Out the back gate, past the ventilation chimneys, crossing, the beware of ghost sign, up over the hill, down residential oneway, police manning the inroads to embassyland, under the pedestrian bridge, left at the south-easterly corner of Yoyogi, in through exit 2, minutes before Chiyoda line sped away, under the city, to Akasaka, debriefing with J., dinner at the first place I’d eaten two doors down from Hotel Felice: clams, grilled fish—Norwegian or Nihonese was available—the local, chuhi and birru. Now I know the way, this morning, the last day of the conference—it is almost sad, to have resolved the problem of finding one’s way, soon to be leaving one’s way behind. Like a secret one carries.
For Kenneth Surin, I decide on Session 28—four other sessions are running at the same time, 9.20-10.50. Morning snacks are served on floor 3: coffee, marmalade bun.
Felicity Coleman, Rebecca Hill and Catherine Dale—the last convening, the former presenting at this session, with Kenneth—talk about being here. Felicity Coleman has in the past hired a car, made her way through the small towns, stopping at onsen. Today, in the rain, she says, an onsen in the woods would be perfect. She is, tomorrow, presenting in London—but will gain a day inflight. In fact, many of the conferees are going straight to London.
I wonder at this moving group of people conducting their business all over the world—taking this world with them, insulated by it; as one is, traveling by car, J. and I later decide, insulated, not reliant on the confusion of finding one’s way along with locals and other visitors, in the confusion, for example of rail, and how it opens one up to by forcing types of exchange which would be missing in the car-bubble. Then there is traveling as a couple also—and this trip we have both traveled alone and together: how couples become a world, infacing.
I introduce myself to Ken, who has come in early, is consulting his laptop. He seems to recall our meeting in Stockholm, but is probably being polite.
Al, preferring the front, we move ringside. He does his round of the table, finding out who is there, what they do, with his great receptive smile.
“Becoming Gender” the session is called. Dale calls it something of a misnomer.
Ken’s preamble is to say that he has to wait until his retirement from Duke University—where he is professor emeritus—and after decades of teaching, to finally present on becoming gender. He has a Union Jack T-shirt, distinctive whiskers, an orotund delivery. …becoming is intrinsically tied to the category of the minor. To which Coleman’s the minor failed, the minor is no longer a possibility… has no salience.
Becoming-animal … part of a constellation, being analytically rather than arithmetically in the minor.
Everyone has to become woman, even women.
Everyone has to become animal, even animals.
Deleuze and Guattari—what is new, remarkable, interesting—“the actual is not what we are but what we become.”
“we become animal so that the animal also becomes something else.”
a zone of interchange
of passage between human an nonhuman
Gregor Samsa fails (to escape Oedipal coding in authoritarian family). Already I want to ask if every such becoming is a failure.
The Wolf Man – Freud’s – his position is in a territoire sauvage, the steppes, between forest and farmland—he is a pack animal.
Eugene Thacker—there are prejudices we have to overcome.
The life of the group forms a plane of consistency. The aggregate comes to have a life
– of packs herds swarms.
Donna Haraway loves dogs.
…it becomes a political question, to set up a steppe, a plane, a pathology … a plan/e of escape.
Wolf Man’s depression: bourgeois interiority.
Schizoid element: outside.
There can be molar collectivities, e.g. kolkhozi, collective farms, set up under a regime of collectivisation—and one might say the open office as well.
In molar collectivities there is also group belonging.
I think about this question:
Is Deleuze-Guattari studies a molar collectivity or does it set up a molecular plane of consistency?
In the molar, negation is used to determine difference in contrast to same. A question of either internal determinations of a concept or external determinations of molar or static nomination, accusation.
What marks one as part of a molar aggregate?
One is only ever sufficiently English Brazilian… but this sufficiency is still not affirmative. It conceals “desire, convention, contrivance.”
Deleuze and Guattari’s first move requires us to work on what I and you do or do not have in common. They do not require an identification, one drawn from abjection. There is a tautology in the racist: the one who claims to be the only one who is French or American; the one who claims to be the only one who has this essence and can have it. This one is inevitably the one who is. (But is it still drawing on abjection, on what we may call ontological abjection, to talk about being sufficiently British? British enough to wear the T-shirt? Deleuzian enough and Guattarian enough to wear the T-shirt?)
Rather than the ontological abjection of identification, we might enter a becoming, as a passage through a zone of indiscernability.
(I am put in mind of the letter in which Kafka writes, I’m going home to China.)
Rebecca Hill speaks next, she is “conceiving immanent desire with Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari.”
Irigigaray offers a diagnosis of phallocentrism. Rather than her criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman Hill traces the “generative commonalities and divergences” amongst these thinkers.
In a 1973 seminar, “Dualism, monism and multiplicities,” Taoist immanent desire is contrasted to Cartesian dualism. From the latter, every statement splits, cuts the subject—dividing thinking from desiring. From the former, there is no need for a split in the subject: thinking and desiring “is a pure process.”
Thought is monist multiplicity outside the status of number.
To become is to escape capital and man. (In a “pure process”?)
Immanent thinking is not feminist and is not colonialist.
The 1973 seminar acknowledges a “phallocratic imperial” background to all thought.
Hill offers that she gives a “highly motivated reading” of Irigaray.
The transcendence of Irigaray’s view of sexual difference—
“Volume without Contour,” “When our lips speak together,” in Speculum of the Other Woman: these concern immanent thought.
Western metaphysics uses woman as its “ground and resource” (all through this I am thinking of the Derridean chora).
Woman overflows and unravels the systematisation of reason and order.
What is stated is an “immanent feminist topology” of thought.
The feminine is the locus of chaos and terror.
The Oresteia trilogy is cited: Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon for killing her daughter Iphigenia.
Orestes—the titular—kills Clytemnestra and is put on trial.
Mother and daughter, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, become unspeakable.
A feminine topology of immanence, from “Volume without Content,” sets up an impersonal and unlimited field of immanence.
In “When our lips speak together,” lips are a figure of multiplicity: against the representative interpretation.
A w/hole that is never totalised—lips are a multiplicity.
The place of woman is mentioned in relation to Taoism.
The phrase is used “absolute self-survey,” but not in reference to Ruyer.
It comes to questions: That was, I say, between “sufficiency” and “purity.” This is a question for both—but perhaps Rebecca will be able to correct the statement—Irigaray writes somewhere, Perhaps (it is only) a (true) (understanding) (of) sexual difference that will save us?
I don’t think it was “true,” says Rebecca Hill. It was of course taken from Heidegger’s phrase.
Of course, I say. (Only a god can save us now, I think.)
And, Hill continues, it is in her later work. I have not dealt with her later work here…
…there seems to be some kind of zone of indiscernability in Kenneth’s phrase, an immanent feminist topology invoked…except polarised…
What do you mean by polarised?
Well, more rigidly constructed.
I would not use the word rigid. I mean, in her later work, Irigaray talks about a zone of something like indiscernability, where a becoming that is dual is possible, of both man and woman, of man with woman… But, I don’t work with her later writing, where she says sexual difference is real. … And she actually says, for which she has been heavily criticised by the trans community, There are only men and women. …
I see I backed away from a proposition rather than having to state it: I might have said polarised over gender—on the basis Irigaray, that it is in her later work notwithstanding, says very much this. But what I was asking had nothing to do with inclusion or exclusion in becoming gender, or becoming animal. It had to do with what the human might be; however, we can never excuse or avoid or refuse addressing sexual politics.
This question of what the human might be, I raised it because Coleman was in the room: in an algorithmic becoming there is no possibility of being saved—or saving us—let alone by understanding sexual difference.
But is this really the case? Isn’t algorithmic becoming something for which men and women can or should take responsibility? Even as it is nonhuman becoming, belonging to a technosemiosis which is not human or gendered. Still, isn’t this letting it go, this question? And I am reminded of Coleman’s As a feminist, I can’t possibly answer that question. Perhaps the algorithmic becoming—well we know that in its use, like reason, it is—uses women and men unequally, makes use of them, where it encounters them differently?
This would not be a question of what the human (contested in its internal differences) can do, it would not be a question of what whatever we is ought to do—therefore it would not be a question of morality—but it would be a question of what the human, we, can be, of what we is, exactly contested in sexual difference. Isn’t this the ethical question of only (an understanding of) sexual difference can save us (now)?
Another question: Ken answers with the long list of becomings which Deleuze and Guattari give. Getting to becoming mineral, he says, this is one I have never really understood. I suppose you could speak of the mineral as that which is used for jewelery, or in computers… is in watches, gemstones and precious metals…
Strangely there is some sage nodding of heads. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that minerals are mobile elements. They pass through sedimentary layers of strata. What might be at stake in a mineralisation, or becoming mineral, is gaining this fine grain level of mobility—and a granular point of view or perspective. (That of the mineral subject, I might now say.)
Ken pronounces haeccitas “hex-itas.”
The next keynote is again presented in the wooden hall underground with the hinged chairs and the technical difficulties. It is Alex Taek-Gwang Lee: “Deleuze/Guattari and the Third World: Rethinking Political Philosophy After May 68.” He is perhaps the third speaker Koichiro-san has introduced as his best friend.
Foucault said political philosophy is a theory of government. Yet Deleuze and Guattari call their own work political philosophy. It does not so much address governmentality as a people who are missing. This is what makes it political philosophy.
The Third World constitutes the historicisation and the politicisation of a people who are missing. (Note: it is not the singular people of a Volk, not a People who is missing.)
In Cinema 2 political cinema is to think about people who are missing—the Third World.
This consideration comes in light of the cinema being an art of the masses. Stalinism. Nazism. Americanism. It is an art of the the mass subject.
Once America was the land of deterritorialised peoples. Now its concerns are its its own ends and interests.
The aim of political cinema is to invent and not to represent people who are missing. “The missing people are a becoming.”
This future politics in my terms is planetary communism.
Why do the people of liberty not accede to a liberation of others? So that A Thousand Plateaus speaks of “exploitation of the Third World; the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.”
Imperialism provides a counter-history of liberalism.
Ultimate aim of Deleuzian politics, according to Mbembe, is
- a founding violence
- imposition of law
- a system designed to sustain colonialism and to replicate it.
But there is then a boomerang effect, from the colonised peoples: Auschwitz has its origins in colonialism—implanted back in the imperium. This is Mbembe’s necro-politics.
Commodification of labour—subjugation of labour force—in colonial countries, flows back—an authoritarian politics—flowing back to Europe and to the West in general.
The fascism and biopolitics in nation-building in the Third World rebound on the West.
Manjiko—as it is called here—Manchuria, shows how fascism grows up in the mechanism of capitalism. Capitalism incubates and bears forth fascism—leading to the mobilisation of the newly imperialised Third World in Total War.
Fascism is the counter-current in imperialism.
Nationalism in the 1930s in Japan became Empire—and failed.
The Japanese designed Manjiko as a nation-state in answer to this failure.
Emancipation and development are the goals of the game: an anti-imperialist nationalism.
The Third World movement shows colonialism does not work out unilaterally. Colonial territory is established on the exclusion of native peoples.
The colonial regime in Manjiko failed because of the division of the colonists and the colonised.
In a Land War, the colonised is a “wild beast” to hunt down.
Foucault writes that in the 17th century the form of power changed from disciplinary power to biopower: people became population.
From Malthus, for whom it is population that matters, while liberalism relies on people and on a cancellation of the population, to Hobbes’s liberal Leviathan, it is an easy step to biopower—to people as data.
Liberalism in Malthus concerns population. The people who are missing concerns a geophilosophy: taking up the conflict for settlement, colonialism, and therefore also imperialism, between land and sea, that between the Behemoth and the Leviathan.
In Schmidt, sea threatens earth-born nature. The Leviathan has no hierarchy. It threatens the Ship of State.
For Deleuze, humans cannot live in security unless they assume the struggle of and land and sea is over.
The Third World is an “island,” the missing people a “desert.”
Inhabitation does not end a desert island.
The island as a field of struggle of ocean and land precedes Robinson Crusoe.
It is prior to the opposition of Crusoe the coloniser and Friday the colonised. In Tournier, the island changes Crusoe.
Crusoe cannot perpetuate our world because he cannot reproduce: he is asexual.
He is a pervert.
There occurs the internal subjectivation of the island as such.
Planetary communism goes from the island as subject. Becoming-island is a politic of the desert island.
The Third World means this kind of island.
Danilo asks about the link between fascism and imperialism.
The French and English empires survived because they underwent development and modernisation.
Nationalism in Japan occurred for the purposes of the modernisation of Japan, resulting in imperialism.
Adam Smith is anti-imperialist. Imperialism in the UK is a product of the nation-state. There is a time lag between empire and nation-state: an attempt to return to empire.
Christoph asks why we should leave our food and our shelter, those of the developed world, and become Third World.
The Third World is an abstract world: it is not a question of refusal but of working against exclusion.
Greg asks after the coherence of a homogeneous concept of the nation-state when the state as we know it is heterogeneous, made of many peoples.
To become Third World you must invent the Third World. A territory.
Leviathan reminds us and recalls us to the nation-state we must be part of.
Greg: First Worlds coexist with Third World, in Mexico, the US, in China.
Craig Lundy: Is Third World a new earth?
In Third World, we are inventing an earth in common: that means communism.
(There are the now commonplace technical difficulties with the mics.)
I read in the programme that Philip Martin, from Macquarie University, Sydney, is presenting on the Kyoto School: something I have been missing is the connection between Deleuze and Guattari and Japanese philosophy.
The Kyoto School’s most well-known representative is Kitaro Nishida.
Working in the tradition today are Shizateru Ueda and Ryosuke Ohashi.
Jun Tohsaka (1900-1945) coined the name Kyoto School.
Martin goes about formulating a connection: the suprasensible in the sensible is how Deleuze frames Kant’s project.
Deleuze’s criticism—of having done with judgement—comes from a criticism of a total form of history—in real historical institutions.
There is another model of the sensible and the suprasensible in Deleuze: this is art.
From Law and Judgement, to, in Deleuze, Art.
Kitaro Nishida’s logic of basho—which a simplified translation might give as place—entails an expressive and transformative relation to the world and to history.
Logic and Life (1936) proposes the reciprocal determination of individuals and their actions and the world as a whole. It is a monadology.
The continuous history of change and transformation between consciousness and the world means we are caught in continuous transformations with the world (as a whole).
Art, ethics and religious experience is a knowing of itself to be transformative.
Miki—is another figure, Martin has not the time to present.
Nishida: the world of historical reality … is the subject of his 1936 work.
Jun Tohsaka: What is the Technological Spirit (1937/2018). This work informed by scientific Marxism links art to life to science. The technological spirit is social production in and of history, working on the level of a technology of self as a creative procedure, and creating thereby, rather than taking it as a given, a common sense—in the production of a society or social and cultural sense.
Antonio Catalano: his theme Deleuze as political thinker, through the work of Italian political philosopher, Toni Negri.
Deleuze does not isolate politics as a way of thinking. The real issue is the relation between ontology and politics.
Marxism follows two lines of descent: a theological-political direction which is that of Benjamin, Schmidt; a biopolitical direction, that of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari.
Negri: At the Origins of Biopolitics (1997).
Negri with Guattari: Communists Like Us.
Our time is one of the saturation of discussion between society and economics.
Capitalism builds a real plane of immanence.
Every singularity is pure energy.
Hegel—dialectics, negativity, history
Deleuze—philosophy of nature, affirmation, becoming-woman
Negri needed from Deleuze and Guattari an ontology of the spontaneous production of beings to transform Marxism.
Living singularities will always exceed the structures of domination.
From Deleuze issues a biopolitics creative of subjectivities, biopolitics as a constituting power and one not simply constitutive or given power in a given set of power relations.
Spinoza engages first philosophy of ontology, materialist immanence: “matter that produces is expression.”
From an ontology of absolute immanence is it possible to derive a politics?
There is no purely theoretical level which must be translated into action—theory and action enter a zone of indistinction where politics equals ontology.
It is in the ideal hegemony of the “inside,” of ontological interiority, that the political is determined.”
Absolute ontological: the ontological inside—the plane of immanence equals an ontological inside.
What relation to singularities does the plane of immanence have? What relation to subjectivities?
Communism is to subjectivities what the plane of immanence is to singularities.
Communism—space for free and autonomous development of singularities: the part is not subordinated to the whole, but a plane of immanence and singularities; work becomes creative process.
Jean-Sébastien Laberge states his theme as a dissensual meta-modelling of ecosophical democracy.
The metamodel is an external apparatus of synthesis.
A few months after joining the Greens, in 1985, Guattari first uses the term dissensus.
Guattari took the Greens in the direction of Rainbow Network, which was an experiment in creative dissensus, agreement in respect of difference—in which dissent is not denied.
With a network of 5,000 each individual or collective cannot claim to the exclusive representation of its membership.
This way of working reverses theme and variations. It starts from variations.
It works in parallel with the priority of the social over the political. It is a movement in social world (not necessarily first a political movement, and not one imposed on or to be imposed on a social world).
Ecosophical democracy is fabulating, not the acceptance of difference but fully assuming it.
Guattari died in August 1992.
Before questions commence, Antonio Catalano leaps to his feet to profess to his shame at speaking before the great Anne Sauvagnargues–in French–had he known, he would not have dared, which Jean-Sébastien Laberge responds to in an equal torrent of French, while Anne makes a little joke, almost concurring with the first speaker, then explaining she is only joking.
In the questions, which again followed after all three presentations, Anne criticised Martin for the use of suprasensible, which, it seems, she heard as super-sensible, therefore in ethical breach of her polemical insistence on immanence without transcendence.
Martin replied that the suprasensible maintains contact with immanence.
Laberge remarks on dissensus that it is used by Guattari and then becomes common in Negri (and also in other Italian political philosophers, like Esposito).
The issue is: new ways to put different points of view together in the social.
It must have been yesterday, in the coffeebreak, that Wren Nishina, or Nishina Wren-san, who was the interpreter for the artists exhibiting at Chiyoda Arts Centre as well as for Uno Kuniichi-sensei, was wearing his dovegrey pleated shirt, and I said to him, Ah, Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please.
Yes, it was the Saturday, because Wren said to me, I thought, since I was presenting, I ought to make an effort. His paper had been “Spatiality according to Deleuze and Shinobu Orikuchi”—taking up on the idea they share of the frontier or boundary not being a ‘geometric fiction sandwiched between two blocs of land’ but a ‘world,’ or—if one were to co-opt computer speak—a partition, that is an horizon on which a world dataset takes place.
It really was a beautiful shirt. Wren is an MA student at Tohuku University. His English-speaking voice is Oxonian. He said, You are a Japanese expert.
No, an amateur.
You seem to know more about Japanese culture than anyone else here.
This impression must have come from simply knowing a little of Uno Kuniichi’s background with Butoh, and Hijikata.
…and then he said something even more flattering, after I’d said I was a late doctorate currently looking for a position—and that if he knew of where I might be welcomed, I would willingly go there. He said, You have such amazing curiosity. If only we all had such curiosity.
What the cure is for that, as Dorothy Parker wrote, noone knows.
Joff Bradley presents the final keynote, in the woody hall, with the technical problems, and the little chairs, that, when Kenneth arrived, he called built for midgets. He had a chair brought into the hall from the foyer, and positioned himself in the aisle.
Joff Bradley’s presentation is called “On deadly spirals of ipseity.” I had gained no real insight into Joff’s area of interest, despite his having convened the session at which I presented, despite having had, albeit cursory, encounters with him, through R.’s intercession, her introduction.
If Chiba Masaya-san had been, as I wrote, the first revelation of the Deleuze|Guattari Camp, with his disconnective Deleuze, Joff was a, if not the, revelation of the conference, his contribution entirely unexpected—in its suggestiveness.
Wilhelm Reich is the figure who presides over the presentation: Nick Land’s dark Deleuze is invoked, as is Masaya Chiba’s disconnective Deleuze. A negative Deleuze, an affirmative Deleuze, but what about a joyful Deleuze? A Reichian orgasmic Deleuze—and Guattari.
He cites a discussion between Žižek and Schutzer—Deleuze and pleasure.
He is dealing with the avoidance of stating the real importance of that crackpot Reich to both Deleuze and Guattari—all through Anti-Oedipus, which even quotes some of his fruitier, whackier theories, commentaries. … “the embarrassment with Deleuze and Guattari for celebrating the anti-fascism of Reich.”
But Reich was Freud’s favourite disciple.
What Joff’s real theme is is the hikikomori—the locked-in-the-parental-home of those too, in fact, embarrassed by themselves. The socially withdrawn.
Of the hikikomori Reich would say it is the worm in man.
But Joff makes the alignment of hikikomori with autism—withdrawn-ness, isolation—not depression, which to me is in this relation to autism.
The (biological) tapeworm spreads cancer—is active in spreading cancer around the body.
Rudolf Steiner might be a blue (as opposed to a red) kind of fascism. (This is a reference to a session in the conference called “Red and Black Deleuze: Planetary Communism and Open Marxism,” which was a panel discussion, taking place at the same time as the session I was attending on Bergson, Space-Time, Deleuze, with Craig Lundy, yesterday.)
With the worm in man the organism can be dammed up petrified and cannot pulse. Reich says fascism of the worm in the life force that does not wiggle but goosestep.
There is a double capture of worm and hikikomori.
Reich holds that orgone energy kills cancer. Resignation shrinks.
Joff speaks to the death in life of the hikikomori: the orgasm frees energy, for Reich.
Reich’s guide to a joyful life is to have as many orgasms as possible.
So as not to be Nietzsche’s lonesomest one.
The lonely withdrawing ones, says Nietzsche—from this comes the possibility of the Overman.
(Once again, it is worthwhile comparing this with Simondon holding up Zarathustra as epitome of transindividual—withdrawing from the crowd, being left to bury the friend, the dwarf, the highwire artist, returning to the cave, and transindividuation.)
The serpent hanging out of the mouth of Zarathustra is none other than the Reichian worm in man.
Armoury is, for Reich, in this contactlessness and affective blockage; an autophagy—in connection with the little machines supposed to provide contact in the hikikomori’s room, or those Reich is left with, in the end, his orgone machines, autophagy belongs to the body without organs: it turns cancerous.
The Id in Reich communicates cosmic orgone energy.
But then in armoured seclusion, waves of desire—undulations of the worm—freeze into segments.
Ipseity is the singularity of the self.
The hikikomori nestles down deeper into the self—in deadly spirals of ipseity.
The face does not open the self to the other, opening to the self—as in Levinas. (Joff states his singular move, not just in this presentation, but in a pragmatics, is not to make recourse to Levinas.) Ipseity is hostage to itself.
Spirals of ipseity occur in detached auto-immunity of the self.
The sovereignty of the self turns to itself—possibly through micromachines—or—spirals into itself.
It concerns the centrifugal rings as the worm recedes into itself. It becomes a malignant subjectivity.
Lingis is the source for the title of the presentation, his phrase “engendering spirals of ipseity,” which describes orgasm. So, here, for Joff, these become deadly.
It concerns, says Joff, not the fascism of the rhizomatic potato but that of the couch potato.
Ryu Murakami, a very different writer from Haruki, (one I have been reading as soon as English translations become available) writes after Fukushima—which Joff states as decisive, a threshold for the increase in the numbers of hikikomori—of the “movement of sorrow of the past to the loneliness of the present.”
– Murakami Ryu’s The Symbiotic Worm
For Stiegler, there has to be a pharmacological coexistence with the worm in man. (Joff does not reject the use of pharmaceuticals—neither, in fact, did Guattari.)
No one can withdraw from withdrawal – spit out the black serpent – the worm in man – “we are all hikikomori.”
As I write this out, back in New Zealand, it resonates with me more; at the time I took as a gesture. I took it to be gestural, and to theatricalise the moment Joff was intending to mark. But now it has something of Coleman’s hopelessness of humanity’s current algorithmic becoming—and of course it has to do with isolation, which is that of the individual who, forced to watch, withdraws, who cannot withdraw from her withdrawal, or who deadens himself.
This enervation is not the same as the numbing to mediated atrocity we are said to suffer as a result of our saturation with images of violence and abjection. No, it is much more personal and has to do with personal shame, libidinal or perhaps orgasmic shame—with which, in adolescents, Joff will identify it.
So perhaps it were better said than forced to watch, watched—forced to be watched—even to the self-consciousness of knowing she is and the autoveillance as an amplification—in a deadly spiral of ipseity—of his being watched: the little machines, who, in that lyric of Mercury Rev, have telephones for eyes.
Ryu Murakami says that Japanese youth may be a new possibility of the human.
I think, Why the interest in the strange pleasures of failure? Is it that fascination Izidor Barši spoke about in his presentation of the intellectual—and by extension the intellect—with violence?
Why the stupid embrace of “vacuoles of noncommunication” (Deleuze’s phrase for what we need in societies of control—in the “postscript” with that title)?
Joff’s big Reichian joke came after his rhetorical gesture: “we are all hikikomori.” He was finished, made a movement to leave the lectern (behind him some of the slides I snapped above), and applause burst out.
But then he returned—held his arms up to quell the applause, saying, “Sorry! Sorry! I finished too soon!”
And he went on:
Where there is processual schizophrenia in schizoanalysis, in hikikomori the question is one of disarming the rings enveloping the body of the hikikomori—getting the worms to stream (in Reich’s term—here problematic considering the streaming media that is a relentless fact of life for hikikomori, as Joff acknowledges).
Narcissism, self-hatred, orgasm-anxiety, forms the basis of the general hatred of life.
Nonfascism, there produced in Anti-Oedipus by processual schizophrenia of schizoanalysis, here is in Nick Land’s cry:
DEATH TO THE HUMAN SECURITY SYSTEM!
Questions:
Anne asks about the social production of autism. Are they (hikikomori) too connected? Or too unconnected?
I am thinking about Josh Cohen’s book Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. His word for the propensity that is innate in humans to stop, to give up, withdraw, lie down, is ataraxia. Cohen gives four case studies for the four types of the ataraxic: for the burnout, Andy Warhol; for the slob, Orson Welles; for the recluse, Emily Dickinson; for the slacker, David Foster Wallace. Note that all four suffer from hyperproductivity at the same time—effecting a remarkable dynamic between creativity and enervation, or the sort of exhaustion which precedes and doesn’t follow from productivity, between work and stopping.
Danilo asks: how does gender apply?
Joff answers there are more male hikikomori.
Danilo asks around the notion of armoury, coined in the sense it is used by Joff, by Theweleit in writing about character-armour against the flood of women and Jews.
There is a question also about the outbursts of deadly violence from otherwise reclusive and alienated hikikomori types: Joff makes the brilliant point that this a question of the drives and not of desire—it is not because, as Stiegler puts it, of a crisis in desire, but is a deadly expression of the drives, the Triebe—sometimes translated as instincts. Desire does not find its destination and the drives now burst out.
Joff gives the numbers of hikikomori as around 1.2 million in Japan. Asked how these figures can be stated, he answers that they come from diagnosed cases, since, often, concerned parents will take their hikikomori children to doctors—for advice and for treatment.
Hikikomori is not limited to Japan: in the US and the UK numbers of such cases appear to be on the rise.
Perhaps it is when answering Danilo’s question, Joff becomes overcome with emotion and says, I am just sick of losing students. One month they are in your class. Then they just disappear.
He also talks about using Pokemon Go in a research project to get hikikomori outside, about which he wrote a very long paper. His conclusion, he says, was not very hopeful: he doesn’t hold out a lot of hope for this type of approach.
Koichiro makes the final address. He says that he has been restrained by his official role from making any kind personal statement, but that now he would like to take this opportunity to make a personal statement: a slide comes up—my book is coming out soon, published by Edinburgh Press, and I would like you all to buy a copy. Buy one for friends too.
He invites a representative from the next Deleuze/Studies Asia Conference to come forward: it will be held in Nanjing. She begins, as Koichiro did, days ago, that Ian Buchanan approached her and said that there should be a Deleuze/Guattari Conference Asia, this time, in China.
I try to find Dan W. Smith to say buy and share my contact details. He must have left. I find Greg Flaxman. He says it’s been great meeting and that all my questions were right on point. I invite him to come to New Zealand. He says he has no doubt our paths will cross some time in the future.
I say goodbye to Al Lingis. It’s been great meeting—I am hopeful of seeing him again—perhaps next month, when he is visiting Christchurch for a conference?
This didn’t happen sadly, the event in Christchurch having already taken place at the time of writing.
My final notes, before leaving on the direct return route to Akasaka and Hotel Felice, concern my own project:
…the joints of opponents as Ronaldo dodges or tackles them… …the letters and articulations of the words and sentences I now write… are so many subjective events, determining the field of a subtractive sensible interest.
In other words, the system of objects on the outside becomes determinate only in actual (becoming) the spontaneous perception of consciousness.
Neither is it determinate in the pattern lying in wait to be found, nor is it animated—in the strongest sense of inspirited, of the simulacrum brought to life, to lifelikeness, by the sculptor: it is rather the thought in action, that is consciousness.
That night, J. and I go out to Tokyo Station to find Ramen Street. It turns out this is underground. We join the queue, and when we reach the machine, we punch in our choices, going by the photos, for our ramen and our drinks, pay entering the coins and notes, and receive tickets which we take to our table, in the middle of a crowded ramen bar.
Leave a Reply