (1995: 101) notes in his chapter from Chaosmosis called ‘The New Aesthetic Paradigm’: Duchamp declared: ‘art is a road which leads towards regions which are not governed by time and space.’ The different domains of thought, action and sensibility position, in dissimilar



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ways, their movement from infinity into the passage of time, or rather into epochs capable of returning to or intersecting each other.

In that sense, and to reaffirm or intensify my observation above, The Shattered Muse is neither a commentary upon nor an exegesis of these themes, so much as a demonstration of how such an aesthetic imperative might feasibly operate –​a practical, rather than a theoretical or abstract unfolding of this imperative in the light of potential ecosophical transitions. Thus the form and expression of a constantly mutating assemblage of script, text, montage, multiple and transversal voices, repetitions, plagiarisms, auto-​plagiarisms and sudden transitions and interruptions, circling and swirling around the multiple questions of ecosophy and art, but especially the around the singular question of whether oikos and sophia can ever be reconciled in any meaningful or productive or sustainable way in the light of ecological, socio-​economic and existential catastrophe, clearly indicates that creativity –​including the generation of concepts –​is more crucial to Guattari’s ‘new aesthetic paradigm’ than a reflection on sense per se. But now I must leave these papers in your virtual hands and vanish, as did the mysterious stranger who dropped its contents on my lap in the midst of a roiling ocean only a matter of weeks ago. A wheel is spinning at the heart of the abandoned funfair at the core of the Casino of Lost Dreams which lies at the centre of the Museum of Lost Objects, and its centrifugal force is dragging me into an exquisite spiral, a chaosmotic vortex, upon the inner sides of which, like the objects perceived by Alice in her descent down the rabbit hole, I can see a framed painting of . . .

The last tree on earth . . . was, of course, the first tree on Earth. Everybody knew that, s/​he said. The boy looked embarrassed for a moment. But was the tree in Africa? s/​he asked, tentatively. No, of course it wasn’t, s/​he responded, casting him a brief, scathing look, before returning to her ants.

Chronos versus The Crucified: London, 2052 Theodora, a beautiful woman of noble birth, was married to a rich, God-​ fearing man and lived in Alexandria in the time of the emperor Zeno. But the

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devil, jealous of Theodora’s holiness, caused another rich man to lust after her, and he pestered her with a stream of letters and gifts to let him have his way. Voragine (1998: 229) Kleptomancy –​divination by theft, whether from oneself or another. Self-​ quotation to the point of infinite regress, either through pure spatial or linear repetition or temporal transection of that repetition. Sometimes a synonym for a déjà vu within a déjà vu (archaic).6 The University is in ruins.7 As she stepped out of the derelict concourse of what had once been New Cross Gate station onto the weed-​choked concrete and tarmac of what had once been the New Cross Road and looked up to the shifting valences of an iridescent and savagely transected sky, she knew at once that the weather would be changing quite drastically before the darkness fell. She knew also, once she had checked with virtual8 fingers the intricate Vorahnung Bedienfeld (™) that she had had installed so painfully before leaving Cologne (after that bleached and sybaritic summer with Zeno#5 and Dionysia#3 in Uppsala) that darkness would fall again soon like fold upon fold of heavy, velvet cloth before the rains began once again. The rain, beating its interminable pattern, its relentless tattoo (click, click, click, patter, patter, patter, click, click, click) on the ever expanding narco-​mondo of the city, the savage and etiolated city with its ageing and semi-​robotic infra-​ tranquilized or hyper-​stimulated hordes, on its migrants, vagrants and nomads, on its low resolution markets and subterranean hostels, hotels and spas, theme parks and prisons and conference centres, its high rise gardens and virtual stadia and blockchain bordellos, its psycho-​pimps and con-​thugs, its ground level transitory mini-​cities, metro-​jungles and elevated fortress communities, its gangs of stray militia, serial data-​vampires and machinic junkies and on its translucent mycological patina spreading like a stain across the city and the sky. But the darkness would fall first. Would swirl and spiral in from the eastern skies and descend, then a gash would slice through those skies and spread from horizon to horizon like a wound, before the incessant lightning flashed and the rains themselves fell again like a vertiginous ocean crashing down from the heavens. Dwindling in due course to the relentless patter, patter, patter, click, click, click, patter, patter, click on the pop-​up village corrugated shelters. Before not after, that is. At least this time. At least for now. She checked the distressed leather bag hanging from her waist and there, amid the impedimenta of her



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mission and alongside her obsidian knife and tarot cards and other essentials, she found two thin antique paperback books that she had been handed by a stranger in the notorious Urverk bar in Uppsala the previous summer. Lifting them out carefully with beautifully manicured fingers she felt and tested their lignin scent, looked at the titles:  Dionysus versus the Crucified and Other Stories9 by René Girard and The Three Ecologies and the Three Fates10 by Félix Guattari, then, putting them back in her bag and tightening its drawstrings, she straightened her back and slowly released her voice, allowing it to slowly rise and slowly fall in parabolic waves. ‘Hmmmm. Mmmmmmmm-​hmmmm-​zzzzzzz-​mmmmm’ she murmured, hummed, sang and resonated, like some falling-​rising-​rising-​falling mantra, some hypnotic melisma. Rising, decaying de-​cadence. Opened her eyes, more relaxed now and smiled.

Theodora (once saint and martyr of old Alexandria, now remade, remodelled, reanimated, repurposed, reborn, like Dionysus or the Nazarene she thought to herself, but different too, lipstick, scent and circuitry, silk and chrome and flexible carbon boots on the cracked, black tarmac) paused, shook her head a little, just a touch to dissipate the haze of travel and exhaustion, bit her lip, brushed a lock of stray, golden, blue and purple hair from her eyes, eyes now of obsidian, now of gold, now of vermillion, now of ultraviolet or infrared and now she closed those tired, opalescent eyes tight tight shut, long dark lashes interlocking, eyebrows furrowed and now took a long, slow, deep, endless breath, allowed her mind to still for a moment, like a rough pebble in a mountain stream. And then, after looking into herself and having established from this inward glance how much time she still had available before the darkness fell, looked down deeply into herself, into the simian wetware apparatus she was wearing, deep into the heat and heart of the flesh and circuitry, and searched then with human digits to check her physical and topographical coordinates, her actual as well as her virtual location. Having calculated the distance between where she now stood and her target, she looked up again at the mazy empyrean, at the vast abrupt. Gazing. Thoughtful. Dreaming. Wistful. Oh, my sweet muse. Oh, my distaff muse. Oh, my shattered muse. My sweet and holy protectoress. My dark and holy precursor. Time-​shattered crystals falling like snow. Falling and calling from innumerable futures entagliated. Trapped though in a singular past. Frozen now in Baltic amber. Africa. Sweet Africa. Woven in French tapestries. Stained in English glass. Etched on quantum particles and the aureoles of distant and dying suns. Etched in the Egyptian sand, sea and sky. Africa.

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Written on swirling waters. Written on the hot, desert wind. Alexandria. Lost city. Sunken city. So long ago. Satan’s last and listless gambit. Heat and surcease. Don’t get distracted now. Wait! Look! Open your eyes!

There were thunderclouds on the distant horizon. Vast and gloomy battlements of a vaporous war. Lightning flashes. Forked and flaring. Bifurcating. Catastrophic. Splitting the tenebrous curlicues of vapour and gravity into servile precipitation. Splitting time itself. Splitting and splicing the sky.11 Theodora looked down again. Paused for a moment. But yes, this was really happening. It was happening now. In this time, at this time. The lightning flashed again on the eastern horizon. Splicing and splitting the distant sky into a tesseract of glowing multiplicities. Yes, this was happening now. Yes. Again and again and again. But no. Wait. No. Not yet. Not here. Not yet. Not now. Cracks in the city. Cracks in the street. Cracks in time. Time is cracked. She checked . . . Minutes to go. Minutes to go

It took her roughly ten of those minutes to get to the site of the ruined university and discover its inner plot, there were obstacles to negotiate on both roadway and rooftops and some of these obstacles were at least partially human. The buildings, guarded by static, digital sentinels had no rooves themselves, but had retained on fading, metallic signs in both script and braille the names and signatures of once presumably eminent thinkers about whom she knew nothing. She negotiated the maze that had been set up within, checking off and whispering in one of the voices she had downloaded from the site set up by the invisible committee the codes and passwords based on the names of the writers she did know something of and would be engaging with this semester: Guattari, of course, and Bataille, Girard, Haraway, Parisi, Barcelos, Callois, Ayache, de Castro, Plant, Oresme, Wilkins, Zeno (all three), Valereto, Demesne, Singleton, Zalamea, Icr-​rina Mali Burch. Then she was there. A  small arena had been carved out of what had formally been an access road. Temporarily rooved with tarpaulin in case of passing squalls and premonitions and seated with pews ransacked from the cellar of a nearby church, this would stand until twilight, after which it would be destroyed by inclement weather. In the meantime, as before, an abductional chrono-​polymer screen had been set up with spherical floating speakers and both internal and external vector projection modules next to a set of calibrators connected to a small, plastic time machine guarded by sentinels near the entrance. There were approximately seventy or eighty in the audience, which was at this point still shifting to greet friends, lovers and



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acquaintances and locate their assigned positions. Over to the left she spied Dionysia, Zeno and Tyche talking and calibrating their own linked apparatus as a DJ hidden behind a second screen mixed weather sounds, apian buzzing and muffled xenosonics in preparation for the lecture, a lecture in which both Zeno and Dionysia –​the first in either series, that is –​would be talking to them from separate times and locations in the past. Some words appeared on the screen for a few moments, flickered then vanished. Fate is harsh. Fortune is capricious. Contingency is a murderess. All is lost. All is gained.

She walked purposefully over to her friends and linked up with them. After greetings and connections and conjectures lightning flashed on the distant horizon and the lighting started to change and the audience, now settled in their positions with their subject groups, grew silent, until only the distant sirens and a few wheeling gulls above them and the rolling of distant thunder could be heard. They waited. After a few more moments the screen lit up in a frenzied display of glitching and then digital blossoms and weeds, the latter two growing and dying like something from an old, accelerated film. Suddenly the animation stopped and the screen became blue-​grey, then some more words appeared. There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds (Bateson 1973: 459–​60)12

On the screen now there were three faces, the ones on the left and the right were clearly Zeno and Dionysia of the original series, apparently talking to one another across the centre regardless of chronic displacement, and then at that centre a static, black-​and-​white portrait of Félix Guattari who was to be the subject, at least ostensibly and at least briefly, of the lecture they were about to hear. Suddenly they were being addressed, interpellated by spatiotemporal proxy.

Part two: why I want to fuck the ancients Sometimes, on those slow, lazy, hot summer afternoons that never seemed to end, s/​he would lie on s/​his stomach and examine the intricate choreography of the ant’s nest that had spread across the grass margin that marked the southern perimeter of the detention centre. Somewhere, nearby in time and space, in space and time (in the way that such notions of proximity had mutated since the Great Collapse), somewhere nearby, but also very distant,

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a child once again burst into flames on an alien hillside. Drones surrounded her, buzzed around as a swarm, outnumbering the Sapien eighteen to one, proliferating. Some were weapons, some were cameras, some were rationaters or temporarily out of service fibrophages, the less specialized, older, pre-​von-​ Neumann versions, of course, were all three. They moved almost balletically around the moment of surcease, like flies already hovering around a corpse. But were they merely destroying, recording and rationating, the conveyor thought, as s/​he gazed up at the big screen? Or were they consuming as well? Illegally? And if so, consuming what? Human affect, perhaps? As in those old science fiction movies hrs girlfriend G and boyfriend T had been so obsessed with before the Dreamcancer scrambled all their references. But in this case, now, the cameras were pointed at the viewer rather than the content, their points swollen and engorged in expectation of response. Inhuman machinery enveloping affect in its digestive juices. The horror subsided as the hyper-​pixilation regrouped and the audio connected with older forms of technology. One day she would be older. One day s/​he would make films about all this. Give lectures. Travel. Visit the cities.

Chaos and terminus: Southern Morocco, 2018 Reality is a garden of peculiarities forged from a constellation of other peculiarities, which at the same time disperse themselves in their own universe to the rhythm of the sap that flows and flowers. Sepúlveda (2005: 13) Desiring-​machines have nothing to do with gadgets, or little home-​made inventions, or with phantasies. Guattari (2009: 90) ‘Imagine’ (the face on the screen stage-​right began, a slight down-​curved or possibly spiral phasing to the enunciation, like some strange transmission on a transistor radio from the 1960s, sonic interference, pink noise, a creaking effect on the lower modulations, a glitching to the image more generally, a vagrant flickering at its edges, its margins, perhaps, readjustment required, sought, accomplished) ‘that, at a certain point in the very near future of our species’ (of your species, of we species, of they-​species (indeed, do we even



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really know what we mean by the term ‘species’?)), imagine that we encounter a dark and irrevocable force that threatens to render us permanently from any notion we might once have collectively entertained of sovereignty, autonomy or ascendancy on the skin of the planet that we now, in this moment, at this moment, in all the moments that we have so far gathered and connect with this moment, call home. Our Earth. Our World. Our Planet. Initially, it takes on the form of a dark star travelling stealthily and unobserved across our skies, etching a raggedly sidereal and infantile script across the empyrean as we sleep, dream, entertain, fight, play, fuck, procrastinate, make plans, make love, reproduce, deproduce, nurture, kill, strategize, hurt, grieve, go crazy, survive and die. An inverse star. An involuted star. An invisible star, moreover, that spins and dissipates into a randomly dissolute and alliterative fan and farrago of force and fear and sensation, caressing our various ecologies with its attenuated fronds and feathers of gravitational distortion, transforming life into licence and death into a seemingly infinite dispersal of affect and abduction. It is a sensation and a momentum and a trajectory that acquires several names and designations in this rapidly evolving scenario, but its more immediate consequences for the human –​ for the people to come –​may be said to include the following: an exponential growth in un-​herded and un-​herdable distributed or swarm intelligence; a process of grieving at the imminent demise of the noosphere around and above us and of the slowly vanishing traces of an earlier, apparently mereotopological vitalism scratched beneath our feet on the still living rocks like ancient but alien hieroglyphics; an increasing attention amongst survivors to the bio-​circuitries of the extinction mechanics and geotraumatics that these traces appear to describe, as also to the echoes of a distant and possibly cosmic phenomenophagism,13 darkly and hungrily rendered, which appears to precede, catalyse and supersede these effects.’ Zeno closed the connection for a moment. The screen flickered and settled to the monochrome white noise ambience of an old analogue television caught between channels. He listened to the buzzing in the sky. It grew in amplitude for a minute or two and then declined to a distant, collective hum. He heard a long sigh and looked round to see Mêtis regarding him coolly from their bed by the bookcase. Long obsidian hair streaked, sapphire, silver and scarlet, ebony skin, piercing sapphire eyes too, their pupils narrowed to panther slits in the strong sunlight. She raised a single eyebrow and pursed her lips, the hint of a smile. He smiled back, turned back. Reopened the channel. Resumed. He could see only vague and shifting shapes across time moving in front of the ruined hall’s jagged teeth.

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‘In a sense, of course, this has already happened, is happening now, will always happen and will always have happened’ (he continued, his voice enthused now, deep and mellifluous). ‘The shaft of time’s arrow has, after all, been split already in mid-​flight to its supposed target (infinite regress) from its former uni-​directional trajectory by a lightning strike from a more divergent series, an infinite series of divergence, and our temporalities are thus and therefore forever flayed, transected and dispersed. We are now, it could be argued, at least nominally, in the realm of abyssal time; neither before or after and certainly not “now” in any classical sense of the instant or moment. And in that sense, it could also be argued, there was never anything other than this realm of flayed temporalities, out of which we compose disjunctive syntheses to hold together what little we have left of psychic, corporeal, social, political and even biological integrity.’ ‘Speaking to you across time as I  am now doing (in both my “now” and a number of your “nows” too, a series of “nows” that is . . .), speaking to you as I  am now from the second decade of the 21st century (others I  know are in my own time, dispersed across the world in frayed, digital space, glitching, no doubt, from overloaded bandwidths or faulty technologies) in a site and a plot that was abandoned rather suddenly some years ago, haunted by an implicit entropy like something from an early J. G. Ballard story, left vacant, before, that is, of course, your technology, which is our technology in a different modality or transmodality, arrived here out of the sky blue, out of the blue and vagrant sky, and transmuted time’s arrow and its ragged feathers of temporality and stream-​capture into a hyper-​dimensional nexus of kaleidoscopic flight and lucid, spiralling kenosis. Speaking to you now as I gaze out of my window to the still lucid blue sky beyond the swaying fronds of artificial palm around the abandoned hotel lobby, to the west, that is, of the gathering storm-​clouds, just downwind of the barely functioning airport and beyond the derelict industrial compound, speaking to you now as jewel-​encrusted seabirds, flesh and bone covered in a lattice of sparkling fibres as light as they air they carve, feather and beak scintillating and iridescent as they wheel and cry above me in the as yet still lucid sky, wheel and cry above me, in patterns nearly as old as the Cambrian explosion and yet as new as the schizotopian wastelands and cities we are about to enter, speaking as I  am to you now, at this moment, in this moment, the weather as yet comparatively in balance, the climate, however, on the edge of massive phase transition, oscillating forcefully between temporarily stable conditions, vorticular in its emergent force, brutal in its inevitable impact upon most if not all our existent species, including our own species and its



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descendants, I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago in one of the newer colleges of the University of Oxford, a public lecture given by the visionary theoretical physicist David Deutsch on life, reality and the apprehension of time machines . . .’ He paused for a moment, as though lost in thought. Information –​text, images, haptics, olfactograms, hyperlinks, diagrams –​began to pour into their apparatus. Adjustment accomplished. He resumed.14

‘But I digress. For now we must retrace our steps, run back up the escalator of history, chaosmotically speaking, anachronistically speaking (if you will forgive my spatio-​temporal conceit for a moment), to where we began, or where thought we began, anyway. For in setting the scene for the drama that may or may not unfold from these shifting fragments and larval strands of narrative, discourse, image and dialectic (in the more ancient sense of the term “dialectic”), these patches of clockwork delirium and digital deliquescence to follow, we return to, or perhaps, rather, we redirect our collective and machinic gaze towards, a philosopher and psychomancer whose influence on 21st century thinking was for some time in critical suspense. Indeed, it is a curiosity of the vicissitudes of anachronism and untimeliness and the art of a kleptomancy that seeks to corral these reckless and recalcitrant thieves of time into significant patterns of retreat and actualization, ascent or projection, divination and dream, that a thinker or intellectual in the more traditional human continua, so to speak, immediately following her or his organic demise, may often appear to belong very much to the era that produced them and in which they were most active, and that they have subsequently become of little interest to the conceptual engineers that follow. And yet (and to continue this temporal-​calendrical conceit for a few moments more) some years on, what once seemed arcane and indeed “dated” might suddenly develops a new aura, a spectral dexterity, a quality of retro futurity that becomes increasing futural to those cresting the frozen wave of the new era and the emergent forms and conceptualizations that characterize the hyper-​dimensional palate from which the artists of that new era will tend to work. Thus it is that the document which precedes and follows, at least for so long as it maintains lexical stability, looks to the later work of psychomancer, revolutionary political activist, melancholy sybarite, compulsive traveller and generator of philosophemes par excellence, Félix Guattari. This being for our purposes the Guattari who, after a long spell of comparative withdrawal from the activism and textual productivity which had characterized his intellectual and political trajectory, and entering for a while a phase of autumnal melancholy

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often characterized, wrongly I  suspect, as the adjective just given suggests, as his “winter” period, returned to his former productivity with a late and singular drive to generate a new multiplicity of machines and assemblages involving tranversalities linking the production of subjectivities, a more generalized molecular politics, schizoanalytical explorations, the expansion of the term “ecology” into a triumvirate of inter-​operative concerns, post-​media and post-​ medialities, chaos, creativity, art and aesthetics. As a committed neologophiliac and generator and engineer of frequently abstruse concepts and shifting constellations of terminology, much of Guattari’s final period can nonetheless be said to hinge especially around the two notions of ecosophy and chaosmosis . . .’ The speaker paused for a moment for rhetorical effect. Theatrically. Suddenly, lightning shot across the sky like a series of miraculated veins and capillaries. Suddenly, like something from an old Buñuel movie, the whole scene shifted, rapidly, abruptly. Then, wherever they had transitioned for a moment gradually resolved itself back to the makeshift auditorium, only now the image of Zeno was gone and Dionysia was on the screen alone evidently speaking fast although she could not be heard. Along with the rest of the audience they began making adjustments to their apparatus, a sense of intense expectation in the air, like the excitement that attended a resurrection. Another a few adjustments and then collectively, as a crowd or a swarm they began receiving a new stream of information, new strands of intensity and creation. The image of Dionysia began to flicker. Then a new set of words appeared on the screen. Due to inclement weather, the resurrection of FG has been postponed.

At this point the screen went dark and the audience could sense a greater darkness spreading across the sky and began humming quietly in the gathering gloom, then, like a single entity, they stopped. ‘We should disperse and head to our shelters’, said Dionysia to her companions, ‘before the weather changes’. Tyche, Zeno and Theodora nodded assent and quickly rose from their pews as did the rest of the audience, as the lightning grew more brutal and abrasive by the second and the darkness spread across the city and the sky like a stain.

The watchtowers As s/​he left the meeting, s/​he noticed a group of right-​wing melismatics waiting by a burnt out car at the end of the street, humming in that drone-​like way they tended to just before they burst out into some collective-​destructive



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choreography. Highly coiffured, branded and hyper-​cosmeticized retro-​ engineered renegades from the world of early 21st century finance, silicon and libidinal circuitry (or, of course, replicas of such), quoting their prayers from the tracts of Californian neo-​feudalism or the time twisting hyperstitional Shanghai Nrx sinovirus of 20??, earpieces humming in synch with the mantras that they murmured, mumbled and hymned blissfully, melismatically, as they worked, haptically, eyelessly, tirelessly and tonelessly on the retrograde urban streets and thoroughfares, shifting whatever capital flows or muddy, semantic trickles and dribbles still remained accessible in the low resolution, slow motion markets that settled and sedimented after the scaly algorithms above had slaked and sated their affectless appetites in the intricate river systems of data, logos and metalogos. For sure these dark melismatics were neo-​reactionary throwbacks, for sure they were, but they could be effectively violent when the weather turned or twisted, as it was just about to, and their circuitry –​which was also their sustenance and source of future sustenance –​ crashed and burned. So it was best to skirt around them, to sneak past silently, to observe the silence and the stillness and the unobservable fluidity of the Order for a moment. Besides, there were other, far more important matters to attend to. Just beyond her field of vision and computation there were events taking place, unfolding in real time and in the phenomenal world that she couldn’t quite capture or visualize. The North African coast, perhaps? Another catastrophe? The empty deserts of southern Australia? The reconstructed leisure resorts of the central Antarctican plateau? A glimpse of Venetian piazzas dancing beneath the lapping waves of the Adriatic –​fungal palaces rising in baroque extravagance from the ancient canals. Of pre-​deluge Old Shanghai resurfacing in the turbulent spray and seaspawn like a glistening Kraken from the depths of the North China Sea. Or of the floating city of New Adelaide drifting South and North, East and West, simultaneously, impossibly, unless riven and bifurcated unstoppably by some local, temporal glitching mechanism, perhaps. She paused to regard an old observation tower rising above the ruins of an ancient shopping mall, a few revenants shuffling here and there, but little real activity, very little sentience. She clanked back into the crystal, into the visionary wetware apparatus set to orphan drift and considered what she was seeing. Whatever it was it indicated some kind of geological/​geopolitical/​ geomantic roulette wheel or ritournelle anyway, s/​he thought, uncurling and circling the world at the speed of Shakespeare’s elf, then uncircling and

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recurling into topological form and vertical function and line as a spiral spinning, exploding outwards like the arms of the nebula or restrained in its tension and endlessly patient unwinding like the central spring of an ancient clock. Destruction, though, for sure. Violence, though, for sure. Neuroplastic and neurophantasmatic violence. Neurostrafing on a vast albeit highly selective scale, it seemed. Drones en regalia operating on the still partially human counters of disparate zones as casino chips conjured from the vinculum by algorithmic servitors and symbionts for their empty and desire-​less masters. Dr. Dionysia Demesne #6, as newly replicated, traced through spectral patterns still hanging in the irradiated air the squares and vectors of the old city and observed and absorbed the spectacle around hrm. Xenopraxis. Xenofeminism. Orphan drift. The endless now. From way, way, above Tyche-​Fortuna gazed down at the dirty grey-​blue planet and then glanced sideways at hrs sisters, a smile flickering across the shadow of her features on the vinculum before s/​he returned hrs gaze to the troubled world whose ecosophical fortunes were now so very much in the balance.

Part three: in the suburbs of schizotopia (ephemera) What is this stuff? They speak of something crawling under the net like fungal pestilence triggering an electronic subsidence into sheer electricity, things hiding in the power grid, some kind of quantum unlife intelligence. Land (2011: 562) For the Greeks, poetry arrives in the manner of an accident: a catastrophic encounter with a transcendent agency. Gumbert (2012: 2) Dionysia #3 hugged her knees and watched Zeno and Theodora arranging their space in the shelter next to hrm. As always, Tyche had disappeared, de-​ substantiated, but s/​he would return after the storm as s/​he always did, always had, always would. Perhaps she really was a divinity after all? –​thought Dionysia #3 to hrmself. Then, closing hrs eyes and casting hrmself back to an earlier version of the series, Dionysia Demesne, she found herself in a small study-​bedroom sitting at a desk. Outside, the sound of traffic and orange wash of street lights. Before her in a small yellow pool of light, a dissertation she was



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evidently in process of compositing from previous drafts. She began to read aloud, but softly. ‘In the extensive sketches drawn up by the founder of American pragmatism and semiotics, C.  S. Peirce (1965:  72), some of which were later collected as “Notes on Scientific Philosophy,” Peirce, mulling over the themes of change and continuity makes the following observation: If all things are continuous, the universe must be undergoing a continuous growth from non-​existence to existence. There is no difficulty in conceiving as a matter of degree. The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing of themselves upon our recognition. If a thing has no such persistence, it is a mere dream. Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity. In the original chaos, where there was no regularity, there was no existence. It was all a confused dream.

This is, of course, a fragment to be developed by Peirce, but one that rhymes very clearly with his later discussion of tychism and synechism, a discussion which has recently exercised the eminent Brazilian culturalist and philosopher of mathematics Ferdinand Zalamea (2014:  907–​ 22) and a number of his contemporary readers, such as Reza Negarestani and Robin Mackay. But before we move on to the curious notion of tychism (adapted from the minor and notoriously capricious Greek deity of fortune, Tyche, parts of whose temple, at the time of writing, still stand in the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus, not far from the coast of contemporary Turkey), it is worth pausing for a moment on Peirce’s claim about and characterization of chaos as a place of no regularity and thus no existence. It is worth pausing on this claim because it raises ontological questions about the nature of chaos itself, and from there, the relation or relations between chaos and its alliterative sister concepts: catastrophe, complexity and contingency.’ ‘For Félix Guattari, approximately a century after Peirce, chaos is like a wild, prismatic ocean in which diagrammatic nets capture larval elements of flux and transform them into percepts, affects, functives and concepts . . .’ She looked up, turned her head and listened to the sound of shouting and gunfire in the street outside, then a distant and muffled explosion in the distance that ricocheted between streets for a moment or two before fading into silence, along with the shouts in the street. After a moment more listening she riffled through the pages to the conclusion of her draft and began to read again, aloud again, her voice more elevated, more forceful.

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‘From ecosophy to catastrosophy  –​the art and politics of schizotopia versus the Empire, multitudes versus the people, the music of the hive, but a spectral hive, that is, a memory hive generated by the Earth for transmission out into the Cosmos, into the Multiverse and back again. Thus it is that, in terms of the art, literature and xenosonics of the schizotopian non-​people to come the ecosophical consciousness of the Earth becomes the catastrosophical imagination of the World which, via the deferred ecstasy of annihilation, becomes the chaosmotic inscription on distant stars and dying suns and quantum effects, the alien hieroglyphics that determine both our beginnings and our ends.’

Pleromatic intensities and the sisters of Tyche From way above the mazy sky, amid virtual lightning bolts that might or might not actualize as lightning, cracking the sky open for the lower world so that its sentient creatures might glimpse for a moment the digital archons of the upper levels, those wanton progeny of the empty set in their capricious games, from here, from this place, the Tyche-​Fortuna-​Mêtis-​Theodora-​ Dionysia series gazed down at the dirty grey-​blue planet spinning in the void as Tyche-​Fortuna glanced sideways and inward at her sisters, a smile flickering across the shadow of their features on the vinculum before they simultaneously returned their collective gaze to the troubled world whose ecosophical fortunes were now so very much in the balance. Reaching forward into the Museum of Lost Objects which they had projected across the vinculum they materialized at its core the abandoned funfair at the heart of the Casino of Lost Dreams and located the wheel at its centre, then they set the wheel to spin for a few billion years more as they vanished once again into the dark Pleroma as the lightning of Kairos and quotidian singularity once again flashed below.15

Notes 1 From Charlie Blake, The Discovery of Clockwork: A Novel of Love & Despair & Broken Parts, being the second volume in a multivolume set provisionally entitled Alice in Schizotopia: A Selection of Pornosophical Fairytales (forthcoming). 2 Although I can find no record of either the institution mentioned or the university to which it is supposedly attached, and suggest this may well have been a fancy or hallucination on the part of the curator, nevertheless, the following message



3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14

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was included with the document as received and should, therefore, be appended here: ‘The Museum of Lost Objects has recently been established by an anonymous benefactor at Miskatonic University under the aegis of the eminent lepidopterist and ontographer, Professor Charles Kinbote, with a mission to collect, collate and study both anonymous and anomalous materials such as these fragments in a more generously academic environment than was formerly possible. The following document is, therefore, dedicated to our anonymous benefactor.’ The story of this discovery is related in Blake (2014: 108–​109). That this preface was itself prefaced was, of course, unknown to the curator at ‘the time of writing’, and should, therefore, be viewed as a form of chiasmatic enfolding of the operative function of the inner text as a magical and catastrosophical document. From the context it would appear that ‘aion’ is to be distinguished here from ‘aeon’, insofar as the former spelling is generally used to signify its pairing with ‘chronos’ as Guattari’s occasional collaborator, Gilles Deleuze, deploys these terms derived from Stoic metaphysics in his fabulatory study of surfaces, depths and (non)sense, translated into English as The Logic of Sense (1990). First mentioned in Blake (2015a: 370 and nt.5). Adapted from the title of Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (1996). Unless otherwise specified, ‘virtual’ is evidently intended in its general sense, rather than the more specific sense associated with Gilles Deleuze or Henri Bergson. The reference here to the title of Girard’s book is curious, in that Girard produced essays and monographs, not stories and no such title at least currently exists, nor is there any record it having existed in the year indicated by the subheading of this section. In the spirit of containing the ontological slippage and ontographical promiscuity this ‘error’ so dangerously portends, the correct title should be given as merely ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’ (Girard 1984). As with the Girard above, this would seem to be a later extrapolation from Guattari’s original text and its translation and publication in English –​possibly a product of the so-​called Dreamcancer or Great Collapse, whose viral infiltration of digital consciousness so utterly transformed prior notions of scholarly, textual and diacritical integrity. For the authentic version, see Guattari (2008). On the ‘Great Collapse’ and the ‘Dreamcancer’, see Blake (2015a: 383–​4). An example of abduction by kleptomancy. For an indication of the cumulative enchantment of this infinite regress, see Blake (2015a: 371). This quotation is also used as an epigraph in Guattari (2008: 19). An outline of phenomenophagism is to be found in Blake (2015a). Presumably the information transmitted by Zeno at this point refers in some way to Deutsch’s discussion –​a discussion which turned out to be broadly correct –​ of the possibility of time travel, a version of which may be found in Deutsch (1998: 289–​320).

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15 On pleromatics, the dark pleroma, and ‘the true and holy path to the ecstasy of annihilation’ as it applies to this passage, see Blake (2015b: 165–​7). On the concept of the pleroma and the history, practices and theories of Gnosticism more generally, see Filoramo (1990: passim). For Bateson on the pleroma and cybernetics, see Bateson (1973: 430).

References Ballard, J. G. (1977), High Rise, St Albans: Triad/​Panther Books. Bateson, Gregory (1973), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, London: Paladin. Berardi, Franco (Bifo) (2008), Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography, trans. and ed. Guiseppina Mechia and Charles J. Stivale, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Blake, Charlie (2014), ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am Not: Inhuman Mediations on the Ultimate Degeneration of Bios and Zoe via the Inevitable Process of Phenomenophagism’, in The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory, Patricia MacCormack, ed., 91–​110, London: Bloomsbury. Blake, Charlie (2015a), ‘A Thousand Chateaus: On Time, Topology and the Seriality of Serial Murder –​Part One’, in Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology, Edia Connole and Gary S. Shipley, eds, 369–​90, London: Schism Book. Blake, Charlie (2015b), ‘On the Ecstasy of Annihilation: Notes towards a Demonic Supplement’, in Mors Mystica: Black Metal Theory Symposium, Edia Connole and Nicola Masciandoro, eds, 147–​68, London: Schism Books. Deleuze, Gilles (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, Constantin Boundas, ed., New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations: 1972–​1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deutsch, David (1998), The Fabric of Reality, London: Penguin Books. Filoramo, Giovanni (1990), A History of Gnosticism, trans. Anthony Alcock, Oxford: Blackwell. Girard, René (1984), ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’, MLN (French Issue), 99, no. 4: 816–​35. Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publication. Guattari, Félix (2008), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum. Guattari, Félix (2009), Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–​1977, trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and Taylor Adkins, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series.



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Gumbert, Matthew (2012), The End of Meaning: Studies in Catastrophe, Newcastle-​ upon-​Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Land, Nick (2011), ‘Occultures’, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1997–​2007, Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, eds, 545–​72, Falmouth: Urbanomic. Lem, Stanislaw (1973), Solaris, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, London: Arrow Books. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1965), ‘Notes on Scientific Philosophy’, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Vol. 1, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds, , 50–​72, Cambridge, MA: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press. Readings, Bill (1996), The University in Ruins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sepúlveda, Jésus (2005), The Garden of Peculiarities, trans. Daniel Montero, Los Angeles: Feral Press. Singleton, Benedict (2014), ‘Speculative Design’, in Speculative Aesthetics, Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell and James Trafford, eds, 20–​5, Falmouth: Urbanomic. Voragine, Jacobus de (1998), The Golden Legend: Selections, trans. and ed. Christopher Stace, London: Penguin Books. Zalamea, Fernando (2014), ‘Peirce’s Tychism: Absolute Contingency for our Transmodern World’, in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Vol. VII, Robin Mackay ed., 907–​22, Falmouth: Urbanomic. Zepke, Stephen (2011), ‘From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari’, in The Guattari Effect, Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey, eds, 205–​19, London: Continuum.

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The Transversalization of Wildness: Queer Desires and Nonhuman Becomings in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Alexandra Magearu

Félix Guattari’s 1989 essay The Three Ecologies proposes an ethico-​political and aesthetic intervention which would re-​articulate subjectivity to its own exteriority, ‘be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic’ (2008: 19). This he terms ecosophy, a multi-​scalar articulation of the three ecological registers –​human subjectivity, social relations and the environment. Among these, the molecular plane of subjectivity, Guattari suggests, should be conceived from the point of view of a practice of mental ecosophy which would come to terms with ‘the logic of desiring ambivalence’ as it surfaces in and disrupts the order of everyday life, while also encouraging ‘a true ecology of the phantasm, one that works through the transference, translation and redeployment’ of phantasms of aggression (38). Instead of allowing for those negative, violent or self-​ destructive phantasmatic tendencies to seep into the structure of the Real and feed back into our culture, proliferating aggression, Guattari argues for the transversalization of violence, which entails a mode of aesthetic expression available for the re-​working of phantasmagorias into quasi-​baroque renditions of destructive desires. Djuna Barnes’s dark and dazzling 1936 novel Nightwood can be conceived of as one such work of mental ecology since it proceeds through the transversalization and re-​signification of fantasies about wildness, beastliness and the abject, as well as the depersonalization, queering and re-​deployment of possessive desire. While displaying a panoply of phantasms, obsessions and anxieties surrounding the radical unknowability of the animal body of the human, Barnes’s text recuperates the heterogeneousness and alterity of those marginal territories of society, theatres of non-​normative performances of embodiment and sexuality.

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Her novel follows the dispersion of desire, away from a logic of domesticity towards an orientation to the world and its multiple potentials for becoming. The heavy, yet fluid, opaque, yet abyssal, baroque structure of the novel speaks to an anti-​representational aesthetic which exults its own unreadability, disorienting the reader, while also multiplying the unrepresentable gaps, the indeterminacy and the unthinkability of the nomadic trajectories of its central feminine presence, Robin Vote. Upon her first reading, Teresa de Lauretis (2008:  118) reflects on the recalcitrant aesthetic composition of the novel by noting that its narrative, being too weak and dispersed, does not allow for the crystallization of stable signifiers: ‘the chain of signifiers would not halt, would not find a resting point where meaning could temporarily congeal’. Taking a different approach, Frann Michel (1989:  44, 46)  claims that Barnes’s novel expands on the tradition of a masculine modernist style of writing, which she disrupts through the intrusion of an unrepresentable femininity. Contrary to Michel, I believe that Barnes’s unique and surprising aesthetic departs from the masculine, insofar as the masculine is described in majoritarian terms, such as in Luce Irigaray’s understanding, as the phallocentric, coherent and rational use of metaphysical discourse. Even if Barnes’s aesthetic bears the legacy of modernist texts by Joyce, Proust, the surrealists and other avant-​garde experiments in style, her novel does not appear by any means strictly gendered. Its extravagant structures function as refusals of immediate meaning, of ready-​made identities and of linear narratives. Nightwood enacts a transversalization of unfulfilled desires for, and fascinations with, wildness, exposing the tragic anatomy of these phantasms especially when their balance is dependent upon the rigidity of the domesticity/​ wildness binary, their idealizations of origins and their micro-​aggressions. The novel also recuperates a space for the non-​normative expression of queer subjectivities and reveals a more materially located sense of wildness in the very few glimpses we are given of Robin’s interactions with animals and forest environments. Other than the fact that Robin appears to be always carried away and entranced by her nomadic flights, expressing a multitudinous desire which cannot be grounded within the logic of the home, she also emerges as radically open to her environment, having unlocked her potentials for becoming and being capable of approaching nonhuman animals in nonhuman ways. Yet, regarded from the point of view of a despairing and desolate Western civilization and its repressed longings for transgression, for wildness, for an outside to the norm, Robin’s figure appears to the novel’s other characters as ethereal



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as she is exoticized, a type of wild femininity, a possessed, demonic spirit, a transcendental, even atavistic, forgetful and blissful creature. These different readings or explications of Robin’s a-​signifying gestures refer us to the powerful hold which an imaginary of wildness has had over the mental ecology of Western society, a dual composition of transgressive idealism and violent oppression. If, on the one hand, the idea of wildness has been a place-​ holder for a ‘pure’ space of untouched and unshackled nature prior to or outside the norms, repressions and regulations of civilization, it has likewise featured in phallocentric, colonizing discourses as the manifestation of the untamed, primitive, exotic space of the Other. In Nightwood, wildness is reconfigured from its heavy historical roots as a majoritarian discourse marking gendered and racialized bodies, and transversalized into a semi-​parodic, performative, minoritarian discourse of marginalized, queer subjectivities, figures of anti-​ normativity, chaos, disorder and excess, in stark contradiction to the aseptic order of society. Robin’s corporeality becomes the nodal point receiving and redeploying these phantasms and their subsequent lines of flight, yet her body finds itself in a highly precarious position.

Reconfiguring wildness: towards a feminist ecosophical aesthetics For Guattari (2008: 29), thinking transversally involves first of all acknowledging the fact that nature can no longer be separated from culture since transversality requires an understanding of the interconnected interactions between ecosystems, social spheres and the realm of the individual. However, developing a transversal understanding of subjectivity and corporeality poses a number of theoretical issues. Feminist critics have explored at length the uneasy associations, cultural conceptions and stereotypes affiliating female and native bodies with natural dynamics, as well as the anthropomorphic representation and exploitation of natural environments through feminine signification, throughout the history of Western culture and philosophy (Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Alaimo 2000). For certain philosophers such as Luce Irigaray (1985), the discursive proximity of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ has provided a fertile field for the recuperation and reconfiguration of a heterogeneous, disordered, fluid and formless feminine imaginary poised against a discursive economy proliferated by the subject of metaphysics. Irigaray is not concerned with the upturning or sublation of a

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masculine-​feminine dialectic, for this would simply entail a reversal of power. She is employing the metonymical figuration of a feminine imaginary or style (through her concept parler femme) not in order to refer to actual embodied women and their relationship to matter and language, but to ‘disrupt and modify’ the phallocratic law of subjecthood and rational classification by reference to the behaviours, pleasures and dispositions to the world which have been historically repressed from a phallocentric logic of the same (68). Starting from the assumption that ‘woman’ has been conceived as a speculum or a reflection meant to bolster and sustain a masculine category of subjectivity, her project relies on the strategic deployment of the excess which has been excluded through the carving of philosophical categories of being. Irigaray adopts an aesthetic position of mimicry, in which the feminine role is deliberately taken up as a means to transform (in Guattari’s terms, transversalize) ‘a form of subordination into affirmation, and thus to being to thwart it’: To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place for her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself –​inasmuch as she is on the side of the ‘perceptible’, of ‘matter’ –​to ‘ideas’, in particular ideas about herself that are elaborated in/​ by a masculine logic, so as to make ‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-​up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means ‘to unveil’ the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere: another case of the persistence of ‘matter’, but also of ‘sexual pleasure’. (76)

Assuming the feminine role deliberately through mimicry involves circumventing it by not simply reiterating the relations of power in place, but critiquing them in the process of their redeployment, parodying them, disentangling and recuperating those zones of the body and its relationships to the world which have been expelled or used as a territory for domination (the material aspects of the body, its embeddedness in the world, its multiple, diverging and contradictory desires), creating a new aesthetico-​political vocabulary which acknowledges the interfolding of nature and culture. In this sense, Irigaray’s feminine imaginary can be articulated to a Guattarian aesthetico-​political transversalization of phantasms. More specifically, a phallocratic phantasmagoria marking those aspects of the female body as instinctual, animal, natural could be potentially subverted through its transversalization as an aesthetic which privileges the absurd, the grotesque, the bestial and the abject.



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In a similar manner, Djuna Barnes refuses to discard those vividly material aspects of the human body, and its moments of errantry, of wildness, of surprising and inexplicable affective responses to nonhuman animals and to environmental complexities. However, the process of re-​signifying the body and its movements has to account, in the process of critique, for its dependency on and its tight relationship to discourses of domination, to enchanted and demonic explications of reality, as well as to the cultural legacies, significations and markings attributed to the constitution of bodies throughout the history of Western civilization. Irigaray’s philosophy has received numerous critiques, especially from feminist theorists of social constructivism, insofar as it appears too close to an essence of femininity rooted in nature in its descriptions of the way in which the (female) body interacts with natural processes. However, for materialist feminists, this assumption of essentialism betrays theory’s flight from nature, since the sex/​ gender binary becomes predicated upon a sharp opposition between nature and culture (Alaimo 2000:  4, 6), while nature is understood as a passive object, an undifferentiated and unchanging organism shaped and thwarted by human culture (Fielding 2003:  1). There is no question that our experience of reality is perpetually mediated by discursive socio-​cultural lenses. However, there is a marked difference between acknowledging the fact that we have no direct access to ontology and prohibiting or dismissing any attempts at redeploying concepts or theories which are more inclusive of nonhuman dynamics, more attentive to the ways in which material processes impact on and shape discourses, in addition to being shaped by discourses. An ecosophical feminist aesthetics must then develop an ethical relationship with the radical unknowability and unpredictability of matter, in addition to its maintained focus on the cultural structures of capture, deformation and mediation. Perhaps there is an intimation to this effect in Catriona Sandilands’s (1997:  138) essay, ‘Wild Democracy:  Ecofeminism, Politics and the Desire Beyond’, which employs Lacanian terminology in order to mobilize a call for an ecological ethics of the Real which accounts for the ‘moment of human linguistic unknowability of nature (always and necessarily including aspects of ourselves)’. This she titles the wild aspect of reality. For her, the acknowledgement of responsibility towards the wild valorizes not only a non-​anthropocentric conception of the limits of the human and the limitations of the social and our modes of representation, but also points to those nonhuman dynamics that have not yet been fully domesticated

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and colonized by the human since they are always in flux, adjacent to the movement of discourse: The Real, the wild, is an unrepresentable kernel of human and nonhuman existence around which language and culture are structured but which the Symbolic can never represent much as we might desire it to do so. The Real is discursively impossible, always something other than the language that attempts to domesticate it. This wildness is unspeakable and calls our attention to the limits of human speech itself; it is a barre through language, signaling the impossibility of language to come to full representation. (138–​9)

In line with Sandilands’s argument, Claire Colebrook (2008) argues that a radical reading of Platonism through Deleuze can open up the imperceptible to the impredictable differentiation of matter. There is a difference, for Colebrook, between saying that there is such a thing as an enduring and forever stable essence (Plato) and saying that essence is completely impredictable and has the capacity to differentiate itself in obscure ways which are not immediately accessible to the subject of knowledge/​experience (Deleuze). For her, the reversal of Platonism in Deleuze can provide ‘a new and positive notion of queerness: not as a destabilization or solicitation of norms, but as a creation of differences that are no longer grounded in either the subject or generating life’ (18). The queering of desire is tied to a politics of tangibility and reflects upon the indeterminateness of affect arguing for other modes of engaging with reality in which sexuality is not driven towards achieving its purpose by assigning itself to an object or an identitarian practice, but manifests itself as the passion which fires the imagination, that defies moral imperatives and regulatory decrees. This is not simply to invoke a wild and free space, a deterritorialized flow, a sexuality that would be free of restraint; rather, beyond such atopic musings we want to encourage a sexuality that may disrupt what is expected, that is fully within the social, that functions hence as political (if not correct). (Grosz and Probyn 1995: xiv)

Contrary to a conception of wildness as a non-​place of pure, unleashed desire, one must acknowledge both the movements of reterritorialization and deterritorialization involved in the constitution of nomadic flights. In addition to accounting for the ways in which wildness is captured in majoritarian discourses and fantasies, wildness must also be reconsidered, in ecosophical terms, as an element of temporary rupture, an intrusion of affect in the dynamics of becoming towards a minoritarian flow.



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Robin’s perspectival wildness Through mimicry, Barnes recuperates and redeploys discourses surrounding ideas such as wildness, animality and beastliness, by restoring a space for those queer sexualities relegated, as elements of sexual perversion, to obscure and secretive corners of society. Robin figures in the midst of Nightwood’s rich prose as its elusive, intricate string which holds its disparate layers together, its poetic monologues, circuitous nightly wanderings, contemplations and desiring fantasies. Her strange gestures, her unpredictability, her frequent absences, her relationship with animals and the natural world, these all generate complex perspectival explanations of her behaviour which reveal more about other characters’ pre-​conceptions, delusions and chimeras about the wild rather than about Robin’s own relationship with the world. Robin’s husband, Felix Volkbein, a misfit and estranged figure, ill at ease with his Jewish identity, adopts a false aristocratic title in order to be accepted among European nobility. When unable to access these circles, he seeks the company of circus and theatre performers, acrobats and sword-​swallowers, actresses, animal tamers and contortionists, since their falsification and spectacularization of glamour, their taking of false aristocratic titles for pure performative amusement, recalls to him a desire for mimicry, for pageantry, for being elsewhere and someone else (Barnes 2006:  14). In Robin’s presence, he finds a similar sense of identification, co-​constitutive with the fascination of an exoticized and eroticized Other. Upon his first encounter with Robin, he and Dr. O’Connor discover her half-​conscious body in loose attire, disheveled and stretched, after a fainting spell, on a hotel bed, surrounded by a profusion of exotic plants: The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of earth-​flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-​worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface . . . Like a painting by the douanier Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room . . . thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra, of wood-​winds render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness. (38)

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In one of the very few representational passages in the book, Robin appears as the illusion of passive vegetal life, accessible, yet submerged in an alternate world, her flesh blending into the texture of plants belonging to a distant elsewhere, evoking an entirely unrealistic fantasy of an Orientalized jungle such as the one captured in Henri Rousseau’s painting Le Rêve (1910). Rousseau’s surreal and lavish picture figures like a palimpsest of exoticism in which relations between the forms of life it depicts, humans, nonhumans and plant types, are rendered purely imaginary. The heterogeneity and sheer concentration of seemingly incongruous species of animals and jungle vegetation, the uncomfortable power binary between a relaxed, passive feminine nude and a subservient, performing native body, almost obliterated by the vegetation, the rich and striking colour tones, as well as the sharp and sudden shapes and lines, these elements push the art work to the edge of excess –​an impossible phantasmagoria. The female nude, portrayed through a distinctly masculine perspective, is comfortably sprawled on a salon couch, her gaze indefinite, lost in the distance of a daydream, her arms wide open, revealing the entirety of her body to the spectator, her hands open and pointed to the spectacle of the jungle, as if trying to grasp without movement, yet her body, with its hard lines and vivid shades of yellow and green, appears to meld with the artificiality of an imaginary jungle vegetation. The same shade of yellow which demarcates the leaves immediately below her reclining figure highlights her skin, as if the female body through its striking materiality is only an inversion of plant life, motionless, available to be taken, indifferent to circumstances. For Felix, the eroticized, half-​awake figure of the woman functions not only as a dream of possession over the intricate materialities of her body, but also as a double temporal portal onto an edenic past and a future claim to the appropriation and seizing of foreign lands and those lives inhabiting them. This desire for appropriation, for capture and absorption of the potentials of Robin’s body, reveals something like a tendency in Felix to fix and halt the movement of life through an approximation of forms, the crystallization of selective meaning through a representational gesture, a museumification of sexuality: The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a ‘picture’ forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; . . . an eland coming down an aisle of trees . . . he felt he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though



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static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind. (Barnes 2006: 41)

Felix is struggling to explain to himself the contradiction between thought, his contemplation and selection of pictures of his lover at rest, and the vivid, moving, effervescence of life, which elicits a complexity of affects, desires and memories. Robin is shape-​shifting, as if her nonhuman potentialities are simmering at the surface of her skin, rendering her ungraspable. For the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1944), the essential quality of life is that it is in perpetual movement, involved in processes of becoming. The fact that we perceive life as freeze-​frames, as static constructions and as clearly defined forms, is the result of our representation of movement according to pre-​established spatial and temporal coordinates and the use of conscious intelligence (101). Whereas, in fact, bodies are permanently embedded, molecular, affected by the proximity of other bodies and shaped by variations in their condition. Robin, by virtue of seeming always in movement, always shifting forms, even when at rest, disorients her spectator who would like to fully visualize her, to consume her presence by incorporating her in his body through sight. However, she appears to Felix at times as an unsettling ancient statue, carved not through human force, but through the antediluvian movements of wind and rain, a creature who can be fully represented only in her absence, ‘as the recollection of a sensation of beauty without its details’ (Barnes 2006:  45). This tension between representation and movement, signification and affect, endures throughout the novel as it demarcates Robin’s moments of flight, her relationship to wildness and her temporary capture by majoritarian discourses of domestication. Perhaps the most effusive of the novel’s characters, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, also a misfit figure who dons an imposter doctor’s garb during the day and female clothing at night, considers Robin to be ‘outside of the “human type”  –​a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin’ (Barnes 2006:  155). The doctor’s philosophical musings betray their Nietzschean influences insofar as he conceives of Robin’s wildness as a remainder of the primordial animal dimension of humans, cleansed and colonized by the normative structures of society. For Friedrich Nietzsche (2000), the meaning of all culture is to tame and domesticate the human animal, to estrange him from his animal instincts and from his own material body, and to proliferate the idea of the neutral, self-​sufficient ‘subject’, a sovereign being with free will and a capacity for transcendence. The process of becoming-​transcendental, the becoming

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calculable of man entails the rejection and externalization of corporeality which begins to connote the abject: On his way of becoming an ‘angel’ (to employ no uglier word) man has evolved that queasy stomach and coated tongue through which not only the joy and innocence of the animal but life itself has become repugnant to him –​so that he sometimes holds his nose in his own presence and, with Pope Innocent the Third, disapprovingly catalogues his own repellent aspects (‘impure begetting, disgusting means of nutrition in his mother’s womb, baseness of the matter out of which man evolves, hideous stink, secretion of saliva, urine, and filth’). (503)

The doctor, unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, however, idealizes the long-​forgotten primitive past of ‘simplicity’ and ‘innocence’, glimpses of which he thinks he has discovered at times in the co-​existence of immediacy and a sentiment of great distance which animals and humans such as Robin exude for him. Instead of conceiving of the animal aspects of the human body as co-​existent and deeply interspersed with cultural norms and determinations, he effects a separation between nature and culture by segregating the body’s indeterminacy, its wildness, as atavistic remnant, from the ‘human’ expressions of thought, remembrance and desire. To him, animals and humans such as Robin hold zones of disordered forgetfulness, betraying an elsewhere forever inaccessible to the human mind, a sacralized and transcendental conception of animal nature. Soon after leaving her husband, Robin becomes embroiled with Nora Flood with whom she shares an apartment in New York. For Nora, Robin appears as a terrifying and demonic creature given to nightly excesses, always slippery and uncontainable, never to be fully possessed except in her sleep or in her death: ‘To keep her (in Robin there was the tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) Nora knew there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her’ (Barnes 2006: 63). Unlike Felix, Nora experiences an extreme corporeal identification with her lover, and for this reason, Robin’s late night wanderings throughout the city and her incessant visits to other people’s beds introduce ruptures in their relationship and the logic of their domestic space, while her returns bring the pain of other worlds, unknowable, inaccessible, distant. ‘Robin’s homeless meanderings’, Dana Seitler (2001: 547) argues, ‘may be understood . . . as a series of deformations, uncoupling desire from object choice, dislocating identity from the time and space by which it is bound’. Robin’s wildness, her radical indeterminacy and unknowability, these are strongly dissonant with all of her lovers’ attempts to capture her shifting, formless body within the sphere of the domestic. Her next lover, Jenny Pentherbridge, experiences the same sense



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of despair as Nora once she loses grip of Robin. Not being able to comprehend Robin’s necessity for frequent departures, her walks throughout the countryside, her desire to sleep in the forest among wild animals, her absolute lack of self-​ concern, Jenny suspects her, like Nora, of being possessed of demonic forces inexplicable to the human mind: Robin walked the open country in the same manner, pulling at the flowers, speaking in a low voice to animals. Those that came near, she grasped, straining their fur back until their eyes were narrowed and their teeth bare, her own teeth showing as if her hand were upon her own neck. Because Robin’s engagements were with something unseen, because in her speech and in her gestures there was a desperate anonymity, Jenny became hysterical. She accused Robin of ‘a sensuous communion with unclean spirits’. (Barnes 2006: 177)

Robin’s unsettling proximity to nonhuman animals, her ability to respond to their gestures through her becoming-​animal and to relate to them on nonhuman terms, these aspects paradoxically elicit for Jenny the anxiety of the supernatural, the nonhuman, the abject. Julia Kristeva (1987: 6) tells us that ‘discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject’. The separation between the I and the Other, the apparition of the I as another, the human metaphysical subject disentangled from its roots within matter, can only face absolute collapse upon the shock of the immediacy and immanence of such bodies who have rejected their dreams of transcendence.

Becoming-​Animal and the queering of desire For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, becoming-​animal is one of the modes of rhizomatic individuation which takes place through a reconfiguration of the speeds and slownesses of a body that will invest it with animal characteristics, but not by resemblance, analogy or imitation, ‘for I  cannot become dog without the dog becoming something else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 258). Becomings are by no means molar, Deleuze and Guattari warn us, the body does not visibly shift into a different form, but it emits ‘corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule. You become animal only molecularly’ (274–​5). All becomings in fact take place

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at the molecular level and rush through woman, child, animal (becoming-​ minoritarian) towards becoming-​imperceptible. Becoming-​minoritarian, can be understood as a renunciation of predetermined subject positions and an active pursuit of the potentialities inherent within and through contact with other modalities of being or becoming, following the circuit of desire. However, becoming-​minoritarian is not an identity politics since it implies a renunciation of all that roots us in ourselves, in our ego, in our memory, in our subjective needs and desire. It is a micropolitics since it does not take place at the molar level of subjectivities, yet functions on a subtler pre-​cognitive molecular plane of consistency, where affects and intensities circulate as pure potentials. This is why becoming-​minoritarian involves passing from man, ‘the molar entity par excellence’ (291) towards becoming-​woman, becoming-​child, becoming-​ animal and becoming-​molecular or -​imperceptible. Becoming, in this sense, is a constant process of expansion by proximity with other bodies or haecceities on a smooth plane of consistency where no one subjectivity takes precedence over another, but where powers, affects and intensities are compressed in the transition between multiplicities. The encounter between two bodies in space is then the merging of two sets of multiplicities with one another. ‘Becoming is the process of desire’ (272) yet desire should be here understood in its complexity, as a field of conflicting and oftentimes mutually cancelling forces, compelled not simply by individual lacks and libidinal attachments, but by a tangled mesh of different potentialities, needs and affordances. As Deleuze and Guattari assert in Anti-​Oedipus (2009), desire functions at a molecular unconscious level as a flow which links or disentangles heterogeneous desiring-​machines, in other words, provisional machinic assemblages held together by the circulation of flows and the distribution of intensities. While desire proceeds along the line of flight of a complexity of interdependent discourses and material concatenations, it becomes apparent at the molar level of the subject only through a process of severe reduction, blockage of potentials and radical breaks from the field of desiring flows. Desire also represents the affirmative driving force of life itself, it is not postulated upon a lack, it does not represent an absence, a castration, a substitution or a supplement. Desire has no one-​to-​one relation with the phallus, nor does it instantiate binary oppositions. Following Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, Patricia McCormack (2012) argues that a liberation of desire from the field of sexuality is necessary. She conceives of desire, in its non-​oppositional dimension, as a posthuman gesture of queering: ‘While queer has been understood as coming after heterosexual and



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homosexual differentiation, as a kind of post-​post modern sexuality, posthuman queer desire occurs before the separation of forms’ (101). In this context, the queering of desire refers to the antinormative flow of life which carries bodies in multiple directions and assigns them to different configurations of human, nonhuman and inorganic actors. The process of becoming is pushed forth by desire on its trajectory towards the minority, towards the molecular quality of matter. As Robin slides towards the formlessness and impersonality of matter, she finds herself becoming-​imperceptible, following the multiple lines of flight of her desire. The final scene captures her most significant transformation. Circling the countryside in search for Nora’s house, Robin eventually stops in a decaying chapel, drawing both her former lover and her lover’s dog towards her. Yet, in the very moment of their encounter, Robin finds herself drawn between two modes of interaction: she can either respond to Nora and resort to conventional signification, or take the path of becoming, sliding down, on all fours, ‘her hair swinging, her arms held out’, reaching for the dog, taking on dog qualities, effecting her molecular transformation: Then she began to bark also, crawling after him –​barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-​on with her, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (Barnes 2006: 179–​80)

Robin’s engagement in a posthuman process of becoming relies on a depersonalization, triangulation and queering of desire among the three different fields of affect connecting together Nora’s, the dog’s and her own body. This dissolution of molarity stages an aesthetic and figurative movement of the dehierarchization of singularities, a levelling on a field of pure intensity. Robin renounces her upright position and takes the form of a dog, refusing language in favour of inarticulate barks, exchanging affective intensities with the dog, exciting and unsettling him. The dog too seems to undergo a transformation, as agitation ceases his body and he begins to cry, his whimpering mingling with Robin’s own sounds, their bodies coalescing, forming a strange hybrid creature.

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An ecosophical extrapolation from wildness There is certainly no sense of purity or innocence to be taken away from the condition of nonhuman animals, who live their days in such inconceivably heterogeneous ways which could never be subsumed within a logic of the same, through their idealization as creatures of primitive blissfulness (as Dr. O’Connor would have it), in order to dismantle the humanist subject. Yet, there is something to be said about the limits of the human and his own socio-​cultural impositions which reduce her possibilities of becoming and his expressions of desire. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood illustrates the unravelling of a humanist subjectivity by employing the notion of wildness as a discursive space of investigation of the human’s own vulnerabilities, her anxieties and her phantasms. Following Robin’s nomadic trajectory, wildness can be reconstituted as the indeterminacy of the body, which, in spite of the successive movements of capture and possession, can be oriented towards the potentialities of the world. To account for these wild potentials, to acknowledge the movements of becoming, the draw and pull of the nonhuman, a revaluation of our conceptual framework is necessary. For in the making of the subject there is always a space of indeterminacy, always an errantry, in addition to habit, repetition, submission and cultural normalization. Yet the novel also invokes the extremes of suffering towards which a philosophy of radical wildness might carry us: Robin’s indiscriminate openness to indeterminacy also means radical uncaring –​every detachment from a lover’s bed, from a pet, from a landscape, is conceived of as an escape, a discharge of intensity so that another intensity can take its place. Radical wildness, as depicted in Nightwood, also gravitates towards lack of responsibility, endurance or care. It risks turning into a narcissistic pursuit through the multiplication of temporary and precarious relations and the severing of the collective. Following Dr.  O’Connor’s advice to the grieving Nora, an ecosophical thinking should enable us to ‘hold on to suffering’ (responsibility, affection, devotion, care and their vicissitudes) ‘and let the spirit loose’ (radical freedom and the acknowledgement of the indeterminacy of desire and its becomings). This requires a thinking of wildness transversally, not only at the level of the individual psyche, but in relation to the social sphere and the larger framework of the ecosystem which enables relations of becoming. Creating an aesthetic platform for the transversalization of violent fantasies would not lead to their complete sublimation, Guattari (2008) argues, nor will organized educational or social reforms bring about change through repression and the



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enforcement of law. What is necessary according to him is ‘the expansion of alternative experiences centred around a respect for singularity, and through the continuous production of an autonomizing subjectivity that can articulate itself appropriately in relation to the rest of society’ (39). A critique of wildness, insofar as it demarcates the precariousness of the category of the human, could function across scales, articulating the realm of the individual (through the dismantling of the sense of self as human, fixable, identifiable) to the redefinition of social relationality (an antinormative mode of becoming-​ together and belonging, as well as a queering of desire), and to an ethico-​political relation to the environment (through a reconfiguration of wildness as the forever receding alterity of the nonhuman).

References Alaimo, Stacy (2000), Undomesticated Nature: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Barnes, Djuna (2006) [1937], Nightwood, New York: A New Directions Book. Bergson, Henri (1944), Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York: Random House. Colebrook, Claire (2008), ‘How Queer Can You Go? Theory, Normality and Normativity’, in Queering the Non/​human, Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, eds, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. de Lauretis, Teresa (2008), ‘Nightwood and the Terror of Uncertain Signs’, in Critical Inquiry, 34, no. 5: 117–​29. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1987. Fourteenth edition, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2009), Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: Penguin Books. Fielding, Helen (2003), ‘Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger and the Potentiality of Matter’, in Continental Philosophy Review, 36: 1–​26. Grosz, Elizabeth and Elspeth Probyn (1995), ‘Introduction’, to Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, London and New York: Routledge. Guattari, Félix (2008), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London and New York: Continuum. Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1987), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press.

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McCormack, Patricia (2012), Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Merchant, Carolyn (1980), The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: Harper and Row. Michel, Frann (1989), ‘Displacing Castration: Nightwood, Ladies Almanack, and Feminine Writing’, Contemporary Literature, 30, no. 1: 22–​58. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2000), ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, 437–​600, New York: The Modern Library. Plumwood, Val (1993), Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York: Routledge. Sandilands, Catriona (1997), ‘Wild Democracy: Ecofeminism, Politics and the Desire Beyond’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 18, no. 2: 135–​56. Seitler, Dana (2001), ‘Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Science of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes’, American Literature, 73, no. 3: 525–​62. Duke University Press.

12

Doing Something Close to Nothing: Marina Abramović’s War Machine renée c. hoogland

‘In the End, It Was All About You.’ ‘The Artist Is Not Present But the Brand Sure Is.’ These are some headlines popping up when I Google the name of the so-​called godmother of performance art, currently also identified as ‘performance-​artist-​ turned-​celebrity-​inspirer-​and-​admirer, and successful crowdfunder’, almost five years after the succès fou of Marina Abramović’s three-​month retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New  York. Reviled in the press for the narcissistic, exhibitionist nature of her work even at the time the show opened, the performance artist, singled out as one of The Top 20 Art World Women of 2014 (in the good company of, among others, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian) (News, artnet 2014), today primarily figures in the earnest art-​ blogosphere as the epitome of cynical capitalist sellout, a cultish self-​appointed guru, whose manipulation of impressionable young artists merely confirms her blinding star power and the prodigious market she has constructed around her person and her ‘brand’. Indeed, as Gilles Deleuze notes in one of his musings with Claire Parnet (2007: 147), ‘The world and its States are no more masters of their plane than revolutionaries are condemned to a deformation of theirs. Everything is played in uncertain games’. Revered, ridiculed, venerated, rejected, worshipped, colonized, resistant: Marina Abramović’s 700-​hour performance, the centre piece of ‘The Artist is Present’, shows, perhaps more poignantly than any work of contemporary art in recent years, that resistance is, by necessity, an uncertain enterprise:  it can always be colonized by the power it opposes and at the same time (continue to) elude such power. Resistance –​and the resistance to resistance, as testified to by Abramović’s decades-​long relegation to the margins of the dominant artistic field –​cannot therefore be seen as the overthrowing of State power by an essential

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revolutionary subject. Resistance today may rather be thought in terms of war: a field of multiple struggles, strategies, localized tactics, temporary setbacks and betrayals –​ongoing antagonisms without the promise of a final victory, yet with the possibility of unlimited becoming. In this chapter, I wish to explore Abramović’s longest performance piece and its operations as a publicity event –​apart from its resounding success at MoMA itself, the frenzy of media attention it has provoked, its preservation in books, a documentary film, on Flickr and its transformation into an eight-​bit video game –​ as a decidedly paradoxical phenomenon. As a performance, an actualization or, simply, an event (accessible now only in multiple mediated forms) ‘The Artist Is Present’ is fundamentally a form of praxis, or what Félix Guattari identifies as an expressive ‘a-​signifying rupture’, a mode of creation that depends on, as much as it eludes, the stultifying operation of current media technologies. Precisely as such does Abramović’s presence across a myriad of media outlets, in galleries, news stories, on magazine covers, in blogs and so on, that is to say, as a rhizomatic formation or moving matrix of forces and intensities, function simultaneously as a war machine, and is thus equally capable of opening up possible worlds and new modes of becoming as it has the potential to be appropriated by the State apparatus and engender destruction. ‘The Artist Is Present’ constructed a stage-​like setting in the middle of the Donald Marron Atrium at the Museum of Modern Art (Figure 12.1). Abramović entered the museum when the audience was allowed in and left it at closing time. Her hair pulled back in a braid and dressed in a long, body-​covering, dramatic robe made of either red, white or black rather shiny fabric, the artist spent the eight hours of the day sitting in an upright chair in front of an empty table (even the table was at some point removed), facing another empty chair. Any visitor of the museum could sit in this chair, and stay as long or as briefly as they wanted. The performance lasted seventy-​two days, in the course of which 1,545 visitors sat in the chair and faced Abramović, while thousands of others observed the sitters, either simply watching, waiting in line for their own turn, or simply by passing from one gallery to another, which necessarily took them through the open atrium space. This setting in itself provoked quite fierce responses:  ‘Wait, Why Did That Woman Sit in the MoMA for 750 Hours?’ reads the title of Elizabeth Greenwood’s piece in The Atlantic (2012), on the documentary film about ‘The Artist Is Present’, which came out in 2012.1 Neither the sexist slur nor the fact that this freelance ‘entertainment’ writer appears to forget that performance art tends to require the artist’s presence should go unnoticed,



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Figure  12.1  Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010). © 2017 Marina Abramović, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery/​(ARS), New York.

but these are regrettably predicable yet minor issues. What interests me here is Greenwood’s and other critics’ palpable unease with the simple fact that Abramović had the audacity, first, after forty years in the margins of a male and money-​dominated art world, to claim a space and a considerable period of time in one of the most prestigious museums in the so-​called capital (and I am choosing the term wisely) of modern and contemporary art –​obviously, a claim to fame and/​or notoriety that mainstream art criticism continues to define as the sacrosanct domain of monied male privilege. It is no small irony, then, that Abramović’s almost statuesque figure occupied the very same space that Barnett Newman’s monumental (phallic) sculpture ‘Broken Obelisk’ (1967) was placed in at the re-​opening of the museum in 2004. Second, and more importantly, Greenwood’s and other critics’ barely suppressed outrage at Abramović’s occupation of the MoMA’s centre stage suggests that, by creating a presence in the large open space at the heart of the museum building, she effectively transformed not only the atrium itself, but also the surrounding galleries, and therewith changed, or at least challenged the rules of proper museum praxis and practices (Figure 12.2). Museum spaces, and especially the galleries that house the artworks that visitors come in to admire and contemplate, quiet, respectfully and from a

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Figure  12.2  Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010). © 2017 Marina Abramović, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery /​(ARS), New York.

distance, are what Deleuze and Guattari (1987:  474–​500), in A Thousand Plateaus, call ‘striated space’. The museum is filled with instructions: from its sequenced spaces and arrangements of objects, to the guided tours, exhibition flyers, the identifying plaques next to individual artworks and perhaps most of all, the ubiquitous exhortation ‘do not touch’, museum spaces provide both the stage set and the script for our proper being and behavior. More abstractly: striated space is a partitioned field, determined by dimension and metric determination, which prohibits free motion. In it, ‘lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another’ (478). Deleuze and Guattari contrast striated space with ‘smooth space’, which refers to an environment –​however large or small –​in which lines do not determine or delimit, but rather operate as ‘vectors’:  smooth space is ‘constructed by



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local operations involving changes in direction’ (478). Directional rather than dimensional, they write: Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter, in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measure and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without Organs instead of an organism and organization. (479; emphasis in the original)

Deleuze and Guattari develop the distinction between smooth and striated space –​which is not one of opposition or mutual exclusion, for the ‘successive terms of the opposition fail to coincide entirely’  –​alongside that between nomad and sedentary space, the first being the space ‘in which the war machine develops,’ the second, the space ‘instituted by the State apparatus’ (474). With reference to the aesthetic, the smooth is a space of ‘close vision’, as distinct from long-​distance, and ‘haptic’, rather than optical. Haptic here does not mean ‘tactile’, but, instead, suggests that the eye itself may fulfil a non-​optical function (492). The smooth, haptic space of close vision is characterized as processual: its ‘orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step’ (493). Moreover, orientations are not fixed or constant, nor are there points of reference that can be assembled into some form of unity that can be observed in its totality from the outside. Points of reference in the smooth haptic space of close vision are ‘tied to any number of observers, who . . . are . . . nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves’ (493). The interlinkages do not ‘imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed’, but are rather ‘constituted according to ordered differences’ that produce ‘intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance’ (493). If there is an absolute in the smooth space of close vision, it is an absolute that is ‘one with becoming itself, with process’ (494). In nomad art, this ‘absolute of passage’ is indistinguishable from its manifestation (494). By creating a work of art in the MoMA’s atrium and turning it into a smooth space, Abramović challenged both the organism of the museum and its organization, including the spatial organization of the surrounding galleries, and that of the visitors’ optical and more generally sensual perception. Add to this that the spatial transformation effected by the creation of the smooth within the striated space of the museum extends into the temporal transformation that occurs when the artwork does not simply sit on a pedestal or hangs from a

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wall –​fixed in both space and time –​but rather enters and leaves the museum at certain intervals, while yet stretching its duration across almost three months. However, this would still not quite capture the perhaps most significant –​and to some critics apparently the most disconcerting  –​aspect of ‘The Artist Is Present’. That is to say, the fact that the performance fundamentally violated the conventional subject-​object relations that not only inform the modern art museum, in which the visiting subject is expected to observe the various objects on display from a distance –​something which equally holds true even for more participatory forms of artistic events, for example, a musical concert or a theatre performance  –​as much as they form the foundation of prevailing notions of being and identity. With both the successive sitting participants and the growing numbers of onlookers observing the performance, whether intentionally or not, co-​producing it, ‘The Artist Is Present’ developed into an co-​creative event in which a shifting configuration of bodies, forces and intensities re-​invented itself discontinuously, in new modes and constellations of ongoing variation that left none of the preexisting entities intact, or at least, not unaffected –​whether positively or negatively. The latter would include retrospective effects, it seems, such as the experience of art critic Alicia Eler (2013), who writes in the online artblog/​-m ​ agazine Hyperallergic, a few years after the event, that she has found herself transformed from former ‘lame fan girl’ into earnest criticaster of the ‘problematic nature of Abramović’s brand, and her evolution toward celebrity’. My interest here is not the validity of such critiques –​nor do I feel the need to either defy or defend Abamović and her work, even if I do find the gendered, agist and ethnocentric undertones in what some of the self-​defined ‘playful, serious and radical’ art bloggers write about the artist decidedly disturbing. For example, when Jerry Saltz (2010) opens his review of the exhibition by identifying Abramović as a ‘63-​year old Yugoslavian-​born performance artist’ about whose plastic surgery ‘widespread art-​world rumors have abounded’. What does interest me is the vehemence of these reactions and responses to a work that is essentially, as my title suggests, doing something close to nothing. Indeed, not knowing in advance if anyone would actually take up the invitation of the empty chair and come and sit with the artist, and envisioning that the ‘chair would often remain empty’ (Biesenbach 2012:  9), both Abramović and the show’s curator Klaus Biesenbach were quite surprised by the overwhelming success of what Saltz derisively calls ‘prolonged staring contests with museumgoers’. So, what exactly did happen, and what made this performance more than something close to nothing? At this point, I must admit that I was not there, that I did not ‘sit’ with the artist and worse still, that I have always had



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a hard time with performance art –​especially since, whenever I have ventured into a performance, it always appeared to involve the artists’ naked bodies, or worse, their mutilated genitals. I  find this kind of thing rather alarming, and hence did not expect that when I nonetheless went to see the earlier mentioned documentary film The Artist Is Present, I was literally blown away. Why? Abramović herself, as well as her various critics, have talked about the impact of the performance in terms of the feelings of loneliness and isolation that people experience in the contemporary world, in which we text and tweet and talk on the phone but rarely spend time facing each other ‘in real time’ –​a pervasive aspect of the postmodern human condition that is poignantly brought to the surface by the profoundly emotional reactions provoked by the locking in of two gazes on the gallery floor. Other comments concern the ways in which the event forces its participants to be in time, to cut through and break away from the ongoing attempt to keep up with it, always running behind the clock and our calendars, and to slow down, to sink into the moment, or moments, when there is nothing, really, to do, and nothing to distract one from being in time and space, silently facing another human being. Yet others have foregrounded the ways in which the performance painfully points up the poverty of interpersonal relationships in our networked society, where we rarely look anybody in the eye, neither in private nor in public spaces. All of these aspects, I believe, are relevant and contribute to the intensity of ‘The Artist Is Present’, an intensity that is just as powerfully palpable, or perhaps even more so, in the various recordings of the performance. Such intensity is undeniably visible, or rather, sensible, in the facial expressions of Abramović and her sitters –​which can be captured in their unusual closeness only through the lens of a camera. Hence, perhaps, the decision of the artist and the curator to have the Italian photographer Marco Anelli, acting as a removed observer sitting outside the line of vision of both sitters and artist, present for the duration of the exhibition. Anelli’s (2012) comprehensive documentation of each and all of the faces of the performers, collected in a book that was published two years after the show closed, constitutes an a-​parallel event, or even, a counterpoint to the artist’s real-​time ‘prolonged staring contests with museumgoers’. I am referring to Anelli’s Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović as an a-​parallel event or even a counterpoint to ‘The Artist Is Present’ itself because of the ways in which the faces captured by the photographer’s camera are fundamentally different from the faces engaged in the artistic performance  –​ even if the latter are now also only accessible to us through technological mediation. The distinction I am suggesting derives from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s

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writing on the face, first theorized in detail in ‘Plateau 7 –​Year Zero: Faciality’ in A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the face stands at the intersection of two semiotic systems, signifiance and subjectivation. Faciality is not the same thing as the face itself, but a function that operates in the form of what they call a ‘white wall/​black hole system’ (167; emphasis in the original). In this system, the ‘black hole’ or unknown zone of the face, that is, the zone in which affective energies may be invested, is correlated with subjectivation, while the ‘white wall’, the surface upon which signs are projected and from which they are reflected, corresponds with signifiance. The face is ‘not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, feels’, Deleuze and Guattari write, for without guidance from the face, the ‘form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate’ (167), that is, without the help of the face the listener would not be able to make her/​his choices about meaning. Furthermore, they point out, the face is not ‘basically’ individual, but rather ‘constructs the walls that the signifier needs in order to bounce of off ’ (168), while simultaneously ‘dig[ging] the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through’ (168). The face is thus not something that simply exists, that comes ‘ready-​made’, but rather comes into being as the effect of an ‘abstract machine of faciality’ (168). It is this ‘abstract machine’ which engenders the face as surface: ‘Facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map’ (170). From the understanding of the face as ‘map’ or ‘surface’, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) infer that the head is included in the body, but the face is not. The face needs to be produced, is the product of a process, of facialization, the effect of the operation of an ‘abstract machine’, an operation that is both ‘horrible and magnificent’: The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code−when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something that we shall call the Face. (170; emphasis in the original)

The process of facialization is first and foremost a question of becoming legible, recognizable, within major, or, rather, majoritarian systems of signification and representation. Deleuze (1986: 99) writes in the first of his two books on cinema: ‘Ordinarily, three roles of the face are recognizable: it is individuating (it distinguishes or characterizes each person); it is socialising (it manifests a social role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only communications between people, but also in a single person, the internal agreement between



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his character and his role).’ Facial traits acquire meaning  –​become a map  –​ in relation to the dominant (non-​marked) face of ‘humanity’ (white, straight, middle-​class, male), and is thus a mapping out of a particular ‘territory’ within the overall ‘landscape’ of privileged modes of being ‘human’, of being and identity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 188). As a politics of homogenization, facialization is not restricted to the head –​indeed, the ‘face is produced only when the head ceases to be part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code’ and has become overcoded, subsumed by the Face. This process of overcoding is an ‘unconscious and machinic operation’, which does not function by means of resemblance but ‘by an order of reasons’ (170). Facialization depends on the interpretive work of the subject in its interlinkages with places, objects and others. It is the subject’s responsibility to ‘get it right’, that is, to adjust to and consolidate privileged sets of meaning and being and develop them into its mode of (coherent) expression. Facialization is thus a process of territorialization –​an abstract machine whose product, that is, the particular form of a face, its actual assemblage, is concrete, and, as such, a politics as well. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) harshest comments on the face occur in their struggle with the question: what triggers faciality? Their answer is that the face has a history, that only ‘certain social formations need face’, and that ‘at very different dates, there occurred a generalized collapse of all of the heterogeneous, polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favor of a semiotic of signifiance and subjectification’ (180). Here lies the connection between facialization, signification and the politics of subjectivity: ‘There is no significance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects’ (180). To escape from the despotic power of the face, Deleuze and Guattari submit, it is necessary to ‘dismantle’ the face, even if such dismantling is ‘no mean affair’ and may lead to ‘madness’ (188). Significantly, though not surprisingly, they point to the ‘resources of art, and art of the highest kind’ (187) to provide the tools for such processes of positive deterritorialization that allow us to ‘break through the wall’ (186), to ‘get out of the black hole’ of the face, and to be swept ‘toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless’ (187). As Ronald Bogue (2003:  105) points out, however, artists may ‘reinforce despotic-​passional encodings by producing facialized compositions’ as much as they may ‘undermine those encodings by deterritorializing the face and its facializations’, since the abstract machine of faciality itself ‘operates in two

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directions’. As abstract machine, faciality, he continues, is immanent within the real, but it is ‘virtual rather than actual’:  the actualizations of the face do not coincide with the ‘deterritorialized, unformed matter with unspecified functions’ that is the abstract machine. Hence, faciality may not only codify, capture and calcify, but also ‘points the way for a decoding of facialization coordinates’, a ‘metamorphic undoing of the regularities of signification and subjectification’ (105). It is this two-​pronged operation of the abstract machine of faciality, which, I  think, marks the fundamental difference between Anelli’s ‘portraits in the presence of Marina Abramović’ and the artist’s presence itself. Despite the fact that both works of art centrally focus on the face and on the process of facing, Anelli’s photographs capture disembodied facial expressions outside of the temporal and spatial dimensions in which they emerge. The orderly presentation of hundreds of still photographs of framed faces on the MoMA website, and, subsequently, in the pages of a book to some extent de-​facializes the individual faces of the sitters by rendering them part of a larger assemblage, a grid, in which faces become almost interchangeable, abstractions themselves. Yet, precisely because of the portrait’s, and especially the photograph’s long history of indexicality (not to mention the fact that quite a few ‘celebrities’ entered the field of the photographer’s field of  –​mechanical  –​vision), these faces suggest, and thus invite us to apply precisely the ‘ordinary’ functions of facialized composition, that is, recognition, socialization and communication. In other words, the photographer’s work evokes the traditional model of the face that treats the face as a surface or map of inscriptions that require interpretation, as something that gives us access to some hidden meaning, as an expressive representation (of something else). Abramović’s performance, in contrast, has nothing to do with representation: it consists in no more (and no less) than the artist’s presence, that is, an event in space and time that does not stand for anything else, a presentation or actualization without underlying or ulterior reality. As such, it inscribes the second possibility that Bogue identifies for the artist responding to the problem of the face, that is, a dismantling or deterritorialization of the facial coordinates that determine significance and subjectification. The faces of the artist and her sitters do not signify or mean anything in the way of the facialized composition of photographic portrait. Rather, their mere presence in time and space –​the actual work of the artwork  –​is a process of making and doing, even if their doing is something close to nothing. The question here is not one of meaning and being but, instead, of doing and becoming.



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Bogue’s evocation of the abstract machine of faciality in relation to the distinction actual/​virtual acquires additional significance when the question consequently becomes, not what does a face mean, but, instead, ‘what can a face do?,’ which is the title of Richard Rushton’s (2002: 219–​37) incisive essay on Deleuze and faces. Rushton’s main concern is not the ‘dismantling’ of the face per se, but rather the actual doings of the face, from which he does not exclude the function of communication. In order to disconnect the subject from the face (as in the traditional model of recognition and communication), he suggests we need to, paradoxically, disembody the expression on the face from the one that is doing the expressing. This allows us to take the expression on the face as an event in-​itself, something we encounter as a ‘pure quality or affect’ (224). This, in turn, enables the question of the ‘doings’ of the face before its subsumption by and within a system of signification and subjectification: The face arrives from somewhere and is on its way to somewhere else. As such, it is a phase of communicability between a here and a there. Rather than being the matter of communication –​the what that is thought, said, or felt –​the face establishes the prior level of communicability, the ‘is it possible?’ that precedes the what of thinking, saying, feeling . . . [The face] is the encounter prior to communication, but it is not communication as such. Following the arrival of a face, a communication . . . can occur, but by this stage the face will no longer be a face –​for its activity of facing will now be concluded, and it will be on its way to somewhere else, in search of another destination. (225; emphases in the original)

The face thus does not ‘communicate’ in the traditional way, that is, sending a message to a receiver, but rather opens up the ‘prior gridding that makes it possible for the signifying elements to become discernible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 180) in the first place. What the face does, then, is, in Rushton’s (2000) words, ‘open up new and possible worlds for actualization’. The virtual dimension of the abstract machine of facialization does not necessarily lead to freedom, but this is ultimately what the virtual does:  it opens up possibilities upon which experiences can be actualized, ‘possibilities for new experiences, for new encounters, for new steps to be taken’ (227). Seen in this light, the face in ‘The Artist Is Present’ is both fundamentally different from its recording and stabilization, whether in the form of Anelli’s photographs or any of the various ways in which the performance has been captured in representation  –​both during or after the event. From the perspective of the virtual, the face in its actualization or presentness is potential; to cite Rushton once more, it ‘opens up

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the world as an experience of possibility; it is the very conception out of which worlds are born’ (225). Hence, rather than personalizing and thus de-​politicizing ‘The Artist Is Present’ by identifying the artist’s face as a projection screen for the sitters’ private emotions, and thus, as some critics have done, reducing all of the performers to self-​indulgent narcissists, merely looking for themselves, or for a moment of fame in the limelight of the celebrity artist, I  wish to highlight the collective, impersonal or indeed pre-​personal aspects of this work of art in its actualization as, what I have earlier called, with reference to Guattari, an ‘a-​signifying rupture’ in the world of meaning and being. In The Three Ecologies (1989/​2000) and its posthumously published sequel Chaosmosis (1992/​1995), Guattari unfolds an ‘ecosophy’ to counter the overall impoverished relations between human beings and both their social and their natural environments in a world governed by what he calls ‘Integrated World Capitalism’. I  can by no means do justice to the complexities of this ethico-​ political model of the future and will therefore only mention a few of its aspects that are most relevant to my purposes here. First, on the social ecological plane, Guattari (2000: 34) foresees experimentations with new modalities of ‘ “group-​ being” [l’être-​en-​group]’, both through institutional interventions, and through ‘existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity’, which should help us respond to such problems as racism and phallocentrism, corporatization, the commercialization and commodification of art, education and so on. Second, alongside such micro-​social and institutional practices of experimentation, mental ecosophy should seek remedies against the standardization of human existence through social media, the fashion and advertising industries, as well as the manipulation of opinion through media politics and powerful public figures. As such, new forms of being-​with-​others will serve to ‘reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the “mysteries” of life and death’. Rather than resembling the modus operandi of psychiatrists, the ways of functioning of mental ecosophy, Guattari submits, will be more like the ‘operations of an artist’ (35). Guattari’s (2000: 36) integrational, or ‘transversalist’, perspective on human existence abandons any idea of the ‘subject’, and redirects our focus to the various forces, or ‘vectors’ of its becoming. The individual should, however, not be regarded as a site through which all vectors of subjectification necessarily pass, but, instead, as ‘something like a “terminal” for processes that involve human groups, socio-​economic ensembles, data-​processing machines, etc.’ (36). It therefore makes little sense to assume individual interiority in opposition



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to, and split off from different layers or modalities of exteriority. Rather, we should conceive of interiority as something that is constituted ‘at the crossroads of multiple components’ (36), while at the same time stipulating the creative potential of the self as it comes into being in the moment of its singularity, the actual occasion of its discontinuous transformation, in its encounter with that which is given. By describing the operations of mental ecosophy with reference to artistic practices, and by foregrounding the creative aspects of subjectivation, Guattari implicitly indicates that the projected ecosophic model is not merely ethico-​political, but also profoundly aesthetic in inspiration. What he will later come to define as ‘chaosmosis’ is hence as much an ethical as it is an aesthetic paradigm. Guattari assumes that a ‘psychical fact’ is ‘inseparable from the assemblage of enunciation that engenders it’. He additionally refuses to make a clear distinction between, on one hand, cognitive or conceptual understanding, and, on the other, affective or perceptive comprehension, regarding the two as entirely complementary. In trying to safeguard, or perhaps better, to rediscover and rekindle, the creative and constructive dimensions of subjective processes, it is necessary, Guattari (2000: 44) writes, to acknowledge that the three ecologies are not so much governed by the logic of ordinary communication and discursive intelligibility, as by a different logic that consists in ‘intensities’ and ‘auto-​ referential existential assemblages engaging in irreversible durations’. Being only concerned with the ‘movement and intensity of evolutive processes’, ecological praxes thus involve that which runs counter to the normal order of things, invoking alternative intensities to those of established discursive sets, in order to forge ‘new existential configurations’ (45). Guattari frankly acknowledges the risks involved in the ‘deterritorializations’ effected by such ‘dissident’ vectors of subjectification, which, in their most violent manifestations, might bring about the destruction of the assemblage of subjectivity per se. He nonetheless insists that more gentle forms of deterritorialization, that is, ‘processual lines of flight’ breaking through referential frames of expression and enunciation to operate as ‘decorporealized existential materials’ (Guattari 2000: 45), are necessary to escape from the huge subjective void produced by Integrated World Capitalism, so as to forge new productive subjective assemblages, as well as to gear emancipatory struggles towards such (micro)political and (micro)social interventions as might lead to a ‘rebuilding of human relations at every level of the socius’ (49). My proposal is to approach ‘The Artist Is Present’ as a form of ecological praxis which, not only as an intervention in the normal order of things in the MoMA,

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but also in its subsequent proliferation across a variety of social and mental ecological planes, simultaneously constitutes a war machine as conceptualized by Guattari in his collaborations with Deleuze. First, the presence of the artist’s body in any type of performance art render its qualities qua intervention in the modern art museum quite obvious: the artwork cannot be separated from the animated material event of the becomings of the artist body. In this case, Abramović furthermore blurred the boundaries between artwork and artist by adding the aspect of duration:  her bodily presence coincided with, and was required by, the duration of the retrospective exhibition per se. Third, the artwork could not exist outside its process of discontinuous becoming, being driven not by the authorizing presence of the artist –​even though there were rules in place (no game can be played without rules) they were minimal: visitors were not allowed to touch Abramović, and the performance was to occur in silence  –​but constituting an experimentation with ‘group-​ being’ whose ‘existential mutations’ were driven by the motor of a wide variety of subjectivities in shifting configurations. These shifting configurations actualize themselves discontinuously in the smooth space of the MoMA’s atrium. Earlier we have seen that Deleuze and Guattari describe smooth space as disorganized matter, which tends to provoke a sensual or tactical response rather than a starkly rational method of operation or a planned trajectory. Smooth space is a texture of ‘traits’, continuous variation of undetermined action. Instead of the metrical forms of striated space, smooth space is made up of constantly changing orientations and interrelations. ‘Smooth’ hence does not mean homogeneous, but rather amorphous or formless. Striation, for Deleuze and Guattari, is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows or varies, and it seeks to erect the constancy and eternity of an in-​itself  –​whether in the form of the space of the art museum, the artwork or that of the State Apparatus. The distinction smooth versus striated furthermore coincides with what they call the nomadic and the sedentary. Smooth space is conducive to rhizomatic growth and nomadic movement; it is occupied by packs and nomads: it is the space of the war machine. While Deleuze and Guattari consider smooth space and striated space to be fundamentally different, they also believe that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space can be folded into striated space, just as much as it can be carved out, as a place of displacement, or a creative line of flight from within striation. This renders the war machine, as a movement of resistance, an unexpected interruption, a space exterior to a pregiven or higher order principle,



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or an assemblage exterior to the State Apparatus, as I have suggested, equally ambivalent. Just as Marco Anelli’s camera is capable of capturing and framing the minute details of facial expressions that elicit identification and, to a degree, individualization, so can these very same faces in their interaction  –​arriving from somewhere and on their way somewhere else –​in what they do within a shifting assemblage marked by different speeds and intensities, that is, in their very discontinuous transformation, open up the virtual upon which experiences can be actualized, give rise to the emergence of ‘possible worlds’. De-​centered, rhizomatic and non-​ hierarchical, a war machine recreates or acts against dominant systems of thought and social regulation. However, precisely because it is irreducibly social in nature, a war machine, while not reducible to capture by the state, can –​like anything else –​be captured by the state form: smooth space may transform into striated space. Whether the elevation of Marina Abramović to celebrity icon or the appearance of the MAI ‘brand’ on the covers of serious art journals and fashion magazines alike signify an insidious sellout to a corporate art world or mere ‘AmbraMoMAnia’ is up for discussion. Resistance can take many forms, including the resistance to resistance, and all forms of resistance can be co-​opted by the State apparatus. That is in the nature of the war machine, which is always social. Yet in its formless, rhizomatic operations, the artist’s presence may equally refuse to be fully tamed. After all, we may conclude with Deleuze: ‘Everything is played in uncertain games.’

Note 1 Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. Directed by Matthew Akers. HBO Documentary Films, 2012.

References Anelli, Marco and Marina Abramović (2012), Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović, Bologna: Damiani. Biesenbach, Klaus (2012), ‘In the Presence of the Artist’, in Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović, 9–​10, Bologna, Italy: Damiani. Bogue, Ronald (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2007), Dialogues II (rev. ed.), trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press. Eler, Alicia (2013), ‘The Artist is Not Present but the Brand Sure Is’, Hyperallergic: http://​ hyperallergic.com/​75766/​the-​artist-​is-​not-​present-​but-​the-​brand-​sure-​is/​. Greenwood, Elizabeth (2012), ‘Wait, Why Did That Woman Sit in the MoMA For 750 Hours?’ The Atlantic: http://​www.theatlantic.com/​entertainment/​archive/​2012/​07/​ wait-​why-​did-​that-​woman-​sit-​in-​the-​MoMA-​for-​750-​hours/​259069/​. Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis, trans. Julian Pefanis and Paul Bains, Sydney: Power Publications. Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press. Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. DVD, 2015. News, artnet (2014), ‘The Top 20 Art World Women of 2014 –​Artnet News’, Artnet News: http://​news.artnet.com/​people/​the-​top-​20-​art-​world-​women-​of-​2014–​197757. Rushton, Richard (2002), ‘What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces’, Cultural Critique, 51, no. 1: 219–​37. doi:10.1353/​cul.2002.0021. Saltz, Jerry (2010), ‘In the End, It Was All About You’, Nymag.com: http://​nymag.com/​ arts/​art/​reviews/​66161/​.

Index L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Parnet) 210 abject 24, 68–​9, 174, 245, 248, 254–​5 Abramović, Marina 25, 261–​3, 265–​7, 270, 274–​5 ‘The Artist is Present’ (performance) 25–​6, 261–​3, 265–​7, 270–​4 Abu Nawas 121 Adams, Brooke 178 Adorno, Theodor 6, 9, 22, 155 and art’s immanent process 6 The Aeneid (Virgil) 79 Aesthetic(s) 1, 7, 10, 32, 52, 132, 158–​9, 166, 169–​70, 187, 199, 208, 218–​19, 221, 236, 248, 257, 265, 273 and activism 7, 158 and becoming 218 and clinical practice 10, 32, 41, 46 as ‘greenwash’ 7 grotesque 202, 248 haptic 11, 13, 20, 75, 82, 85, 183, 235, 237, 265 processual 199 affect(s) see also emotion 4, 11–​12, 14, 18, 20, 24–​6, 32, 35–​6, 38–​42, 46, 52, 58–​63, 68, 74, 76, 78, 81–​3, 85, 138, 148, 161, 169, 173–​4, 179–​82, 186, 203, 210, 219, 232–​3, 249–​50, 253, 256–​7, 265, 271, 273 affective encounters (gentleness) 11, 51–​4, 60 and animality 63 and becoming 58 and Deleuze’s holism 50, 58 disgust 13, 69 and fear 181 nonhuman 249 primordial affectivity 71, 81–​2, 87 affections 51 Affleck, Ben 185 ahuman 11, 26, 222 AIDS 84, 162 Akers, Matthew 275 n.1

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present 262, 267, 275 n.1 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 183 Albertus Magnus 222 Algerian War 129 al-​Hallaj, Mansur 16, 115 Alien (Ridley Scott) 136 alterity 2 Althusser, Louis 19 interpellation 19 Amati, Ugo 141 Anelli, Marco 26, 267, 270–​1, 275 Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović 26, 267, 270 animals/​animality 24, 62–​3, 65, 70, 75, 87–​9, 123, 157, 168, 188, 245–​6, 251–​5 and care/​co-​operation 70 and dissociation 88 and sound 75 animal types see also Deleuze and Guattari demonic/​wild/​pack 62–​3 domesticated/​Oedipal 62 see also packs, multiplicity Anthropocene 1, 49, 207, 220 anthropocentrism 2, 37, 62–​3, 222, 249 anthropomorphism 247 anti-​Oedipal 200 Anti-​Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 110, 114, 152, 156–​9, 196–​7, 199–​200, 256 The Anti-​Oedipus Papers (Guattari) 22, 194 Antonioni, Michelangelo 17–​18, 141, 165 Identification of a Woman 142 L’Avventura 18, 142 Apocalypse Now! (Francis Ford Coppola) 177 Apollo Space Program 209 Aristotle 205 art 2, 5, 8–​9, 13, 33, 35, 65, 71–​2, 159, 198, 221, 227, 236, 252, 269, 272 art for art’s sake 8

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Index

and autonomy 6–​7 and biology 65 as bio-​power 13 and caregiving 66 and eco-​activism 5 and faciality 269 as liberation 198 limitations of 5 major art 4–​5 and mental ecosophy 33 minor art 4–​5 and/​in nature 9, 71 as non-​verbal semiotization 8 as phantasmagoria 252 as thought 159 as trigger for lines of flight 2 Artaud, Antonin 174 spiritual automaton 174 ‘The Artist is Present’ (Abramović performance) 25–​6, 261–​3, 265–​7, 270–​4 assemblage see also Guattari: group subject 1, 9, 12, 16, 19, 23, 31–​2, 35–​9, 46, 61–​2, 111, 148–​9, 153, 157–​8, 160, 162, 168–​9, 183, 193–​4, 209, 226, 236, 256, 269–​70, 273, 275 and (collective) enunciation 1, 23, 43, 109, 113, 122, 168, 195, 208–​9, 273 interspecies 61 and machinic connectivity 31–​2, 256 and pack 62 and ‘soft subversion’ 32, 41 see also language: collective enunciation The Atlantic 262 atom bomb (Hiroshima & Nakasaki) 115, 197, 203 Audubon, John James 14, 96 ‘Birds of America’ 96 Auschwitz 22, 110 auto-​affection 182 Autonomia (Italy) 15–​17, 129–​30, 134–​5, 157 and free radio 16–​17, 129–​32, 137, 158 Baal (Brecht) 7 Bach, Johann Sebastian 205 Bachelard, Gaston 72 Badlands (Malick) 20–​1, 173, 175–​8 Bakhtin, Mikhail 108, 118, 131, 219 and the dialogic 118

Bakunin, Mikhail 200 ‘Balance Sheet-​Program for Desiring Machines’ (Deleuze & Guattari) 203 Bale, Christian 182 Ballard, James Graham 220, 234 High Rise 220 Barbican Arts Centre (London) 5 Barbier-​Mueller, Monique 204 Bardem, Javier 186 Barnes, Djuna 24–​5, 245–​6, 249, 251, 258 and anti-​representation 246 Nightwood 24–​5, 245–​7, 251–​8 Baroque 14, 24 and the abyss 24 Barthes, Roland 6 Barrère, Igor 145 n.3 Le droit à la folie 145 n.3 Bataille, Georges 66, 230 Bateson, Gregory 13, 14, 71–​2, 83, 167, 174, 242 n.15 and care 13 ecology 13, 174 organism+ 71 systems theory 167 Baudrillard, Jean 201–​2 The Transparency of Evil 201 becoming(s) 2, 24, 26, 39, 42, 51–​2, 58, 67, 70, 85, 88–​9, 129, 181, 186, 210, 218, 246, 250, 253, 255, 257–​8, 261, 265, 270, 272, 274 and affect (mode of reciprocity) 58 -​android 89 -​artist 32 -​animal 8, 11, 24, 51, 60, 63, 129, 255–​6 -​child 129, 256 -​consistent 132 -​horse 63 -​imperceptible 223, 256–​7 and intersubjectivity 67 -​invisible 129 -​machine 194 -​minoritarian 256 -​molecular 255 -​multiple 129 -​other 202 and performance 274 and relational field 52 -​Tinguely 194 -​together 259 -​transcendental 253

Index as unnatural alliance 2 -​woman 129, 256 -​with the world 24 Beauviala, Jean-​Pierre 130 Beethoven, Ludwig van 205 Behaviourism 153 Benjamin, Walter 6–​7 aura 6 Beowulf 80 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 15, 17, 109–​10, 133, 155–​6, 158, 160–​1, 196, 218 and connecting 218 dictatorship of the signified 110 free radio campaign 17 Radio Alice (Bologna) 17, 129–​31, 158, 160, 162 The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance 109 Bergson, Henri 11, 14, 51, 61, 195, 201, 204, 241 n.8, 253 affective encounters 11, 51 durée 61 élan vital 14 laughter (schizo) 201–​3 Bernstein, Charles 106 Berto, Juliet 131 Betti, Laura 135 Beyoncé (Knowles-​Carter) 261 Beyond Petroleum (BP) 5 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud) 87 Bieri, Ramon 176 Biesenbach, Klaus 266 bio-​history 70 bio-​power 13, 68, 90 gossip 13, 74–​7 grooming 13, 74–​7, 82 language see also Robin Dunbar 74–​6 ‘Birds of America’ (Audubon) 96 Biven, Lucy 72 Black Panthers 116 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) 137, 139, 145 n.3 body 7, 11–​12, 14, 33, 40, 52, 58–​9, 62, 76, 84, 89, 130, 132, 137, 157, 187, 248–​9, 251–​2, 254–​5, 257–​8, 268, 272, 274 and affective encounter 58–​9, 62 and animal 253–​4 and becoming 255 and docility 40 as ‘egg’ 158

279

and ethology 52 and facialization 268 machinic 137 and performance 274 as plant 252 schizoid 130 and subject 33 and thought 7 Body without Organs (BwO) 23, 36, 39, 157, 159, 265 Boetticher, Budd 176 Bogue, Ronald 269–71 Bologna Uprisings 17–18, 129, 158 Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression 35, 42 Bourriaud, Nicolas 7–9 relational aesthetics 7–9 Bowers, Kathryn 77 Boyd, Brian 91 n.2 Brecht, Bertolt 5–7 Baal 7 Galileo 7 gest 5–6 Lehrstücke (learning plays) 6 Verfremdungseffekt 5 Breton André 108 ‘explosante fixe’ 108 see also Pierre Joris: ‘explosante mouvante’ Bridle, James 210 Broken Obelisk (Newman) 263 Buňuel, Luis 236 Burch, Noel 21, 174–5 ‘The Large Form’ (S-​A-​S¹) 21, 174–5, 184 ‘The Small Form’ (A-​S-​A¹) 21, 189 capitalism 3–5, 10–11, 13–15, 21, 23, 32, 41, 49, 107, 110–11, 114, 132, 139, 155–7, 159, 162, 164, 166, 170, 196– 7, 204, 206–7, 209 and art 261 and conspicuous consumption 49 and deterritorialization 107 and ecological crisis 49–50 and language 111 machine (as madness) 196–7 and poetry 15 and schizophrenia 23, 209 and subjectivity 114

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Index

Carpenter, John 139 catastrosophy 23, 220–1, 225, 240 Caviezel, Jim 180 Celan, Paul 110 Center for the Study and Research of Institutional Formation (CERFI) 154 Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) 128 Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​aesthetic Paradigm (Guattari) 8, 15, 53, 105, 108–9, 112–​14, 219, 225–6, 272 Chaosophy (Guattari) 197 Chaplin, Charles 153 The Freaks 153 Chaplin, Victoria 153 Chapsal, Madeleine 198 Charlie Hebdo (Paris) 160 Chastain, Jessica 187 Chopin, Frédéric, 162 Christianity 68 chronoplasticity 219 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze) 20, 51, 58–9, 61, 174 Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze) 59, 61 Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud) 68, 83 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg) 136, 139, 140 Cohn-​Bendit, Daniel 154 Cold War 199, 203–4 Colebrook, Claire 185, 250 Colombel, Jeanette 199 Colombetti, Giovanna 71 The Feeling Body 71 Coluche (Michel Gérard Joseph Colucci) 160 Communism 7 Communist Party (France) 154 Communist Party (Italy) 157 contagion see also affect; packs 26 Copernicus 205 Corballis, Michael C. 76 Creeley, Robert 119 Cronenberg, David 139, 145 n.3 The Fly 145 n.3 Rabid 136 Shivers 136

Videodrome 136 cyberpunk 223 A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway) 202 Cyrus, Miley 261 Dada 22, 195–7, 209 Darwin, Charles 14, 67 theory of evolution 14 da Vinci, Leonardo 204, 208 Days of Heaven (Malick) 20–1, 173, 175–9, 187 Dean, David 76–7 Dean, James 177 Debussy, Claude 219 Decoder (Muscha) 141 Deepwater Horizon 5 de Landa, Manuel, 208 de Lauretis, Teresa 246 Deleuze, Gilles see also Guattari 2, 4, 7, 11, 16, 19–23, 26, 45, 50–2, 54–63, 71, 108, 110–11, 114–15, 148–9, 152–9, 169, 174–7, 181, 184–5, 189, 193, 196–205, 210–11, 219, 241 n.5, 241 n.8, 250, 255–6, 261, 264–5, 267–9, 271, 274–5 Anti-​Oedipus 110, 114, 152, 156–9, 196–7, 199–200, 256 ‘Balance Sheet-​Program for Desiring Machines’ 203 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 20, 51, 58–9, 61, 174 Cinema 2: The Time-Image 59, 61 Différence et Répétition 51, 54, 57–8, 60–2, 155 ecological holism 11, 50, 57, 60, 62 encompasser 21, 175–9, 183–6, 189 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza 50–1, 57–8, 61 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 159 The Logic of Sense 241 n.5 a ‘people yet to come’ 210, 233 A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) 8, 11, 51, 54, 61–2, 111, 158–9, 264, 268 What is Philosophy? 22, 193–4, 211 a ‘world yet to come’ 202–3 see also movement-​image see also time-​image de Menil, Dominique 197 Depussé, Marie 158 Descartes, René 222

Index desire 12, 15, 18, 20, 24–​5, 39, 41–​2, 65–​6, 68, 109, 133, 139–​40, 152–​3, 157, 161, 171, 173, 196–​7, 209, 218, 220, 245–​6, 250–​1, 253–​4, 256, 258–​9 and capital 133 desiring machines 36, 39, 41, 148–​9 liberated from sexuality 256 and poetry 109 deterritorialization 3–​4, 8, 9, 11–​12, 16, 20–​1, 26, 31, 52, 80, 107, 137, 139, 151–​2, 156, 159, 161, 167, 173, 179, 183, 190, 193–​4, 197, 205, 208, 210, 250, 269–​70, 273 gentle 11, 52, 183, 273 lines of flight 18–​19, 171, 247, 256–​7, 274 Deutsch, David 235, 241 n.14 diagram see also vector 22, 205–​7, 209 difference 11, 32, 46, 54–​5, 87–​8, 150, 152, 155–​7, 159, 201, 204, 250 and dialectic 155 and ecosophy 11 qualitative 54 quantitative 54 Différence et Répétition (Deleuze) 51, 54, 57–​8, 60–​2, 155 Dionysus versus the Crucified (Girard) 229, 241 n.9 Direct Cinema 17 Dodds, Joseph 84 Duchamp, Marcel 195, 197, 219, 226 Dugatkin, Lee Alan 76 Dunbar, Robin 73–​7 Duns Scotus, John 54 univocity of Being 54–​5, 57 Dziga Vertov Group 132 Eco-​Aesthetics (Miles) 5 eco-​logic (logic of intensities) 44, 165, 167 The Ecological Thought (Morton) 10, 50 Ecologies of the Moving Image (Ivakhiv) 173 ecology see also Bateson; Guattari 2, 4, 7, 9–​13, 15, 20, 26, 37, 39, 43–​4, 49–​53, 60, 70, 72–​3, 82, 90, 95–​6, 105, 123, 163–​5, 167–​70, 173–​4, 179, 183, 188, 218, 225, 227, 233, 236, 249, 272–​3 and art 72 deep ecology 2, 36

281

and depression/​melancholia 163 as ecosophy 168 and the imaginary 179 mental 22, 26, 188, 193, 247 praxis 26, 273 of relation 43 ecosophy see also Guattari 2, 5, 9, 11, 14, 16, 19–​20, 23–​5, 31–​2, 36–​7, 46, 51–​ 3, 58, 61, 123, 147–​8, 165–​6, 168–​70, 174, 177–​8, 182–​4, 185, 190, 193–​4, 196, 218, 220, 222, 225–​7, 236, 238, 240, 245, 249–​50, 258, 272–​3 aesthetics 5, 13–​14, 16, 23, 25, 52, 174, 202, 218–​19 and the affection-​image 58 and the constitution of nature 51 and deep ecology 36 ecosophical chaosophy 196 ethics 14 and feminism 25, 249 mental 33, 179, 245, 272–​3 and scalar integration 19, 165 as schizo-​therapy 5 Einstein, Albert 205 Eler, Alicia 266 Eleusinian mysteries 225 Emerling, Jae 211 encompasser see Deleuze Engels, Friedrich 195 Eppler, Laramie 187 Erasmus, Desiderius 222 Esposito, Roberto 69 ‘immunitas’ 69 Essentialism 249 E.T. (Steven Spielberg) 136 ethics see also Spinoza 1, 9, 11–​14, 25–​6, 31–​2, 38–​9, 46, 52, 65, 67–​8, 71, 77, 81, 132, 169, 221, 249, 259, 272–​3 as affect-​laden 68 and auto-​affection 9 ethico-​aesthetic paradigm 22, 26, 194, 203 fragilization and integration 67 and machinic assemblages 31 The Ethics (Spinoza) 55 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan) 68 Ettinger, Bracha L. 84 Eurocentrism 110, 222 evolution 14, 65, 67, 70, 188

282

Index

Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Deleuze) 50–​1, 57–​8, 61 fabulation 23, 117, 136, 143–​4, 203, 211, 218 faciality (white wall/​black hole system) 26, 118, 268–​71, 275 and ‘doing’ 271 fake-​news 3–​4 Farrell, Colin 182 fascism 7, 32, 140, 166, 204 micro-​fascisms 46, 131 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 135 The Third Generation 135 Fedayeen 116 The Feeling Body (Colombetti) 71 Fellini, Federico 139 feminism/​feminist theory 25, 46, 69, 84, 247, 249 and ecosophy 249 Ferri, Francesca 89 filiation 2 Filoramo, Giovanni 242 n.15 Flaherty, Robert 175 Nanook 175 flesh 4, 251 as vegetation 251–​2 Flickr 26, 262 The Fly (Cronenberg) 145 n.3 Ford, John 21, 175–​7, 183 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 176 Stagecoach 175 Foucault, Michel 2, 77, 84, 154, 199, 258 episteme 2–​3 The Order of Things 2 the panopticon 77 France/​Tour/​Détour/​Deux/​Enfants (Godard) 131 Frankfurt School 5 and autonomous art 5 The Freaks (Chaplin) 153 Freud, Sigmund 12, 68, 83–​4, 87, 150, 153, 179, 197 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ 87 castration 200, 256 Civilisation and Its Discontents 68, 83 Fort-​Da 87 ‘Little Hans’ 63 primal scene 138

primary process 116, 179 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ 68 transference 12, 150 see also Klein, Lacan, Oedipality Fromanger, Gérard 158, 200 Fugate, Caril Ann 20, 173 Futurism 13 Galilei, Galileo 205 Galileo (Brecht) 7 Galois, Ēvariste 205 Gast, Peter 198 The Gay Science (Nietzsche) 199 gender 23–​4, 246–​7 Generation Ecologie (France) 170 Genet, Jean 106, 116, 121, 134 The Prisoner of Love 116 Geoffrey of Monmouth 78 The History of the Kings of Britain 78 Gere, Richard 178 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini) 138 Gibson, James J. 71 affordance 71 Gilligan, Carol 84 Girard, René 229–​30, 241 n.9 Dionysus versus the Crucified 229, 241 n.9 globalization 68 Gnosticism 242 n.15 pleroma 240, 242 n.15 Godard, Jean-​Luc 18, 131–​2, 135, 139 France/​Tour/​Détour/​Deux/​Enfants 131 Le Gai Savoir 131 Passion 135 Prénom Carmen 135 Sauve qui peut (la vie) 135 Un film comme les autres 131 Goldberg, Rube 196–​7 Goldman, Emma 201 Goldsmiths College (London) 24 Grabplatte für Kamikaze (Tinguely) 210 Gramsci, Antonio 18, 147 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) 180 Green Party (France) 170–​1 Greenwood, Elizabeth 262–​3 Grifi, Alberto 129 Guadalcanal 20, 173, 180 The Guardian 49 Guattari, Félix see also Deleuze

Index Anti-​Oedipus 110, 114, 152, 156–​9, 196–​7, 199–​200, 256 The Anti-​Oedipus Papers 22, 194 ‘Balance Sheet-​Program for Desiring Machines’ 203 and borders 1 cartography 3, 23, 111–​13, 162–​3, 223 and chaos 239 Chaosmosis: An Ethico-​aesthetic Paradigm 8, 15, 53, 105, 108–​9, 112–​14, 219, 225–​6, 272 chaosmosis 23, 168, 170, 196, 224, 226, 236, 240, 273 Chaosophy 197 and creative ‘failure’ 18–​19, 147–​8, 151, 153, 164–​6, 169–​70 and ecosophy 2, 5, 147–​8, 236 ethico-​aesthetic paradigm 22, 26, 169 existential operators 16, 121–​3 group subject 10, 149, 157–​8, 169 Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) 10, 20, 22, 25, 44, 166–​70, 193, 207, 219, 272–​3 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 159 Latitante 17, 134–​5 machinic heterogenesis 131 media 3 metamodelisation 115, 197, 207, 211 modular crystallizations 16, 116–​17, 121 Molecular Revolutions 206 new aesthetic paradigm 15, 23, 109–​10, 113, 226–​7 polyphonic fabulous images 16 post-​media poetics 9, 15–​17, 25, 26, 106–​10, 123, 132, 236 Projet de film au sujet des radios libres 17, 129, 133 Project for a film by Kafka 145 n.4 Radio Tomato (and free radio) 17, 160–​1 Schizoanalytic Cartographies 22, 107, 116, 163, 194 series of subjectivization (power, knowledge, self-​reference) 34 subject group 33, 107 A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) 8, 11, 51, 54, 61–​2, 111, 158–​9, 264, 268

283

three ecologies (subject, relation, environment) 7, 10, 20, 31–​2, 123, 165, 174, 225, 245, 273 The Three Ecologies 10, 15, 49, 52, 174, 183, 225, 229, 245, 272 three zones of historical fracture 107 Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) 16–​18, 128–​9, 136–​41, 143, 161–​5 What is Philosophy? 22, 193–​4, 211 see also ecosophy see also La Borde Clinic see also processual praxis see also processual subjectivity Gulf War 16, 108, 115 haecceity 265 Halberstam, Judith 18, 147, 163 Haraway, Donna 62–​3, 202, 230 A Cyborg Manifesto 202 When Species Meet 62 Hassan ben Thabit 122 Hawks, Howard 21, 175–​6, 178, 183–​4 Rio Bravo 176 Scarface 175 Hegel Georg F. W. 50, 148, 155–​7 hegemony 19 Heidegger, Martin 50, 173, 179, 194–​5 Heraclitus 181–​3, 186–​7 Hesiod 225 heterotopia 14 High Rise (Ballard) 220 Hippocrates 85 History Lessons (Huillet & Straub) 132 The History of the Kings of Britain (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 78 Hobbes, Thomas 180 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 67 Hollway, Wendy 71 Holmes, Brian 111–​12, 196 Homage to New York (Tinguely) 200–​1 Homer 78 Huillet, Danièle 132 History Lessons 132 human 24, 107, 188, 222, 249–​50, 252, 257, 259 human-​animal difference/​ correspondence 24, 222 as imaginary 252 see also nonhuman

284

Index

humanism 258 see also post-​humanism Hume, David 59, 204 Husserl, Edmund 220 Huygens, Christiaan 222 Hyperallergic (blog) 266 Ice (Kramer) 17, 134 idealism 247 Identification of a Woman (Antonioni) 142 identity politics 162 image(s) fabulous 118, 121 photographic/​indexicality 6, 267–​71 see also movement-​image; time-​image IMEC Archives 142 immanence see also plane of immanence; Spinoza 2, 4, 6, 11–​12, 14, 16, 20–​1, 51, 55–​9, 61, 116, 132, 136, 156–​7, 167, 175–​6, 179, 182, 186, 189, 204, 218, 255, 277 and encompasser 175–​6, 179 politics of 116 included middle 46, 179 individuality 15 see also singularity inhumanism 22 In Search of UIQ (Thomson & Maglioni) 16, 143 intensities 24, 26, 42, 45, 157, 167, 183–​4, 189, 203, 256–​8, 262, 273, 275 any-​question-​whatever 184 produced 43 Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC, Montréal) 82 interpellation 5, 147, 150 Irigaray, Luce 246–​9 parler femme 248 Ivakhiv, Adrian 20, 173–​4, 179, 182, 188, 190 Ecologies of the Moving Image 173 process-​relational methodology 174 ‘The Zone’ 20, 21, 173–​4 Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky) 138 James, Montague Rhodes 221 Jamestown Colony (Virginia) 173 James Watt (Tinguely) 193, 207

Jarry, Alfred 21 pataphysics 21 Joris, Pierre 16, 18, 106–​8, 110, 114–​18, 120–​3 atomic constructions 117–​18, 121 ‘explosante mouvante’ 108 Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​Hallaj 16, 108, 115–​18, 121 nomadic poetics 108–​9, 114 Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics 123 Reading Edward Jabès 115 Joyce, James 113, 158, 161, 165, 246 chaosmic writing 113 Kafka, Franz 145 n.4 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari) 159 Kamikaze 210–​11 Kandinsky, Wassily 13 Kant, Immanuel 6, 194 Das Kapital (Marx) 207 Kaplan, Bernard 76 Kardashian, Kim 261 Kennedy, John F. 209 Kilcher, Q’orianka 182 Kinbaku 14 Klein, Melanie 83–​4 knowledge 3, 14 as power 3, 14 Kohut, Heinz 83 Kramer, Robert 17, 133–​5, 140, 142, 164 Ice 17, 134 Latitante 17, 134–​5 Milestones 17, 134 Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal 17, 134 Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) 16–​18, 128–​9, 136–​41, 143, 161–​5 Kristeva, Julia 84, 255 chora 84 Kropotkin, Peter 67, 195, 200 Mutual Aid –​A Factor in Evolution 67 Kublai Khan 210 Kurosawa, Akira 184 oneirism 184 The Seven Samurai 184 Kurylenko, Olga 185

Index La Borde Clinic see also Guattari & Oury 4, 10, 12, 18–​19, 23, 136, 145 n.3, 148–​54, 158, 225–​6 ‘The Grid’ 18, 150–​2 Lacan, Jacques 68, 72–​3, 81, 86–​7, 112, 149–​50, 152–​3, 156, 197, 249 desire as lack 152–​3, 156, 256 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 68 the unconscious and language 86, 112 and the Real 152, 245, 249–​50 see also Freud; desire La Chesnaie Clinic 150 L’affaire des Divisions Morituri (Ossang) 141 language see also semiotics 8, 13, 15–​16, 35–​6, 72–​5, 82, 86, 108, 110–​11, 116–​18, 122–​3, 250 collective enunciation 2, 16–​17, 21–​2, 120–​1, 130–​2, 144, 160, 170, 179, 193, 207 and embodied relationality 13 and/​as grooming 74–​5, 82 material flux of 108 paralanguage 71–​2, 75, 82, 86 and the Real 250 as sound 122 stammering 110, 118 and subjectivity 111 see also assemblage: (collective) enunciation Latitante (Guattari & Kramer) 17, 134–​5 Lautman, Albert 58 L’Avventura (Antonioni) 18, 142 Léaud, Jean-​Pierre 131 Le droit à la folie (Barrère) 145 n.3 Leffert, Mark 84 Le Gai Savoir (Godard) 131 Le Pont du Nord (Rivette) 135 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) 138 Liberate Tate 5 Life 12 and immanence 12 lifeworld (Umwelt) 67 ‘Little Hans’ (Freud) 63 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) 241 n.5 Lorraine, Tamsin 205 Lotringer, Sylvère 32 and schizo-​culture 32

285

Lucretius 204 ludic 15 Lynch, David, 139 MacCormack, Patricia 189, 256 machinic 8–​10, 16, 20–​1, 25, 31–​2, 43, 46, 111–​13, 118, 123, 129, 139, 148, 153, 156–​7, 159–​60, 163, 165–​6, 168–​9, 171, 174, 182, 195–​6, 199–​200, 204–​5, 208–​11, 217, 220, 236, 269 abstract machine (faciality) 268–​71 abstract machine (Tinguely) 21–​3, 193–​5, 202–​9 anti-​machines 200, 209 celibate machine 201 centripetal-​connection machine 19, 21, 148–​9, 151, 154, 156, 159–​61, 170 and cinema 21 clockwork 217 and SST Concorde 22, 206–​7 desiring machines 16, 153, 199, 201, 204, 232, 256 ecology 16, 174, 188 modularity 118 peripatetic-​disruption machine 19, 21, 149, 151–​2, 154, 156, 159–​60, 170 phylum 22–​3, 112–​13, 181, 187, 199, 207–​8 suicide (Tinguely) 198, 200–​1, 204, 210 see also unconscious Mackay, Robin 238 Maglioni, Silvia 164 In Search of UIQ 16, 143 majoritarian see also minoritarian 9–​10, 24–​5, 31–​44, 246–​7, 250, 253, 268 and the extra-​human machine 35 privilege 32, 38 and therapy 10, 31–​44 Malick, Terrence 20–​1, 173, 175–​7, 179–​80, 182–​4, 187–​9 Badlands 20–​1, 173, 175–​8 cosmodicy and anthropodicy in 185–​6, 189–​90 Days of Heaven 20–​1, 173, 175–​9, 187 The New World 173, 180, 182–​5 The Thin Red Line 20, 173, 180–​2, 184–​5 To the Wonder 21, 173, 180, 184–​9

286 The Tree of Life 20–​1, 173, 180, 185, 187–​90 Mallarmé, Stéphane 113, 115 Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard 113 Mangou, Isabelle 142 Manifest Destiny 186 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford) 176 Manz, Linda 178 Marcuse, Herbert 6, 155–​6 Margolin, Stuart 178 Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (Akers film) 262, 267, 275 n.1 Marx, Karl 22, 66, 148, 204, 207–​8 Das Kapital 207 Marxism 6, 155 Maturana, Humberto 87, 89, 113 autopoiesis 113 The Tree of Knowledge 89 Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax) 139 May 1968 18, 110, 131, 133, 154–​8, 196 Odéon Théatre occupation 154 Mayo Clinic 34 McAdams, Rachel 185 McCann, Ben 178 McCune, Lorraine 76 Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-​ Hallaj (Joris) 16, 108, 115–​18, 121 melismatics 23, 219, 225, 236–​7 Memorial to the Sacred Wind or The Tomb of the Kamikaze (Tinguely) 210 mental illness 10, 34, 37–​8 as failure to thrive 38 Plan A 10, 38 Plan N 10, 43–​5 Plan AN (patient-​led analysis) 10, 45–​6 Mercury Theatre 130 Metropolitan Indians (‘Geronimo’, Italy) 157 Michel, Frann 246 micro-​biology 17 micro-​fascism 10 micro-​narrative 7 micro-​politics (group) 15, 46, 133, 157, 256, 273 Miles, Malcolm 5, 7, 26 Eco-​Aesthetics 5 ‘greenwash’ 7

Index Milestones (Kramer) 17, 134 Mille Plateaux see A Thousand Plateaus Milton, John 71 mimesis 6, 248 and cinema 6 mimicry 25, 248, 251 mind/​theory of 71–​4, 85–​6, 88 embodied 85 emulative learning 73 and language 74 minoritarian see also feminism; majoritarian 3–​4, 24, 31, 41, 46, 247, 250 minor cinema 16–​17, 132, 139–​40 minor geography 20, 173 minor literature 159 Misery (Rob Reiner) 81 Mitterand, François 141 Mizoguchi, Kenji 21, 189 The Story of the Last Chysanthemum 21 Ugetsu Monagatari 21 Modernism/​modernity 13, 113, 133, 218–​19 masculinist 246 radical modernism 106, 113 see also Guattari: post-​media poetics molar/​molecular 18–​19, 25, 43, 62, 115, 134–​5, 147, 149, 151–​2, 161–​3, 171, 199, 226, 236, 245, 253, 255–​7 Molecular Revolutions (Guattari) 206 Monbiot, George 10, 49 Mondello, Romina 185 Montaigne, Michel de 222 Mont St. Michel 186 More, Thomas 222 Morton, Timothy 10–​11, 50, 52, 60, 163–​4 The Ecological Thought 10, 50 the mesh 10–​11, 50 Mottram, Ron 182 movement-​image see also time-​image 61 action-​image 59–​60, 174–​5, 177–​8 affection-​image 58–​60, 179 any-​space-​whatever 178 close-​up 59 realism 175 Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely (Teshigahara) 211 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 75

Index multiplicity 10, 20, 24, 39, 55, 59, 61, 88, 109, 111, 153, 171, 230, 236, 256, 265 qualitative 55 Mumford, Lewis 196 Muscha (Jürgen Muschalek) 141 Decoder 141 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 25–​6, 200, 261–​3, 265, 270, 273–​4 Mutual Aid –​A Factor in Evolution (Kropotkin) 67 Nagel, Thomas 53 Nanook (Flaherty) 175 narratology 18 National Health Service (UK) 34 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (UK) 34 Natterson-​Horowitz, Barbara 77 nature 2, 6, 9, 11, 13–​14, 16, 20, 25, 50–​1, 54, 56–​7, 71, 73, 76, 96, 173–​4, 176–​9, 182, 185–​6, 188, 190, 247, 249 and art 6, 9 and culture 247–​9 gendered as female 247, 249 and grace 188 and life 16 post-​nature 50 the subject in 51 see also the wild/​wildness Negarestani, Reza 238 Neo-​Darwinism 65, 67, 91 n.2 neoliberalism 19, 147, 162–​4, 170, 218 New-​Hollywood 133 Newman, Barnett 263 Broken Obelisk 263 new media 68, 107 The New World (Malick) 173, 180, 182–​5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 22, 156, 182, 186–​7, 194–​5, 198–​9, 204, 210, 253–​4 the dice throw (chance and necessity) 182, 186 eternal return 182, 195 The Gay Science 199 Nightwood (Barnes) 24–​5, 245–​7, 251–​8 No Future (Lee Edelman) 84 nomadism 19, 24, 26, 36, 108, 123, 246, 250, 258, 265, 274 and sedentary space 26, 265, 274

287

nonhuman 11, 25, 52–​3, 87, 164, 168, 246, 249–​50, 252–​3, 255, 257–​9 ‘Notes on Scientific Philosophy’ (Peirce) 239 Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics (Joris) 123 Nouveau Realisme 194 Oates, Warren 176 object-​oriented ontology 1 object-​relations theory 83–​4 Oedipalisation see also anti-​Oedipal, Freud 12–​13, 18, 25, 81, 83, 152–​3, 157, 171, 197, 200 pre-​Oedipal 83 and Surrealism 197 Of Being Numerous (Oppen) 15, 106 Oppen, George 15, 106, 110, 113 Of Being Numerous 15, 106 The Order of Things (Foucault) 2 Orphism 224 Ossang, F. J. 141 L’affaire des Divisions Morituri 141 Oury, Jean see also La Borde Clinic 12, 145 n.3, 149, 154 Oxford University 235 Ozu, Yasujiro 178, 184 packs/​swarms see also assemblage, multiplicity 12, 62, 274 Pain, Jacques 209 Panksepp, Jaak 71–​2 Parnet, Claire 261 L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze 210 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 18, 135, 143 ‘The Screenplay as a Structure that Wants to be Another Structure’ 18, 143 Passion (Godard) 135 pataphysics 193–​4, 199, 204, 211 patriarchy 189 Peckinpah, Sam 176 Peirce, Charles Sanders 20, 24, 174, 180, 239 and chaos 239 ‘Notes on Scientific Philosophy’ 239 Penn, Sean 180, 187 Peraldi, Françoise 36 displacement 36

288 performative/​performance art 8, 25–​7, 219, 251, 261–​2, 266–​7, 274 Perisauli, Faustino 222 phallocentrism 222, 246–​8, 272 phenomenology 53–​4, 220 Phillips, Michael 17, 140, 164 Les Philosophes (Tinguely) 22, 193–​4 philosophy 2, 63, 84, 131, 148, 155, 159, 165, 182, 194, 199, 222, 247, 258 as artistic 2 Continental Philosophy 3–​4 and movement 194 of relations 2 ‘philosophiction’ (theory fiction) 219 Pitt, Brad 187 plane of consistency/​immanence 22, 159, 166, 182, 194–​5, 205 plane of organisation 22, 25 Platinga, Carl 20, 173 affective counterpoint/​incongruity 20, 173, 177 Plato 250 Platonism 250 Platoon (Oliver Stone) 177 play/​ludic see also Bateson 72, 87 and metabolism 72 Pompidou Centre (Paris) 196 Pope Innocent III 254 Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović (Anelli) 26, 267, 270 post-​humanism 1, 23, 84, 222, 257 and intersubjectivity 84 post-​modernism 15, 26, 106, 133, 267 as ‘shipwreck of the singular’ 106 post-​Nature 50 post-​structuralism 3–​4, 106 post-​truth 3 power 2, 4, 6, 9–​10, 12–​14, 17, 31–​7, 39–​ 41, 44, 46, 51, 54, 56–​9, 61–​2, 121, 199, 269 differentiation of 54 power-​quality (affection-​image) 59 pre-​power 4 and signification 269 see also bio-​power Powhatan 183–​4 Prelude (Wordsworth) 181 Prénom Carmen (Godard) 135 Pre-​Socratics 182

Index The Prisoner of Love (Genet) 116 probe heads (têtes chercheuses) 20, 174–​5 processual aesthetic 199 assemblages 183 becomings 45 discourse 167 ecosophy 148, 166, 168 exploitation of singularities 15, 107 and the face 268 lines of flight 273 power 121 praxis 8–​9, 14–​16, 52, 106, 109, 116–​17, 121, 123 space 26, 265 subjectivity 33, 106–​8, 110, 115, 123 Project for a film by Kafka (Guattari) 145 n.4 Projet de film au sujet des radios libres (Guattari) 17, 129, 133 Proust, Marcel 15, 183, 246 À la recherche du temps perdu 183 psychiatry 4, 9, 32 psychoanalysis/​psychotherapy 9, 12, 31–​46, 68, 70, 81–​90, 109, 111–​12, 127–​8, 147, 152–​4, 156–​7, 166, 169–​70, 197 and art 35 and assemblage 12 and care 12–​13, 66–​90 and cure 12, 35, 90 dissociation 88 enactment 89 materialist psychoanalysis 85, 88 and ‘mental illness’ 10 and need 65–​6 Multisystemic Therapy 39–​40, 45 transference 12, 82–​3, 88, 111–​12 the uncanny 82 verbalization 85 ‘wild’ psychoanalysis 88 punk movement (UK) 133 queering/​queer theory 84, 147, 163, 245–​6, 250–​1, 256–​7, 259 see also sexuality; subjectivity Rabid (Cronenberg) 136 race 169 racism 46, 272

Index Radio Télévision Belge (Brussels) 200 Reading Edward Jabès (Joris) 115 Readings, Bill 241 n.7 The University in Ruins 241 n.7 Reagan, Ronald 82 Real see Lacan yet to come 205 Reason, David 9 refrain see also territory 15, 23, 65, 118, 127, 156, 183, 194, 196, 225 and birdsong 78 relationality/​relational field 1, 4–​5, 8–​11, 13, 15, 20, 26, 31–​3, 36, 43, 45, 51–​2, 54, 57–​9, 61–​2, 72, 75, 81, 83 and grooming 75 reterritorialisation 147, 151–​2, 157, 159, 166, 171, 250 Le Rêve (Rousseau) 252 rhizome 16, 18, 23, 26, 42, 108–​9, 149–​50, 156, 166, 255, 262, 274–​5 and reciprocal dependence 42 Riemann, Bernhard 58, 205 Rilke, Rainer Maria 109 Rio Bravo (Hawks) 176 ritornello/​ritournelle 8–​9, 196, 201, 225, 237 Rivette, Jacques 135 Le Pont du Nord 135 Rossellini, Roberto 138 Germany Year Zero 138 Rothermel, Dennis 180–​1 Rousseau, (le Douanier) Henri 251–​2 Le Rêve 252 Roussel, Raymond 195 Rushton, Richard 271 Saltz, Jerry 266 Sandilands, Catriona 249–​50 ‘Wild Democracy’ 249 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 149, 155–​6 and the ‘practico-​inert’ 149 Sauvagnargues, Anne, 297 Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard) 135 Scarface (Hawks) 175 Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (Kramer) 17, 134 schizoanalysis 22–​3, 36, 105, 153–​4, 194, 196, 198, 200, 211 schizo-​intensity 10, 46

289

Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari) 22, 107, 116, 163, 194 schizoanalytic cartographies (model of) 111, 113–​15, 128, 218 autopoiesis see also Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, 12, 20, 25, 66, 87, 89, 111, 113–​15, 121, 167, 170, 173, 199, 219 schizo-​fracture 111, 114–​15 transversality 1–​4, 9, 12, 15, 18–​19, 23–​4, 26, 33, 111–​13, 115, 118, 120–​1, 136, 150–​1, 157–​8, 166–​9, 218–​9, 225, 227, 236, 245–​8, 258, 272 schizo-​chaosmosis 20 Schönberg, Arnold 6 twelve-​tone technique 6 Schopenhauer, Arthur 22, 194–​5 ‘The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to Be Another Structure’ (Pasolini) 18, 143 Seitler, Dana 254 semiology see also language 140 Semiotext(e) 35 Semiotic(s) 4, 36–​7, 72, 85–​6, 112, 114, 117, 129, 138, 140, 145 n.4, 150, 152, 156, 162, 196, 206, 239, 268–​9 and clinical practice 4, 35–​6, 72, 150, 152 fluxes 112–​13, 148, 153 and Kristeva 84 pre-​semiotic 4 sensations 203 The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa) 184 sexuality see also desiring machines, phallocentrism 24–​5, 187, 245, 250–​2, 256 museumification of 252 as political 250 queering/​queer politics 24–​5, 245, 251, 257 Shakespeare, William 237 Sheen, Martin 176 Shepard, Sam 178 Shivers (Cronenberg) 136 The Showroom Gallery (London) 145 n.8 signification 253 simulacrum 32 Singleton, Benedict 224

290 singularity 8–​9, 15, 18, 32, 105–​6, 110–​11, 113, 115, 127, 148–​9, 152, 171, 183, 187–​8, 194, 196, 205, 208, 211, 257, 259, 273 and autopoiesis 113 re-​singularization of media 107, 123 right to 106 see also Guattari see also individuality Situationists 8 Slocombe, Katie E. 75 Smith, John Dee 180 Smith, W. John 77 smooth/​striated space 19, 22, 25–​7, 211, 264–​5, 274–​5 Spacek, Sissy 176 species 14, 53–​5, 60, 63, 66, 70, 72, 74, 78, 86, 95–​6, 119, 123, 222, 232–​3 see also Guattari, chaosmosis see also Life, lifeworld (Umwelt) speculative realism 1 speeds and slownesses 255, 275 Spielberg, Steven 17, 164 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 136, 139, 140 E.T. 136 Spinoza, Baruch 9–​11, 26, 31, 37–​8, 50–​1, 54–​7, 61, 148, 156, 181–​2, 199, 204 affectio and affectus 11, 61 affirmative ethics 9–​11, 26 The Ethics 55 modes of being (intensive & extensive) 11, 50–​1, 54–​8 substance 51, 54–​8 three levels of knowledge 182 Stagecoach (Ford) 175 Stalin, Josef 151, 201 Stalker (Tarkovsky) 20, 173 Starkweather, Charles 20, 173 Star Wars (George Lucas) 133 State machine/​apparatus see also war machine 262, 265, 274–​5 Steinbeck, John 180 The Grapes of Wrath 180 Stirner, Max 195, 200 Stoics 241 n.5 The Story of the Last Chysanthemum (Mizoguchi) 21 Straub, Jean-​Marie 132

Index History Lessons 132 Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire 44 subjectivity and subjectification 1–​2, 8–​9, 11, 15–​17, 19, 20, 38, 43, 66, 72, 105, 108–​9, 111–​17, 121–​2, 128–​9, 131–​2, 150, 155, 160–​3, 168–​70, 179, 183, 187, 196, 211, 218, 226, 236, 245–​8, 256, 259, 269–​74 and art 9, 72 and cinema 20, 129, 131, 179 and ecology 105 ego 128 and faciality 268–​70 and free radio 160 gendered 247–​8 intersubjectivity as care 12, 66–​7 machinic (molecular/​fragmented/​ nomadic) 105, 118, 128, 137 mutant 168 as production 8, 38, 105, 113–​14, 122, 129, 132 protosubjectivity 118 queer 246 transference of 108 see also Guattari sublime 62 Surrealism 14, 197, 246 Suzuki/​Hiroshima (Tinguely) 193 Symbolism 110 Tarkovsky, Andrei 20, 139, 173 Ivan’s Childhood 138 Stalker 20, 173 Tate Modern (London) 5 Tati, Jacques 141 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot 138 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese) 140 television 160–​1 territorialization 269 and faciality 269 territory see also refrain 9, 15, 31–​2, 111, 162, 269 existential, 8, 11, 15, 19, 21, 52, 110, 112–​13, 165, 168, 188 and faciality 269 and language 111 and mass media 162 map-​territory differentiation 163

Index and singularity 9, 15 terrorism 46, 69 Teshigahara, Hiroshi 211 Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely 211 Theorem (Pier Paolo Pasolini) 139 thermodynamics 223 Thierrée, Jean-​Baptiste 153 The Thin Red Line (Malick) 20, 173, 180–​2, 184 The Third Generation (Fassbinder) 135 Thomson, Graeme 164 In Search of UIQ 16, 143 thought 86, 89 and enactment 89 unthought 204 and the wild 86 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (Freud) 68 A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) (Deleuze and Guattari) 8, 11, 51, 54, 61–​2, 111, 158–​9, 264, 268 ‘1730: Becoming-​Intense, Becoming-​Animal, Becoming-​Imperceptible’ 54 ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ 268 ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’ 205 The Three Ecologies (Guattari) 10, 15, 49, 52, 174, 183, 225, 229, 245, 272 THRIVE Infant Family program (Los Angeles) 85 time-​image see also movement-​image opsigns 178 sonsigns 178 Tinguely, Jean 16, 21–​3, 193–​211 Homage to New York 200–​1 James Watt 193, 207 Grabplatte für Kamikaze 210 Les Philosophes 22, 193–​4 Memorial to the Sacred Wind or The Tomb of the Kamikaze 210 Suzuki/​Hiroshima 193 Tokyo Gal 201 Tokyo Gal (Tinguely) 201 Tomasello, Michael 73 Tomatis, Alfred 72 totalitarianism 156 To the Wonder (Malick) 21, 173, 180, 184–​9 transhumanism 222

291

The Transparency of Evil (Baudrillard) 201 The Tree of Life (Malick) 20–​1, 173, 180, 185, 187–​90 The Tree of Knowledge (Maturana & Varela) 89 Uexküll, Jacob von 51, 61 ethology 51–​2 Ugetsu Monagatari (Mizoguchi) 21 Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) (Guattari & Kramer) 16–​18, 128–​9, 136–​41, 143, 161–​5 unconscious see also machinic, Oedipalisation 4, 32, 35, 38, 43, 46, 67, 87, 112, 114, 116, 128, 149, 152–​3, 156, 256, 269 fractality 114 molecular 256 and the social field 128 and structuralism 152, 197 Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (Mallarmé) 113 Un film comme les autres (Godard) 131 universes of value 112–​13, 132 The University in Ruins (Readings) 241 n.7 The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Berardi) 109 Van Gogh, Vincent 219 Varela, Francisco 12, 87, 89, 113, 219, 221 allopoesis 221 autopoiesis 12, 20, 25, 87, 113, 219, 221 The Tree of Knowledge 89 vector see also diagram 3, 16, 21, 24, 26, 167, 171, 176, 182–​3, 189, 265, 272–​3 Videodrome (Cronenberg) 136 Vietnam War 176–​7 violence 21, 24, 68, 176–​7, 179, 181, 183, 197, 220, 238, 245 Virgil 78 The Aeneid 79 virtual 3, 4, 11–​13, 15, 20, 58–​61, 112, 113, 118, 127, 144, 158, 165–​8, 174, 194, 206, 209, 225, 227–​9, 240, 241 n.8, 270–​1, 275 and actual 11, 20, 58–​9, 61, 144, 174, 270–​1, 275 and affect 58–​9 and becoming 194

292 ecology 169–​70, 174 existential territories 113 and the machinic 209 and social body 158 universes of virtuality 112 vitalism 25 see also affect von Neumann, John 232 Wagner, Richard 205 Wallace, Alfred Russel 65 war machine see also State machine 16, 26–​7, 156, 262, 265, 274–​5 War of the Worlds (Wells) 130 Watson, Janell 211 Watt, James 22, 207–​8 Webern, Anton 205 Welles, Orson 130 Wells, H. G. 130 War of the Worlds 130

Index Werner, Heinz 76 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 22, 193–​4, 211 When Species Meet (Haraway) 62 Wilson, David Sloan 76 the wild/​wildness 13, 24–​5, 70, 86–​8, 245–​ 7, 249–​51, 253–​4, 258–​9 as uncaring 258 ‘Wild Democracy’ (Sandilands) 249 Winkelman, Michael 91 n.2 Winnicott, Donald Woods 81, 91 n.3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 225 Wordsworth, William 181 Prelude 181 Young, John Zachary 65 Zalamea, Ferdinand 230, 239 Zeno of Elea 24, 230 Zepke, Stephen 219