CHAOSMOSIS: AN ETHICO-AESTHETIC PARADIGM - FELIX GUATTARI

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 Another book that’s hard to get/out of print that I downloaded then printed off. This one’s a motherfucker. I knew this going in, I’ve been fascinated by the Deluze-iverse, which, like most Amerikans I discovered through the much more accessible Foucault. I’ve been through ANTI-OEDIPUS and fucked around with 1000 PLATEAUS and THE LOGIC OF SENSE but never in a proper academic setting and, obviously, in translation. I dig the vibe. It’s very heady, boarding on nonsensical. D&G will use technical scientific vocab in a metaphorical sense. They’re given to cryptic statements and paradox. You can go paragraphs and chapters having no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. Infuriating for some, but since their whole philosophical project is against totalized meanings or transcendent consistencies, the very form of the books themselves acts as an example of what they're talking about. Deluze is the more famous of the two, for reasons that aren’t 100% clear to me (because he wrote more?) but I’ve always been more interested in Guattari. Unlike the totally academic Deluze who taught college and wrote books and was that weird French thing of a person famous for being smart. As an Amerikan I cannot relate, we basically have the opposite system. Guattari interests me because he actually did something in the real world. He ran a psychiatric hospital for decades and pioneered new methods of analysis and less fascist techniques for running such institutions. It matters a lot to me that he was engaged with actual people, purely theoretical texts are occasionally interesting but frustratingly useless to those of us who work in this field. Also, this book features heavily in Erik Davis’ HIGH WEIRDNESS. Irregardless, you get what you expect from this. Large portions were really dense and inscrutable. Moments of it were brilliant and changed the way I think about some of the work I do and the people I hang out with (esp. the psychotics and schizophrenics). Additionally, Guattari is very ahead of the curve when writing, from the late 80s, about how new modes of subjectivity would be necessary to avoid an oncoming ecological crisis. He even coins the term “Ecosophy” to describe what’s needed. We might be fucked because we didn’t take the advice when given. It’s always fun to try to read something like this, it’s like maxing out weights at the gym, you’ve got to really be stretching and squeezing intellectually/emotionally to grok what’s going on. Additionally, I’m always a fan of complication and against metanarratives or reduction. Here’s a quote of him explaining schizoanalysis: “rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex…[schizoanalysis] will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity.” As a quick aside, does anyone besides folks in France, actually offer this type of analysis to the public? I have the same question about Lacanian analysis, They both seem like theoretical frameworks rather than real-life tools. Too bad, I feel like I could use this type of therapy. 1000 Plateaus