Freudian Archetypes Compared to Deleuze & Guattaris Body Without Organs

8/11/2019 Freudian Archetypes Compared to Deleuze & Guattaris Body Without Organs

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Freudian Archetypes Compared to Deleuze & Guattaris Body Without

Organs: framing, nomad thought & becoming

S. B. Innes

Framing is how chaos becomes territory.Framing is the means by which objects are delimited,

qualities unleashed and art made possible.

Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other[]

-Elizabeth Grosz

This essay provides descriptions of Jungian figurative and Deleuzian anti-representational

sites of chaos and immanence. It will also briefly discuss the potentiality of the concept of the

Body without Organs via an elucidation of the process of framing as described by Elizabeth

Grosz in Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008).

Neurosis is often referred to as invisible injury because the psychological distress, or

disorder, is unaccompanied by delusions or hallucinations to cause the sufferer to act outside

of social norms. In seeking the root of neurosis, psychoanalytical approaches sought to

unlock the symbolic language and grammar of the unconscious through the interpretation of

dreams. Sigmund Freud believed individuals needed to be brought to the realisation of an

existing infantile sexual fixation, dubbed the Oedipus complex, which, disguised by such

grammar, resided in the unconscious and caused neurosis. However his student and

successor, Carl G. Jung rejected this disguise theory and saw dreams as attempts to

understand the world and our place in it (Leeming, 117). During his studies Jung, who

authored Man and His Symbols (1964), drew on recurring motifs and patterns in his patients

dreams to develop a theory of universal psychic tendencies he called archetypes . These

archetypes are models situated within the unconscious and represent a series of standard

metamorphoses that men and women have undergone for centuries (Campbell, 8). As images

deep within the unconscious, archetypes are like psychic blueprints which can become

distorted by experiences such as those in childhood. Each of the four functions (sensation,

feeling, thinking, and intuition) features a male/female, and positive/negative aspect; they are

mapped and reduced to such (stereo)types as ogre, tramp, siren, princess, witch etc. It is

supposed that each of these aspects must be psychologically integrated into one whole,


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balance entity the Hero. The Hero epitomises the Freudian ego that, in considering itself

separated from all else, seeks identity and wholeness. This search is the common dramatic

purpose (quest) of stories. The archetype with which a person has the most difficulty is often

projected onto people around the individual (in narcissistic fashion) and is referred to as a

Shadow. In overcoming shadows and being able to utilise every archetypebalance is

achieved. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) Joseph Campbell outlines the standard

path of the (mythological) adventure undertaken by a Hero, and highlights the psychological

significance of symbolism in mythology.

Anti-representationalists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari confronted psychoanalysis

with Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977) by explaining how Oedipus causes

neurosis (by shaming desire) as opposed to neurosis being caused by an oedipal complex.

Their book attempts to link schizophrenia to capitalism, here I will only be focusing on their

concept of experience as the body without organs . Rejecting psychoanalysiss views (on

neurosis) and methods, they proposed schizo-analysis as opposed to psychoanalysis in order

to reveal the stratas of domination that were responsible for neuroses. Rather than

withdrawal into reductive codes (such as those imposed by institutions) they proposed

escaping (Judeo-Christian) duality into multiplicity. 1 They also supported expansion from

making experimental and inventive connections by the relay of ideas into action. The

Christian concept of the body and the mind as separately functioning entities is overcome and

there is but one body with organising machines imposed upon it so as to see, hear, eat, feel

etc. This means that external forces (culture, school, state) that dominate corporeal

experience build and shape an organism in a fashion not dissimilar to the construction of an

ego. Deleuze and Guattari posit an act of resisting these dominating strata which involves

shedding these organising forms imposed upon the body, breaking it with a small death, to

become a body without organs . This is likened to the death of the psychological construct, the

ego, by means of a destructive dismantling. 2

Where psychoanalysis supports individuals being defined in terms of common and

external goals, following a predetermined (and doctrinally precise) map with the ends of

achieving a conflict free existenceDeleuze and Guattaris theoretical endeavours propose

1 All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane" increase with the number of connections that aremade on it. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)2 Egolessness involves loss over the construction of a sane mind, so it inevitably is fraught with complications.


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schizo-analysis as a means of deciphering and exposing cultural superstructures, 3 thus

allowing the body to become a body without organs for temporal escapes (tracing lines of

flight 4 into alternate strata). They also support free and experimental wandering (as nomads)

in the territories whose inhibiting structures can thus become exposed. 5 Deleuze and Guattari

expanded and experimented with the nomad thought called for in Anti-Oedipus, in their

collaborative sequel A Thousand Plateaus (1980). While psychoanalysts desire to construct a

rational consciousness, (schizo-analysts) Deleuze and Guattari support existing subjectivity

through a rejection of the systematic simplification and mapping of human changes with

totalising systems.

To highlight the Deleuzian body without organs (BwO) as the anti-thesis to

archetypes which reside in a collective unconscious, I will reiterate some major differences.

Jungian archetypes poses the world as a finite space (we are connected by a collective

unconscious ground in virtual matter; the unus mundus ), that features simple (archetypal)

components where states of change are predetermined (by these omnipresent models). The

BwO exists in an undefinable and therefore infinite world (as our experience of it is

infolding), freedom is limited by ones faculties (of transformation such as thought and

feeling) beyond which things are de formed (Massumi, 1999) 6. The nomad thought of the

BwO exists in a repeating process of (recognising territories) deteritorialising and

reteritorialising the complex surfaces (environments) it traverses, not aimlessly but

experimentally. Here, not all things have a cause and delineated movement is about encounter

(one after another after x + y + z... continually) and becoming; 7 about repeating (this process)

to differ. It is about travelling, speed and being in between .8 There are no predetermining

3 Which dominate corporeal experience4 The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibilityof a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions.The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet:lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)5 Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thoughthas so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference overuniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary butnomadic. Michel Foucault (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977)6 (On mans inability to comprehend anything completely) No matter what instruments he uses, at some soint he reaches theedge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.(Jung, 21)7 A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation,but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be" but the fabric of the rhizome is theconjunction, "and ... and ...and..." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)8 Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions.Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation-all imply a falseconception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic ... ). (Deleuze &Guattari, 1987)


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systems or maps, but lines of flight (connections made between strata) compose an ever-

transforming rhizome network. 9 This rhizome sounds similar to the holographic patterns

produced by the disturbance of entities in Ervin Lazlos conception of the (Jungian) universe,

but the rhizome lacks a totalitarian condition. The archetypal realm, to the Deleuzian BwO, is

an organising machine, a form that may be imbricated onto the body. This perspective is

consistent with the ideology of a linguistic universe where the unity of a text lies in the reader

(Barthes 1968) as opposed to the object. It is also key to understanding how to negate

archetypes as deeply entrenched ways of conceptualising that can inhibit the flexibility

necessary for personal and spiritual change and growth (Meadow, 192). 10

While Jungian archetypes presuppose a beings predetermined metamorphosis under

the influence existing elements (constants), the BwO requires an encounter with undefinable

elements. However both theories refer to a field of latent potentiality and immanence,

external to the former and part of the later. The BwO can partake of immanence (smooth

space, a concept) only as far as its senses allow (because beyond this point all things are

de formed). In this sense, (in reference to Judeo-Christian duplicity) the immaterial (spiritual)

world cannot be transcended to, because we are already a part of it. In Science and the

Akashic Field (2004), Ervin Lazlo attempted to ground Jungs collective unconscious (the

underlying unified reality unus mundus) in the quantum vacuum of contemporary physics

(Mackey, 5). The quantum vacuum is not empty space but a swirling cauldron of virtual

particles flickering into and out of existence and the term virtual refers to a latent

potentiality that lacks manifestation in reality (Mackey, 6). Contemporary physics accepts

the quantum vacuum as the origin of all matter and energy, so Lazlo proposed that as the

unitary basis of all psyche and matter it may also be an information field, the holographic

memory of the universe. While Lazlos theory resolves many intriguing dilemmas of

contemporary science, among its deficits is that it doesnt incorporate a process for creativity

and emergence (Mackey, 13). This means that, while Lazlo can speculate about how

9 The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce thetracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it isentirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed inupon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies withoutorgans, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. Themap is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, [and] susceptible to constant modification.It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can bedrawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (Deleuze and Guattari,1987)10 For example, the roles and postures assigned to women based on archetypal images of their passivity have contributed tothe formulation of religious policies antithetical to women (Meadow, 192). Much of the patriarchal nature of religion findssupport in humankinds expressions (Meadow, 193).


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archetypal blueprints may be manifested in the complex holographic patterns of a quantum

vacuum 11 he fails to explain how they might be accessed, brought back to the material world.

The inaccessibility of information outside expression compliments the BwO and can be

related to the Lacanian register of the real the site of the sublime, which is ungraspable

because it exceeds the imaginary (mirror realm) and the symbolic realm of language

(graspable by human perception). In the way of defining the undefinable unseen sea, (as

exampled in expressions of the unity of existence such as Jungs unus mundus , the Akashic

Field of Ancient Indian philosophy, the Quantum Vacuum or the Tao)as Lao Tzu put it

best: the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao (Mackey, 13).

In seeking a contemporary reality, the concept of the BwO: limits postmodern self-

reflexivity (even though infolding occurs, the embrace of desire for exploration and

experimentation is encouraged); it emboldens fragmented and hybridized ways of being (by

not just problematising but exposing the perspectival foundations of systems); and embraces

a chaotic and random world (to repeat, by leaving behind the self-conscious condition of

postmodernism to embrace nomadic exploration). When the BwO, exemplifies nomad

thought, by moving freely in an element of exteriority rather than an ordered interiority

(Massumi, 1987), it is embodying the plane of immanence (smooth space). These notions of

nomadic movement through chaos and complexity compliment Nicholas Bourriauds notion

of Altermodernity (2009). Altermodern came on the back of developments in postcolonial

discourse and global themes of borders, travelling and exile and answers Deleuze and

Guattaris calls for immersion in the changing state of things (Seem, xxii). This current

contemporary theory is similarly focused on the act of travelling as opposed to dwelling on

definable locales (and individuals being defined by these locales), mirroring Deleuze and

Guattaris notions of constantly being in-between. 12

In order to finish this essay with a proper articulation and example of the process of

framing as elucidated by Elizabeth Grosz in Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing

of the Earth (2008), I would like to compare the composition of the Deleuzian plane of

immanence with some qualities of the Quantum Vacuum. For Deleuze and Guattari the

concept is a field of pure immanence and this field is unanchored because it is composed of

11 a construction which is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattaris rhizome network.

12 The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does notdesignate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction,[...] (Deleuzeand Guattari, 1987)


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variations without constants (Massumi, 1999). These variations pass indiscernibly into the

next (variation) simultaneouslyas co-present moments in non-linear time and unbounded

space. This has an uncanny resemblance to the quantum vacuum whose surface could be

described (using the ocean as an analogy) as an ever changing mix of waves and troughs.

For every wave a corresponding trough exists [and they] combine, on average, to sea level

(Mackey, 8). 13 To quote Elizabeth Grosz: Chaos here may be [now] understood not as

absolute disorder but rather as a plethora of orders [my italics], forms, wills -forces that

cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other, both matter and its conditions for

being otherwise, both the actual and the virtual indistinguishably. (Grosz, 5). This violate

scene of repetition and difference, virtual (manifest) and latent (unmanifested) potential is

where territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation as a continuous process of framing, unframing and reframing occurs. Territorialisation (whether by architecture or art) is

the movement of joining the body to the chaos of the universe itself according to the bodys

needs and interests (Grosz, 18). This movement breaks up systems of enclosure and

performance while the body is impacted by what it encounters (Grosz, 18). To produce a

work of art the artist becomes a conduit for the passage of a frame, to a screen (in matter)

you could call it a refrain which has tamed the virtual. 14 After the extraction of qualities

from chaos, if the screen can provide amplified sensation autonomous of the creator... itbecomes art proper (Grosz, 7). 15 Art enables matter to become expressive [] (Grosz, 4).

In Noctambulist (2009) a multiplicity of frames reveals fragments of systems of

enclosure and performance. Unnumbered pages and asynchronistic narrative passages

delineate time and fragment what is expected to be the literary heros quest. The book as

whole is constructed of small screens, a multiplicitous assemblage. Scripted scenes (Figure

1.) provide randomly occurring accounts of corporeal experiences, which have the potential

to mirror a readers experience of wandering experimentally, in an effort to discover patterns

and make connections. The intensity and affect of sensations produced by ambiguous

13 Lazlos theory contends that every entity that exists in the universe is embedded within this field and creates waves orripples which interact to form complex patterns or holograms carrying the imprint of each entity within its total complexity(Mackey, 9-10). Under the right conditions, if an individual imprint could be extracted, one might conclude that thishologram contains the memory of the universe and all its entities (Mackey, 10). This concept sounds like the psychicversion of the codified genetic instructions in DNA.It also resonates with Henri Bergsons notion of incipient memory : [...]life, even the simplest organic cell, carries its past with its present as no material object does Through evolution our senseshave been attuned to that which interests us, is of use to us. Bergson was one of Deleuzes major philosophical influences.(Grosz, 6)14 The emergence of the frame is the condition of all the arts and is the particular contribution of architecture to thetaming of the virtual. (Grosz, 17)15 Framing is how chaos becomes territory and territory frames chaos provisionally (Grosz, 16-17).


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references is entirely dependant upon the reader, who is invited to play an active role in

constructing the text because so much is missing . Points that make note of this action of

leaving the texts origin (the page) include talk of inter-dimensional portals (figure 2) and

the edge of a page (figure 3), space beyond human activities, war and work. When a reader

attempts to build a linear narrative by filling in the gaps, the work of origin dissolves as the

volume of narrative invented by the reader increases. 16 Previous passages of experience are

self-reflexively re-lived, but soon abandoned in search of a new clue, another

experience. If this free exploration could be traced like lines of flight between different

strata, and the sites visited locked, a shifting rhizome would appear. Linear narrative is also

disrupted by the edge of frames -whether in text or image (figure 4) that represent the limit of

the information supplied and a point beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.Encouragingly, the reader has the option of inventing further narrative from forms supplied -

however obscure, esoteric or vapid their symbolic value initially appeared. In a climate where

transnational and global images can find their way into readers minds, the interpretation of

symbolism is not nearly as pertinent as an understanding of otherness. As Elizabeth Grosz

says, art is the opening up of the universe to becoming other and so it follows that art,

composed by rendering transitory refrains with evocative qualities, enables nomadic

wandering, exploration and a chance to venture within and perhaps beyond imbricatedenclosures to discover new narratives and be one who is becoming .

While desiring temporal escapes as a Body without Organs in smooth space on a plane of

immanence, to discover, embrace and eventually harness the reality of one as being in the

process of becoming and thus of an in-between condition, is to counter the rigidity laden

where one must supply and repetitively enact reductive definitions of self in who , what and

where within organised systems that inhibit intuitive movement. Liberated of inflexible

archetypal or societal representations, continued attempts to access alternative stratum

(alternative coexisting realities or refrains) become movements against the will of states that

impose stratum (by shaming or sublimating desire). To embody nomad thought is to travel

with a desire for punctum points through which new streams of narratable consciousness may

emerge.

16 Flesh is only the developer which disappears in what it develops: the compound of sensation. (Grosz, 23).


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Figure 1


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Figure 2


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Figure 3


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Figure 4


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Figure 5


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