The epistemology of dizziness in psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis: Individuation, screen-based media, and the production of unconsciouses1Abstract
Concerned with the reconceptualization of the unconscious and its immanence in contemporary life, this essay bridges the disciplines of psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. We propose the understanding of the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as post-Lacanian contributions to clinical and theoretical elaborations of the Freudian cause. We analyze how the relations between individuals and screen-based media narratives enable the emergence of an epistemology of dizziness through the concepts of crypt, death-image, fold, patchwork, signaletic animism, and transmonadism. For that, we focus on the Japanese television animation (anime) show Kill la Kill not as a representation, but as an active reflexivity of screen-based media’s own affective power over microperceptions.
Keywords
Schizoanalysis; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; screen-based media; desiring production
Resumo
Preocupado com a reconceitualização do inconsciente e sua imanência na vida contemporânea, o ensaio conecta as disciplinas da psicanálise e da esquizoanálise. Propomos o entendimento das obras de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari enquanto contribuições pós-lacanianas para as elaborações clínicas e teóricas da causa freudiana. Analisamos como as relações entre indivíduos e narrativas midiáticas baseadas em telas possibilitam o surgimento de uma epistemologia da vertigem através dos conceitos de cripta, imagem-morte, dobra, patchwork, animismo sinalético, e transmonadismo. Para isso, focamos no programa de animação televisiva japonesa (anime) Kill la Kill não como uma representação, mas como uma reflexividade ativa do próprio poder afetivo da mídia em telas sobre as micropercepções.
Palavras-chave
Esquizoanálise; Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari; mídia em telas; produção desejante
Abstract
Préoccupé par la reconceptualisation de l’inconscient et de son immanence dans la vie contemporaine, l’essai relie les disciplines de la psychanalyse et de la schizoanalyse. Nous proposons que les œuvres de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari soient comprises comme des contributions post-lacanniennes aux élaborations cliniques et théoriques de la cause freudienne. Nous analysons comment les relations entre les individus et les récits médiatiques à écran permettent l’émergence d’une épistémologie du vertige à travers les concepts de crypte, d’image-mort, de pli, de patchwork, d’animisme signalétique, et de transmonadisme. Nous nous concentrons sur la série d’animation télévisuelle japonaise (anime) Kill la Kill non pas comme une représentation, mais comme une réflexivité active sur le pouvoir affectif des médias à écran sur les microperceptions.
Mots-clés
Schizoanalyse; Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari; médias à écran; production désirante
Resumen
Preocupado por la reconceptualización del inconsciente y su inmanencia en la vida contemporánea, este ensayo conecta las disciplinas del psicoanálisis y el esquizoanálisis. Proponemos que las obras de Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari son contribuciones poslacanianas a las elaboraciones clínicas y teóricas de la causa freudiana. Analizamos cómo las relaciones entre los individuos y las narrativas mediáticas basadas en pantallas permiten el surgimiento de una epistemología del vértigo a través de los conceptos de cripta, imagen-muerte, pliegue, patchwork, animismo señalético y transmonadismo. Para ello, nos enfocamos en el programa de animación televisiva japonesa (anime) Kill la Kill no como una representación, sino como una reflexividad activa del propio poder afectivo de los medios en pantalla sobre las micropercepciones.
Palabras clave
Esquizoanálisis; Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari; medios en pantalla; producción deseante
The chaosmic fold of deterritorialization and the autopoietic fold of enunciation, with their interface of existential grasping and transmonadism, implant at the heart of the object-subject relation – and before any instance of representation — a creative processuality, an ontological responsibility which binds liberty and its ethical vertigo at the heart of ecosystemic necessities.
(Guattari, 2022, p. 180).
Introduction: Transmonadism
Beyond the epistemological limits of both hermeneutics and pheno-menology, perceiving and affecting are operations of power conceptualized — with the immanence of the unconscious — in the notions of agency and assemblage. This is a philosophical problematization already organized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari after their readings of distinguished figures such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Henri Bergson, Paul Virilio, Michel Foucault, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Yet, this research will approach Deleuze’s and Guattari’s elaborations aiming to propose a new perspective to the actualities and virtualities within the circular ontologies composed by perceptions and affections — which they call by the names percepts and affects not only in What is Philosophy? (1991), but also in other books such as Capitalism and Schizophrenia I and II: Anti-Oedipus; A Thousand Plateaus (1972; 1980), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), Foucault (1986), and Chaosmosis (2022). On the strength of bridging — via transmonadism — psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic clinic, we will work with ontological entanglements and detachments provoked by libidinal unconscious investments and the technology of the war machine manifesting desire against Jacques Lacan’s category of the symbolic, in favor of new relations between the categories of the imaginary and the real.
Nevertheless, our hypothesis will indicate the uncharted territories that exist beyond limits of circular interactions between strata and folds – connecting Félix Guattari’s transmonadism to Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s concept of the crypt (1976) while proposing that desire is agency toward the production of multiple unconsciouses, a patchwork of unconsciouses (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, p. 38). How do bodies perceive other worlds? Which are the worlds perceived in bodies? How do bodies affect, composing worlds? What can affect bodies in their composition of other worlds? Which forms of expression may exist in these uncharted territories where bodies compose worlds using the immanence of libidinal unconscious investments?
Our questions emerge from investigating contemporary moving images of screen-based narratives produced by Japanese television animation (anime): where televisual signals must not be captured as representations attached or referenced to cultural meanings, but as intensities working with the fragmentation of bodies in episodic folds and series within monads. This is a methodology that listens to and studies anime in its global force of reachability — not as an object in the field of Japanese studies —, circulating both immanent and animistic values via screen-based media. Monadic bodies may deterritorialize the mirror-image gestalt of the I (Ich) in the clinical systems of Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s Narcissism (2002). Fragmented bodies call for atomic, monadic, and nomadic epistemologies; these are epistemologies of states of death or catalepsy, of sleep, of drowsiness, of numbness (Deleuze, 1988, p. 115), or simply put: the epistemology of dizziness, conducted with ethical vertigo and varying according to ecosystemic necessities — precisely where we localize Abraham’s and Torok’s crypt.
This is a novelty for both the clinical and theoretical imbrications of the works with the unconscious, contributing to the debates of psychoanalysis because it creates new post-Lacanian points of view: beyond the chains of signifiers, diverging from the epistemology of the lack and its hiatus provoked by cultural castration or language alienation (Lacan, 1964/1973, p. 227). The word dizziness is a translation for étourdissement, displaying the crossroads where there are Jacques Lacan’s dizziness — underlining familistic interpretative relations and belongings to the strata —, and Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s dizziness — attentive to the processual becomings of the folds.
In the epistemology of dizziness, psychoanalysts may listen to desires for an Other, instead of desires of the Other. Epistemologies of dizziness run with the immanence of dust — small nonmetaphorical confusing particles of perception that compose the circuits of a body that inhales and exhales (Deleuze, 1988, p. 115) —, not with the transcendent swarming of signifiers occupying representations and organizing substitutions under the vectors of the master signifier and the dialectics of structuralism: S2 following S1, where the unconscious is the barred Other. We may call these confusing particles of microperception by the term death-images, vibrations and contractions of the organs composing a body with sensations that drive autopoietic movements of the imaginary beyond the pleasure principle (Freud, 2003b).
Death-images are entropic relations between Ich and Other, refragmenting the narcissistic body on the strength of its extrinsic nomadic forces producing new references. This is precisely the semiotic undertaking of anime productions when thinking with the clinic of psychoanalysis because they propose other possibilities of unconscious composed by the revolutionary specificity of desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, p. 141) as a praxis inside of capitalism — thus, the title of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s books: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I and II.
Thomas Lamarre conceptualized epistemologies of dizziness that he found in the powerful electromagnetic emissions of images and sounds analyzed by the shows of Japanese television animation with the term signaletic animism (2018, p. 353). For Lamarre, anime productions are animistic thought-affecting-transferential machines in semiotic ecologies, underscoring while analyzing with their narratives their own power over the symbioses of Nature and Culture as well as the compositions between the organic and the inorganic.
How does one conceptualize the unconscious in relation to screen-based media and contemporary forms of narrative production (anime, TikTok, videogames, YouTube etc.)? Can we talk about multiple unconsciouses: not as a barred Other, but as virtual vectors of worlds without object — with a nonobject, in a new understanding of object a —, coming from hallucinatory microperceptions or the paradox of sleeping while awake?
If for Freud and Lacan symbolic castration was the bedrock for both the conceptualization of the unconscious and the psychoanalytic practice, we pose the question: Does one still operate with Jacques Lacan’s name-of-the-father when working within the multiplicity of narratives investigating the powers of percepts and affects via screen-based media creations? How do anime shows elaborate on the breaches in transcendent representation? What happens when the unconscious is not structured as language, with signifiers, but with haptic immanent images, with percepts and affects? To debate these questions, I will focus on Studio Trigger’s anime — broadcast in 2013 — Kill la Kill.
The Importance of Schizoanalysis to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Microperceptions
Matters of nonrepresentation appear as schizoanalysis’ main concern in the praxis of listening to nonreproductive sexuality. On the strength of the physiologic interactions between screen-based media and the body through electromagnetic microperceptions, the critique of representation posed by schizoanalysis has turned into an influence on both the clinic and the theory of the contemporary unconscious.
If Jacques Lacan expanded Sigmund Freud’s societal impact by proposing the chain of signifiers — the struggles and discourses of S1 and S2 — when elaborating on both institutions and abstractions such as the State beyond the family drama, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari focused on the decolonization of the Lacanian categories of the real and the imaginary from the symbolic and its mediation, looking for hallucinations or hallucinatory operations instead of substitutions. Schizoanalysis aims to free the body’s libidinal investments from the signifying chain or the master-slave transcendence of binary post-Hegelian articulations. We underline these post-Hegelian articulations as connections of notions of progress to the transcendence of ideas.
We learn from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s readings of both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan that the analyst must be a nearby presence, aware of an individual’s agency short-circuiting the real and the imaginary, bypassing the symbolic, producing new circuits as affections in a territory. The Anti-Oedipus points out, problematizing Jacques Lacan’s position, that the symbolic is the impossible. The symbolic is what is yet to come via heterogeneous processes of different bodies. On the other hand, both the real and the imaginary produce graphic technological assemblages: images, sounds, territories, and machines with the immanence of the unconscious in a body: working with virtualities and non-verbal sensations. There is an Other of the Other: it is the impossible symbolic to which the clinic needs to find or invent ways of listening.
Also, in schizoanalysis, there are sexual relations because the short-circuit between the real and the imaginary deviates form the original concept of the libido. For Lacan, after Freud, the libido fuels a circuit of drives grounded on symbolic substitutions found in a treasure of signifiers. This conceptual understanding organizes the libido in relation to the Other in its clash against the subject, transforming it into a barred subject and regulating the unconscious as the transcendent barred Other.
Nevertheless, influenced by schizoanalysis, contemporary psycho-analysis may propose a decoded libido as flows, rhythms, and compositions in existential territories. The contemporary existential territories we find in anime shows and their audiences display how transversal, tense, and blurred the separations between the binaries man and woman, nature and culture, human and animal, and primitive and civilized are.
The clinic and the theory of the contemporary unconscious deal with the becomings of a fragmented body. This body is decoded, without external organizations to its insides — What does an organ do? It assembles electric machines that create codes via animistic cuts and attachments to organic and inorganic elements of the world. These machines are not metaphorical or sublimations — they are not the body’s erogenous zones revested by signifiers as it is understood by the pleasure principle or the desexualized Ich built with narcissism; they are active creations or expressions of the body’s intrinsic autopoiesis.
Because desire is understood as revolutionary production of production and heterogenesis, not as the lack resulting from symbolic castration, psychoanalysts must be attentive to new compositions that are not articulated by the metonymical formula that states that the root of one’s own desire – the object autre — has its reference in A – the Autre. The real and the imaginary produce their own Autre, outside of the signifying chain: new universes of reference, as Félix Guattari theorizes after his practice.
New universes of reference hold onto the microphysics of the body and its multiple sensations in relation to technology. Involving microperceptions during processes of assemblage, the body affects while it is affected by the codes and materials of technological objects. These objects must be approached animistically. Technology is part of the body, merging perspectives that compose assemblages. These are connections and disconnections of libidinal machines assembled by the body. Machines that are at the same time intense, multiple, and singular.
We stress the importance of A Thousand Plateaus’ final image. In its conclusion, titled Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines, there is an image of Albert Einstein created by computational drawing. The superposition between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis happens at the intersection where the body is an agent in space, producing electric torsions while actively colliding with other organic and inorganic bodies. This is a space unmediated by representation, excluded from temporal symbolic attention; this is a space of both microperceptions and trans-individuations.
Schizoanalysis, in its questionings of psychoanalysis, is not only a critique, but a difference toward the conceptualization of the unconscious. It was generated by the studies of perspectivism as the foundational stone of individuation, unconscious investments, and psychic operations. The image of Einstein’s face drawn by a computer and displayed by Deleuze and Guattari is not a representation. This drawing is a scientific and creative process of production conducted by the schizoanalytic concern with the contemporary: approximating artistic practices conducted by a machine to the clinic and the theory of the unconscious. Just as we explore the tensions traversing the works of Isaac Newton, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein as physicists who research mechanics and its radical difference created by quantum mechanics, we must work with Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Félix Guattari as psychoanalysts who undertake investigations using different concrete rules and thus assembling various prototypes of abstract machines. From the singular consistencies of each one of their bodies organizing concrete rules of both sexuality and agency in libidinal territories, analysands create their own plateaus. There are thousands of them. Namely, in transmonadism, plateaus are abstract machines for bodies to live different lives. Abstract machines are universes of reference to the clinic and the theory of the unconscious that do not distinguish a psychoanalyst from a schizoanalyst, or metaphor from hallucination. In their movements of desiring production, abstract machines are transversal to the realms of representation and nonrepresentation. It is the role of the clinician to invent concepts when affected by each new form of expression or by each new plateau an analysand creates.
Schizoanalysis’ contributions only exist on the strength of debating and practicing with Lacanian reconceptualizations that entangle theory with the clinic. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contribute to the psychoanalytic debate by introducing new pragmatic questions concerned with immanent processes of individuation while being interested in creating new possibilities of psychoanalytic listening to manifestations of desire. We define contemporary psychoanalysis as the psychoanalytic elaboration of the post-structuralist unconscious.
Schizoanalysis is the specificity of a practice that dismisses representation as its setting or wallpaper. Both clinical and theoretical approaches to the unconscious must be considered in their hapticality, where forms of expression such as drawings — for adults and for children — are as important as talking. The body creates images. Thinking is a psychic activity of the body as much as walking, painting, coding, dreaming, humming, or screaming. How does one listen to the intensities of unconscious productions? What if psychosis was the common ground, instead of neurosis, when working with the unconscious? Schizoanalysis proposes a new perspective to psychoanalytic questions because it is concerned with the graphic possibilities of the body.
Psychoanalysis, in the contemporary, influenced by schizoanalysis, is a discipline that works with the sensations of the aesthetic body since it proposes that the unconscious is the infrastructure producing physiological movements such as dreams, acting outs, and symptoms. Our work with the electromagnetic signs of Japanese television animation is an attempt to expand psychoanalytic clinic and theory, intermingling Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s work with Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s vistas. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are attentive to the rhizomatic forces of pop-analysis and are interested in both the pragmatics and the multiplicity of semiotic forces and their tensions that compose the unconscious. Similar to what we find in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Kafka (1975) — where fiction is an undertaking toward the elaboration of unconscious processes —, we will underscore the relevance of anime to the contemporary machinic/environmental creations of trans-individualities. As analysands harness affects that escape from symbolic apprehension, short-circuiting the Lacanian categories of the real and the imaginary, we will analyze what anime thinks about nonrepresentation as a producer of clinical narratives instead of an illustration of concepts.
Based on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s approaches to the unconscious, we aim to advance practices as well as conceptual productions beyond the divides separating schizoanalysis from psychoanalysis. The concepts of affects, percepts, and sensation were only possible due to a common research interest and a desire to face the theorization of a praxis which is the clinic of the unconscious, or the clinic of culture. With these considerations, our objective is to provide new contributions that highlight the convergences of both disciplines. With a new epistemology, the epistemology of dizziness, we conceptualize a framework that is not the one in which the transcendence of the symbolic institutes the lack that structures the unconscious. The new framework is that of multiple unconsciouses, where bodies generate worlds. Disobedient bodies — Kill la Kill colorfully indicates in its images, sounds, and narrative — are not ruled by metaphors.
Hallucinating with Kill la Kill
How do screen-based media narratives enable the emergence of both new forms of expression and universes of reference? Kill la Kill is an anime from the genre magical girl — a genre where exact sequences of the characters’ transformations are repeated every episode, and during the narrative these transformations start including evolutions, fusions, and variations — directed by Imaishi Hiroyuki for Studio Trigger and broadcast for the first time in 2013. It is the story of Matoi Ryuko, a teenage woman who wants to avenge the death of her father.
In the world of Kill la Kill, uniforms work symbiotically with humans through the technology of Life Fibers. Uniforms feed on human blood while evolving and giving them powers. After the death of her father, seeking to destroy the organization that killed him and controls the world in militarist fashion, Ryuko finds a special uniform called Senketsu at his laboratory. It has a body, a life of its own, and conducts long conversations with Ryuko — nevertheless, she is the only one capable of hearing it.
Because Ryuko wears Senketsu, she can understand its language. During the battles, while wearing Senketsu, Ryuko’s body both fragments and puts itself together, constantly: she becomes — and indeed discovers during the TV show’s narrative that she was already — an in-between of clothes and humans, an organic-inorganic life form where phylogenetics and machinic phylum meet (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 491).
Is Matoi Ryuko hallucinating when she talks and analyzes her fate with Senketsu? This is a question the anime show poses as an elaboration that exceeds both the conventional metaphors found in neurosis and healing hallucinations of psychosis as clinical techniques concerned with fitting individuals into symbolic castration and human evolution.
Kill la Kill, on the other hand, proposes characters that do not fit: thus, Ryuko and Senketsu organize their revolution. A revolution conducted by their symbiosis, cutting themselves away from the strata of institutions ruling the world — such as school, family, or State —, empowering the folds of Ryuko’s rebellious body wearing Senketsu. The production of the folds will not go back to the strata, in a circular movement, they will be novelty, transforming virtual worlds of desire into life possibilities.
Senketsu does not know its backstory; there are gaps in its memory. Ryuko will wear it and resemioticize her own story, in a destructive yet creative plastic process where the world is transformed and she defeats the organization that aims to control the whole planet by covering it with Life Fibers. Senketsu, with its language that only Ryuko speaks because she wears its fabric, is the tool with which the main character will disorganize power.
Ryuko and Senketsu create their crypt, their own unconscious assembled through unique perceptions and affections, with which they will generate pragmatic investments, alliances, and universes of reference. They are Lazarean characters — surviving death, experimenting with the dizziness provoked by the dust of hallucinatory microperceptions — so as to create new worlds from the materiality of their cryptic symbiosis (Viegas, 2023).
Studio Trigger’s production — when creating Senketsu as a character in an over-the-top and perverse narrative of humans fighting against clothes and then to have Ryuko as a merged ontological existence — makes us consider the other worlds we do not see, the other languages we do not hear or understand. Senketsu is a powerful cryptic weapon that speaks its own language, enabling the conceptual proposition that redefines the unconscious as unconsciouses: as multiple symbiotic catalysts searching for Others of the Other, results of immanent revolutionary processes. With screen-based media, every anime can be a Senketsu, and individuals can wear electromagnetic signals as uniforms, creating their crypts.
Signaletic animism operates — nonmetaphorically, but intensely —as Life Fibers, where one wears images that hit the body and entangle the organic and the inorganic, recomposing its circuits and therefore the world. This approximation between signaletic animism and Life Fibers is not metaphorical because conceptualizations, thoughts, are body. The body is not an effect of language, but an affecting force of expression and creation: where language is a secretion, one of many movements in the circuits of libidinal investments organized by its singular autopoiesis.
Kill la Kill has an animistic plot that invites Kawakubo Rei’s 1997 collection for Comme des Garçons to the conversation. Titled Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, the designer created fashion pieces which produce body mutations. Kawakubo was interested in perspectivist crashes when making the collection in a process that emerged after she brought the word Renaissance to the atelier. While working with the pattern cutters, Kawakubo also exploded the projections of the word.
Renaissance, as a subverted signifier, is used by Kawakubo Rei beyond language or history, causing baroque confusion — not a cartesian aesthetic judgment of the material image based on the mind and body anthropocentric divide — by limiting the geometric comprehension of what is dress and what is body in a fashion show due to the curves and masses produced with meetings. Taking possession of the French word Renaissance, the Japanese designer gave birth to new incomprehensible body shapes.
Kawakubo liberates both the form and libidinal investments to compose molecular rearticulations of strangeness or unheimlichkeit that we may call, after Eduardo Viveiros de Castro — and his multinatarualist contributions that follow Amerindian perspectivism —, as anti-narcissistic (2009). From the atelier of the Comme des Garçons, she proposes a new diagram of forces between clothes and flesh.
With characters such as Senketsu, anime becomes a praxis of media and art that reaches out to the clinic of psychoanalysis — reformulating or reframing understandings of the unconscious in the contemporary. This is a predicate of the Freudian cause: in other words, the persistent mutation of the concept of the unconscious due to its intensive immanence in relation to desire production in everyday life and technology.
Jacques Lacan conceptualized both the tensions and discontents between Nature and Culture after Sigmund Freud’s work by underlining the importance of desire in the rhythms of psychoanalytic practice. For Lacan, desire is produced by the existence of a relational object — object a —, which may appear during the transferential process (Lacan, 1962-63/2004). Lacan proposes that the analyst becomes the analysand’s object a: the root of one’s own desire.
For Félix Guattari (2015) — who criticized and yet improved the Lacanian notion —, object a is a nonobject resistant to representation, resulting in both the experience of anxiety and the necessity of aesthetic elaborations of new universes of reference — namely: other Others —, composing more narratives, mise-en-scènes, expressions, resemiotizations, and transmonadic opportunities for virtualities to emerge. For schizoanalysis, object a is what confuses representations of the body, creating novelty outside of language, from the movements of the flesh: an opposition to the refunds of pleasure due to castration that are coordinated by metaphors in the epistemology of the lack.
Thus, Senketsu can be defined as the desiring process that happens in the connection between schizoanalysis and contemporary psychoanalysis —where symbioses of Nature and Culture are analyzed semiotically, and desire is understood as novelty that surpasses phantasmatic compensations for discontents in culture: deterritorializing libidinal investments, assembling the forces of the folds, tearing their monads apart from the social strata.
Contemporary psychoanalysis as both a discipline and a daily praxis in the epistemology of dizziness listens to revolutionary desire by promoting zones of emergence composed of semiotic particles of microperceptions. Schizoanalysis instructs us to work with enunciative coordinates in fragmented and decentralized multiplicities using the immanent power of the unconscious that infrastructures bodies beyond the classical psychoanalytic understanding of cultural castration — in other words: the Oedipus Complex as the myth introducing a body to the signifying chain.
These considerations, when one clinically works with them while writing or listening to someone else in the ethical vertigo at the heart of ecosystemic necessities, may contribute to the production of new comprehensions of art and culture in connection to power, individuation, symbolic alienation, and mainstream screen-based media.
Bodies, through agency and assemblage, compose worlds. One must investigate vectors of future and virtualities in the enunciative territories conceptualized in the schizoanalytic texts of Félix Guattari, where the sexualized body transforms affecting forces into worlds. These forces detach themselves from a familiar gestalt of the strata and use the technology of Senketsu as a weapon of the war machine to manifest desire, mutate, and survive: producing their own folds, assembling their own languages, symbolics, cogitos, and cultures.
Families of one, as Deleuze and Guattari propose in Anti-Oedipus: triggering a process of resemiotization from one’s own folds, symbioses, cuts, and attachments. Families of the crypt that can emerge as existential spaces inside of a house, at work, during the school recess, in everyday activities when one is watching narratives from a television set or a personal device — in a different spectatorship experience from that of the film theater and its cartesian image projection. Screen-based media transmits electromagnetic images that touch the body, streaming hapticality. Thinking with haptic images in semiotic unconsciouses is to look for a more ancient ontogenetic process than the one produced with words (Freud, 1923/2010, p. 57).
We may understand that the notion of the outside of the strata can be the inside of a bedroom, where a person stays for the entire day isolated from the rest of the household, but in intense connection to screen-based media narratives; fiction is a living thing that alters the flesh while the flesh alters the whole world, producing a crypt. Contemporary psychoanalysis must work with, listen to, problematize, and conceptualize this clinical setting.
Kill la Kill is episodic fiction that actively reflects upon anime’s machinic power of affection in a semiotic ecology of individual microperceptions and dizziness. In its reflexivity, Kill la Kill encourages viewers to think, to feel, and to analyze their own spectatorship not as passive conditions, but as active agency: an epistemology produced by their entanglement with signaletic animism, in a combination of affected body and affected thought. Could affected body and affected thought become body that affects and thought that affects, something that individuals learn from anime?
Patchwork and Virtual Worlds
When conceptualizing technological models in The Smooth and The Striated section that is part of their A Thousand Plateaus book, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss the epistemological importance of the patchwork to the nomadic war machines; we also highlight the patchwork as a transmonadic possibility. Deleuze and Guattari argue that patchwork compositions assemble haptic ways of decentralized processes of production that run with the rhythms of a basic motif.
Patchwork’s technological model, thus, appears as an interface of materials and variations where agency is relationally underscored in a hands-on visual assemblage. Relationality that is transmonadic, or trans-individual: producer of several unconsciouses instead of partaking in one meta-philosophical transcendent unconscious as the barred Other. To articulate fashioning forces when dealing with the powers of perceptions and affections that exist between media and individuals, we must read Deleuze’s and Guattari’s paragraph on patchwork modelization:
There are many interfacings, mixes between felt and fabric. Can we not displace the opposition yet again? In knitting, for example, the needles produce a striated space; one of them plays the role of the warp, the other of the woof, but by turns. Crochet, on the other hand, draws an open space in all directions, a space that is prolongable in all directions — but still has a center. A more significant distinction would be between embroidery, with its central theme or motif, and patchwork, with its piece-by-piece construction, its infinite, successive additions of fabric. Of course, embroidery’s variables and constants, fixed and mobile elements, may be of extraordinary complexity. Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery. But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way: there is no center; its basic motif (“block”) is composed of a single element; the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from the harmonies of embroidery (in particular, in “crazy” patchwork, which fits together pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the texture of the fabrics). (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, pp. 594-595)
As a post-Lacanian undertaking, schizoanalysis claims that one must not work with a central point of view or theme — namely: the phallus, the masculine characteristic of the libido, the lack, culture, the myth, the One, or Man as the ontological condition to be compared with or developed from as the Other.
For Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, hysteria would be what questions this central theme; on the other hand, for schizoanalysis, questions are missing links, they are not in relation to a central theme. Questions are posed with animism by the organic and inorganic lives of percepts, affects, and concepts in the evolution of species (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 241): an infinite decentralized and fragmented movement between order and chaos, produced piece-by-piece, with folds, opening the space for both new materials and forms of expressions.
Here, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari meet Sandor Ferenczi’s Thalassa (2018), where the libidinal body — in Moebius Strips and folds within monads — looks for new vibrations and contractions produced by sensations to transform itself and the world. The monad is a one-infiniteths (1/∞) existence — a finite infinite —, full of folds, alongside several other monads in their own processes (Deleuze, 1988, p. 66).
Patchworks operate with the technology of the folds, where vibrating tissues of a mutating body — in contact with microperceptions — keep transforming themselves into new compositions, recreating the virtuality of different worlds. This is the epistemology of dizziness, an active agency that is not referenced by what is inside of the institutional strata, but by what is yet to be known — the variations of the “crazy” patchwork.
Matoi Ryuko, in the anime Kill la Kill, after meeting the uniform Senketsu, starts folding the semiotics of their locked-in cryptic symbiosis, working with their singular intermingling forces. They become a basic motif which transforms the narrative with the immanent power of their combined bodies.
The patchwork, instead of operating with a structure that organizes a central Law to the composition or a choreography, starts with a basic motif that triggers image variations and improvisations which will be put together in a time-based mise-en-scène of haptic narrative actions. Patchworks are productive screens where spectators of the basic motif will have their agency activated by its first movements.
A basic motif, an image, is a proposition, a question, a problematization, an ecosystemic necessity that aims to create a machine. This machine is not harmonious; it does not look for a phantasmatic complementization with the Other. The desiring machine is rhythmic and playful, revolutionary, keeping its movement because it pragmatically opens itself to uncontrolled narratives expressed in components of varied sizes, shapes, colors, and textures.
In its transmonadic nomadism, the desiring machine conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari throughout their lives demands a new sensibility toward technological compositions. It introduces an aesthetic paradigm for the clinic of the unconscious by underlining animism and multiplicity as composers of predicates within enunciative circuits. The desiring machine subverts the critics to Sigmund Freud’s proposition that anatomy is destiny by recreating incorporeal predicates with mutating actions of the body.
Individuals change the anatomy of their bodies because of libidinal investments. Agency works assembling destinies while desiring machines trace noninterpretative maps to virtual worlds, producing their own unconsciouses in the process. These unconsciouses, nevertheless, are crypts: never confirming a hermeneutic or phenomenological clarification. They are unruled by the symbolic and its mediations. Our hypothesis is that viewers of anime use screen-based media to paradoxically create alternatives to these mediations: they are nonreducible contemporary discontents, utterly incomprehensible.
As Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok write down when analyzing the Wolf Man’s case and conceptualizing the crypt, Freud’s sentence Wo Es war soll Ich werden must be changed. In the screen-based fragmentations of contemporary cryptic transmonadism, we may redefine the unconscious patchwork with Abraham’s and Torok’s proposition — where the Wolf Man disorganizes a clinical-theoretical structure by creating his own unconscious, in a new sentence: Wo Ich war soll Es werden. Instead of comprehension, the clinic of the unconscious appears as the organization of a neighborhood to the analysand’s desiring productions.
In his book on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze (1988) shows a diagram of the relations between monads and the world in which a circular movement takes place between them. As an original contribution to the studies of contemporary psychoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s texts, we find it necessary to connect this monadological diagram to the nomadic screens of smooth spaces where the patchwork runs against the main theme of the symbolic. This is the diagram, from the chapter The Folds in the Soul:
However, on the strength of the nomadic patchwork assembled by screen-based media and individuals, we stress that the movements between monads and the world are not circular. Monads express noncircular lines of flight to virtual worlds. These lines of flight are libidinal circuits from the impregnated body, which assembles with media singular existential graspings in infinite variation. Within each monad, one travels in a crypt to outer space, developing technological models of existence by gathering varied materials found in the world, in complex symbioses.
The crypt is the negation of a mixing with the Other, which would institute the symbolic — according to Sigmund Freud’s articulation developed by Jacques Lacan in his lecture Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever (1966/1970) or with the jargons foreclosure and name-of-the-father — as the psychoanalytic foundation and condition for the clinic. A technological model, the crypt puts psychoanalysts in the position of rethinking the discipline’s methodology because of its impenetrable composition that protects incomprehensibility. The crypt appears as the sophisticated weapon of the war machine against the striated space of representation, interpretation, and known experience; it is a creation in the epistemology of dizziness, beyond the limits of the epistemology of the lack and its substitutive pleasures.
Instead of being a neurotic structure of meaningful cover memories organized by phallic signifiers, the crypt denies its analysis: being a composition of the intense dust of microperceptions, becomings, and fugitivity that confuses the psychoanalytic setting. With signaletic animism, the paradigm of contemporary psychoanalysis may shift to the cryptic patchwork of screen-based media intermingled with individuals. Through aesthetic operations, the unconscious structured as language becomes semiotic unconsciouses in a machinic media ecology.
Semiotic unconsciouses are the catalyst folds merging Nature and Culture with the technology of the cryptic patchwork; they organize variations that come from the libidinal monadic body. The monadic body explodes its representations of both the world and its own compositional organs. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari continue their argumentation which connects transmonadism to nomadism. For them, decentralized points of view are haptic and call for digital (numérique) powers, references, creations, and predicates of the vibrating body:
The “monadological” points of view can be interlinked only in a nomad space; the whole and the parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. (In a much cruder fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the same function: to give the eye a digital function.) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 616)
The mind is not an interpreter of the senses or a metaphor to the finger; it must digitally create its haptic ability due to ecosystemic interaction leading to contractions of the organism. In other words, the digital is what can be produced without an earlier reference, liberating the folds of resemiotization. This is a crucial difference between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis because the interlinks between vibrations and contractions are points of view within a body that is multiple and yet singular: its expressions must be unchained from cultural signifying structures.
Following Deleuze and Guattari, kaleidoscopic unconsciouses which infrastructure the body run with mutating symbioses while pointing out that the production of desire, in its revolutionary specificity, may also be the production of organs. Schizoanalysis proposes a different path to be taken by post-Lacanian elaborations, deviating from Jacques Derrida’s introduction to Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s book, Slavoj Zizek’s texts on cinema, and Catherine Malabou’s destructive plasticity: which are philosophical explorations of the unconscious mediated by representational language or the culmination of the symbolic built by the neuroscientific apparatus (Derrida, 1976; Zizek, 2013; Malabou, 2022).
The sexual body is the question of the unconscious because it poses an evolutionary problem concerned with episodes and seriations, with what deviates from the Other or the State apparatus and transforms itself. Transformation is possible on the strength of the libido investing in technological models which allow both nonreproductive and nonrepresentational lives to survive. The sexual body does not work with mythomachias or the unreal — yet very representational and possessive — organ that is the lamella (Lacan, 1964/1973, p. 220) capturing it; it works with sensations and counterattacks, actively secreting back its investments as results of the interminglings of desire, perceptions, and organs in a tense semiotic field of virtuality.
This is the conceptualization of the body without organs: where intensities, not meanings, change the rhythm of vibrations and contractions, altering the circuit of the drives by reformulating diagrams of forces present in erogenous zones. The libido fuels the extrinsic movement of driving machinic circuits — of new singular apparatuses — that fold themselves due to ecological challenges. Folds are the autopoietic agency of object a, assembling the crypt, an inner world created with diversified aesthetic expressions.
Conclusion: Not Simply a Matter of Vocabulary!
We reach the conclusion of this essay at a crossroad that aims to push further Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s contributions to both the clinic and the theory of the unconscious, beyond speculative ideas. To do so, we need to work with Guattari’s paragraph that follows our essay’s opening quotation extracted from Chaosmosis:
To speak of machines rather than drives, fluxes rather than libido, existential territories rather than the instances of the self and of transference, incorporeal Universes rather than unconscious complexes and sublimation, chaosmic entities rather than signifiers — fitting ontological dimensions together in a circular manner rather than dividing the world up into infrastructure and superstructure — may not simply be a matter of vocabulary! Conceptual tools open and close fields of the possible, they catalyze universes of virtuality. (2022, p. 180)
In our investigations, we argue that unconsciouses do not operate in a circular manner. They are infrastructural immanent operatives that conduct movements of agency and assemblage in lines of flight to the outside of superstructural definitions of the strata. Thus, as a radical undertaking in the epistemology of dizziness — capable of infiltrating and provoking much needed contemporary transformations in the ways we both listen to and work with analysands at psychoanalytic schools, universities, and in our daily practices —, we confront a problem: Can we speak with a cohabitation of old and new psychoanalytic terms, notions, and jargons in a Thalassean sea of folds of thought that is body?
Because we look for unconsciouses instead of the unconscious in the contemporary, it can be possible to pragmatically use the words machines and drives, fluxes and libido, existential territories, instances of the self, and transference, incorporeal universes, unconscious complexes, and sublimation, chaosmic entities and signifiers that operate together in the cosmological politics of psychoanalysis. Vocabularies are investments of the body which create opportunities for its own change — vocabularies assemble the crypt, referring to the title of Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s studies on the Wolf Man: Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups. Affects, percepts, and concepts are together composing animistic blocks in a patchwork of sensations which opens spaces for universes of virtuality.
At the same time, the crypt is a protecting device for the Wolf Man and an attacking strategy against symbolic interpretations. The crypt pointed out the necessity of transformation within the psychoanalytic setting. Sigmund Freud had to use transference and nonfamilistic planes of composition when working with the analysand.
Senketsu, in Kill la Kill, is the object of art that introduces to Matoi Ryuko the nonobject of her desire; she will build her crypt with it, her living condition. Ryuko will use Senketsu to smooth striated spaces of representation, including her own body which is combined with it — the mirror-image of the body is the most powerful representation. The main character of the anime show will then have the power to affect, to confuse, to remix new vibrations and contractions of her body with possible worlds: becoming herself a symbiotic object of art, of screen-based media, of signaletic animism. The symbiosis of Ryuko and Senketsu may alter our ways of working and living by showing new engagements inside of psychoanalytic inquiries. The study of her fiction makes the imbrications of clinic and theory hallucinate, showing new trajectories that can be taken in personal analysis or when receiving analysands.
In the composition of contemporary life, an anime such as Kill la Kill is screen-based media elaborating on its forces. We say that Kill la Kill conducts analysis because we did not look for representation, myths, and identifications in it. We debated a work of art via its intensity, beyond meanings: attentive to the pragmatics of vocabularies and sensations that enable the emergence of new forms of expression and existence.
By dealing with contemporary individuations and the production of unconsciouses while attentive to openings and closings in the discipline of psychoanalysis, we aimed to propose the conceptualization of an epistemology of dizziness. Such epistemology allows us to discuss noncircular schizo-journeys that short-circuit the real and the imaginary. These journeys happen away from the symbolic strata — they have an extrinsic relationship with institutions such as family, language, culture, or State —, inviting readers to a debate about the monadic nomad crypt, its incomprehensibility, percepts and affects, and the persistent mutations that keep the Freudian cause alive.
Disponibilidade de Dados de Pesquisa:
Não se aplica.
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Financiamento/Funding:
Esta pesquisa foi financiada pelo European Research Council Consolidator Grant Film and death (n. 101088956) / This research was funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant Film and death (n. 101088956).
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Editores do artigo/Editors:
Paulo Antonio de Campos Beer, Wilson Franco
