I wanted to write something different from the last three essays that focus on politics. I chose a random book chapter, which can be found in ‘Molecular Revolution in Brazil’ by Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik. Its title is ‘Emotion, Energy, Body, Sex’. It’s short, what, ten pages or so that it should be a quick read, if you are interested.
Right, so, the premise of this, what Guattari and a few others will go on to talk about, is that what he and Gilles Deleuze refer to as nomadism in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ should not be taken as inherently better than sedentarism. To put that in other words, fluidity is not inherently better than solidity.
So, in these little conversations between Guattari and a number of others, someone (403) asks him to clarify this distinction, like what to do if you are stuck and what to do if you are swept away by the current, or so to speak. He (404) replies by stating that they are not promoting some idea of going on a journey, or a trip, like, let’s say, road trip, or some drug induced trip, to find yourself. Okay, you can understand what they promote in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ as a journey or a trip, sure, but, as he (404) points, it’s not about going from one place, like from birth, to another place, to death, with there being these intermediary points on a path, like one’s lifepath. It’s not like that, at all.
So, what is that nomadism about then? Why are they so against sedentarism? Well, first, if you are sedentary, you are stuck in place. Okay, you not strictly speaking immobile, but rather relatively speaking immobile. It’s not like you are stuck living in the same country, province, region, city or neighborhood. You may well be making all these trips elsewhere, yet still be stuck in a certain place. Why? Because you make those trips only to return. That said, you could also be physically stuck in one place, like let’s say your neighborhood, or your home, what have you, yet be very nomadic. How so? Well, you can also be nomadic in your thought. You can go to places, without going anywhere, or so to speak, just by reading a book.
For Guattari (404), it’s all about the process. So, instead of thinking that you are here, wherever you may be at the moment, like stuck in that place, or seeking to escape from being stuck in place, going on a trip, for example, you take both, being, here and now, and that trip, going from one place to another, as the same. It’s, as he and Deleuze keep insisting in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, that you are always in the middle, both spatially and temporally. There’s always something around you and there’s really no start, nor finish.
This is also the case with subjectivity as he (404) points out. There is no subject, no me, no I, no self, that isn’t a process. It’s also important to understand, as he (404) puts it, that subjectivity is always, always highly differentiated, by which he wishes to emphasize that it’s not that there is a separate process that is the subject, like a processual subject, but rather that the subject or subjectivity is part of a process or processes, as well as a result of that process or processes. Simply put, none of us exists in isolation from what else is there. It’s like you owe your existence to existence itself, yet you are part of that existence to which everything owes its existence to.
Why does he (404) want to emphasize that it’s all about a process? Well, because, if we think in terms of trips, or journeys, like going from here to there, we end up thinking that any deviation from that path is going astray, as he (404) points out. He (404) uses the example of domesticity:
“Two people are involved in a process of love, and that process eventually leads to a closing of territory, which neutralizes each and every possibility of richness (including sexual desire), every opening.”
To be clear, that domesticity is a process. That’s not a problem. A relationship is not, in itself, a problem, no matter how heterosexual, conjugal or familial it is. It’s rather the idea that it’s the end all and be all in life that is the problem. So, what he (404) is pointing out here is that by fixating on love as this journey from one point, falling in love another person, to another point, until death separates you two, is the problem. Again, it’s like you have just this one path that you end up taking, even though you could take another path, even though you could just go off the path or paths.
Also, this does not mean that the path you’ve taken is, by any means, inherently wrong. It might be a good path. If it is, it is. No problem. It’s just that it often isn’t, as noted by him (404).
He (404-405) isn’t saying like, whatever, it’s all the same, feel free to improvise, just enjoy and what not. No, no. It’s not about being whimsical. He (405) provides some examples, of which the first one, the specific Italian feminist movement, I won’t comment, because I honestly lack familiarity with what happened with that, but the second one makes sense to so, I’ll comment on that. Right, so, reading ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ or ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, you might get this feeling like that it’s all about experimentation, like that’s the way you should live your life, like to the max, just seeing what happens, which may tempt you to think that they’re totally fine with people doing drugs. That’s, however, not what they are saying, as specified by him (405):
“It’s true that LSD—or drugs in general—can develop perceptual processes, enriching semiotic processes, when they are assembled with a personality such as Henri Michaux. Unfortunately, the Henri Michaux assemblages are not very common, and we can easily find phenomena of implosion, neutralization, impotentialization, or quite simply phenomena of black holes.”
Now, to unpack that, you don’t need to know all the terms, nor who Henri Michaux is, although, of course, you can simply look it up, like right now. What matters here is that he (405) telling you not to take drugs for the sake of taking drugs, nor in hopes of, somehow, making your life better, because it is so, so easy for things go wrong if you do any of that. So, while they can have a positive impact on people, they can also have a negative impact on people. Instead of allowing you to stray from the path, like to make you think unlike you otherwise would, they can take you on a very difficult path.
In another conversation, someone (405) asks Guattari what he thinks of emotion? He (405-406) replies to that by asking us to think what we mean by emotion and whether it’s different from affect. That said, as that’s a bit abstract, he (405) first responds by acknowledging that white, western people are, indeed, often thought to be lacking in emotion or even emotionless, only to attribute it to how subjectivity is produced under capitalism. Now, that may seem like he wants white, western people be more emotional, but he (405-406) reckons that it’s foolish to think that people can, somehow, become more emotional, by like regaining their humanity or something like that.
Anyway, I reckon that he, nor Deleuze, wants to talk about emotions, because it presupposes that there is that subject that has this range of emotions. He (405-406) doesn’t say it, so this is just my take, as it always is, but he clearly doesn’t like this western idea where every white person in the west has, somehow, lost their connection to nature or the universe and that they must then go on some spiritual journey, backpacking and sleeping in a hammock, often in some economically poor, yet spiritually rich country, just so that they can find that connection again and reveal to themselves who they truly are and what their position in the universe is.
Now, to unpack what he (405-406) means by affect, it’s really about what something does to something else, and so on, and so forth. That’s basically Baruch Spinoza’s affect, rather than thinking about emotions, like how one may have this or that feeling. His interlocutors are a bit puzzled by this, but he (406) is indeed saying that something like listening to music, on the go, on your headphones can, of course, be understood as a way of producing subjects that then come listen to certain kinds of music, namely pop music, over and over again, while also acknowledging that it can also change the way we engage with music, while that music also changes how we engage with what else is there. For me, that’s like the difference between listening to music at home and listening to it when I’m jogging. They are very similar to one another, sure, but they are different or, rather, as he’d (404) put it, differentiated. To give you a more common example, I guess that’s also how it is with listening to music and dancing to music.
I try to explain this at times, albeit to no avail. This is not about emotions, like how you feel, right here, right now. It’s rather about what something does to you, or to anyone or anything else, for that matter, and what you, or anyone or anything else, does to others. It’s action, yes, but it’s more like interaction, like where all actions come to constitute future actions.
Oh, and this is not my idea, nor Guattari’s idea. It’s definitely Spinoza’s idea. It’s how he (215) conceives what’s good or bad for a body in his ‘Ethics’. So, for him (215), there’s the good:
“Whatsoever disposes the human body, so as to render it capable of being affected in an increased number of ways, or of affecting external bodies in an increased number of ways, is useful[.]”
And then, in his (215) there’s also the bad:
“[C]ontrariwise, whatsoever renders the body less capable in this respect is hurtful[.]”
That’s basically your dual capacity, your capacity to act and be acted upon or, as Deleuze (27) explains it in ‘Spinoza: Practical Philosophy’, your “power of acting” and “power of being acted upon”. So, you have that capacity to act, what Deleuze (27) refers to as having to do with:
“An individual is first of all a singular essence, which is to say, a degree of power.”
In other words, an individual, me, you, anyone, anything, is simply a degree of power, what it is that I, you, anyone or anything can do. Therefore, an individual is defined according to its capacity to act, as in what it can do others, as in what affects it is capable of. Now, as nothing is simply given, that capacity to act is defined by one’s capacity to be acted upon, or, as Deleuze (27) puts it, by one’s “capacity for being affected”:
“A characteristic relation corresponds to this essence, and a certain capacity for being affected corresponds to this degree of power.”
In other words, your capacity to act depends on other acts, as well as your capacity to be acted upon. That means that what you can do depends on how you’ve been constituted or constructed, both mentally and physically.
A good example of this would be exercising. If you know what to eat and you exercise, without injuring yourself, your physical capacity to act will increase. Of course, it doesn’t increase in general. If you just lift a ton weights, okay, you’ll be strong, but you might not be, no longer very agile, which may decrease your capacity to act. It all really depends on what kinds of acts, or affects, we are talking about.
It’s the same with thinking. If you hone your thinking, by speaking, listening, reading and writing, or watching, filming, what have, you, your mental capacity will increase. Now, of course, that won’t increase in general. It’s going to be likewise specific to the task you are dealing with. It can also decrease your mental capacity if you become very narrow minded, or if you think too highly of yourself.
Now, if you understand how that works, like how that Spinozist way of thinking works, you’ll see the world very differently. In fact, you’ll see it so differently that a lot of things that many other people, even very educated people, like academics, struggle to comprehend or accomplish become really easy for you. It’s like if you understand that general process, of how it all comes together, how it’s all conditioned, yet also conditioning, at all times, yeah, you’ll start to understand the world, intuitively.
This matches Spinoza’s (113) third kind of knowledge that’s based on intuition. It’s not at all like his (113) first kind of knowledge, which is based opinion or imagination, nor his second kind of knowledge, which is based on reason. Most academics are capable of gaining and producing the second kind of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that is based on reason. In Spinoza’s (113-114) view, that’s pretty good as that kind of knowledge is adequate, whereas the first kind of knowledge is inadequate. In his (109, 113), the second kind of knowledge is superior to the first kind of knowledge because what matters more than the particulars is what’s common to those particulars. That said, he (93, 113) also reckons that while gain much from this second kind of knowledge, it’s not particularly useful to us as it ends up losing all that particularity. The third kind of knowledge is vastly superior to the first and the second kinds of knowledge, because, through intuition, it deals with essences, which, by the way, for Spinoza, are definable as the dual capacity to act and be acted upon, as explained by Deleuze (27).
The second kind of knowledge, what we might also call scientific knowledge, tells us that, for example, humans are mammals, as in they have tits, or that they are primates, as in related to apes. It’s not whimsical, like the first kind of knowledge that is based on opinion or imagination, but, in the end, it’s all very static and generic. So, to return that human example again, think of identical twins, as mentioned by Deleuze (1) in ‘Difference and Repetition’. They are, supposedly, identical, as in the same, yet they are not. While this second kind of knowledge is very, very useful, it is, in the end, rather useless, because it cannot provide an answer to how that can be. Only the third kind of knowledge can do that, because it doesn’t rely on static notions. Instead, it asks us to assess each of the twins on the basis of their capacity to act and be acted upon.
This is also exactly what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they (257) state in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ that:
“In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects.”
This is also explicitly a Spinozist way of understanding the world, as acknowledged by them (257):
“This kind of study is called ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics.”
Now, if you fail to grasp what they mean by that, you are in luck as they (257) provide a helpful example:
“A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.”
How so? Aren’t they both horses? Yes, they are both horses. You got me there. That said, a workhorse is not at all like a racehorse and more like an ox, because its essence, its capacity to act and be acted upon is very similar to an ox and very different from a racehorse.
So, as you can see, we are dealing with very different kinds of knowledge, one that is hellbent on determining what everything is, and what it consists of, as in what they are, and another one that isn’t at all interested in what something is, but rather in what it does, as in what it can do. In their (257) words:
“We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.”
So, instead of saying that a human is an animal, a primate, a mammal, that has two legs and two arms, which is why a human acts the way a human does, a Spinozist is going to say the exact opposite, that no, what we call a human, that is this animal, this primate, this mammal, that has two legs and two arms, because that’s what a human does, because that’s what we call a human is capable of.
Right, so, I’m often perplexed by this. Whenever I apply for grant money for some project, as you do in academics, there’s basically zero chance that I’ll get it. Why? Well, I can’t know for sure, because you are rarely told why you don’t get it, but I’d say it’s because I come across as really bad at planning. Am I? No, not really. It’s just that I manage my projects as processes. There’s no clear beginning, nor an end. I’m always in the middle of it all.
You might ask me how can I do something? Easily. That’s how I can do something. I’m capable of doing it. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. That’s what I call intuition. It’s also Henri Bergson’s approach, as explained by him (58) in ‘The Creative Mind’:
“[I]t is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated.”
So, you have a problem, whatever it may be, and you seek a solution to it. People like to think that research is difficult, but, frankly, it isn’t. It’s all about finding solutions to problems that you encounter. Once you have that problem, know what it is, that problem will lend itself to helping you to come up with a solution to it.
Just think of it in the form of a question. If you ask a how question something can be done, you can only answer it by explaining that it can be done in this and/or that way, whatever it is. If you ask a why something is the way it is, you can only answer it by explain that it is because this and/or that. Not very difficult.
The only difficulty you have is coming up with the problems, finding them and inventing them in the process of positing them, as stated by Bergson (58). You’ll find a solution, that answer to your question, once you’ve done that. Like I just pointed out, this is not very difficult.
In my view, the reason people aren’t very good at this is because we’ve been led to believe that what Bergson and Spinoza refer to as intuition is somehow irrational. Deleuze comments on this in his book on Bergson, titled ‘Bergsonism’. He (15) notes that we are told that problems are pre-existing, like just waiting for us or, rather, our brightest minds to find them and then solve them, but this is just a way to keep us “in a kind of slavery.”
Deleuze (16) reckons that Bergson’s explanation of this, quoted in length, might elude you, so explains this through how Karl Marx’s would formulate that. He (16) notes that we can only come up with problems that we are capable of solving and that we only come up with solutions that our problems deserve. That’s what I mean when I state that you can only answer a question in a certain way. If you answer it in another way, you aren’t giving it an answer it deserves. The answer might still be an answer to a question, yes, but it is an answer to a different question, one that deserves that answer, if you will.
We also get an example of how this applies to everything for Bergson. In Deleuze’s (16) view, Bergson presents life itself as this game of addressing problems that we encounter and then solving them.
Anyway, enough of Bergson. How do you find the way solve a problem then? Well, firstly, as Deleuze (16) points out, we can only come up with a solution that the problem deserves, and we can only present both with the terms we happen to have. This emphasizes the importance of knowledge, not in the sense that we just produce it for the sake of producing it, or accumulate it for the sake of accumulating it, as if we were on a quest to find all pieces of the puzzle, no, but in the sense that the very terms we have, those concepts that we, me, you and others, whoever they may be, have created, allow us to think of it all in the first place. Secondly, you’ll come up with a solution to a problem, that answer to your question, if it is important enough to you. I think Friedrich Nietzsche (6) summarizes this perfectly in his ‘Epigrams and Arrows’, as included in ‘Twilight of the Idols’:
“If you have your why for life, you can get by with almost any how.”
That is so true. If you can’t solve something, it is possible that you simply lack the tools to solve it, fair enough, as Deleuze (16) might point out, but, even then, it’s rather an indication that what you are dealing with just isn’t important enough to you. I mean, if it is important enough to you, it’s like the only thing on your mind and nothing else matters until you’ve solve that problem, until you’ve provided that answer to your question.
I’m definitely like that. I find it very, very difficult to not put in the hours to get something done, and even more difficult to understand how others are like, well, I might want to research this and/or that. You might want to? What? That’s no motivation. If you don’t want to get it done, right now, right here, you aren’t interested in that.
Now, you might counter that by stating that you need to figure out this and/or that first. Yes, of course, but if that’s the thing, what is preventing you from doing that, right now, right here? I’d say it’s your lack of motivation. You aren’t really interested in that. You have other interests. Oh, and that’s fine. Everyone has other interests. It’s rather that I’m not convinced by anyone who says something like that. In that case those other interests are simply more important to you.
This is connected to how I hate coming up with research plans. It’s some made up stuff about how this and/or that’s maybe going to happen. If you really were proposing something interesting, some worthwhile, something that’ll get done, you already be doing it. I find it laughable when people explain that they’ll be doing this and then that, followed by whatever it is. I’m like no, no and no. Just no. Stop planning what it is that you want to do and start doing it instead.
Doing research, conditionally, like that has gotta be the dumbest and the most dishonest thing among academics. Who has a great idea, like maybe the best ever, and is like, nah, I’ll keep doing whatever it is that I’m doing until, maybe, one day, someone might approve of it and give me funding for it? That’s not a great idea, probably not even a good one.
Okay, okay, if your situation is precarious, like if you are doing your doctorate and you can’t start doing other stuff, because otherwise you won’t get your degree, fair enough. I’m not blaming you. Like I postponed my nightscape research because of that. Then again, yeah, I did a lot of the groundwork, a lot of the necessary reading and trials for nighttime photography way before I officially started that project after getting my degree. It was just so compelling that I had to do it.
Right, back to Guattari. Pepe Escobar (406) asks him to explain how people can express themselves affectively, rather than merely linguistically. Well, had he asked me, I would have answered that we are always expressing ourselves affectively, even when we are expressing ourselves linguistically. That’s the gist of speech act theory. Anyway, so, but Guattari’s (407-408) answer is slightly different. To summarize it, he points out to others that we tend to have a strange, somewhat luddite relationship to technology, whereas the younger generations don’t have such. Now, he reckons that we are also tempted to think that they are then, somehow, corrupted by the technology and that we, the older folks, are smart not to share their enthusiasm. To be clear, it’s not that he is saying whatever, it’s all good, that there’s nothing about technology. What he is saying that by refusing to use technology, we are missing out on a lot of opportunities. Oh, and no, this is not some tech-bro thing that he is saying. No, not at all. It’s really all about how you use that technology.
If you ask me, his (407-408) views remind me a lot of open-source software development. He is clear all for technology, inasmuch as it can be used in an open-ended way. What he doesn’t like is, oddly enough, what has largely happened instead:
“As for me, machines don’t frighten me, because they broaden the perception and simplify human behavior. What frightens me is when they are reduced to the level of human foolishness.”
I bet he’d be really up in arms about smartphones, not because there isn’t this great potential to them, but because they’ve been reduced to serving and fueling that human foolishness. I’d say that he’d think of them more of like as a television than an actual computer, in the sense that it is the device that acts on you, much more, instead of you acting on the device, except in ways that then facilitate that device acting on you again.
I also like the way he (408) points out that, well, once you have that technology, once it spreads, it’s pointless to fight against it, because “we have to admit that technoscientific expansion has an irreversible character.” Indeed, there’s no going back.
Okay, to be clear, he’s not saying that you should embrace whatever, like the latest fads. It’s rather that he wants to be productive. He wants us to think what we could do with that technology. It’s like instead of relying on giant tech corporations to provide us some generic, streamlined user experience, he wants us to think what else we could do with those smartphones.
Oh, and to candid, I also now own a smartphone. It’s just, let’s say, a very, very different kind of, highly customized smartphone. It’s exactly the kind of smartphone that Guattari would approve of. Instead of being a tool for it, it’s a tool for me.
I think he would also have been supportive of what’ve come to refer to as social media, albeit I’d say that he would have preferred the earlier versions, the ones in which only a small minority of the world population participated in before they turned into these majority platforms, where one is not actually a user, but rather used by the platform.
Right, moving on. Rose Murano (410) tells him that, in Brazil, there are all these differences between the different social classes. What’s interesting here is that he (410-411) rejects this way of addressing social issues only relation to class. This is not to say that he rejects class as a sociological category. No, that’s not what he’s saying. It’s rather that he (411) wants any sociological analysis to include much, much more categories and their variables. I totally agree. Things only ever get interesting once you have all that data, with all those categories and variables. It’s very interesting to address such data, through a number of variables. It can be very, very rich, and offer very, very good insight into a society, no matter how much people object to its quantitative nature.
Then there’s the final question. Escobar (412) wants to know what Guattari thinks of sexual liberation or, what used to be called sexual liberation. I guess we’d use the term queer these days. Guattari (412) provides a very concise answer to this. He (412) acknowledges that, okay, sure, that has happened and that it challenges the normativity view of sexuality in contemporary societies, only to add that it has become compromised and taken over by capitalism. How so? Well, I mean, you gotta give to him, like how he foresaw what would happen, like way back, already in the early 1980s. What do I mean? Okay, so, I’m all for the rainbows. The more, the merrier. That’s not the issue. It’s rather that the rainbows have been turned into a commodity, i.e., a product or a subscription, and a marketing tool that is, you guessed it, to sell you something.
References
- Bergson, H. ([1934] 1946). The Creative Mind (M. L. Andison, Trans.). New York, NY: Philosophical Library.
- Deleuze, G. ([1973] 1988). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
- Deleuze, G. ([1968] 1994). Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1972] 1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Guattari, F., and, S. Rolnik ([1986] 2007). Molecular Revolution in Brazil (K. Clapshow and B. Holmes, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
- Nietzsche, F. ([1889] 1997). Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer (R. Polt, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
- Spinoza, B. ([1667] 1884). The Ethics. In B. Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, Vol. II (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.) (pp. 43–271). London, United Kingdom: George Bell and Sons.