<<TRANSMATHOME

BETWEEN THE SEEN AND THE SAID Deleuze-Guattari's Pragmatics of the Order-Word Bruce McClure

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

 

2. Semiotics and Soul Murder

 

2.0 Introduction

Having argued for the foundational importance of difference in itself, which we have shown to be synonymous with intensity (Section 1.5), we must now try and establish why such a stance puts us in any better position to understand the functioning of language.

 

In the last chapter, we examined Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari’s accounts of the formation of the subject and its faculties in a way which demonstrated the derivative nature of good sense and common sense, and of the Same and the Similar, and proposed the notion of difference in itself, or intensity, as the origin of matter and life — a notion that differs from any transcendent origin (such as God), since intensity is immanent to matter/life. On this view, rather than being a radical break in the history of the world, the human subject is and remains an offshoot of this immanence of difference, and further, that the stories told by religion and philosophy of its special place in the universe delimit and restrain the modes of engagement open to the human bodymind, as well as harmfully overemphasising the dichotomy between it and the rest of Nature.

 

In pointing to difference or intensity as the ‘common’ origin of all matter and life, it should be noted that this does not entail any homogenisation: rather, it allows for greater differentiation across the board. [1]   In suggesting as I have just done, that the emergence of the human subject of common sense/good sense is not a discernible moment or decisive break in history, the point is not to play down or devalue the relative achievements of humans in comparison to other configurations of matter. The point is that these achievements must be themselves understood as configurations of matter, certain aspects of which not only have remarkable and diverse ways of affecting other aspects. The unwieldy nature of this mode of description offers the benefits (as well as the challenges) of freeing us from thinking in terms of isolated human actors, as though these were figures in a primitive animated cartoon, moving around against a static backdrop. Instead we wish to lay out the resources needed to explore the configurations of matter in our tiny region of the Cosmos, on a variety of levels and without eliminatively reducing from one to another.

 

In this chapter I propose the notion of ‘material semiotics’, a method dedicated to the exploration of signs as components in material systems, as opposed to being mysterious entities belonging to some purely semantic realm (signifiers or representations). [2] In order for this not to be reductionist — for example, by attempting to explain the effects of ‘meaning’ in terms of brute physical processes — this method requires the resources both of the actual/virtual opposition (discussed in the previous chapter), and that of double articulation (introduced below and spelled out in further chapters). These two apparent dualisms are erected on a pragmatic basis according to the specificities of particular cases, and do not detract from the underlying insistence on the singular immanence of difference in itself, being as they are not transcendent realms, but inadequately explored aspects or modes of this one. As we will see, material semiotics concerns signs as active components functioning in three modes: on the level of expression, at the intersection between content and expression, and on the Plane of Consistency (the all-encompassing level of pure immanence) itself. From the angle of the relations between actual and virtual, these active signs concern movements both of differentiation and differenciation (respectively, movements virtualàvirtual and virtualàactual). [3]

 

In this section, we pursue the nature of the subject, through the astonishing case of Judge Schreber. Our aims in this section are to open up other zones of Deleuze-Guattari’s apparatus, most importantly the two sides of the Assemblage (machinic and collective). Along the way we will examine selected contributions from psychology, psychiatry and analytic philosophy, in order to present a picture of subjectivation that brings together the preindividual singularities, or ‘fledgling and larval selves’, of the previous chapter, with the notions of the order-word and stratification. A number of themes will be raised in condensed form, to be unpacked in later chapters. Since there is no easy way to present these ideas, I have chosen to set in motion at least a fraction of the huge range of elements present in Schreber’s Memoirs, by way of avoiding a move from simple (or simplistic) to complex, and instead moving from an irreducible whole, through a process of subdivision (as opposed to reduction), to an illumination of some of its constituent processes. That Schreber’s story, itself a recurrent motif in AntiOedipus, is eminently amenable to this approach, is what I will show in this chapter.

Did Deleuze-Guattari actually read the Memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber? [4]   Samuel M Weber, in his introduction to the Memoirs’ translation, takes Deleuze-Guattari as ‘exemplary’ among those for whom Schreber is but a member of the ‘canon of the often mentioned but never read’ (M xiii and li, note 16). Yet the Judge plays a crucial role in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, particularly in AntiOedipus, where he seems to stand for all those who have been subject to wilful misinterpretation at the hands of psychoanalysis. His pivotal position in this respect leads Louis S. Sass to suggest that Deleuze-Guattari (and other radical antipsychiatric writers, such as R. D. Laing, Norman O. Brown) uncritically accept the psychoanalytic reading of psychosis as something childlike or Dionysian, though they then make the romantic move of valorizing rather than pathologizing these supposedly primitive and uncontrolled conditions. [5]   Another writer, Eric Santner, takes Deleuze-Guattari’s Schreber as providing ‘a storehouse of protofascist fantasies and fantasy structures’ making it apparent, as the present alternative approach will try to show, that it is Deleuze-Guattari who are not being read. [6]

 

What follows, then, comprises the beginnings of a ‘material semiotics’ of ‘the Schreber case’, where ‘case’ is seen not as indicating Schreber’s interior world in isolation. Rather, his name is taken to designate the singular nexus of a variety of different assemblages or machines discussed below. After a short discussion of Deleuze-Guattari for purposes of orientation, I will employ elements from Daniel Dennett’s demythologisation of mentalist explanations in Consciousness Explained to examine Louis Sass’s Schreber. [7] Sections 2.3 and 2.4 will concentrate on Eric Santner’s superlative reading of Schreber, which I will arrange in terms of collective assemblages of enunciation (2.3) and machinic assemblages (2.4), attempting to elucidate these terms and their relations in the process. The last section will look at Schreber’s becoming-woman, before finally approaching the issue of Deleuze-Guattari’s ‘schizophrenia’.

 

2.1 Immanence

If there is one basic move Deleuze-Guattari make, it is the abandonment of transcendental stability, that is, the refusal to leave any terms uninterrogated. It is on this basis that the nearest Deleuze-Guattari get in pointing towards some kind of origin or ground is the notion we encountered above of difference in itself. At different stages in their work, this key idea is presented in slightly different forms, in such guises as Body without Organs, Plane of Consistency and Abstract Machine — each relating to a base-level of materiality, which functions as a degree-zero, from which everything emerges as differences in intensity. Whether this corresponds to a local Body without Organs (such as that of a particular individual or a particular social or biochemical assemblage) or the Cosmos as a whole — this question remains open — the point of this move is to place a big Zero where other theoretical interventions retain some transcendental principle or other (e.g. for Kantians or phenomenologists, this is the transcendental subject; for Saussurean linguistics and semiology this is the Signifier; for Marx as for Hegel, History; for empiricists, this might be the World or its experience through sense data; for realists and anti-realists alike, this is some Real whether obtainable or unobtainable, and so on). Deleuze-Guattari deal not with words and things, but with the processes of production that facilitate the articulable and the visible. While both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia present different versions of a kind of Universal History, this is an account of contingency rather than necessity — each are nonformal, ideographic accounts of how things happen to be. [8]

 

Given this approach, theory is never a matter of discovering essences, underlying structures or gesturing towards unknowable Ur-realities, but always a matter of experimentation. Rather than collapsing into postmodern relativism, Deleuze-Guattari do not abandon Reality; rather, for them it encompasses both things as they are and how they could be, with the manifold potentials of sometime-, seldom- or never-actualised relations having real effects as the virtual-but-real. This is a thoroughgoing immanence of substance (tagged by the ‘magic formula’ of PLURALISM=MONISM we encountered in the last chapter) which sees distinctions between Natural/Artificial, Man/World, Organic/Inorganic not as originary but as the products of particular, contingent machineries — the Strata — which must be diagrammed or ‘reverse-engineered’. The term ‘reverse engineering’ is associated with evolutionary biology, where natural selection is presented as an explanation for the emergence of particular organs or capacities. The point is not to unveil a secret teleology that was driving the process all along, but to show how a particular series of contingencies resulted in the capacity (or power) concerned became ‘locked in’ and allowed to propagate. According to Dennett, this approach focuses (like Deleuze-Guattari) on the processes of production — what he calls ‘abstract architecture’ and they call ‘abstract machines’ — and the material constraints in play every step of the way, rather than producing teleological hypotheses on the basis of the characteristics of the eventual artefacts (CE: 212-220).

 

Such an endeavour is not any kind of disinterested inquiry in the name of Science or Rationality (or their cross-cousins Medicine and Psychiatry), since both of these are themselves rooted in (and in some sense, constitutive of) the Strata. It is necessarily pragmatic, and (as Deleuze-Guattari say of the book) there is no difference between ‘what it talks about and how it is made’ (TP 4) — the diagram is not a representation of the processes with which it is concerned, it is an intervention on those processes. There is no disinterested vantage point from which to survey the Strata: the praxis of schizoanalysis involves both de- and re-stratifying tendencies. Material semiotics attends experimentally to this distinction both in the strategically-delimited zone it is engaged with, and in its own functioning — an inclusive disjunction which constitutes its pragmatics. What follows is an attempt to distinguish this approach from that of other readers of Schreber (to whose work I am nonetheless indebted).

 

2.2 Understanding the Nerve-Language

How best to approach Schreber, whose Memoirs are an astounding mixture of charnel house meat-dream, Cosmic conspiracy theory and grotesque theological horror-comedy? [9]   It might be argued that since Schreber was quite clearly barking mad, nothing he says can be relied upon, except as evidence of his madness. In any case, for material semiotics, the Author (whether sane/reliable or mad/unreliable) cannot be serve as explanandum, any more than cosmology can be content with God as cause of the universe. [10]   The book is not a representation of the world or an object in-the-world, but a (literary) machine with a set of shifting relations with other machines. For us now, these are most obviously psychiatric, juridical and psychoanalytic (taking the form, for instance, of the reports by Dr Weber, the court proceedings and Schreber’s essay in jurisprudence, and the essays by Samuel Weber and the translators MacAlpine and Hunter, that came bundled with the English edition), but they also include the specific machines of stratification in their physical and symbolic aspects by which Schreber was processed in his lifetime, as we will examine shortly.

 

There are certain parallels with this approach and that of Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s ‘heterophenomenology’ [11] accepts the importance of individual testimony, but leaves open the question of a ‘Central Meaner’, that is, the notion that there is something irreducible and mysterious at the heart of experience that repels all attempts to understand it in purely scientific terms. Dennett’s explorations are far from definitive; however, he insists that the translation of many ‘mentalist’ descriptions into physical terms need not involve an impoverished reduction. The rich descriptive account he is aiming at shuns the tendency to rely on ‘black boxes’ of both traditional psychological explanations of the mind (most famously Skinnerian behaviourism with its explanations of behaviour simply as the result of whatever conditioning there ‘must have been’ to have caused it — the virtus dormitus explanation [12] ), and also those which rely on homunculi of one form or another, that is, ‘little men’ in the brain supposed to explain behaviour, while themselves remaining completely mysterious. In other words, the project is one of demythologisation.

 

Perhaps the most suggestive material in the Memoirs for Dennett’s approach is Schreber’s account of the ‘nerve-language’. [13] Louis Sass makes this the focus of a chapter in his Madness and Modernism in which (in a nutshell) he argues for a conception of schizophrenia which doesn’t involve, as is traditionally assumed, a regression to infantile states, but instead is a kind of hyperrationality — a state which finds parallels in much 20th Century art, literature and philosophy. In Schreber’s case, this is manifested in his panoptical state of self-observation. Sass interprets the nerve-language as inner speech, an idea for which there is more support in the Memoirs than Sass himself allows. [14]   Schreber makes clear that the nerve-language is opposed to the spoken language of humans, and is what goes on in sleep. This allows God, who is ignorant of the whole realm of humans as social beings, to influence sleepers and those in contemplative states — hence the divine inspiration of the poets and prophets. Schreber also makes a strong distinction between what he sees with his ‘bodily eye’ and what he ‘pictures’ with his ‘mind’s eye’ — though this last technique has both active and passive forms. The rays, despite often being described as ‘little men’ (such as those who climb up his legs and pump his spinal column out of his mouth in clouds of steam  (M137)), are for the most part known only by the phrases they utter. [15]

 

Sass writes, ‘According to Vygotsky’s classic Thought and Language, the structure or skeleton of normal adult thought is largely provided by an “inner speech” that initially derives from and mimics overt, vocalised speech’ (MM 256). [16] Such speech is (for reasons of efficiency) simplified and condensed into the most minimal of phrases. This truncation is possible because the content of the thought is largely carried by the particular context in which the individual having it finds itself. For the most part, we are unaware that our thoughts are not spelled out completely and exhaustively; indeed even in introspection we may fail to detect these half-phrases as objects of our consciousness. This is because, Sass maintains, in a certain sense they are our consciousness — it is one and the same with this flow of thoughts, observations and decisions. [17]

 

Sass sees Schreber as laying bare these mechanisms of thought, and draws on Foucault’s account of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish to describe the hyperreflexive state in which Schreber unwillingly finds himself. [18] The panopticon instils the belief that the prisoners are constantly visible to an external power thus building a self-monitoring faculty into their own awareness (the famous ‘cop in the head’). For Schreber, this takes the form of God and the rays, challenging his every thought, and tormenting him with accusations of impropriety (e.g. ‘are you not ashamed in front of your wife?’ and ‘fancy a person who was a Senatspräsident allowing himself to be f....d’ (M149)). Sass, who presents Schreber as offering an ‘allegory of innerness’, concludes: ‘The strange medium of the nerve-language might perhaps stand as a metaphor for modern subjectivity in general. For, though the most intimate and familiar part of the self, this ghostly product of self-scrutiny nevertheless exists as a quasi-external object, an alien, mysterious realm that must constantly be examined and decoded by the very being who creates and lives it’ (MM 260).

 

Sass’s account of Schreber’s nightmare of hyperreflexivity is extremely convincing, and recalls the remark in AntiOedipus, ‘It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but paranoid, insomniac rationality’ (AO 112). However, there are certain problems with Sass’s account, one of which is his insistence that these processes must be read as metaphor, as must Foucault’s use of the panopticon itself, as opposed to its ostensive reality for both Schreber and the subjects of modernity Sass takes the Judge as to some extent representing. Rather than Foucault’s panopticon being a metaphorical allusion to Bentham’s design for a prison, it designates an abstract machine of surveillance that is actualised in schools, hospitals and prisons alike (DP 195-228). This point need not detract too much from the importance of Sass’s insight. However, in a subsequent study dedicated to Schreber and Wittgenstein, Paradoxes of Delusion, Sass makes clear his orientation to Schreber, in contrast to most of the other commentators:

 

In my view, to grasp the distinctive meaning of sex and power in the Schreberian cosmos — and in the worlds of many schizoids and schizophrenics — one must understand the dimension that is more fundamental for such individuals, that of knowledge. [19]

 

I contend the implication that Schreber’s problems are therefore primarily epistemological. Epistemology, in a Deleuze-Guattarian or Foucauldian view, is hardly capable of grounding the processes of sexuality or power, and is not usefully separated off from them — particularly as regards Schreber. Knowledge is indeed fundamental to Schreber’s ordeal, but it is knowledge in relation to the plot laid against him, his striving to retain control over his person (both from God and his rays, and from the psychiatric regimes he endures, and the court that imposes his tutelage), and also his strategies in cultivating that which provides some little relief, his soul-voluptuousness in becoming-woman. These elements will be explored in more detail below. There is, however, another sense still of knowledge, that of Deleuze-Foucault, whereby the strata (as visibilities and articulabilities) comprise the forms of the knowable — and it is indeed this type of knowledge with which Schreber is locked in conflict.

 

A further caveat to my support of Sass, is that following the heterophenomenological approach, we are not obliged to accept as yet the idea that this is all going on in Schreber’s head. Returning to Dennett, we can sophisticate Sass’s account by interrogating the Vygotskian notion of inner speech. The debate about whether our thoughts are in their own language (often called ‘Mentalese’) is long and complex. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained seeks ways round this assumption, as part of his programme of breaking down the barriers between scientific and common sense understandings of the mind. One of the problems with the postulation of Mentalese is it requires more explanation than it provides (as a kind of distributed homunculus). When finally called upon to give a positive account of consciousness by his sceptical interlocutor ‘Otto’, Dennett introduces the notion of presentiments as the stuff from which consciousness can be said to emerge. After Dennett has presented his explanation of what presentiments are, Otto exclaims, ‘So presentiments are like speech acts except that there’s no Actor and no Speech!’ (CE 364-365).

 

The idea is that beneath the Vygotskian picture Sass utilises of a stream of nerve-language, is a Pandemonium [20] of presentiments, or ‘events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain’ (CE 365). In a recent essay, Dennett describes this Pandemonium as

 

an anarchic, competitive arena in which many different sorts of things happen — Grand Central Station, in which groups of visitors speaking many tongues try to find like-minded cohorts by calling out to each other, sweeping across the floor in growing crowds, waving their hands, pushing and shoving and gesturing. [21]

 

This highly suggestive passage contains several key points. There are ‘many tongues’ being spoken, rather than a single Mentalese, or lingua franca of thought — a notion that is all too compatible with the reinstating of a Central Meaner whose mother tongue it would be. [22]   The crowds of preindividual impulses, relating to the different options afforded the individual by its surroundings, and imposed on it by the syntheses of Habit and Memory, compete with one another for control of the body’s utterances and movements. These singularities have the character of speech acts in that they are judgements that are completely context-dependent. They do not possess any significatory value; they do not refer to or represent anything outside themselves — they are unmediated relationships of action and reaction between nervous system and environment, brain and its habits, bodymind and its memories. They are events of orientation, of ordering, that collectively, situate the body in the world: they territorialise it. For these reasons, Dennett’s presentiments can be usefully elided with Deleuze-Guattari’s order-words — i.e. there is a strong parallel between the intra-personal events of context-fixation, these speechless speech acts that are prior to the actor, and the inter-personal level of order-words. It is in this respect that they account for Schreber’s experience of compulsive thinking.

 

These presentiments are precisely what Deleuze talks about as the ‘fledgling and larval selves’ we encountered in Section 1.7 above. In his contact with the nerve language, Schreber effects a partial escape from the Self into the realm of preindividual singularities — and it could be argued that it is through his paranoia that he overcodes these as real people or portions of real people, while at the same time never losing the sense of himself as an integrated subject to whom this is all happening. From a common sense perspective, from which all these ‘little men’ (e.g.  M 83), ‘fleeting-improvised-men’ (e.g. M 43), and nerves-rays in general, appear as clearly delusional, Schreber has confused these different parts of himself, these different fabulations of his own diseased mind, with objectively extant personalities. However, from the present perspective, the truth is rather that we are all immersed in this oceanic tumult of proto-persons (each of which exists purely in relation to particular roles, environments and other proto-persons), adopting now this persona, now that, as our ‘subject’ traverses this interplay of pre-individual singularities. In other words, the individual is characterised at any given point by the dominant pre-individual tendencies in line with which it acts. As Dennett puts it,

 

most successful activities depend on enlisting large multi-modal coalitions, involving the excitation of several largish areas [of the brain] simultaneously, but occasionally swifter, more efficient contacts co-ordinate activity with hardly any commotion at all (LT 285).

 

These latter, more efficient transitions depend on the role of language in thought, which we will discuss in much more detail in later chapters.

 

2.3 Symbolic Investiture and Order-Words

Eric Santner’s My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity brings together material from a range of sources on Schreber, and teases out a range of fascinating implications in three areas. These I will outline and then rearrange according to the priorities of a material semiotics. In the first section, Santner examines Freud’s reading in detail, suggesting that the ‘crisis of symbolic investiture’ that faced Schreber in his new post of Senatspräsident closely matches Freud’s own, as he barricades his own brand of psychoanalysis against those who would usurp his throne. [23]   Secondly, Santner presents an account of the ‘surplus father’ (personified most clearly in the lower god Ariman and certain of the Flechsig souls) — which far from being simply the return of Schreber’s repressed homosexual desire for his father, is the concretisation of the insidious, all-pervasive machineries of surveillance and control that Schreber suffered both as the child of a sadistic pedagogue and as what might now be called ‘mental health services consumer’. The third section attempts to rescue Schreber from Canetti’s diagnosis of proto-fascism (CP 505-537) by characterising the Memoirs as ‘a forceful intervention in the European debates on the “Jewish Question”: 

 

The claim is that when, at the end of the nineteenth century, a German man belonging to an elite (such as the judiciary) comes, for whatever reasons, to feel his identification with his status disturbed, he will automatically find himself in the symbolic position of the marginal figures of that culture — in this instance women and Jews — and begin, unconsciously and conflictually, to elaborate the consequences of his new set of identifications using whatever images and fantasies are ready to hand in the cultural “archive” (MPG 99)

 

This ‘crisis of symbolic investiture’ is Schreber’s recognition of the mechanisms of exclusions and cruelties on which his symbolic roles (white German Protestant heterosexual male judge etc.) are based, and his inability to metabolise this situation, except through his becomings-woman and -Jew. Santner’s account of symbolic investiture is based on a nuanced account of what Deleuze-Guattari call the order-word. Santner opens up the realm of symbolic power, as discussed by Bourdieu, as related to the crisis of authority and legitimation that faces any juridical or bureaucratic system (including of course the machinery of psychiatry) — for example, in the words of the title of Schreber’s contribution to the debate, ‘In what circumstances can a person considered insane be detained in an Asylum against his declared will?’ (M 363). [24]  

 

Schreber makes clear that his crisis is intimately connected with the legitimacy (or rather, the self-legitimation) of power. Once circumstances pertaining to the Order of the World are contravened, it is a free-for-all, God is drawn into conflict with himself and power is up for grabs (M 58). Symbolic power concerns not the relative strength of individual bodies, though it may in a roundabout way depend on the relative strength of armies and police forces. It cannot be claimed by an ambitious individual on his or her own, it must be vested in particular individuals by the structures already in place: it is therefore the property of particular modes of social organisation — and subsists beyond the tenure of particular administrations. We could perhaps distinguish between such administrations and ‘Administration as such’, that which, for example, in Kafka’s story ‘The Great Wall of China’, makes it unimportant which particular emperor happens to be in power at any given time. [25]

 

There are compelling correspondences between Santner’s account of symbolic investiture and Deleuze-Guattari’s order-word, which, they argue, is the ‘elementary unit of language’ and is a function ‘coextensive with language’ (TP 76). Contrary to the assumption that language is a tool for the communication of information first and foremost, is the assertion that the order-word functions through redundancy: language refers not to an extra-linguistic world, but rather back to what has been said before: ‘language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying’. Where for deconstruction, the symbolic chain cannot be broken and no access to a world beneath can be had, Deleuze-Guattari insist that the connection of language to the outside is intrinsic to language:  the transmission of an order word is always a concrete event, and depends for its effects entirely on the specifics of the enunciation in question. As we will see in Chapter 4, Deleuze-Guattari draw on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin, and (like Bourdieu) free it up from semantics, so the efficacy of a speech act lies not in the meanings of words, so much as in the specifics of the situation. [26] Speech act theory, then, is not limited to blatant examples such as ‘I promise that...’, ‘I’m warning you,’ etc, nor even to all the intricacies of Gricean implicature (such as A getting his audience to realise he means the opposite by saying “X is a fine friend” when they are well aware that A knows that X has in fact betrayed him). [27] Rather, it eats up all of spoken language use, and by extension all written language, since all saying and writing (or listening and reading) is doing: each utterance transmits a statement — its implicit presupposition, or ‘sense’. This sense can be stated explicitly, but only while simultaneously producing its own implicit presupposition, which must be stated separately. In any case, the order word is produced in the site of the utterance, and is not a matter of signification or semantics, but of the variables of the particular situation, and the way they are affected by the utterance; i.e. the incorporeal transformations it effects.

 

In other words, what Schreber’s Memoirs could be said to be ‘about’, is the essential relation between the level of symbolic power, and the level of the bodies it serves to order and discipline. For Deleuze-Guattari, these levels correspond to the double articulation of the Strata, which they designate (following Hjelmslev, as we will see in Chapter 6) respectively: expression, the level of collective assemblages of enunciation, and content, the level of machinic assemblages. The two aspects are ‘really distinct’ (i.e. dealing with different compositions of matter-energy) but are in a relation of reciprocal presupposition. The order-word is a defining moment of double articulation; it is a moment of reinforcement, of repetition or redundancy production. It finds its distorted reversal in the ‘password’, inherent in every order-word as its potentials for breaking open new zones of relations, rather than reaffirming (helping to lock in) the relations already in place. Santner draws from Judith Butler the account of gender-assignment in these terms — ‘it’s a boy’ (in the circumstances of the maternity theatre) is an order-word, containing the imperative that acceptable gender roles are adhered to, while the very failure of the categories boy and girl to encompass the range of actual and potential sexualities of which the individual body is capable, opens up zones of ‘deviance’ and experimentation, as well as zones of torture and destruction. [28]

 

As we have seen, Sass connects the repeated phrases of the nerve-language with the commands issued to the subject first by parental and other authorities, and then issued internally from a panoptical superego. Deleuze-Guattari’s account of the redundancy of the order-word is clearly visible in Schreber, where the scoldings, demands and abuse Schreber suffers have a cumulative effect through their frequent repetition. Schreber even manages to harness this redundancy through adopting the repetition process himself. Where at first he is compelled to attend to the significance of the words each time anew, filling in the missing words to show he has recognised the sentiment concerned, he learns to simply repeat the words themselves to himself over and over again, evacuating them of their symbolic content and facilitating the blessed ‘not-thinking-of-anything-thought’. [29]   While on Sass’s account mentioned above the commands issued by the rays are already linguistic, I contend that the linguistic aspect is secondary to that of the command itself, allowing Schreber to use the irrelevance of the actual words as a way of escaping the force of the command of which they are the effect. [30] The question now is to analyse the machineries which give the order-words their force, that are the preconditions of those phrases being attached to those meanings in the first place.

 

2.4 Schreber’s Becoming-Minor

Santner’s rich and subtle argument finds for Schreber’s diagnosis of ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’ (M 164) corroborations in Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, in Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter and Panizza’s ‘The Operated Jew’. [31] Santner’s reading of Kafka has Gregor Samsa function as the sacrificial victim in the name of authority, both before his transformation, working his guts out despite the fact his dad has been keeping secret a strongbox full of cash all along, and after, where he becomes the monstrous, perverse wretch that embodies the breakdown and impotence of that authority — and must ultimately be taken out with the trash, allowing the family to flourish. Weininger, coming from the opposite side as it were, presents a neo-Kantian (and in certain respects proto-Lacanian) account of autonomy as the metabolization-without-remainder of the categorical imperative. This account takes it for granted that the likes of women and Jews, who are without souls, can never achieve this internalisation of the moral law, and will forever suffer conflicts between their own interests and those of the law. The Panizza story is ostensibly a piece of virulent anti-Semitism in which a particularly grotesque caricature of Jewishness called Faitel Stern goes to bizarre lengths (ultimately surgical) to be transformed into an authentic German, only to have his bestial and depraved Jewish frame and deportment burst out of its disguise at his wedding banquet. Santner suggests that Panizza’s purpose is to arouse in his ‘Aryan’ readership the suspicion that they themselves can never quite claim to embody their ideal, that all humanity is tainted with the ‘lying substance’ (Lügensubstanz), the slimy taint of dissimulation.

 

In all these cases we have an account of the rottenness, Schreber’s ‘poison of corpses’, the redundancy on which the power of the order-word is based. This aspect of Santner’s account focuses on the level of expression, dealing with the formation and breakdown of the notions of the pure German that physically affect Schreber — the conflicts raging between the majoritarian Aryan male, whose shaky identity is constituted on the basis of the exclusion of the minoritarian non-subjects of Jews, women and so on. [32] Schreber, as former National Liberal Party candidate, and as a judge involved in the wranglings over the formation of Germany’s Civil Code, suffered in madness a visceral critique of his Protestant subjectivity. As mentioned above, it is not a matter of ‘identification’ with the repressed Other. If there is a ‘return of the repressed’, it is the very mechanisms of subjectification which Schreber encounters. Schreber’s BwO is the surface on which these elements are arranged and classified, and assigned their identity — Schreber’s contact with them is not through identification, but through the breakdown of his capacity to identify with ‘himself’ as dictated by categories he was thrust towards from birth.

 

Santner also provides great insight into the level of content, as the controls on the body. Here he builds on the insights of Niederland and Schatzman, who point out the many correspondences between Schreber’s delusions and specific practices of his father, and the corresponding insights of Lothane and Kittler relating instead to the practices of Schreber’s psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber. [33] In the former case, for example, miracles directed at Schreber’s eyes (including one point where a Flechsig soul lives for a time as a watery substance on the surface of Schreber’s eyeballs) are taken to relate to his father’s insistence that the eyeball itself be sponged clean several times a day from shortly after birth; similarly, Schreber’s distressing encounters with a ‘head compressing machine’ are seen to have begun with Moritz Schreber’s orthopaedic devices for improving posture. In the latter case, Schreber’s accusation of ‘soul murder’ against Flechsig is taken to correspond to Flechsig’s pioneering forays into eliminative materialism, his passion for legitimating psychiatry as a science on the basis of a ‘psycho-physics’ of the brain. [34]   This project clearly runs contrary to the Order of the World as far as Schreber is concerned, since, through the study of dead brains on which it is founded, it literally dissects the human soul.

 

The importance of Schreber’s father to his delusions is not, then, as the original object of Schreber’s homosexual desire. Moritz Schreber’s pedagogical practices are in no uncertain terms the systematic disciplining and docilising of the child’s body, at the same time as it is trained to internalise the father’s authority and good sense. Schreber senior was a scholar of the disciplinary techniques necessary for breeding a generation worthy of their Germanic heritage. [35]   As Santner notes, there are remarkable parallels between Moritz’s techniques and those applied to Faitel Stern in Panizza’s story. Faitel ultimately has all his bones broken and reset in the name of achieving that upright Aryan posture. And in Weininger’s account of the transition from heteronomy to autonomy, there are close links with Moritz’s methods for forcibly imposing the categorical imperative on the psyche of the child, in such a way as to make it incapable of distinguishing its own desires from its Duty.

 

Santner introduces the notion of the ‘surplus father’ to designate the machineries of constant and invasive discipline and surveillance that characterise the rays’ frequent attacks on Schreber’s person, as delusional actualisations of the same abstract machines of control acting on Schreber in childhood and in hospital. For Santner, Schreber diagnoses the advent of Foucault’s disciplinary society in these terms: that God, in conditions consistent with the Order of the World (the lost Golden Age that has been irreparably altered), knows only the departed souls who assimilate in him (apart from the occasional contact with dreaming poets). Following the catastrophe around which the Memoirs centre, God is forced into disastrous proximity with Schreber and his ignorance of the needs of the living human result in Schreber’s many tortures and indignities. [36] The ‘surplus father’ is this harmful overproximity of forces insensitive to the needs of man — and its presence reconfigures the relationship between Schreber and the world, making necessary his active participation in the processes of unmanning he initially regards with horror.

 

2.5 Schreber’s Becoming-Woman

We have looked briefly at the machineries of stratification, both on physical and symbolic levels, the suggestion being that forces acting on Schreber all his life actually reappear in his delusions. Perhaps we can transduce in the opposite direction Schreber’s strategies of resistance — and submission — to these forces. Crucial among these is his cultivation (despite immense resistance to the plan to begin with) of soul voluptuousness, through a paradigmatic example of what Deleuze-Guattari describe as ‘becoming-woman’. The process Schreber refers to as ‘unmanning’ is tied closely to soul murder, though while soul murder is more or less straightforwardly the destruction of Schreber’s reason, unmanning is much more ambiguous, its status depending on whether it is occurring in consonance with the Order of the World, i.e. in the procreation of a new race in a miraculously fecund Schreber, or in opposition to the Order, i.e. as a tool of human origin, used in the plot to destroy Schreber’s reason (M 72). On the one hand it pertains to Schreber’s transformation into a woman, that he may be ‘forsaken’, i.e. used as a harlot and left to rot (M 71). However this gradually takes on a more positive tone, as he realises it is the best way to preserve his reason (and as he says, ‘I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in a male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter’ (M 149)). Now that soul-contact has been established between Schreber and God, his well-being is index-linked to the proximity of God’s nerves to his body. Schreber’s nerves have reached such a pitch of excitation that God (or at least his posterior realms) are inexorably drawn into Schreber’s body, to perish within with plaintive cries for help.

 

Schreber discovers the happiest situation for all concerned is if he can keep the rays’ attention by making himself appealing to them, allowing him to avoid either assimilating them or enduring the pain of their withdrawal. This he does by occupying his mind with all things feminine, dressing in trinkets and bows and posing sweetly before the mirror, and by imagining himself as a man and woman making love. There is no simple way in which Schreber simply thinks of himself as, for example, a woman trapped in a man’s body. Rather he has been picked up and thrust onto a trajectory of becoming, saturated with feminine nerves, the presence of which, he remains certain, would be confirmed by a physical examination (M 205-206, 295). Schreber’s extreme experiences bequeath him a certain healthy arrogance that enables him to pursue this course, despite its obvious dissonance with everything befitting a man of his position — ‘he who entered into a special relationship to divine rays as I have is to a certain extent entitled to sh.. on all the world’ (M 177) — even if he is still at great pains to emphasise his divine transformations have ‘nothing whatever to do with any idea of masturbation or anything like it’ (M 208).

 

From the above, we can construct a pleasing fairy story (with a moral): [37]   Schreber, as former National Liberal Party activist, was fundamentally concerned with the rights of individuals, the juridical safeguarding of their freedom (most specifically, against being detained against their will). But in his illness, he is confronted with the dark underside of this idealism. He confronts the nonmetabolisable outside of the rational (i.e. sane) male Protestant German subject position he formerly took for granted. His eventual solution is to explore the restorative potential of abandoning that position, having by this stage been through ordeals far more terrifying than the disapproval of his peers. And where as judge he would have left the distinction between sane and insane to the psychiatrists, when he finds himself on the wrong end of such a judgement, he challenges the right of the state to keep him locked up — and wins. [38]   (We will paper over his relapse and death in hospital, for the purposes of a ‘happy ending’ to this paragraph.)  Such a version of Schreber’s importance could well arise from the kinds of nonreadings of Deleuze-Guattari mentioned in the introduction, where ‘schizophrenia’ is a lifestyle choice of the ‘right-on’ white-faced man, as is becoming-woman: wacky, naughty simulated deviances which our Everyman is already better placed to enjoy than either actual mental patients (who have carelessly let themselves be institutionalised — they should have preserved that little bit of strata to wake up to, should they not! [39] ) or actual women (who have to bother with the irksome detail of actually fighting for their rights, taking valuable time away from private becomings).

 

Material semiotics is not interested in the residual voluntarism which drives such readings (be they critical or celebratory). What I have attempted to do here is approach Schreber as a complex of both territorial machines (the processes of discipline/surveillance and symbolic investiture) and deterritorialising vectors (finding new joy through becoming-woman, neutralising command by harnessing its redundancy) — to arrive at an account of Schreber-as-subject as a shifting point along these trajectories. There is no one founding point or principle to be arrived at, though the order-word has emerged as the locus of switchings between these paths, constitutive of both sub- and inter-personal levels — most noticeably in Schreber, where such a distinction between levels collapses: it doesn’t matter from the command’s ‘point of view’ whether it has been actualised in a courtroom or hospital, or in a single individual’s head.

 

In avoiding anything like the moralising, voluntarist position caricatured above, it must be stressed that the territorial and deterritorialising distinction does not correspond to ‘bad’ and ‘good’ — the two are opposite sides of the same process, and the issue of whether one is preferable to the other cannot be prejudged: ‘Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed’ (TP 10). Soul murder, for example, is for Schreber initially understood as the destruction of his reason, and is related by Santner (among other things) to Schreber’s anxieties about the dehumanising effects of early materialist psychiatry (which knows only of corpses). Should we then criticise such scientific ventures, because of their indifference to the sensitivities of a Schreber?  Dennett’s Consciousness Explained would have given him more nightmares, as no doubt would Capitalism and Schizophrenia. One point is that such ventures cannot get off the ground merely through human effort, they must be taken up by the appropriate economic, political and libidinal assemblages — if Schreber had not felt the impact of these ideas directly on his body as already imbued with symbolic and physical power, it is unlikely they would have had such dramatic effects. Schreber suffers in his conflict with such assemblages, finding his rights eroded and identity-assumptions dismantled or decoded. But as it happens, what relief Schreber achieves is through the other side of soul murder, unmanning, where the limitations of these processes, their failure to lock down all the potentials for experimentation open to Schreber, give rise to the heightened intensities of his transformations — but these transformations were dependent on soul murder in the first place.

 

Deleuze-Guattari use schizophrenia as the immanent end-point of capitalism as a planetary machine, the ‘subject of the decoded flows on the body without organs’ (AO 34). While there is not room to explore this properly, this thesis is intended to be consonant with that use, in the sense that capitalism’s decoding of flows, the dismantling of traditional structures, of familial roles and of hierarchical organisations of businesses and states alike, and most crucially to drastically changing conceptions of the subject, tends towards schizophrenia as ‘soul genocide’. Material semiotics, which oscillates between the Strata and schizophrenia in the aforementioned sense, tracks this (inexorable?) process, and the new instabilities and potentials it generates.

 

2.6 Conclusion: Homunculess

To retrace the somewhat frantic steps of the preceding, I present now some words of clarification. I drew on Dennett’s notion of ‘heterophenomenology’ to allow us to take Schreber at his word. We did not attempt to explain away his account, but rather to set it in a relation of mutual illumination with the theoretical approaches outlined. This was done by shedding the foregone conclusion that Schreber’s account must be read first and foremost as delusional, but rather that it gives insight not only into his own experience but also into ours (however far apart they may initially seem). Schreber thus becomes exemplary in his contact with the prepersonal and suprapersonal, rather than being the difficult anomaly he would be for most accounts of language and the human.

 

What, then, has Schreber illuminated for the project we have been calling material semiotics?  Firstly, and in continuation of the ideas presented in Chapter 1, we presented a ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ account of thought and consciousness, whereby the human body is immersed in crowds of preindividual singularities, which struggle for domination of the body and its movements. These ‘entities’, we proposed, are the manifold of connections between body and environment. Rather than a preexistent division between subject and objects, we have the continual interplay between nervous system and environment impacting on one another in all kinds of different ways, the boundary between the two constantly contested. There is no Central Meaner that receives and sends out information to the world; different parts of the bodymind act on and react to the world in different (but more or less consistent) ways. These connective syntheses that precede the subject are never neutral, but are always already weighted with relative degrees of intensity or desire — relative to others on the same level and relative to emergent, global syntheses of the kind that could appear as conscious judgements (‘bad, scared, help!’) or instinctive, spontaneous reactions (such as the complex corrective movements people exhibit to avoid falling over, if you give them a hefty shove).

 

Because these subpersonal syntheses between body and world have never been neutral, we avoid the charge that the departure of the homunculus or Central Meaner in any way leaves a void that needs filling, or that it impoverishes our account of the subject. We see with Schreber ways in which this Pandemonium of connections is forcibly integrated into a global whole — with varying degrees of success. The question of how to compare Schreber’s consciousness to that of ‘normal’ humans is not one I feel needs to be tackled in those terms, since I do not wish to emphasise the pathological side of his story, but rather those interconnected aspects (subjectification, inner speech, receptivity and resistance to command) with which we are all engaged in different ways. Though we now leave Schreber, we will proceed to develop these aspects, to show how Deleuze-Guattari’s account (combined with other influences in future chapters) opens up this approach to thought, language and identity.