A brief introduction to ‘Schizotechnics’
Toute l’écriture est de la cochonnerie. — Antonin Artaud, Le Pèse-Nerfs.
All writing is a filth. Not erotic filth, but grotesque, mucky, irresponsible filth. For Bataille, the writer is a culprit who must expiate himself by going beyond the limits of language and thought.
Life is traversed by impersonal thought, thought by writing and writing by text. We are more effect than cause, and we are condemned to become-cause in order to realize an authentic artistic creation. Thus the outside is an instance of active force that pushes the subject to pursue thought: it is the chosen one and at the same time the condemned.
Bataille calls the "mystical experience" the emotional experiences in solitude of the anchorite. It is the task of those who experience these sensations empirically to express them with technique and to capture even the linguistically unattainable: the poetic pen is the most suitable for the vast enterprise of expressing the inexpressible, but my campaign wishes to take the direction of the directly material to show the evident of the Third World reality, which seems to be, paradoxically, the least evident.
I am a person who has nothing new to say, but rather a thousand things to show. I tend to think of myself as a simulacrum of Walter Benjamin, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, which undertakes its revolutionary task by painstakingly compiling different fragments that end up forming a totality. My technique is to repeat what has already been said with new approaches, a rigorous analysis of an infinite multiplicity of thoughts, to weave a rhizomatic web, to compact them as integral parts of a total assemblage, 'to take different authors by the back and give them a child, thus creating a new monster', as Deleuze claims, and open up new horizons of possibilities. I do not take authors as I please, nor do I embrace them dogmatically: my task is that of the palimpsest in order to make possible philosophies out of them. I am a subject constantly exposed to the schizophrenic flow of outside forces — as every person does — , and many times I have been brought down by these forces, not to mention the times when I have let them have their way with me. Still, I accept the guilt as a writer and take the condemnation with the risky aim of atoning myself.
I apologize in advance for the details that I might overlook in the course of time.
Finally, to conclude this introductory post regarding the ultimate purpose of the blog, an explanation of its name is required.
We must understand that 'schizo', in a purely schizoanalytic sense, is that which accelerates the rhythm of the unconscious, i.e. schizophrenia is synonymous with speed. The flows of desire, schizophrenically liberated and self-limited by capitalism, while revolutionary, exhaust the body as it resists. Although, in the span from Anti-Oedipus (1972) to What is Philosophy? (1995) we note a no small change with respect to the schizo, a shift from advocating the acceleration of the flows of desire in order to overcome the flows of desire — liberated and self-limited by the capital — to a clamour for stability and deceleration:
We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. — Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?
There is a fatal flaw in the Deleuzoguattarian anti-capitalist project, and that is to proclaim the acceleration of the deterritorialisation of social subjectivity without any mastery of technique. Thus Schizotechnics is the management, control and domination of the tools necessary to preserve the integrity of our bodies, and at the same time, a science in constant updating in pursuit of [re]formulating optimal strategies for revolution.
Revolution haunts as an unsuspected virtuality, and schizotechnics is the only bridge capable of materializing its possibility, of turning potency into an act.
