(Re)Learning our Alphabet: Reflecting on Systemic Thought ...

[Pages:21]Human Systems: The Journal of Therapy, Consultation & Training

(Re)Learning our Alphabet: Reflecting on Systemic Thought Using Deleuze and Bateson1

Pietro Barbetta1 and Maria Nichterlein2

1. Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia and Universit? di Bergamo, Italy. 2. AIM/CAMHS, Austin Hospital in Melbourne and University of New South Wales,

Australia

This paper discusses some of the concepts that shape the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze and explores their possible applications within the field of systemic therapy. We propose that Deleuzian ideas connect in significant ways to the more familiar ideas of Gregory Bateson. They constitute a powerful and affirmative critique of the dominant understanding of knowledge, science and practice. As Deleuze would express it, lines of flight. In his work with the anti-psychiatrist Felix Guattari, Deleuze used the term plateau ? an explicit reference to Bateson ? to develop an entire philosophy of life and creativity that has significant heuristic possibilities in our field to both consolidate and expand Bateson's early insights.

The paper is organised in two parts: an overview of Deleuze's pro ject, and a possible integration of some key concepts into systemic practice. This is done through the concrete clinical exploration of one theme: alcoholism. The direct connection is with the letter B ("B for boisson [drink]") in Deleuze's Abecedaire, an improvised dialogue with Claire Parnet recorded during his last years of life. This example allows us to reflect on Deleuze's account of alcoholism in a way informed by Bateson's notion of the cybernetics of self. We will also be referring at that point to Foucault's notion of dispositive. Deleuze, Bateson, Foucault: not yet "the usual suspects", and very different in many ways amongst themselves both as to substance and as to style, but sharing the same bottle nevertheless.

1. We would like to thank John Morss for his help in smoothing our English grammar and helping us to shape the literary style of this article.

? LFTRC & AIA

Volume No 21, Issue 3, 2010, pp. 399-419

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Key words: Bateson, Deleuze, therapy, psychoanalysis, systemic therapy

The problem is not one of being this or that in man, but rather one of becoming human, of a universal becoming animal: not to take oneself for a beast, but to undo the human organization of the body, to cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of us discovering the zones which are really his, and the groups, the populations, the species which inhabit him (Deleuze, 1973).

Deleuze is a philosopher who still is almost unknown in the field of family therapy. He belonged to the generation that saw Derrida and Foucault emerge in the French philosophical milieu yet, unlike them, he had no time to travel or to go conference-ing. Deleuze ? like Bateson ? was perceived by some as an abstruse if not aloof thinker. Yet, this is not a thoughtful ? let alone respectful ? view of him for perhaps, more than many of this generation ? the generation of May '68 ?, he was the one who did philosophy with most innocence (Derrida, 2001, p. 193) and, like such a child, he was deeply committed to the optimism and the puissance sketched in the revolutionary project of the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1984).2

So why is it that Deleuze seems to be taking such a critical presence in these current times?

This is an important question to ask because it addresses a more fundamental ethical question that arises from reading Deleuze: how might one live? May's introduction to Deleuze's work (2005, p. 4-5) points quite well to this, indicating that this is a philosophical question that is of relevance to our times as a result of the effects that thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre had in the shaping of the Western mindset.3

2. Deleuze warns us however that one has to separate this revolutionary project from actual revolutions which, he is consistent in stating, have all ended up miserably by consolidating totalitarian regimes as their result. The revolutionary spirit that Deleuze is invoking is ? as Foucault indicates in his writing ? closer to what Kant referred to with his definition of Enlightenment. 3. It is no longer, May clarifies, the question posed in ancient philosophy ? how should one live? ? which, in turn, was transformed during the modern period to how should one act?

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The connection between Deleuze and Guattari is of relevance to us because Guattari was a renowned anti-psychiatrist who ? although trained with Lacan ? had an ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis being far more positive about the possibilities offered by the emergent field of family therapy (Guattari, 1989).

Their first collaborative book Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) ? the first of two volumes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia ? was very influential (Colebrook, 2002, p. xvii). Foucault's prologue to the book defines it as "the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time", an "introduction to the Non-Fascist life" (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). It is a book with a passionate, at times angry, style that offers a strong Nietzschean critique of the then prevalent Marxist and psychoanalytical ideas upheld by French intellectual circles. The critique was targeted at the psychoanalytic unconscious: "it is not theatre but a factory producing the delirium we call reality [...] an active and productive force of desire" (Foucault & Raulet, 1983, p. 446). Their critique also invoked the vital and intimate function that the psychoanalysis of that time had within the capitalist machinery: by forcing interpretation back into the family4, the expansive and creative wanderings of the desiring-machine are captured into a pre-established mould, appropriate to the State in which the individual is living5.

These ideas in Anti-Oedipus had already been pre-shaped in Deleuze's doctoral thesis ? Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994), where he articulated a critique of representational thought ? what he called a static image of thought ? and its manifestations: common and good sense. He carried out this critique by questioning the prevalence of identity and asserting that what is central to life is not the stability of an image/thought, but difference and variation. Thought in this thesis is no longer a representation of a stable reality ? of well defined identities and quantities ? but an active and productive encounter with the outside; an outside that is experienced as a problem in search of an answer. The outside cannot but present itself as a problem since it is itself fluid, fragmented and essentially undecidable. So whatever image one has of what the world is, sooner rather than later one is doomed to encounter difference, a limit in its applicability. Thought then is a complementary process to the outside: a response, a solution to the problem presented through living. And like the outside to which it relates, this alternative thought is equally fluid and fragmented, thus its name: Nomadic.

4. Which is done by reading unconscious activity as perverse desires that ultimately have to do with mummies and daddies; the psychoanalytical Oedipal psyche. 5. This is in close connection with Foucault's ideas on the construction of docile and governable bodies.

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Deleuze makes a distinction between the static ? State-like ? thought that allows governability and this nomadic thought that is intimately connected with life. This distinction is more clearly presented in their second volume, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), published eight years after Anti-Oedipus. It constituted a very different and "much more complex project than Anti-Oedipus" (Deleuze, 1984, p. 239), perhaps completing it as an intellectual project. Rather than presenting a critique, like the earlier book, it proposes a positive project, with its most intriguing aspect perhaps being its structural openness. It is composed of playful plateaux6, where each plateau articulates a whole field of resonances and intensities that channel flows into different forms of organizations/assemblages. There are an infinite number of potential plateaux that can be formed, their only condition for existence being that "they work". This notion of multiplicities of coexisting plateaux resonates with another ? and, in our field, more popular (Hoffman, 2008) ? of their concepts: the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3-25). The rhizome is a type of knowledge that is decentralized yet highly contingent and contextual. The nomadic thought that Deleuze defined in his thesis organizes itself through rhizomes, constantly expanding in unpredictable yet highly complex ways.

Troubling/problematizing the Clinic

Before addressing Deleuze's response to the question posed earlier ? how might one live? ? we see some further value in referring to what it does not show us as professionals in this field. For, after all, Deleuze's question seems to refer us back neither to family nor to systemic thinking as we know them, does it?

In Anti-Oedipus as well as in a number of other essays and interviews (Lapoujade, 2004; 2006), Deleuze and Guattari criticized the family model of psychoanalysis ? the Oedipic triangle mom-dad-child ? for its totalizing and capturing gesture: they criticized its claims that the family was the source of everything in the psychic life. As we indicated above, for Deleuze and Guattari psychoanalysis was not a representation of the human psyche but a reductionism of the child7 who is in fact far more interested, as (s)he grows, in understanding how the world out-there in all of its complexity works (for a late summary of these ideas see "what children say" in Deleuze, 1997).

6. This is a concept that they borrowed from Bateson. We will touch on this point later in the paper. 7. The same argument is used for adults too.

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With this in mind one could argue that the Anti-Oedipal question is this: is there, in the realm of life, something that flees (the famous line of flight) the psychoanalytic Oedipus? Or, in perhaps a less confrontational style, is there a way for psychoanalysis to transcend the dangers of "familialism"? And, a perhaps more direct and relevant question for us in this field, is Family Therapy the new way out of the Oedipisation of everything? The response offers an interesting opening: Family Therapy has not been able to entirely answer this question because in many ways it still remains attached to the idea that everything in life happens in the family: familialism as Deleuze and Guattari call it.

So, we are still in need of a line of flight for therapy. But what is a line of flight?

Like with any of Deleuze's concepts, there is no simple and straight definition. An answer can perhaps start by indicating that in considering the expression "line of flight", we have to bear in mind the idea of derivation in mathematics8 and variation in repetition. As mentioned earlier, life for Deleuze is not a straight line within an ordered world that could be grasped/understood rationally by an independent individual. Although social life appears as a straight and ordered line, life is instead a sinuous and indefinable line, a wandering of sorts; not a straight line but a line that folds, which is socially treated as a straight line9. This treatment of life as lineal is a result of social "manipulation"; the effects of living within what Foucault defines as Dispositives. In his friendship towards Foucault, Deleuze (Deleuze, 1988) defines a Dispositive as a set of heterogeneous elements, socially co-ordinated, comprising a multitude of lines that include lines of flight10. Such a definition helps to articulate the subtle and dynamic tension involved in the constitution of our subjectivities, where subjectivity is inherently social and inevitably transient in that such definitions are deemed to end and change in our ongoing ? assemblage-like ? relation with the world. To live a life therefore means that we need to be open to line(s) of derivation, taking care not to get stuck.

Connecting with Bateson

And we are stuck in familialism as we indicated earlier. Perhaps confirming

8. A concept that Deleuze surely borrowed from Bergson. 9. Foucault would argue that this is done for purposes of governmentality, and, as such, it is not necessarily all bad. 10. Note that this is a singular definition. For Deleuze, as individuals ? especially so in the globalized society we are currently living in ? we are constituted as a multitude and, as such, we co-exist in a multitude of such dispositives.

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Bateson's intellectual force in the field, we can find in his idea of double bind something that can help us to move forward. There are a number of connections traversing through the work of both Bateson and Deleuze that help us understand the power of the double bind as a line of flight. These are:

1. The notion of thought as a process In our opinion, Bateson was not interested in Systemic theory but in Systemic thinking, that is, he was not interested in defining specific contents. His focus was rather on the process and the mechanisms that account for what we observe. This was also a preoccupation for Deleuze as we indicated above.

There is also a further variation on this point in that both Bateson and Deleuze saw thought not only as intimately connected with the world ? not as a separate activity based on the brain ? but as fundamentally dynamic. Thought is not about static realities but about evolutionary processes (for Bateson) or nomadic trajectories (for Deleuze).

2. The centrality of difference A second common point between Bateson and Deleuze is the importance that they attribute to Difference. The Batesonian dictum of "a difference that makes a difference" is well known in the field: any difference makes another difference, you see a difference, and such a difference makes a difference in your own mind, creating a meaning. Deleuze is not far from this position in his own investigations which seemed to have been developed at around the same time. As indicated before, his major thesis was an attempt to position difference ? instead of identity and representation ? at the centre of philosophical investigation.

3. The actualization of particularities In a similar way that Bateson warns us of the use of physical explanations to describe the world of Creatura ? the world of differences (Bateson, 2002, p. 7) ? Deleuze warns us of the danger of metaphors of identity and representation. The world is not a static world where stable beings struggle to express their identities. Very much in line with the Batesonian notion of an evolutionary ecology of Mind, Deleuze's understanding of the world is as an organic whole that is constantly actualizing itself through the emergence of unique particularities that are constantly changing and differing. Drawing from Spinoza (Deleuze, 1992) and from Nietzsche (Deleuze, 1986), "what is" for Deleuze then is not identities but forces of differentiation. Thus, it is not the individual that is stable but the wholeness of this world, through its endless and ever-changing manifestations. Rather than a stable self, a more

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accurate representation of our condition is one of an ambiguous and fluid self that is intimately connected to its circumstances. In other words, our condition involves an openness to endless opportunities to be other(wise). It is this potential ? rather than a stable essence ? which is of value to our work as therapists and thus it is important not to get caught in the "ready-made" images that present to the session but to break these images down to the particulars ? the emotions, the behaviours and their contexts ? that construct them so as to be in search of alternative combinations.

It is in this context that Bateson's words ? "He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars" (italics are ours, Bateson, 1966, p. 445 where he is quoting William Blake) ? make sense. It is also in this context that both Bateson and Deleuze position practical matters ? praxis, including clinical praxis ? as questions of style.

4. The notion of Plateaus There is also great affinity between Deleuze and Bateson in terms of their interests and methods of investigation, so there is some logic in stating that there is a similarity between Deleuze and Guattari's idea of assemblage, Foucault's ideas around the Dispositive and the Batesonian idea of a System. Neither Deleuze, nor Foucault nor Bateson were interested in the constitution of systems as such11. Bateson, as Deleuze, was intrigued by observing and describing systems in their actual workings, and in finding their immanent lines of flight12. In a twist of irony, Deleuze chooses Plateaus directly from the work of Bateson (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21-2). Bateson uses this concept to describe some of the phenomena he was identifying in his ethnographic research. He writes: "some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climax" (Bateson, 1949, p. 85). Deleuze and Guattari will quote this exact statement in A Thousand Plateau translating the word climax as orgasm (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 22. In the English version, the translation adds "[sexual]" in front of climax)13. The irony is double when we are reminded that

11. Perhaps a way of understanding this is by commenting that many of the therapists in psychoanalysis and in family therapy have adopted Parsons' structural functionalist approach to systems, in opposition to Bateson's view. 12. The immanency of systems is central for both thinkers: a fundamental respect for the autonomy of the observed systems. One could argue that this is a connecting thread throughout the history of the radical ideas that defined family therapy. 13. This has been the reason for many readers ? of Deleuze and Guattari as well as of Bateson ? thinking that they were hetero-sexual intercourses, comparing Western practices with oriental ones.

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the observation was, in fact, about mother-child interactions, a return to the Oedipus and the problem of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest a line of flight to explore how far one can go exploring life outside the Oedipus. They call this exploration Schizoanalysis. In many ways, this was a similar line to the one that Bateson had taken when he distanced himself from the Strategic movement in order to chart a connection between madness and creativity. This arose from the well known argument between Bateson and Haley, about "power" as constitutive of pathology, and of the use of therapeutic power (Bateson, 1969, p. 462-3).

Life as Experimentation in Plateaux; To Live as an Author

How might one live? This was the question we stated at the beginning of this paper and one that perhaps we can now start to address. For Deleuze, life is an experimentation, an active engagement with the world in the constitution of a Joycean chaosmos: "a composed chaos, neither foreseen not preconceived" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 204). Life is an ethical becoming ? artists seeking to create not individuals but individuations that are constantly in the process of becoming (devenir). This is a similar conception to the one expressed by Heinz von Foerster when using the term Human Becoming instead of Human Being (Cecchin et al., 2005, Barbetta & Toffanetti, 2006).

This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to with their concept of becoming, which is always "becoming other": the emphasis is not on the expression of "what we are" but in the creation, through encounters with the other, of what we could become. This process of experimentation with one's life is evaluated by its ability to engender unique ? not before known ? relationships with the outside that not only work (make sense) but also elude established forms of knowledge.

But, as with Bateson's ideas, the individuation that Deleuze calls for, cannot be thought as separate from its ecology. The Deleuzian becoming is also a becoming of the assemblage for there is no becoming of an individual that does not imply an equal process on the other side: the becoming of oneself is paired with the becoming of the other in such a way that any distinction between these two processes is highly arbitrary. The self and the world are byproducts of the same desiring machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 2).

For Deleuze, becoming is an individuation that is not self-centred but event-centred and constitutes a "logic of impersonal individuation rather

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