On Signs and Meaning

Here is a brief look at Deleuze's philosophy in his book A Thousand Plateaus and, more importantly, how it relates to religion.  A downloadable version (pdf) can be found here.

In Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, we can find a strong attempt by the authors to combat any system of signs that create a static, unchanging interpretation.  Generally, these lead to fascism—the desire to be controlled. In religion, and particularly in Christianity, we can find this motif in fundamentalism.  As we can see fundamentalism seemingly on the rise, what is an alternative that stays away from such a system? What are some symptoms of it that we may be able to find not only in our world, but also even in our own lives?

Faciality

Deleuze and Guattari call the Face that which decodes and overcodes body and head into a single object: a face.  This Face should be understood as an abstract image—a white wall and a black hole. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that these two objects always follow two concepts: signification (signifiance) and subjectification. Signification is never without a white wall and subjectification never without a black hole.  At their intersection is where the face appears.  In the movies, the close-up treats the face as a landscape—again, the white wall and black hole.¹ Deleuze writes that “Christian education” exerts spiritual control over both the abstract face and the landscape by overcoding them into a predefined system of meaning.  But, I suggest we read “Christian education” here more as “fundamentalist tendencies” as it appears that in other sections of this work that he isn't necessarily against religion—or Christianity—in general, but rather a specific form of it.

Signification happens, regardless of one's approach.  In a motion not unlike Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari state that “the world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signified is given without being known.”² Then, Deleuze gives us examples of this: “Your wife looked at you with a funny expression.  And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers.  Then you stepped in a pile of dog [feces].....It doesn't matter what it means, it's still signifying.”³ There is always this act of signification, regardless of meaning. Signs always refer to other signs in an infinitely circular pattern—Deleuze's hint at Nietzsche's eternal return.  Yet, fundamentalist tendencies take a portion of these signs and deem it knowable.  Then, a class of priests that interpret everything is added, but Deleuze points out that they are deceptive because their interpretation always reimparts the signifier—the Face.  Hence, “the ultimate signified is therefore the signifier itself, in its redundancy or 'excess.'”⁴

Regimes

This religious regime of signs can be seen as such: the Face at the center, surrounded by priests.  Around the priests are circles of society where members move relatively freely between the lines of society, but there is always an excess.  This excess is taken as the counterbody of the Face.  The counterbody is the body of the tortured or excluded and is seen negatively as something always becoming-animal (i.e. inhuman).⁵ The priests take this and impart signification on it by transforming it negatively as a scapegoat.  The scapegoat is sent out as excess into the unknown desert where the crowd of people should never go. As a result, the priests' system is able to remain hierarchical and without change.  Yet, it is precisely this tangent that Deleuze would like to see religion travel along: “It is we who must follow the most deterritorialized line, the line of the scapegoat, but we will change its sign, we will turn it into the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion, our proceeding or grievance.  We will be our own scapegoat.  We will be the lamb: 'The God who, like a lion, was given blood sacrifice must be shoved into the background, and the sacrificed god must occupy the foreground.... God became the animal that was slain, instead of the animal that does the slaying.'”⁶

This direction, then, means the eradication of the sign-to-sign circularity.  We now have in the place of the center of signification a point of subjectification.  Instead of a spiral, we have a “linear proceeding into which the sign is swept via subjects.”⁷ This line is best seen as a line of deterritorialization—the decoding of signs.  Tied with this line is also the line of reterritorialization—the recoding of signs, giving new meaning to signs as they are interpreted through subjectification.  This creates a never-ending process of interpretation and re-interpretation while staying away from the overcoding processes of the despotic regime. We now have a cut from the binary system of the despotic regime and a movement towards a polyvocal system.  And this polyvocal grouping is Deleuze's alternative to fundamentalism.  But, is it the direction that Christianity should follow?

-------

1Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota, 1987), p 172.

2ATP, 112.

3ATP, 112.

4ATP, 114.

5ATP, 115.

6ATP, 122.  Quotation is from D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Viking, 1932), pp. 93-94.

7ATP, 127.

Comments

[Melchizedek]

Is fundamentalism really on the rise?

[rodney neill]

'that create a static, unchanging interpretation. Generally, these lead to fascism—the desire to be controlled. In religion, and particularly in Christianity, we can find this motif in fundamentalism'

Does a 'static unchanging' emphasis not place a high value on tradition such as Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodoxy Christianity do with their millions of members - does this lead to 'fascism' (a very emotive negative word) or fundamentalism ( I have interacted with many 'fundamentalists'ie very conservative Christians who are caring decent people and a real witness to an authentic Christian faith.) I do not feel that the many Christians who cherish or respect their traditions as being of value as a guide to the Christian life can be labelled in this way - a somewhat unfortunate tendency of some in the EC.

Rodney

[Christopher Roussel]

Rodney,
I am using "fundamentalism" in a very generic way which doesn't include everyone who willingly claims that label. Fundamentalism, in the way that I am using (as well as most of the people I read), is a strict adherence to a literal reading of their sacred texts and the rejection of anything beyond that strict scope, included tradition, new interpretation, etc. In this respect, it is fascism in religious clothing because it means total control by a "priestly" class as to what one can and cannot believe. In contemporary society, it would be more along the lines of the KJV-only crowd, Bob Enyart and his Denver Bible Church, hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Aum Shinriko would also fall under this category. The main problem with the term is that it is also a historical term rooted in American Protestantism of the late 19th century and while the two do share some common features, the "generic" version is far more extreme of a position. Typically those who use the label for themselves don't fall into the category. Those who do fall into the category are the ones who claim that their particular group is correct in all things--religious or not--and will not entertain any variance in position.

Mel,
It seems to be according to people in the religious studies field. Fundamentalism is the one thing that attempts to pervade all aspects of public life and conform them to its own preconceived notions of how things should be. In Islamic areas, fundamentalism consistently turns political differences (say, the Palestinian conflict) into a religious "holy war" where the political end result is a direct reflection on the religious faith one has. And it's not just in Islam. We can see Aum Shinriko (the terrorist group in Japan that coordinated the Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in the mid 1990s) hitting the limelight, as well as Christian groups (Timothy McVeigh claimed to be part of the crowd, as well as tons of abortion clinic bombers) in America, Hindu groups in India, and even smaller groups (Shikhs for instance) iin the Punjabi region. This militant fundamentalism has been on the rise for a while. The main difficulty is that the non-fundamentalists of that particular religion claim that the fundamentalists aren't true devotees.

[Nate]

The heirarchy of priests reminds me of Tolstoy's "Confessions". He said that all religions are true in so far as they declare all men equal, but go through cycles of corruption when a priestly class legitimates scripture, doctrine, etc. instead of the other way around.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

christopher,

thanks for this lively post.

now I want to through a wrench into machine.

What if, on the geo-political scale, it is exactly this process of deterritorialization, the de-coding of signs, which has led to the rise of various fundamentalisms? What if it is the endless play of interepreations, which I will link to mass marketting and capitalist consumption, which gives rise to sectarian backlash?

Now I haven't read much of Deleuze, but what if while trying to guard against the totalitarian regimes of fascist Europe, he has left the back door open for fascist Capitalism to exploit endless deterritorialization?

I guess I could say it this way. Does Deleuze help us break out of the system of Law and Transgression (as St. Paul notes in Romans 8), or does he merely help us to identity with the transgressive excessive element of the Law, Totalisty, etc.?

[Jason Hesiak]

Geoff...good thoughts. I like. I don't have an answer...but I like. Funnily a Christian guy who's not a fan of the emerging church recently did a whole post that turnd the question into - in his mind - a pretty definitive answer:

http://simplegodstuff.blogstream.com/v1/pid/192507.html

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

Oh Geoff...and I think that with that post the author takes it quite a bit further than you would have intended with your question...

[Just Curious]

Well, gee whiz, I guess I did not know that Gilles Deleuze was a liberal theologian. Question: When do we paint a happy face on the God of Osama bin Laden? Or Genghis Kahn? - (Deleuze's favorite example). When the war machine cuts your bleeding heart out and feeds it to you as your Last Supper?
Just Curious

[Carl]

Hi Chris,
Way to go. I'm glad you can share with this group what we talked all about in the religious theory seminar last fall.

Two quick observations:
1) One of the reasons Deleuze is only beginning to be taken seriously in postmodern philosophical circles is that he is a complex and encyclopedic thinker. One shouldn't make easy inferences from the Deleuzian corpus into contemporary political and social agendas, let alone "ecclesiastical" ones. Deleuze is the supreme semiotician. His theory of signs for cultural theory is only beginning to be appreciated, particularly with the growth of globalization studies. But he is not a theologian, and forcefully eschewed throughtout his entire philosophical career any intimation that he might be a "religious" thinker. It is often difficult for religious thinkers to respect a "pure" philosopher for what they are, and make their own connections to what their own theological enterprise happens to be.
2) The question of "fundamentalism" is not really an issue with Deleuze. I realize that emergent types are preoccupied with "fundamentalism," whatever that word might mean to them, but that is their issue, not Deleuze's. I want to stress that the issue is not about intellectual suppleness. Many emergent types in their politics are no less "fundamentalist" than the religious right. Political correctness and uncritical group-think anti-fundamentalism is just as "fundamentalist" as right wing militaristic, dominionist politics, which emergents abhor. The culture wars is just a battle between Godzilla and the Beast from 20 Thousand Fathoms (if you can get the reference from that 1950s horror movie), as far as Deleuze would see it. They are both the product of autocatalytic thinking. That's Deleuze's problem with religion in general.

If one wants to take a serious look at the problem of "fundamentalism" from a genuine - as opposed to a cheap and tendentious - Deleuzian perspective, I would suggest reading Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam, which Chris also read for the course. Roy
sees fundamentalism as essentially an epiphenomenon of the crisis of identity in a de-territorialized and globalizing world cosmopolis. Religion supplies radical identity when culture has failed to provide it. Fundamentalism has nothing to do with the repression of desire or with priestly "faciality".

Deleuze in that section is simply interested in explicating the semiotics of the hierarchical state, which he develops from his reading of Dumezil. The section appears in the Treatise on Nomadology, from which the concept of "de-territorialization" is derived. Deterritorialization is to cultural semiotics what deconstruction is to the reading of texts.

If one takes Deleuze and Roy seriously, one does not see the problem of "globalized religion" as simply the struggle between authority and antinomianism. That is a pseudo-issue for Deleuze. It is a tiresome issue.

Deleuze is the greatest philosopher of culture - and of history - since Nietzsche, to whom he is profoundly indebted. One needs to read Deleuze with respect, and apply him with caution.

There is a reason Deleuze never came to the US - unlike Derrida - and did not insert himself into American academic debates. Perhaps he realized that he would be instantly misappropriated, as Americans are accustomed to doing.

[rodney neill]

Although I know nothing about Deleuze Carls point about the EC in para 2 is very much in line with my own observation too. In the UK there is a very marked anti - American left wing bias ( President Bush is the devil and Tony Blair is his right hand accomplice , America is the evil empire like the Roman Empire in NT times , a fixation on the Iraq war to the detriment of other burning social justice issues). Christ is identified mainly as a socialist revolutionary in political terms. Such is the world of the EC.

rodney

[Geoff Holsclaw]

carl,

thanks for the very clarifying comment. I think that in a way you answered my questions concerning de-territorialization and fundamentalism. In a sense the former causes the latter.

My new question is this: is this state of de-territorialization a descriptive position for Deleuze (commenting on the global sense) or is it something prescriptive (a hope or goal)? It seems to be the latter in Hardt and Negri's use of Deleuze (as well as Deleuzes' detractors such as Badiou and Zizek).

The reason I ask is that as a descriptive notions it carries tremendous promise for me, but as a prescriptive idea i turn cautious as not seeing much promise in reveling in the transgression. (perhaps I've already entered into hasty misappropriation...or I'm thinking too much about destruction instead of deterritoriatization)

[rodney neill]

'for a non-specialist audience'

I think you should probably rebrand the site as a place for high level academic discussion only as most of it is now over my head and it has turned into a conversation of around 4-6 people only ( many being contributors). The non-specialist idea has now gone out the window. I am also very wary about making a comment because I do not think it will be profound or intellegent enough. If you want to make an impact outside the rarified world of academia with only 4 people in the whole world being involved in discussions the site is in urgent need of overhaul and new ideas!!!!

Adios,

Rodney

[rodney neill]

'Tied with this line is also the line of reterritorialization—the recoding of signs, giving new meaning to signs as they are interpreted through subjectification'

'This direction, then, means the eradication of the sign-to-sign circularity'

'We now have a cut from the binary system of the despotic regime and a movement towards a polyvocal system'

How on earth is a non-specialist audience(probably me and 5 lurkers) expected to understand such technical academic language as these 3 statements in this post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rodney

[Jason Hesiak]

Rodney...I don't think Dr. Seuss's vocabulary world has the range to encompass the world being explored here...lol. Maybe this site can challenge and enlarge the world of Dr. Seuss. I'm no expert either. I listen and learn what I can...

[Carl]

I think that some of these people were only honestly wnating to understand the meaning of some technical philosophical concepts that appear in Deleuze. Chris raised the issue, and he is enthusiastic about the importance of Deleuze. I'm sensitive to "high level academic discussions" as intimidating or driving off "church people". But you, know, I think it's quite alright for someone who hasn't read postmodern philosophy to have a genuine curiosity about an interesting and difficult concept or term. For me Deleuze is more profound and increasingly more important that Derrida. Fifteen years ago most "church people" had the reaction to the term "deconsrtuciton." Now everyone's using the word, though unfortunately many are misuing it.

This site is called "church and pomo." If anyone is serious about "postmodern Christianity," then they better have a little understanding of what postmodern philosophical and religious thought is really about. It's not about reading THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE. Given the explosive growth of the "emergent" movement, everyone is now calling themselves a "postmodern," but are using that term to leverage ideas often that are neither Christian nor postmodern in any credible sense. It sounds cool, and that's about it.

In American consumer culture and its form of Christianity - "Burger King Christianity" as in the slogan "have it your way" - there is a pervasive attitude that "if you don't speak my language then I'm not going to listen to you." You know, for the non-believer "Christian speak" is just as foreign as the parlance of "Deleuzian semiotics." But that's something we as Christians often want to admit. There was guy once named Paul who was willing to speak as many languages in the name of Christ as he could (to..."I am all things"). Postmodernese may sound like Greek to many, but Paul didn't refuse to speak to Greeks because it wasn't his language. Pomo is for better or worse "out there" in numerous senses of the word. Emergents (BTW emergents have their own lingo now speaking to only other emergents, and they need to open up and lighten up and not take themselves all so seriously). That's pure Greek to my pastor friend from Enos, Oklahoma.

"De-territorialization" for Deleuze is NOT a prescriptive term, and it is applied to both language and to culture. The whole question of globalization - e.g., "globalized Christianity" or GloboChrist - turns on this concept. What does Christ have to say to the "de-territorialized". Grace and truth!
Carl

[Jason Hesiak]

..."not prescriptive"...I can check one big question mark off my list of such things on postmodern stuff. Thanks Carl :) 'Twas where I was leaning, I think. But I really didn't know. Carl, what makes you say that? I mean, my guess is that if I just read more Deleuze, then, well...I'd know. Duuh. But my guess is that he doesn't come out and say that his thoughts on "deteritorrialization" aren't "prescriptive". So what makes you say that?

BTW...its a kink the some chains if "Purpose Driven Life" isn't postmodern due to Saddleback's loud music.

[RODNEY NEILL]

I recognise the validity of academic discussion using technical terms in its own right in talking about the relationship between Christianity/postmodernism. However this board is intended FOR A NON SPECIALIZED AUDIENCE who most likely not familiar with philosphical language. Abstract theoretical
concepts need to be translated into more everyday language so that a wider audience can understand the posts or no-one will read them. The only people who comment regularly now outside the Baker authors is me and Jason - 2 people. It is precisely BECAUSE I wish that these discussions would reach a wider non specialized audience that I write this comments. I am sure it would be much more encouraging for those posting if more people read their posts and commented on them. I am also somewhat sorry to see the rather sneering comments about Rick Warren who books appeal to the obviously rather unintellegent average church member!!!!!!!

Rodney

[Jason Hesiak]

Rodney - gotcha. Except on Rick Warren's book. People aren't unintelligent because they think of Warren's book or church as postmodern. How would someone, however unintelligent, be expected to get that if they haven't been exposed to the postmodern (or even modern) discourse? Further, obviously, Warren's book has helped some folks:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/14/smith.transcript/

Similarly - your own comments don't need to be up to some standard of intelligence. It would help if they were intelligible, which they always are, but I think maybe you are burdening yourself in ways that we (at least I) are not. I say that to push toward a freedom rather than more of a burden.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

rodney,

I would stay that your concern is very welcome and noted. I certainly hope that we can be a place to discuss high level concepts is a way non-specialists can understand. there is always that difficulty between wanting to be clear and precise in the articulation of concepts (especially ideas expressed by someone else using an obscure vocabulary, which it seems most philosophers do).

I feel that the recent post on art and the church, as well as Jason Clark's post on the superficial church were fairly accessible for the lay audience.

also, not to be narcissistic, but we do have many readers of the site (through hits and rss reader), just not that many commentors. That's just part of the beast. You never know when a conversation will take off and when it will fall flat. I thought Dan's recent piece was wonderful but no one's commented on it.

but again, rodney, I'm glad you raised this concern to keep us honest.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

Carl,

thanks for the clarification about 'de-territorialization' being descriptive on Deleuze's part.

I haven't read a lick of Deleuze so I couldn't tell but by those who are using his work.

[Carl]

I just was typing in a long and hopefully simple explanation of why "de-territorialization" is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Then I hit some button on my computer and lost the whole thing. In a nutshell, Deleuze prided himself on not being prescriptive. He saw himself as a latter day Spinoza, for whom things just "are". As I said (and lost), a lot of people read Deleuze and de-territorialization through the eyes of Hardt and Negri (or actually through those who have read Hardt and Negri and are using them to make their own points). Hardt and Negri are anti-global activists and have their own agenda, which is fine. But you can't understand Deleuze from reading H&N any more than you can really understand Hegel from reading Marx alone - or from reading Marxists for that matter. Deleuze himself got the word from the 1960s "ethnologist" and animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz.

This is one of the reasons to have a few (though not regular) technical philosophical discussions on this blog. It's only because so many people cite philosophers and cite them in a totally wrong way. The problem is even much worse with the word "postmodern", which is hardly unrecognizable these days to people are familiar with its original meaning. Progressives flaunt their "pomo" credentials, and conservatives bash it. But for the most part the discussions are fruitless because they're not really arguing over anything that has any real conceptual reference. So I think it's good that some people actually want to discuss what the words mean, or what the philosophers and theologians said.

I hope these discussions will whet the appetite of people to read my new book GLOBOCHRIST (technical philosophical discussions are rare, and only for clarification of terms). The book is basically about Jesus, globalization, and the parochialism of American Christians - not just conservatives, but also "emergents". I basically say like Deleuze said "Forget Foucault" - let's forget the culture wars and grow up both spiritually and intellectually. Why? Because that's not where the action is. We don't need to recycle the Sixties, which is what we all seem to be doing generationally. It's not about what is going on in American any more. It's about what's going on in the world. "Make disciples of all nations." That's a quote from the first great pomoist. I think his name was Jesus.

[Jason Hesiak]

1. Interesting that "deteritorrialization" came from an 'ethnologist' and animal behaviorist! Wouldn't have guessed that one! Ha ha.

2. Interesting about Focault too. Seems a bit reactionary. Bacon's "knowledge is power" was pretty particular.

[Jason Hesiak]

and i hate when i type long messages, of whatever variety, and then loose them. its usually not as good the second time around.

[Jason Hesiak]

WAIT...carl i wasn't saying that your message wasn't good! Ha ha.

[John Doyle]

I'm not as confident as Carl that I fully grasp Deleuze and Guattari on deterritorialization, but I'd like to comment on whether or not there is a prescriptive element. In anti-oedipus Deleuze and Guattari show the vague outline of what they call "schizoanalysis," a praxis of purposeful deterritorialization that doesn't fall into the usual trap of reterritorialization. They say, for example, that Freud deterritorializes the flows of desire but reterritorializes them -- channels the flows -- in terms of the Oedipus complex and a predefined, structured, unifying relationship between conscious and unconscious.

Deleuze and Guattari want to avoid the restructuring of what's been blown apart in Freudian analysis. Here they invoke as early exemplar the name of Lacan (Guattari was a psychoanalyst trained and analyzed by Lacan), who recognized the essentially unrepresentable, unstructurable nature of desire. The signs of desire, being nonsignifying, become signifying in representation only in terms of a signifier of absence or lack. But even Lacan imposes structure on the psychic chaos he unleashes, trying to interpret symptoms as a nonverbal language of the unrepresentable. Too constraining, too structuralist, too much of an attempt to trap schizoid freedom in the channles of a neuroticism that, D&G contend, are characteristic of capitalism's rechanneling of desire.

Destroy, destroy, is D&G's presription. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction -- a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration. It is not a matter of pious destructions, such as those performed by psychoanalysis under the benevolent neutral eye of the analyst. For these are Hegel-style destructions, ways of conserving. D&G heap disdain on the Oedipus myth, which Lacan transforms but preserves: Oedipus as the last word of capitalist consumption -- sucking away at mommy/daddy, being blocked and triangulated on the couch... the whole of psychoanalysis is an immense perversion, a drug, a radical break with reality, starting with the reality of desire, it is a narcissism, a monstrous autism: the characteristic autism and the intrinsic perversion of the machine of capital.

That is why, insist D&G, inversely, schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent... Schizoanalysis on the contrary must disengage the deterritorialized flows of desire... In its destructive task, schizoanalysis must proceed as quickly as possible, but it can also proceed only with great patience, great care, by successively undoing the representative territorialities and reterritorializations through which a subject passes in his individual history.

What's the point of all this destruction and deterritorialization? The creation of a new land, say D&G, which can be arrived at only by traversing the many old lands, studying and understanding them, then passing through and beyond them -- an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating.

In sum, D&G outline the praxis of schizoanalysis, or "antipsychiatry": (1)undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2)liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows. Here they cite Foucault, who wrote the Preface to anti-oedipus, as a fellow-traveler. It should therefore be said that one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven't seen anything yet -- an irreversible process.

There's more, but that's enough already. I've not read A Thousand Plateaus, but I wonder: do the "plateaus" refer to the successive restructurings and re-representations, the restrictions of the flows of desire into delimited channels, that result from each successive destruction via schizoanalysis? Does this praxis of an irreversible deterritorialization, of unleashing flows of desire, of creating a new land without maps, have any implications for a postmodern Christian praxis? Or is Christianity all about channeling desires and repressing their overflow -- creating neuroticism in P&G's evaluation -- rather than releasing them?

[Carl]

John,
I see where you are going with the above analysis, and I discern what you would call a "prescriptive" element in Deleuze. But again, what may be INFERRED as a prescriptive move on your part does not necessarily REFLECT such a move on Deleuze's part in my humble estimation. I realize that we may be splitting hairs here, since what ultimately matters is how ideas work, regardless of their origin. But I am trying to push toward a larger issue of what are the baseline implications of Deleuze's monumental body of writing for theological reflection today. It has been obvious to me that Deleuze, unlike Derrida who build his career on figuring out how to read texts – he is the grand old man of what Caputo calls “radical hermeneutics” – wanted to figure out where the world was going. Like all children of the Sixties, especially in France, he was fascinated with sudden and overwhelming cultural and historical changes. That is why today he can be considered the philosophical “prophet” of globalization.

You bring up ANTI-OEDIPUS, which forms the first panel of the literary and “theoretical” diptych that he wrote with Guattari and is known as CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA. The second of course is A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, which “flows around” the TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY. It is both fruitful and perilous to try to understand what Deleuze is doing with the whole diptych, which really made him famous, by reading only the one without the other. But there is a progression. In short, CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA first tries to read the “inscriptions” of culture (“codes”) on the contemporary psyche and “deconstruct” them through what D&D call “schizoanalaysis”. Schizophrenia can only be understood by this process of “inscription” (the same word Foucault used). It is what one might call a “microanalysis” of repression and expression by focusing on the typical Freudian patient. In classical Freudian analysis –and to a certain extent in Lacan - resolving the Oedipal problem was the aim and goal. For D&D – and this is why their work was so for their time – Oedipus IS the problem. Oedipus is the inscription by capital through what Lacan termed the “name of the father” (authoritarian demands and prohibitions) on the psyche of the patient. Anti-Oedipus simply does in a more sophisticated and “philosophical” manner what Foucault had started in his study of madness and sexuality. D&D do not identify capitalism with patriarchy; capitalism is a regime that simulates what were previously patriarchal codes.

The second phase – A THOUSAND PLATEAUS - represents a “macroanalysis.” In the second section of ANTI-OEDIPUS D&D point in this direction. “The fact has often been overlooked that the schizo indeed participates in history” (p. 85). So what is this history? What Oedipus is to the individual, the state with its magical system of law-giving and priestly authority is to history. The state is Oedipus written large, and Oedipus is the state written small through codings of capital. Just as schizoanalysis is to Oedipus the microstate, so nomadology is to politics and “empire”, the macrostate.

But D&D follow Marx in regarding capitalism not as a moral or a “normative” problem but as an historical process. Capitalism is not “bad”; it just is, and as Marx saw, it is necessary to usher in the conditions leading to human liberation through socialism and communism. D&D, as French intellectuals, realized that the problem was not capitalism versus communism (or anti-capitalism), because communism was as much the problem as capitalism. That was a common radical French view in the 1960s. The problem is the state and the relationship between desire and the demands of civilization which the state requires. Here, as for Marcuse and the other “cultural Marxists” of that period (e.g., Marcuse) who were also “radical Freudians”, for D&D the “prescriptive” challenge is to de-territorialize desire in a way that it is not “re-territorialized” as a kind of pseudo-liberation that is an enslavement. They had in mind the illusive “freedom” of consumer society and the rhetoric of “choice.” Late consumer capitalism both “deterritorializes” old family and folk codes (obligations, taboos, etc.) while reterritorializing them as the images of popular culture aimed at promoting self-gratification. “Civilized modern societies are defined by the processes of decoding and deterrioralization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other.” (p. 257)

One cannot deterritoritialize without reterritorializing just as one cannot deconstruct without constructing. Culture and history are ongoing processes of both. Capital has speeded up the process. Globalization is this process en masse. It is all about whether make a fetish of our signs and codes (reterritorializing them).

Now what does this have to do with Christianity and the church? Everything. A Deleuzian pomo – as opposed to a Derridean pomo – is globopomo, a “nomadology” of the Christian in a globalizing world. Christian faith, which begins with Abraham, is a nomadic walk in this world. Read the book of Hebrews. The church? It’s all about what I call in my new book the “radical rhizomic relationality” of globoChristiantity that has always been there and serves to de-territorialize every “neo-territoriality” (Deleuze’s word) that claims to be Christian, even the new emerging “emergent” orthodoxy of anti-modernism in the name of something called “postmodernism.”

If one looks beyond America and the West, which has territorialized itself through the Janus-faced “secular Christianity” that has bred the Hobson’s choice of the culture wars, we find something else – strangely “paleo-Christian”, like we find in Acts – that refuses to be reterritorialized in terms of the codes of the West. It is Jenkins’ “next Christendom”. It is an Episcopal mass being said in Swahili in an African village, a mega-mega church in the slums of Sao Paolo, etc. It is not the “emergent” but the RESURGENT church, the resurgence of religion that Derrida prophesied in the Capri conversations of the early 90s.

[John Doyle]

Carl,
Surely there's more description than prescription in anti-oedipus. The prescriptive praxis seems ultimately unnattainable, since as you observe every deterritorialization of desire inevitably resettles itself into a new network of channels. D&G seem to want to go there, though -- into the realm of the schiz where representation and structure don't exist, where the Name of the Father is not invoked. It is, they acknowledge, something akin to madness, though to label it mad is to entrap it in yet another territorialization.

Capital is the main actor in late-modern de/reterritorialization, and for D&G both capitalism and Marxism impose a neuroticizing structure on the flows of desire. Still, Lacan's (following Freud) Name of the Father comes from an explicitly Judeo-Christian context, of God laying down the Law and speaking the Word, embedding everyone in a network of cultural signifiers that restrict the flow of desire. The Christian dies to the Law, but the New Testament certainly lays out a fairly well-structured territory. And Christ is the Word: he who has seen him has seen (and heard) the Father. The network of Christian signifiers may have shifted tectonically from the Old Testament, but it's still there, still assigned by the Master Signifier Himself.

As you envision an emerging resurgent Church, do you perceive a continual project of deterritorializing and reterritorializing that perhaps doesn't lock into either the New Testament or the tradition? Do you picture a release in the flows of desire rather than what has traditionally been a Christian restriction of desire? And are these desires explicitly sexual, as they are for Freud, Lacan and D&G? The self-gratification of consumer capitalism is, per D&G, a false promise that sustains itself on neurotic desire. Is there some other sort of distinctly Christian flow of jouissance that is other than or perhaps subsumes sex and the false gratification of the marketplace?

Of course these are very difficult questions. It seems to me there's a strict limit built into Christianity that D&G would regard as the template on which capital modeled its territory, as the paradigmatically tyrannical system of repression and suppression. Perhaps D&G in measured doses becomes a corrective for an overly-repressive version of Christianity. This seems to be the strategy by which the emerging church adapts -- some would call it taming or co-opting -- a lot of postmodern theory. Even in a secular world D&G are pretty far out there. Maybe they're best regarded as practitioners of what Rorty calls "edifying philosophy" -- reactive, hyperbolic, "intentionally marginal."

[Jason Hesiak]

John,

As with our previous conversation on Gnosticism on your site...I wonder whether it's really a question of restrictions or releases of desire (corresponding here to questions of materiality and limits in our other conversation) or if it ought better be a question of ORDER and formation (of form(s), which have limits, or of desires...in accordance, a word dealing with order, with how we are MADE, or formed)?

I ask the question, but in reality I'm out of my league here. I don't know enough of D and G. But my intuition is telling me that my above question pertains...to them as well as the Gnostics, although probably in different ways...

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

Speaking of desire, limits, formation, ect...I just saw Black Snake Moan. It was MUCH better than I expected. It was pretty darn good. Convicting actually. Had the obligatory Hollywood stupidity here and there, but... For anyone who cares...

[John Doyle]

Jason -
Again, I'm limited here to my reading of anti-oedipus which, because it's written in a sort of schizoid style, is hard to rein in conceptually. I think D&G are pitting desire against order. Order is a territorializing operation that restricts and channels the flow of desire -- or, as you say, imposes limits. Because unchanneled desire is a threat to order, these excess flows are categorized as marginal, transgressive, neurotic. Transgression, guilt, castration: are these determinations of the unconscious, or is this the way a priest sees things? The Law restricts the flow of desire; the Law tells us what is prohibited; therefore desire concentrates its flows on violation and transgressing the prohibitions. We don't spontaneously want to kill our fathers and have sex with our mothers: the Law channels all excess flows of desire toward taboos, forcing them to become transgressive. The analyst is a "priest" of the social order, trying to rechannel these transgressive overflows into neurotic but lawful repressions.

If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive... desire is revolutionary in its essence -- desire, not left-wing holidays! -- and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised. If a society is identical with its structures -- an amusing hypothesis -- then yes, desire threatens its very being. It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired. It is quite troublesome to have to say such rudimentary things: desire does not threaten a society because it is a desire to sleep with the mother, but because it is revolutionary... Desire does not "want" revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants (p. 116).

As for the Gnosticism, I don't know. Certainly D&G chastise Freud and Lacan for embracing a mythology of the Father and Oedipus, as if they are the archons and everyone else is merely a simulacrum. Is that Gnostic, would you say? If so, then perhaps D&G are anti-Gnostic. Maybe those more well-read in D&G can comment. Mostly I'm just cutting and pasting chunks of text from the book.

[Jason Hesiak]

Well, now to Carl and to John, I suppose,

I have taken my dive. So I'll try and swim. Keep in mind that I'm swimming through thick waters. Gnostic waters are easy for me. D and G are very new territory for me, though. Because of that I went to our good pal wikipedia just now; and as well I went back and re-read the post as well as Carl and John's comments above. That said...

I made the comment that some of this D/G stuff was starting to sound Gnostic to me. I mentioned order and formation (to be pitted against escape from some illusory construction). John responded by saying that D/G seem to pit order against desire; and that, in the context of Lacan and Freud, D/G might well be anti-Gnostic.

Interestingly, as I read and re-read everything, I came to think of D/G as even more definitively Gnostic. Further, in specific comparision to Lacan and Freud, I came to think of D/G as the more Gnostic ones. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. When I'm done explaining, it may help to throw the Gnostic label out entirely, but I think it may help to go through the explanation process first, to get to my point.

Quoting from Wikipedia (keeping in mind that wikipedia, Carl and John Doyle are different from D/G), I'll start from the end, and work from there:

"Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though we cannot know what that is in advance."

So I jumped to the end. By "end" I am specifically referring to the Gnostic "end" of becoming, through "gnosis", like gods ("to live well is to fully express one's power"). I will now jump back to the beginning for a moment. To quote from the post above: "Signification happens, regardless of one's approach. In a motion not unlike Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari state that 'the world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signified is given without being known.'"

Being Christian, I really have no qualms with this version of a "beginning". To me, in fact, it sort of helps me understand better my relation, as a human, to God. In addition, as an architect, it helps a lot for me to think of thinking as a kind of craft. Also, obviously, what I quoted previously as the "end" is obviosuly not specifically Gnostic. Might just as well be Greek, Roman (politically), whatever.

To me D/G begin to sound specifically Gnostic when: for one, desire doesn't know its object (in perfect LOVE it darn sure does, although, yes, love and desire are not one in the same); and for two, such weight is given to a radical "de-territorilization", in terms of a question of what one is actually doing, or where one is actually heading. Whatever one might begin to think of as "God" at this point begins to, in a bit of a fishy way to me, smell an awful like the Gnostic Godhead. Distant, completely featureless, and not having a whole lot to do with me on a personal level.

Now, obviously, D/G aren't expressly nor purposefully Gnostics. They aren't trying to attain union with the Godhead through their gnosis. But their gnosis, whatever its goals, or whoever else it might more closely resemble, does involve a kind of Gnostic stripping away of images, and, seemingly, a kind of escape from an illusion-forming construction of - maybe - a blind and ignorant half-god.

Now, Gnosticism posits an "individual" with traces or remnants of the Godhead in him/her, giving him/her the ability to climb the ladder of escape from the illusion. With how D/G think of what an "individual" is in the first place, this obviously isn't what D/G are up to. Here's where it might become helpful to throw out the term Gnostic, I think. Here's where it becomes evident that they don't thik of the "world" as an "illusion". For D/G, it seems, the world forms us; that's just the way it is.

The original question in my mind, though, that lead me to ask about D/G's relationship to Gnosticism remains. Why, for them, is it even a question of repression/suppression of desire in the first place? To think of order as repression obviously involves a different concpetion of what it means to be human as compared to, say, G.K. Chesterton, who wasn't, of course, a "postmodernist". This certainly doesn't mean Gnosticism. But I don't think that a more open conceptual, or even perceptual horizon necessarily means a correspondingly open identity. Maybe so far as I KNOW, but, that's not necessarily the end of the story.

I mean...one "territory" I don't plan on setting out from in "faith" (Abraham reference) is a "pre-given significance" of the sentence, "God loves me, personally". Additionally, God's love for me has a whole heck of a lot to do with the most important 2 commands on which all the rest hinge. At this point can they really be thought of a "repressive"? Oh contraire. I also don't plan on "setting out" from the "pre-given significance" of the sentence "God loves me" upon my identity. Its where I stake my flagpole, thanks. That said, it'd probably do me some good to get good and angry at God every now and again, lol.

Speaking of two hands de-territorializing and re-territorilizing at the same time...I'm getting the image of a semi-famouse image of a shirtless and high (slightly "mad") Jim Morrison tippy-toing along the edge of a pretty-high stage with a goat under his right arm and a cross dangling freely from his neck. I'm getting that image in the context of his own desire to push the limits of his sensibilities, once expressed in his pushing his audience to completely destroy the de-limiting line between stage and audience...causing quite the ruccaus, not really knowing nor caring what lines might end up getting re-drawn, or where, or how. I think that's a different ruccause from that of Jesus.

That said...I most likely just now did some serious leap-frogging not only between philsophy and theology, but between different philosophies and theologies. Possibly helpful leap-frogging, possibly not, I'm not sure.

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

Jeez, John - I just now read your "Stop Making Sense" post:
(http://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/stop-making-sense/#respond):

"This morning I wrote a comment on Church and Pomo about Deleuze and Guattari, who advocate a kind of 'schizoanalysis' for freeing the flows of desire from 'territorialization' in any sort of social or linguistic order. In explicitly moving beyond Hegel they acknowledge the source of their project: the link between the incoherent and the transcendent, a kind of metaphysical glossolalia. As Sontag observes, The literature of the crazy in this [i.e., the twentieth] century is a rich religious literature — perhaps the last original zone of genuine Gnostic speculation."

Maybe I'm so sensitive to these things precisely because I'm half-mad, half-seeking a kind of transcendence. Or maybe just that an experience or two of genuine transcendence has left me half-mad, studying both Gnosticism and traditional Christianity. "...it’s more fun to play at madness than to be really mad." - maybe.

Example:
http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2006/02/men-in-dignified-attire.html

Jason

[John Doyle]

Jason -
Interesting thoughts. As I said before, I think I'll wait for somebody with more knowledge about Deleuze & Guattari and/or about Gnosticism to respond. Meanwhile perhaps this book will be of some help. It's not yet translated into English -- you do read French, no? Oh, and I saw the Doors play live 3 times -- alas, never once a goat.

[Jason Hesiak]

Well John, thanks for the link. Pretty funny, actually, ha ha. I don't think I felt guilty, though, for not having read D/G till after having read that humorous article. Aaahhh...oh well. Will I READ that book...? I'm certainly tempted. I think maybe I'd rather read D/G...or Proust...?

[Jason Hesiak]

Oh...French...I took 5 years of it in grade school, but I think all of what I was supposed to absorb in French class I absorbed in the art classroom! Or maybe geometry. Ha ha.

[Timo Zeichik]

Why does the church need to change? It's not going to die, that was a promise of Christ's.
Shouldn't it be the people who should change not the church? Why is theology suddenly allowed to be reinterpreted because somebody was offended by a so-called Christian, when most likely they were never Christian to begin with, or one in serious need of the grace of God? Why is theology, why is the Bible, why is God allowed to be reinterpreted because maybe some gossippy lady offended someone?

[Jason Hesiak]

Timo dude,

Things need to be reinterpreted because the dirty gossipy old lady is modernity offering her "gossipy" interpretation of God, history, reality and everything else. That's on top of the old hag's BEING gossip in the first place, her interpretation-offering self being an interpretation in the first place.

You're audience here, for the most part, is not folks on their way out the church because they've been burnt by it. But it consists of folks who, like you share faith in a God and His promise that He will be with us till the end of the age. People just don't like old hags. And people especially can't tolerate old gossipy hags being the authoritative determining voice on who God is. So people are talking back rather than remaining silent.

:)

Jason

[Timo]

But isn't there only one correct interpretation?

[Jason Hesiak]

Timo,

Who knows it? You? Me? One of our pastors? One of their teachers...maybe even the same one, to keep matters simpler? Jesus and interpretations of the Fella are two different things. You and I aren't Jesus. So interpreting him can be difficult!

Besides that everyone around here has this undyng sneaking suspicion that there is something terribly wrong with much of what we grew up being taught (maybe the same pastor(s) as the current one, maybe not?)...which was handed to us by...that old had modernity. Besides that 99.9999 percent of the population is completely unaware of what they owe to modernity on their very identities; and the other .00001 percent is partially unaware. Much less then how that identity of ours shapes our own interpretation of Jesus and his identity. This lack of awareness I'm pointing out is like pointing out a fish's lack of awareness of its lack of atmospheric air.

Jason

[Timo]

But isn't there an interpretation that exists that is not an influence of modernity that is correct? And why is the Bible not subject to the same rules of interpretation that say the newspaper is?