Koichiro Kokubun asks, Does schizophrenia remain the key concept in understanding Deleuze and Guattari?
Psychosis was not sufficiently analyzed because inaccessible to psychoanalysis.
In oppressive excess—neurosis ensues.
Kokubun-san makes three “completely indefensible” hypotheses:
1) the 19th century is neurosis;
2) the 20th century is schizophrenia;
3 the 21st century is autism.
As in previous sessions, there is a possible confusion within the epistemological field of psychoanalysis, if not the field of philosophy, of ontology with the field itself, or the horizon and conditions of its appearance: the pathology that is diagnosed—is it a thing? Is it something—an existent?
Domination of (father’s) authority—malfunction of discipline—liberation of individual—gives to 20th century psychosis.
W.H. Auden calls the early 20th century the Age of Anxiety.
“your perception of the world presupposes what you do not perceive.”
“the part of the object I do not see I posit as visible to others.”
—this is from Deleuze’s work on Tournier’s Robinsonnade: “A World Without Others.”
And: “the margins of the world disappear” on a desert island or in a world without others. “I am nothing other than my past … past is not present for me. No self without others.”
Shin’ichiro Kamagaya:
our next speaker, was born in 1977 with cerebral palsy. He suffered procedures of normalisation as a child and found them physically painful, and “as you see,” he says, from his motorised wheelchair, “they did not work.”
He first practiced as a pediatrician and in 2001 began work on autism using a method developed in Japan called Tojisha-kenkyu.
The method came out of the paradigm shift to coexistence with disabled people in the 1980s. The person with disabilities should not have to change. It is rather society which must change.
Shin’ichiro notes the differences between a social model of “disability” and a medical model of “impairment” and the friction between the two.
Co-production or participatory or user-led research—with the ‘subject’ of the research, that is ‘tojisha’ participation—tojisha-kenkyu developed in 2001 from the work of the group Schizophrenics Anonymous, which had begun the year before, in 2000. It was therefore started by schizophrenics.
The beautiful distinction is made between disempowerment in the sythesising of different viewpoints and empowerment in the juxtaposition of different narratives to form a polyphony.
Tojisha-kenkyu has 5 steps:
1) assuming a metacognitive position, of myself as others see me;
2) putting my problems into words and sharing them with others;
3) making up hypotheses about why we are living like this;
4) experimentation in how to live of the tojisha where failure disappears and where failure is an important resource to update our hypotheses;
5) testing and updating our hypotheses; building up a shared database: giving rise to manuals, worksheets and a literature in tojisha-kenkyu.
Individual characteristics indicate impairments. But the social dimension exists between people.
Autism is the misfit here because communicative disorders of miscommunication cross both social and medical lines: autism is both impairment and disability at once.
“We cannot ask whether there is a cause on the part of society, if we adopt ‘impairment of social interaction’ as our definition of autism.” The medical definition of autism has to be replaced.
In the last several decades the number of diagnoses of autism has increased by 3000 per cent. Academic research cannot explain it. A biological explanation can only account for a small portion of the diagnosed number.
Another factor for consideration is that the condition expresses itself differently according to the social context. Auditory processing characteristics have been shown to differ between the UK and Japan in the literature. The autism is different from culture to culture.
“It is not an example of a pure natural kind” and calls into question social contract thinking.
Part of autism is socially constructed. The rest is biologically describable.
The approach of “primary deficit in social cognition is not only empirically but also logically problematic.
Theory of mind does not suffice to explain autism because it goes to the sender as well as the receiver in communication.
Variability in autism from place to place is in view of social norms—of communication, registration, sending, receiving.
Local social culture determines autism as a ‘deficit in social cognition.’
A 2010 study by Elinor Ochs and Olga Solomon, “Autistic Sociality” shows Austistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to be socially specific.
Unlike other ‘disabilities,’ ASD people do not have the option of demanding that society change to allow their coexistence with and within it. But they must either be isolated from it or must themselves adapt to it.
Individuation in characteristics amount to an heterogeneity in the symptomatology of austism, quite apart from talking about a ‘spectrum’ of disorders of sociality.
This leads me to wonder about there being a Japanese phenomenology and a Japanese Merleau-Ponty, both for the construction of a perceptual field perputed to belong to the autistic person and for the epistemological construct as well as the ontological speculation which brings autism, in its individuating heterogeneity, to light on these levels, phenomenological, epistemological and ontological.
Social cognition can be divided into identification—sense of self—and autobiographical memory—mentalising, empathy based on self-other discrimination, where sense of self works by “intentional or emotional contagion.” The latter provokes the consideration of similar neuro-atypical others in the case of the autistic individual.
Ayaya Satski is a tojisha-kenkyu researcher with autism. For her, “a familiar face is seen as an assembly of parts.” She has no automatic recognition of either her mother’s face or of her own.
“Unconscious and automaticity” are very important in autism, conscious and unconscious control—this is a very good hypothesis for tojisha-kenkyu’s with autism.
Kokubun Koichiro-san: the hypothesis is connected to capitalism today, to an increase in the diagnosis of ASD.
People go for diagnosis because they fear their own inability or impairment in view of social cognition.
“In order to entrust our perception to others, these others must be similar,” says Koichiro-san.
I’m thinking about narcissism, a narcissism spectrum: depressive cannot escape from self. ASD cannot but. Cannot return (to self).
Is the desert island model—of Deleuze’s “world without others”—a normalising one?
Danilo asks: Is a protected [isolating ASDs from others] better than integration?
Shin’ichiro-san cites the deaf community as rejecting integration: “people with invisible impairments tend to be neglected [by society]; they have to adapt [not society].
The problem is the included minority rather than individuation.
“Mainstreaming” necessitates adaptation.
“Inclusion” ought to cover minority but in practice does not.
Next to speak is Takuya Matsumoto, a very young professor, flicking his fringe from his face.
Eugene Bleuler 1911 described schizophrenic patients as autistic because they were withdrawn from the outside world.
Leo Kanner 1943 described infantile autism from the start as “extreme aloneness,” unlike schizophrenia, of which it was first diagnosed to be a symptom, in which a previously existing relation is disrupted.
The 1970s distinguished autism from schizophrenia.
ASD is a recent development.
1981 Aspergers was recognised as a syndrome and named for him.
1995 Lorna Wing introduced Austistic Spectrum—inclusive of Aspergers.
2011The Wall: Psychoanalysis at the Test of Autism a propaganda film made by Sophie Robert disparages psychoanalysts in France for not distinguishing autism from schizophrenia.
Donna Williams, autistic writer, in Nobody Nowhere, described autism as a battle to “keep out of the world and a battle to join it.”
Lewis Carroll, Louis Wolfson and Raymond Roussel have all recently been diagnosed ASD.
The process of a “minor literature” in minorisation of language in particular is not so much schizophrenic as autistic.
Hypersensitivity to temperature, from which Carroll famously suffered, is part of ASD diagnostics.
Carroll and Artaud are differentiated in The Logic of Sense, the former a writer of the surface, the latter a writer of depth, due to their suffering from different disorders: Artaud schizophrenic, Carroll autistic.
“The problem is not to go beyond the bounds of reason, it is to cross the bounds of reason as a victor. Then one can speak of good mental health.” Deleuze on Wolfson, in Essays Critical and Clinical.
Matsumoto Takuya-san cites Lacan’s the sinthome as useful for understanding ASD.
Is the question one of the radical outside as invoked by Deleuze in Foucault?
…rencontre…encounter… Ritornello … refrain, exists as autistic trope of echolalia, forming a territory. [What about Beckett?]
…
We all followed Koichiro-san through the metro system to the National Noh Theatre.
Here we were introduced in a talk to the ritornello underlying Noh performance—Jo Ha Ku.
Jo—slow plateau of rhythm;
Ha—rapid increase in speed leading to peak;
Ku—abrupt completion of rhythm.
Each performance, each scene in each performance, each movement, down to gesture, in each scene develops in jo ha ku.
The Jo Ha Ku system was formalised in the early 15th century.
In Noh, there is no intention in the actor. The movement, gesture, stylised or natural, just happens. Jo Ha Ku follows the shape of natural impulse. It is spontaneous. Necessary for this spontaneity and naturalness is to cultivate mental nothingness.
The shape of impulse: it has not yet differentiated itself; it is inchoate; it begins not knowing its goal; this leads to an exponential curve of individuation in the movement, gesture, sound—for example birdsong—and its release; then its abrupt completion, as the impulse cancels itself in release.
Noh is between manmade and natural.
Control—but then let it go.
Noh—importantly, and in light of what Hijikata says of Butoh, that it is performed for the dead—is performed for the gods.
We tour the theatre, both auditorium and backstage. The dressing rooms are the series of identical tatami rooms, each with an identical locker, each identical to the one beside it, each one separated by sliding screen, extending in series. Each one is therefore characterless and impersonal. A formal structure is present in the backstage. But this formalism prepares an intensive structure of spontaneous—although formalised—gestures and movements and sounds, a theatrical language, onstage. Separating backstage from onstage is a symbolic threshold marked by a change in the wood of the floor: we were told that we were not to step over this threshold, onto the wood of the stage, even before it reaches the curtain covering the entrance to backstage—not wings because singular, wing—without the special toed white booties.
We were each given a pair of these and came to use them on the practice stage, a replica of the mainstage set up in a rehearsal room, complete with entryway bridge (to wing), stage marked by pillars, bearing a roof—Noh was originally played outside, under the cover of this tithing-house type awning, in shrines (separated from the audience by an empty space—for the gods?) and the traditional backdrop of the pinetree.
The Deleuze|Guattari-campers were split into fives and each group sent to a station situated in and around the practice auditorium. Here we knelt and learnt the basic different techniques for three types of drum used in Noh performances—one played on the left knee, one on the right shoulder, the base drum taipa on a stand with fat wooden drumsticks: each of these is assembled onstage by the player. All are horseskin. Players not only provide a rhythmic background but also vocalisations for the different characters, whooping to a high note for the young woman mask character. We learnt the transverse flute, getting breathless blowing over the hole, learning the most basic trill, again low to high—jo ha ku—the only melodic instrument in the band.
Performances are also accompanied by a chorus of singers in an almost continuous recitative, the origins apparent of Noh in trance, with odd asymmetrical whoops and offkilter rhyhmic and melodic motifs.
At each of the instrumental stations we had to kneel, feet tucked under bums, and make a bowing greeting, and at the giving a bowing thanks. Where this was too painful to sustain—it was—we were allowed to sit cross-legged, but if a camera was present, and at the start and end bow, return to traditional kneeling upright position, spine straight, and head level, keeping the rhythm, coordinating the whoops.
The last station our little group got to was the walking onstage. We put on our white toed slippers, stood in a line. The posture requires feet together, sternum angled to the ground, but head and chin back, to keep the mask—which we were not wearing—facing flat on to the audience. Arms are held out, elbows slightly bent, hands lightly clenched, with thumbs to the frontward plane. The master came around and corrected arms, angle of head and neck, hand rotation, then demonstrated what we were to do: feet are in continuous contact with stage—hollow to resonate when stamped—and toes lift at end of each sliding step.
Approach front stage in the jo ha ku rhythm, slow, accelerating, and performing the gesture of lifting the fan, closed, as if making a strong point to an interlocutor, while keeping arm slightly bent at elbow, moving arm from shoulder, hand lightly clenched. Then both arms, the left as if holding fan, the right hand holding one.
“Lift the fan as if the entire weight of all the air in the room lay on its end.”
Our lessons complete, our ankles bruised from kneeling, we became the audience for a demonstration performance. First the actor was dressed.
He explained in Japanese (translators were supplied who were PhD students for the workshops and a German translator, from Tokyo University, working on Noh, translated into English for this section) that this was embarrassing for him, since he had never been dressed in front of an audience before.
The dressing began with a skull cap and long underwear. The dressers were male, both in male kimono. They moved around the actor attaching and fitting the different parts of the costume for a drowned samurai spirit who makes his entrance at the end of a Noh drama. (Noh is sometimes referred to as the theatre where no one laughs; its sister form (kogyen?) is therefore the satirical form of Noh, using Noh elements—we saw a performance of this type in Hiroshima.) Costumes for Noh are all of the same size and worn by men and women—the acceptance of female performers into Noh is a recent development. Wearing a brilliant blue and gold-splashed stiff skirt-style kimono, the actor explained that this was a new costume but that in the next several hundred years it would develop a more beautiful patina. Costumes are still in use that are over 200 years old.
The final stage in the dressing is donning the mask. The actor said, When I put on the mask, I will no longer speak. My dressers, however, will speak for me.
The mask was only to be touched and held by its edges. The actor disappeared behind it. The dressers fitted him with his long fronded black wig. He has been in the sea, this spirit, so the hair does not need to be neat, but hangs over his face like seaweed.
The actor received his halberd. He retired backstage and the four musicians took their places on the practice stage. We had been told that filming was strictly prohibited during the performance; even the cameras recording the event were lens-capped: it seemed that this was less in reverence or out of tradition and more that the gods would not abide the competition of a technosemiotic eye.
The two dressers took their place stageleft, kneeling, to sing the chorus parts.
The samurai spirit returned to the stage by the bridge leading from backstage through a curtain to stageright. Bearing his halberd, he charged and jumped and raged and postured. The leaps took him off the stage, the surface of which boomed when he landed back onto its resonating surface. The voices of both chorus and musicians whooped and hooted, and the chorus chanted.
The rhythms and interlace of instruments and voices sounded as if each, apart from the recitative chanting (we were told that Japanese do not understand the words), were following his own (all male today) line. Drum. Hoot. Chant. Whoop. High to low flute trill. Leap. Posture. Jo Ha Ku. … like a crazy cart with wheels off-centre at each corner, less moving forward than in chaotic and cacophonous motion, back and forth, side to side, up and down.
The spirit came out again, after the performance finished and offered poses to the camera—as you might see from the snaps above.
R. stayed for dinner in the area, I headed away, relieved to be left to wander the subways and … in fact, I got out at Yoyobi station–on the Oedo Line from Sendagaya–not Yoyobi-Koen, and headed in what I hoped was the right direction, passing finally down the famous clothing market street in Harajuku, Takeshita, turning right, walking walking—I found I had performed a huge circle, and made no progress, but back and forth, side to side, uphill and down.
A handy map informed me I ought to have turned left not right at the end of Harajuku’s famous street, Takeshita (see UFO candy-floss above), which, when I got to it, I did. This took me to the bottom of Yoyogi park and soon I was back by the entrance to Yoyogi Youth Memorial Olympic Hostel. I walked right by to come to the street of food over the railway line. It was around 9.30pm when I bought, starving, after the drumming, the whooping, the walk of Noh, and the circuit I had taken, a ramen, which was heated at the Seven Eleven, and a salad. These I took back to my room. Delicious greasy pork noodles and sesame Japanese spinach.
…
a nice note on the white stones around the perimeter of the Noh stage: there for outdoor performances to reflect light into the masked faces of performers as footlights—now redundant, but retained; the poles define the stage for the masked performer—without them, she or he would not know where the edge of the stage is, the masks difficult to see out of, and the steps at the front of the stage are there just in case he or she misses the edge and tumbles from the stage to get back onto it.
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