Though brief, this review aims to be both critical and balanced / nuanced.
I will publish it in parts.
Part 1 - Twitter and Guattari
Twitter Origin Story
Murphy's book seemingly spawned out of a Twitter thread (or a few) to the effect of 'Culp's Dark Deleuze isn't really dark, he is a little edgy but not dark in any way that escapes the shackles of left mainstream academia' (relax, I own Dark Deleuze and enjoy it despite feeling it does not go far enough, and relax again, I'm sure there are ways to be effectively edgy - if that's what you want to do - within a left milieu while also keeping true to left values, etc. etc....).
Following the Twitter thread, my first encounter with the idea of the book was one of disagreement considering the book seemed to position Deleuze as the main creative drive in the collaborative works with Guattari, slotting Guattari as a sort of jester / idiot leftist riding D's coattails.
- Tl;dr: the book was initially presented as being a sort of answer to Dark Deleuze that disparaged Guattari and elevated Deleuze. Whether or not this implication was intended is up for debate, but it was my impression.
Now onto the book.
Reclaiming Guattari
The book never touches upon Culp, but does, towards the end, throw Guattari under the bus. As this is where my personal interest/bias lies, I will address this first.
Murphy writes on pg. 84
"...person is adopted or sponsored by someone much smarter, more joyous, wealthier, more based, etc. In some sense, this is the politics Deleuze appears to have practiced toward Guattari. Deleuze’s biography is a tranquil desert: though he was inflicted with painful respiratory problems throughout his life, and would ultimately kill himself by the somewhat dramatic method of jumping from a window, there is not much else to observe, other than his thinking, writing, and teaching. He spent his life married to one woman, they had kids, he avoided travel, and avoided Guattari’s constant social, political, and psychiatric happenings. Guattari, in contrast, was a deeply troubled man. He was certainly intelligent, creative, and capable of executing significantwork, as he did with his sole-authored books and his activist and psychiatric work. But the man’s life was an utter mess, to a degree that has scarcely been confronted by any of the secondary literature. The tragic life of Guattari will provide a sad but fascinating foil for appreciating Deleuze’s imperceptibly based vitality."
Murphy goes on for about 2 pages pointing out the differences between Guattari and Deleuze - Guattari, morose and sickly, Deleuze, based and functional, etc. before writing on pg. 86
"The very notion of a “Deleuze-Guattari collaboration” must therefore be revised. It was not so much a collaboration as a pedagogical sponsorship by Deleuze, an experiment in tutelage based on a political ethic of Christian charity. Stable genius Deleuze knows privately that this gifted but depressive, womanizing, socially liberal activist is doomed to personal and philosophical dissoluteness, but he — a based husband & father — would turn the boy’s ideas into
something special."
I'm the first person to admit to these faults in Guattari (see, in addition to my upcoming book on Guattari and Psychoanalysis, my upcoming book on Nick Land and Mark Fisher that covers left suicidal melancholia and right homicidal mania where I draw connections between Guattari's left activism and his depression - something that Bifo covers in his book on G...). Murphy isn't completely wrong here, and he does pepper in some generous and understanding commentary on Guattari, remarking on his intelligence, creativity, and compassion. It's true that Guattari caught the bug much of the left catches, which is that in trying to help everyone and solve the world's problems he neglects his family and own mental and physical health. However, to play this game of pitting D vs. G opens up the space to reverse the polemic and pick out some things Murphy missed regarding D in addition to some of things he overlooked in G.
As is well known, Deleuze was an academic philosopher who before Guattari mainly published monographs on dead (Kant, Nietzsche, Hume, Bergson, etc.) or drying (Foucault) philosophers. He was also a severe alcoholic in part because of his respiratory illness, both of which kept him from getting out much. One could speculate on D's emotional lack or psychological make up that would predispose him to such an affliction, bad habit, or - to frame things somewhat in Murphy's realm - sin (and I don't mean to say 'addicts are bad' or anything reactionary like that...). One could also say that coping with life by relying on alcohol is not very 'based.' In fact, it is easy to present a somewhat convincing narrative that Deleuze was a drunk old boring shut-in stuck in the academic rut of producing accurate, succinct, but 'perceptible' work (i.e., nothing ground breaking) until that zany Guattari came along with a bunch of cool, outside ideas that, to invoke Kant comments on Hume, 'woke Deleuze from his dogmatic slumber.' In fact, its not a controversial statement to say that all the literature seems to point to the fact that Guattari was the driving force behind Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative work - mainly Capitalism and Schizophrenia project - except for What Is Philosophy? which, it is rumored, Deleuze only tacked on Guattari's name as a nice gesture to his friend.
Furthermore, Guattari was in many ways more 'based' than Deleuze. In her autobiography Guattari's daugther describes her father as being quite, to use her word, "authoritarian" at times, ruling the house with an iron fist and forcing his children to eat (despite his gentleness). After all it was G, not D, a militant with prominent relations in early communist circles for years, that stressed the notion of micro-fascist tendencies that we all carry inside us. As some Twitter guy said when I replied to Murphy with some of these - 'The communist who lorded around that asylum had some fascist tendencies, big suprise' (and again, I don't really wish to argue that Guattari was based or whatever...).
- Tl;dr: D was not quite that vital, G was not that (N)PC, and yes, the D and G collabaration must be revised - revised from viewing Guattari in the shadow of Deleuze to viewing Guattari as absolutely central to the work. But this is mostly besides the point, probably. It's Based Deleuze, not Unbased Guattari. So let's just start with beginning of the book (which I enjoyed reading) and work through the chapters.
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Part 2 - Preface to Terminology Sections
I'm going to move quickly through the first two sections of the book here. I make no claims to authority, great insights, etc. This is essentially a collection of my notes and opinions with some attempt at expanding what is being say.
In places where others are generous I will attempt to be critical, in places where are others are critical, generous. Or maybe not. We'll see.
Preface and Terminology
On page 2 , demonstrating in the least a faint awareness of academic trends (and I don't mean this polemically, almost everyone can point to the post modern turn in academia...) Justin sets the tone quite cleverly by simply 'owning' or affirming in advance the criticisms he is likely to receive. The book is supposed to be "accessible," does not attempt to take an 'objective' stance instead leaning into opinion, and admits to being "just one portrait" that may rely on cherry picking.
Take this anecdote to emphasize why I find this important: In the past I've worked as a researcher (nothing rigorous or brag worthy) at a nonprofit, and in my own psychoanalytic doctoral program I have worked as a lowly teaching assistant (and as a freelance editor from time to time). In these positions, mostly the latter, I have helped masters level students hone their research projects. Students come to me worried about this or that flaw in their text or thesis and time after time I tell them the same thing - 'you don't have to change any of those things, you just have to name them as limitations in your limitations section in the text which makes the text stronger as it takes away the chance that a critic can count that against you.' 'I don't have enough data' - limitation. 'I only saw the patient in this or that capacity' - limitation. etc.
- tl;dr: Murphy, as he proclaims often, is/was a social science researcher. As researchers do in studies, he's included the limits and scopes of his project as to focus it and disarm criticism. 'You can criticism my project for not having done X or Y, but as I said, I never intended to do X or Y.'
After criticizing mainstream academia for a bit (a position which at face value is basic enough to be agreeable), Justin - as if to say 'the book you're about to read; A: is crazily inaccurate, as you say, but this inaccuracy is consistent with the literature, or B: may be provocative, but is still more sensible than the goofy literature you're about to see - ends the preface with the following rhetorical flourish:
"I respect why many readers will be similarly skeptical of the Deleuze they meet in the following pages. If my portrait of Deleuze seems impossible on the face of it, then perhaps we should inquire into who or what has generated the face of Deleuze we currently take for granted. Even the quickest look at the academic consensus on Deleuze will make any reader far less confident in whatever they’ve already heard about Deleuze. Consider the following masterpieces of scholarship one might find conducting research on Deleuze:
- Un-Glunking Geography: Spatial Science A er Dr. Seuss and Gilles Deleuze (Doel 2002)
- Deleuze and Guattari in the Nursery: Towards an Ethnographic, Multi-Sensory Mapping of Gendered Bodies and Becomings (Emma and Mellor 2013)
- Becoming Rhizomatic Parents: Deleuze, Guattari and Disabled Babies (Goodley 2007)
- “Ecosystem Service Commodities” - a New Imperial Ecology? Implications for Animist Immanent Ecologies, With Deleuze and Guattari (Sullivan 2010)
- Immaculate Defecation: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Organization Theory (Sørensen 2005)
- Virtually Sustainable: Deleuze and Desiring Di erenciation in Second Life (Hickey-Moody and Wood 2008)
- Transgender Without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-A ective Theory of Gender Modification (Crawford 2008)
- Deleuze on Viagra (Or, What Can a “Viagra-Body” Do?) (Potts 2004)
Do these titles inspire confidence? Do you believe the institutionalized culture generating these titles would likely impart to the public an accurate and useful image of a complicated French philosopher? And yet... Most of what you think you know about Deleuze has come to you, through osmosis, from the same kind of geniuses
who cra ed these titles."
Tl;dr: Either my book is better than these, or it fits with them, so what can you criticize now?
I can affirm this in my own experience with Deleuzian literature. I purchased The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy (2010) which is a collection of essays from various authors on Deleuze and different topics related to science and philosophy. To speak very plainly of this collection - some of the essays are great while some of the essays I remember nearly falling sleep reading (i read in bed) often thinking to myself "this is all just fluff, just the author doing one big 'what if this where the case?' or 'what if we thought this instead of that?'" Bogus speculative BS (and I am all for speculation, but this was speculation that also wanted to appeal to a sense of authority over belief...).
Anyways, back to Murphy's book.
The terminology chapter where Murphy correctly points out that Deleuze was a post structuralist (a move away from Marx) not a postmodernist who wanted to look for better problems to discuss, not find solutions, does not need to be discussed, but a line towards the end regarding reactionary politics does.
In this line Murphy makes a connection that Lyotard, contemporary of D and G, published Libidinal Economy in 1972, the same year D and G publish Anti-Oedipus. The importance this connection has is that, as Murphy points out, Lyotard in this book can be not inaccurately thought of as being reactionary in disavowing Marx and suggesting that the working class not only somewhat invites their oppression, but that they enjoy it too (keep in mind that Murphy seems to be referencing the same excerpt of Lyotard that Mark Fisher uses to open up his Terminator vs. Avatar lecture which is the only bit of Fisher to be featured in Urbanomic's collection #Accelerate: the Accelerationist Reader. I.e., Lyotard is in fact in the accelerationist and leftist canon).
- tl;dr: in the 70s Marx and therefore traditional leftism was going out of fashion and a new, provocative line of somewhat reactionary leftism was growing (no wonder they called D a potato fascist...). For Murphy, this is where Deleuze takes off.
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Part 3 - On Troubled Land
If anything truly interesting has happened to Deleuze literature its Nick Land. He's the Terminator-Robocop VHS double feature of Deleuzian scholarship.
And this is not to knock Shaviro, DeLanda, Culp, and all the other less 'notable' folks who contribute meaningfully to D scholarship, but rather that Land offers something very wildly different than what you might expect.
Thus, consistent with Justin's project, it's no surprise that he covers Land quite early in the text.
Justin seems to think Land thinks Deleuze thinks capitalism is great (let that sentence gel for a sec).
This may be true, but in my reading of Land it seems that Land doesn't care what Deleuze thinks of anything but rather - in a sort of Deleuzian fashion - Land derives conclusions from Deleuze and Guattari's work that D and G did not themselves intend or were unable to formulate for whatever reason (cathédrale?). Likewise, gone are the days of scholarship where we try and suss out what a thinker 'really' means, in are the days where we see how their thought interfaces with the real (or diagrammatics). There's what D (and G) thought and believed, and then there's the real effects of their work. Nick Land hijacks (and this is not a bad word) their effects.
But this is all a little besides the point. Justin probably knows this anyhow...
Justin ends this section with the following excerpt
"I began to realize that, if one posits the existence of an esoteric “reactionary” thread in Deleuze’s work, then the whole network of his ideas suddenly starts to make much more sense. Even his well-known concepts become more intuitive and immanently productive. On the other hand, though Nick Land’s capitalist Deleuze has been a much-needed provocation, it’s still at odds with almost everything else we know about Deleuze and his milieu. Thus, it is the purpose of this book to account for Deleuze’s weird reactionary currents in a way that also does justice to his voluminous and explicit left-wing affirmations. If his systematic deviations from his purported left-wing allegiance do not render him a full-bore capitalist, then what do they render him?"
It's OK if Land's ideas are at odds with Deleuze because it's not always a scholar's job to make a thinker clearer, sometimes its a scholar's job to dredge up and reconstruct parts of a thinkers thought that the thinker isn't aware of. In a way, this is a possible 'line of flight' Justin could have taken in regard to Deleuze - 'he is not himself a reactionary, but was unconsciously espousing reactionary positions in a way of working through conflicts in an attempt to attain a less reactionary position...'
- Tl;dr: Murphy introduces Land's Deleuze as to slightly differentiate his own take. He means to communicate that his Deleuze is somewhere between Land, the outlier, and the typical literature (as I wrote in the margins, and consistent with Justin's earlier comment, this is where Fisher, Lyotard and Guattari fill the gap - we in part desire capitalism, partake in it with joy, and are in part microfascist and need to analyze our own desire and investments if we wish to make changes in those areas...).
We'll cover the next chapter in the next session (and we'll talk more about Land and Guattari at the end of the review...).
Part 4 - Decentralized Pronomianism
This entry is more of a free association or discussion than it is an elucidation, so don't get too excited. I'm not even really touching on the title of the section or that part of the argument.
It's a more technical section than those before it. It's also the section I find least interesting (which is not necessarily reflective of the quality, but of my own interest...).
Some good points are made however which I will mention before going on to extrapolate and amplify a few themes of the chapter I liked and had more interested in.
To be short - D wasn't as left as his left as his colleagues as he stayed relatively out of politics and was more interested in philosophical conceptualization of law.
Justin writes
"When Deleuze tells Negri he is interested in 'user-groups' generating their own jurisprudence, he is...not asking that we let loose unconstrained authority and power via informal institutions: 'We don’t need an ethical committee of supposedly well-qualified wise men.' Rather he is suggesting that autonomous groups should begin to
generate their own Law, with defined parameters, 'free consent,' no imposition on third parties, etc"
Here, Deleuze (as understood accurately it seems by Justin) is interested in law the same way that Lacan was, and therefore, to an extent, the same way that Guattari was. That is, Lacan said an analyst cannot be made official by knowledge, a test, credentials, etc., but has to be self authorized (though G in some interview somewhere does say that this is not true, Lacanian analysts make unconscious appeals to scientific meta models to create the image of authority, but whatever...I think both positions merit consideration). When the trainee is ready to be an analyst (after reflecting on what is learned in his/her own analysis) he calls the secretary of Lacan's Freudian School and says something like 'I'm ready to see patients, put me on the roster,' or whatever.
That is, the psychoanalyst does not take his cues from an other - arbitrary bureaucratic stuff, gameable structures, traditional politics of alterity, etc. - he makes his own law, creates his own cues based on his own desire (which we see in practice when the analyst locates the locus of meaning as being often strictly between analyst and analysand). This is of course reminiscent of the quote attributed correctly to Deleuze (and not D
and G) - "If you're trapped in the dream of the other you're fucked." It can be said, broadly and vulgarly, that this phrase describes a major aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Similarly, as Andre Green put it in his interview from 1994 (see my psychoanalysis blog entry 19), despite their talk of the law of the father, there isn't much law in Lacanianism other than what the analyst wants to do.
This gets us to the Landian notion of patchwork, or Justin's take on it that he mentions in this section - "Neofeudal Technocommunism." Democracy is stuck in the idea of enlightenment tropes, arguments, debates, fights of and for legitimacy over who has what control to call who this or that / do this or that to whoever, over land, etc. Changing opinion to force unity, often through large mediated bureaucracies, rather than some other model which would allow groups to form alliances based on meaningful wants and needs (who gets along with who, who desires who, material substratums, communities of heterogeneous or homogeneous populations, depending on the desire of the groupuscule that is) and decide what works best for them in their own space without having to convince the other group of their indisputable legitimacy (patchwork, in theory, is a way out of politics towards a material existence connected to desire - in talking with some smart people who I won't throw under the bus, I can confidently say patchwork is intended to be anti-racist and anti-political. But if you don't believe me, also see
Xenogothic's work on the matter which quite uniquely approaches the left / right debate on patchwork...).
This reminds me of one of my favorite passages of D and G's
What is Philosophy? (which I quote at length
here in another of my texts concerned with politics):
“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one.” (What is Philosophy? pg. 28-29).
If this all sounds familiar - the passage and Justin's section - its because it's Nietzschean, psychologically healthy, and philosophically and socially critical. Escaping the dream of the other and self-authorizing is the psychoanalytical practice of getting in touch with your own desire and 'true self' (non mystically), the marxian practice of reattaching values to material, and the Nietzschean act of transvaluating values, i.e. making new values that connect up with one's own instincts or will to power (Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud being the unholy trinity of true noncringe 'critical' theory...).
Fitting, as Justin's next two sections of the book either anticipate or center on Nietzsche...
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Entry 5- Bearing One's Cross and the Eternal Return
I'm well aware that this series is turning into me narcissistically associating to Justin's book...
So be it (the review will bleed through here and there...the response will take over...IDK)...
I'm obviously the most dedicated reply guy (Not really, I will end this series with criticisms of the book...).
In keeping with my trend of shamelessly inserting myself into this book response/review I will say that I find these chapters excellent because I once wrote an essay (which was never published but will be a part of my book on Guattari...) that covers very similar points as these two sections of Based Deleuze.
Justin correctly points out that Deleuze was - consistent with the old adage that it costs nothing to critique but takes a lot to create - not a fan of objections.
Justin writes
"A philosopher who refuses to object can hardly be a left-wing activist capable of protesting. For Deleuze, there is never any question of protesting injustice. He may think about, and articulate his
thoughts about, various situations of social injustice..."
Likewise, in my essay, utilizing Lyotard, Zizek, Fisher, Land, D and G, etc., elaborating on the idea that contemporary political protest is often an impotent, reactive affair related to voice and symbolism, I write
" Beckman (2017 pg. 41), in her biography on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, an active participant in May 68’ via Guattari, writes that “[Deleuze’s position is that] it would have been more efficient…for people to finish their dissertations than to collect signatures for petitions.” Beckman goes on “Being a leftist, for Deleuze, is a matter of perception. It is about ‘perceiving the horizon’ [text in inverted commas are Deleuze’s words]…” "
This is what I call 'be smart not loud' (exit not voice), that is, finish your studies so you're informed.
The point here is not so much that Justin and I share a small agreement over Deleuze, but that it would not be totally incorrect to say this position of Deleuze's is somewhat 'reactionary,' and therefore there seems to be some secondary and primary literature that both supports Justin's position here and has larger political (or anti-political) implications.
This is not the kicker, however. This shorter section really takes off in the next few lines. Justin writes
"Our sufferings, including material deprivations caused by more powerful individuals, are not actualities but virtualities."
"It is easy to see that actual facts are a relatively small component of the larger psychological and emotional ensemble constituting any “material deprivation” (e.g., the fact that someone has no money in their bank account is only one small portion of the much larger and often painful life experience called “poverty.”). We know this because there is variation in the relationship between actual facts and psychological or emotional ensembles — for instance, the existence of people who are poor and joyous, and people who are rich and sad."
Here Justin makes his argument by relying on a combination of 'common sense,' some consistencies in Deleuze's work, and their possible connection to some more contemporary social theory.
He is correct but obfuscated and unconvincing. Here is a more clinical - i.e. both a finding and guiding theory of mine and importantly, many others psychoanalytical therapy practice - that captures what Justin means to say about Deleuze's ideas on suffering.
There is no 1 to 1 correspondence between the environment and internal emotional states. Freud developed 'drive theory' and speaks of 'vicissitudes of drives' to account for this (similarly, in brain science there is no 1 to 1 relation between objects and how they are perceived and mentally modeled internally. Brain science, linking up with Kant, posits that the outside is mapped by the faculties of the inside whereupon the map of in/out feedbacks back into the inside creating layers of consistency...).
Here's drive theory in a few sentences: The human organism as it naturally grows comes to embody or captures energy on its inside. That is, instincts and bodily needs - thirst, hunger, sex, comfort, violence, etc. - seek for objects or discharges. These body states may remain somatic and be gratified or frustrated or they may be converted or transformed into mental images and eventually language, thought, or feeling where again they may be gratified or frustrated. There is always a conflict between the inside and outside; between the impetus to gratify an internal need while also maintaining a sense of safety or concern for social norms, or to navigate the negative feelings aroused in these ways when the need is frustrated. The way we resolve the conflict creates pathways that our drives tend to follow.
This all sounds like folk biology or psuedoscience. Here is how I describe it quite simply to parents who can't understand why their child - rich, not weird looking, well taken care of, etc. - who has little to no external conflicts somehow has severe mental health issues. I tell them 'as children grow they have feelings and sensations that well up on the inside regardless of the outside, and the way those thoughts and feelings sit with the kid can cause conflicts, internal conflicts that have little to no relation to their family or environment. This is why your child is depressed despite having no reason to seem depressed.' Parents are reassured and children under my care do get better. I.e., even if it is folk biology, this drive theory model has a clear heuristic and diagnostic effectiveness.
As I wrote in my psychoanalysis blog entry
"Or, more broadly in relation to the vitality of psychoanalysis, the death drive solves the problem of naïve humanism. The death drive is an ethical position, an as if, that says ‘even if this is bogus science, who cares! It’s not about the science, it’s about acting as if you had a death drive in you,’ or whatever, because humanism relies too heavily on projecting the 'negative' into the environment where it can be left undealt with. The death drive brings the conflict back to an internal level." (Guattari was also known to say in interviews, probably in reference to Marxism, that we need to move away from this 'everything on the outside world has made me bad' model, i.e., what I call humanism).
What's the point? Justin is essentially correct. Just because X (no money in my bank) happens doesn't mean we need to react with Y (suicide). There are certain tendencies for certain feelings and ideas to arise in relation to certain stimuli, but it is not strictly determined. Object and subject have a complexity to them. Over the course of treatment, what helps many adults and children become more well adjusted is that they gradually learn that they have many possible tools and 'choices' (not in a cognitive or conscious sense) to pull from as different responses to the same stimuli. One analyst I know (who has been at it for 50 or more years) will sometimes say in a caring but also stern way 'Is being sad the only reaction you can have to this?' This is incredibly important in a clinical sense. Nothing makes anyone do anything (or what elsewhere I call psychotic humanist determinism).
To this effect, but in a less clinical sense, Justin goes on to use Deleuze in a way that explicates the basic fact that pain and suffering are part of the fabric of life, but that this does not mean that one must be morose, depressed, suicidal, resentful, etc. In fact, it's when people insist that pain and suffering can be expunged from the world given enough social coordination, enough effort, enough intellect, etc. (impossible utopianism, a collective social objet petit a) that one slips into morose, depressed, resentful, suicidal positions to life (things are bad and I have to react only in this way to the bad thing and therefore I have to feel this or that...).
This gets us to the second section I'm covering in this entry, The Eternal Return.
Again, I will insert myself. Justin claims the eternal return is an ethical device. This is not untrue. In undergrad I suggested to my philosopher professor (a rabbi at a progressive temple who wrote a two volume 1k+ word dissertation on Nietzsche and who taught me Jewish mysticism such as Kabbalah - this guy was cool...) that 'the eternal return is an immanent version of Kant's categorical imperative' (which I will not elaborate on and will instead allow the intelligent reader to determine if true or not) to which he agreed. Again, not stressing our agreement, simply stressing that Justin's point is not so strange that it was, retrospectively, ill received by a relatively well read and idiosyncratic Nietzsche scholar.
Considering I have already written quite a bit in this entry, and that I also think this section is best read and not explained, I will end here by saying that in this section Justin recuperates with Nietzsche the positive project of the critical gestures of the previous section. The eternal return is about affirming chance without slipping into anxiety, necessity without slipping into hopelessness, and therefore about affirming life.
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Entry 6 - Creativity is Submission, A Fascist Mother..., From Christ to the Bourgeois
In Creativity is Submission Murphy begins with the uncontroversial position that Deleuze differed quite markedly from what could tentatively be called his colleagues - other French poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida - in that Deleuze favored ontology of becoming that conceptualizes a 'real' Outside as opposed to an abstract political or linguistic conceptualization that does not go beyond itself. I say uncontroversial because this echoes the adage about Deleuze that can be read across the literature that he is essentially an 'old metaphysician at heart.'
This is old news, but the conclusion Murphy draws - or the consequence he posits - from this info is of interest for many reasons. Murphy writes
"For Deleuze, it is only a radical empirical basedness that makes possible true freedom and creativity. For the ultimate insight gained from a fidelity to reality is how reality can be changed, even if it cannot be changed any way one pleases. There is no access to the mechanisms whereby reality can be changed, wherever there is less than absolute fidelity to reality. Submission to a status quo reality reveals the paths to escape it, paths which exist objectively within it. Trying to create something new by ignoring or disobeying what really exists leads to a confused, incessant repetition of the same."
Here we see three interrelated things that together make one interesting point and separate make their own different but still interesting points; 1: Accelerationism; 2: Nick Land; 3: Slavoj Zizek
1: Here we see how Deleuze (without Guattari who, as the Anti-Oedipus papers point out, was actually the one to insert the Nietzschean bit about 'accelerate further still,' not Deleuze) anticipates accelerationism. Reality or an actual Outside needs to be engaged with and accelerated, not strange myths, social niceties, and mental defenses we use to codify and refute the Outside/Real (the Cathedral). An is over an ought, though, as critics point out regarding Landian accelerationism, for Land an ought is itself an 'is' due to the hyperreal nature (hyperstition) of existence and feedback processes. That is, an 'ought' is an 'is' for input into the machine.
2: As hinted at above, Deleuze here is somewhat consistent with Land's reading of Deleuze (though, as I mentioned earlier, who cares if Land's reading of Deleuze is 'correct' when what we should be considering is if its interesting and what it diagrams into existence) in that Land on Twitter has described the core of his philosophy simply as 'Reality rules,' i.e., his Twitter tag 'Outsideness.' Elsewhere in interviews he has said that politics as a whole offer false solutions because it refuses to conceptualize real problems due to the mental restrictions the Cathedral places on thought.
3: This position of Deleuze's which Land intensifies is relatively consistent with notions that Zizek has raised several times in lectures and also at least once in writing. As I mentioned earlier - shamelessly bringing my own unpublished work into things -
" Beckman (2017 pg. 41), in her biography Deleuze writes “[Deleuze’s position is that] it would have been more efficient…for people to finish their dissertations than to collect signatures for petitions...being a leftist, for Deleuze, is a matter of perception. It is about ‘perceiving the horizon’ [text in inverted commas are Deleuze’s words]…' "
What I did not include from my own work was the next bit from my work:
" "Similarly, in his book which looks at the failure of various leftist political movements from 68’ to 08’ and in doing so erects Guattari’s friend Negri and Deleuze as strawmen for misguided political activists, Lacanian-Psychoanalytic philosopher Zizek (2009 pg. 11) writes: “The old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ is one of the most stupid things one can say...rather, the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much…perhaps it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about doing something instead of doing it; but sometimes we also do things in order to avoid talking about them. Such as throwing $700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it arose in the first place.” "
Think, don't just act.
That is, Deleuze, Land, and Zizek all say roughly the same thing - the 'real' needs to be considered before action is taken, and political action is often impotent unless it faces some ugly facts, i.e., interfaces with the real.
Not only does this create a consistent thread - albeit somewhat of a stretch - between Landian accelerationism and some more 'popular' 'leftists' like Deleuze and Zizek, but it confirms to a degree what M.Crumps (Murphy's playful nemesis?) has stated on Twitter and on
Jacobite - that Ziz is kind of a reactionary, or, in Murphy's terms,
Deleuze is based like Ziz and Land.
This latent line of thinking culminates in the next section - A Fascist Mother - in that, as we mentioned just now as well as earlier in regard to Deleuze's disdain for political protest, Deleuze's passivity in the face of left activism put him in a overlapping position with fascist and bourgeios sentiments (the ole' 'can't be neutral on a moving train' / 'bystanders are as bad as perpetrators' motif).
The next section of the book - From Christ to Bourg...- reiterates this last idea, and though it has its interesting moments it personally strikes me as less interesting so I will only say this about it - Murphy argues that Deleuze is influenced by Christianity and mysticism (or both) which is consistent with some literature (like how one of Deleuze's first papers is a paper on Jung that he later had expunged from his official bibliography!).
...
Entry 7 - Deleuzo-Petersonianism, HBDeleuze and Becoming Imperceptible
I'm a shitty reviewer. This isn't a 'woe is a me' moment. It's just me giving myself a way out. That is, I didn't love these sections so I am not really going to say much on it.
It's interesting to connect Jordan Peterson to Deleuze and there is some psychologically and statistically (as opposed to psychoanalytically and clinically - which are understandably not present here) correct information about surface level schizophrenic phenomena but ultimately I view the section as a missed opportunity to riff on Zizek and Peterson's debate as being a repetition of difference within the eternal return given Zizek's standoffish (and criminally lazy) take downs of Guattari (
this 2012 lecture) and Deleuze (that terrible Organs Without Bodies book). That is, Peterson is to Zizek what Deleuze was Badiou what Guattari was to Lacan, etc. But for me to say all this amounts to nothing as this is the chapter
I would've written (which I am writing) not the one Justin wanted to write. So go read the chapter and see what you make of it yourself.
Moving on.
Ok. The section 'HBDeleuze...'
I thought HBD stood for 'happy birthday' until people started arguing over whether it was fascist or not on Twitter. 'How could happy birthday be fascist?' I thought.
Instead of 'human biodiversity' I personally use the old developmental psychology term 'disposition' which refers to a number of complex factors that converge to form an organism with certain traits and tendencies. Bound up with this concept of disposition is the following: consistent with ethological thinking, there are certain inborn traits that exist latent in the earliest form of the organism which later unfurl following a sort of unsaid blueprint and develop into structures or traits specific to certain animals. To speak vulgarly of the ethology, there are learned behaviors and innate behaviors; there are necessary inborn dispositional traits that tend to almost always occur as the organism grows (birds grow wings, humans do not grow wings), accidental traits that may or may not develop in specific forms (some birds may learn certain ritualistic behaviors while others may not), as well as more general acquired or accidental traits (all animals may learn to do similar kinds of rituals). There is the effect of traits or structures interacting with each other internally as well as interfacing with the world. These lead to differences in physical and mental abilities.
Society - to continue speaking vulgar by using large reiffications - sets as a moral mandate or ethical code that, despite any real or fictional differences that may exist among people, that all people are equal in the eyes of God's law. As society (according to Weber - and Moldbug...) unconsciously secularizes itself this statement transforms into 'the eyes of the law' or human law instead of God law. In other words, part of the 'social contract' (simply living with others in a system of order) is having the same chance as your neighbor at accruing stuff, not being killed, etc. etc.
In short, this section makes this argument by showing D and G's appreciation and reliance on ethological research interpreted through a philosophical metaphysics of pure difference (difference and repetition as opposed to difference as a negation). In very vulgar language - stuff happens in many different ways and not everything is just one thing at one time. Darwin and all his stupid birds. Nature churns out 500 fucking finches at random and the ones who accidentally end up with long thin beaks can get the bugs and the ones who accidentally end up with someone else die and etc. etc. Nature is a permutation machine that repeats differentials.
But whats the pay off?
As Land writes himself 'I know what you're thinking, don't talk about race, don't talk about race...'
Murphy, despite his recent 'not being provocative' tendencies, and echoing Peter Sloterdijk's critique of Sartre, handles the (hot, hot, hotter) topic of race gracefully and respectfully (he is still a leftist afterall). He writes that in Deleuze and Guattari there is
"...an emphatic refusal of Left moralism on race talk...They [D and G] are not racists — not at all — but rather race-accelerationists: The liberation of oppressed races will not be won through “anti-racism,” which has resentment built into its very concept, but through a kind of excessive elaboration of races. Because the concept of race is the morbid fixation of an uncreative identity, purifying it means exposing it to the Nietzschean “eternal recurrence,” which means, as we have seen, Darwinian selection. Purification of race does not mean harboring but exhausting it, shedding all that is rotten within it. Purifying means filtering until all that is left is a real kernel, a real core. And the real core of race ultimately has little to do with race, but rather the continuous variation of creativity, previously overcoded by race"
Now you the reader are smart, and Murphy is quite clear here, so I will not explicate this phrase. I will however relate it to one of Murphy's previous guests Elliot Rosenstock a leftist Lacanian/Zizekian psychotherapist and Zero Books author in California. Rosenstock i
n his blog post responding to Andrew Culp (much like Murphy originally was) which is centered on the film Black Dynamite, a self aware parody of black exploitation films, writes
"A tradition of racist caricature can not be simply negated by bland critique, but it needs to perhaps, even accelerate this process. “Black Dynamite” takes into account the libidinal vulgarity which is offered by blaxploitation, and it turns it against itself."
This puts Murphy's 'race acceleration' neatly into context showing it to be consistent with leftist critiques of racial epithets (as well as bonding over not loving Culp [who I have never met or spoken with and have no personal feelings for other than thinking his to be book lackluster at points]).
Now onto becoming imperceptible.
This chapter can be summed quite simply as 'one should be aware of why they are speaking, writing, acting, creating, etc. If one is creating to appease others one is necessarily sacrificing part of one's creativity in order for it to be well received. Part of your project is now coded in advance with the other's response in mind (part of what Andre Green explicating Donald Winnicott refers to as 'the false self,' when the child takes its parents' wants and needs into account more than its own thus leading to neurotic and sometimes psychotic conditions). In a sentence, as we said above, Deleuze's adage 'if you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked!'
Entry 8 - Accelerate the Process, The Real, The Evolved, and the Traditional, Becoming Minority
We're nearing the end and I am getting lazy...
So pick up speed...
Murphy has his own take on acceleration. He doesn't rearrange old arguments as to look smart or give way to jargon. He starts off with talk of concrete realities - capitalism and markets (some will argue these aren't concrete realities and that the right makes what Whitehead calls 'the error of misplaced concreteness' i.e. reiffies abstractions. Incorrect. As Lazzarato, a good leftist, shows in his book Signs and Machines, markets and money have direct diagrammatic effects on the everyday lives of people. They are concrete machines). Suspend this for a moment however.
Murphy gets that accelerationism is about making connections between pre-existent entities, 'riding historical waves' which, if I were to further reduce into layman's terms, is basically 'going with the flow,' etc., all in order to 'express deeper forces,' that is, interface with the real.
Again, though, this seems simple, so what is the consequence of this insight?
Murphy writes
"In short, all the injustices we observe in society — problems of power and domination — are never due to the flows but to the institutions installed onto the flows..."
Connect the dots in accordance with reality and 'justice' (here I take it in its Platonic sense to mean, vulgarly, things being where they belong and thus producing syntonic effects) will occur. Try too hard - and any amount over zero is often too hard - to organize things by an 'ought' (rather than interface with them as an 'is') and one neurotically slips into attempting to omnipotently controlling reality in a way that disavows or rejects reality.
OK. Now recall the market / capitalism talk from earlier. This 'is over ought' is a sort of 'let the market run its course and see what happens, no regulation please' kinda deal.
After these assertions Murphy moves onto to tackling the concept of 'the body without organs' (BwO). Speaking of Whitehead and reality, Murphy neatly conceptualizes reality as being composed of actual, virtual, and real.
"The actual is what naïve materialists and Marxists take to be 'material reality,' or the hard facts. But Bergson showed that, in fact, the actual is not the real. The actual is only a set of arbitrary, contingent, and fleeting circumstances and sensations. The present is always slipping into the past, so whatever is merely actual is no true ground. Rather, what is real is the entire flow of time that leads up to and produces the present. This long continuous flow does not actually exist anywhere, it is virtual, and yet it is the realest of the real."
We assemble reality from material circumstances coupled with real virtualities (we symbolically interpret real intensities). So reality is bound up with our sense organs that compose or synthesize sense data which is filtered through internal categories. Thus the BwO is a mental or conceptual maneuver that helps us work towards thinking 'as if' our organs were not filtering our experiences - a real interface with the Outside. My understanding of this is that becoming a BwO means making yourself phenotype-esque and therefore open to lines of flight and deterritorialization due to the fact that rigid structures have yet to ossify which leaves open virtual valences.
Building on this notion of a novel reorganization, the last chapter discusses what it takes to make one's self something truly different in a political world. This chapter is perhaps the best chapter of the book, but I will not discuss it at length for a few reasons; 1: Some of the Anti-Guattarin sentiments (if we can call them that, I wouldn't commit to this) I discussed at the beginning of this blog post; 2: it should be read and the reader should make their own thoughts about it; 3: in many ways the chapter is 'anti discussion' so I would like to emphasize that aspect of the chapter by not having a 'voice' on the matter and encouraging my reader to experience it own their own.
With that said I feel obligated to offer at least a brief overview - Murphy compares Deleuze and Guattari's atypical stance on identity to the (un)political writings of Nick Land pointing out that neither thinkers are 'racists' but in fact looking for affirmative models of existing in groups that avoid racist violence and senseless politics. One specific solution is the notion of patchwork.
Before getting to patchwork, let me make this parallel connection - much of Nick Land's 'democracy is simply convincing other people to think how you think / why bother voicing debate when you can exit?' is directly derived from D and G's thinking. I return to the excerpt I used earlier here, and elsewhere in my blog,
“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one.” (What is Philosophy? pg. 28-29).
Moving on.
Rather than reiterate the chapter I will simply make my own point on this matter that some smarter people than me (who I will not name but carry far more name-authority) agree with: Patchwork is a way out of things such as genocide, race wars, and endless divisive political battles. Let people choose who they find comfortable living with and how they feel comfortable living. There will always be a place for those who are left out as they can live with other people who feel the same. This does not mean ethnic divisions (the racist ethnostate) nor bloody political battles over who deserves what land or what social privileges. It is, at heart, a nonpolitics of desire - what do you want and how do you want to get it.
Conclusion
Whether or not you like Murphy you may want to simply read the book. It's short, cleanly written, and attempts to use direct excerpts and biographical information to support some interesting claims.
Now about those claims...who cares if they are right or wrong - they're interesting! And, we should add, not very provacative for a thinker who has in recent times come to be known as the guy who says 'not to be provocative, but...' Is the Guattari stuff a bit off? Yes. But Murphy did not set out to write a book on Guattari, and the rhetorical positioning of Guattari vs. Deleuze is somewhat warranted. Was Deleuze somewhat reactionary? Probably. Regardless of whether you read Justin's book or not its pretty clear that early in his life he was into people like Nietzsche and Jung who have come to be associated with somewhat reactionary thought, and before he met Guattari he was a straight shooting academic who had little interest in politics. After he met Guattari, of course, he had no interest in being 'politically correct!'
So - read the book and whether you hate it or love it, write something on it...
