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.