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How do we map the break (downs / throughs)s or schizzes in our experience?
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What are the structures of events that fill your life? For example,
"bath / reading / work / AOL / talking to friends on the phone"
How do these interact with each other? How do these connect you with other people? Do you like the way they create your life? How are you filling your life / how is your life being filled? What are your rhythms, and how do they connect events that crisscross you? How can you link with others in such a way as to alter your routines?
Where are your turning points? What drives you crazy? What takes you outside yourself? What is productive of ecstasy, what of terror? These questions can't be determined in advance, they can only be determined through questing, through adventuring. Only through plunging into the adventure of love, for example, can you figure out how love warps you.
If the universe consists not of laws but of habit patterns, then how are the habits we are living cocreating a universe in which we must live?
Identifying the roles we imputedly are supposed to be playing in a situation, and then learning which roles our unconscious is actually having fun with playing with can reveal two different trajectories. In any interaction with someone, identify what social expectations would ordinarily be in operation at that moment. Then ask, "Can we suspend these to create a free space?"
For example, I was on the phone with someone and I moaned because I was in pain. I told my friend, "You know, hypothetically, there's nothing about the technology of the phone that prevents us from having a moaning conversation." She said, "Nothing but social expectations." I said, "Well, hell, why don't we just suspend those?" She said,"ok", and thus commenced a 15 minute "conversation" of moaning and groaning in which the body was allowed to speak, to be heard, and to be responded to. This was amazingly healing, totally outside social conventions, and creative of an interaction that brought true liveliness to the surface!!
Whenever there is something you desire and it conflicts with social expectation, find a creative way to lift social expectation to mutually and consensually create that desire with an other (s). By creating cracks (schizzes) in social expectations, you open up a smooth space in the strata through which more ecstatic, less egobound ways of experiencing the world can flow through.
It is not necessary to be moralistic about these questions, to try and figure out which breaks are "right" or "wrong". The universe is too complex to fit into this simplistic dualistic scheme. Rather, an ethics can be constructed, which is simply figuring out the relationship between the consistency of one's desires, and the consequences of one's actions. Every one of our actions contributes towards creating a certain type of world. When we consider a certain action, is the world it points towards one we desire? If so, let us embrace it. If not, why bother? It's not a matter of "right" or "wrong" ; it's a matter of putting into incarnation the world you want. For example, I want a world where people are uninhibited, strong, assertive, playful, and creative rather than passive, and so I will try to create actions and habits that align with these goals.
Deleuze and Guattari provide us with a rubric from which to construct schizosocial cartographies. Instead of considering ourselves a "self" which is somehow different from "others" or the "outside world", let us consider how various flows come together in this commingling that we are. There are three ways the world's flows synthesize or confluence into a nexus that we might identify as a moment of agency or "self" : the disjunctive synthesis, the connective synthesis, and the conjunctive synthesis. We might call these the ORs, the ANDs, and the RoleCall. The ORs are all our choices, all the different ways we could go, all the vectors that pull us this way or that way. This is the level of our radical ambivalency. One of our tasks will be to chart these ambivalencies in ourselves ; another will be to keep them open so they don't close down into exclusivities. When a disjunction becomes exclusive, it becomes an either-or : either you do this or you do that and you must choose. The inclusive disjunctive synthesis attempts to maintain the radical ambivalency by keeping both options open, even as there may be a tendency to explore more one than the other at any particular time. Identifying our junctions, our dis-junctions, our turning points, is half the schizo-analysis. Then we figure out how these choice-nodes or nodes of ambiguity link up to each other, the ANDs. How do they connect to form a consistency? And finally, as they link, who's on call? Who's There? The conjunctive synthesis may be imagined as a ragtag band of nomadic minstrels figuring out who's together at the moment. In any nomadic formation, there are droppings-out and comings-in. Some of the ORs will be online, others will not. Some flows will be connected ; others will not. The conjunctive synthesis doesn't determine "who we are" for all time ; but it does try to figure out which forces have come together for this particular synthesis at this particular moment in time.
So how is society, history, economics, family, culture, art, schooling, genetics, and all sorts of hiphop record skips across these creating the breakbeat that is our present experience of the moment, our cocreation with others of reality? By identifying these, not only through intellectual analysis, but by juxtaposing our experience and practice to those of others and therefore opening up illuminations (intracultural anthropology), we can open up crazes in the glaze which point to lines of flight.
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Undoing the World
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No one has a whole image of "the world". We each synthesize very particular perspectives, viewpoints, and experiences into a motley crue we then privilege as a global viewpoint. But there are so many cracks, slips, and breakage points across these ragtag minions! By realizing that the "whole" image we've been given of the world is merely an aesthetic choice, an artistic scam of sorts, we can begin to explore those parts of the world that don't fit in with the narratives our culture has given us. This is to explore what Chilton-Pearce has called "the crack in the cosmic egg". Schizo-analysis is about Exploring these cracks. How do you Undo yourself / your world? Drugs? Meditation? Sleep deprivation? Trance? Rave clubs? Ritual intensities? Nomadic drifts of month-long duration? What are the advantages and drawbacks of these methods? How can you link with others exploring the cracks to create a revolution of the marginalia?
When we begin to explore the cracks in our world, we can stop being passive to that world. We have been trained in how "the world is" and therefore how we must fit into it. All of this can be set aside as we construct new models. Instead of meeting each other as predictables who fit into role standards, we meet each other as question marks of desire and figure out whether we can link our desire up to each other outside any role expectations. As we do so, we change "the world" by acting outside standard models of what that world is and how we are supposed to fit into it. Through a schizo-analysis, we can together conduct a revolution of everyday life. Schizoanalysis can help us to not only figure out where our cracks are, but encourage us to actually create cracks. How can we upset our routine such that it dances to new rhythms?
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Knights Errant
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There is not one private self interacting with a status quo world. In fact, there are multiplicities moving across each other and co-construing each other in multiple ways. There is no "one way" of living or understanding things. Yet most of us have been trained to edit out our embarassments, our discomforts, our ambiguities, our ambivalencies, our hesitancies, our moments of differing or difference from our Conversation with the World ; and it is only by covering over these radical ambivalencies and differences that the image of a unified status quo world is discovered. By beginning to speak up about what is not comfortable, by beginning to live our discomfort, we discover as Ryan Hopeless has pointed out, that Discomfort is Your Friend. Awkward moments are truly pregnant, and when we stop being so glib that slickness and hipness and coolness are our only concerns, and we begin to see ourselves as Artists of Mistakes, we can glory in the imperfection of a wonderfully imperfect world where we are all knights errant gloriously linking our mistakes together in experimentations that alter each other. Instead of hiding from each other behind "whole" images, we can walk naked and bodypainted in front of each other in all our ragtagness, yes, i am a hurricane, a storm, a concantenation of longings, blunderings, wyrd thoughts, inconvenient emotions, vast, obsessive, uncontrollable creativities that spout forth from me and cannot be coded into any categories of "art", "work" or "productiveness". Then, as we spill forth, we create a creativity and productiveness that overflows capitalist models of productivity. We see that our not-workings, our symptoms, are themselves repressed creativities that want to flow forth in a schizorevolution where schizophrenics represent only the dark, repressed side of a gloriously glossolalic and constantly mutating movement of deviation. Suddenly we are not devoted to right-ings and wrong-ings, but linking up with those deviations that affirm each other! What are your psychoses? Perhaps they link with mine in amazing ways! The society that will result from these types of new linkings will be far different from our present encrusted misery, and my actions will aim towards this new world. Join the schizorevolution!! Email me your cartographies, your maps of schizzes, your adventures, your hopes, your mad loves, your batty impulses and derives. Err boldly!
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