It is not a matter of merely interpreting experience, but of changing it.  Methods of progressive differentiation substantiated by an immanent philosophy of difference,  coupled with an understanding of the processes which comprise our experience of reality, the relationship between mind-body functioning and resulting phenomenological experience and ultimately the relationship between said experience and reality, leads to the consideration of how we may change our experiences themselves, not just establish another perspective on experience.  Deleuze immediately confronts this maligned position of an ultimate-transcendent perspective, whilst providing his idea of ‘becoming’.  The world is comprised by a complex flow of  pure difference or becoming.  Actualization or aspects of this becoming, such as perception, contract difference reducing it into perceivable terms (such as a light wave becoming actualized into colour).  This pure difference would be experienced as pure chaos, or delirium, if not contracted, actualized, and organized into terms germane to our experiential apparatus.  Our bodies cast planes over chaos, the planes of art, philosophy, and science.  Each plane constitutes its own world, with its own forces and powers of becoming.  Aspects of one plane may become, co-extensive with another plane,  however, there are singularities unique to each plane.  Phenomenological subjects emerge on these planes, the “I” or self conscious annunciations exhibited within statements such as “I feel” (art), “I know” (science), and “I conceive” (philosophy).  These planes are not pre determined, each plane becomes, constituted through a creative process.  Science is concerned with creation of observable states of affairs, working with “variables that have become independent by slowing down, that is to say, by the elimination of whatever other visibilities are liable to interfere, so that the variables, that are retained enter into determinable relations in a function: they are no longer links of properties in things, but finite coordinates on a secant plane of reference that go from local probabilities to a global cosmology” (Deleuze).  Art is concerned with the creation of affects and percepts, constructing a “being of sensation”, concerned with thought in affective terms as apposed to analytical.  Philosophy is concerned with creating concepts, palpating the virtual, giving voice to the power of difference coiled within the actual, exploring the very capabilities and possibilities of life.

There is no goal or teleological aspect to becoming.  Becoming is a process; for a soma, a continual process taking place at relative - greater or lesser degrees, depending upon the experiential apparatuses machinic disposition and the sustainability which it requires to maintain those connections.  Machinic connections and the processes which these connections permit, afford the subjects (or aspects-affects of subjectivity) which it engenders, the ability to affect or be affected.  The human species; the scoio-historical, culturally contingent entities comprising “mankind”, of which we are are an example, have become self-aware, though within it’s evolutionary path, mankind has also established identities-idols , essences, morality, and other static misnomers which have concealed difference and the morphogenetic power and expressivity of the environments of which man is himself apart, including his own body.  Difference has become a power to fear, something to control in fear of unknown processes of adaptation which may lead us towards novel, uncomfortable, unfathomable, and unprecedented experiences.

The word soma may be defined as the ‘body as experienced from within’.  The ’soma’ is the conscious witness to, and a resulting aspect of the processes of mind-body functioning or bio-energetic becoming.  In order to increase our ability to affect and be affected, to confront difference, and shake ourselves free from habits or constrictions (self imposed or otherwise), we must construct methods of navigation, of pre-representational progressive differentiation, producing novel events within all three planes of thought.  The more neuro-somatic connections we make, the more ‘movement’ takes place, the greater the range of experience.  To progressively differentiate ourselves is to direct movement, establish new neural connections, expand our range of expression/perception, and enable ourselves an optimal level of adaptation called upon by our environment, facilitated to a greater or lesser extent by our will of awareness.  Both modes of adaptation, assimilative and accomodative, relate to their own aspects of consciousness, perception and becoming.  Optimal adaptation is relative to the assemblage to which it corresponds and is conditional to the events within which the process itself arises.  Adaptation is a bio-energetic process of (a) becoming-soma.

Adaptation is not merely a passive process, but an active processes.  Sometimes this process includes becoming non-self conscious, allowing the body to adapt itself unhindered, molding itself to its environment via drive patterns evoked by the situation.  Thomas Hanna introduces the relationship between the sensory motor system and sensing, reflecting on somatic functioning, when he states: “The sensory motor system functions as a closed-loop feedback system.  We cannot sense without acting, and we cannot act without sensing.  The indissoluble unity is essential to the somatic processes of self-regulation; at all times, it allows us to know what we are doing.”  In addition, “Awareness serves as a probe, recruiting new material for the repertoire of voluntary consciousness”.  Somatic methods of developmental movement involve focusing your awareness on and initiating movement from different parts of the body, learning the innate intelligence (or pattern) of it’s corresponding sequence (sequential form - of expression). Developmental movement patterns must be self initiated or ’stimulated into existence’.  What is being established whilst these new forms of movement are being learnt?  New forms of movement establish new patterns for cognition, leading to new ways of perceiving, conceiving, and expressing.  Whilst exploring the different types of movement and perception which they engender, we are also recruiting new material for the repertoire of voluntary consciousness.  What does this mean for adaptation?  Since we are constantly adapting to our environments, we are constantly utilizing different patterns of movement, cognition, and perception, the more patterns the more multiplicity of action.  “These patterns will fall on a continuum between efficiency or inefficiency.  The greater the range of patterns, the more multiplicity of action is open for us” (Cohen), facilitating machinic connections which engender new experiences.  The motivation behind somatic progressive differentiation is to establish a greater baseline for experience, facilitating a transfiguration of life itself.

Somatic-becoming, may take us beyond representation, beyond an assimilative mode of adaptation, towards an awareness of the multiplicities of intensities, which inform our felt presence of immediate experience and are the sensual terms, upon which our experience is founded.

“The life of the individual ceded its place to an impersonal, and yet singular, life, that releases a pure event liberated from the accidents of interior and exterior life, in other words, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. “Homo tantum,” sympathized with by everyone, to the point of reaching a kind of beatitude. It is an haecceity, that is no longer of individuation but of singularization: life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil because only the subject that incarnated it among things made it good or bad. The life of this individuality disappears and yields to the singular immanent life of a man that no longer has a name, because he cannot be confused with any other. Singular essence, a life ….” (Deleuze, Milles Plateaux pg.14-15).

Then, there are particular processes or functions which have their own ‘meaning’ or significance, relating to the particular structure of actualized terms.  Outside of, though coextensive with these terms, is the pure event, the haecceity.  With the actualization of virtual difference, a contraction, such as perception, or reduction of chaos occurs. Utilizing our faculty of consciousness, we may direct said awareness towards the ‘being of the sensible’:  “an experience of sensibility itself” which constitutes singularities defined as “the events from which the difference of time flows”.  Thus the focus on progressive differentiation within “Virtual Navigation”, given the actual conditions (somatic/machinic) whilst acknowledging the swarms of difference which populate the universe and the  attempt to create the right conditions for the substantiation of (the power of) these swarms, to become with them towards un-thought of/unexpected possibilities.

Meaning of meaning?

Meaning may be broken down into two types, significance vs. signification.  The “body as world axis” focuses on both types of meaning, signification involving the study of semantics-semiotics (an interpretation of x), and significance concerning itself with explanations (an explanation of  x, and how it makes a difference), duly positing a hermeneutic query into the nature of it’s subject, coupled with an explanation for it’s consideration.  [I have recentlly come across these distinction in the lectures of Manuel DeLanda, and in the works of Charles W. Morris.]

General Semantics is a system which addresses both types of meaning, addressing the first type with principles such as, the non-identity principle, which acknowledges that a word may have multiple definitions and is ultimately not it’s signified, it is never the thing it represents, but rather an abstraction.  Going one step further, it could be said that meaning or sense derives as a complex affect of the contact between the series of ‘being’ and the series of ‘language’, both of which contain their own difference.  For Deleuze, sense emerges from non-sense as “a paradoxical element that ‘traverses’ both series” (May, pg.107*).  How is the generation of non-sense informed by embodiment?  Emergent experiential properties resulting from  dynamic organism-environment transactions, inform aspects of non-sense, attributing a non-linguistic sense of meaning or significance to our language.  However, this meaning  is constructed experientially, and therefore rests on quality dimensions such as weight, pitch, sharpness etc, which intrinsically matter to us on a level of self preservation.   This question is addressed within my article entitled ‘body as world axis’ (forthcoming), and considers  evidence within cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual metaphor theory, image/mimetic schemas, and affective tone, as a significant step towards understanding the role of embodiment in the production of ‘non-sense’.

The wise verse of Ivor Cutler sheds light on non-sense emerging from the meeting of two heterogeneous ‘worlds’, the world of difference which constitutes different languages, and the world or ontological difference which constitutes the world of being.  Though in this case, it’s the world of bread and the world of butter:

“Bread is a world.  Butter is a world.  You can not place them together.  It is bread and butter or butter on bread.  Yet, if you search between the bread and the butter, you will find neither and, not on.  Just butter. Just bread.”  (Ivor Cutler - Bread and Butter, from the Velvet Donkey album)

Of course, the two different considerations of meaning meet.  When considering the significance of the three planes of thought: philosophy, art, science, and the significance of our embodied functioning in relation to ‘being’ (Dasein) and all it’s qualities (reasoning, meaning, imagination/representation etc), we will of course look at signification, how we come to understand our own definitions, how we use language and how it uses us,  how language aids or impedes the construction of concepts, how we make meaning (significance; how our functioning is significant etc).

*’Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction’, by Todd May.

My writing focuses on current positions within fields which address the notion of what it means ‘to be’, including mind-body functioning, the relationship between mind-body and experience, and ultimately experience and reality.  I have always had a disdain for non-pragmatic, disembodied philosophy.  The sort that falls under the category of ‘mental masturbation’.  The goal is certainly not merely to interpret reality, but to change it.  It is from this perspective that I undertake my work.

Currently, these interests are directed towards the construction of two pieces of writing: “Body as World Axis” and “Virtual Navigation”.   I will initially be posting “draft” versions of these pieces, which include heavy citations and extracts from reference material.  Of course, this material will all be credited towards it’s authorship.  Both projects are an ongoing exploration, with no definitive end.  So, my goal is to update this page as the work develops.  Any comments, suggestions or questions, as always, will be  appreciated.

The ‘body as world axis’ focuses on ontogenetic development and resulting phenomenological experience. This includes the embodied origins of cognition and the social construction of reality.  The first part of this writing pertains specifically to the pre-natal onset of consciousness, pre - representational construction of cognition, development of the sign function, the resulting bifurcation of whats been labeled “ones internal meaning space”* (neuro categorization/categorization of experiential qualities/modalities): into perceptual affective consciousness, and reflective consciousness.  I have shown this split into affective vs. reflective consciousness, as corresponding with both phenomenological vs. analytical consciousness, and non symbolic vs. symbolic portions of experience.  The latter (non-symbolic vs. symbolic) distinguishing between portions of experience, considering “mind” as the symbolic repertoire of some organism, here with a particular consideration on thought.  I consider thinking about something, of something, or on something as involving a symbolic representation of said subject to some degree.  However thought is part of a greater process of cognition, which is structured by the body and its dynamic organism/environment interactions (such as affective tone which provides a degree of meaning for our linguistic terms/concepts).  The idea that the term “mind” refers to a symbol processing machine is of course antiquated, with phenomenological studies and cognitive science’s principles of embodiment taking lead (i.e. conceptual metaphor theory).  The world of linguistics is a vast plane, with a host of heterogeneous theories, all with valid arguments towards an explanations of the structure and function of linguistic systems, maybe the truth is multiple..  The study of symbolism, linguistics, and representation is still valid, only after considering the embodied origins of cognition (eliminating false mind-body dualism).  Also included in this section are some findings in cognitive linguistics, how language is grounded in embodied experience, and the resulting structure of our concepts - not just linguistic structure but the very possibility of thought itself.  This includes employing conceptual metaphor, amongst other tools, in order to recruit root experiential ‘perceptions’/experiences/categorization, for abstract conceptualization.

“Rhythmic ornament grew from his hand seemingly without conscious effort” stated Haydn Mackay in regards to the work of Austin Osman Spare; the same can be said for the artist Christopher DeLange. Although I was never able to see the former working in person, the latter I have seen executing such graceful strokes even whilst on a moving bus! Both of these artists have been able to capture and communicate, to me, the energetic expression, grace and fluidity of life through their drawings. This piece is certainly no exception. DeLange’s drawings are alive, like frozen portraits that are still breathing with a fiery intensity. “Old flames” ignites within me, a feeling of ecstasy in juxtaposition with a feeling of great focus and driving intensity. Both portraits rely upon one another for their full form, both communicate and determine their point of intersection which marks the cross roads of vision, stemming from an integration and union of the two polar opposites. DeLange’s other works communicate through a surreal ambiguity, always stirring the imagination, connecting with the observer through a presence which saturates and claims the very space that both subject and object occupy. At the cross roads of vision, here depicted, such illusory dichotomies converge and yield to a transmutative effect of vision through ecstasy, not just a theme, but a virtual doorway, framed and made manifest by the works of DeLange.

- Joseph Jay Haskins

The collective project entitled “Embodied Machines” may be found here.
All personal pages are located on the right hand side menu. Enjoy!

I am looking forward to posting more submissions from other authors, and shall do so upon their arrival/completion.

Within “What is Philosophy?”, Deleuze and Guatarri state that “Philosophy, art and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought brain.  They are the three planes, the rafts on which the brain plunges into chaos” (pg.210).  Our experience of reality is both mediated through and productive of, the body; the subject emerges from this ‘zone of intensity’ or mediation as an affect.  These affects include the production of the above three planes, or modes of thought, by a “non-objectifiable brain”.

In a chapter entitled “Sharing Technologies”, Maaike Bleeker contrasts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “non-objectifiable brain” with the work of Lakoff and Johnson, two major proponents of cognitive linguistics:

“According to them [Deleuze and Guattari], it is the brain that thinks and not man - the latter being only a ‘cerebral crystalization’.  Lakoff and Johnson search for this moment where subjectivity appears as a cerebral crystallization.  They look for it within the deepest synaptic fissures, and they come up with a model in which subjectivity is the effect of complex processes of inferences taking place between reasoning, conceptual thinking, perception and motor control” (pg.69).  Following this, Bleeker traces certain tenets of Lakoff and Johnson’s perspective on embodied cognition, starting with categorization, moving to the resultant structuring of concepts, and finally to the inferential capacity of concepts and the production of metaphor.

The above excerpt is just one example of a variety of different examinations which may be made detailing the consequences of embodiment in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism.  May we conceive of ‘progressive differentiation’ under the principles of embodiment in order to extend the capacity to experience?  Are there methods which utilize, or apply an understanding of the function and structure of the embodied machine, that will lead to new styles of perception and becoming?

May we employ the body as a tool to transgress the limits of the self?  What importance does this have when considering Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’?

If you desire to contribute by way of difference and repetition, please contact me at joe.haskins[at]gmail.com.  All articles shall be credited to the author and accompanied by a link if desired.

*Eventually I’d like to start a discussion group on such topics.  These writings could possibly serve as starting points for future discussions.

Refracting ‘health’. Deleuze, Guattari and Body/Self

Nick J Fox - University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract

This paper considers ‘health’ and issues of embodiment through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s framework of theory. Deleuze and Guattari speak of an embodied subjectivity, a ‘body-without organs’ (BwO), which is the outcome of a dynamic tension between culture and biology. This BwO - or ‘body-self’ — is a limit, the outcome of physical, psychological and social ‘territorialization’, but which may be ‘deterritorialized’ to open up new possibilities for embodied subjectivity.

The question ‘what can a body do?’ is posed to address issues of health and illness. The physical, psychological, emotional and social relations of body-self together comprise the limit of a person’s embodied subjectivity, and as such delimit its ‘health’. ‘Illness’ is a further limiting of these relations, while health care may offer the potential to de-territorialize these relations, opening up new possibilities. This model suggests the importance of a collaborative approach to illness, health and health care.

Introduction

Social theorists of health, illness and health care have struggled - as have other social scientists - with the problem of how to conceptualise the relationship between individuals, their bodies and their social context.¹ In some studies (notably those looking at the ‘micro’ level of health and illness experiences), individuals’ accounts have been privileged, establishing a view of a person’s subjectivity that is apparently free and prior to social structures. This essentialist kind of approach to self-hood has been implicit in studies that have sought to understand the impact of illness, particularly chronic illness or disability (for example, Baszanger 1992, Charmaz 1983, Herzlich and Pierret 1986). On the other hand, a range of studies have emphasised the constructed character of illness, implicating social contexts such as poverty and deprivation, as well as ‘macro’ constructs of gender, ethnicity and cultural characteristics (for example, Annandale and Clark 2000, Daykin and Doyal 1999, Fitzpatrick 1991). These structuralist or materialist studies often implicitly theorise people and patients as socially and culturally determined, with little or no potential to resist the forces and structures that impinge on them.

Intellectually, neither the notion of a prior, essential self nor that of a passive, determined subject seems adequate to fully understand the social and psychological character of health and illness. On one hand, essentialist models allow for an active, engaged subjectivity among people and patients, offering the potential to theorise resistance, for example to overbearing health professionals or to definitions of what it is to be ill, healthy or have a disability. Such studies may over-emphasise this freedom to act, at the expense of recognising the social context in which health and illness are located. On the other hand, the social context of health and illness is central to structuralist accounts, yet where theorised as deterministic (for example, in exploring the impact of deprivation on well-being, or the gendering of patient-professional interactions) this model seems counter-factual to lived experience of resisting and refusing structures of power and inequality.

One solution for those who study health and health care is pragmatism, choosing essentialist approaches to address ‘lived experiences’ and non-essentialist frameworks to account for the social context of their subject. This strategy at least has the benefit of enabling studies at both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ levels to flourish, although translation between these levels remains problematic. To give an example of where such translation between micro (experiential) and macro (social context) is important: in trans-cultural work on care and dependency, it is important to be able to explore and give weight to the lived experiences of patients or older adults, but to explore how these arise within a social and cultural context - for instance concerning family organisation, systems of welfare and cultural norms and values (Fox 1999). Understanding this topic should neither reduce people to constructions, incapable of resistance (Butler 1990, Lash 1991), nor discount the impact of context on experience by elevating subjectivity as prior and essential.

The quest for an approach which might transcend this divide has been revitalised by post-structuralist approaches to health and health care. Here the focus is upon the relevance of subjectivity and the biological and cultural construction of the body in experiences of health and care, and upon language as the mediator of both. The development of a sociology of the body (Featherstone et al 1991, Turner 1992, Williams and Bendelow 1998) has drawn on such positions, identifying the body as a site of power, a node which is contested between forces of control and resistance (Foucault 1979). This perspective has been productive within the context of sociological reflections on health and illness (Cheek 2000, Fox 1999, Lupton 1995, Nettleton 1995, Petersen 1997). Language and ’systems of thought’ (Foucault 1970) are the media within which both the body is disciplined and the self is constructed. ²

Within this latter corpus, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is worthy of attention. Relatively ignored in Anglophone sociology, their propositions concerning the body, the self and the social world offer some interesting ways of thinking about illness, health and health care. Intrinsic to Deleuze and Guattari’s position is the recognition of the embodied nature of subjectivity, which is to say more than the trivial observation that having a self is impossible without having a body too! For Deleuze and Guattari, subjectivity is a consequence of the confluence between embodiment on one hand, and on the other, the physical and cultural worlds which impinge and limit, yet also make possible. Because of this, human embodiment cannot be reduced to physiology. Implicated in the construction of subjectivity, embodiment needs to be understood as an always-unfinished project, of conforming and transgression; while the true discipline of the body is political science, the study of diversity and resistance.

In this paper, I want to examine how Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical model of an embodied self, or a body-self ‘confluence’ supplies new ways to think about health. This formulation of body-self engages both with the active, experimenting, unfolding capacity of self to construct itself and the world about it, and with the contrary dynamic of a biophysical and social world which constructs and determines subjectivity. By asking the question ‘what can a body do?’ (Buchanan 1997), I examine how body-self mediates what we call ‘health’ and ‘illness’, and how these notions become collaborative rather than individualised concepts in the context of health care.

Deleuze, Guattari and the embodied self

In this section I summarise the three key elements in Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical position: the body-without-organs (BwO), territorialization³ and nomadic subjectivity. These abstractions will be explored to suggest how Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions can be used to think creatively about the confluence of subjectivity and embodiment, and provide new understanding concerning health and illness..

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze established his intellectual partnership with the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari shortly after the May 1968 revolt by students and workers in Paris. The corpus of their shared authorship includes the major works Anti-Oedipus (1984), A Thousand Plateaus (1988) and What is Philosophy? (1994). Born in 1925 and a student of philosophy in 1940s Paris, Deleuze’s influences included Nietzsche, Bergson and Heidegger, and resulted in such works as Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). While this anti-rationalist tradition coincided with French structuralism’s emphasis on the centrality of language in constructing both the world and the self, Deleuze was critical of structuralist ontology as impersonal and over-deterministic (Bogue 1989: 2-3). An associate of Foucault’s, he wrote a study of that writer’s work (Deleuze 1988) which is both a discussion of Foucault and of Deleuze’s own perspective on the issues with which Foucault concerned himself.

Guattari was born in 1930 and following studies in pharmacy and philosophy became involved in oppositional politics, both as a member of the French Communist Party and in challenges to traditional models of mental illness and its treatment. During the 1960s he underwent psychoanalysis with Lacan and subsequently became a Lacanian analyst. However, it was his rejection of Lacan’s blend of Freud and Saussurian structuralism, in favour of an effort to synthesise Freud and Marx, which provided the basis for his association with Deleuze (Bogue 1989: 5-6). For both Deleuze and Guattari, the collaboration over their first joint work, Anti-Oedipus (published in France in 1972, and sub-titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia) may be seen as synergistic from earlier (though different) commitments and intellectual influences, and as an innovative direction which was to be developed over the following decade. Their collaboration continued into the 1990s: until Guattari’s death, which was followed shortly afterwards by Deleuze’s own demise.

Deleuze and Guattari’s first collaboration, Anti-Oedipus (1984) was both an attack on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the formulation of a radical ontology. As materialists, they sought to undermine Lacan’s continuation of the Freudian focus on ‘desire-as-lack’ as the prime motor of psychodynamics. In this corpus, it is the lack or absence of an object (food, the mother, the phallus) translated into the realm of the ’symbolic’ which may both lead to neurosis, but also supply the possibility of ‘cure’ once this symbolic desire is exposed. Deleuze and Guattari deny the latter proposition, arguing that it is only by challenging or changing the physical or psychological relations to real things or concepts (as opposed to their psychic symbols) that we may break free from the constraints of the social. Both psychotherapy and progressive political action must focus on the material roots of oppression rather than the psychic processes that are oppression’s outcome.

Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the existence of a symbolic desire-as-lack, but propose in addition a conception of positive desire which is both real and productive, in the sense that it establishes real relations with objects and concepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 254). This desire can be understood as a creative affirmation of potential (Massumi 1992: 174) akin to Nietzsche’s will-to-power (Bogue 1989: 23-4). By the exertion of this will-to-power, it is possible for humans to be creative rather than reactive, to meet their (real) needs and become free from oppression by capitalism.

The importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on this creative potential is developed in their follow-up work A Thousand Plateaus (1988), which focuses less on the ills of psychoanalysis and more on the politics of resistance (Massumi 1992: 82). Deleuze and Guattari develop their understanding of human beings as active and motivated rather than passive and determined, incorporating their engagement with the world through an on-going work of ‘experimentation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 149-51). The construction of subjectivity - they argue — is in the dialogical play of social processes and affirmative, creative and embodied experimentation/engagement with the world. The body-without-organs (BwO) is the locus of this dynamic encounter, territorialization and deterritorialization mark out the limits of the BwO as the social impinges and ‘writes’ the embodied self, and nomadology is the strategic resistance of territorialization.

The Body-without-Organs

The body-without-organs (henceforth BwO) emerges from Deleuze’s early work The Logic of Sense (1969), in which he sought to explicate the relationship between reality and meaning without recourse to an essential subjectivity. In Anti-Oedipus, the term becomes the pivotal relation between reflexive, embodied sense-making and the social environment. The BwO is not the physical body in any sense, indeed it is quite unlike what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘organism’ or ‘body-with-organs’: the ‘common-sense’ understanding of physical embodiment which systems of thought in religion, law and biomedicine have constituted. Rather, the BwO is the outcome of what might be described as the ‘in-folding’ of the social and natural world. This process does not create a simple mirror-image of the environment, but more of a ‘refraction’ affected by the very physical and psychological nature of the medium being inscribed. For humans, this includes both the physicality of embodied subjectivity, and the sense-making processes which enable the establishment of reflexivity and thus a ’self’.

To give an example: when a health professional ‘takes a history’ from a person with an infectious condition, she does not directly perceive the bacterium or virus, but apprehends through signs what that infective agent may be. Nor does she become the patient as she hears of the physical or emotional impact of the infection for the sufferer. Yet the health professional’s BwO is affected psychologically and emotionally by the natural and social elements in this consultation. She may locate herself as epidemiologist, or therapist, or carer, and her consultee as fellow-human, patient or public health risk. She may assign moral characteristics to her interlocutor and to herself, she may empathise or sympathise with her patient, or feel fear, anger or disgust. The meanings of the encounter re-define her BwO around new limits, opening up (or closing down) possibilities for her own embodied self. Needless to say in such an encounter, there will also be an impact on the BwO of the patient.

The BwO links (and allows the inter-penetration of) psychic experience with the forces of society and of nature (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 150), creating a sense-of-self, and furthermore, the potential to resist such social forces. Within this dynamic struggle, the BwO may be thought of as a territory constantly contested and fought over. While the BwO is the site of cultural inscription, it is also the site of resistance and refusal, and is constructed and reconstructed (territorialized) continually. This dynamic model is of great significance for understanding the relation between body and self, and hence of health and illness as embodied processes.

An example will help to clarify the difference between Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective and an essentialist model of the human subject as prior (making sense of, and thereby constructing the social world around it). In the context of the experience of chronic illness, Charmaz suggests that

(p)hysical pain, psychological distress, and the deleterious effects of medical procedures all cause the chronically ill to suffer as they experience their illness. However, a narrow medicalised view of suffering ignores or minimises the broader significance of suffering: the loss of self felt by many people with chronic illnesses. Chronically ill people frequently experience a crumbling away of their former self-images without simultaneous development of equally valued new ones (Charmaz 1983: 168, emphasis in original).

Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical framework offers an alternative to this reading, in which there is not a prior, ‘interior’ self: a self to be ‘lost’. (Such use of metaphors of depth and surface are one tactic by which an essential, prior self has become commonsensical, Butler (1990) has argued.) For Deleuze and Guattari, such oppositions are swept away: the anatomical body is not the carapace of the self. The lived physical body and the self which ‘experiences’ itself as being ‘inside’ the body are both consequences of reflexive, normative ways of thinking (territorializations) about embodiment and individuality. The ’self-inside-the -body’ is the BwO, the limit which is the outcome of a historical dynamic between psyche and the forces of the social.

Similarly, physiological ‘distress’ and the sensation of pain — which have no implicit meaning - come to signify because of further territorialization of the BwO by biomedical and human sciences systems of thought, into what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the organism’ or ‘body-with-organs’. Once pain signifies in relation to the organism, it contributes to the subjectivity which has been territorialized on the BwO. In this reading, it is not the self which experiences pain or attributes meaning to it, the self is the pain, the self is an effect of the meaning of the sensations (Fox 1993: 145).

In contrast with essentialist conceptions of the self, which bemoan the impact upon essential selves of chronic illness and suffering and the concomitant existential despair of embodiment, Deleuze and Guattari’s position offers the possibility for a subjectivity (and a ‘health’) not limited by the body-with-organs. Meanings are capable of transformation, with possibilities for deterritorialization (see below). Part of that process may be the dissolution of systems of thought deriving from biomedicine, mind-body dualism (which sees the mind as ‘trapped’ inside the body), and the interior-exterior conception of subjectivity. The individualising of pain and suffering by biomedicine (often with the collaboration of the human sciences) territorializes and limits the BwO as organisms or bodies-with-organs, which are then the natural subjects for the expertise of medicine.

Territorialization

Deleuze and Guattari see territorialization (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) as the outcome of dynamic relations between physical and/or psychosocial forces (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 67ff.). Territorialization is an active process, whose agent may be human, animate, inanimate or abstracted (society, God, ‘they’), as may the object of territorialization. Thus the force of the sun’s gravity territorializes the earth in its travels through space, acting on it through the exertion of a force. Air blown through a reed is territorialized to vibrate and produce a specific tone, and again into music by the designation of musician and audience upon blower and locutor.

Deleuze and Guattari apply this general conception to the specific arena of how meaning is ascribed within the social relations of human life. Re-reading Marx from this perspective suggests that the capitalist deterritorializes products into commodities, while labour is abstracted, becoming reterritorialized as wages (ibid: 68). Territories and territorializations may be not only physical but also psychological and spiritual: philosophy and ideology have historically reterritorialized land as ‘nations’, Homeland or Fatherland (ibid.). These systems of thought (what Foucault called ‘discourses’) possess authority, and as such may deterritorialize and reterritorialize how we think about the world and about ourselves.

Territorialization provides an explanatory framework for how the forces of the social impinge on individuals or cultures, from the stratification of class, gender and ethnicity through to the construction of subjectivities, for instance as ‘women’, ‘husbands’, ‘patients’ and ‘risk takers’. Usually (though not always) these social territorializations entail — somewhere in the process — some act of interpretation, of ascribing meaning to an act or action. Goffman’s (1968) description of the ’stripping’ of identity (for instance when a person becomes a patient) may be better understood as a re-territorialization into a different identity defined by the cultural setting and achieved reflexively by the embodied self of the subject. Doctors, nurses and sociologists of ‘health’ deterritorialize patients according to their models of health, disease and illness, reterritorializing them in frameworks which match their systems of thought (Fox 1993). Because meanings derive from a conceptual realm independent of the material world it seeks to represent (Derrida 1978), there are endless possibilities for de- and re-territorialization: language offers the potential for humans to interpret the world with infinite variety.

People are the continual subjects of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as their BwOs are inscribed by the forces of the social. From birth (perhaps — one could argue — from conception) every inscription is a deterritorialization of virgin territory and a reterritorialization in some new patterning. The BwO is the summation of all these myriad deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the embodied self: it is in this sense that we might agree with Foucault’s (1977: 148) description of the body as totally imprinted by (its) history. But - I would add - this is a history which has been enacted and engaged with, not simply imposed.

The Nomadic Subject and Nomadology

Deleuze and Guattari identify the potential for resistance in this process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, whether it is the outcome of an individual’s reflexivity or through the actions of another. Either way, it can provide what they call (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 9) a line of flight by which the BwO escapes from a territorialization. Often the de-territorialization is momentary and perhaps inconsequential: the BwO moves just a little from its previous position before re-territorializing in a new patterning. At other times, it may be substantial and life-changing, a line of flight which carries the BwO into unimagined realms of possibility and becoming-other. To give two examples: a patient’s BwO may be de-territorialized by the health care worker or friend who treats them as something more than a collection of pathologies; a child’s BwO may be deterritorialized (and reterritorialized) by the adult who treats her as an equal.

Such lines of flight can lead to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as nomadic subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 55). Because the relation between a person and her environment is dynamic and challenging, movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are commonplace: part of the daily fabric of existence, part of the unfolding and becoming-other character of life and death, health and illness. Deterritorialization can be seen clearly in relation to sickness and mortality. Thus a risk to health from some environmental factor leads to a change in behaviour; an illness or impairment forces a person to adapt and exploit unused potentialities. In each case there is relative deterritorialization of the BwO. But these relative deterritorializations, even if they are very rapid or very extreme, rarely (perhaps never) result in an absolute line of flight, the absolute deterritorialization of the BwO which Deleuze and Guattari call nomadism or nomadology.

Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of nomadology as an aspiration and an alternative philosophy to what they saw as the discursive straitjacket of western thought (1988: 23-25). In a narrower sense, nomadology is about replacing monolithic definitions of reality with a multiplicity of narratives. This enables an uninterrupted flow of deterritorialization that establishes a line of flight away from territories, grand designs and monolithic institutions. Needless to say, this is not something which is achieved once and for all, there is always another and another deterritorialization ahead.

Thus nomadology must be thought of not as an outcome but as a process, as a line of flight which continually resists the sedentary, the single fixed perspective. Again recall that Foucault (1977: 148) spoke of the body completely imprinted with history — that is, the forces of the social. Nomadology sets itself in opposition to this inscription: nomad subjectivity is one free to roam, untrammelled by the territorializations of power, and free to resist. As such, a commitment to deterritorialization and the nomad is intrinsically political, always on the side of freedom, experimentation and becoming, always opposed to power, territory and the fixing of identity.

This last concept from the work of Deleuze and Guattari seems pregnant with significance for our understanding of the social character of health and illness. Looking back at the earlier discussion of pain, it is possible to see the medicalised BwO as territorialized into the body-with-organs. The sick, the convalescent, the disabled are all part of this territorialization: the history of health has been written, and continues to be written within this territory. This can be recognised as the focus of critique in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on mental illness, which began with the limited project of Anti-Oedipus and continued on the broader canvas of A Thousand Plateaus (a book conceived as a line of flight itself). What if there were to be a nomadological refusal of the territory of ‘health’? It is to this proposition that we now turn.

Refracting ‘health’: what can a body do?

In an essay which focuses attention on a key element in Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, Buchanan (1997) suggests that theorists of the body (in philosophy, social science and biomedicine) have been asking the wrong question. Rather than considering what a body is, they should ask: what can a body do? This question is

the critical means of finding out what masochists, drug users, obsessives and paranoiacs are actually trying to do. The question works by staking out an area of what a body actually can do. This area is restricted by obvious physical constraints which must be respected. But this does not mean that there is no beyond, or that a beyond cannot be desired. And it is just this beyond - beyond the physical limits of the physical body - that the concept of the body-without organs articulates. … It is the body’s limits that define the BwO, not the other way around (Buchanan 1997: 79, his emphases)

Note that this approach is not functionalistic, indeed it rejects efforts to define the essential nature of a body. Deleuze and Guattari’s approach consists not in assessing bodily cause and effect (it has kidneys, so it can excrete), but in counting what they call the affects or relations of a body (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 257): its psychological, emotional and physical attachments — which may be many or few. Asking ‘what can a body do’ recognises an active, experimenting, engaged and engaging body, not one passively written in systems of thought. Bodies are not the locus at which forces act, they are the production of the interactions of forces. A body is the capacity to form new relations, and the desire to do so. (Buchanan 1997: 83)

A body can do this and it can do that in relation to the situations and settings it inhabits, and to its aspirations within an unfolding, active experimentation. In other words, it does this or that because of how it is territorialized (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 316). A blackbird sings inter alia because it has vocal chords (and neural pathways) that can form a relation with air that results in song. It has a relation to the dawning day or to predators in its environment. And the singing-blackbird has serendipitous relations with other bodies (blackbirds and other animals) concerning mating, or warning, or marking territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 312).⁴

For human beings, things are more complicated because of our capacity for reflexivity, but the principle is the same. We have relations which are proper to our physiology, to our environment, and to our aspirations to talk, to work, to love, to reason or whatever. In this perspective, a person or a patient is defined not by essential conceptions of gender, age or ‘diagnosis’, but by their unfolding and changing relations. Rather than talking of their ‘experiences’, we can identify their myriad relations or affects: to air, to food, to their families, to walking, to their carers, to their homes and to their past and future lives. All of these relations establish the limits of a person’s body: what it can do. It is the forces - of biology, of environment, of culture and reflexivity, and of the aspirational potential which all living things possess - which together make the body. They do this by defining (constraining, elaborating) the body’s relations or affects, what it can do. The forces and the resistances together constitute the becoming-body (as opposed to an essentialist being-body).

Asking the question of a body: what can it do? (which are its relations?) informs us about its BwO (the confluences of a body with its affects and relations), about territory and nomadism (the forces that make it what it is and what it may become), about deterritorialization and lines of flight (the trajectories which open up possibilities for becoming-other). For Deleuze and Guattari, this has both a theoretical significance and a practical utility, including the creation of a basis for their ’schizoanalysis’. By encouraging patients (or people) to pursue an aspiration, it opens locked doors to new vistas (Buchanan 1997: 85). Importantly, this

does not result in the patient being restored to his or her former self, rather, using the newly awakened affect, he or she is encouraged to invent a new self. … (This formulation avoids) the inevitable closure of standard hermeneutic accounts of the embodied self that picture it as a mostly stable negotiation between the instinctual desires of nature and the necessary compromise of culture. (Buchanan 1997: 85-6)

Both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ forces comprise the relations which a body can have (and thus, what it can do), both are implicated in the ’self-invention’ which is both a feature of schizoanalysis, and more generally of nomadology. Counting the relations (’natural’ or ‘cultural’ - these terms become meaningless) of a body can indicate how it is territorialized; fostering new relations may open the way to a line of flight.

So let us ask this question about the human body. In Buchanan’s essay, he focused on some BwOs which are congruent with the Deleuze and Guattari project: the anorexic body, the paralysed body, the schizoid body (Buchanan 1997: 8ff), just as Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 150) considered the hypochondriac, drugged and masochistic bodies. I want to look at some less extreme BwOs, which may help map the limits of the ‘healthy’ body (including its implicit antithesis, the ’sick’ body), and hence the lines of flight which might change those limits. In these sketches, think about relations/affects, about territorialization and about lines of flight into nomadic subjectivity.

The Growing Body

The body has a relation with time and with space. It aspires to have moved beyond where it is now, for time to have passed, for space to have been filled; alternatively it aspires always to remain the same, to return to what it was before. It tests its new capacities against the environment, and measures itself against what it has been, and what it will be in the future. Its relation to the environment is one of absorption: of nutrients and of experience.

The Becoming-Fit Body

The body has a relation to gravity: it resists it and yet requires it for its creation and its sustenance. Gravity is an addiction, yet unlike a drug whose addict craves its ingestion, here the addiction is concerned with refusing its victory. The muscles of the body enter into new relations with the skin: pressing outwards, testing its limits. There are relations with fat and heart disease, which have become the enemy: the fit body wages poignant war on itself, denying (yet simultaneously admitting) its relation to time and to degradation.

The Cancerous (Cancering) Body

The body subjects itself to censorship, to moralistic outrage. It appraises itself: ‘this part is good, it can remain; this part is bad, it must be excised or burnt or poisoned or overcome by positive mental effort’. The body is conservative, it is suspicious of novelty, of otherness: it is a control freak because the worst consequence is to lose control.

The Slimming Body

The body enhances, concentrates and strengthens its relation with food, it thinks of everything it sees: ‘I can consume you, you can become part of me’. Life is measured in kilograms and days: the body becomes utopian, Puritan and millenarian, imagining a time and a remade, slim body which has yet to come into existence but which once attained will be free of pain and longing, gloriously released from the shackles of unconsummated desire.

The Valetudinarian Body

This body has been consumed by the diseases it fears. There is nothing left, it has been burnt out, it has become pathology. The BwO rattles, like an empty husk whose only contents are the ailments which began this hopeless territorialization.

The Dying Body

The body has a relation to time: it passes time by giving its capacities away, until there is nothing left to give, no more aspiration. It is engaged in giving up all that was once needed, saying ‘I no longer have a use for this or that, what do I want with that any more?’ When the body is emptied of all it contained, it no longer aspires to anything.

In writing these abstractions, I have tried to elaborate the ambivalence of the affects or relations, and their capacity to become all consuming. All these bodies are active, and they are all becoming-other (the exercising body is becoming-fit, the valetudinarian body is becoming-invalid, the dying body is becoming-moribund). They are all constitutive of BwOs as they conjoin with their affects (there is a food plus eating-body confluence and a medicine plus sick-body confluence and so on).

We can understand the ‘patient’ and her/his health/illness in terms of the affects or relations that are confluent to construct the BwO, the limit of what their bodies can do. This is not however, an exercise in assessing mobility or capacity to work or to reason or whatever. What a body can do is not a matter of health assessment or pathology diagnosis, but of the deterritorialization which the walking, working, reasoning-body makes possible: a glimpse of nomadic subjectivity. What a body can do deterritorializes the BwO, to open up new possibilities for her becoming-other.

But this cuts both ways. The intensification of an affect or relation can lead to a becoming which reterritorializes and inhibits further lines of flight. Buchanan offers the example of the anorexic (the ’slimming body’ gone critical, perhaps), who

endeavours to obtain freedom, to become free, via the pathway of an intensive hunger, eliminating in the process all extensive demand (demands of the body-organism). Hunger that is not determined by the demands of the body is intense because it is now for itself; as such, it would be more correct to describe it as ‘hungering’ not hunger. The problem for the anorexic, however, and this is the inherent danger of all self-motivated becoming, is that far from accelerating becoming, what he or she actually does is deform it. Intensifying a particular (affect is) … a gross delimitation of becoming itself. It confuses the blissfully passive beyond of becoming which Nietzsche idealizes, with the passivity of the already become. (Buchanan 1997: 87)

A body (BwO) that has become (rather than being in the process of becoming) has suffered territorialization, into a territory that cannot easily be escaped. The valetudinarian has become an invalid, the dementing body loses all sense of continuity. For some people, being a ‘patient’ or receiving care is just such a reterritorialization, one that closes down possibilities, creating a body-self trammelled by dependency. Having become, there is no becoming left to do. Singularity of purpose leads not to the beyond, but to death.

Becoming other requires the multiplication of affects, not the intensification of a single affect or relation. It is an opening-up to difference, to possibility and to the ‘rightness’ of the many rather than the few or the one. This is not an easy conclusion to draw: multiplication of affects and relations, particularly if - like some ‘patients’ — one’s resources are limited, may not be something which can be achieved independently: we may need all the help we can get (Fox 1995). There is an agenda here which goes beyond the clinic and the academy and encompasses health and social policy, economics and the politics of welfare.

Conclusion

There are several elements which make Deleuze and Guattari’s model important for understanding health, both for the specifics of exploring the play of power and resistance in the embodied subjectivities of people and ‘patients’, and more generally to theorise an anti-essentialist yet resisting self.

First, the self and the body cannot be thought of as separate. The self-body confluence is the ontological entity which must be conceptualised as we consider embodiment and subjectivity. Further, the body upon which the social world impinges is not the physical body. The use of the term body-without-organs makes it clearer that the ‘in-folding’ of the social operates in a realm distance from the physical body, indeed that the sense we have of a physical body is a result of this patterning of the BwO. The BwO is the limit of what a body can do, not in a functionalist sense, but in terms of the affects or relations it possesses. For patients, people with disabilities, older adults and for anyone, the social may impinge to territorialize the BwO, to establish limits from which it is hard to fly. But these limits can be re-drawn, especially if one has a little help. For people with bodies everywhere, the BwO is the locus for confluences of relations, and these relations together establish what it can do. In studying ‘health’, the confluence of body-self that is the BwO becomes the focus of attention.

Second, body-self — this embodied subjectivity — is not the passive outcome of ‘inscription’, but a dynamic, reflexive, ‘reading’ of the social by an active, experimenting, motivated human being. For Deleuze and Guattari, the BwO is like an uncharted territory, but one whose possession must be fought over, inch by inch. The BwO is always in flux, as it is endlessly territorialized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Territorialization is a function both of the forces of the social and by the motivated, ‘experimenting’ BwO as it becomes other. The self is neither prior nor an outcome: it is processual, continually unfolding and becoming other.

Thus the discourses of biomedicine (along with law, religion and so forth) are not passively inscribed on the BwO, creating direct images or reflections. Rather these territorializations are resisted and subverted by an experimenting, ‘experiencing’ body-self, so that what ends up being inscribed is not a simulacrum, but a refracted patterning which bears some, but perhaps only indirect resemblance to the territorializing force. And what is inscribed may be deterritorialized by other forces of the social and natural worlds, ad infinitum (or at least ad mortem). This dynamic model of body-self can conjure the endless permutations of living, of ‘health’, ‘illness’ and ‘disability’, the multiplying, becoming-other BwO: the ultimate ‘reader’, always capable of a new interpretation, another nuance.

Third, we may understand ‘health’ as - at least in part - the resistance of body-self to forces of territorialization. Resistance is not only a possibility: it is the character of the body-self as it refracts the affects and relations which impinge upon it. As has been noted, these include physical and biological, psychological or emotional, social and cultural relations, and the body-self uses these strategically to define what it can ‘do’. So the ‘health’ of a body is the outcome of all these refracted and resisted relations, biological capabilities or cultural mind-sets, alliances with friends or health workers, struggles for control over treatment or conditions of living. Health is neither an absolute (defined by whatever discipline) to be aspired towards, nor an idealised outcome of ‘mind-over-matter’. It is a process of becoming by body-self, of rallying affects and relations, resisting physical or social territorialization, and experimenting with what is, and what might become.

Inevitably, this perspective makes health and health care intrinsically political. For ‘patients’ and for everyone, the politics of health and illness are about engaging with the real struggles of people as they are territorialized - by biology or by culture, as they resist, and as they encourage others in their aspirations. Health is processual, and both at the level of the individual and the wider public health, this is a process that encompasses natural and social science disciplines. For health care (as for education, citizenship and every aspect of social action), the analysis developed from the work of Deleuze and Guattari suggests an agenda for its practitioners that fosters deterritorialization in the body-selves of those for whom they care (Fox 1995, 1999) and generates a politics of health that transcends economic and management perspectives. To engage productively with such agendas collapses disciplinary boundaries and establishes a pressing need for collaboration between medical and caring professions, social and political scientists, social activists, indeed everyone with a body.

Notes

1. Humanistic movements in psychology and sociology such as interactionism and phenomenology emphasise agency, and argue that individuals actively construct their own social world (Shutz 1962, Berger and Luckmann 1971). In essentialist models, the self is present, albeit in an unformed state, from birth. Other approaches have challenged this essentialism, and social theorists of health and health care have drawn on these perspectives. Turner (1968) described complex rites de passage in Ndembu healing rituals, while among the Cameroonian Bakweri, women’s seizures were healed by rites that re-asserted the society’s gender roles (Ardener 1972). Ethnomethodologists see humans as consummate actors, playing roles to achieve intended outcomes, such as doctors’ artful practices in managing consultations (Bloor 1977, Heath 1981, Silverman and Perakyla 1990). Studies focusing on material and structural factors in determining health outcomes by-and-large discount experiential elements entirely.

2. The ‘post-structuralist turn’ in social theory has explicitly rejected humanism and concomitantly, any sense of an essential self (Moi 1985). In Foucauldian studies of clinical patients, the self is apparently nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the systems of thought or ‘discourses’ which structure subjectivity (Armstrong 1993, Foucault 1967, 1976, Nettleton 1992). Unlike structuralists, in post-structuralism subjectivity and self are outcomes of a micropolitics of power mediated through systems of ‘knowledge’ and often focused on the body. The aspiration of post-structuralism is for a theory in which neither ‘the self’ nor the forces of ‘the social’ is prior or ontologically independent of the other. Despite this, post-structuralist approaches have been criticised for determinism: the reduction of the human being to a totally constructed cipher, incapable of resistance (Lash 1991). No institution really is ‘total’ (Goffman 1968) or entirely discursive (Foucault 1976); people choose to act despite clear risks to their health (Fox 1999); patients reflect upon their circumstances and challenge and refuse definitions offered by professionals (Bloor and Macintosh 1990, Kleinman 1988).

3. In this paper, I use the American spelling of this term, as used throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

4. ‘Blackbird’ is itself a territorialization, achieved through the affects and relations humans have with these BwOs. There is a blackbird-human confluence which territorializes both elements!

References

Within “What is Philosophy?”, Deleuze and Guatarri state that “Philosophy, art and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought brain.  They are the three planes, the rafts on which the brain plunges into chaos” (pg.210).  Our experience of reality is both mediated through and productive of, the body; the subject emerges from this ‘zone of intensity’ or mediation as an affect.  These affects include the production of the above three planes, or modes of thought, by a “non-objectifiable brain”.

In a chapter entitled “Sharing Technologies”, Maaike Bleeker contrasts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “non-objectifiable brain” with the work of Lakoff and Johnson, two major proponents of cognitive linguistics:

“According to them [Deleuze and Guattari], it is the brain that thinks and not man - the latter being only a ‘cerebral crystalization’.  Lakoff and Johnson search for this moment where subjectivity appears as a cerebral crystallization.  They look for it within the deepest synaptic fissures, and they come up with a model in which subjectivity is the effect of complex processes of inferences taking place between reasoning, conceptual thinking, perception and motor control” (pg.69).  Following this, Bleeker traces certain tenets of Lakoff and Johnson’s perspective on embodied cognition, starting with categorization, moving to the resultant structuring of concepts, and finally to the inferential capacity of concepts and the production of metaphor.

The above excerpt is just one example of a variety of different examinations which may be made detailing the consequences of embodiment in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism.  May we conceive of ‘progressive differentiation’ under the principles of embodiment in order to extend the capacity to experience?  Are there methods which utilize, or apply an understanding of the function and structure of the embodied machine, that will lead to new styles of perception and becoming?

May we employ the body as a tool to transgress the limits of the self?  What importance does this have when considering Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’?

If you desire to contribute by way of difference and repetition, please contact me at joe.haskins[at]gmail.com.  All articles shall be credited to the author and accompanied by a link if desired.

*Eventually I’d like to start a discussion group on such topics.  These writings could possibly serve as starting points for future discussions.

I originally came across the term “Machinic Point” whilst reading a talk given by Deleuze, transcribed from a tape recording and published in the journal “Contretemps 2″ in May 2001.  The seminar itself took place on March 26, 1973.  The excerpt follows:

“There’s a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient China.  This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements.  That’s curious.  I ask myself: OK, how can we extract ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences, analogies, and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants.  I indeed see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused… it’s perfect - it would consist in saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as if a social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine.  We would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would
mark its absence of qualification, so that everything will be clear.  [...] At the same time, this abstract machine, at a given moment, will break with the abstract machine of the preceding epochs - in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge (a la pointe), thus it would receive the name machinic point (pointe machinique).  It would be the machinic point of a group or a given collectivity; it would indicate, within a group, and at a given moment, the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation.  This is somewhat abstract at the moment, it’s like algebra.  It’s this abstract machine which, in conditions that will have to be determined…it’s this machinic point of deterritorialization that is reterritorialized in this or that machine, or in this or that military machine, amorous machine, productive of new statements. This is a possible hypothesis.”

So, the idea behind this site is to create a space where such an abstract machine may exist.  My writings focus on current positions within fields which address the notion of what it means to be human, including mind-body functioning, the relationship between mind-body and experience, and ultimately experience and reality.  I hope the ideas expressed here shall promote cognitive deterritorialization amongst you, my readership.  Engaging a reterritorialization upon newly emergent syntheses [mind, body, world, state, self, other].

I hope you may each, “progressively differentiate” [M. DeLanda] yourselves, via this explorative plan(e) of consistency.  As there is nothing other in the world than, ‘the (spontaneous) flow of becoming’.

“freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity”.  - Bey

- Joseph Jay Haskins