I planned to write either on article that I\u2019m working on, or an old text written by F\u00e9lix Guattari, but I never managed to get where I wanted with that article (you know, editing a bit of this and a bit of that, adding, removing, as if it actually changed anything, except for Reviewer #2 who we all know to be darling, let\u2019s put it that way) and I ended up on a major tangent while on that second text (I did manage to make notes on the whole text though). Anyway, so, this essay will be that tangent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, the old text is called \u2018Machine and Structure\u2019. It appears in at least two different complications of Guattari’s work: \u2018Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics\u2019 and \u2018Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955\u20131971\u2019. It was published in a journal 1972, but, according to the notes included in the latter compilation, it was planned as a lecture that was to be given in 1969. That means that this text, essay, article or lecture, I\u2019m not sure what it should be called, gives us insight to Guattari\u2019s thinking at the time he was working with Gilles Deleuze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is, apparently, also the text that is known to have caused a fallout between Guattari and his former mentor, Jacques Lacan, which, in turn, led Guattari to work with Deleuze. I remember reading about this and, perhaps, I\u2019ve even mentioned this in the past, but I\u2019ll let Janell Watson explain this. She (39, 189) covers this episode in her book \u2018Guattari\u2019s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze\u2019, noting that there are (at least) two versions of this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the first version, Lacan wanted to publish the text in his own journal, \u2018Scilicet\u2019, but, well, just never did, so it ended up in Jean-Pierre Faye\u2019s journal, \u2018Change\u2019, instead. According to the second version, Roland Barthes wanted the text to be published in his journal, \u2018Communications\u2019, but Lacan wanted it to be published in his journal, which prompted Guattari to pull the article from \u2018Communications\u2019, despite having agreed to publish it there, only for it to be never published by Lacan and then ending up published in \u2018Change\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s common between the two versions is that Lacan wanted the text to be published in his journal, but then just didn\u2019t bother to publish it, which, I reckon, angered Guattari. The gist of that episode is that Guattari started working with Deleuze, because one way or another Deleuze ended up reading it, as pointed out by Watson (189).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If aren\u2019t into Guattari but would like to understand what he means by structure <\/em>and, more importantly, by machine<\/em>, you’ll like this text because, unlike many of his other texts, it\u2019s fairly straight forward. Sure, it\u2019s difficult to read, as you\u2019d guess with anything written by Guattari, on his own or in collaboration with Deleuze, but it\u2019s alright if you just focus on it and make some notes while at it. Deleuze (21) mentions this text in preface for the latter compilation, noting that it is a particularly important text alongside another text, which, to be honest, is hilariously difficult to read, not because Guattari has gone all the way to make it hard to read, but because it\u2019s basically a collection of excerpts, so that, well, technically, it\u2019s not really a text at all but rather some 27 pages of his notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That other text is called \u2018From One Sign to the Other (excerpts)\u2019. It\u2019s like reading someone\u2019s train of thought. It\u2019s kind of like how I work, how my essays must appear to some of you who happen to read these, but, well, let\u2019s say that if you find my train of thought difficult to follow, you probably shouldn\u2019t even try to read that text. I\u2019ve tried to get through it, but I need more runs at it to make more sense of it. Maybe someday. We\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It might actually be more fruitful to try to find the original as, according to Watson (26), it is supposed to be longer. The translated version that I have access to is only a partial reproduction, which explains why it\u2019s listed as dealing with excerpts. There might also be some fresh translation of it out there, somewhere, but, as I pointed out already, we\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s actually kind of funny, now that I\u2019m teaching a basic writing course. I mean, in academic writing you are expected to cater to your reader, to make it so that everything is, supposedly, as clear as possible and that your train of thought is easy to follow, which, in my opinion, does have its merits, no doubt about that, but it can and often does end up pampering and infantilizing the reader, as if the reader couldn\u2019t figure out stuff on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deleuze comments on this matter in \u2018Letter to a Harsh Critic\u2019, a text I\u2019ve mentioned a couple of times in the past, noting that there are two ways of going about this. He (7-8) uses the example of reading, stating that there are two ways of reading. The first one he (7) refers to as the perverse or depraved ways of going about it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[Y]ou \u2026 see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you\u2019re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the book like a box contained in the first or containing it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n He (7-8) adds to this that this results in a never-ending search for its meaning<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and so on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Now you might be thinking, ha, gotcha, you idiot, that\u2019s exactly what you are doing when you write these essays. Ooooh! Saucy! I do like your attitude, but no. That\u2019s not what I\u2019m doing, at all, nor what Deleuze did in his own books on other people\u2019s works, like the ones on Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. Yes, it\u2019s commentary, but I\u2019m under no illusion that I have the answers that you might seek, that I know for sure what any of the people whose works I\u2019ve commented on actually meant with this and\/or that, whatever that may be. They are my takes, and you should always take them as such. If you find them useful, well, great, good for you, and if you don\u2019t, well, that\u2019s too bad, not good for you. Plus, I really, really recommend that you go through the effort of reading the originals. I don\u2019t seek to mislead you. It\u2019s not my plan to provide you with some take that\u2019s not even close to the original, just to fuck with you. Nah. It\u2019s rather that I\u2019m not the arbiter of truth. I\u2019m not even its messenger. I try my best. I try to give you what I find important and\/or interesting in some text, in its original form, if possible, to have that transparency, with my commentary of it. That\u2019s exactly why I have these block quotes, which are sometimes, I know, I know, don\u2019t think I don’t know, painfully long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This leads me to the second way of going about it. Deleuze (8) explains it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[Y]ou see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is \u2018Does it work, and how does it work?\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the way I go about writing and reading, the cherry-picking fucker that I may appear to be because of it. Now, you might be wondering what I mean by that, like, isn\u2019t cherry-picking something frowned upon, something that I shouldn\u2019t be doing. Well, yes, you are not supposed to be cherry-picking, aka quote-mining, when you write something academic, nor in argumentation in general, but do note that I didn\u2019t write that I do that, but rather that I may appear to be doing that, even though I\u2019m not doing that. But why do I then appear to be doing that, even though I\u2019m not? Well, to connect this to the first compilation mentioned in this essay, to its introduction, to be precise, it\u2019s rather that I do whatever I please, whatever I come to desire, without hesitation, without giving a fuck about on whose fields I roam. That\u2019s what Deleuze and Guattari do and advocate for, as do I. David Cooper (1) explains this well in the introduction to that compilation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[I]n the tradition of Guattari and Deleuze there can be no compartmentalization of disciplines: philosophy, politics, structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis (or rather its undoing), micro-sociology \u2013 all frontiers are violated but violated on principle.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Exactly! There\u2019s nothing whimsical, nor spiteful about that roaming. It\u2019s like roaming, for the sake of roaming. I don\u2019t know. Perhaps I shouldn\u2019t even call it roaming, because it\u2019s typically understood as lacking a purpose, whereas this has a purpose. It is principled, as pointed out by Cooper (1). It\u2019s like moving for the sake of moving, being in movement, which, I guess, is not actually being <\/em>but becoming<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cooper (1-2) notes that this approach has its roots in French academics where most of the heavy hitters where familiar with at least two different fields <\/em>or disciplines<\/em>, while also acknowledging that such combos can either work really well or really poorly. I\u2019d say that it can work well because you aren\u2019t confided, because you no longer see the world in this or that light, but in this and that light. It can, of course, also work really poorly. That\u2019s what happens when you don\u2019t take your reading seriously, when you don\u2019t put in the hours. Anyway, he (2) moves on to further comment what I already anticipated, as I was reading this introduction:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe word [transversality], however, also connotes an intellectual mobility across discipline boundaries and above all the establishment of a continuum through theory, practice and militant action.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s transversality<\/em> for you. That\u2019s what Deleuze and Guattari (499) mean by \u201cstreaming, spiraling, zigzagging\u201d and \u201csnaking\u201d, as mentioned in \u2018A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia\u2019. He (2) also adds that it would be misguided to think that Guattari\u2019s work (and I guess, by proxy, Deleuze\u2019s work) is somehow against theory<\/em>. Well, I\u2019d say it is actually anti-theoretical, but only in the sense that it\u2019s against treating theory as something separate from practice<\/em>, as something pre-existing that we ponder about. Cooper (2-3) also points this out, albeit in slightly different manner, noting that, for Guattari, theory is about creativity<\/em>, about the act of creation, not of what I\u2019d call discovery<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cooper (3) also explains how this works for Guattari:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn this writing, individuals, groups and \u2018the society\u2019 are not denied, but the desiring machines operate in the spaces between<\/em> these \u2018entities\u2019. Guattari\u2019s writing itself issues from this sort of interspace and is directed back again into these \u2018spaces between\u2019, which are the spaces where things are agenc\u00e9es<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I agree with his (3) take on Guattari\u2019s writing, albeit with some reservations. I think this is a pretty good summary, but I also think it risks making it appear that the entities are given, even though they are not. To be clear, each entity consists of other entities that can be understood as its parts and also act as a part of some other entity, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari (42) in \u2018Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia\u2019:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of<\/em> these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of<\/em> all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n They (42) also explain this in, perhaps, less difficult manner, noting that it\u2019s not like we have some original unity of a number of pieces, like a puzzle, that we are set up to complete after finding all the pieces. There is no origin, nor a goal, only pieces, and we can do whatever we want with those pieces, fit them together in this and\/or that way. That\u2019s creativity <\/em>for you. The totality or the unity of whatever it is that we are dealing with is always immanent<\/em>. To be fair, Cooper (3) does acknowledge this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThen, by a curious but comprehensible logic, the writing itself becomes agencement<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n He (3) also notes that the difficult thing with Guattari\u2019s work is that you have to let go of taking things for granted as Guattari is all about coming up \u201c[h]ow to re-think what thought might be.\u201d Related to this, he (3) also notes that reading Guattari\u2019s works is difficult because he uses a lot of terms that people are unlikely to be familiar with, but that doesn\u2019t mean that he \u201cis guilty of stylistic perversity\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs with Deleuze his totally explicit aim is to destructure a consciousness and a rationality over-sure of itself and thus too easy prey to subtle, and not so subtle, dogmatisms.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Cooper (4) finishes his summary of Guattari\u2019s work and the way he does it, that transversality<\/em>, or nomadism<\/em>, as it is also known as, by explaining why we might want to go along with it, despite all the work that we must put into it, despite all the difficulty that we must face in doing so:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf we choose to follow F\u00e9lix Guattari in his nomadism through regions of ambiguity it is because we glimpse from very early on an eminently rewarding clarity that emerges through this highly original writing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I agree. Guattari\u2019s writing isn\u2019t at all difficult to read once you get into it. Is it easy? No. It\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s also much more difficult than most things you\u2019ve encountered before, because it is so original, as Cooper (4) points out, but once you let go of that requirement that the writer must cater to you as a reader, holding your hand, making sure that you are taken good care of every step of the way, it\u2019s not that difficult. Once you get it, you get it and it\u2019ll be clear to you, kind of like, how to put it better, intuitively<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It might also be that what you are reading just isn\u2019t for you, at least not in that moment. That\u2019s the point Deleuze makes when he (8) adds that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow does it work for you? If it doesn\u2019t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Yeah, if it isn\u2019t working, don\u2019t try to force it to work because it doesn\u2019t work that way. He (8) continues:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis second way of reading\u2019s intensive: something comes through or it doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n So, yeah, don\u2019t waste your time, reading, not to mention annotating, interpreting and\/or questioning what you\u2019ve read if there\u2019s nothing to it, if it just isn\u2019t coming across. He (8) has still something to add:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It\u2019s like plugging in to an electric circuit.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Indeed, it\u2019s that plugging in, that connection that you form with what you read. That\u2019s exactly what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they state that something is a machine<\/em>. Deleuze (8) summarizes this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis second way of reading\u2019s quite different from the first, because it relates a book directly to what\u2019s Outside.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Note how this is in stark contrast what he (7) pointed out earlier on, how in the first way of reading you look at what\u2019s in what you read, how you limit it to that, just that, or to it and what other texts it is linked to, in a series, to discover <\/em>the meaning <\/em>contained in it. As you can see, this second way of reading something emphasizes the connection that you make with what you read, there and then, without anything else to it. That\u2019s why it either works or it doesn\u2019t. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so simple. He (8) elaborates this by adding that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows\u2014flows of shit, sperm, words, action, eroticism, money, politics, and so on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n So, what he wants to emphasize here is that there is nothing special about writing and reading. That doesn\u2019t mean that it is pointless to write and read. No, no. It\u2019s rather that there\u2019s much more to life than just writing and reading, like shitting, ejaculating, speaking, doing, eroticizing (is that even a word? it is now!), buying and selling, taking part in politics and what not, as he (8) points out. If that makes no sense to you, well, too bad, but let\u2019s see if his (8) example is of any help:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTake Bloom, writing in the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other: what\u2019s the relation between those two flows?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a good question, to which I don\u2019t know the answer. What\u2019s the point of that James Joyce\u2019s \u2018Ulysses\u2019 reference? I don\u2019t know and I take it that neither do you. Why is Leopold Bloom having a wank? Why is he writing? How are these two things connected? Is he writing about whatever pushed him to have a wank? Is he writing about the wanking? So many questions, not a lot of answers, but that\u2019s the charm of it. It\u2019s up to you <\/em>to make sense <\/em>of it, because there\u2019s nothing inherent about wanking and writing that connects them to one another, no inherent meaning to be discovered<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deleuze provides another example. He (8) states that he and Guattari wrote \u2018Anti-Oedipus\u2019 because there was a certain outside, a certain readership of young people that they sought to make a connection with through the book. The title ought to tell it to you, that it\u2019s an anti-oedipal book. It is countercurrent that connects to a current. That book wouldn\u2019t exist without that coupling. There wouldn\u2019t be schizoanalysis<\/em> without psychoanalysis<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He (8-9) summarizes what the deal with the second way of reading is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis intensive way of reading, in contact with what\u2019s outside the book, as a flow meeting with other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with book, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything \u2026 is reading with love.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Note how he emphasizes that these connections that we make with texts <\/em>are not just with other texts, but with, well, anything. It\u2019s not that the connections between texts, i.e., intertextuality<\/em>, isn\u2019t important, but rather that\u2019s not all there is to it. There are many connections between texts, yes, but there are also many connections to what\u2019s outside texts. If that seems familiar, it\u2019s because it is. That\u2019s pragmatics <\/em>for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As that may seem a bit obscure, he (9) exemplifies what he means by such connections. For him (9), it\u2019s not about what the text is <\/em>or what it means<\/em>, in itself, as that\u2019s the first way of reading a book, a futile endeavor, but what you do <\/em>with it. In other words, the text works <\/em>on you as you read it. It changes you to some extent, which alters how you connect with other texts and, well, with anything, unless it doesn\u2019t, of course, in which case you move on to reading or doing something else instead. That\u2019s the point Deleuze wants to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, so, that\u2019s the end of that tangent that I ended up on because I started reading and making notes of \u2018Machine and Structure\u2019, while also teaching a writing course, being connected to that text, as well as texts related to writing, and the encounters I had in class. I started out somewhere, with some goal, yes, but I ended up somewhere else, zigzagging all over the place while at it, and I\u2019m glad I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I planned to write either on article that I\u2019m working on, or an old text written by F\u00e9lix Guattari, but I never managed to get where I wanted with that article (you know, editing a bit of this and a bit of that, adding, removing, as if it actually changed anything, except for Reviewer #2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3554,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[580,71,123,1572,1569],"class_list":["post-3357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-cooper","tag-deleuze","tag-guattari","tag-joyce","tag-watson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3357"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4626,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3357\/revisions\/4626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}References<\/h4>\n\n\n\n