Strayed in Schizophrenic Landscapes of a Celibate Machine Atelier Uraiqat
“ The forces of living bodies,..... which exert their energy or force through the production of the new and create, through their efforts, networks, fields, territories that temporarily and provisionally slow down chaos enough to exert from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an organisation of colour or movement that eventually transforms, enables, and produces art”
Elizabeth Grosz
According to Deleuze, art is about capturing moments in the chaos of the cosmos, enframing them in a manner that displays the unseen properties that produce these flux of effects and emotion. Thus art is a force not a representation, it is an expression provoked by desire, with chaos as its raw material.
The first artistic endeavours taken in nature were motivated by sexual selection, where the animal creates works of art through its behaviour, colour, sound, smell, or any other means possible, in order to seduce the opposite sex. This is only possible through the free expression of desire as productive force, and this becomes more sophisticated and abstract with the development of the life form towards consciousness, allowing humans to exhibit works that are not mere objects, but effects and intensifications that impact the intellect and emotion. And just as the animal through its artistic expression risks seducing not only its sexual partner but also predators, thus placing itself in high danger of being sacrificed, art for humans is no less dangerous, exposing the inner vulnerabilities of the self to scrutiny and terrorization, all in an attempt to seek emotional redemption.
In order to achieve freedom of expression and creativity in creation, and to gain accessibility to the chaos of the cosmos independent of the artificial structures of society and global influences, one must be in touch with desire as the engine that provides the energy and motivation for art. But contemporary societies especially in our conservative settings seem to have a single main objective which is to conceal, eliminate, and exterminate desire as being the major source of corruption and degradation. Deleuze and Guattari propose a theory of creativity using desire as a productive force instead of a paralyzing disease, and using delirium and schizophrenia as the keys to the doors of the creative subconscious that is free from the restrictions of society and contemporary modes of life.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring machines. The schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious, because the schizo escapes the confines of society which forces the rational, the predictable, and the mundane. Thus, the key to the liberation of the subconscious is the return to the original and the free, to desire.
Deleuze and Guattari propose three synthesis of desiring production (connection, disjunction, conjunction) in the critique of Freud’s psychoanalysis in which they refuse the notion that desire is the lack that human subjects are constantly trying to satisfy, on the contrary, it is the generative force of production. It is the engine and the motivator, it is only the social machines that transform it into a lack, a disability that needs to be hidden and denied.
The synthesis of connection is where desire takes over the body and exploits it to its own ends. It dissects the body into its component parts, deconstructing it so that each part gains an autonomy and loses its context, thus freeing it from its imposed role. In the synthesis of disjunction it rearranges it according to a new logic that gives new roles to each organ based not on function but on effect provoked by libidinal motivations. When the body is recomposed it becomes the “body without organs”, the virtual potential of the human subject. It is when desire gains control over the system and begins to assume superiority over the organs that enable its functioning thus creating a tension between desire and the “body without organs” creating a schizophrenia of components which is the synthesis of conjunction. This is where society as machine becomes at work suppressing and tabooing in an attempt to eliminate the tension. It is here where desire becomes destructive, it becomes a lack.
Anti-Oedipus defines a machine as a system of interruptions or breaks, and every machine is related to a continual material flow that it cuts into, like a ham-cutting machine, removing portions from the associative flow. The body parts function like machines, the mouth interrupts the flow of milk, air, and sound, the heart cuts the flow of blood, …etc. The machine produces an interruption of the flow only when connected to another machine that produces the flow. Like the anus-machine and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and the stomach-machine, the stomach-machine and the mouth-machine, the mouth-machine and the milk-machine…. . Every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to another machine to which it is connected, but at the same time it is a flow itself in relation to the machine connected to it: everywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up.
In that same manner, the desiring self and society form a chain of machines, where the subconscious is a desiring machine in the synthesis of conjunction and disjunction, and where the social machine is linked to it in the synthesis of conjunction to interrupt the flow of desire. This interruption is the codifying of the individual in order to fit in the regimes of the social, thereby repressing and oppressing. Thus the body is dissected on multiple levels: desire dissecting to form the body without organs which in turn is stripped naked and skinned to reveal its inner structures, its veins, to eliminate its individuality and shape, and to reduce it to a uniformity that can be exploited by society to produce the expected and the respected, thereby leading to the death of the creative self as desire. Society as machine interrupts the flow of the body without organs, the body without organs is a machine interrupting the flow of desire, and desiring production as machine interrupting the flow of the subconscious, forming a series of machines, a factory, with conflicting parts that twist in agony and pain leaving the subject Strayed in Schizophrenic Landscapes of a Celibate Machine. It is the fabrication of the uniform, organised, and systematic, modern society as we know it. But it is the death of the individual, transformed into a unit in a structure, a number in a system.
In the moments of the immense feeling of pure existence, or the lack of it, the schizophrenic self appears, and the world starts to become a series of machines. In a society where desire, sexuality, and delirium are not only taboos but sources of shame, architecture becomes a celibate machine, a frustrated space, a dissected body stripped naked revealing the inner bloodiness, exposing the repressed desires as deformed and distorted by the machine of society, which twists, grinds, transforms the body without organs in an attempt to create a homogeneous structure that is the collective, replacing the individual. But desire resists, and in the struggle becomes deformed, paranoid, and delirious. This is the schizophrenic space, a parallel world embodied within our frustrated selves, where desire dwells as the real, and society is the oppressor, transformer, the unreal.
“ A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces... There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state to a point that is almost unbearable – a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intensive feeling of transition, states of pure naked intensity stripped of all shape and form...” Deleuze and Guattari – Anti-Oedipus
Strayed in Schizophrenic Landscapes of a Celibate Machine Atelier Uraiqat
“ The forces of living bodies,..... which exert their energy or force through the production of the new and create, through their efforts, networks, fields, territories that temporarily and provisionally slow down chaos enough to exert from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an organisation of colour or movement that eventually transforms, enables, and produces art”
Elizabeth Grosz
According to Deleuze, art is about capturing moments in the chaos of the cosmos, enframing them in a manner that displays the unseen properties that produce these flux of effects and emotion. Thus art is a force not a representation, it is an expression provoked by desire, with chaos as its raw material.
The first artistic endeavours taken in nature were motivated by sexual selection, where the animal creates works of art through its behaviour, colour, sound, smell, or any other means possible, in order to seduce the opposite sex. This is only possible through the free expression of desire as productive force, and this becomes more sophisticated and abstract with the development of the life form towards consciousness, allowing humans to exhibit works that are not mere objects, but effects and intensifications that impact the intellect and emotion. And just as the animal through its artistic expression risks seducing not only its sexual partner but also predators, thus placing itself in high danger of being sacrificed, art for humans is no less dangerous, exposing the inner vulnerabilities of the self to scrutiny and terrorization, all in an attempt to seek emotional redemption.
In order to achieve freedom of expression and creativity in creation, and to gain accessibility to the chaos of the cosmos independent of the artificial structures of society and global influences, one must be in touch with desire as the engine that provides the energy and motivation for art. But contemporary societies especially in our conservative settings seem to have a single main objective which is to conceal, eliminate, and exterminate desire as being the major source of corruption and degradation. Deleuze and Guattari propose a theory of creativity using desire as a productive force instead of a paralyzing disease, and using delirium and schizophrenia as the keys to the doors of the creative subconscious that is free from the restrictions of society and contemporary modes of life.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring machines. The schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious, because the schizo escapes the confines of society which forces the rational, the predictable, and the mundane. Thus, the key to the liberation of the subconscious is the return to the original and the free, to desire.
Deleuze and Guattari propose three synthesis of desiring production (connection, disjunction, conjunction) in the critique of Freud’s psychoanalysis in which they refuse the notion that desire is the lack that human subjects are constantly trying to satisfy, on the contrary, it is the generative force of production. It is the engine and the motivator, it is only the social machines that transform it into a lack, a disability that needs to be hidden and denied.
The synthesis of connection is where desire takes over the body and exploits it to its own ends. It dissects the body into its component parts, deconstructing it so that each part gains an autonomy and loses its context, thus freeing it from its imposed role. In the synthesis of disjunction it rearranges it according to a new logic that gives new roles to each organ based not on function but on effect provoked by libidinal motivations. When the body is recomposed it becomes the “body without organs”, the virtual potential of the human subject. It is when desire gains control over the system and begins to assume superiority over the organs that enable its functioning thus creating a tension between desire and the “body without organs” creating a schizophrenia of components which is the synthesis of conjunction. This is where society as machine becomes at work suppressing and tabooing in an attempt to eliminate the tension. It is here where desire becomes destructive, it becomes a lack.
Anti-Oedipus defines a machine as a system of interruptions or breaks, and every machine is related to a continual material flow that it cuts into, like a ham-cutting machine, removing portions from the associative flow. The body parts function like machines, the mouth interrupts the flow of milk, air, and sound, the heart cuts the flow of blood, …etc. The machine produces an interruption of the flow only when connected to another machine that produces the flow. Like the anus-machine and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and the stomach-machine, the stomach-machine and the mouth-machine, the mouth-machine and the milk-machine…. . Every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to another machine to which it is connected, but at the same time it is a flow itself in relation to the machine connected to it: everywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up.
In that same manner, the desiring self and society form a chain of machines, where the subconscious is a desiring machine in the synthesis of conjunction and disjunction, and where the social machine is linked to it in the synthesis of conjunction to interrupt the flow of desire. This interruption is the codifying of the individual in order to fit in the regimes of the social, thereby repressing and oppressing. Thus the body is dissected on multiple levels: desire dissecting to form the body without organs which in turn is stripped naked and skinned to reveal its inner structures, its veins, to eliminate its individuality and shape, and to reduce it to a uniformity that can be exploited by society to produce the expected and the respected, thereby leading to the death of the creative self as desire. Society as machine interrupts the flow of the body without organs, the body without organs is a machine interrupting the flow of desire, and desiring production as machine interrupting the flow of the subconscious, forming a series of machines, a factory, with conflicting parts that twist in agony and pain leaving the subject Strayed in Schizophrenic Landscapes of a Celibate Machine. It is the fabrication of the uniform, organised, and systematic, modern society as we know it. But it is the death of the individual, transformed into a unit in a structure, a number in a system.
In the moments of the immense feeling of pure existence, or the lack of it, the schizophrenic self appears, and the world starts to become a series of machines. In a society where desire, sexuality, and delirium are not only taboos but sources of shame, architecture becomes a celibate machine, a frustrated space, a dissected body stripped naked revealing the inner bloodiness, exposing the repressed desires as deformed and distorted by the machine of society, which twists, grinds, transforms the body without organs in an attempt to create a homogeneous structure that is the collective, replacing the individual. But desire resists, and in the struggle becomes deformed, paranoid, and delirious. This is the schizophrenic space, a parallel world embodied within our frustrated selves, where desire dwells as the real, and society is the oppressor, transformer, the unreal.
“ A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces... There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state to a point that is almost unbearable – a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intensive feeling of transition, states of pure naked intensity stripped of all shape and form...” Deleuze and Guattari – Anti-Oedipus