Nomadology

This page will include materials on Deleuze and Guattari, Bruce Chatwin and Nick’s own work.

The following is an extract from a forthcoming paper by Nick Fox. Please note that it may not be quoted without the author’s express permission.
Deleuze, Guattari and the embodied self

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze established an intellectual partnership with the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari shortly after the May 1968 revolt by students and workers in Paris. The corpus of their shared authorship includes the major works Anti-Oedipus (1984), A Thousand Plateaus (1988) and What is Philosophy? (1994). Born in 1925 and a student of philosophy in 1940s Paris, Deleuze’s influences included Nietzsche, Bergson and Heidegger, and resulted in such works as Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). While this anti-rationalist tradition coincided with French structuralism’s emphasis on the centrality of language in constructing both the world and the self, he was critical of structuralist ontology as impersonal and over-deterministic (Bogue 1989: 2-3). An associate of Foucault’s, he wrote a study of that writer’s work (Deleuze 1988) which is both a discussion of Foucault and of Deleuze’s own take on the issues with which Foucault concerned himself.

Guattari was born in 1930 and following studies in pharmacy and philosophy became involved in oppositional politics, both as a member of the French Communist Party and in challenges to traditional models of mental illness and its treatment. During the 1960s he underwent psychoanalysis with Lacan and subsequently became a Lacanian analyst. However, it was his rejection of Lacan’s blend of Freud and Saussurian structuralism, in favour of an effort to synthesise Freud and Marx, which provided the basis for his association with Deleuze (Bogue 1989: 5-6). For both Deleuze and Guattari, the collaboration over their first joint work, Anti-Oedipus (published in France in 1972, and sub-titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia) may be seen as synergistic from earlier (though different) commitments and intellectual influences, and as an innovative direction which was to be developed over the following decade. Their collaboration continued into the 1990s: until Guattari’s death, which was followed shortly afterwards by Deleuze’s own demise.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (1984) criticise psychoanalysis for its view that desire must always be considered as a lack or absence of an object (food, the mother, the phallus). Further, this desire is located in the realm of the psyche which Freud and his followers such as Lacan called the symbolic, and thus is distanced from the ‘real’ world which impinges on the human subject. Because desire is symbolic, it is bound to fail, because it cannot possess its (real) object. Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the existence of a symbolic desire-as-lack, but propose in addition a conception of positive desire which is both real and productive, a creative affirmation of potential (Massumi 1992: 174) akin to Nietzsche’s will-to-power of the organism (Bogue 1989: 23-4). By the exertion of this will-to-power, it is possible for the human subject to be active rather than reactive, to meet its (real) needs and free itself from the chains of oppression under capitalism.

The importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on human beings’ will to power or affirmation of potential is developed in their follow-up work A Thousand Plateaus (also sub-titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia), which focuses less on the ills of psychoanalysis and more on the process of resisting oppression (Massumi 1992: 82). In this work, what is implied by these concepts is that human beings are active and motivated rather than passive, and incorporate their engagement with the world through an on-going work of sense-making. It is this aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s model which is of greatest relevance: that the construction of subjectivity is in the dialogical play of social processes and the affirmative and active creation of meaning (the will-to-power) as the human being engages with the world. It is to describe the constructive act of self-hood that Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notions of the body-without-organs, of the territorialization1 of this entity by the social, and of nomadology as the strategic resistance of territorialization.

The Body-without-Organs

The notion of the body-without-organs (henceforth BwO) can be traced back to Deleuze’s early work The Logic of Sense (1969), in which he sought to explicate the relationship between reality and meaning without recourse to an essential subjectivity. The collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari which applies the concept of the BwO can be seen as an extension of this project. In Anti-Oedipus, the term becomes the pivotal relation between subjective sense-making (including a sense of embodiment) and the social environment.

The BwO is quite unlike what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘organism’ or ‘body-with-organs’: the ‘common-sense’ understanding of physical embodiment which systems of thought in religion, law and biomedicine have constituted. Rather, it is a reflexive ‘in-folding’ of the social world which enables the emergence of subjectivity. While the BwO is the site of domination, it is also the site of resistance and refusal, and can be understood also as a limit constituted in this opposition of power and resistance. Within this dynamic struggle between domination and resistance, the BwO is constructed and reconstructed continually. Exploring this dynamic tension provides the basis for what Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 23) call nomadology. The BwO links (and allows the inter-penetration of) psychic experience with the forces of society (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 12), creating a sense-of-self, and furthermore, the potential to resist such social forces. While acknowledging the constructed nature of the ‘self’ (and concomitantly, the ‘body’) as a continuing project of the social, this needs to be understood as a dynamic rather than a passive process of ‘inscription’.

Thus we can recognise the impact of the social world on how we understand our selves and our bodies, for example, in the kinds of analyses developed by Foucault and his followers (Fox 1998a). Power, mediated through systems of thought and knowledge, instigate a reflexive sense of self in its subjects. At different periods in history, people come to understand their humanity, self-hood and bodies in ways appropriate to the systems of thought of the day. Just as the body is disciplined (by education, law, medicine etc.), so subjectivity is disciplined by systems of knowledge — from ancient philosophy and religion to the modern social sciences.

Deleuze and Guattari describe the tension between the forces of the social and the BwO’s will-to-power as a territorialization, and thus the BwO may be thought of as a territory constantly contested and fought over. In other words, it is the locus for resistance to power. An example will make the point about the difference between their perspective and an essentialist model of the human subject as prior (making sense of, and thereby constructing the social world around it). In the context of the experience of chronic illness, Charmaz suggests that

(p)hysical pain, psychological distress, and the deleterious effects of medical procedures all cause the chronically ill to suffer as they experience their illness. However, a narrow medicalised view of suffering ignores or minimises the broader significance of suffering: the loss of self felt by many people with chronic illnesses. Chronically ill people frequently experience a crumbling away of their former self-images without simultaneous development of equally valued new ones (Charmaz 1983: 168, emphasis in original).

Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical framework offers an alternative to this essentialist reading, in which there is not a prior, ‘interior’ experiencing self. Essentialism, Butler (1990) argues, achieves privilege for the self through such use of metaphors of depth and surface. For Deleuze and Guattari, such oppositions are swept away: the anatomical body is not the carapace of the self, rather, the self which ‘experiences’ itself as being ‘inside’ the body does so because of a reflexive way of thinking (a territorialization). Similarly, physiological ‘distress’ and the sensation of pain — which have no implicit meaning – come to signify because of territorialization of the BwO by biomedical and human sciences systems of thought into what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the organism’ or ‘body-with-organs’. Once pain signifies in relation to the organism, it contributes to the subjectivity which has been territorialized on the BwO. In this reading, it is not the self which experiences pain or attributes meaning to it, the self is the pain, the self is an effect of the meaning (Fox 1993: 145).

In contrast with essentialist conceptions of the self, which bemoan the impact upon essential selves of chronic illness and suffering and the concomitant existential despair of embodiment, Deleuze and Guattari’s position offers the possibility for a subjectivity not limited by the body-with-organs. Meanings are capable of transformation, with possibilities for deterritorialization (see below). Part of that process may be the dissolution of systems of thought deriving from biomedicine, mind-body dualism (which sees the mind as ‘trapped’ inside the body, and the interior-exterior conception of subjectivity. The individualising of pain and suffering by biomedicine (often with the collaboration of the human sciences) territorializes and limits the BwO as organisms or bodies-with-organs, which are then the natural subjects for the expertise of medicine.

Territorialization

Deleuze and Guattari see territorialization (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) as the outcome of dynamic relations between physical and/or psychosocial forces. Territorialization is an active process, whose agent may be human, animate, inanimate or abstracted (society, God, ‘they’), as may the object of territorialization. Thus the force of the sun’s gravity territorializes the earth in its travels through space, acting on it through the exertion of a force. Similarly, the air blown through a reed is territorialized to vibrate and produce a musical tone through the action of a musician’s lungs.

This general conception is applied by Deleuze and Guattari to the specific arena of how meaning is ascribed to the social relations of human life. The act of taking a tree’s branch and turning it into a tool is both a material and a phenomenological reterritorialization. From another point of view, a sharpened stick is a deterritorialized branch. which is released from its previous role as a component of a living tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 67). A re-reading of Marx from this perspective suggests that the capitalist deterritorializes products into commodities, while labour is abstracted, becoming reterritorialized as wages (ibid: 68). Territories and territorializations may be not only physical but also psychological and spiritual: philosophy and ideology have historically reterritorialized land as Homeland or Fatherland (ibid.). These systems of thought (what Foucault called ‘discourses’) possess authority, and as such may deterritorialize and reterritorialize how we think about the world and about ourselves.

This analysis can be used to articulate how the forces of the social impinge on individuals or cultures, from the stratification of class, gender and ethnicity through to the construction of people – in the realm of health and health behaviour — as ‘patients’ or ‘risk takers’ (Nettleton 1995, Fox 1998b). Usually (though not always) these social territorializations entail — somewhere in the process — some act of interpretation, of ascribing meaning to an act or action. Thus, in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987), he describes how aboriginal people ‘sing their world into existence’ as they trace out the journeys by which their totemic ancestors travelled across the land. The song — of the aboriginal person, or of a child in the dark or a person doing housework (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 311) — territorializes the chaos which is the Universe. The child is no longer afraid, the aboriginal person no longer lost, as the song ascribes meaning to the environment and to his/her relation with it. And because meanings derive from a conceptual realm independent of the material world it seeks to represent (Derrida 1978), there are endless possibilities for de- and re-territorialization: language offers the potential for humans to interpret the world with infinite variety.

People are the continual subjects of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as their BwOs are inscribed by the forces of the social. From birth (perhaps — one could argue — from conception) every inscription is a deterritorialization of virgin territory and a reterritorialization in some new patterning. The BwO is the summation of all these myriad deterritorializations and reterritorializations: it is in this sense that we might agree with Foucault’s (1977: 148) description of the body as totally imprinted by (its) history. But – I would add – this is a history which has been enacted and engaged with, not simply imposed.

The Nomadic Subject and Nomadology

Deleuze and Guattari identify the potential for resistance in this process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Importantly, this may be a consequence of either an individual’s reflexivity or the actions of another. Either way, it can provide what they call (1988: 9) a line of flight by which the BwO escapes from a territorialization. Often the de-territorialization is momentary and perhaps inconsequential: the BwO moves just a little from its previous position before re-territorializing in a new patterning. At other times, it may be substantial and life-changing, a line of flight which carries the BwO into unimagined realms of possibility and becoming-other. To give two examples: a patient’s BwO may be de-territorialized by the health care worker or friend who treats them as something more than a collection of pathologies; the child’s BwO may be deterritorialized (and reterritorialized) by the adult who treats her as an equal.

Such lines of flight can lead to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as nomadic subjectivity. All deterritorializations carry the trace of the nomadic in them, but Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between relative and absolute deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 55). Because the relation between a person and her environment is dynamic and challenging, movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are commonplace: part of the daily fabric of existence, part of the unfolding and becoming-other character of life and death, health and illness. Deterritorialization can be seen clearly in relation to sickness and mortality. Thus a risk to health from some environmental factor leads to a change in behaviour; an illness or impairment forces a person to adapt and exploit unused potentialities. In each case there is relative deterritorialization of the BwO. But these relative deterritorializations, even if they are very rapid or very extreme, rarely (perhaps never) result in an absolute line of flight, the absolute deterritorialization of the BwO which Deleuze and Guattari call nomadism.

This metaphor of the nomad exemplifies absolute deterritorialization. Nomads may follow customary paths, but the points along the way possess no intrinsic significance for them. They do not mark out territory to be distributed among people (as with sedentary cultures), rather people are distributed in an open space without borders or enclosures. Nomad space is smooth, without features, and in that sense the nomad traverses without movement, the land ceases to be other than support. Unlike the migrant, the nomad does not leave land because it has become hostile: rather she clings to the land because it is undifferentiated from other spaces she inhabits (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 380-1).

Nomadism is not just a life-style choice, however. Deleuze and Guattari (ibid: 23) see nomadology as an alternative approach to understanding the history of civilisation. Traditionally, history has been written from the point of view of the sedentary, from which has grown all the apparatus of the State, including ‘state philosophy’ (Massumi 1992: 4-5), the official version of how to live and die. Nomadology – in contrast — multiplies narratives; creating an uninterrupted flow of deterritorialization which establishes a line of flight away from territories, grand designs and monolithic institutions. Needless to say, this is not something which is achieved once and for all, there is always another and another deterritorialization ahead.

Thus nomadism must be thought of not as an outcome but as a process, as a line of flight which continually resists the sedentary, the single fixed perspective. Again recall that Foucault (1977: 148) spoke of the body completely imprinted with history — that is, the forces of the social. Nomadology sets itself in opposition to this inscription: nomad subjectivity is one free to roam, untrammelled by the territorializations of power, and free to resist. As such, a commitment to deterritorialization and the nomad is intrinsically political, always on the side of freedom, choice and becoming, always opposed to power, territory and the fixing of identity.

© Nick Fox: December 1999