The notes below are not my own but from the Lecture itself.
Deleuze and Guattari and Creativity
Play Richard Pinhas work
Slide One – Session aims
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You were
listening to the music of Richard Pinhas. A composer who attended many of
Gilles Deleuze's seminars in the late 1960s, and was greatly influenced by many
of his ideas. The music is a series of continually oscillating motifs formed by
the interactions of individual sounds that momentarily cohere with one another,
before dissipating, and reconfiguring in changed form.
-
Aim – To examine
how Deleuze and Guattari draw emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature
of social reality.
-
Objectives (1) To
contrast models of creative, “rhizomatic” thought with traditional “tree-like”
models of thought based in sequential argumentation; (2) To examine Deleuze and
Guattari's interpretations of processes of social change and development; (3)
To consider how they propose individual people might transform themselves; (4)
To contextualise these theories of change and development in relation to the
concepts “the virtual” and “the actual”.
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Deleuze and
Guattari were a philosopher and psychiatrist who worked together in France in
the 1970s and 1980s, and who have been hugely influential in numerous fields,
including (but not restricted to) art practice, theories of music, geography
and sociology.
Slide Two – May 1968 riots
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Their
collaboration developed against the backdrop of the student and worker protests
in Paris in May 1968. This attempt to directly challenge the French state, and
the eventual crackdown by the authorities, led to a widespread re-assessment of
the role of the activist in society, a task that Deleuze and Guattari undertook
in two books Anti-Oedipus (1972), and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Slide Three – A Thousand
Plateaus
-
Our focus today
will fall on the second book, A Thousand Plateaus. In this text, they
examine and reconfigure the notion of a concept.
Slide Four - Trees
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Their project was
envisaged as a revolt against traditional modes of thought, which they identify
with a “tree-like” structure. Deleuze and Guattari identify this 'tree-like'
image of thought, where one line of argument must sequentially lead to another,
branching out in a structured manner, with thinkers such as Kant and Hegel,
whose ideas, such as the sovereign subject of thought, universally valid
reason, and the moral good, continue to shape contemporary social life.
-
Against this
dominant tradition Deleuze and Guattari conceived of an alternate structure for
thought that privileges difference, play and creativity.
-
They called this
rhizomatic thought.
-
We're going to
look at A Thousand Plateaus, and the concepts developed within it: the
rhizome, assemblage, subjectivation, schizo-analysis, the body without organs,
and the virtual and the actual.
-
Each chapter (or,
as they put it, plateau, meaning a particular set of circumstances
brought together in an intensive relationship) resists reduction to a
goal-oriented argument. Instead multi-disciplinary practices are brought into a
state of play, and concepts are re-contextualised and reverberate together.
-
Our task today
will be to navigate these plateaus by drawing out and examining the
configurations of thought developed within them.
Rhizome
Slide Five – Rhizomes
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A rhizome is an
underground stem that grows horizontally and pushes up lateral shoots - like the ginger plant. For Deleuze and
Guattari, the rhizome forms an alternative model of thought to the tree-like
structure that they associate with traditional philosophy.
-
Here, claims are
no longer linked in a continuous vertical progression towards a conclusion;
rather, they are linked through leaps of association and the relation of
seemingly unconnected ideas.
-
Deleuze and
Guattari emphasise that concepts “are not waiting for us ready-made, like
heavenly bodies. […] They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created”.
The concept, they affirm, is not an abstract isolated entity but a principle of
interrelationship. Each one contains “bits or components” that come from other
concepts, but also links up with these others in a state of mutual support,
co-ordination and articulation.
Slide Six – Saussaure
Diagram
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This
understanding of the concept can be grounded if we refer back to Ferdinand de
Saussure's conception of the signified.
-
This is the
mental concept that Saussure considered to be an arbitrary construct, produced
only through agreement between users of a given language system.
-
Thus, in
Saussure's reading, the concepts that we use in thought and speech gain their
meanings purely from a repeated pattern of contextual usage between different
language users. Individual words, such as dog, gain their meanings through
agreements between people that this word and no others refers to a particular
furry mammal that barks and wags its tail.
-
Deleuze and
Guattari's notion of the rhizome draws upon the arbitrary and constructed and
interconnected nature by which meaning is constructed, according to Sausurre's
semiotic theory. Thus the rhizome builds relationships between objects, places,
people and ideas, generating unanticipated commonalities between seemingly
disparate entities. Rhizomes are inherently creative and may be produced
intentionally or unintentionally.
-
Likewise, if we
look back to Nietzsche, we can see how he contrasts the cool abstractions of
rational man with the heat and intensity of intuitive man. Intuitive man
pursues the primal character of his immersion-in-the-world and embraces
contingency, irregularity, intensity, strangeness, experimentation.
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For Deleuze and
Guattari these become creative forces that shape new rhizomatic configurations.
Such configurations dissolve conventional procedures and thought patterns,
reconnecting them as contingent, diverse, formations.
Slide Seven – Isa Genzken
-
We might consider
Isa Genzken's sculptures as rhizomatic artworks. Her works reflect the chaos of
the urban landscape, yet often read as small scale skyscrapers. In these works,
objects, images and poured paint collide, creating formations that suggest
future architectural production shaped in relation to the city's own detritus. Materials,
images and ideas drawn from diverse sources collide, suggesting possibilities
for the transformation of urban space.
Assemblage
-
How do
conventional meanings and practices become fixed? In order to address this
question, Deleuze and Guattari developed the notion of the assemblage.
-
Their usage
derives from the French agencement,
the meaning of which emphasises processes of arranging, organising and fitting
together. Assemblages emphasise the convergence of heterogeneous elements such
as food, furniture, and people in recognisable structures, such as a dinner
party.
-
An example of an
assemblage with which we are all familiar is the place we make our home. A home
is a way in which we make a space express comfort to us. Deleuze and Guattari
describe a child, alone and afraid in the dark. The child hums or sings a tune
as a way of bringing familiarity to the place.
-
J. Macgregor Wise
notes “...one need not be fixed in one's dwelling to create a home: a home
might be an airline seat, a stroll in the neighbourhood, a car for daily
commuting, or a space on the lawn for a picnic. Home is thus not a pre-existing
space; it is not [necessarily] in the house”.
-
Beyond our
personal habituation of our environment, Deleuze and Guattari also consider how
language orders corporeal situations.
-
They directly
link contexts and language. On their understanding, the literal meanings of
words are always accompanied by assumptions of value, power and authority.
Slide Eight – High School
Diploma
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For example, the
principal of a school says “here is your diploma”. Pre-supposed in this
statement is a relation of power between the principal and student, as the
bestower and the receiver of knowledge. This also implies a debt to be repaid
by the student – society has devoted a lot of time and resources to you: now go
get a job.
-
The principal's
speech at the same event will undoubtedly hammer home the presuppositions of
duty, and the right to enter the world of work. Brian Massumi considers the
ramifications such presuppositions. “Every word is laden with the implicit
presupposition of what one says-thinks-does in such a circumstance”.
-
Oswald Ducrot
examined this dimension of power within social agreements. He emphasised the
role of words like “I” and “you”, which shift back and forth between people in
conversation. They also serve as a form of identification in performative
utterances; statements that enact their meaning, such as when a speaker
announces “I do” at the moment of marriage.
-
Consider this
work Good Boy, Bad Boy by the artist Bruce Nauman.
Play Good Boy, Bad Boy
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The work features
a man and a woman who face you, the viewer. They repeat statements that
continually change through the substitution of individual words. These
statements begin with variations between “I”, “you”, “we”, “they”, placing the
viewer in a disorienting set of changing roles between individual accuser, and
accused, and member or condemner of a particular social grouping.
-
With reference to
terms, such as 'you' and 'I' Ducrot argued that language is not just about the
transmission of messages; it also places the interlocutor under an obligation
to reply. Thus simple language use imposes a role upon the language user, and
forces them to accept the presuppositions of value, power, and even prejudice
within the language system.
Slide Nine – Hoodies
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Consider how the
term “hoodie” has come in modern British society to signify both a person
wearing a hooded sweater with the hood up, and also a particular criminal
identity. Now consider how you or, perhaps a policeman, or another authority
figure might judge a person wearing their hood up to be “up to no good”. Here
they are employing the pre-suppositions of the language system.
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So, assemblages
of all kinds operate, and they operate within a territory. And territory is not
simply a place, it's also a process.
-
A congregation of
kids in hooded sweaters might occupy the trolley park outside a supermarket.
They form an assemblage of bodies that is coded in relation to a series of
judgements by passers-by. The may be read as a gang, just a bunch of kids
entertaining themselves however they can. One might assume they are waiting for
a friend, or plotting how to buy alcohol, or perhaps they are planning criminal
activity. They make the security guard nervous, a passing family keeps its
distance, the police, in the hope of controlling them, engage them in dialogue.
They are physical. They emit a force. They de-territorialise the trolley park.
It is no longer a banal storage area, it is re-territorialised as a space of
social interaction, banter, potential danger. The kids have appropriated this
space, subtracting it from the supermarket territory, which remains an
assemblage of products, displays, checkouts, parking space, special offers,
sedentary consumption and surveillance.
-
This process of
de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation might continue nightly. Its
status in the eyes of those who pass the trolley park might also change in
relation to de-territorialisations within more collective assemblages: media
reporting, community policing, propaganda and rioting might all cause a change
in how these people are judged.
-
De-territorialisations
and re-territorialisations occur within assemblages in accordance with the
flows in which their component parts move at different speeds. Different social
constructions change at different rates. The status of teenagers in society,
for instance, can change very quickly, while the status of the military is very
embedded and static and slow to change. This effects how assemblages form and
shift.
Slide Ten – Zaha Hadid
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The architect
Zaha Hadid is interested in expressing such assemblages through archtiectural
form. The National Museum of XXI Century Arts, in Rome was designed by Zaha
Hadid as an assemblage. The structure of the building is conceived in relation
to the spatial flows that structure the district of Rome, which the architect
deterritorialises into architectural forms.
Subjectivation
-
People are caught
up in these developments. They are brought into the fray through Ducrot's
shifters, I and you. “Hey you, what are you doing there?”
-
Deleuze and
Guattari go further, though. As individual bodies are buffeted around these
social assemblages - from school, to home life, to church, and to work, and in
a continual immersion in social activity - reading other people's approval or
disapproval, being gendered, by selecting interests and passions or having them
prescribed by others - a subject is produced.
-
This is the
process of subjectivation. This is how Deleuze and Guattari consider that you
and I were constructed. Constantin V. Boundas notes “The Deleuzian subject is
an assemblage of heterogeneous elements […] Deleuze insists that subjectivity
is not given; it is always under construction.”
-
The subject's
recognition of itself is an after-effect. Society produces subjects. As we have
already seen the word “I” is empty, and can only be appropriated, yet is used
by each individual as a means of self-reference – “I suffer, I walk, I breathe,
I feel”
-
Deleuze and Gauttari
also draw upon Louis Althusser's notion of ideological state apparatuses to
develop their analysis of subjectivation. T.J. Clark defines ideology as “those
systems of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation by which
particular social classes, in conflict with one another, attempt to
‘naturalise’ their own special place in history.
-
Ideology shapes
how we view ourselves and our place in the world. Multiple ideologies circulate within any given society at any
given time, yet some are able to dominate as they reflect dominant class
interests. In effect the people who own he means of production get to shout
loudest.
-
church, schools, the family, the legal system, the
political system, the trade unions, the media and the arts reproduce a plethora
of ideological formations, which serve to maintain the state in its existing
form, by reflecting the ideology of the ruling class.
-
Althusser
identifies such institutions as ideological state apparatuses, which serve to
re-produce and re-enforce dominant ideologies. 'All ideology represents in its
necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production [...]
but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to their relations of
production”.
Such apparatuses form the material contexts, such as schools or churches, that
integrate individuals into a range of social practices that are conducive to
maintaining existing class relations. One might consider how the protestant
church might teach virtue of work to a proletarian worker.
-
In Deleuze and
Guattari's reading, these ideological state apparatuses serve to reproduce the
presuppositions of language that code material contexts and the roles of
individuals within them.
-
As people navigate
these different contexts they are led to take on different identities that are
deemed appropriate to them, and they adjust themselves to what is deemed
acceptable to their roles within these places.
Slide Eleven – Commuter
-
Consider the
working day. One is shocked out of dream fantasies by the alarm clock, jostled
into the role of commuter, thrust into the tasks of wage labour, and then, back
at home, required to perform as a parent, and finally show the sensitivity of a
lover. All this in one day. Each different situation makes a series of unique
demands upon the individual, to which they must conform, at the risk of
castigation.
Schizo-analysis
-
Whilst Deleuze
and Guattari set out this model for the social construction of identity, they
also try to create a practical means by which individuals might reconfigure
their own subjectivities.
- In their collaboration the authors were able to draw
upon Guattari's psychiatric practice at the radical clinic La Borde.
Slide Twelve – La Borde
-
The objective of
the clinic was not to cure the mentally sick, but to encourage the individual
to participate in their own self-creation.
-
Schizo-analysis
questioned the dominant modes of interpretation that shaped Freudian
psychoanalysis, emphasising the relations of power between analyst and
analysand.
-
For Freud,
parental relationships shape an infant's emerging psyche, and the dominant role
of the father serves as an external prohibition (curtailing the child's desire
to possess their mother) under which the infantile libido is definitively
shaped.
-
This narrative
functions as a core conceptual construct within Freudian psychoanalysis,
explaining the mediation of unconscious desire by the super-ego. This theory
forms a tree-like model that guides the analyst's interpretation and treatment
of patients.
-
Deleuze and
Guattari note “[psychoanalysis] is not only a theory but [is] also [a] practice
of calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this
regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the
unconscious. Psychoanalysis 's margin of manoeuvrability is therefore very
limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object there is always a general,
always a leader (General Freud). ”
-
Here is a set of
pre-determined conceptions of the unconscious, desire and power that restrict
the process of analysis and shape conclusions. The particularities of each
patient's life is subsumed under the generalities of psychoanalytic theory,
which is mediated by the authority figure of Freud.
-
Schizo-analysis
and Guattari's work at La Borde aimed to remove such models and to
re-negotiate the role of the analyst. The functional, productive space of the
kitchen replaced the analyst's couch, and, in collaboration, patient and
analyst would create roles throughout the day. This process would generate a
number of situations that implicate “the care-givers as much as the patients.
They [would] concern a whole gamut of activities through which the patients
express themselves, which we as care givers make possible […] and which
contribute to a diverse nuclei of subjectification”.
- Schizophrenia came to exemplify a willingness to
embrace alternatives that drove this process. In traditional psychology
schizophrenia is framed in entirely negative terms as a form of fragmentation
within the ego that generates a sense of disassociation, and detachment from
reality.
-
For Deleuze and
Guattari, the debilitating fragmentation of the schizophrenic's connection with
the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in new ways.
-
They attempted to
draw a distinction between schizophrenia as a clinical entity (breakdown), and
schizophrenia as a process, that is, as a breach or an opening that breaks the
continuity of the ego, carrying it off on an intense and terrifying voyage.
-
The instability
wrought by this illness indicated to these thinkers the possibility that
thought and action could simultaneously accommodate multiple standpoints,
leading to the development of a methodology that they termed schizo-analysis.
-
Against the
psycho-analytic model, schizo-analysis “treats the unconscious as an acentred
[productive] system […] The issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to
interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to
produce the unconscious, and with it, new statements and different desires.”
-
Schizo-analysis
repudiates the notion of self as a fixed entity. It emphasises instead the
social construction of identity, and seeks to generate activities in which set
patterns of self identification can be de-stabilised, thus creating the
possibility for their re-construction.
Body without organs
Slide Thirteen – Antonin
Artaud
-
The concept of
the body without organs describes a radical reduction of the bodily awareness
down to an unordered state.
-
The term was
initially developed by the playwright Antonin Artaud in the 1920s, whose
“Theatre of Cruelty” was designed not to represent man, but to create a
movement within the being of the participants and audience.
-
This movement
depended upon a breakdown of identity. The body is here experienced as a field
of sensation. Deleuze notes “It is an intense and intensive body. It is
traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to
the variations in its amplitude. […] Sensation exceeds the bounds of the
organic”.
Slide Fourteen – Francis
Bacon
-
In a book devoted
to the Irish painter Francis Bacon Deleuze describes the painter's attempt to
capture the fact of the sitter before him. Deleuze describes this as a recourse
to ‘flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels [of sensation]
upon it’.
This wave is captured by the flow of oil paint across the canvas that renders
the sitter as a continuum of mobilised flesh, tensing and flexing against
pressures within its environment.
-
How does one
attain this state? A whole chapter of A Thousand Plateaus is devoted to
making yourself a body without organs. Possibilities range from sado-masochism,
meditation, and Taoist sex. The authors note, “Is it really so sad and dangerous
to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing
with your mouth, talking with your tongue, and [and] thinking with your brain.
Why not walk on your head […] see through your skin, breathe through your
belly. […] When psychoanalysis says “stop, find yourself again”, we should say
instead, “Let's go still further, we haven't found our body without organs
yet”.
-
The point here is
to create a process that allows one to break away or de-territorialise from
fixed identities, unmasking their arbitrary and culturally determined natures,
and to then re-territorialise within new forms of identity.
Virtual
/ Actual
-
Construction and
contingency are key themes in the thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari. In their
eyes, what a gang of children signifies, how the principal of your school
shaped your attitude to work, and whatever comfort means to you, could all have
been different.
-
This is because
all these examples depend upon a shifting array of social formations caught in
a perpetual process of mutual development. Nothing is inevitable. Everything
changes.
-
Think, for
example, of how the signification of the term 'banker' has changed in recent
years in relation to press revelations about reckless lending and enormous
bonuses.
-
The only
certainty for Deleuze and Guattari is difference, and they consider the western
tradition of thought to be falsely pre-occupied with identity. The forms of
identity to which they refer might be what we understand to be the real world,
“the realm of things that exist independently of our ways of thinking about
them”, or the way we prioritise our subjectivity and see this as the basis of
our experience.
-
Here we can see
the recurrence of the idea of 'reality' that Baudrillard felt was corroded by
the simulacrum. Difference for Deleuze and Guattari precedes identity, and they
consider that what we think are 'real' solid objects, and unchanging
identities, are mutable and transitory.
Slide Fifteen – Mont Sant
Victoire
-
Within Deleuze
and Guattari's project, everything, even a mountain, must be considered a
construction, and every component of that construction is made up of other
smaller components.
-
What they term
the molar form (the protrusion of the singular rock formation against the
landscape), is also comprised of molecular constituents (the layers of
particles within the stone, the tectonic forces that slowly drive through each
fibre of the mountain).
-
We should also
consider the manner in which the presence of such a real object is ascertained.
James Williams notes “a mountain exists as real with all the ways it has been
painted, sensed, written about and walked over.”
This traditional notion of 'the real',
where something is real as opposed to something imaginary, or copied, no longer
holds. Every object we understand in relation to its brute materiality is only
ever known from a given perspective.
Slide Sixteen - Cezanne's
late paintings of Mont Sainte-victoire
-
This point is
exemplified in Cezanne's late paintings of Mont Sainte-victoire, which seek to
capture, in Gottfried-Boehm's analysis a “synthesis of change and permanence.”
This thousand metre limestone ridge was rendered in Cezanne's paintings in
relation to the dynamics of his own act of perception.
-
The paintings not
only captured the monumental structure of the mountain, but also brought
attention to how the artist's own perception of it was ordered, i.e. how he
perceived depth, how he located objects in visual sensations, and how he
related a central visual focus to objects in the periphery of his visual
field.
-
Thus, as any
object is a contingent construction, an assemblage of molecular units and
forces that can only be experienced or
shown from a given perspective, if we are to retain the notion of real it must
be radically re-conceptualised.
-
Deleuze and
Guattari afford us this opportunity with their contrast of the virtual and
actual. Constantin V. Boundas notes “the virtual and the actual are two
mutually exclusive, yet jointly sufficient, characterisations of the real.”
The actual refers to states of affairs, bodies, and individuals, whilst the
virtual refers to what these entities imply, and what in fact brings them into
existence. Brian Massumi explains “For a statement or thought to appear in all
its apparent clarity, its complicated genesis must recede into the shadows from
whence it came. The virtual is the unsaid of the statement, the unthought of
the thought.”
Slide Seventeen – Francis
Bacon's Studio
-
Let us return to
the studio of the artist Francis Bacon. The floor of this work space was awash
with photographs, of celebrities, wild animals, military leaders, images of
diseased bodies, old master paintings, press photographs, and stills from
films. Along with the photographs he worked from of the people featured in the
paintings, these images served mental triggers that suggested characteristics
that might emerge within the painting process.
-
Like all the
implied meanings that accompany the literal meanings of order words, lending
them the capacity to re-establish relations of power between people, these
images are the subtext of Bacon's apprehension of the sitter. They are all the
layers of visual association that shaped Bacon's perception of the person
before him. Thus the photographs exist as virtual layers of significance that
shape the actual recognition of the person before the artist.
Conclusion
-
Between creative
rhizomatic constructions, social assemblages, individual re-programming, and
questioning accepted notions of thought, Deleuze and Guattari developed a
series of tools for strategic thought and action. These provide a set of tools
for those who wish to challenge order that exists for its own sake, and a way
of understanding how we today exist in relation to an ever changing, and ever
more complicated modern world.
