Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus" (Part 2/4)

[@jonadsit753]

Hey, David. I am intrigued by your discussion of faciality and how, many times during the contact between human civilizations, humans from different cultures did not necessarily see each other as humans but rather as demons, monsters, or goblins. I believe you mentioned in one of your videos that there is a book on this topic (different cultures seeing each other as demons or monsters upon first contact) that is really good, but I cannot remember what it was called and would love to read it. There is a brief bit in one of your videos where you mention it, but I cannot for the life of me find it or remember where you talk about it precisely (I have scoured many hours looking for where you mention it for like 5 seconds but to no avail). If you happen to see this, could you let me know what that book was called or if what I am talking about rings a bell? Thanks for all your vids and everything.

[@TheTurkey79]

Is the body without organs kinda similar to Lacans "The Real"?

[@numbersix8919]

Sorry this is late! D&G are using "schizo-" in its original meaning, "split" or "double" and in their case "multiple." It doesn't relate to a psychiatric condition. Given the association with schizophrenia, it is a provocative, attention-getting choice, and they are doing it to emphatically distance their program from a totalizing system or analysis. As you said earlier, they are not against psychoanalysis, but want to free it up. This is consistent with their view of eros or the libido as productive/creative, if I understand that correctly.

[@noiseforthealgorithm4668]

I'm extremely ignorant and not a philosophy student whatsoever, but don't they take the term "schizo" from thinking about Beckett's Molloy and with the characters relationship to the world?

[@construct3]

Beckett's "M" characters are an example. Bückner's Lenz is another example as we saw in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus. Perhaps another example is The Unnamable. All the "M" characters circle the speaker at different speeds. And as he says, "What matter who speaks." What do you think? Malone is the transition. Bedridden, he writes his stories in which his characters walk.

[@sirako]

among other things, I don't get why he finds it problematic, Delueuze/Guattari is a schizofrenic machine. also free jazz, maybe even pschizofrenic people are, sometimes.

[@construct3]

@@sirako I had not thought about free jazz. I think you're right. I've been re-reading the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia with a friend, rather slowly I might add. And it will be a few weeks before we get to the chapter on the refrain. But looking at the sentences I have underlined, it seems to be about territoriality. But there is the section in the Kafka book about the dancing mouse. (We've already done Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. It's my third time through all this material over a span of about twenty-five years.) Could one see the repetition and development in the sonata allegro form as a figure of the eternal return? I think it's worth thinking about at least. The development sections of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies with their fragmentation of thematic motifs and harmonic progressions at least provide material to think about with D&G in mind (and of course Our Pal Nietzsche is never far behind). And just listen to the Grosse Fuge! Not a sonata allegro, but it's my favorite and also worth listening to with D&G in mind. That work is so "modern" that Beethoven was, in OPN's words, untimely born. My reading partner is a psychiatrist. Psychiatry has moved way beyond D&G's psychoanalytic frame of reference (Freud, Klein, Lacan). Schizophrenia as we speak of it in America today with the DSM-5 is very different from schizophrenia as D&G use it. Today, it's best seen as a metaphor for an approach to life, with all the dangers that way of life carries with it--Artaud's refusal. It's taken my friend a very long time to realize this. For him, talking about psychoanalysis is about as relevant as talking about Gilgamesh, which is to say, not at all. But he is providing me with important historical context. I'm kind of surprised that Deleuze didn't write a book about Beckett like he did with Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, and Proust. I'm sure it would be insightful. I'd love to see what he would have said about the later texts and novels--the short texts from the late 50s and 60s--Company and Worstword Ho.

[@sirako]

@@construct3 this is what i understand as wholesome. please excuse my. poor english. I think those examples of the return are so on ponit, but I would look somewhere more chaotic, to get the fuul picture. I also think it applies to life, to meeting people, going back to old ideas. I see the return in everything, from an ocean''s wave, or a bird who was here last year and came back, or maybe they were always there but they sing because of the season, but also, it manifests in ideas that come back transformed like neo nazis, or the awful wake of racism and ultra left. and also, now there is a kind of universal return to deleuze, and it always comes back with different ideas, new methods. and this awareness of the return while it's beautiful to watch or listen to in art, or maybe on TV, I was thinking that Twin Peaks is a ultra Deleuzian world. The 3rd season i't even called the return. And , ok, i'm kind of loosing my point, but I think all those texts were tools, to fight whatever it is that opresses you through creativity, and being creative on the way you do things, for example your share reading and discussion of the text with your friend. I would look to how the most opressed behave right now and will find a lot of creativity and alliances in creative ways, for example, Mexico is controlled by the drug cartels, and they are also a rhyzome, but the way normal people with peacefull lifes arrange their lives around it, i'ts amazing, and turns living in mexico into living in a dream like world. but ok, going back to Psychiatry, I myself find thiz schizo world a normal thing for autistic and ADHD people, because it's like being in the return mode all the time, with the cood and the bad things, meeting your daily goals and organizing perfectly through out the years, and suddenly failing in a way that takes you back to when you were a kid, and you reframe everything, and some autistic people, after ba break up with some one or meeting a new cool friend, apparently change their whole personality, but they are adapting (the bird I told you about is back now, to remind me to include them one more time) adapting by restarting, returning. so ok, I would recomend Ayler, the spirits rejoice bunch or something like Frank Zappa's Sleep dirt album for something totally Schizofrenic, Maybe Gustav Mahler's 2nd and 8th symphonies, and of course why not, something as crazy as Sax ruins.

[@construct3]

@@sirako Yes. I like where you're going with this. The plane of consistency is a good place to build new abstract machines and to map out lines of flight. Then you take them with you back into the strata to use strategically to effect change in this world. Staying out there on the plane of consistency--total destratification--is to be with Artaud, and that's certainly not a good place to hang out. I'm with Deleuze that if philosophy is to be any good, it's got to be "practical." It is, as you say, about making the space for free creativity, undetermined by arborescent binaries.

[@dangerousideas5356]

tysm4thisfam

[@Zing_art]

Great work, David. I too find the word 'schizoanalysis' quite troublesome and I have no clue how that functions. It's so multiplicitous and perhaps that's why it doesn't focus on a functionality either. Schizophrenia is non consensual with the existing reality. I guess, D&G , with that term, are trying to undo the monolithic reality. But then, as you establish, they appear more as reformers than as groundbreakers. They suggest not doing away with the system in its entirety. I am pretty confused. So much intellectualization for a reform? Haha

[@harprudich5946]

francois laruelle's work in non-philosophy can potentially address this indeterminacy in D&G's edict. it definitely has helped me at least make some sense of this stuff

[@harprudich5946]

also if you have not already, watch david's video about the body without organs, it was immensely invaluable for my understanding!

[@Zing_art]

@@harprudich5946 thanks. I have watched it :)

[@egonomics352]

There's a two part video series titled "Schizoanalysis and Method" on youtube by philosopher and Deleuze scholar Ian Buchanan. I highly recommend it to learn more about what schizoanalysis is and isn't

[@numbersix8919]

Sorry this is late, but D&G are using "schizo-" in its original meaning as "split" ofttimes "double" but in their case "multiple" -- I'm sure you've got to that. There isn't really a psychiatric meaning to it. It's provocative and kind of a dig and certainly distancing from a totalizing analysis. They aren't against psychoanalysis and creating order, but they want to free it up so it isn't oppressive. Freedom! "It is what it is." Anyway, that's my take.

[@alexanderastoria4906]

Please cut down on the ads

[@TheHUPofHWC]

Your understanding of science is extremely impoverished.

[@royzlatanestevez9843]

What an absolute load of pseudointellectual horseshit this pair has managed to sell in the mood of their time.

[@stevenf5902]

Someone woke on the wrong side of the dump

[@royzlatanestevez9843]

Nah my man Stevie og, I wouldn't put it that way. I'm happy. Happy how smart people with perfectly useful brains get dragged down the rabbit hole of wasting their lives on writing theses and papers on this manure and study it for years. It's a sort of equalizing justice. Some people are smart, some people are dumb. To see, then, that smart people throw away their unfairly gotten genetic advantage by getting lost in an intricate maze of fantasy, adding nooks and crannies and passageways to it and making it ever more intricate in an attempt to learn and understand it, that fills me with a sense of justice and glee.