Page 82: Deleuze writes here on the experience of madness. Within our Pascal example, two numbers are generating (via the fibonacci sequence) a GCD. The GCD is tethered to the two numbers so that the two numbers can potentialy be factored in an orderly fashion. Should the GCD break away on its own, it is effectively groundless and has no crystalline structure connected to it by which it could become organized. This is no problem for small numbers, but you could see how if a person has a psychotic episode (e.g. schizophrenia), it would be akin to having a madman (i.e. the GCD) walk around in your brain, saying anything, doing anything, no discipline, no structure, perverse morals, inability to weigh costs and benefits, etc. One visualization that I use to see this is let's say you have a hideout inside a mountain. The interior of this structure is filled with tunnels and diagonal elevators (your crystalline structure). Should an event of madness occur, the mountain gets inverted inside out, such that all these structures are pushed to the outside, to the surface. Now, the only means to get to the top of the mountain (or anywhere else) is to follow the fibonacci spirals that were inherent inside the structure that have now become manifest on the outside -- effectively following a path around around and around the mountain, slowly gaining elevation, until at last you are back at the top. When the mountain is turned inside-out, it appears as if there are lots of gaping holes in the body. Rather than structuring the structure, the crystalline meshwork is on the outside -- the gaps, the breaks, are clearly evident. (cf. p.87) In this situation, everything is mixed up, such that in the psyche, schizophrenia dominates. When Deleuze says, on Artaud, that "For him [Artaud], there is not, there is no longer, any surface," (86) he means that the psyche has lost any semblance of consistency -- the forces of the depths of the soul rise to the surface indiscriminately; hence the loss of sense: "In this collapse of the surface, the entire world loses its meaning." (87) The corruption of sense results in indecipherable language, streams of language more like animal "howls" than spoken words. (89) The sound of phonetic language has become entirely dissociated from its meaning(s). Within our diagram, this would be all the non-red dots of the Pascal diagram, the non-factors of the GCD; there is a pattern, but it is almost impossible to decipher because it would mean decoding the inverse of a crystalline image (i.e. if there are very few red dots and many non-red dots, it is like decoding language through the gaps in speech, through the breaks). Deleuze speaks of this madness-event as nonsense "engulfing" sense. (91) We can get a clear visualization of that if we think of the mountain structure turning inside out such that the non-red dots are on the outside.
In this chapter, Deleuze opposes surfaces to poles of depth, or mixtures of depth. Again, we should read here, "the crystalline" and "the organic", respectively, from his other works.
"Psychoanalysis must have geometric dimensions....Psychoanalysis is the psychoanalysis of sense." (92) I think this is the takeaway for New Pioneerism...that to perform cultural analysis, as one might perform psychoanalysis, one must analyze geometrically, structurally.
Deleuze states his preference for Artaud over Carroll (93). The point being that from an understanding of the depths, one could always have the building blocks of the surface. Carroll's examination of the surface is epiphenomenal. In the two levels of the house, Artaud sits on the ground floor (cf. The Fold). Deleuze states that Artaud made his discoveries through suffering. He was creating a gap (an aleatory point, a differentiator) in himself through pain. The same thing could be said about the discoveries of Nietzsche. This reminds me of how George Soros says that his greatest discoveries and wins in investing happen to coincide with severe back pain.
No comments:
Post a Comment