Isle of Lyngvi

A little known fact is that the expression “whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” was actually written by Nietzsche. He didn’t mean that anyone who faced something became stronger for it, some people are emotionally crippled by facing criticism. Criticism didn’t kill them and it didn’t make them any stronger either. Nietzsche was talking about himself and his nodal concept the Ubermensch.

The Ubermensch is not perfect. He is perfecting. Whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger. He is engaged in a process of becoming perfect but he never arrives. Perfection is a limit, you can approach it but you can never be it. Nietzsche didn’t consider himself perfect (most of the time) but he was working very hard in that direction. His philosophy is an eminently practical one. He advises his reader to figure out what climate, diet and routines makes them the strongest, healthiest and happiest. His superman is perfecting because it faces the situations it encounters and learns from them, compensates for them.

The Nazis all other confusions aside were not supermen, were not ubermensches. The Ubermensch was not prone to following orders but to deciding on a course of action and applying themselves to it. Nietzsche’s was a philosophy of nobility not slaves. Hitler was even more definitely not an ubermensch. He was incapable of handling negative feedback and failed to learn from his, or anyone else’s, mistakes.

To be ubermensch is to be a self-correcting, self-perfecting, organism. We can play our own becoming-uber if we face the world, set our own goals, and take negative feedback we are offered, from failure to rejection, and learn from it, grow by it. Accepting our natures as imperfect beings we can still be perfecting ones through cybernetic self-correction.

“Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”

Their project for Capitalism and Schizophrenia was psychological emancipation of the individual and cooperative social organization so they are very compatable with both Marxism and Occult practice.

Deleuze and Guattari, however, is not a totalized whole that can be understood and explained. Rather their work is many things subject to many understandings. One purpose of studying Deleuze and Guattari is to change how you think. It is an initiation. Their concepts are not a system to be understood but rather tools we can apply or put to work.

The second problem with getting into D&G material is almost every introduction to them is made in terms of A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, whereas the material you might want to start with is in Anti-Oedipus, the first one.

Rather than just leave you with a pile of negatives I’m going to attempt to put some of their thought into context and explain how certain of their concepts can be useful.

Locating Deleuze and Guattari in Context

Deleuze was a mainstream (for the French) philosopher who initially made his splash by investigating what has been called a nomad line or minority position of philosophy and western culture. The nomad line would be a secondary stream or descendence where ideas out of the primary discourse have recurred and developed. This would include thinkers like Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza as opposed to Plato, Hegel and Kant. His method, as he explained, was to sneak up behind a thinker, rape them, and force the birth of a bastard love child, conceptually speaking. It might be important that he hated Hegel, and was not even willing to “rape” him as one could argue Marx did.

I suppose what I should go over next is what he took or adapted from those thinkers.

Bergson was a thinker that concentrated on perception, creativity, and evolution. Bergson also was a proponent of what is called Vitalism. Vitalism looks at the world in terms of life energy and its movement or flow through the world and living beings. Vitalism is a significant recurring feature of the nomad line and appears again and again in many different guises. I’ve even realized that Scientology or at least Dianetics is based around Vitalist conceptions. While I’m not sure if Bergson’s Vitalism did, many incarnations of Vitalism considered the live energy to be distinctly sexual in nature. This feature will be important later. Additionally Vitalism underlies many forms of occult conception and practice. One way to adapt Vitalism to a Marxist context is to reexamine the labour time theory of value. If we put the emphasis on our energy, Kapital is even more directly vampiric.

Nietzsche is one the most misunderstood philosophers of all time and unfortunately has been tarred with the brush of Nazism and ignored. He started with philology the historical study of language. From there he branched into aesthetics before moving into ethics. A note on disciplines within philosophy, aesthetics is about the appreciation of beauty, logic is about discernment of truth, and ethics is about selection of good. The most common approach to ethics is to treat it as discernment of truth or judging good against bad. The other approach is to treat ethics as about action. It is in this sense that Nietzsche and Spinoza study ethics. Nietzsche explores how the ethics system and morality taught to the masses benefits the powerful and works contrary to the common man’s best interests. It is very easy to adapt this to a Marxist understanding of ideology or the rather occult conception of Maya as veil of illusion.

Nietzsche further places the emphasis on a person’s body and actions as opposed to their mind and thought He goes so far as to give advices about where to live and how to care for one’s metabolism. He even puts some attention to how passion or emotional energy fuels us.

Spinoza is a difficult case to approach and unfortunately I have not done nearly enough reading here. I can, however, go over a couple of his ideas that influenced Deleuze and Guattari. The first is the body, Spinoza’s body is an affective body and is defined according to what it can do, its actions. One consequence of this conception is that a group of people working towards some complicated affect, say a revolution, are in a sense one body. Another consequence is that a body is never fully closed, as we never know all that it could do.

The next concept to approach is Spinoza’s formulation of determinism and causation. For Spinoza causation was absolute and choice an illusion. The only power available was human reason and our capacity to understand why. The philosophy espoused by the Merovingian character in Matrix Reloaded is actually directly Spinozean. This understanding of causation is fairly compatible with Marx’s historical materialism, how human behaviour springs from material conditions, and the inevitableness of the changes in mode of production.

The last concept involves the distinction between emotion and passion. Based on the observation that no animal in nature acts against its interests as a species and yet humanity does. Emotions are those natural feelings that lead us to take actions in our own interests, at least as a species. Passions on the other hand are those feelings that incite action contrary to our best interests. These passions are foreign to us and are like a virus or addiction. Kapital, as it is clearly against our interests, is an alien and enemy intelligence. It is in these terms that Mark from K-punk considers the writer William S. Burroughs as a Spinozaist.

Guattari is the other member of the intellectual tag team behind Capitalism and Schizophrenia. He was a psychotherapist and Marxist activist. He was trained as a Lacanian and long after the ideas and practices he espoused ceased to look Lacanian he still considered himself one. He was a founding member of the LaBorde Clinic a radical anti-hierarchical psychotherapy organization. In addition to Lacan, Guattari’s primary influences are Marx and Hjelmslev.

Lacan himself is probably best viewed in terms of his own influences, those being Freud, Marx, and Saussure’s semiotics. Now early Freud is based on the idea of the libido driving the organism, a kind of Vitalism. Later Freud is concentrated on the Oedipus complex and the father mother child love triangle. Lacan identifies the signifier of semiotics as an Oedipal operation, castration essentially. This can be related back to the work of Burroughs, the word is a fundamental error that alienates us from reality and this form of communication is ideological.

Hjelmslev created a non-saussurean semiotics. The essential differences are instead of the two terms of signifier and signified he used three purport, substance and form. The reason Guattari uses this is to attempt to find a semiotics that is not bound to ideological communication. Ultimately this is beyond the scope of this article so we’ll move on and perhaps cover that in a later discussion.

In a fundamental sense Guattari remains a Lacanian even as he alters what this means. He works to bring in and generate concepts that counteract limitations in the system. Even his participation in Anti-Oedipus can be seen in this context. Hjelmslev he imports to compensate for the form of semiotics Lacan used and Nietzsche for problems with late Freud. His project remains psychological emancipation of the individual and cooperative social organization.

I’m sure that a knowledgeable person could find many contentious interpretations and even some errors of fact in the above and I welcome comments and corrections. Consider this a work in progress.

First page of a new notebook, got to love it.

This post brought to you by the letter C for Chaos Marxism and Cold Rationalists (Burroughs as a).

And runner up status to A for Action Yoga.

The parts of an assemblage are the members of a set, different in kind from their co-members but of equal importance. The assemblage must contain every part necessary to do what the assemblage does. Each assemblage acts as a unit and can be a component of another assemblage. Additionally just as members can be in different sets at the same time, a component can be in multiple assemblages along different lines.

Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The Situationist Drift is an example of a program that creates a Body without Organs and circulates charge across it.

By disengaging with the striated purpose of the city and the streets the drifter creates or allows a null to exist. This smooth space forms the body without organs. The organs of the city cut themselves loose from the organized system that makes a city an organism.

The next phase in the drifter’s program is to pass, or allow to pass, an intensive charge over the city’s body. This is the search for psychogeographic traces or the experiencing of synchronicities. The drifter feels, senses, these intensities rather than perceives them. Over time sites of power are found and returned to, zones of intensity like the power centers or charkas that form on the body as a result of a tantric or taoist alchemy program.

Drifts are not climactic but rather form plateaus, which the drifter can recapitulate or reconstruct. Climaxes are a collapse of the fields either through explosion or implosion. The intensity spikes and the body without organs falls back into the systems of an organism. Sometimes of course the climax collapses into a different organism than the one that generated the fields.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming they talk of parts, which are sub-selves with a semi-separate nature and their own volitional program. In general these programs are contextually activated but some, with different areas of responsibility are always active These parts are related to coex systems in that they bundle experiences of a related nature but they have a program of action attached that is triggered by the familiar context. In this way they are similar to engrams but they are not strictly negative. In fact it is a ground assumption of NLP that people and parts always have positive intentions. Problems arise with errors in scope that can lead to programs that conflict each other.

Desiring-machines exist by splitting off some portion of the available “energy” to move in the direction of the desire or purpose that they exist for. The word energy is necessarily vague as it is used to refer to a variety of separate features of the human organism. It refers to both the physical energy to move the body and the mental energy to move the body and the mental energy to motivate action and even the amount of attention that is available. Energy refers to all these resources that are available for the organism to get its work done. It also refers to a common pattern of directional flow that these things share. What we perceive as a person is an assemblage of these parts of desiring machines and only a relatively small percentage participate in the process we label consciousness. Each part is interconnected with other parts and each part has its own vector and percentage of the available force. The vectors and can be in a direction that no part is aiming at and at speeds much slower than if all vectors pointed in the same direction. When there is conflict and incongruence in the assemblage the desires that are reached are random, inefficient and stunted.

The person, the self, is a story a narratization created by the part called “I” describing the movements of the whole assemblage in terms of the volitions and actions of the “I” or factors acting on the part called “Me” any desiring-machines or parts other than the subject “I” and the object “Me” are unconscious drives and programs, or at least they start unconscious. A coex system is a collection of associated experiences but when dealing with one consciously we don’t experience the whole bundle, that would take as much time as it did to experience each part of the bundle originally, instead we experience or relate to an excerption that stands in for the rest.

Works Cited

Bandler, Richard and Grinder, John. (1979). Frogs into Princes. Moab, Utah: Real People Press.

Grof, Stanislav and Bennet, Hal Zina. (1993). The Holotropic Mind. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Jaynes, Julian. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Lilly, John C. (1967, 1968). Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer. New York: Julian Press.

I just discovered that Scientology, or at least Dianetics, is within the band of my research. It is vitalist in nature. The purpose of Dianetics processing is to remove blocks in the flow of life energy. L. Ron Hubbard just called the energy theta and the blocks engrams. The main difference between this and other vitalist practices is that this, at least at the stages I’ve had access to, has been much more mental than physical.

Originally posted on: Wed, Feb. 8th, 2006 04:39

I am interested in the idea of machine in two different ways, the tool as object to achieve a purpose and the automation as object of mechanical operation. Society is machine in both of these senses. It is a human-relation-machine. On the one hand it was formed as and, in my opinion should remain as, a tool facilitating human interactions and cooperation. On the other it seems to situate human interaction as mechanical relations and humans as parts of this social-machine.

One potential out from this situation is to create less totalized social machines adjacent to the existing society and to each other each acting as tools for small interaction functions and slowly, as we have machines to support us, we can unplug from the current society. We need to adjust our role from machine-part to tool-operator.

The network is one such social-machine. The advantage of it is, it emphasizes that the part of the social experience that matters is our connections to and interactions with other people not the abstract social structures that individuals have very little control over. Out of these networks the next machines to arise are the interest groups. They either share a topic or share goals or perhaps both. They share vectors or intentionality in common and so are grouped together in terms of them. After this comes the trust group. At the fundamental level the trust group is that subset of an individual’s network connections that the individual trusts. Past this point individual people can interconnect their trust so that you can have groupings where each member knows and trusts each other member. Interest groups and trust groups are built on networks but are independent of each other. They can, however, overlap. Trust-groups that are the same as interest groups, that have all the same members, are in a powerful position. They can now work together towards the goal or topic-interest that they share in common. This new group structure could be titled the subject group, as Deleuze and Guattari title it, as it is in position to act rather than be acted upon.

An important point to make is that just because a particular group is a subject group at some time A doesn’t mean it will be or even should be, at another time B. Individual’s interests or trusts can change and if we ignore that and force the individual to remain subsumed in the group then people are no longer the tool-operator, they are again the machine-parts.