CTS LECTURE X//DELEUZE and GUATTARI and CREATIVITY.

CTS LECTURE X//DELEUZE & GUATTARI & CREATIVITY
Notes from today's lecture.


AIM


To examine how Deleuze and Guattari drew emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature of social reality.


OBJECTIVES


1//To contrast their module of creative, "rhizomatic" thought with traditional "tree-like" models of thought based in sequential argumentation;
2//To examine how Deleuze and Guattari's interpretations of processes of social change and development.
3// To consider how they propose individual people might transform themselves;
4//To contextualise these theories of change and development in relation to the concepts "the virtual" and "the actual".


- Dealing with the ideas of institutionally.


- The collaboration was built against the student and worker protest in May 1968, Paris. The eventual crack down of the authorities led to the re-assessment of the activist in society.
- 'A Thousand Plateaus'- Deleuze & Guattari (book). The idea that change in society could be incremental. 


- One line of argument must sequentially lead onto another ('Tree of thought')- The 'Soverign subject of thought'- people are the point of genesis. Values that are "just so" applied everywhere, all the time. These "tree- like thinkers" still have an appropriate place in contemporary cultures.


- "Risomatic thought"- plants growing, appearing from underwater.
- Subjectivation- how people are socially constructed, and how people may change their psychological make- up.
- A state of pure sensation, a repositioning of identity.
- The virtual, and the actual. 


- The riso owns an alternative thought from the tree- like structure from traditional philosophy. Rather, they are linked through leaps of association- seemingly unconnected ideas. Concepts are not waiting for us, but must be created, fabricated. The concept is not an abstract, isolated identity- but inter-relationship. Each contains facets from others, through articulation.


> Concept (SIGNIFIED) > Sound Image (SIGNIFIER )> (An ever-rotating circle)


- The way in which we conceptualise the world doesn't refer to a set of named object, but it is named, through different language users.


- Nietzsche contrasts cool abstractions of rational man with the heat and intensity of irrational man. Rational man embraces contingency, strangeness and experimentation- rational man wanted to created a theory of the world, and our relationship to the world. 


- ISA GENZKEN, Hospital (Ground Zero), 2008- suggesting new architectural productions, a sense of manual production and "things being held together in provisional ways". 




THE ASSEMBLAGE


- Genzken's sculptures take on the form of assemblage. 
- The process of organising, arranging, and putting together- recognisable structures of objects such as food at a dinner party- a school, you need bricks and mortar, teachers, chairs and students to assemble the school.
- The place we make our home is an assemblage- where we express comfort. 
- Language orders corporal social situations.
- How places become meaningful.
- The literal meanings of words are always placed with meaning of power and authority.
- Every word is laden we the implict manner of what a person says and does in a circumstance.


MODERN EXAMPLES


- "Hoodies"- youth wearing hoods or potential criminals? New Labour/Conservative political approach to "hugging a hoodie".
- "Hoodies" may be assumed that they are waiting for a friend, plotting to buy alcohol, or plan criminal activity. A passing family keep their distance, law and order watch over them, deteratorialise a trolley park, but retertitorialised as a place of social interaction and potential danger. 
- Propaganda and riots may produce changes in the way in which these particular individuals are judged at a particular moment in time.
- The status of teenagers in society can change very rapidly- whilst the status of the military is very embedded and slow to change- evidence of how assemblages change and shift.


ZAHA HADID for MAXXI, National Museum of XXI Century Arts in ROME


- How the building moves around the pathways around with it- how it flows through and between them, along with the flow and mutation of the interiors, and how people move through the space.


SUBJECTIVICATION


- How Deleuze and Guattari talk about how we are constructed.
- Subjectivity (our sense of self and identity) is always under construction. The subjects recognition of ones self is always around when they are invented- we are a part of the world before we realise we are part of the world.


SCHIZOPHRENIA


- Came to embrace in contemporary psychology, traditionally it was seen as detachment from reality- traditionally conceived of as loosing a state of who you are.


THE BODY WITHOUT ORGANS


- A practical process that one may set in motion to affect psychological change.
- A radical reduction of bodily awareness down to an unordered state.
- "Theatre of cruelty" was design to create a movement in the being of a participant and the audience- surrealist (with Bretton).
- A field of sensation- engaged with ones presence. 
- "It is an intense and intensive body...".


THE VIRTUAL & THE ACTUAL


- What everything means to you, everything that has happened, could be different.
- The recurrence of the idea of reality that Baudrillard notes is eroded by simulacra. 
- Even a mountain must be considered a constructed (geological), every component of this construction is made up of smaller components.