Schizo chaosmosis (Part 2)

​by  Felix  Guattari

In the pathic apprehension of delire, dreams and passion, it is essential to realise that the ontological petrification, the existential freezing of the heterogenesis of beings which manifest themselves there according to particular styles, is always latent in other modalities of subjectivation. It is like a freeze-frame which both indicates its basic (or bass) position in the polyphony of chaosmic components, and intensifies its power relative to them. Thus it does not constitute a degree zero of  subjectivation, a neutral, passive, deficient, negative point, but an extreme degree of intensification. It is in passing through this chaotic "earthing," this perilous oscillation, that something else becomes possible, that ontological bifurcations and the emergence of coefficients of processual creativity can occur. The fact that the psychotic patient is incapable of a heterogenetic re-establishment does not in itself obviate the richness of ontological experimentation with which he is confronted despite himself. This is why delirious narrativity, as a discursive power finalised by the crystallisation of a Universe of reference or a non-discursive substance, constitutes the paradigm for the construction and reconstruction of mythical, mystical, aesthetic, even scientific, worlds. The existence of chaosmic stases is certainly not the privilege of psychopathology. Their presence can be detected in philosophy - in Pascal or even the most rationalist authors. The Cartesian sequence of generalised doubt - which precedes an encounter of the utmost urgency with the Cogito, to be succeeded by the reunion with God and the refoundation of the world - is akin to this schizo-chaotic reduction: the fact that complexity and alterity are tempted (by the evil demon) to throw in the towel confers on subjectivity the supplementary power of escaping from spatio-temporal coordinates which are otherwise reinforced. More generally, we can see that a collapsus of sense will always be associated with the promotion of a-signifying links of discursivity dedicated to the ontological weaving of an auto-consistent world. The event-centred rupture thus happens at the heart of being and it is from there that it is able to generate new ontological mutations. Distinctive oppositions, syntaxes and semantics relating to codes, signals and signifiers, pursue their rounds - but to the side of their strata of origin. As in delire, signal-systems and semiotics take off. Schizo chaosmosis is a means for the apperception of abstract machines which work transversally to heterogeneous strata. The passage through chaosmic homogenesis, which can be a path to complexual heterogenesis (but this is never mechanically or dialectically guaranteed), does not constitute a translucent, indifferent zone of being, but an intolerable nucleus of ontological creationism. 

​By dismantling the ontological heterogenesis which confers its diversity to the world and its distraction (in Pascal's sense) to subjectivity, schizo homogenesis exacerbates the transversal power of chaosmosis, its ability to traverse strata and break through barriers. Whence the frequently observed capacity of many schizophrenics to reveal, as if by accident, the best guarded intentions of their interlocutors, to somehow read the Unconscious like an open book. Complexity released from its signifying, discursive constraints is embodied in mute, immobile and stupefying, abstract machinic dances. We should be wary of the simplifying and reifying use of categories such as autism and dissociation to describe schizo strangeness, the loss of vital feeling for depression, glischrogeny for epilepsy .... Rather than global and standard deficit alterations of normal subjectivity, we are actually dealing with modalities of autoalterity that are at once plural and singular. I is an other, a multiplicity of others, embodied at the intersection of partial components of enunciation, breaching on all sides individuated identity and the organised body. The cursor of chaosmosis never stops oscillating between these diverse enunciative nuclei - not in order to totalise them, synthesise them in a transcendent self, but in spite of everything, to make a world of them. So we are in the presence of two types of homogenesis: a normal and/or neurotic homogenesis, which stops itself from going too far and for too long into a chaosmic, schizo type of reduction; and an extreme pathic-pathological homogenesis leading to a positioning point of worldly complexions, where not only do components of sensibility (fixed in a time and a ​space) and those of affectivity and cognition find themselves conjoined, but also axiological, ethical and aesthetic "charges" as well. On the passive side of schizo ontology we thus find a reductive homogenesis, a loss of colour, flavour and timbre in Universes of reference, but on the active side we find an emergent alterification relieved of the mimetic barriers of the self. Being is affirmed as the responsibility of the other (Levinas) when nuclei of partial subjectivation are constituted in absorption or adsorption with the autonomy and autopoiesis of creative processes. 

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The point of this is certainly not to make the schizo a hero of the postmodern and above all not to underestimate the weight of systemic components (organic, somatic, imaginary, familial, social) within the psychotic process, but to indicate the effects of inter-componential inhibitions which lead to a stand-off with chaosmic immanence. Social stratifications are set up in a way that avoids, so far as possible, the disquieting strangeness generated by a too marked fixation on chaosmosis. We have to move quickly, we mustn't linger on something that might bog us down: madness, pain, death, drugs, the vertigo of the bod without organs, extreme passion... Of course, all these aspects of existence are the object of a functional awareness by the dominant socius but always as the correlative of an active misrecognition of their chaosmic dimension. The reactive approach to chaosmosis secretes an imaginary of eternity, particularly through the mass media, which misses its essential dimension of finitude: the facticity of being-there, without qualities, without past, without future, in absolute dereliction and yet still a virtual nucleus of complexity without bounds. The eternity of a profoundly infantile adult world that must be opposed to the hyper-lucidity of the child in solitary meditation on the cosmos, or the becoming-child of poetry, music and mystical experience. Only when chaosmosis congeals, implodes ​in an abyss of despair, depression and mental derailing rather than revitalising complexions of alterity and rekindling processes of semiotisation - must we of course pose questions about a recomposition of existential Territories, "grafts of transference," dialogic relays and the invention of all kinds of social welfare and institutional pragmatics. Not a heroism then of psychosis but, on the contrary, an unindulgent indexation of the chaosmic body it carries to incandescence and whose bruised wrecks are today eaten away by chemotherapy -now that it has ceased being cultivated in the traditional Asylum, like so many monstrous flowers.
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The delirious primary pulverisation or the grand narrative constructions of paranoia, the unstable paths healing the intrusion of the absolute, cannot be put on the same level as those well socialised systems of defence such as games, sports, the manias supported by the media, racist phobias .... However, their mixture is the daily bread of institutional psychotherapy and schizoanalyses. 

It is thus equally from a hotchpotch of banalities, prejudices, stereotypes, absurd situations - a whole free association of everyday life - that we have to extricate, once and for all, these Z or Zen points of chaosmosis, which can only be discovered in nonsense, through the lapsus, symptoms, aporias, the acting out of somatic scenes, familial theatricalism, or institutional structures. This, I repeat, stems from the fact that chaosmosis is not exclusive to the individuated psyche. We are confronted by it in group life, in economic relations, machinism (for example, informatics) and even in the incorporeal Universes of art or religion. In each case, it calls for the reconstruction of an operational narrativity, that is, functioning beyond information and communication, like an existential crystallisation of ontological heterogenesis. The fact that the ​production of a new real-other-virtual complexion always results from a rupture of sense, a short circuiting of significations, the manifestation of non-redundant repetition, autoaffirmative of its own consistency and the promotion of partial non-"identifiable" nuclei of alterity-which escape identification -condemns the therapist and mental health worker to an essentially ethical duplicity. One one hand they work in the register of a heterogenesis of bits and pieces in order to remodel existential Territories, to forge transitory semiotic components between blocks of immanence in the process of petrification .... And on the other they can only claim pathic access to the chaosmic thing - within psychosis and the institution - to the extent that they in one way or another recreate and reinvent themselves as bodies without organs receptive to non-discursive intensities. Their potential conquests of supplementary coefficients of heterogenetic liberty, their access to mutant Universes of reference and their entrance into renewed registers of alterity, depend on their own submersion in homogenetic immanence. 

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​Nosographic categories, psychiatric and psychoanalytic cartographies, necessarily betray the chaosmic texture of psychotic transference. They constitute so many languages, modelisations among others - of delire, the novel, the television serial - which cannot aspire to any epistemological preeminence. Nothing more but nothing less! Which is perhaps already a lot, because they themselves embody roles, points of view and submissive behaviour, and even, why not, liberating processes. Who speaks the truth? This is no longer the question; but how, and under what conditions can the best bring about the pragmatics of incorporeal events that will recompose a world and reinstall processual complexity? The idiosyncratic modelisations grafted onto one-to-one analysis, self-analysis and group ​psychotherapy ... always resort to borrowing from specialised languages. Our problematic of chaosmosis and the schizoanalytic escape from the prison of signification is directed - to compensate for these borrowings -towards a necessary a-signifying deconstruction of their discursivity and towards placing their ontological efficacity into a pragmatic perspective. 

excerpt  from  the  book: Chaosmosis an ethico-aesthetic paradigm by Felix Guattari ​

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