1: Introduction
2: The Booming 50s
3: Guattari the Patriarch
4: Rhetorical Fascism
5: Guattari the Weeb
6: The Nick Land Refrain
7: Conclusion
7: Conclusion
1: Introduction
"Freebase: a purified solid form of cocaine...that is obtained by treating the powdered hydrochloride of cocaine with an alkaloid base (such as sodium bicarbonate) and that can be smoked or heated to produce vapors for inhalations...a form derived from treatment of the hydrochloride of cocaine with ammonia or similar alkaloid solution followed by extraction with a solvent (such as ether)" - Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Somewhat in response to Andrew Culp's Dark Deleuze (2016), Justin Murphy wrote Based Deleuze (2019) in which he rhetorically positioned Guattari as a lovable but morose average leftist whose crazy ramblings were made worthwhile by the practical, levelheaded, and fatherly Deleuze. I enjoyed the book but as I outlined in my (shitty) review I felt that however understandable this framing of Guattari was given the structure of the book - needing to compare Deleuze's 'based' nature to Guattari's unbased nature - that this framing of Guattari was factually wrong.
I have nothing against typical morose leftists (I used to be one...), but regardless Guattari wasn't one of them. In fact, he was a lot more 'based' than many assume. However, it's not my agenda to engage in any sort of literature on who is or isn't based / cringe as its not my style or interest and ultimately whether or not another author's approach to a thinker is or is not factual is of little import to me as long as the work is interesting and encourages the production of thought. Rather, here I want to make a case for something else - where Murphy had Based Deleuze, Culp Dark, I will create Freebased Guattari.
Why freebase? Merely to pun on Murphy? Yes and no. Mostly no. Freebasing a drugs like cocaine (and maybe meth? I don't know enough about drug culture...) - stimulants - is a chemical approach bound up with molecular processes of purification that, to use one of D and G's terms, helps one 'pick up speed.' Guattari, trained in pharmacy before becoming a psychoanalyst and therefore a self-prescriber of pharmaceuticals (Dossee 2011 pg. 425) and thinker of molecular revolutionary becomings (Molecular Revolution 1984) who with Deleuze famously conceptualized history as a kind of chemistry (Anti-Oedipus pg. 86), through these gestures and ones like them practically embodies the idea of freebasing. Furthermore, Guattari was, as Deleuze points out endearingly (Dosse 2011 pg. 10), a man of shimmering and clear nature. So where Culp darkens Deleuze to reclaim him from neohippies, we will brighten and 'purify' - or chemically reduce - Guattari as to expose some of the hidden and overlooked 'effects' (intensify the high) of his name and its vectors on the world at large. Finally but least importantly, freebasing captures my method - I am going to go fast, be sloppy, and will have little regard for scholarly convention, but at the end something fun should've occurred.
So there you have the motivation for the text and the form it takes, but what of the content? I will be brief and let the text speak for itself. In The Booming 50s I will outline how Guattari's parents were essentially working class petite bourgeoisie (protoboomers) and how Guattari, born in 1930 but not coming into his own until the 1950s, was somewhat of a 'Boomer' himself (but not really, relax). From here, building on this weak boomer argument, I will show in Guattari the Patriarch how during the 50s and late 60s Guattari was, to be frank, a harsh, somewhat authoritarian and domineering father to his children at home and to his colleagues at work, not to mention a womanizer (all of which he seems to share with his analyst at the time, some nobody idiot named Lacan...[relax, Lacanians...]). In the section that follows this, Rhetorical Fascism, I outline how Guattari argued - to put it in a silly Disney way - that we all have a little fascism in us, and that he at times explicitly used his talk of fascism as a rhetorical ploy to playfully provoke political reaction. In what comes next, Guattari the Weeb, I outline the possible 'not woke' implications of Guattari's love (which manifested in multiple trips) of Japan. Finally I connect all the dots between these sections and attempt to make a final connection between Guattari's concepts of schizoanalysis, asignifying semiotics, and diagrammatics (and they are Guattari's concepts, not Deleuze and Guattari's...) and Nick Land's solo work and the CCRU.
Ultimately this text aims to have fun and possibly impart knowledge along the way and in no way makes any claims to authority, novelty, ingenuity, or rigor.
...
2: The Booming 50s
In Based Deleuze Murphy briefly explores Deleuze's familial background arguing that political beliefs, in addition to being socially transmitted, are genetically inherited and therefore it's likely that Gilles inherited some fascism from ma and pa. Whether or not this is true, debatable, etc., - who cares. The rhetorical point of the maneuver is to imply Gilles' basedness as consistent with his parents' basedness. Whether we agree with this or not, let's run the same thing with Guattari and see what the outcome is.
In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives - the only biographical work on Guattari besides Guattari's untranslated autobiography Ritournelles and his daughter Emmanuelle's memoir I, Little Asylum, - Francois Dosse outlines Felix's family: his parents, born in the early 1900s, were traditional and conservative. Dad was a proletariat factory worker later promoted to run the factory before becoming an independent business owner while mom was a housewife who cooked, cleaned,
and took care of the kids instead of pursuing her ambitions.
In short, Felix's dad is what contemporary woke-folk would call something like 'a petite bourgeoisie class traitor capitalist' while mom would be sympathized with for being a victim of patriarchal capitalism's familialism and therefore not living up to the feminist standards, or critiqued for being a traditional wife.
I am not endorsing these positions nor do I necessarily accept the legitimacy or validity of these critiques as they are moral positions and it's plain stupid to apply current politico-ethical standards to past people (though on the one hand we could compare mom and dad's 1900s era conservative 'praxis' to revolutionaries of the time such as the communist cabal Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc., and on the other hand we could refrain from being a timecuck and apply whatever concepts what we want to whoever want). With that said, we're dealing with narratives and how they relate to (resonate with) other narratives (hyperrealities, hyperstitions), so for the sake of (bad) argument we can say that Felix's parents were kind of Boomers.
Though we shouldn't take this stuff too seriously as we're just having fun, we will get rigorous for a moment - Boomers are people born in America between 1946 to 1964. Felix's parents were born in Europe during the early 1900s and Felix himself was born in 1930. This means none of them are truly boomers (though, as is obvious and as I've written elsewhere Boomer has come to signify certain characteristics). However, Felix did not come into his own as a man, thinker, or author until the peak boomer decade of the 1950s.
In 1948-1949 Guattari begins to feel he no longer wants to study pharmacy, the rather Boomerish field he took up after being pressured by his family. In 51 Felix, getting further into political squabbles and writing essays under a pen name, moves in with his girlfriend, quits pharmacy school, and tries his hand at philosophy. It's at this point, in a very Lacanian sense, Guattari throws off the patriarchal other structuring his desire (daddy's voice says what job Felix should do, who to date, what to believe) and decides to pursue his own desire (Guattari comes into his own enunciation politically, theoretically, and romantically - see Dosse and the 1980 Institutional Intervention from Soft Subversions: Text and Interviews 1977-1985 ed. Genosko).
It is soon after this renunciation of the father that Guattari finds two new daddies - Jean Oury and Jacques Lacan. By 1952 Guattari has already been studying with Jean Oury, head of the La Borde Cinic, who introduced him to Lacan's texts before they were available to the public. In 53 Guattari attends a lecture of Lacan's and gets inspired to write more theoretical work. In 54 Lacan invites Guattari to one of his Lectures. In 55 Guattari begins to work full-time at La Borde, and somewhere between 54 and 56 gets on Lacan's couch as an analysand. Shortly after Guattari enters psychoanalytic training.
In short, by the turn of the decades Guattari is a psychoanalyst (and four years later in 64 he is a founding member of Lacan's Freudian School of Paris...), a turn in the 50s (really 48 to 68) that shows up in the literature as well: The first collection of Guattari's texts (which Deleuze wrote the preface for) originally published in 1972 entitled Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971 begins with - as the name implies - Guattari's early work in the mid 50s.
Thus, it seems that between the cultural resonances of these trends in the 1950s and his parents influences, Felix was exposed to and carried around some of the Boomer virus however latent. But how did the virus manifest you ask? That is the subject of our next section.
...
3: Guattari the Patriarch
Felix was a real big daddy. Instead of wearing New Balance sneakers and getting mad when people touch the thermostat, Felix enacted a strict early bedtime and dominated the household through controlling the kitchen while dominating his colleagues and patients at work. We will discuss home, then work.
Felix's daughter Emmanuelle in her memoir I, Little Asylum (2007 pg. 37-39) presents a series of interesting stories around food and papa Felix. The first is simply entitled The Lemon Yogurts. The story goes like this - Felix and his then wife used to buy "family-sized variety packs of flavored yogurts." No one liked the lemon flavor so they wouldn't get eaten and Felix would "systematically hand them out at the end of meals..." to be eaten. Eat this whether you like it or not!
A few pages later (pg. 41-42) in another simply titled story Regilait Milk, Emmanuelle documents how Felix would make the kids breakfast hot chocolate with powdered milk; powdered milk which Emmanuelle writes "reigned in the pantry," a reigning that seems to have been displaced in the Freudian sense from Felix to the milk. That is, it's likely Felix reigned in the pantry and Emmanuelle felt uncomfortable with this fact and assigned the affect to an inanimate object, the milk. The kids would not drink the milk, however, but instead wait until Felix went into his office before discretely throwing out the milk.
In final food story simply entitled The Meat (pg. 76), Felix's then wife (he went through three or more partners) prepared some awful looking and smelling meat for dinner. The kids say it "smells like shit" and Felix lifts his son up by the collar of shirt and carries him away in a rage.
So Guattari was a kind of strict dad to his kids? But he was also as absent as he was strict. Let's return to Dosse (2011 pg. 65-68) to explore further:
"Félix was a rather absent father who divided his time between La Borde and Paris, where he rented an immense, magnificent apartment...Guattari tried to compensate for his absences by lavishing attention on his children...[but] Félix was authoritarian; he forced six- year- old Bruno to keep a diary, which caused him great consternation— but he had to do what he was told, since his father locked him in the study with a notebook and a pen."
"Félix quickly stopped devoting much time to his children and leaned on his wife. After their breakup, he delegated this responsibility to Bruno, his eldest son. 'I haven’t got the time, you take care of everything.' When their father was at La Borde, the children’s lives were organized on a separate schedule; they ate alone because Guattari worked late and went to bed late..."A break up that led Guattari to become an "impenitent womanizer."
So, big daddy Guatt bosses his kids around like a cafeteria lunch lady, locks his kid in a room and forces him to write like a cruel teacher, and breaks up his family, abandons his kids, spends most of his time at a luxury apartment to himself, and begins sleeping around with women like a chauvinist. This is far from a moralistic leftist (or whatever the opposite of based is).
This showed up outside the house as well. Take La Borde for example. With staff, Guattari - referred to as "God" or "La Borde's Lacan" - was a "rigidly militant" leader who ran "demanding meetings" and enforced strict organizational requirements and work standards; with patients - who loved him - "he was quite authoritarian and especially firm...They were told to get out of their rooms and get involved in some of the scheduled activities.;" and with staff and patients alike Guattari wasn't afraid to use "judo, if necessary, to quell any violent tendencies" (Dosse pg. 46, 57-58).
Not unlike Lacan, a womanizer who it is said not only would emotionally abuse his patients but at time physically slap them (I can't find the source, sue me!), some of these antics extended into Guattari's individual, private practice where he ignored some patients, insulted others, and referred to some as "idiots" (Dosse pg. 74). Take for example the following excerpt from The Anti-Oedipus Papers which are texts pulled from Guattari's journals, notes, and letters during the time of writing Anti-Oedipus with Deleuze:
That is, much like Lacan, Guattari made himself a ruthless father figure at home and in the work place, one who dominated his patients (the example he gives here is of a female...) and his many lovers (and this is without mentioning he makes his first girlfriend type up his essays, and that his third wife was a secretary at La Borde...). Far from woke, Guattari here is a sort of stereotypical patriarch.
...
4: Rhetorical Fascism
From Guattari's latent boomerism follows Guattari's manifest patriarchalism. We could leave it at that or we could be woke and go 'further still' and claim that from Guattari's patriarchalism follows Guattari's fascism. After all, following the contemporary rhetoric, boomers are fascist, and patriarchs are fascist, so it all makes sense, right?
Whether or not I am joking or being sincere here, this is still a fitting place to start because Guattari himself would not be opposed to considering these aspects - what I am here comically referring to as boomerism and patriarchalism - as "microfascisms" present in himself, and ultimately he would agree and disagree with this rhetoric (and whenever one disagrees and agrees - a disjunctive relation of yes and, and, and... as opposed to either/or - we know we are in the appropriate realm of complexity and desire). Yes, these things are fascist, and yes typical leftist social and moral critique are not in any way desirable or effective. Much like Wilhelm Reich - communist psychoanalyst turned anti-communist but still anti-fascist weirdo, author of Mass Psychology of Fascism, etc. - Guattari argues that fascism, though still ultimately 'bad,' is neither something purely external to revolutionary desire, something that occurs by mistake, nor something we're duped into supporting, but something that we want to do because it is on some level desirable. Yes, fascism is harmful. Yes, people still want it.
In fact, in 1973 Guattari gave a lecture for a psychoanalysis and politics conference entitled "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist" (later published in 77 and again in 2009 - see Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977). Here's a few excerpts:
That is, the social (macro) and the individual (micro) are not separate concepts 'bridged' together as Freudomarxist argue, but inseparable investments of the same basic libidinal stuff (different modes). Fascist flows of the Outside get territorialized or captured on the inside, in the form of the superego and the familial relations, and because its all desire and investment, there is some level of wanting fascism.This showed up outside the house as well. Take La Borde for example. With staff, Guattari - referred to as "God" or "La Borde's Lacan" - was a "rigidly militant" leader who ran "demanding meetings" and enforced strict organizational requirements and work standards; with patients - who loved him - "he was quite authoritarian and especially firm...They were told to get out of their rooms and get involved in some of the scheduled activities.;" and with staff and patients alike Guattari wasn't afraid to use "judo, if necessary, to quell any violent tendencies" (Dosse pg. 46, 57-58).
Not unlike Lacan, a womanizer who it is said not only would emotionally abuse his patients but at time physically slap them (I can't find the source, sue me!), some of these antics extended into Guattari's individual, private practice where he ignored some patients, insulted others, and referred to some as "idiots" (Dosse pg. 74). Take for example the following excerpt from The Anti-Oedipus Papers which are texts pulled from Guattari's journals, notes, and letters during the time of writing Anti-Oedipus with Deleuze:
"Schizo-analysis tends to make the neurotic break his moorings...sometimes with aI don't introduce this to in any way morally critique Guattari. Many analysts including myself often feel this way with patients and I have personally executed similar interventions when I feel bored (except I am a bit more playful...). In psychoanalytic training, analysts learn to monitor their transference and counter transference situation (how the patient feels about the therapist and how the therapist feels in relation to that), and it is acknowledged that an analyst has to 'want to' work with an analysand (or at least get curious about what gets in the way of doing so). What is important to note here is that Guattari, like Lacan, did not see himself bound by any sort of moral restrictions when it came to helping people get in touch with how to live life. Guattari acted in accordance with his own desire to model for others how they could to. I think that's pretty - ergh - 'based.'
brutality you can't imagine. 'Don't get me wrong—I'm not your father, or your mother...
fuck off!' ... Short sequence: a woman-doctor is annoying me telling me her life story in great and gory detail: it's like a novel! I'm bored, so I get a book and read it under her nose... Next session, she's flabbergasted: 'It's true, it's stupid, I talk... like a book...' And she tells me...[some stuff that interests Guattari about literature...]...Okay, I'm interested—now we can talk! I can get something out of this for my own (perverse) pleasure."
That is, much like Lacan, Guattari made himself a ruthless father figure at home and in the work place, one who dominated his patients (the example he gives here is of a female...) and his many lovers (and this is without mentioning he makes his first girlfriend type up his essays, and that his third wife was a secretary at La Borde...). Far from woke, Guattari here is a sort of stereotypical patriarch.
...
4: Rhetorical Fascism
From Guattari's latent boomerism follows Guattari's manifest patriarchalism. We could leave it at that or we could be woke and go 'further still' and claim that from Guattari's patriarchalism follows Guattari's fascism. After all, following the contemporary rhetoric, boomers are fascist, and patriarchs are fascist, so it all makes sense, right?
Whether or not I am joking or being sincere here, this is still a fitting place to start because Guattari himself would not be opposed to considering these aspects - what I am here comically referring to as boomerism and patriarchalism - as "microfascisms" present in himself, and ultimately he would agree and disagree with this rhetoric (and whenever one disagrees and agrees - a disjunctive relation of yes and, and, and... as opposed to either/or - we know we are in the appropriate realm of complexity and desire). Yes, these things are fascist, and yes typical leftist social and moral critique are not in any way desirable or effective. Much like Wilhelm Reich - communist psychoanalyst turned anti-communist but still anti-fascist weirdo, author of Mass Psychology of Fascism, etc. - Guattari argues that fascism, though still ultimately 'bad,' is neither something purely external to revolutionary desire, something that occurs by mistake, nor something we're duped into supporting, but something that we want to do because it is on some level desirable. Yes, fascism is harmful. Yes, people still want it.
In fact, in 1973 Guattari gave a lecture for a psychoanalysis and politics conference entitled "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist" (later published in 77 and again in 2009 - see Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977). Here's a few excerpts:
"The despotism which exists in...family relationships arises from the same kind of libidinal disposition that exists in the broadest social field..." (pg. 156).
"what fascism set in motion yesterday continues to proliferate in other forms...A whole totalitarian chemistry manipulates the structures of...institutional and family structures...inasmuch as one can speak of a sort of fascism of the superego in situations of guilt and neurosis" (pg. 163).
"a slow burning fascism in familialism" (pg. 171).
Guattari expands on this in the later part of the lecture when he outlines simply that Hitler (and therefore Hitler's mode of fascism) came to power because the left did not do a good job presenting appealing alternatives (and continues to fail in this way) to the dark pull fascism has on desire (and here he explicitly agrees with and cites Reich pg. 167-168), and that Hitler's fascism resonated with some of what the masses wanted; he was a "plebeian" military veteran with a "paranoiac energy" that preyed on Germany's post-WWI anger and a "shopkeepers opportunism" that allowed him to make financial gains and connections without being off-putting to the financial heavyweight's authorities (pg. 165-166). Guattari continues that the historical and social master narratives around WWII have convinced us that a monolithic fascism has been defeated by the good guys, but Guattari - not unlike Zizek in this way - argues that an ideology that presents itself as dead is more alive than ever, now merely transformed into a malleable, decentralized, unconscious semi-liquid state that "passes through the tightest mesh" (pg. 171).
More than Zizek, this reminds me personally of the CCRU and Nick Land - which we will cover more extensively in the section after the next - in their use of themes such as liquid, goo, generalization, meshing, flux, diagrams, hyperrealites, etc. to capture the amorphous aspects of deterritorialization and the breakdown between inside and outside, object and subject, true and false, fiction and reality, speaking-writing and doing, etc. To this effect, Guattari, not unlike Nick Land's Making it With Death (which I cover here), says in his lecture:
"All fascist meanings stem out of a composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one. Hitler and the Nazis were fighting for death, right up to and including the death of Germany..." (pg. 168-169).That is, fascism per the Nazis is still something people want or desire even its simply the investment of desire in wiping out any future desire. Like many things in life, people sometimes want that which would in the future preclude them being able to want anything else (the anthropomorphic aspect of the death drive).
But back to our point - to nail home his argument, Guattari ends his lecture by reminding the audience that claiming fascism is over and will not return is foolish. He continues:
"Fascism...passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micropolitical economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone's desire. We must stop, once and for all, being misled by the sinister buffooneries of those socio-democrats who are so astonished that their army, allegedly the most democratic in the world, launches, without notice, the worst fascist repressions...Fascism, like desire, is scatted everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationship of force. it can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak..." (pg. 170-171).You get the idea.
However, years later in his 1975 Schizo Culture "Molecular Revolutions and Q&A" Guattari, after outlining much of what we covered above, had this to say about fascism:
"I put all these struggles under the term 'microfascist,' although I don't particularly like it. I use it simply because it startles and annoys people" (Schizo Culture: The Event, 2013 pg. 186-187).Guattari purposely provokes by using the term fascism? Is this not that which is discretely at work in many contemporary critics who polemically refer to something as 'fascist?' Here, Guattari is able to engage in his rhetoric, saying this or that is fascist, only to be self aware enough to understand he is playing a provocative language game. But perhaps this is just another microfascism of Guattai's. Let's say it is, and that from his boomerism follows his patriarchalism, and from his patriarchalism follows his microfascism - then what follows from his microfascism? His love for Japan - his weeabooism.
...
5: Guattari the Weeb
Guattari visited Japan 18 times between 1983 and 1992 (Dosee 2011 pg. 482-483). A 2015 text entitled Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan collects the texts produced during or from these visits. Despite what this and my title implies, Guattari wasn't really a weeb. I admit to using the term in the same manner as Guattari used the term fascist (as covered above), that is, to provoke a response.
In fact, Guattari called "cute culture (kawaii)" and "the reading'drug of Manga comics" hysterical, "puerile" capitalist pollution (ibid pg. 14). No, not a weeb. His passion for Japan is much more interesting than that.
Let's take a look at Guattari and Japan across his later career and synthesize and extrapolate the main points at the end.
In an essay from around 1980 ('Tokyo the Proud' ibid) Guattari writes:
"All the trends of the West have arrived on the shores [of Japan] without resistance. But the...'spirit of capitalism' has never managed to swamp them. Might Japanese capitalism be a mutation resulting from the monstrous crossing of animist powers inherited from feudalism...and the machinic powers of modernity...? ...where inside and outside no longer maintain the mutually exclusive relationship of opposition to which Westerners are accustomed...(pg. 14)..."Tokyo in many ways reveals its ancient existential territories and ancestral affinities between microcosm and macrocosm" (pg. 15)In 1983 Guattari, responding to a survey, writes "I'm just back from Japan" before going on to imply that Utopian cities of the future will be very much like Japanese cities ('Utopia Today' in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985, 2009 pg. 307).
In a 1984 interview 'Machinic Junkies' Guattari similarly says
"the Japanese make the best of ...a pseudo-archaic structure...they have remade a feudal territoriality out of their traditions...it works! The Japanese structure their universe and order their emotions within the proliferation and disorder of machines, while hanging on to their archaic references" (ibid pg. 158).In a 1985 interview 'So What' Guattari reiterates these points
"...the hypermodern cocktail, the high-tech current, and the return of archaic structures found there are fascinating..." (ibid pg. 79)In another 1985 interview 'Institutional Practice and Politics' Guattari stated:
"Two countries came out of the Second World War completely destroyed: Germany and Japan. From that two economic 'miracles' resulted...And, paradoxically, these countries had practically no raw materials or capital reserves. But they reconstituted a prodigious 'capital of subjectivity'...they invented new types of subjectivity out of that same devastation. The Japanese in particular recovered archaic elements of their subjectivity and converted them into the most 'advanced' forms of social and material production." (The Guattari Reader 1996 pg 129-130)In Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989 - I am using the 2013 version), Guattari's third to last book, Guattari viewed Japan and California as two poles that arched around the globe and upon meeting connected together 'the loop of the Capitalist system' (pg. 14).
A page earlier he writes
"Look closely at Japan, the model of models for new capitalist subjectivities! It has never been emphasized enough that one of the essential ingredients of the miracle cocktail that it presents to visitors consists in the fact that collective subjectivity, which is massively produced there, associates the most 'hi-tech' components with archaisms inherited from the depths of the past" (pg. 13).As Dosse (2011) points out, Guattari, in his other 1989 book The Three Ecologies which was originally a part of Schizoanalytic Cartographies until Virilio encouraged him to publish it a separate text, Guattari was
"fascinated with Japan, because that country was able to 'graft high- end industries on a collective subjectivity that remained tied to the past, and occasionally to the very distant past (going back to Shinto- Buddhism in Japan) [pg. 63 in ...Ecologies]' " (pg. 392).What's it all mean? Before unpacking dense theory with more theory let's connect this to an experiential register. My partner recently visited Japan. To both of our interests, she reported to me via phone the experience of walking by a one story traditional temple surrounded by towering skyscrapers or, in a more synthesized fashion, how one could find many towering skyscrapers designed to share appearances with traditional temples. She also described firsthand what are now the stereotypes of Japanese industry: big business moguls in suits manically fiddling with their Iphones one second - most likely engaging in the world market, making high profile electronic moves, etc., i.e. the new god of technocapitalism - and doing corporate sponsored Yoga and worshiping the old God's the next. That is, ancient tradition coexists with future tech. Neither dominates (overcodes, to use D and G's concept) the other.
But it doesn't take a trip to Japan to know this. It's always been a trope in videogames and animated television programs where future sci-fi characters resemble updated and enhanced ancient figures, being often equipped with both future technology and archaic weaponry and armor (the Jedi Knight of the Star Wars universe is a western version of this; also see Genji from the videogame Overwatch who is a robotic Japanese Ninja with a future katana or the Gundam suits in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, a Japanese TV series popular enough to warrant a 65 foot tall Gundam statue in Japan. One can also simply google 'future Ninja' or 'Future Samurai.' These kinds of tropes mirror the West's interest in future cowboys. In a register of realism, a future soldier would have no need for a katana, but in the realm of fantasy, the creator is toying with the idea of what the past would look like when projected into the high tech future...).
Now for theory. True Guattari and Deleuze readers will notice in these Guattari excerpts a familiar concept from another Eastern land discussed in an even earlier D and G text - Marx's Asiatic production in Anti-Oedipus. As I wrote in the next to last section of my China: Memories from the Future (which I have annotated here):
"...some excerpts I've pulled from AO [concerning Asiatic Production - see the section 4 of Chapter 6 The Barbarian Despotic Machine'] and rearranged as I see fit:
'...Marx defines Asiatic production: a higher unity of the State establishes itself on the foundations of the primitive rural communities, which keep their ownership of the soil, while the State becomes the true owner...[of] the surplus product to the State....'
'...rural communities subsist...but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the State machine...[they] retain at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the former regime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that appropriates surplus value. The old inscription remains, but is bricked over by and in the inscription of the State...territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely allied with the new alliance...'
'The despotic State, such as it appears in the purest conditions of 'Asiatic' production...replaces the territorial machine, it forms a new deterritoiialized full body; on the other hand it maintains the old territorialities, integrates them as parts or organs of production in the new machine. It is perfected all at once because it functions on the basis of dispersed rural communities...a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new...the State...appropriates all the forces and agents of production; but...allows the old territorial inscriptions to subsist, as "bricks" on the new surface...Scattered partial objects hanging on the body without organs'In short, when an old system of social organization is 'replaced' by a new one, it's not really replaced...negated...(as in vulgar dialectics) etc.,..rather the two (or more) modes coexist in a synthetic and conjunctive fashion that produces something new (disjunctive synthesis).
...the old barbarous ways "haunt" the new (unintentionally anticipating Fisher's hauntology of lost futures). The old is broken down into parts wherein new relationships are made between the part and the new entity organizing the parts into a whole, with the new whole appropriating the surplus produced by the parts (a precursor to Nick Land's work on templexive loops - what came first, the chicken [the state] or the egg [the BwO]). "
So, Guattari adored Japan for its ability to engage in disjunctive / connective synthesis (and / or, or, or - schizo logic) that integrates deep past with distant future as opposed to 'mutual exclusive' logic (either / or - oedipal logic) that commits to traditionalism or futurism.
This makes this author ponder three questions; 1: Generally, what does Guattari's love of Japan say about him? 2: If we allow ourselves to be more speculative - could it be Guattari also secretly (or unconsciously) liked Japan for another reason than the one given? 3: And what if that reason was, to use contemporary polemics, fascism? When Guattari reminds us that 'everybody wants to be a fascist,' does this not include himself and his own microfascisms he spoke of?
Perhaps. But how is Japan fascist you say? It's not really, but if we had to make the (weak) argument we would remind the reader that Japan kept their borders closed to the outsides from 1635 to 1850 in order to preserve national and traditional customs - a move that by then standards would be considered a nationalist position and by today's standards a hard xenophobic or racist one - where it then embraced "nationalism...or...fascism" in the1860s which, due to geopolitical reasons, subsequently grew in intensity in the 1920s and 1930s ultimately culminating in that whole allying with Nazi Germany thing in 1940. It's not looking goof for Japan. In fact, this short open educational resource website on the 'history of fascism in Japan' indicates that this lasted up until 1989, and it is my opinion that, based on the difficulties inherent to the process of applying to live in Japan, this isolationist approach has somewhat remained consistent to this day (though I have no way of verifying the truthfulness of the first source here, what is important is not the facts themselves but the fact that the narratives around Japan are epistemologically associated with fascism).
So Guattari's favorite place to talk about and visit (next to Brasil who has their own history around fascism) is a fascist, nationalist, xenophobic, imperial island that finds a way to incorporate its deep traditionalist past with a yet to be technocapitalist realized future? Far from woke. In fact, Guattari's interest in Japan seems to mirror an unlikely unwoke theorists' interests - Nick Land.
Hyperstition, coined by Nick Land with the CCRU, is when a fiction makes itself real, or a coincident intensifier. So here's a neat coincidence. Nick Land was recently discussing Japan (Kantbot's Tekwar episode)!
"...basically Japan has extremely uncomplicated ethnic identity. And they know that...Japan doesn't have 'We Stand' ...'[we're Japanese] and we're running Japan' and the Japanese agree and think that's a good thing."In short, as Nick goes on to explain, the Japanese are concordant with themselves and find suitable their own cultural values which means the Japanese don't need strange, ideological maneuvers to organize into social groups or engage in needless social tensions.
Here, not only do Guattari and Land share an appreciation for Japan's social organization, but what is more, Guattari's love of Japan mirror Land's interest in China (I wouldn't say Land 'loves' China) on a general and specific level: Guattari's interest in Japan's ability to integrate its deep traditional past with with distant future tech is precisely the notion of ancient myth (demons, magic, rituals) being reinvigorated by future tech (simulation, implants, meshings, meltdowns, etc.) that Land explores in the early CCRU work where characters encounter 'Old One's or ancient unnameable demonic and alien forces through engaging with technology that catapults them years beyond their comprehension.
In light of this, and in part in response to the Deleuze-Land literature which, like all other Deleuze litearture, leaves out or ignores Guattari, we will explore in our next chapter the strange crossovers between Guattari in Land.
...
6: The Nick Land Refrain
Land finished his Phd thesis in 1987, wrote several essays, and published his first and only full book in 1992. Fanged Noumena, his collected essays, covers 87-2007. The CCRU Writings covers 97 to 2003. In short, Land is very active from 87 to 2003.
Deleuze published five texts most of which have little to do with Landian concepts (his book on Foucault, his book on Leibniz [which inspired Fisher and his Fatlines Constructs thesis, a founding part of the CCRU theory], his dialogues with Chatelet, and Essays Critical and Clinical) between 86 and 93 before dying in 95.
Deleuze and Guattari published several small books in the 80s which were compiled into the English translation of A Thousand Plateaus which was published the same year Land finished his thesis, 1987. D and G publish their last book together What Is Philosophy? in 1991, a year before Land's first book.
Guattari published three books during the time Land was writing essays - Schizoanalytic Cartographies and The Three Ecologies (which as we mentioned was originally part of Schizoanalytic Cartographies) in 1989, and Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm in 1992, right before his death.
In short, Deleuze, Guattari, and Land were all quite intellectually active during the same time, mainly between 87 and 92. It's a cool fanboy thought to think that not only was Land reading these texts, but both Deleuze and Guattari could have - theoretically at least - read Land's first book and many of his essays.
So, Felix Guattari died in 1992. In 1993, Nick Land begins his essay Making it With Death with
Later in the same essay Land accuses Guattari of being indoctrinated by his analyst Lacan, and rightfully credits Guattari with "the supposed anti-Freudianism of" Anti-Oedipus. Though this is somewhat true given Guattari is indeed the one who brings the actual knowledge of psychoanalysis to the duo, it is also misleading as Guattari throughout his career up until his death not only displayed an excellent understanding and affinity for Freudian psychoanalysis, often having nice things to say about it, but also performed classical Freudian analysis with many of his patients up until his death. Though, of course, it is not Land's objective to delve into Guattari, nor is it his goal or obligation to provide a nuanced understanding of him.
In short, Land doesn't have much love for Guattari, writing him off much like Murphy does. However, this doesn't stop the two thinkers - Land and Guattari - from being meaningfully similar in their use of concepts and at times style. Here's why this is the case in one overarching generalization followed by five propositions and a bunch of evidence;
Overarching generalization:
1 - Acceleration not Dialectics: Guattari not Deleuze is the one who introduces the idea of 'accelerating the process' into the discourse. As evident in The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) - a collection of Felix Guattari's notes and letters while working with Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus - and as Txgen Meyers points out in her 2019 'Thirst for Acceleration' (pg. 35-37), as early as 1969 Guattari is reading the work of scientists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Steingers who write of "dissipating processes." In fact, the word 'process' appears on nearly every page of Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers, often paired with "deterritorialization."
In these moments Guattari never endorses any notions of slowing down the process of deterritorialization, but often talks about 'needing to go further,' (he even uses the phrase 'go further still' in another context) a fact that is consistent with Guattari's general oeuvre both pre and post Schizophrenia and Capitalism project which can be summed vulgarly as 'don't make yourself a neurotic and reground your crazy thoughts in mommy and daddy, follow the line of flight and see where it goes.' For example, on pg. 39 of the Anti-Oedipus Papers Guattari writes "we have to consider 'philosophies of the void'...as perverse attempts to 'catch up with the process'," i.e., one enters unknown territories - perhaps even nihilistic ones - to catch up with outside real forces, a wording that indicates the process moves faster than the subject and that the subject may be lost altogether (though, Txgen does note that Guattari was never for unconditional acceleration. For Guattari accelerating was a way of using disorder to create new orders, or using order to facilitate disorder, not to get to complete disorder. In this way she is right in saying Land and Guattari differ importantly). An obsolete human subjectivity giving way to the process-void? Sounds familiar...
Though we do not see the exact quote from Anti-Oedipus, the one at the core of accelerationism so often used by Land - '...to go further still...to accelerate the process,' etc., - present in Guattari's notebooks, given the above evidence, and considering the sheer amount of writing Guattari actually did for Anti-Oedipus, it seems probable that Guattari, not Deleuze, wrote the now famous accelerationist line (though, even with this knowledge it would still be easy to incorrectly credit the phrase as it appears in Anti-Oedipus to Deleuze given its Nietzschean spin. Luckily for my argument, Guattari spends several pages throughout the Anti-Oedipus Papers engaging with Nietzsche. In other words, Guattari was familiar with Nietzsche, Nietzsche doesn't equate to 'Deleuze wrote this').
In sum, what has become the 'motto' or 'slogan,' as Land comments in his New Center for Research class, for accelerationism is, for the most part, written by Guattari. Instead of turning back, negating, critiquing with impotent language or representation, Guattari suggests we push forward, to do more. For Guattari, turning back has always been to turn to the side of molar institutions, the state, oppression, oedipal neurosis, etc. To accelerate is to schizophrenize, to fragmentize, etc. In this sense, Guattari would agree with Land's polemic 'Hegel is brain cancer.' But what to do if not linguistic, dialectical critique? Diagrams.
2 - Diagrammatics not Signification: Guattari not Deleuze is the one who conceptualizes Diagrammatics (the "Diagram" entry in The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionay [2014 pg. 87] states that the diagram first appeared in Guattari's solo works in the 1970s, then in A Thousand Plateaus). A diagram is an asignifying model of experiencing the world through action, particles, fragments, etc. (machinations) as opposed to signs, signifiers, subjects, and whole objects (representations). This is how schizo's operate - the word on the level of thing; a schizo says the word 'rock' and feels his body becoming heavy and cold. Language and the real are not split. Form and content collapse. As D and G put it, an atom crashes into a letter. Feedback takes off. Intensities wash over the body that is not yet divided and compartmentalized into whole objects. etc. etc.
We are sure this is Guattari not only because this is a kind of modified early Freudianism of which Guattari would have had more knowledge and interest in than Deleuze, but because the notion of a 'diagram' comes from Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of pragmatism whom Guattari read and cited often as early as 69. In much of G's solo work, pragmatics has an important function, and in The Geology of Morals plateau of A Thousand Plateaus it is used a synonym for "rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics" (pg. 43) which are, for the most part, Guattari's concepts and interests which can be traced to his solo work.
Part of this diagrammatic model is the assemblage of enunciation, i.e. the singularity effect created when disparate and heterogeneous materials from varying registers are brought together to create something that feedbacks into itself, and Guattari's molecular approach wherein proper names assigned to singularities or assemblages of enunciation are events that produce effects and charge vectors like in Chemistry, not signs labeling objects. We will come back to this in full shortly. For now, the take away is that with diagrammatics divisions between registers blur and collapse.
2, 3, and 4 - Diagramamtics, Theoryfiction not Theory, Hyperreality not Realism: Guattari not Deleuze writes in an unwieldy, crazy jargon that is oft compared to science fiction by Guattari scholars in order to induce new thought in the reader and write-to-create as opposed to write-to-signify; Guattari not Deleuze is the one who reads science fiction and writes a science fiction screenplay focusing on applying theory to fictional concepts of aliens and technology (A Love of UIQ); Again, this is a model in which realities are produced and created through fictional musings, acts, gestures, the synthesis of heterogeneous materials from varying registers, and the invention of new words and languages that refer to new creations and future realities that resonate together as opposed to signs that split, divide, and refer back to old objects. This is at the very least a theory fictional method, and at its most generous simply Theoryfiction or Hyperstition.
2, 3, 4, and 5 - Diagramamtics, Theoryfiction, Hyperreality, Exit not Voice: Guattari not Deleuze, in line with the above diagramamtics, theoryfiction, and hyperreality, writes about the need to "exit language," the need to escape molar identities and institutions, and the futility of impotent, plain speech that appeals to representation or others.
This shows up in Deleuze and Guattari's final book together, What is Philosophy? which, so the literature says, is most likely a Deleuze book that D slapped G's name on out of kindness:
We've opened a lot of lines of flight above. Now we need to connect them. 1 stands sort of on its own, but 2,3,4, and 5 are interconnected and require more explication. Consider the following.
In his last book, a short and very readable text entitled Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992), Guattari aims to replace ontological models of right/wrong, truth/false, reality/fiction, real/representation with a model where a multiplicity of 'aesthetic' experiences of life would determine the favorable way to live. The ambiguities and complexities of this model can be expanded elsewhere, but what is important for right now is that creativity and subjective experience of imperceptible and strange inhuman realities are privileged over the notion of a subject that experiences an objective world, and that these events are experienced through images and feelings.
In the book that came prior to Chaosmosis, a long unreadable text entitled Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari lays much of the groundwork for this model. This is a book full of literal diagrams, and impenetrable prose that touches upon such themes as the irreversible and asymmetric nature of time, "abstract viruses," "ontology of modules," and how the subject is formed from "pre personal" and "nonhuman" forces.
Though it is too dense to fully engage with here, it may be helpful to provide a few excerpts:
Here, we see Guattari values fictional resonances of the outside and inhuman. This explains his hatred for language. Who needs a language when you're up to this crazy stuff all time? You need a diagram.
In Maurizio Lazzarato's 2014 book on Guattari entitled Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, the aesthetic function introduced in Chaosmosis is defined as a tool that helps a subject conceptualize and create a reality through images and words that act like diagrams or images that translate information to induce action (pg. 213).
A few excerpts:
Though we have shown here and there how this connects to some of Land's proclamations - accelerate the process, Hegel is brain cancer, Exit not voice - we have neglected the most straight forward and important connection that underlies all this above work - hyperstition.
Hyperstition, a kind of theoryfiction concept coined by the CCRU, is a fiction that makes itself real, a coincidence intensifier, a numerical and cultural resonator, etc., that acts by diagrammatic force and therefore meshes with the real.
Just like Guattari's diagramamtics that mesh directly with the real, the diagrammatic hyperstitions of the CCRU
"If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo Kantianism that counts as philosophy in France today, it is necessary to re-assemble and deepen his genealogy...Deleuze's power stems from the fact that he succeeds in detaching himself from Parisian temporality much more successfully than most of his contemporaries, including even Guattari [italics mine]. The time of Deleuze's text is a colder, more reptilian, more German time...the anti-German Germans of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche..."In addition to this seeming to be the same prompt for Murphy's Based Deleuze - i.e. to expand Deleuze past basic left leaning French philosophy and reconnect him with deeper, colder, and harder concepts - this introduction of Land's gives us some information about how Land feels about Guattari: not unlike Murphy's juxtaposition, Guattari was 'an inane, liberal French intellectual' caught up in the plebeian trends as compared to Deleuze's cold, novel, rigor.
Later in the same essay Land accuses Guattari of being indoctrinated by his analyst Lacan, and rightfully credits Guattari with "the supposed anti-Freudianism of" Anti-Oedipus. Though this is somewhat true given Guattari is indeed the one who brings the actual knowledge of psychoanalysis to the duo, it is also misleading as Guattari throughout his career up until his death not only displayed an excellent understanding and affinity for Freudian psychoanalysis, often having nice things to say about it, but also performed classical Freudian analysis with many of his patients up until his death. Though, of course, it is not Land's objective to delve into Guattari, nor is it his goal or obligation to provide a nuanced understanding of him.
In short, Land doesn't have much love for Guattari, writing him off much like Murphy does. However, this doesn't stop the two thinkers - Land and Guattari - from being meaningfully similar in their use of concepts and at times style. Here's why this is the case in one overarching generalization followed by five propositions and a bunch of evidence;
Overarching generalization:
The majority of concepts in both Capitalism and Schizophrenia project books are Guattari's concepts, not Deleuze's, and furthermore, the majority of the concepts Land pulls from D and G fall on the 'G' side of things.The following five propositions refer to Guattari's concepts that are shared with Deleuze but not primarily from Deleuze and are shared with Land:
1. Acceleration not DialecticsEvidence:
2. Diagrammatics not Signification
3. Theoryfiction not Theory
4. Hyperreality not Realism
5. Exit not voice.
1 - Acceleration not Dialectics: Guattari not Deleuze is the one who introduces the idea of 'accelerating the process' into the discourse. As evident in The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) - a collection of Felix Guattari's notes and letters while working with Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus - and as Txgen Meyers points out in her 2019 'Thirst for Acceleration' (pg. 35-37), as early as 1969 Guattari is reading the work of scientists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Steingers who write of "dissipating processes." In fact, the word 'process' appears on nearly every page of Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers, often paired with "deterritorialization."
In these moments Guattari never endorses any notions of slowing down the process of deterritorialization, but often talks about 'needing to go further,' (he even uses the phrase 'go further still' in another context) a fact that is consistent with Guattari's general oeuvre both pre and post Schizophrenia and Capitalism project which can be summed vulgarly as 'don't make yourself a neurotic and reground your crazy thoughts in mommy and daddy, follow the line of flight and see where it goes.' For example, on pg. 39 of the Anti-Oedipus Papers Guattari writes "we have to consider 'philosophies of the void'...as perverse attempts to 'catch up with the process'," i.e., one enters unknown territories - perhaps even nihilistic ones - to catch up with outside real forces, a wording that indicates the process moves faster than the subject and that the subject may be lost altogether (though, Txgen does note that Guattari was never for unconditional acceleration. For Guattari accelerating was a way of using disorder to create new orders, or using order to facilitate disorder, not to get to complete disorder. In this way she is right in saying Land and Guattari differ importantly). An obsolete human subjectivity giving way to the process-void? Sounds familiar...
Though we do not see the exact quote from Anti-Oedipus, the one at the core of accelerationism so often used by Land - '...to go further still...to accelerate the process,' etc., - present in Guattari's notebooks, given the above evidence, and considering the sheer amount of writing Guattari actually did for Anti-Oedipus, it seems probable that Guattari, not Deleuze, wrote the now famous accelerationist line (though, even with this knowledge it would still be easy to incorrectly credit the phrase as it appears in Anti-Oedipus to Deleuze given its Nietzschean spin. Luckily for my argument, Guattari spends several pages throughout the Anti-Oedipus Papers engaging with Nietzsche. In other words, Guattari was familiar with Nietzsche, Nietzsche doesn't equate to 'Deleuze wrote this').
In sum, what has become the 'motto' or 'slogan,' as Land comments in his New Center for Research class, for accelerationism is, for the most part, written by Guattari. Instead of turning back, negating, critiquing with impotent language or representation, Guattari suggests we push forward, to do more. For Guattari, turning back has always been to turn to the side of molar institutions, the state, oppression, oedipal neurosis, etc. To accelerate is to schizophrenize, to fragmentize, etc. In this sense, Guattari would agree with Land's polemic 'Hegel is brain cancer.' But what to do if not linguistic, dialectical critique? Diagrams.
2 - Diagrammatics not Signification: Guattari not Deleuze is the one who conceptualizes Diagrammatics (the "Diagram" entry in The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionay [2014 pg. 87] states that the diagram first appeared in Guattari's solo works in the 1970s, then in A Thousand Plateaus). A diagram is an asignifying model of experiencing the world through action, particles, fragments, etc. (machinations) as opposed to signs, signifiers, subjects, and whole objects (representations). This is how schizo's operate - the word on the level of thing; a schizo says the word 'rock' and feels his body becoming heavy and cold. Language and the real are not split. Form and content collapse. As D and G put it, an atom crashes into a letter. Feedback takes off. Intensities wash over the body that is not yet divided and compartmentalized into whole objects. etc. etc.
We are sure this is Guattari not only because this is a kind of modified early Freudianism of which Guattari would have had more knowledge and interest in than Deleuze, but because the notion of a 'diagram' comes from Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of pragmatism whom Guattari read and cited often as early as 69. In much of G's solo work, pragmatics has an important function, and in The Geology of Morals plateau of A Thousand Plateaus it is used a synonym for "rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics" (pg. 43) which are, for the most part, Guattari's concepts and interests which can be traced to his solo work.
Part of this diagrammatic model is the assemblage of enunciation, i.e. the singularity effect created when disparate and heterogeneous materials from varying registers are brought together to create something that feedbacks into itself, and Guattari's molecular approach wherein proper names assigned to singularities or assemblages of enunciation are events that produce effects and charge vectors like in Chemistry, not signs labeling objects. We will come back to this in full shortly. For now, the take away is that with diagrammatics divisions between registers blur and collapse.
2, 3, and 4 - Diagramamtics, Theoryfiction not Theory, Hyperreality not Realism: Guattari not Deleuze writes in an unwieldy, crazy jargon that is oft compared to science fiction by Guattari scholars in order to induce new thought in the reader and write-to-create as opposed to write-to-signify; Guattari not Deleuze is the one who reads science fiction and writes a science fiction screenplay focusing on applying theory to fictional concepts of aliens and technology (A Love of UIQ); Again, this is a model in which realities are produced and created through fictional musings, acts, gestures, the synthesis of heterogeneous materials from varying registers, and the invention of new words and languages that refer to new creations and future realities that resonate together as opposed to signs that split, divide, and refer back to old objects. This is at the very least a theory fictional method, and at its most generous simply Theoryfiction or Hyperstition.
2, 3, 4, and 5 - Diagramamtics, Theoryfiction, Hyperreality, Exit not Voice: Guattari not Deleuze, in line with the above diagramamtics, theoryfiction, and hyperreality, writes about the need to "exit language," the need to escape molar identities and institutions, and the futility of impotent, plain speech that appeals to representation or others.
This shows up in Deleuze and Guattari's final book together, What is Philosophy? which, so the literature says, is most likely a Deleuze book that D slapped G's name on out of kindness:
“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.."If any D and G quote encapsulates Nick Land's "exit, not voice" present in his conceptualization of Patchwork, it's this one. Even if it is really a Deleuze quote, its a notion Guattari explicitly shares and that Deleuze may have conceptualized with Guattari in mind.
We've opened a lot of lines of flight above. Now we need to connect them. 1 stands sort of on its own, but 2,3,4, and 5 are interconnected and require more explication. Consider the following.
In his last book, a short and very readable text entitled Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992), Guattari aims to replace ontological models of right/wrong, truth/false, reality/fiction, real/representation with a model where a multiplicity of 'aesthetic' experiences of life would determine the favorable way to live. The ambiguities and complexities of this model can be expanded elsewhere, but what is important for right now is that creativity and subjective experience of imperceptible and strange inhuman realities are privileged over the notion of a subject that experiences an objective world, and that these events are experienced through images and feelings.
In the book that came prior to Chaosmosis, a long unreadable text entitled Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari lays much of the groundwork for this model. This is a book full of literal diagrams, and impenetrable prose that touches upon such themes as the irreversible and asymmetric nature of time, "abstract viruses," "ontology of modules," and how the subject is formed from "pre personal" and "nonhuman" forces.
Though it is too dense to fully engage with here, it may be helpful to provide a few excerpts:
"formalism meshes directly with the realities of reference (diagrammatism)...(one need only think of the use of bank cards which trigger the physical effect of distributing money..." (pg. 88-89).Later, speaking on Jean Genet's comment that "dreaming also belongs to the real world. Dreams are realities" - a beautiful hyperreal notion, we should add - Guattari says
"diagrammatic function f(diag)...meshes directly with material flows" (pg. 168).
"It is clear...Genet never passed through the famous stages of development and adaption to the real...linked together through...Oedipus...for him, everything functioned at the same time..."This, what he refers to as "Genet's madness," Guattari argues we must
"orient ourselves towards...something that would order the real, the imagination and creation differently. Something that would not make them seperate instances but would...engender each other. An imaginary-symbolic producing new realities" (pg. 218).Similarly, in place of Freud's analyses which are based on old positivist distinctions between real and represented, Guattari analyses focus on "picking out parallel and intersecting lines of sense" that culminate in "Constellations of Universes of reference" (pg. 196).
Here, we see Guattari values fictional resonances of the outside and inhuman. This explains his hatred for language. Who needs a language when you're up to this crazy stuff all time? You need a diagram.
In Maurizio Lazzarato's 2014 book on Guattari entitled Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, the aesthetic function introduced in Chaosmosis is defined as a tool that helps a subject conceptualize and create a reality through images and words that act like diagrams or images that translate information to induce action (pg. 213).
A few excerpts:
"Guattari calls the operations of asignifying semiotics 'diagrammatic' ... taken from Peirce's categories...images and diagrams...functions are operational rather than representational..." (pg. 86).As Lazzarato points out, for Guattari, an aesthetic experience with diagrammatic functions gets one away from the "impotentized signs" of language to a new model that actually produces effects - or what Guattari refers to as "exiting language" (pg. 84). Lazzarato ends his book discussing parrhesia - a concept that seems dear to Murphy's heart - as a diagrammatic practice of using language without a regard for others' signifying reception to convey aesthetic truths that induce real effects, or what Guattari refers to as "exiting language" (pg. 233). Exiting Language appears as early as 1979 in Chapter 2 of The Machinic Unconscious: Essays In Schizoanalysis which is entitled "Escaping Language" according to Taylor Adkins' translation (with the first section of the chapter is "The Wastebasket of Pragmatics") though is translated as "exiting language" elsewhere (Dosse 2011 pg. 233). When this is coupled with Guattari's theories of signification, gesture, and enunciation - all which look to move speech away from impotent representation towards creating effects, we see that Guattari would tentatively agree with Land's proclamation at the beginning of The Dark Enlightenment, "exit, not voice."
"diagrams...break through what Guattari calls the 'ontological iron curtain,' seperating words and things, subjects and objects. Unlike language, the diagram operates a machinic, and non-signifying, translatability...the imagining of new scenarios, new possibilities..." (pg. 87).
"...diagrammatic pragmatics...asignifying semiotics work like a 'material' cog in humans-machines..." (pg. 115).
"Money...which in its specific function, diagrammatic, asignifying, has no use for subjects or objects, persons or things" (pg. 123).
"diagrammatics...moves away from classical humanist ideals...abandon the anthropological and humanist perspective..." (pg. 138).
"discourses, signs, and concepts must function as access point sto new worlds, as the 'diagrammatic initiator'" of action...in schizoanalysis....acts secretes its own reference..." (pg. 214).
Though we have shown here and there how this connects to some of Land's proclamations - accelerate the process, Hegel is brain cancer, Exit not voice - we have neglected the most straight forward and important connection that underlies all this above work - hyperstition.
Hyperstition, a kind of theoryfiction concept coined by the CCRU, is a fiction that makes itself real, a coincidence intensifier, a numerical and cultural resonator, etc., that acts by diagrammatic force and therefore meshes with the real.
Just like Guattari's diagramamtics that mesh directly with the real, the diagrammatic hyperstitions of the CCRU
"....makes itself out of the spaces beneath and between the net and in the biotechnical intervals between netc-components. Mesh necessarily - but coincidentally - assembles a fully connective system whenever it emerges. Any two mesh-pauses always interlink...meshing together means falling apart."Over his life, Guattari developed both his style and content towards a meltdown singularity. Dense, made up words, run on sentences full of concepts that make themselves up as they go, whole passages that bleed from one book into another, concepts focused on creating possible worlds through fictional acts, not representational ones, etc. What Guattari was pioneering here was protohyperstition. Creating worlds of reference through fictionalizing theory, not theorizing to get a better grasp on a world that already existed.
...
7: Conclusion
To sum, we can say Guattari is a theorist and practitioner with little time for discussion, one who descended from a nuclear family of capitalist boomers, someone who was a bit of a tyrant as a father husband, boss, and therapist, all of which can be called, per Guattari's own conceptualization, microfascisms. And these are microfascisms that culminate in a love of Japan and their latent fascist history, all of which, as indicated in our last section, clearly link up with Nick Land and accelerationism through concepts such as the inhuman, impersonal, acceleration, diagrammatics, theoryfiction, hyperrreality, and exit.
With this in mind, are we to say Murphy is accurate when he says
"...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...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."This is not so crazy. Some of my work here even supports this point to an extent, but hopefully as I have shown here, not only did Guattari - not Deleuze - actually provide much of the concepts Nick Land would go on to apply, but Guattari also supplied these concepts to Deleuze.
What is more important is that Guattari was, to use today's nomenclature, far from woke, or even an 'inane liberal.' Whereas the contemporary culture of critique says 'if you have bad thoughts you're a bad fascist and should be canceled,' Guattari would say 'it is understandable that people have fascist slip ups, after all fascism is in part desirable despite its damages, and we all exercise 'fascism' without knowing it.' He also admitted, to use the term Land uses, that fascism is a bit of a 'slur,' a polemic used to provoke. That is, Guattari would not cancel someone - and would probably be cancelled himself if he were around today! No, Guattari was not woke. He was in fact a little schizo, a little reactionary, but still dedicated to hard and fast leftist endeavors.
I'm not sure if this makes him based, or if that really matters, but it makes him out to be more interesting than others have made him out to be, it gives him three (or,or,or...more) dimensions, and that's an important task when exploring a thinker, especially someone as weird and interesting as Guattari.
Work cited
Guattari, F.
-The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Written 1969-1972.
-Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971. Originally published in 1972.
-Chaosophy: Collected Essays and Interviews 1972-1977
-Soft Subversions: Collected Essays and Interviews 1977-1985.
-The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Originally published in 1979.
-The Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Originally published in 1977, republished with additional content in 1980, reformed and edited and published as Communists Like Us in 1985, Molecular Revolution in Brazil 1986.
-Machinic Eros: Writings in Japan. Written 1980s-1990s.
-Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Originally published in 1989.
-The Three Ecologies. Originally published in 1989.
-Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Originally published in 1992.
-The Guattari Reader: Collected Essays and Interviews.
-I, Little Asylum. Originally published in 2012.
Deleuze and Guattari
-Anti-Oedipus-A Thousand Plateaus
-What Is Philosophy?
-The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary. Originally published in 2013.
Land, N.
-A Thirst for Annihilation: Virulent Nihilism and George Batailles. Originally published in 1992.
-Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
-CCRU Writings 1997-2003
Meyers, T.
- Thirst for Acceleration. Originally published in 2019.
Murphy, J.
-Based Deleuze. Originally published in 2019.
Culp, A.
-Dark Deleuze. Originally published in 2016.
Lazzarato, M.
-Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Originally published in 2014.
Dosse, F.
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. English trans.
