The plan consists of three variants or variations of the "schizo's brain-eye"1, a process that is, as schizo experiences, the rupture of the "I" in ex-sistence2 , through what R. D. Ling calls "a voyage of initiation, transcendental experience of the loss of the ego" (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 93). These schizo-becomings, which involves deterritorialization of boundaries between the cosmos and I, connect the two micro- and macro level, microcosms and macrocosms, via a kind of "devenir un citoyen du monde"3 or becoming-cosmic corpuscle, that of a schizophrenic Hallucination-machine being enounced in a global delusion. By this metamorphosis, the schizophrenic reconstructs or re-creates him/herself, in a Nietzschean sense and "becomes who he/she is", namely being of becoming flows. Schizo is not an "autistic ego" or separated “I”, on the contrary, a synthetic unconscious that is able to make infinite syntheses of fluxes by producing a movement between the mini- and mega perceptional dimensions4. Hence, he/she becomes one with the pré-noms de lʼêtre which are not “the ready-mades”, but "the things-in-making" and, an endless becoming, passes constant intensities through his/her non-Cartesian mind-body. Schizo makes possible the "hyper-experimentation of the world" by constructing an illusion-machine, and expresses
his/her narrative/non-narrative5 on the "history of the molecules’ formations” (the microsphere) and the transformations of the cosmos (the macrosphere) in an ontological delusion. It is a radical critique on "pure reason", which claims to provide a true version of "the world in-itself.” (Narrative intellect6), but in a non-Kantian sense. The schizo-machine is “To have done with the judgment” of the uni-verse through its Hegelian Aufhebung 7 , by opening it onto irrationality hidden in the heart of thought (multiverse), or madness as the unthinkable within the thought itself. Schizo-synthesis includes an agencement (assemblage/agency) between the small and big components of being through delusion-machines that are fabricated in the procès of "autopoiesis"8. The schizoid auto-construction here presented in three episodes-montages: 1) the Geo-histories of molecules, 2) the
hallucination-machine in synthesis with delusion-machine, and 3) cosmogenesis, or the multiversal evolution/involution.
During the different phases of autopoiesis, the living cells units receive from their external milieus "anonymous matters" which are called dark-matters or antimatters (energy of flows). This Other-dark matter is the basic condition for “egobecomings” in the procedure of losing pre-existence. Thus, becoming is an ontological "evolution-involution" in which the demarcation between the other and I is blurred, leading to what Rimbaud said, "Je est un autre". Schizo always lives “I” as the multitude of others, the redundancies or resonances of new “nonegos” through a hallucination-machine, and constantly produces the alterity within him/herself, which is the "basic condition for the heterogeneity in thought". And by traversing the Other, in any case, he/she openly creates the "selflessness", as Beckett wrote in Unnamable: “I won’t say I anymore, I’ll never utter it again; It’s just too damn stupid (Beckett 1959). According to schizo's "brain-eye", there is only one route to auto-create immanently and permanently: enfolding the other, including uncanny objects, into oneself. Thus, auto-poiesis in fact ends up in hetero-poiesis and the schizo-cartographies draws two
instances: "de-epistemologizing the ego" and "trans-ontologizing the process".
1. Geo-history of molecules: In this part, the video commences with a view of a green molecule on the background of the cosmos, and a hand that comes down from the top corner of the image announces the beginning of the process: "memories of a molecule" are formed here, that is an archeology of fluxes in cell divisions and particles proliferation, in which a Protozoa spreads and multiplies itself through the acceleration of auto-creation; that is the Spinozaʼs substance, which extends and intensifies its attributes and modes by "expression /construction": a ground of molecular augmentations and emissions, cellular subdivisions; mutations and vacuolar transforming in which ontological matters at the micro level generate the molecular tissue of living beings. This tissue is also an enunciation of an "inorganic life of things"9, a biosphere that stretched in schizoʼs psycho-molecules: desire-circulations, dispersions and cell membranes on which there are the non-capitalistic
primitive accumulations of unknown substances. Here the ontological univocity of the primary cell leads to a multiplicity of cells, just as schizo loses his "I" in the machinery of délirer de lʼexistence; Schizophrenia is a delusion of uniting with being=becoming, a de-lusion of removing limits. It is in this sense that schizo is a "Homo Natura"; He/She lives nature in terms of diffusion and multiplication of particulate streams. Additionally, the nature in schizo Erfahrung is not “natural” (natura naturata), but itself should be re-invented
(natura naturans) as Guattari said10. Hence, he also experiences the geo-history of earth as an eco-political being.
2. The hallucination-machine in synthesis with delusion-machine: As Freud has demonstrated, schizophrenic delusion is an attempt to self-treatment. Delusion is a psycho political phenomenon in which schizophrenic expresses Das Ding as it appears in his/her hallucination. By removing the border between the cosmos and the ego, schizo can connect words to the things on the surface of real (schizo reduction versus phenomenological reduction11) and experiment the burning thing-in-itself as an "anti-Kantian reason", through
suspending "common sense" and transgressing it which can only interpret phenomena at the level of a "consensus, discursive intellect". Schizo's brain-eye with its hallucination-machine is able to attain over-seeing or an extra viewing-eye by hyper-synthesis of flows (see-more-glass according to Salinger12); the schizo's retina creates an anti-mind by reproducing counter images or meta-statements on the hadrons of the brain. And by being a site for "passive synthesis" of the fluxes, that anti-mind goes beyond "active synthesis" in Kant's general intellect. Kant's model of faculties is still too close to the "collective assemblage of consciousness", but it is the schizophrenic hallucination-machine which invents, by the retinal proliferation, a "liquid or gaseous intellect"13 that floats on the area of currents and from which the schizo-flows related to hallucinatory machine originate: the delusion of having done with the judgment of the common mind. Schizo-delusion is not an
inhuman or post-human machine, but a "cosmo-assemblage", a deterritorialized creature connected to the mega-verse. It is the schizo who stands on the edge of the most non-human artificial intelligence (machines) and the most post-natural phenomenon of being (the cosmos) and connects them with a "conjunctive synthesis"; Delusion is a conjunctive and simultaneously connective synthesis: a “je ne sais qua” and the trees, and the water, and the cars, and the birds, and the stones, and the bicycle, and a beloved, and ..., the delusion is a synthesis between cycles (a cyclo-analysis) that the common sense (psycho-analysis) cannot comprehend; thus it immediately returns it into a "non-sense". In fact, schizophrenia is not merely the asignifying, non-sensory dispositif, but a hyper-sensory machine. Schizo does
not suffer from not having reason, but his/her real pain comes from having too much of it, from bearing the heavy burden of "acute syntheses" of flows in retinal delusional-machine.
3. The cosmogenesis, or the multiversal evolution/involution: If the schizo is a delusion of union with the cosmos, just as he/she expresses by a narrative/non-narrative the paleontology of existence in molecular dimensions, he/she also finds in him/herself the history of metaversal evolution/involution and world creation in its molarity. The cosmos, this " deterritorialized giant […] Molecule" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 40) , brought into being by the "Big Bang", is a macro and dense schizophrenic cry that schizo rediscovers the traces and remnants of its pervasive rays in his psyche .The schizophrenic auditory illusions are vibrations of the cosmic sounds remained of this "primary darkness" and spread throughout the world, molecules that have turned into the suns and the stars; cellular moyens leading to the galaxies and the Milky Way. Schizo finds himself alone in the face of this infinite elegance, what can he/she do but turn him/herself into a wandering iota and write the memories of a mote floating in the galaxy (“a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”14): souvenirs and dangers; standing at the crossroads of ex-istence, at the intersection of wind, sun and sky; living flows in their most intense modes; the experience of the cosmos by incessant becoming and stopping “to be”, yes, schizo is already a full-fledged Heraclitian, and when we want to prevent him/her--by medication and neuroleptics--from his processual
becoming, or to freeze the flux to bring him/her back to general intelligence, whether natural, artificial or social, we deprive ourselves from la gaya scienza of a cosmogenesis, of schizo-revelations, the receiver of cosmic radiations that can articulate all of species in a complex delusion. But we don’t learn Le schizo et les langues15 ; Talking with molecular trans-codes and the language of creatures, speaking at the level of gleams. Schizo-languages encounters the cosmo-languages and the consequence is the evolution/involution’s traces of the Pluriverse 16 in a hallucination-machine that a reason-particle accelerator generates. Schizo expresses the speed of thought or velocity within reason; the eye-flow that draws on the surface of being a molten intellect or the self-bypassing mind that, in its "transcendental empiricism", provokes the non-narrative of the archelogy of becoming (a devenir-logique).
References:
Beckett, Samuel (1959) The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press.
Cull, Laura (ed) (2009). Deleuze and the Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (2004). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, trans. by Brian Massumi, London: The Athlone Press.
Guattari, F (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Guattari, F (2000). The three ecologies, trans. by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, New Jersey: The Athlone Press.
Varela, Francisco (1973). Principles of Biological Autonomy, New York and Oxford: North Holland.
Lacan, Jacques (2006). Ecrits: the first complete edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Notes:
1-“Brain-eye” is an expression coined by Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Belgian-born poet and painter. Éric Alliez and Jean-Clet Martin re-construct the term along the concept of hallucination in Hippolyte Taine’s studies on cerebralization and de-naturalization of reality in modern painters’ brain-eye. See: The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting, Éric Alliez, and Jean-Clet Martin, trans. by Robin Mackay, London: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2016.
2- Jacques Lacan invented this neologism in his Seminar on “purloined letter” to explain a state between “insistence of signifying chain” to inscribe itself in subject’s life and the topology of the unconscious which is outside of conscious agency (Lacan 2006: 11).
3-In his beautiful essay, “Becoming a Citizen of the World: Deleuze between Allan Kaprow
and Adrian Piper”, Stephen Zepke extends this Deleuzian concept (Cull 2009: 109-125).
4- Here we are trying to outline a synthetic unconscious instead of an analytic one, which works with the psycho-syntheses.
5-It is Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers who introduce a novel notion of “narration” in their book, Entre le temps et l'éternité, Paris: Fayard, 1988 :see the three ecologies (Guattari , 2000 :83, n 33): “The creation of a new species signifies that among [several] microevents some have taken on meaning [sens] . . . The fact that any event can "take on meaning [sens]" ceases to be a mere noise in the nonsensical uproar of microscopic activity, and introduces into physics that narrative element which is indispensable to a true conception of evolution' (Prigogine et Stengers, 1988 : 47 , 61 )]”. But for us it is also necessary to envisage the non-narrative elements of an a-signifying schizo-semiotics.
6-we are referring to Jean-Pierre Faye’s, French writer and Philosopher, conception of
“narrative reason” examined in his important book, langages totalitaires: Critique de la raison narrative, critique de l'économie narrative (1973). In this text, he opens another perspective on the notion of narration and its relation to power language, what he calls “roman criminel”.
7-An Artaudian shizo-password which operates cruelly against Kantian judgments and
Hegelian sublations which conduct thought in adaptation to a “neurotic-mind” model.
8- Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela propose this inventive term to describe the
autonomy of a biological entity for developing or reconstituting itself, as Varela remarks in
Principles of Biological Autonomy: “an autopoietic machine continuously generates and
specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own
components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of
continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations. Therefore, an autopoietic
machine is a homeostatic (or rather a relations-static) system that has its own organization
(defining network of relations) as the fundamental invariant” (Varela, 1979:13). We consider
schizoid delusion as an autopoietic machine which allows schizophrenic to re-create
him/herself according to a processual construction which produces a fluidity in reason and autoreferent condition for “new multiverses of values”.
9-Deleuze borrows this expression from Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian, to present
in logic of Sensation a creative form of life which exists beyond organic and structural modes
of being, and the Francis Bacon’s paintings designate it.
10- In Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes two form of nature, natura naturata (nature natured) and
natura naturans (nature naturing). By the same token, in Deleuze and Guattari, nature is not
natural, but mechanic that means constructivist. For example see: The three ecologies, where Guattari talks about “re-invention of environment” (Guattari, 2000: 68).
11- Guattari writes in Chaosmosis: “The schizo fracture is the royal road of access to the
emergent fractality of the Unconscious. What could be called the schizo reduction goes beyond all the eidetic reductions of phenomenology—it leads to an encounter with the a-signifying refrains which give back to the narrative, which recast in artifice, existential narrativity and alterity, albeit delirious ones”(Guattari 1995: 64)
12- A phrase pronounced by the “little girl” of Salinger’s story, A perfect day for bananafish,
Sybil Carpenter. Her becoming-child can’t be understood by her mother who just renders it to an infantile, non-sense language-game. But by her molecular perceptions, Sybil can enter into Seymour Glass’s ungraspable world.
13- In his books on Cinema, Deleuze poses several kind of perceptions including diffuse, liquid and gaseous ones. We approach to schizo’s mental ecology as a liquid or gaseous milieu against the solid segmentation in neurosis.
14- A quote by Carl Sagan, American cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author and
poet.
15- The tittle of a book by Louis Wolfson in which the author presents himself as “the student of schizophrenic languages, a mentally ill student and the student of mad speeches”. See : Louis Wolfson, Le schizo et les langues, Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
16- For a philosophical inquiry on this concept see: Jean-Clet Martin, Plurivers. Essai sur la
fin du monde, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2010.
Simin azarpour is a video artist and poet from Iran. Simin has a background in literature. Her interests reside in Feminism and gender studies. Simin has been working on digital art and glitch art as a method of resistance against the social and political problems in her environment.
Mehdi Rafei As an independent researcher and translator, Mehdi Rafi started his career with poetry and psycho-analytical works, especially Freudo-Lacanian ones. Afterward, when he discovered Anti-Oedipus turned radically against constrains of analytical theory and praxis. He also works on post-Deleuzian philosophy with a transdisciplinary approach to art and non-art. Rafi teaches philosophy and writes and translates in champ Deleuzien…