Some updates on recent teaching, new streams and talk about dreams.

I chat with a pagan mate about beards (and revolution) …

Chanting the sun

I mentioned earlier that the assemblage, the community, is never static and can become something reactionary as well as revolutionary. The group is also an assemblage, and my first thought is about the difference in the assemblage ‘group’ and in the assemblage ‘community’. They obviously share a lot of features – not least being that …

This week I began teaching ‘Schizoanalysis for Beginners‘ again. I haven’t taught it for 4 years and haven’t spent time reading Anti-Oedipus all the way through for maybe two or three years. I return to it quite regularly but in chunks and so it’s interesting to begin reading through it again, in a new space …

Tuesday evening. My cat, Bob, died tonight, in my arms. She had been with us 19 years. I sat with her as she passed, until the last breath and then we sat wake for her as she rested on our altar. I wanted to start this weeks notes at this point. It’s Morrigans 51st birthday. …

(First published Jan 1st 2007, minor edits made.  Republishing Oct 3rd 2024, as I start my second run of the course ‘Schizoanalysis for Beginners’). There is a background to every text, a life, a thought, an obsession, a spilt cup of coffee on papers badly placed on a temporary desk. Good sex, drunken rants, flirtatious …

The scale of things, to come back to that word, is still troubling my thoughts. The inhuman scale of politics operates at the scale of population, community and beyond, but appears in the face of the individual, whether that individual be Trump, Johnson or Corbyn – or any number of other figures. Underneath that ‘face’ …

The image is already fading.  This is perhaps the only thing we might want to accelerate within capitalism, although capitalism is not the source of the image, or the fading.  Both image and fading have, however, been transformed and accelerated, in some sense, through capitalism.

The first in a series of notes for a comrade I’m working on a book with.

I spoke at a conference recently, drawing in part on the work I’ve been doing in teaching and organising at the Free University of Brighton.  The conference was aimed in part at thinking through the problems of the academic institution, drawing on the work of Guattari and his institutional analysis

I recently spoke at a seminar organised by The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in London, on the theme of ‘Sorcery and Trance’ as part of their Post-Psychoanalysis series.

After being ill for a week I return to Chapter 4 on the ‘Postulates of linguistics’ and discuss constants, variables and death sentences.

The postulates of linguistics (Chapter 4) have sub-headings that at first sight are a little confusing. To begin with, all four of the postulates have sub-headings in quotation marks, which immediately makes one wonder who is speaking, which ‘position’ is being articulated. Next, the first of these – “Language is informational and communicational” – is …

Picking up the 3rd chapter, the ‘geology of Morals’, from roughly midway through (from the paragraph that begins “Most of the audience had left…” – ATP:57) we find a typology of strata being outlined. Three primary types of strata are posited. These are what I would call (1) the ‘simple’, (2) the organic and (3) …

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Turning to the 5th and 6th characteristics of the rhizome – the principle of cartography and decalcomania – we move from discussions of the book, of evolutionary science, of music, to discussions of psychoanalysis, the first real moment in which a continuity between ATP and Anti-Oedipus really makes itself felt.

There are 6 principles of the rhizome that are outlined in the first chapter of ATP. They are introduced as ways of characterising the rhizome, although these are only “approximate characteristics” (ATP 7). Here I look briefly at the first 4 of these principles.

I haven’t read ATP in a group setting before but as Guattari has increasingly come to be central to my own thinking, taking over from Deleuze in many ways, ATP and Anti-Oedipus have obviously begun to play more central roles in my work. These posts will aim to contain my notes and reflections as I work through the text

“I am interested”, Guattari says, “in a totally different kind of unconscious. It is not the unconscious of specialists, but a region everyone can have access to with neither distress nor particular preparation: it is open to social and economic interactions and directly engaged with major historical currents”.