When Nietzsche claimed that God was Dead, meaning the Christian god specifically, he really meant that we were all dead, at least the selves we imagined we were, based on that inherited sense from the Abrahamic religions, that notion of being created in the image of God. If there was never a creator god, then there is no image, or simulacra of the original godhead. We are therefore free to be ourselves, which is great, except we are not ourselves, not selves in the sense we are accustomed to believe, since that sort of self cannot exist without its relation to the creator. Though this may be the case, there is even among the most secular, perhaps still tattooed to the back of our brain, an image of ourselves as these unitary and autonomous beings, in the world, but somehow apart from it.
So what are we then? We are not whole, that’s one thing. We are not fully independent individuals, not as much as we had come to believe, since we live in a chronic interdependence. We cannot be born without parentage, we cannot even learn how to eat and shit correctly without proper guidance. And our support for each other especially through our most tender early years, via family, community, public infrastructure and education, is perhaps the original signs of our collectivism, our socialism (god forbid!), which we often tend to forget. We don’t even have our own thoughts, but rely on a received language, history and the ideas of others. We are in fact each of us molecular bits of a chaotic swarm, this Anthropocene, and not created to be the princely occupants of a vast palatial afterlife, only here in physical manifestation as a kind of preparatory note, though we often behave as if that were the case.
A number of the more notorious lefty French thinkers, those so-called postmoderns whose ideas have wrung right wing intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad into hysterical tantrums, and who get blamed for the eventual decline of western civilization, had begun asking questions about why the 1968 student and workers movement in France had eventually failed. Two such theorists, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari pointed to the possibility that each one of us harbors an inner despot, or rather, a habituated tendency to channel our psychic energies along despotic or fascistic lines, which help en masse to carve out unconscious behavioral channels that tend to short-circuit progressive lines of flight and attempts at positive social change. And this goes as much for well-meaning leftists as it does for outright denizens of fascism. Accordingly, we are all terrible tyrants, though we are unaware, who are more than willing to cooperate with fascists, surrendering to that dark lord of our souls, and it was that inner despot who had to be dealt with first, or at least in parallel with the social movement towards a greater empathetic and egalitarian whole. It is also likely what someone like Gil Scott Heron meant when he said that the “revolution will not be televised,” since as he later explained, it is one’s mind that needs to change first before changing the world.
Guattari worked with schizophrenics, so he saw this despotic effect magnified in the erratic lives of his patients. It was a clear parallel. In fact, he conceived the image of the schizophrenic out for a walk, as illustrated in works of fiction by Georg Buchner and Robert Walser, as a better representation of a typical human being than Freud’s neurotic on the couch. We might agree, when we consider where the normalized definition of a self originated, at least in the modern western world, that anachronistic princely subject and copy of the great godhead him/herself.
Deleuze & Guattari, in their essay 587 BC – AD 70: On Several Regimes of Signs, a chapter of their A Thousand Plateaus, argued that the core goal of the education system, both public and private, in western countries, was to normalize its participants through a process which they call Subjectification, in which we become subjects – not of a particular deity – but to a particular set of statements, which we master and internalize and that becomes a kind of content of our identity, values, and hence what we think of as our individuality. These statements are a mixed bag at best. Many of the statements we took as acceptable 200 years ago are no longer acceptable today, that is obvious. What is less obvious is that we can often look back five or ten years and find the same.
Such suspicions have historically been the impetus for many experiments in art and theory, more recently in modernist movements of the 20th and 21st century, from the Surrealists, Dadaists, Situationists, abstract expressionists, and every form of poststructuralist art and poetics experimentation. In borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, there is also a thing called schizopoetics, which aside from being a study of the poetry of schizophrenics, is also an approach to writing poetry whose aim is the dissolution of representations of the self, that composite of received statements, almost as a form of inquiry more than an approach to making art, though it has had a residual influence on the recent decades of art production in general. In my more humble approach to this writing process, one I simply call schizodelia, I often think back to Wallace Stevens. In the penultimate section of his long poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar, he says:
What Stevens asks of us is that we turn away now and then from the rotten words and ideas that make up our ready-made worldview, our illusory shape of self, the way we arrange the symbols we use to guide our minds’ lives, to throw away the lights and destroy the crust of shape, or the habit of self, which confines us, and to drill down to the molecular level of meaning. If we do so we can surprise ourselves with a new song, a song derived, not from the static shape we take as ourselves, but more from the present energy of living being.
Attempting this process is as easy as the following. Forget for a time that you are writing for publication. Forget that you write to communicate with other human beings. Instead listen to the many voices chattering inside your head, how they collide and coalesce, fuse at times or break into still smaller pieces. Converse with them and forget that you are a person, and feel that free floating sense of being many and yet part of something else, an infinite unknowable. The result of this process will engender a new form of writing. You will have escaped identity, your ego, if only for odd moments. You can then come back and go about your business, perhaps changed ever so slightly.
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