Με αφορμή το βιβλίο «Αντι-οφθαλμός: μια φιλοσοφία της απόδρασης» οι εκδόσεις Affect και το Κενό Δίκτυο σας προσκαλούν σε μια παρουσίαση / συζήτηση με τον Adam Jones, συγγραφέα και φιλόσοφο και μέλος της συλλογικότητας Acid Horizon.

Πέμπτη 18/12/2025
στις 20:00
Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο
Θέατρο Εμπρός
(Ρήγα Παλαμήδη 2)

Η ομιλία θα μεταφράζεται στα Ελληνικά. Την εκδήλωση θα ανοίξει ο Αλέξανδρος Γεωργίου από τις εκδόσεις Affect.

Τις περισσότερες φορές η αντίληψη του ελέγχου εξαντλείται στην έννοια της επιτήρησης σαν μάτι της εξουσίας, με τις αστυνομικές συνδηλώσεις που αυτη έχει, και χάνει έτσι τη διαδικασία παραγωγής της εξουσίας του ελέγχου. Με άλλα λόγια, η έμφαση έχει δοθεί συνήθως στην ίδια την εξουσία και όχι στο βλέπειν αυτού του μεταφορικού ματιού.

Τι θα γινόταν αν θέταμε το ερώτημα: τι σημαίνει ότι το μάτι της εξουσίας βλέπει; – ή ακόμα καλύτερα πώς βλέπει το μάτι της εξουσίας; Η απάντηση σε αυτό το ερώτημα είναι που για τους Acid Horizon αποκαλύπτει το διάγραμμα της εξουσίας – το διάγραμμα ως σχηματικό αποτύπωμα των μηχανισμών της εξουσίας.

Ο οφθαλμός ορίζεται στο κείμενο ως εκείνο το μάτι που αναγνωρίζει, και μέσω της αναγνώρισης ταυτο-ποιεί, δηλαδή κατατάσσει τα άτομα σε προκατασκευασμένες
ταυτότητες.

Οφθαλμικότητα λοιπόν είναι ακριβώς η πράξη της αναγνώρισης με στόχο την ταυτοποίηση, η συνθήκη της λειτουργίας εκείνης που αποτελεί προϋπόθεση της άσκησης της κυβερνητικής (cybernetic), της διακυβέρνησης, δηλαδή της άσκησης της εξουσίας στις συνθήκες της κοινωνίας του ελέγχου. Η πράξη αυτή δεν επιτελείται μονοσήμαντα από ένα κεντρικό «μάτι στον ουρανό», αντιθέτως απλώνεται σε ένα σύμπαν από μηχανισμούς. Περισσότερο από ουσία της εξουσίας ή υλοποιημένη οντότητα, η οφθαλμικότητα περιγράφει το modus operandi κάθε εξουσιαστικού μηχανισμού, είναι ο αφαιρετικός πυρήνας με βάση τον οποίο μπορούν να οργανωθούν διαφορετικές εξουσιαστικές διατάξεις, όπως και έχει γίνει ιστορικά και κατά περίπτωση.

Το βιβλίο αυτό αποτελεί μια σημαντική συμβολή στον τρόπο που αντιλαμβανόμαστε την κυβερνολογική του ελέγχου και τις προϋποθέσεις ώστε αυτή να διαμορφώνει τα υποκείμενα πάνω στα οποία ασκείται. Διασχίζοντας το πέρασμα από το Φουκώ του «Επιτήρηση και Τιμωρία» στο Ντελέζ της «Κοινωνίας του ελέγχου» και των Tiqqun της «Κυβερνητικής Υπόθεσης», οι Acid Horizon εντοπίζουν τη διαμόρφωση των τεχνικών ταυτοποίησης και ελέγχου στις κανονικοποιήσεις αυτών που αποκλίνουν: στο φυλετικό ρατσισμό, στο δυισμό του φύλου, στην νευροτυπικότητα, στην αγυρτεία. Από εκεί ακριβώς ανοίγεται και ένα παράθυρο για να φανταστούμε την ιδέα της απόδρασης, για να οργανώσουμε κοινότητες έξω από τις μορφές της κυβερνητικής διακυβέρνησης.

Διοργάνωση:
affect editions https://affecteditions.gr/
Κενό Δίκτυο https://voidnetwork.gr/

The post Ομιλία: «Αντι-οφθαλμός: μια φιλοσοφία της απόδρασης» Adam Jones (Acid Horizon, UK) appeared first on Void Network.

Επιλέγω, μιλώντας σε αυτήν την επετειακή εκδήλωση, να εστιάσω κυρίως σε τι μας διαφωτίζει σήμερα και μάλιστα στους δυστοπικούς -αλλά ίσως και γονιμοποιούς- καιρούς μας, ο Αντι-Οιδίπους. Πριν από αυτό ωστόσο θα δώσω μια συνοπτική εικόνα του νέου πνευματικού κλίματος στο οποίο μας εισάγουν οι Deleuze & Guattari (οι παραπομπές σε σελίδες αφορούν την ελληνική έκδοση των εκδόσεων Ράππα του ’77).

Στο 1^ο Κεφάλαιο γίνεται λόγος για την επιθυμία. Η επιθυμία σηματοδοτεί δύο αντιδιαστολές. Η πρώτη αφορά το καντιανό υποκείμενο της βούλησης, η δεύτερη το φροϋδικό Εγώ. Οι D-G ορίζουν την επιθυμία ως μηχανή αφ’ ενός έξω και πέρα από υποκείμενα που ακολουθώντας τον πρακτικό Λόγο είναι κυρίαρχα των ορμών τους, αφ’ ετέρου έξω και πέρα από υποκείμενα που είναι αιχμάλωτα των ενορμήσεων, Εγώ-υπολείμματα των ορμών. Αν η αντίθεση προς τον καντιανό ιδεαλισμό είναι πρόδηλη, η αντίθεση προς τη φροϋδική φυσιοκρατία είναι πιο σύνθετη: οι D-G δεν οπισθοχωρούν στον ιδεαλισμό, οξύνουν τον υλισμό του Freud που κάμπτεται από την εκδραμάτιση του Ασυνειδήτου. Οι D-G θεωρούν το Ασυνείδητο ένα παραγωγικό Συνεχές. Είναι η οιδιπόδεια καθήλωση της ψυχανάλυσης που στα μάτια τους ανοίγει την πόρτα στον ιδεαλισμό και είναι η ολική έκθλιψη του παραδοσιακού υποκειμένου χάριν της επιθυμητικής μηχανής που κλείνει οριστικά αυτήν την πόρτα: από το αντικείμενο της επιθυμίας δεν λείπει τίποτε, έλλειμμα είναι το ίδιο το υποκείμενο, μια στρέβλωση της Επιθυμίας (εδώ αναγγέλλεται η μερική ρήξη με τον Lacan). Το ασυνείδητο είναι ένα παραγωγικό εργοστάσιο, δεν είναι θεατρική παράσταση. Θα γράψουν οι D-G: «Γιατί το ασυνείδητο είναι ορφανό και αυτοπαράγεται […]» (σελ. 57).

Στο 2^ο Κεφάλαιο η επίθεση στο οιδιπόδειο παρουσιάζεται αναλυτικά για να δείξει την ψυχανάλυση ως επαναϊδιωτικοποιούσα την φυσική παραγωγή, ως υποτροπή της θεολογίας, ως απόπειρα σταματήματος των επιθυμητικών ροών που σχιζοφρενοποιούν. Η κριτική αυτή θα αποτελέσει τη βάση του πολιτικού προτάγματος του Αντι-Οιδίποδα. Γράφουν οι D-G: «Απαράμιλλο όργανο του αγελαίου, το οιδιπόδειο είναι η έσχατη εδαφικότητα, η καθυποταγμένη και ιδιωτική εδαφικότητα του Ευρωπαίου» (σελ. 120). Ο Αντι-Οιδίπους ανοίγεται έτσι στο κατ’ εξοχήν πολιτικό διακύβευμα βάθους: το δίλημμα ανάμεσα στη χωριστική μονο-σήμανση των επιθυμητικών ροών (φασισμός, ρατσισμός) και στη σχιζο-νομαδική τους πολυ-σήμανση (επανάσταση). Η επιθυμία απελευθερώνεται πλέον από την «έλλειψη», το νόμο και το σημαίνον, τους άξονες της απο-πολιτικοποίησης. Η οικογένεια γίνεται η συνεκδοχή της κοινωνικής καταστολής της επιθυμίας. Η επιθυμία θεωρείται εγγενώς επαναστατική σε αντίθεση με τα «γλεντάκια» (σελ. 136) που φτιασιδώνουν την καταστολή και γίνονται με τη σειρά τους -δευτερογενώς και έκπτωτα- επίσης επιθυμητά. Η υπόσκαψη της οιδιπόδειας λαβής πάνω στην επιθυμία, μας λένε οι D-G, πέρα από την καταφυγή στη νεύρωση και δια μέσου της διαστροφής, αλλά κυρίως η κατά μέτωπο σφοδρή επίθεση εναντίον της που οδηγεί στην αναδίπλωση στο δίχως όργανα σώμα του ψυχωσικού είναι τρόποι που παρασιτούν πάνω στην καθολικότητα της σχίσης που εκρήγνυται χωρίς να μπορεί ποτέ να «σημανθεί» (σελ. 157-9).

Στο 3^ο Κεφάλαιο εισαγόμαστε στο πολιτικό μέρος του έργου, όπου θα ήθελα, όπως προείπα, να εστιάσω περισσότερο. Μέσα από τη μετατοπισμένη αντίληψη της πρωτογενούς αιμομικτικής επιθυμίας που ανάγεται στην ένταση και τη γη, μέσα από την οιδιπόδεια κωδίκωση αυτής της τελευταίας ως απαγορευμένης/απωθημένης/σεξουαλικής, η αποικιοποίηση της πρωτόγονης εμπειρίας στοιχειοθετεί τη βιοϋλιστική/φυλετική βάση του ντελεζιανο-γκαταρικού Πολιτικού. Ο καπιταλισμός είναι η πιο αναβαθμισμένη μορφή αυτής της αποικιοποίησης. Με την ελεγχόμενη ελευθέρωση των επιθυμητικών ροών αφομοιώνει όλες τις αντίθετες προς αυτόν εδαφικοποιήσεις και μεταθέτει τη συνάντηση με την ολική αποκωδίκωση των ροών αυτών με τον ευνουχισμό της επιθυμίας που όλα τα μη καπιταλιστικά συστήματα απαγορευτικής σκληρότητας δεν μπορούσαν να πετύχουν.

Αλλά και η εμφάνιση του βαρβαρικού τυραννικού κράτους είναι δεμένη με τη βιοφυλετική έδρα του ντελεζιανο-γκατταρικού Πολιτικού, όσο και αν μετουσιώνει και συμβολοποιεί προϊόντως, ιδίως ως αυτοκρατορικός σχηματισμός («Το σημείο που έγινε τώρα γράμμα. Η επιθυμία […] έγινε επιθυμία της επιθυμίας […]. Το στόμα δεν μιλάει πιά, πίνει το γράμμα. Το μάτι δεν βλέπει πιά, διαβάζει.» [σελ. 240]). Και ιδού η προκλητική κατάληξη της σκέψης των D-G: σε τόνο που θυμίζει όχι μόνο Nietzsche, αλλά και Bataille, ο Αντι-Οιδίπους κατανοεί το νόμο, που έτσι γεννιέται, ως αντικατάσταση των συστημάτων σκληρότητας με την τρομοκρατία, την επιβολή δικαιικής κύρωσης ως υποκατάσταση της εκδίκησης στη γιορτή που ήταν άλλοτε η τιμωρία, τη νομική υποχρέωση ως ατέρμονη οφειλή. Ο νόμος είναι έκφραση του «ιμπεριαλισμού του σημαίνοντος» (σελ. 247). Τίποτε δεν επισημαίνεται, τίποτε δεν άπτεται ενός βιωμένου σημαινόμενου, όλα μέσα στο νόμο είναι σημεία, σημειοδοτήσεις που ολοποιούν αφηρημένα.

Πίσω από όλα αυτά όμως παραμονεύει η κρατική μηχανή, το ‘Ur-Staat’. Οι D-G θα καταλήξουν στο συμπέρασμα ότι σε όλες τις μορφές κοινωνικών μηχανών υφέρπει «ο ασιατικός δεσποτικός σχηματισμός» (σελ. 302). Ο καπιταλισμός δεν είναι παρά η εσωτερίκευση, κανονικοποίηση και πνευματοποίηση της αρχι-κρατικής μηχανής, είναι η μήτρα του κυνικού ατομικιστή που αποζητά την ασφάλειά του και πουλά τη ζωτικότητά του. Ο νόμος της αξίας και όλοι οι μαρξισμοί παρασιτούν πάνω σε αυτό. Οι περιοδικές-κυκλικές κρίσεις του Marx είναι η εκλογίκευση της παράδοξης λειτουργικότητας του κεφαλαίου, ενός σακάτη που συνεχίζει να περπατά οργώνοντας σώματα και ψυχές. Σώματα και ψυχές ηλίθιων (οι D-G μιλούν ευθέως για τη μαζική ροή ηλιθιότητας, που εισάγει, όπως λένε, την «έλλειψη» στην κοινωνία, την ανάγκη της για εξημέρωση και υποταγή [σελ. 273]).

Ο «εργάτης/εργαζόμενος» στηλιτεύεται, παύει να απενοχοποιείται, όπως το κάνει μια λεγόμενη «Αριστερά» που έχει ενδοβάλει όλη την λογική του ελλιπούς συστήματος (σελ. 274-5). Οι D-G βρίσκουν τη διέξοδο στην περαιτέρω σχιζοποίηση των ροών αποκωδίκωσης, στην υπέρβαση και του καπιταλιστικού μοντέλου μετάθεσης των ορίων και ελέγχου της αποκωδικοποίησης/απεδαφικοποίησης μέσω μιας αξιωματικής που προφυλάσσει το σακάτικο σύστημα από την κατάρρευση (βλ. σελ. 285) καθολικοποιώντας το ζώο-δούλο ως διαταξικό ανθρώπινο τύπο. Τύπο, που προδίδει ακόμη και το υλικό-ταξικό του συμφέρον για να απολαύσει τη συστημικά διεστραμμένη επιθυμία του, για να δοθεί στο φασισμό, αποδεικνύοντας και πάλι ότι ο τόπος του Πολιτικού είναι η επιθυμία και όχι τα έλλογα συμφέροντα που κατασκευάζει η διανοητική ορθοπεδική του Διαφωτισμού (σελ. 298). Το οιδιπόδειο υποβαστάζει φαντασιακά το καπιταλιστικό άτομο, που είναι ένα ασήμαντο, περιχαρές στην αθλιότητά του ναρκισσικό εξάμβλωμα, ταυτόχρονα μνησίκακο και ασκητικό -οι D-G κάνουν λόγο εδώ για την «ψυχολογία του παπά» (σελ. 312)- τελικά, ένας ευνούχος.

Στο 4^ο Κεφάλαιο του Αντι-Οιδίποδα για τη σχιζοανάλυση η πολιτική μετάπλαση της λογικής της επιθυμίας και έτσι και της υπέρβασης της ψυχανάλυσης αναπτύσσεται αναλυτικά. Συγκρατώ για τη θεματική που ανέπτυξα εδώ τη βαθιά ριζοσπαστικοποίηση της κίνησης των ροών επιθυμίας, που επιτρέπει στους D-G να δηλώσουν ρητά την κατάφασή τους στην αποκαθήλωση του ταμπού της βίας για την επαναστατική μηχανή: «Μια επαναστατική μηχανή δεν είναι τίποτε, αν δεν αποκτήσει τουλάχιστον τόση δύναμη τομής και ροής όσην έχουν και αυτές οι μηχανές καταναγκασμού» (σελ. 337). Η ντελεζο-γκατταριανή στάση εισηγείται μια καταστροφολογία parexcellence (βλ. π.χ. το κείμενο της σελ. 358) που εν ταυτώ συνοδεύεται από μια φαντασμαγορία θετικού έργου, μοριακού, εναρμονισμένου με γραμμές φυγής, αποκωδικοποιητικού/απο-σημαίνοντος, έργου, στο πλαίσιο του οποίου ακόμη και ο θάνατος «σχιζοφρενείται», όπως δείχνουν οι αναλύσεις του Κεφ. αυτού ειδικά για το Δίχως Όργανα Σώμα (σελ. 379-81).

Η επαναστατική διαδικασία είναι έργο ομάδων-υποκειμένων που θραύουν την υποταγή ελευθερώνοντας την επιθυμία και την παραγωγή της (σελ. 402). Η ελευθέρωση αυτή είναι το ξήλωμα του ιατρείου και της οικογένειας, η συνεπαφή με το κοινωνικό «έξω» (σελ. 411-2). Είναι ρήξη με την αιτιότητα και τα εξηγητικά μοντέλα που στηρίζονται σε αυτήν (σελ. 434). Γράφουν οι D-G: «[Μ]όνο αυτό που ανήκει στην κατηγορία της επιθυμίας και της εισβολής της μπορεί να εξηγήσει ότι η ρήξη αυτή πραγματοποιείται σε μιάν ορισμένη στιγμή, σ’ έναν ορισμένο τόπο» (σελ. 435). Παρόλο το βάρος της αιτιότητας, των «μεγάλων αριθμών», των συμφερόντων κλπ. «[π]αραμένει γεγονός», γράφουν οι D-G, «ότι η σχίση γεννήθηκε μονάχα από μιάν επιθυμία, άσκοπη και αναίτια που τη χαράζει και την ενστερνίζεται. Αδύνατη χωρίς τη σειρά των αιτίων, γίνεται πραγματική μόνο με κάτι που ανήκει σε μιάν άλλη σειρά: την Επιθυμία, την επιθυμία-έρημο, την επένδυση επαναστατικής επιθυμίας» (σελ. 436).

Και η έρημος αρχίζει να κατονομάζεται, για να χαθεί στη συνέχεια, να εμφανιστεί αλλιώς μετά: «Ένας Φιδέλ Κάστρο, ένας Άραβας, ένας Μαύρος Πάνθηρας, ένας Κινέζος; Ένας γαλλικός Μάης ’68[;] (ibid). Το παλινδρομικό κύμα των ονομάτων αντανακλά -κι αυτό είναι ίσως το μεγάλο ολιστικό μάθημα του έργου- τη διασπορά του Πολιτικού παντού. Κλείνοντας το Παράρτημα-Σχόλιο για τις επιθυμητικές μηχανές στο βιβλίο, οι D-G θα ανιχνεύσουν πτυχές της επιθυμίας ως όψεις του Πολιτικού στα καλλιτεχνικά ρεύματα του πρώτου μισού του περασμένου αι., το φασιστικό ιταλικό φουτουρισμό, τη ρωσική φουτουριστική και κονστρουκτιβιστική πρωτοπορία, που μοσχεύει αναρχισμό στη σταλινική πολιτική μηχανή, τους Dada που απελευθερώνουν απολίτικα και το σουρρεαλισμό που επαναπειθαρχεί την επιθυμία ανθρωπιστικά (σελ. 463 κ. επ.). Τέλος, τη μορφή του αγώνα των ομάδων-υποκειμένων θα αναλύσουν οι συγγραφείς στα MillePlateaux αργότερα, μιλώντας για τις μηχανές πολέμου στη νομαδολογία τους, που παρεντίθεται σε ένα έργο αφιερωμένο στο ρίζωμα και τη διάσωση των ενικοτήτων.

Πώς εμπλουτίζει την κατανόησή μας του Πολιτικού γενικά και ειδικά σήμερα ο Αντι-Οιδίπους; Το βιβλίο απηχεί το πνεύμα του Μάη, αλλά σήμερα ο φαινότυπος εκείνης της εμπειρίας έχει αλλάξει. Τα σπουδαστήρια που ανάσαιναν μαζικά, η πολιτισμική εξέγερση, η συμπλοκή έρωτα και πολιτικής, η παράκαμψη των κομμάτων έχουν αφομοιωθεί στα νεολίμπεραλ αγοραία πανεπιστήμια, στη φασίζουσα μαζική κουλτούρα, στις έκ-κεντρες απολίτικες ταυτότητες, στο μείγμα υστερικο-εμμονικού δικαιωματισμού και βιοπολιτικού μετανθρωπισμού. Η βιοϋλιστική έδραση του Πολιτικού του Αντι-Οιδίποδα εμβολίζεται έτσι εγκάρσια ή, πράγμα που είναι το ίδιο, ο Αντι-Οιδίπους επιβεβαιώνεται- φεύ!- ως η αλήθεια του ύστερου καπιταλισμού. Άρα, το στοίχημα του βιβλίου, της αθανασίας ή της συνθηκολόγησής του, είναι το εάν μπορεί να ανοσοποιηθεί από αυτή τη διεμβόλιση.

Θα το διατυπώσω υπό μορφή ερωτημάτων κλείνοντας. Αίφνης: οι γεωπολιτικοί σεισμοί που αρχίζουν τι σημαίνουν; Πόσο μπορεί η στέπα και η έρημος, τόποι της ντελεζο-γκαταρριανής πολεμικής μηχανής, να γίνουν τόποι της σύγχρονης επαναστατικής εμπειρίας; Πόσο βεβαρημένος είναι ο όρος «ασιατική δεσποτεία» με υποδόριο δυτικό ρατσισμό, πόσο δηλαδή γίνεται σύμπτωμα ασύνειδου φιλελεύθερου υπολείμματος στη σκέψη των D-G;

Μπορεί ο αντι-ιδεαλισμός του Αντι-Οιδίποδα να αναστοχαστεί την αναγέννηση της σκέψης για την έν-τοπη εμπειρία συλλογικών σωμάτων που φέρονται από «εθνο-λαούς»; Μπορεί η ριζωματική νομαδικότητα να λειτουργήσει όχι μόνο μοριακά αλλά και εδαφοποιητικά, διαπλάθοντας μια νέα παγκόσμια πολυ- πολικότητα με συνείδηση, πια, της ριζικής μας, όλων, περατότητας; Επιτρέπει το βιοϋλιστικό-μηχανικό σύμπαν του Αντι-Οιδίποδα χώρο για μια συλλογική τελετουργία με την οποία εκδηλώνεται μια ιδιότυπη «πνευματικότητα» του Πολιτικού πέρα από τα δυτικά του αφηγήματα, μια πνευματικότητα σαν αυτή που διέγνωσε ο Foucault στην Ιρανική Επανάσταση;

Τέλος, τα ονόματα: ποιες άραγε «ομάδες-υποκείμενα» εκφράζουν σήμερα διαχρονικές ιστορικές φιγούρες όπως ο Ernst Niekisch, ο Ernst Jünger ή η Ulrike Meinhof ή τύποι όπως ο Τζερζίνσκι ή ο στρατιώτης/παρτιζάνος του Μεγάλου Πατριωτικού Πολέμου; Πώς συνδέεται η Μυστική Γερμανία και η ρωσική Ευρασία;

Εν ολίγοις, πώς να ξανασκεφτούμε μέσα από τον Αντι-Οιδίποδα το Συμβάν που έρχεται;

Αν ο Αντι-Οιδίπους άνοιξε το παράθυρο του ιατρείου για να δεί τη δημοσιά και τους γκρεμούς του «έξω», το ερώτημα που τού τίθεται πλέον είναι αν μπορεί να βγεί από το ιατρείο και να χαθεί στα μονοπάτια που ανοίγονται εκεί έξω, και είναι άγνωστο αν οδηγούν στη σωτηρία ή στην άβυσσο… 

_________

Χάρη Παπαχαραλάμπους, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής Ποινικού Δικαίου (Τμήμα Νομικής του Πανεπιστημίου Κύπρου), διδάκτωρ ποινικού δικαίου και θεωρίας δικαίου του Πανεπιστημίου Goethe της Φρανκφούρτης, δικηγόρος στον Άρειο Πάγο.

The post 50 Χρόνια Deleuze & Guattari “Καπιταλισμός και Σχιζοφρένεια- Αντι-Οιδίπους” appeared first on Void Network.

Τα βιβλία του Andrew Culp “Dark Deleuze” (2016) και “A Guerilla Guide to Refusal” (2022), καθώς και η ταινία του “Machines In Flames” (2022, https://machinesinflames.com/3) θα χρησιμοποιηθούν ως σημεία εκκίνησης της συζήτησης, μαζί με τα βιβλία της Dana Papachristou “Art as a War Machine” (2022) και του Brett Zehner “Machines of Subjection” (2019). Το πάνελ θα έχει τη μορφή παρουσίασης και συζήτησης, μεταξύ συζητητών και επισκεπτών. Είσοδος ελεύθερη.

ΔΕΥΤΕΡΑ 21/11/2022
ώρα έναρξης 18.30

Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο
Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ
(Ρ. Παλαμήδη 2, Ψυρρή)

Διοργάνωση:
To aesthate
https://www.facebook.com/toaesthate
+Ινστιτούτο [Πειραματικών Τεχνών]
https://www.theinstitute.info
Κενό Δίκτυο
https://www.voidnetwork.gr

___

Ο Andrew Culp (MA 2009, PhD 2013) είναι Καθηγητής Ιστορίας και Θεωρίας των Μέσων Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης και Διευθυντής του προγράμματος MA Aesthetics and Politics (από την άνοιξη του 2023) στη Σχολή Κριτικών Σπουδών και στο πρόγραμμα MA Aesthetics and Politics του California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Στο πρώτο του βιβλίο, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), προτείνει μια επαναστατική νέα εικόνα της σκέψης του Gilles Deleuze, κατάλληλη για το πανταχού παρόν περιβάλλον των μέσων ενημέρωσης στο οποίο ζούμε 24 ώρες της ημέρα-7 μέρες την εβδομάδα, και έχει μεταφραστεί σε οκτώ γλώσσες. Στα ελληνικά κυκλοφόρησε από τις εκδόσεις Επέκεινα το 2019 σε μετάφραση του Παναγιώτη Τριτσιμπίδα και της Χλόης Κολύρη.
Με το δεύτερο βιβλίο του, A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), οπλίζει τον αναγνώστη με την κριτική θεωρίαως μέρος ενός ταξιδιού μέσα από έναν αναρχικό πληροφοριακό πόλεμο, τους queer παραβάτες και την εξέγερση της Μαύρης κουλτούρας.
Αυτή τη στιγμή εργάζεται πάνω σε δύο έργα: μια νέα δομιστική θεωρία της κρατικής Αρχής και μια κριτική ιστορία της κυβερνητικής από εκείνους που την ανατρέπουν από το εσωτερικό της. Τα γραπτά του Culp για αυτά και άλλα θέματα έχουν δημοσιευτεί στα περιοδικά Flügschriften, Radical Philosophy, symplokē, parallax, angelaki, Deleuziana, The Alienocene και boundary 2.
Ως μέλος της Destructionist International, δημιουργεί επίσης ταινίες και άλλα μέσα. Το πιο πρόσφατο είναι το πειραματικό ντοκιμαντέρ Machines in Flames (2022), το οποίο διερευνά την κληρονομιά του τεχνο-σαμποτάζ.

http://www.andrewculp.org/

Η Ντάνα Παπαχρήστου είναι θεωρητικός και καλλιτέχνης του ήχου που εστιάζει στον συνδυασμό καλλιτεχνικών ειδών με τη χρήση νέων μέσων. Σπούδασε μουσική (πιάνο, κλαρινέτο, σύνθεση),μουσικολογία στο Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών και Πολιτισμικές Σπουδές και Σπουδές Μέσων Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης στο τμήμα Σπουδών Μέσων Μαζικής Ενημέρωσηςστο ΕΚΠΑ, εμβαθύνοντας στο μεταπτυχιακό της (2012) στη “σχέση της μουσικής και της ζωγραφικής στο πλαίσιο του μοντερνισμού, μέσα από την αλληλογραφία των Shoenberg και Kandinsky”. Σπούδασε επίσης σύνθεση με τους Θεόδωρο Αντωνίου, Nestor Taylor, Fergus Curry και Αναστάση Φιλιππακόπουλο. Είναι κάτοχος διδακτορικού διπλώματος με θέμα την “Αισθητική των Νέων Τεχνών των Μέσων Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης στα έργα Anti-Oedipus και Milles Plateaux των Deleuze και Guattari” από το Paris VIII – Vincennes – St. Denis και το Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο (2020).
Τα τελευταία χρόνια έχει συμμετάσχει σε διεπιστημονικά ερευνητικά προγράμματα σχετικά με τη σύγχρονη μουσική και τη σχέση της με άλλα είδη τέχνης, σε διάφορα μουσικά και γεωγραφικά προγράμματα και έχει εργαστεί ως καθηγήτρια μουσικής στην εκπαίδευση. Ασχολείται με τον ήχο, τη μουσική, το περπάτημα, το δημόσιο χώρο και την performance και είναι ιδρυτικό μέλος της ομάδας akoo.o, με την οποία ασχολείται με τη σύνθεση ηχητικών περιπάτων και ακουστικών περιπάτων με τη χρήση τοπο-ειδικών μέσων και γεω-τοποθέτησης.
Έχει εργαστεί ως υπεύθυνη εκπαίδευσης στο πρόγραμμα της Δημιουργικής Ευρώπης “Β-Air: Art Infinity Radio, music for babies, toddlers and vulnerable groups” για το TwixtLab, στο Ειδικό Σχολείο Κωφών και Βαρηκόων στην Αργυρούπολη της Αθήνας. Σήμερα είναι διδάσκουσα (Θεωρία Μέσων και Performance) στο Τμήμα Πολιτισμού, Δημιουργικών Μέσων και Βιομηχανιών του Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλίας στο Βόλο και μεταδιδακτορική ερευνήτρια στο Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο.

https://soundcloud.com/danapapachristou

Ο Brett Zehner είναι θεωρητικός των μέσων και καλλιτέχνης που γράφει για τις τεχνολογίες της αντίστασης. Το διδακτορικό έργο του, Machines of Subjection, διερευνά την πανταχού παρούσα εμφάνιση των μέσων πρόβλεψης με τη μορφή της μηχανικής μάθησης. Η έρευνα αυτή αποσκοπεί στην εννοιολόγηση μιας νέας μορφής πολιτικής εξουσίας, όπου η ατομική λήψη αποφάσεων αντικαθίσταται από την πανταχού παρούσα προβλεπτική υπολογιστική διαδικασία. Για παράδειγμα, οι θεωρίες του σχηματισμού ταυτότητας και της απόκτησης γλώσσας πρέπει να επικαιροποιηθούν με την εμφάνιση της λεγόμενης επεξεργασίας φυσικής γλώσσας και ενός ευρέος φάσματος αντιληπτικών τεχνολογιών πραγματικού χρόνου που αντιστοιχούν στη στατιστική συνάθροιση στη μηχανική μάθηση.

Ως καλλιτέχνης της ψηφιακής γλώσσας, η Brett ενδιαφέρεται επίσης για τους νέους αισθητικο-πολιτικούς σχηματισμούς που αναδύονται μέσα από τις καλλιτεχνικές εξερευνήσεις της τεχνητής νοημοσύνης. Τα τελευταία πέντε χρόνια ο Brett έχει προβληματίσει τα όρια της συνεργατικής λογοτεχνικής πρακτικής, των εννοιολογικών και υπολογιστικών μορφών τέχνης, καθώς και των κοινωνικών πρακτικών που ενημερώνονται από την ακαδημαϊκή και κοινοτική έρευνα. Αυτός ο πειραματισμός έχει λάβει τη μορφή διαφόρων ενδιάμεσων έργων που δοκιμάζουν τα όρια των τεχνολογικών πλατφορμών και τη σχέση τους με τις οικονομίες της προσωπικής έκφρασης. Ο Brett έχει μοιραστεί το ερευνητικό και δημιουργικό του έργο διεθνώς. Αυτή τη στιγμή είναι μεταδιδακτορικός υπότροφος στο Πανεπιστήμιο στις Σπουδές Επιτέλεσης και στα Υπολογιστικά Μέσα και είναι κάτοχος μεταπτυχιακού διπλώματος ειδίκευσης από το UC San Diego.

https://brettzehner.net/

_______

ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΕΠΙΣΗΣ την εξαντλημένη έκδοση του βιβλίου ΣΚΟΤΕΙΝΟΣ ΝΤΕΛΕΖ του Andrew Culp – εκδόσεις Επέκεινα -σε μετάφραση του Παναγιώτη Τριτσιμπίδα και της Χλόης Κολύρη

https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/%CE%A3%CE%BA%CE%BF%CF%84%CE%B5%CE%B9%CE%BD%CF%8C%CF%82-%CE%9D%CF%84%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%AD%CE%B6-Andrew-Culp.pdf

The post Andrew Culp, Dana Papachristou, Brett Zehner- Ομιλία / Συζήτηση – Δευτέρα 21-11-2022- Θέατρο Εμπρός appeared first on Void Network.

Becoming-Other, Becoming-Many: Poststructuralism and the Problem of Justice- George Sotiropoulos– political philosopher and member of Void Network participates in the conference POSTSTRUCTURALISM: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Wed. 6/3/2019 MADRID

This paper argues that poststructuralist thought can help articulate a critical and materialist notion of justice against the normativist and idealist conceptions dominant today. The assumption that justice is a critical concept goes all the way back to Plato, whose interrogation of the notion in the Republic yields a critical analysis of the political forms existing in Greece at the time. On the other hand, in the very same work, Plato has been taken to canonize an idealist conceptualization of justice, as a normative Ideal that prescribes how things Ought to be. This conception remains prevalent today in mainstream theories of justice, which unfold within a more or less liberal frame of reference. Despite the plurality of perspectives and the willingness to critically engage with key premises of liberal thought, justice continues for the most part to be conceived as a judgment that reason passes on material reality. Recognizing the exclusionary implications of this type of normative political theory, a diverse yet identifiable current of thought has emerged that attempts to recover a more critical conception of justice, which does not adopt however the reductionist attitude of traditional Marxist or more broadly materialist critiques. In this context, the legacy of poststructuralism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the late work of Derrida has arguably been an inaugurating moment of contemporary critical and non-reductionist theories of justice. On the other hand, it is not hard to find instances in the work of other iconic poststructuralist thinkers that suggest a principled dismissal of the notion’s analytical and political merits. Intentionally or inadvertently, poststructuralism’s radical critique of political normativism has been said (and accused) to lead to a subsumption of justice to power. Even Derrida’s attempts to sustain the irreducibility of the former to the latter, ends up in an aporetic position, which refrains from articulating an alternative, positive conception of justice. It is the latter possibility that my paper explores. Starting with a brief discussion of Derrida and Foucault and then focusing on Deleuze and Guattari, it will be argued that poststructuralist thought provides a fertile basis for a concept of justice that foregrounds the latter’s critical potency without however forfeiting its normative and ethical traits. At the same time, this conception will be shown to be consistent to a materialist theory of social reality, yet respectful of the ideational dimension of justice as well as of its excessiveness vis-à-vis historical actuality.

Conference Program

more info: https://poststructuralismconference.wordpress.com/conference-abstracts/

The post POSTSTRUCTURALISM: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Conference – George Sotiropoulos (Void Network) talk – 6-7/3/19 Madrid appeared first on Void Network.

Félix Guattari is widely discussed among philosophers, particularly feminists and specialists in ecology and technology. But in the Anglophone world, political organisers tend to ignore him. In part this is due to academic paywalls and university strictures confining his work, but the problem goes further: the stylistic conservatism of so much of the Anglo-American left has impeded the capacity to learn from his insights, because they are presented in an nontraditional and unfamiliar style. This resistance has obscured his continuing activity as a participant and organiser in a variety of international struggles.

This is not merely of historical interest; these practical and conceptual experiences may prove to revitalise contemporary projects. Marxism has experienced a series of crises around the question of the relationship of “identity” to fundamental economic structures. Guattari contributed new ways of thinking and practicing politics that help us rethink this challenge. From a starting point in the Trotskyist movement, he integrated elements of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. However, his most famous writings were produced in collaboration with a philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Guattari drew from a revolutionary interpretation of psychoanalysis, in order to express a theory of desire that exceeds the bourgeois family and the individualism it produces.

In his solely authored works, as well as his philosophical projects co-authored with Deleuze, Guattari expanded the Marxist conceptual armoury to help us better understand gender, sexuality, identification with capitalist values, and the necessity of revolutionary organisation. Moreover, his philosophical elucidation of the ‘assemblage’ provides a capacious and materialist way of thinking the interconnectedness of economic and social struggles against exploitation and oppression. His distinct ideas remain evident in rich descriptions of contemporary problems, such as Jasbir K. Puar’s approach to ‘homonationalism’ and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s exploration of American indigenous thought. It is helpful to reinvestigate the full scope of Guattari’s work in order to discover tools to assist revolutionary socialists today.

Marxism and Psychoanalysis

Guattari began his career with a dual fidelity; to the Marxist tradition as developed by Trotskyism, and to psychoanalysis as reinvented by Lacan. In the 1950s, French psychoanalysis was shaken by Lacan’s controversial insights. Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, distorted the radical potential of psychoanalysis by advocating the strengthening of the ego (the conscious individual self). Lacan believed that this emphasis on the ego would only intensify social repression and miss the purpose of analysis, which was the discovery of unconscious desire. Especially in the United States, psychoanalysis has often had a history of conservative social practice – particularly in its inscription of a regime of repressive gender norms. In France, however, Lacan pioneered a strongly anti-authoritarian reading of Freud that might be mobilised against the oppression of women and those with same-sex attractions. Guattari’s Marxist politics led him to explore this potential to its fullest.

This outlook attracted the interest of a number of French Marxists. In particular, Louis Althusser commended Lacan and endorsed his views. Although a member of the French Communist Party, Althusser tried to develop an anti-Stalinist critique within it. His circle of intellectuals became increasingly sympathetic to the Chinese revolution and to Maoism, which they believed had overcome the state-capitalist economy of the Soviet Union. In the culturally avant-garde circles of the 1960s, there was a trend toward reading Lacan, Althusser, and Mao Zedong together. In this context, Guattari was unusual in that he was very sceptical of Althusser and Mao, and instead maintained a critical inheritance from Leon Trotsky. For Guattari, the Maoists were puritanical and joyless, and remained wedded to an authoritarian state structure. In contrast, he championed a viewpoint inspired by Trotskyism and the decolonisation movements; this critical viewpoint appeared in a journal he co-edited, titled La Voie Communiste.

Beginning in 1955, Guattari worked at La Borde, a clinic open to patients who were unresponsive to traditional methods. Guattari had no choice but to develop new techniques in order to treat psychosis. Freudian theory makes a distinction between neurosis, the product of excessive repression, and psychosis, arising from a failure to limit imagination by reality. Guattari initially drew from Lacan’s approach. In Lacan’s view, psychotics have not fully entered the Symbolic order; they have not developed an ego separate from the world in which they are immersed. For him, this disorder also carries a certain rigor or truth; psychosis reveals the artificiality of the ego. Lacan’s reading of Freud argues that the ego is a product of social repression and that analytic experience ought to counter it, and instead reveal the unconscious desires of the analysand. Analysis could then understand the social factors that determine ego-formation, and by this means, develop a practice conducive to a new form of subjectivity. The experience of subjectivity, drawing from the realisation of the unconscious as prior to the ego, might allow a renegotiation of the relationship with the social order. It was this potential that Guattari would go on to explore.

Rejecting Lacan, Encountering Deleuze

At the end of the 1960s, Guattari began to question some of Lacan’s theses and eventually certain preconceptions of psychoanalysis as a whole. Lacan had been inspired by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. This framework characterised analysis as attention to signifiers; the unconscious as manifested literally in spoken language. Lacan would come to speak of motérialité, a portmanteau combining the French words for ‘word’ and ‘materiality.’ He read Freud’s insight as the revelation of unconscious drives, through unexpected alternative interpretations of phrases or statements, or errors of communication that could reveal repressed desires. He hypothesised that the unconscious is ‘structured like a language.’ This did not indicate that the mind was comprised only of linguistic elements; rather, he meant that mental phenomena could be understood according to the mechanisms of signification described by Saussure. This attention to alternative interpretations, beyond intentional meaning, could reveal ambiguities in thought and speech that would escape the workings of social repression.

Further, Lacan believed that the apparent fixity of meaning was a product of an individual’s entry into the symbolic order, which required the self-recognition of a distinct ego. He believed that this ego formation, and the symbolic order which registered it, required a process of socialisation within the family. Freud placed emphasis on the profundity of the classical myth of Oedipus, the king who murders his father and marries his mother. In his account of the ‘mirror stage,’ Lacan formalised this myth. He described ego-formation as bound to an imitation of the father’s ability to speak, and enmeshed in relations of hostility, mortality, and sexuality as a result.

While Guattari had been convinced of this in the 1950s, by the end of the subsequent decade he began to question Lacan’s emphasis on the signification of language, and to see this as reliant on Oedipal relations (even in the formalised, abstract form that Lacan gave them). Guattari believed that this would continue to reify social conditions that limit the possibility of creativity. He approached the problem by reconsidering the relationship between individual subjects and social reality. In his efforts to do so, he became inspired by an unusual book of philosophy by Deleuze: Difference and Repetition, published in 1968.

Like Lacan, Deleuze was strongly affected by Saussure’s linguistics. He was also impressed by Althusser’s re-reading of Marx, itself indebted to Freud. However, Deleuze argued that difference could only be properly understood if it exceeded the question of representation. This presented a considerable challenge and modification to Saussure’s model, which presented signification (meaning) as reliant on differences between signs. For Deleuze, changes could be thought as immanent processes in which an element does not signify a secondary meaning; rather, each concept and object in the world could logically participate and affect one another without a process of signifying. That is to say, a concept does not stand in for a material object, but rather each is autonomous – the concept and the object reciprocally affect one another, without priority for one over the other.

Deleuze developed this method partly by attention to historical processes – each historical moment can only be understood by the interconnectedness of all of its elements; but further, this understanding is itself an intervention in the situation, participating among other factors. For example, Deleuze reads the novelist Marcel Proust as demonstrating the active and creative aspect of memory. For him, reminiscence is not simply a representation of the past, but a new process of invention. Over-emphasising the linguistic analysis of social reality would obscure the social process of determination by forces of production and their concrete relations. Deleuze argued that this insight would realise an affirmative mode of thought in which potentiality would be discovered and valorised, rather than confined or judged according to a prior norm. Potentiality described the raw capacity of action of any object or agent; Deleuze chose not to understand things according to their pre-given purpose or origin, but rather by their capacities. Production became an organising principle; representation was set aside in favour of an understanding of mechanisms participating in a world continually created by the multiplicity of entities. For Deleuze, affirmation opened a better awareness of the natural and social forces producing any event, as well as the ability to transform these relations. While this was primarily expressed in formal, theoretical terms, Guattari would apply these insights toward more concrete political problems.

In his essay of 1969, ‘Machine and Structure,’ Guattari applied this way of thinking to structuralism, trying to overcome its tendency to reduce real processes to language, by offering his conception of a ‘machine.’ He argued that subjectivity could be understood without the durability of an ego, rooted in imitation of the father. Lacan had already argued that this ego should be displaced in favour of the experience of desires that exceed it, but Guattari wished to radicalise this and to go further. Machines (both in thought and in practice) would exceed the bounds of Lacan’s signifier and its linguistic frame of reference. The machine, rather than depending on representation (words that could represent things), would be a process that co-implicates creation and interaction. Guattari suggests that the world should be conceived according to interconnected processes. These processes (‘machines’) make up individual and group activity, with each individual process a component of a larger one. This point of view led him to reject Lacan, and to begin a close collaboration with Deleuze. Together, they tried to produce a new creative project that would draw from psychoanalytic ideas, but overcome its reference to social normalisation – through the integration of a Marxist social analysis and political commitment to revolution from below.

Anti-Oedipus

Guattari’s break with Lacan was affected by the reading of Deleuze, but also by concrete events in the world around him. In May 1968, a student strike took place, followed by mass action by workers. These events took place without support by the PCF or its affiliated unions; Althusser was unwilling to break with the party line and refused to condone the strikes. Lacan was initially intrigued by the events, but subsequently took a dim view. He believed that the students were acting out, attempting to derive a reaction from authority figures rather than engaging in the ongoing work of uncovering and renegotiating desire. By contrast, Guattari and Deleuze were elated and inspired.

Behind the stable matrix of the law-giving Father, separating the individual from the desire of the Mother, Guattari identified social power. The Symbolic law existed in the cop and the boss just as much as in the presence of the Father – and indeed, familial authority might even be secondary to these other forms of economic and social power outside the home. To identify the transhistorical law of selfhood with the bourgeois family, then, would lead to reconciliation with a social order built on foundations of authority and domination. In contrast, they saw the new social movements as a vast range of social experimentation. Questioning and rejecting the police along with the family opened the possibility of practical changes in the condition of possibility for individual understanding, beyond the limits of the clinic or therapy.

The 1968 movement advocated a transformation of everyday life and refused the confinement to the economic sphere or to improved consumer goods. The militants of these events demanded a rethinking of the family order and of social taboos and restrictions around sexuality and creativity. This revolutionary outlook, then, confronted the structures and institutions that created an alienated experience of life. Deleuze and Guattari believed that their affirmative philosophy could add new conceptual tools in order to assist and mobilise this new spirit of liberation. They gave a new meaning to the notion of ‘alienation’; original human nature could not be retrieved and liberation could never be the recovery of a prior innocence. Yet, May 1968 showed that the social relations of the capitalist order repressed and limited the multiplicity and potential of the world, rendering subjects alienated in their inability to experience collective creativity. In their view, revolution would invent new forms of community.

In 1972, Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This book developed the earlier philosophical criticism of representative thinking, applying it to society and the mode of production. It was not only inspired by the May 1968 events, but also had a decisive effect on many revolutionaries of that generation, who believed that the book captured the new economic, social, and political realities of the era. Deleuze and Guattari argued that psychoanalysis misconceived consciousness as a theatre (a stage in which psychodramas are acted out), and instead psychic experience ought to be understood as a factory; a place of production. They were cognisant of Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses, which materially produced individual subjects. The apparatuses produce certain capacities, skills, and bodies of knowledge, but they also transmit obedience to political authority and susceptibility to economic exploitation. However, they rejected the notion of ideology insofar as they believed that it was still too bound to questions of meaning and interpretation. They did not view ideological critique as fundamentally about the correction of false consciousness, which could be dispelled by a scientific viewpoint.

Instead, they argued that capitalism acted to set constraints on possible associations and activity, through channelling collective desires. Capitalism had the inevitable effect of inciting new needs and desires for individuals and groups, which it tried to satisfy through commodities (as well as disciplining the class through the coercive arm of the state). However, Deleuze and Guattari argued that the revolutionary struggle of workers would naturally exceed any satisfaction that could be offered through consumerism, or the punitive mechanisms of the law. They believed that working-class self-activity was inherently more affirmative and more active than the methods of punishment and reward offered by capitalist structures or institutions.

Deleuze and Guattari on Revolutionary Organisation

There is a common tendency to read Anti-Oedipus as an uncritical celebration of anarchic, undisciplined activity and romantic excess. For example, Alain Badiou and other French Maoists of this period called them ‘anarcho-desirers.’ However, a close reading of the book counters this impression, particularly in light of Guattari’s lifelong activities. Deleuze and Guattari do not call for hyper-individualism. Rather, they called for a new type of revolutionary group that could effectively counter recuperation by the capitalist state. In contrast to the contemporary doxa, which some have called ‘anarcho-liberalism’ – an emphasis on local struggles, modest demands, unstable structures, and proceduralism – Deleuze and Guattari always insisted on the need for organisation, and the ultimate goal of a new society. As Deleuze wrote in a preface to Guattari’s writings, published the same year as Anti-Oedipus: ‘Clearly, a revolutionary machine cannot remain satisfied with local and occasional struggles: it has to be at the same time super-centralised and super-desiring.’ This emphasis is explicit in a later book by the two authors, A Thousand Plateaus. There Deleuze and Guattari define their problem as ‘that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means.’ They stipulate that this war machine will avoid ‘the war of extermination’ and ‘the peace of generalised terror,’ but rather proceed toward ‘revolutionary movement.’ Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc describes this problematic as ‘neo-Leninist.’ He emphasises Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the socialist ‘war machine’ by its distinction from state organs. In this regard, their viewpoint demands collective organisation from below, without emulating prior authorities. This war machine would emerge from situated experience, but would also refuse any limitation to a single sphere of struggle – the social, economic, and cultural would be practically intertwined.

Deleuze and Guattari express ambivalence about the Leninist legacy. In Anti-Oedipus, they admire Vladimir Lenin’s command of slogans and his ability to produce new modes of power, new popular machines. By declaring ‘All power to the Soviets’ at the right moment, Lenin was able to harness desires that exceed and overpower the state. However, they saw the historical circumstances of that time as necessitating the transformation of this novelty into a new form of state capitalism. They believed that the degeneration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union produced a faulty organisational form, incapable of accomplishing a socialist revolution. ‘Leninist’ parties of their time, including the orthodox-Trotskyist variants, did not successfully reinvent the possibility of revolutionary organisation. Guattari believed that this could be done by creating a new revolutionary group that could coordinate and deepen various social struggles, transforming its members by their shared commitment to diverse fights against oppression.

They did not deduce an apathetic or individualist conclusion from their critique of the Stalinist legacy. While Deleuze’s work was primarily theoretical and philosophical in nature, Guattari remained actively committed to various social movements of his time. These included the beginnings of the LGBT movement in France, workers’ and students’ activity in Italy, and diverse social movements that countered the Brazilian military dictatorship. All of these social struggles should be studied further, and Guattari’s involvement in them is of considerable significance.

Guattari and International Social Movements: France, Italy, Brazil

Anti-Oedipus had immediate effects on French social movements. Among these was the beginning of what was then called the ‘gay liberation movement.’ In France, the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR) was among the first organisations to demand social equality for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. In addition, the group had a conscious anti-capitalist political perspective. The group’s founder, Guy Hocquenghem, took inspiration from Anti-Oedipus. The desire to overcome the bourgeois family, and to reveal it as bound to other forms of social authoritarianism, inspired a practical and theoretical rejection of heteronormativity (to apply a later term produced by queer theory). Guattari helped to organise and publish the FHAR’s first public pronouncements, as well as arranging support from Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and others. This led to political repression of the publication as well as legal action against Guattari himself, who was fined for his ‘affront to public decency.’ Guattari publicly defended himself and the right to expression of the FHAR, in a landmark case for French gays and lesbians. Guattari was also among the first French intellectuals to defend the rights of transgender people in France and abroad. In his defense of the FHAR, Guattari said:

This is, in fact, more about transsexuality than homosexuality: at issue is the definition of what sexuality would be in a society freed from capitalist exploitation and the alienation it engenders on all levels of social organisation. From this perspective, the struggle for the liberty of homosexuality becomes an integral part of the struggle for social liberation.

Guattari’s social commitment on this matter cleaved with his philosophy. In his writings with Deleuze, Guattari described a process of ‘becoming-woman’ that could alter the potential of one’s own body. This concept could include concrete transgender experience, as well as conceptual, imaginative innovations that may not involve an individual permanently transitioning from one gender to another. He saw such practices as politically valuable, because they free desire (in thought and action) from the constraints put on it by the capitalist order. A new vision of solidarity, beyond fixed, identity, is at stake here; rising from a struggle to change the way the body and mind has been conditioned by an alienated society. Guattari met with organisations that defended transgender people outside France; these included the Gay Group of Bahia, in Brazil. These practical gestures of solidarity and experiences of new social struggles enriched his understanding of global potential for collective reshaping of desire.

Despite their novelty of expression, the FHAR did not have a good understanding of the particular oppression of women and lesbians in capitalist society. As a result, in 1971 a separate group, the Goines Rouges (Red Dykes) split off. Their most famous figure, Monique Wittig, drew from the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to dissolve sexual difference itself; she paraphrased their emphasis on singularity to contend that there are “as many sexes as individuals.” In this reading, Deleuze and Guattari’s position could be martialed in favour of a feminist strategy of gender abolition. However, others have subsequently received their work differently. Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz believe that their emphasis on embodiment over representation is compatible with a contemporary approach to sexual difference that acknowledges the excess and contingency of sexed bodies. This draws in part from the reception of their ideas by feminists in Italy.

Anti-Oedipus and Guattari in particular were extraordinarily influential for the Italian left of the 1970s. Anti-Oedipus was translated into Italian in 1975, where a social crisis was taking place. With a high degree of unemployment, government austerity measures, and widespread dissatisfaction with the economic and political order, many young people sought out a revolutionary path. As François Dosse writes, a ‘series of far-left Italian currents found a new language in the theses of Deleuze and Guattari, notably in Anti-Oedipus […] and the notion of ‘desiring machines.’’ In September of 1977, Guattari appeared at a great colloquium in Bologna, comprised of people who organised and acted for politics beyond the official left. These included feminists, gay and lesbian groups, as well as workers’ organisation. As Guattari’s friend, the painter Gérard Fromanger, recalled:

This was the first time that we had seen a demonstration of twenty thousand young women shouting and making the ‘pussy’ sign with their hands. It was so beautiful! That was the first time we saw that it was possible! Women Power!

Guattari was regarded as a leading figure in this movement. He became friends with another radical philosopher, Antonio Negri. By 1978, the situation in Italy had become violent; the revolutionary movement had split between a terrorist wing, the Red Brigades, and forces based in more mass-oriented politics (like Autonomia Operaia, Negri’s group). The state was able to take the violence of the terrorist groups as a pretext to repress the movement as whole. The Italian state prosecuted Negri and held him responsible for the Red Brigades, in a famous and protracted episode of persecution. Guattari himself attempted to defend Negri and others.

In addition, Guattari drew on his own fame and reputation in the Italian scene in order to dissuade young militants from adopting terrorist tactics. Guattari became concerned that solidarity was becoming eroded by particularism, and that struggles in Europe were no longer communicating with one another. In a later discussion, he cites the case of a feminist group that split from Lotta Continua, one of the Italian revolutionary organisations. While the new feminist group made a number of theoretical and practical contributions, the splitting into smaller groups and the inability of them to communicate with one another was very detrimental to the Italian struggle. He tried to overcome this sectarianism in subsequent activities.

In the early 1980s, Guattari became interested in the Brazilian social movements, in danger of repression by the military dictatorship of João Figueiredo. In particular, he was intrigued by the convergence of popular opposition forces and their ability to work together. Guattari’s experiences in France and Italy had made him increasingly aware of the problems of a fragmented, divided revolutionary movement. As he had argued in his philosophical works with Deleuze, an organisational form capable of overcoming the state was necessary. Guattari hoped that a new revolutionary party could articulate the commonalities among different struggles – the workers’ movement, anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, and other movements.

In Brazil at this time, the Worker’s Party had some success in coordinating among these different struggles. As Sue Branford and Jan Rocha summarise,

The Workers’ Party attracted traditionally incompatible groups, including Trotskyists, Leninists, Marxist, Catholics from the liberation wing of the Catholic Church, scarcely literate workers and renowned intellectuals. It was the first mass party in Brazil with predominantly socialist ideas and the only mainstream party with activists and political activity outside electoral periods.

As Omar G. Encarnación has documented, the Worker’s Party also coordinated all of these sectors with the beginnings of the LGBT movement, becoming one of the first political expressions of the Latin American queer community. Guattari was fascinated by the possibility that the Workers’ Party could fuse countercultural tendencies with working-class activity. This party formation, he believed, could function as an instrument of the Brazilian masses, guiding a united front against the military dictatorship. He applied the term ‘autonomy’ to refer to a range of liberating practices and workers’ self-activity, which he understood to be critical for developing an organisation’s revolutionary capacity. As he put in, in 1982:

Autonomy is a function. The ‘function of autonomy’ can be embodied effectively in feminist, black, ecological, homosexual, or other groups. But it can also be embodied in machines for struggle on a large scale – as in the case of the PT [Workers’ Party] at this time of electoral campaign.

I really believe that organisations such as parties or unions can be fields in which to exercise the function of autonomy.

In 1982, he interviewed the party’s leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was at that time an idealistic trade-union organiser. Guattari understood that the Workers’ Party would succeed in organising popular forces in order to overcome the dictatorship. Through the early 1980s, Figueiredo presided over a transition to electoral democracy, responding to pressure from below. However, as the 1980s went on, the Workers’ Party shed its revolutionary character and became a more conventional social-democratic organisation. Lula was elected president of Brazil in 2002, after considerably centralising power in his own hands. The party had considerable popularity for years, but was ultimately driven from power after a number of corruption scandals, many of which were trumped-up. At present, Lula remains a rallying point for Brazilian democracy and resistance to new austerity measures.

The Workers’ Party has not answered Guattari’s hopes (and those of Brazilian people). However, his enthusiasm for its early phase was not misplaced. Guattari had the correct intuition that social struggles for different forms of individual empowerment and against social oppression required an alliance with working-class struggle for economic change. Today, it is necessary to reapply his theoretical orientation toward a ‘machine for struggle’ that could win social autonomy, in Brazil and elsewhere. The Workers’ Party ability to fight on multiple fronts, transforming society as a whole, was an early prototype for the capacity to link diverse struggles and to coordinate their potential to unsettle the alienating relations that maintain the capitalist state. Guattari helps us to recognise the various sectors of society whose potential for creativity might one day act as compositional elements of revolutionary agency; in this sense, solidarity is a responsibility to question the stability of our bodies and social practices. The question of politics becomes a collective project of building new revolutionary subjects, through abandoning the selves that capitalism assigns us.

Possibilities Opened by Guattari’s Legacy: Jasbir K. Puar and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

In collaboration with Deleuze, Guattari developed his concept of machines toward a broader concept, the ‘assemblage.’ In his description, assemblages bring together an assortment of different practical machines. They do not produce a new dialectical unity, but they maintain functioning across disparate elements. Assemblage-theory can describe machines that oppress us, as well as new machines that overcome or exceed this oppression. Jasbir K. Puar, in her essay of 2005, ‘Queer Times, Queer Assemblages’ drew from this approach in order to understand multicultural experience in the world of the twenty-first century. Puar argued that this could present a more dynamic and capacious way of thinking identity and difference, in comparison with another highly influential model, intersectionality. In Puar’s critical presentation, intersectionality ‘presumes components – race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion – are separable analytics,’ whereas assemblage is ‘a series of dispersed but mutually implicated networks,’ ‘attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body.’ Put briefly, she writes: ‘Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information.’

An assemblage is constructed of imagination and desire, as well as nature and economic production. Puar applies this mode of thought to understand the specific mode of oppression faced by turbaned Sikh immigrants and prisoners. She argues that the social construction of their appearance cannot be understood very well by the addition of various qualities (raced, gendered, or otherwise) but rather can be better thought as formed by a series of complex and interrelated historical relations. She applies the same method to describe what she calls ‘homonationalism’: the re-evaluation of same-sex desire in order to establish a new form of patriotism and imperialist politics.

Homonationalism is an example of a social transformation and recuperation, along lines described by Deleuze and Guattari. Capitalism incites and liberates desires, but then domesticates them toward the ends of the capitalist state. These relations of sexuality, technology, national identity, racial distinction, and class relations cannot be understood independently, but only in their inseparability and co-determinacy. Deleuze and Guattari believed that a mode of thinking more aware of these complex relations, across nature, desire, and technology, would be better suited to produce new assemblages that could counter and overcome the limitations and domination exercised by the state.

They believed that this mode of thinking, towards the assemblage, drew from a variety of twentieth-century innovations in the arts and sciences. However, they also believed that they had rediscovered a more communal way of thinking that preceded the subordination of thought to capital accumulation and state dictates. For this reason, they were fascinated by the thought and practices of indigenous peoples whose societies had not been subordinated by a state. They have been a valuable aid to those who translate and interpret the philosophies of these indigenous populations.

Guattari’s visits to Brazil in the early 1980s had a strong effect on the intellectual culture there. His ideas were picked up not only in radical politics but also in clinical psychology and in anthropology. One result of this was the combination of his way of thinking with attempts to translate and understand the traditional philosophy of Brazilian Indians. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes,

The philosophy of Deleuze, and more particularly the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that were written with Guattari, is where I found the most appropriate machine for retransmitting the sonar frequency that I had picked up from Amerindian thought. Perspectivism and multinaturalism, which are, again, objects that have been resynthesised by anthropological discourse (indigenous theories, I dare say, do not present themselves in such conveniently pre-packaged fashion!) are the result of the encounter between a certain becoming-Deleuzian of Amerindian ethnology and a certain becoming-Indian of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.

‘Perspectivism’ and ‘multinaturalism’ are each concepts, as Viveiros de Castro says, that emerge from the study of traditional indigenous thought. They also describe aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. The assemblage is a product of multiple interrelated sources and factors; each of these can be recognised as ‘natural,’ and each has an active character, rather than standing as a passive object of knowledge.

Perspectivism is an idea that revises the traditional conception of subjects and objects: Rather than a thinking, perceiving subject who gathers knowledge about a more passive object, as in certain forms of Western thought, American Indians of Brazil posited reciprocal knowledge and interconnected, dynamic relations among many different elements of a situation. This is not the same as a simple relativism where all views are equally correct – some ways of thinking and acting are better than others – but different cultures each have their own means of constructing their world, through experiment, imagination, and interaction.

‘Multinaturalism’ follows from an expanded concept of nature; the idea that human civilisation does not represent a break from natural processes. Deleuze and Guattari insisted,

[W]e make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species.

This means that there is not a ‘fall’ from nature; the foundation of civilisation has not escaped natural laws, and a prior natural harmony also cannot be restored. Rather, present technology and the extractivism on which it relies takes place within a complex ecosystem in which human and non-human animals as well as botanical and geological formations all of have dynamic relations among one another. This develops Marx’s own views on nature, in that he also saw capitalism as producing an illusory division between society and nature. Deleuze and Guattari (and Viveiros de Castro’s exploration of their work in terms of indigenous thought) respond to the question that Marx poses regarding continuity between the human and natural worlds. In a world wracked by climate change, revolutionary struggles need to be imagined in ways that do not presume a passive nature, ready to be mastered by human technology. Rather, new political projects will draw from profound understanding of nature’s autonomous potential.

Indigenous communities are now at the forefront of anti-capitalist struggle, particularly in South America. Jeffery Webber has written powerfully of the ‘left-indigenous movements [that] increasingly come into confrontation with the compensatory state and the extractive model of accumulation,’ in Bolivia and elsewhere. However, indigenous resistance has also become startlingly significant in North America, with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which began in 2016. In order to relate to these movements and to treat indigenous thought and lands with respect, we must re-think some of our own categories. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas proved helpful in this respect for Brazilians, and their innovations may assist us in becoming more open to indigenous concepts and understandings in the Anglophone world, as well.

Guattari contributed intriguing new ways of thinking and extended the tradition of philosophical creation. However, I insist that he developed these ideas as interventions to assist the social struggles of his time. To some degree, his work has become relegated to academic life or to the realm of aesthetic theory. His ideas should be reconsidered, though, for their process of development alongside the great collective practices of the late twentieth century – not only the insurrection of 1968, but feminism, the LGBT movements, and decolonisation struggles. His thought is not the disconnected or hermetic production of an eccentric, but born of practice and conversation with mass events. We ought to receive his critique of identity as produced by alienating institutions in capitalist society; but also draw on his work in order to rethink the way that questions of culture and desire can function socially and politically. Guattari can help us think of struggles around anti-racism and gender expression not as battles for representation or inclusion, but the reshaping of desire toward practical solidarity and creative activity.

Thanks to Fainan Lakha for her assistance with this essay.

Andrew Ryder teaches at Texas Christian University. He has written numerous articles on French Marxism, decolonisation struggles in Latin America, and twentieth-century Continental philosophy.

source: Salvage

The post ‘The Function of Autonomy’: Félix Guattari and New Revolutionary Prospects appeared first on Void Network.

Q: So what is specific to capitalism in all this?

GD: Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly “abnormal” way in capitalism? I believe so. Capital, or money, is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage. It is too complicated to describe here, but one detail should be mentioned. In other societies, there is exploitation, there are also scandals and secrets, but that is part of the “code”, there are even explicitly secret codes. With capitalism, it is very different: nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code (this is why capitalism is “democratic” and can “publicize” itself, even in a juridical sense). And yet nothing is admissible. Legality itself is inadmissible. By contrast to other societies, it is a regime born of the public *and* the admissible. A very special delirium inherent to the regime of money. Take what are called scandals today: newspapers talk a lot about them, some people pretend to defend themselves, others go on the attack, yet it would be hard to find anything illegal in terms of the capitalist regime. The prime minister’s tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital — in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders, what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was “reasonable,” it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There’s no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals.

Instead, one talks of “ideology”. But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the “economic-ideological” distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power– that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic — haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression.

Q: So is ideology a trompe l’oeil?

GD: Not at all. To say “ideology is a trompe l’oeil, ” that’s still the traditional thesis. One puts the infrastructure on one side– the economic, the serious– and on the other, the superstructure, of which ideology is a part, thus rejecting the phenomena of desire in ideology. It’s a perfect way to ignore how desire works within the infrastructure, how it invests in it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system. We do not say: ideology is a trompe l’oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions) We say: there is no ideology, it is an illusion. That’s why it suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure. Take two examples. Education: in May 1968 the leftists lost a lot of time insisting that professors engage in public self-criticism as agents of bourgeois ideology. It’s stupid, and simply fuels the masochistic impulses of academics. The struggle against the competitive examination was abandoned for the benefit of the controversy, or the great anti-ideological public confession. In the meantime, the more conservative professors had no difficulty reorganizing their power. The problem of education is not an ideological problem, but a problem of the organization of power: it is the specificity of educational power that makes it appear to be an ideology, but it’s pure illusion. Power in the primary schools, that means something, it affects all children. Second example: Christianity. The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it’s a very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It’s far more important than ideology.

FELIX GUATTARI: It’s the same thing in traditional political structures. One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determined by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms. There the real divisions show up: a treatment of desire and power, of investments, of group Oedipus, of group “superegos”, of perverse phenomena, etc. And then political oppositions are built up: the individual takes such a position against another one, because in the scheme of organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his adversary.

Q: Your analysis is convincing in the case of the Soviet Union and of capitalism. But in the particulars? If all ideological oppositions mask, by definition, the conflicts of desire, how would you analyze, for example, the divergences of three Trotskyite groupuscules? Of what conflict of desire can this be the result? Despite the political quarrels, each group seems to fulfill the same function vis-a-vis its militants: a reassuring hierarchy, the reconstitution of a small social milieu, a final explanation of the world… I don’t see the difference.

FG: Because any resemblance to existing groups is merely fortuitous, one can well imagine one of these groups defining itself first by its fidelity to hardened positions of the communist left after the creation of the Third International. It’s a whole axiomatic, down to the phonological level — the way of articulating certain words, the gesture that accompanies them — and then the structures of organization, the conception of what sort of relationships to maintain with the allies, the centrists, the adversaries… This may correspond to a certain figure of Oedipalization, a reassuring, intangible universe like that of the obsessive who loses his sense of security if one shifts the position of a single, familiar object. It’s a question of reaching, through this kind of identification with recurrent figures and images, a certain type of efficiency that characterized Stalinism–except for its ideology, precisely. In other respects, one keeps the general framework of the method, but adapts oneself to it very carefully: “The enemy is the same, comrades, but the conditions have changed.” Then one has a more open groupuscule. It’s a compromise: one has crossed out the first image, whilst maintaining it, and injected other notions. One multiplies meetings and training sessions, but also the external interventions. For the desiring will, there is — as Zaire says– a certain way of bugging students and militants, among others.

In the final analysis, all these groupuscules say basically the same thing. But they are radically opposed in their *style*: the definition of the leader, of propaganda, a conception of discipline, loyalty, modesty, and the asceticism of the militant. How does one account for these polarities without rummaging in the economy of desire of the social machine? >From anarchists to Maoists the spread is very wide, politically as much as analytically. Without even considering the mass of people, outside the limited range of the groupuscules, who do not quite know how to distinguish between the leftist elan, the appeal of union action, revolt, hesitation of indifference.

One must explain the role of these machines. these goupuscules and their work of stacking and sifting–in crashing desire. It’s a dilemma: to be broken by the social system of to be integrated in the pre-established structure of these little churches. In a way, May 1968 was an astonishing revelation. The desiring power became so accelerated that it broke up the groupuscules. These later pulled themselves together; they participated in the reordering business with the other repressive forces, the CGT [Communist worker’s union], the PC, the CRS [riot police]. I don’t say this to be provocative. Of course, the militants courageously fought the police. But if one leaves the sphere of struggle to consider the function of desire, one must recognize that certain groupuscules approached the youth in a spirit of repression: to contain liberated desire in order to re-channel it.

Q: What is liberated desire? I certainly see how this can be translated at the level of an individual or small group: an artistic creation, or breaking windows, burning things, or even simply an orgy or letting things go to hell through laziness or vegetating. But then what? What could a collectively liberated desire be at the level of a social group? And what does this signify in relation to t”the totality of society”, if you do not reject this term as Michel Foucault does.

FG: We have taken desire in one of its most critical, most acute stages: that of the schizophrenic–and the schizo that can produce something within or beyond the scope of the confined schizo, battered down with drugs and social repression. It appears to us that certain schizophrenics directly express a free deciphering of desire. But now does one conceive a collective form of the economy of desire? Certainly not at the local level. I would have a lot of difficulty imagining a small, liberated community maintaining itself against the flows of a repressive society, like the addition of individuals emancipated one by one. If, on the contrary, desire constitutes the very texture of society in its entirety, including in its mechanisms of reproduction, a movement of liberation can “crystallize” in the whole of society. In May 1968, from the first sparks to local clashes, the shake-up was brutally transmitted to the whole of society, in some groups that had nothing remotely to do with the revolutionary movement–doctors, lawyers, grocers. Yet it was vested interests that carried the day, but only after a month of burning. We are moving toward explosions of this type, yet more profound.

Q: Might there have already been a vigorous and durable liberation of desire in hostpry, apart from brief periods. a celebration, carnage, war, or revolutionary upheavals? Or do you really believe in an end of history. after millennia of alienation, social evolution will suddenly turn around in a final revolution that will liberate desire forever?

FG: Neither the one nor the other. Neither a final end to history, nor provisional excess. All civilizations, all periods have known ends of history–this is not necessarily convincing and not necessarily liberating. As for excess, or moments of celebration, this is no more reassuring. There are militant revolutionaries who feel a sense of responsibility and say: Yes excess “at the first stage of revolution,” serious thing s… Or desire is not liberated in simple moments of celebration. See the discussion between Victor and Foucault in the issue of *Les Temps Moderns* on the Maoists. Victor consents to excess, but at the “first stage”. As for the rest, as for the real thing, Victor calls for a new apparatus of state, new norms, a popular justice with a tribunal, a legal process external to the masses, a third party capable of resolving contradictions among the masses. One always finds the old schema: the detachment of a pseudo capable of bringing about syntheses, of forming a party as an embryo of state apparatus, of drawing out a well brought up, well educated working class; and the rest is a residue, a lumpen-proletariat one should always mistrust (the same old condemnation of desire). But these distinctions themselves are another way of trapping desire for the advantage of a bureaucratic caste. Foucault reacts by denouncing the third party, saying that if there is popular justice, it does not issue from a tribunal. He shows very well that the distinction “avant-garde-lumpen-proletariat” is first of all a distinction introduced by the bourgeoisie to the masses, and therefore serves to crush the phenomena of desire, to *marginalize* desire. The whole question is that of state apparatus. It would be strange to rely on a party or state apparatus for the liberation of desire. To want better justice is like wanting better judges, better cops, better bosses, a cleaner France, etc. And then we are told: how would you unify isolated struggles without a party? How do you make the machine work without a state apparatus? It is evident that a revolution requires a war machine, out this is not a state apparatus, it is also certain that it requires an instance of analysis, an analysis of the desires of the masses, yet this is not an apparatus external to the synthesis. Liberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of totalising, but of plugging into the same plan of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire.

Q: In the beginning, was capitalism able to assume the social desires?

GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It’s enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire. And fascism too–one must say that it has “assumed the social desires”, including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don’t thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it’s organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.

Q: On the contrary, I think that the rising bourgeoisie imagined and prepared its revolution throughout the Enlightenment. From its point of view, it was a revolutionary class “to the bitter end”, since it had shaken up the *ancien regime* and swept into power. Whatever parallel movements took place among the peasantry and in the suburbs, the bourgeois revolution is a revolution made by the bourgeoisie terms are hardly distinguishable–and to judge it in the name of 19th or 20th century socialist utopias introduces, by anachronism, a category that did not exist.

GD: Here again, what you say fits a certain Marxist schema. At one point in history, the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, it was even necessary–necessary to pass through a stage of capitalism, through a bourgeois revolutionary stage. It’S a Stalinist point of view, but you can’t take that seriously. When a social formation exhausts itself, draining out of every gap, all sorts of things decode themselves, all sorts of uncontrolled flows start pouring out, like the peasant migrations in feudal Europe, the phenomena of “deterritorialisation.” The bourgoisie imposes a new code, both economic and political, so that one can believe it was a revolution. Not at all. Daniel Guerin has said some profound things about the revolution of 1789. The bourgoisie never had illusions about who its real enemy was. Its real enemy was not the previous system, but what escaped the previous systems’s control, and what the bourgoisie strove to master in its turn. It too owed its power to the ruin of the old system, but this power could only be exerciced insofar as it opposed everything else that was in rebellion against the old system. The bourgoiseie has never been revolutionary. It simply made sure others pulled of the revolution for it. It manipulated, channeled, and repressed an enormous surge of popular desire. The people were finally beaten down at Valmy.

Q: They were certainly beaten down at Verdun.

FG: Exactly. And that’s what interests us. Where do these eruptions, these uprisings, these enthusiasms come from that cannot be explained by a social rationality and that are diverted, captured by the power at the moment they are born? One cannot account for a revolutionary situation by a simple analysis of the interests of the time. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party debated the alliances and organization of the proletariat, and the role of the avant-garde. While pretending to prepare for the revolution, it was suddenly shaken up by the events of 1095 and had to jump on board a moving train. There was a crystallization of desire on board a wide social scale created by a yet incomprehensible situation. Same thing in 1917. And there too, the politicians climbed on board a moving train, finally getting control of it. Yet no revolutionary tendency was able or willing to assume the need for a soviet-style organization that could permit the masses to take real charge of their interests and their desire. Instead, one put machines in circulation, so-called political organizations, that functioned on the model elaborated by Dimitrov at the Seventh International Congress–alternating between popular fronts and sectarian retractions–and that always led to the same repressive results. We saw it in 1936, in 1945, in 1968. By their very axiomatic, these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. It is, in an underhanded way, a politics comparable to that of the President of the Republic or of the clergy, but with red flag in hand. And we think that this corresponds to a certain position vis-a-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the ego, the individual, the family. This raises a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization: or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism that makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke.

Q: But then what is the nature of this profound, fundamental desire which one sees as beeing constitutive of man and social man, but which is constantly betrayed? Why does it always invest itself in antinomic machines of the dominant machine, and yet remain so similar to it? Could this mean that desire is condemned to a pure explosion without consequence or to perpetual betrayal? I have to insist: can there ever be, one fine day in history, a collective and during expression of liberated desire, and how?

GD: If one knew, one wouldn’t talk about it, one would do it. Anyway, Felx just said it: revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine and not of state apparatus, of an analyzer of desire and not an external systhesis. In every social system, there have always been lines of escape, and then also a rigidification to block off escape, or certainly (which is not the same thing) embryonic apparatuses that integrate them, that deflect or arrest them in a new system in preparation. The crusades should be analysed from this point of view. But in every respect, capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape are not just difficulties that arise, they are the conditions of its own operation. it is constituted by a generalized decoding of all flux, fluctuations of wealth, fluctuations of language, fluctuations of art, etc. It did not create any code, it has set up a sort of accountability, an axiomatic of decoded fluxes as the basis of its economy. It ligatures the points of escape and leaps itself having to seal new leaks at every limit. It doesn’t resolve any of its fundamental problems, it can’t even forsee the monetary increase in a country over a single year. It never stops crossing its own limits which keep reapperaing farther away. It puts itself in alarming situations with respect to its won production, its social life, its demographics, its borders with the Third World, its internal regions, etc. Its gaps are everwhere, forever giving rise to the displaced limits of capitalism. And doubtless, the revolutionary way out (the active escape of which Jackson spoke when he said: ” I don’t stop running, but while running, I look for weapons”) is not at all the same thing as other kinds of esacpe, the schizo-escape, the drug-escape. But it is certainly the problem of the marginalized: to plug all these lines of escape into a revolutionary plateau. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on a new character, a new type of revolutionary potential. You see, there is hope.

Q: You spoke just now of the crusades. For you, this is one of the first manifestations of collective shizohrenia in the West.

FG: This was, in fact, an extraordinary schizophrenic movement. Basically, in an already schismatic and troubled world, thousands and thousands of people got fed up with the life they led, makeshift preachers rose up, people deserted entire villages. It’s only later that the shocked papacy tried to give direction to the movement by leading it off to the Holy Land. A double advantage: to be rid of errant bands and to reinforce Christian outposts in the Near East thretened by the Turks. This didn’t always work: the Venetian Crusade wound up in Constantinople, the Childrens Crusade veered off toward the South of France and very quickly lost all sympathy: there were entire villages taken and burned by these “crosses” children, who the regular armies finally had to round up. They were killed or sold into slavery.

Q: Can one find parallels with contemporary movements: communities and by-roads to escape the factory and the office? NAd would there be any pope to co-opt them? A Jesus Revolution?

FG: A recuperation by Christianity is not inconceivable. It is, up to a certain point, a reality in the United States, but much less so in Europe or in France. But there is already a latent return to it in the form of a Naturist tendency, the idea that one can retire from production and reconstruct a little society at a remove, as if one were not branded and hemmed in by the capitalist system.

Q: What role can still be attributed to the church in a country like ours? The church was at the center of power in Western civilization until the 18th Century, the bond and structure of the social machine until the emergence of the nation-state. Today, deproved by the technocracy of this essential function, it seems to have gone adrift, without a point of anchorage, and to have split up. One can only wonder if the church, pressured by the currents of Catholic progressivism, might not become less confessional than certain political organizations.

FG: And ecumenism? In’t it a way of falling back on one’s feet? THe church has never been stronger. There us bi reasiob ti oppose church and technocracy, there is a technocracy of the church. Historically, Christianity and positivism have always been good partners. The development of positive sciences has a Christian motor. One cannot say that the psychiatrist has replaced the priest. Nor can one say the cop has replaced the priest. There is always a use for everyone in repression. What has aged about Christianity is its ideology, not its organization of power.

Q: Let’s get to this other aspect of your book: the critique of psychiatry. Can one say that France is already covered by the psychiatry of *Sectuer*–and how far does this influence spread?

FG: The structure of psychiatric hospitals essentially depends on the state and the psychiatrists are mere functionaries. For a long time the state was content to practice a politics of coercion and didn’t do anything for almost a century. One had to wait fot the Liberation for any signs of anxiety to appear: the first psychiatric revolution, the opening of the hospitals, the free services, instituional psychotherapy. All that has led to the great utopian politics of “Sectorization,” which consisted in limiting the number of internments and of sending teams of psychiatrists out into the population like missionaries in the bush. Due to lack of credit and will, the reform got bogged down: a few model services for official visits, and here or there a hospital in the most underdeveloped regions. We are now moving toward a major crisis, comparable in size to the university crisis, a disaster at all levels: facilities, training of personnel, therapy, etc.

The instituional charting of childhood is, on the contrary, undertaken with better results. In this case, the initiative has escaped the state framework and its financing to return to all sorts of associations–childhood protection or parental associations…. The establishments have proliferated, subsidized by Social Security. The child is immediately taken charge of by a network of psychologists, tagged at the age of three, and followed for life. One can expect to see solutions of this type for adult psychiatry. In the face of the present impasse, the state will try to de-nationalize institutions in favor of other institutions ruled by the law of 1901 and most certainly manipulated by political powers and reactionary family groups. We are moving toward a psychiatric surveillance of France, if the present scrises fail to liberate its revolutionary potentialities. Everywhere, the most conservative ideology is in bloom, a flat transposition of the concepts of Oedipalism. In the childrens’s wards, one calls the director “uncle,” the nurse, “mother.” I have even heard distinctions like the following: group games obey a maternal principle, the workshops, a paternal one. The psychiatry of *Secteur* semms progressive because it opens the hospital. But if this means imposing a grid over the neighborhood, we will soon regret the loss of the closed asylums of yesterday. It’s like psychoanalysis, it functions openly, so it is all the worse, much more dangerous as a repressive force.

GD: Here’s a case. A woman arrives at a consultation. She explains that she takes tranquilizers. She asks for a glass of water. Then she speaks: “You understand I have a certain amount of culture. I have studied, i love to read, and there you have it. Now I spend all my time crying. I can’t bear the subway. And the minute I read something, I start to cry. I watch television; I see images of Vietnam: I can’t stand it …” The doctor doesn’t say much. The woman continues: “I was in the Resistance… a bit. I was a go-between.” The doctor asks her to explain. “Well, yes, don’t you understand, doctor? I went to a cafe and I asked, for example, is there something for Rene?” I would be given a letter to pass on.” The doctor hears “Rene”; he wakes up: “Why do you say “Rene”? It’s the first time he asks a question. Up to that point, she was speaking about the metro, Hiroshima, Vietnam, of the effect all that had on her body, the need to cry about it. But the doctor only asks: “Wait, wait, ‘Rene’ … what dies ‘Rene’ mean to you?” Rene–someone who is reborn [re-n’e]? The Renaissance, this fits into a universal schema, the archetype: “You want to be reborn.” The doctor gets his bearings: at last he’s on track. And he gets her to talk about her mother and her father.

It’s an essential aspect of our book, and it’s very concrete. The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have never paid any attentiaon to delirium. It’S enough just to listen to someone who is delirious: it’s the Russians that worry him, the Chinese; my mouth is dry; somebody buggered me in the metro; there are germs and spermatozoa swimming everywhere; it’s Franco’s fault, the Jews, the Maoists: all a delirium of the social field. Why shouldn’t this concern the sexuality of the subject–the relations it has with the Chinese, the whites, the blacks? Whith civilization, the crusades, the metro? Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts hear nothing of this, on the defensive as much as they are indefensible. They crush the contents of the unsoncious under prefab statements: “You speak to me of the Chinese, but what about your father? No, he isn’t Chinese? THen , do you have a Chinese lover?” It’s atz the same level of repressive work as the judge in the Angela Davis case who affirmed: “Her behavior can only be explained by her beeing in love.” ANd what if, on the contrary, Angela Davis’s libido was a social, revolutionary libido? What if she were in love because she was a revolutionary?

That is what we want to say to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts: yopu don’t know what delirium is; you haven’t understood anything. If our bnook has a meaning, it is that we have reached a stage where many people feel the psychoanalytif machine no longer works, where a whole generation is getting fed up with all-purpose schemas–oedipus and castration, imaginary and symbolic–which systematically efface the social, political, and cultural contents of any psychic disturbance.

Q: You associate schizophrenia with capitalism; it is the very foundation of your book. Are there cases of schizophrenia in other societies?

FG: Schizophrenia is indissocialble from the capitalist system, itself conceived as primary leakage (fuite): and exclusive malady. In other societies, escape and marginalization take on other aspects. The asocial individual of so-called primitive societies is not locked up. The prison and the asylum are resent notions. One chases him, he is exiled at the edge of the village and dies of it, unless he is integrated to a neighboring village. Besides, each system has its paricular sickness: the hysteric of so-called primitive societies, the manic-depressive paranoiacs of the great empires… The capitalist economy preoceeds by decoding and de-territorialization: it has its exterme cases, i.e., schzophrenics who decode and de-territorialize themselves to the limit; but also it has its extreme consequences–revolutionaries.

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
source: http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/capitalism-very-special-delirium.html?m=1

The post “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari appeared first on Void Network.