Deleuze Explained Simply Pt.1

People tend to find it very difficult to understand what Deleuze is getting at when they attempt to read Deleuzian philosophy. In practice, it really isn’t that hard to understand what it is about, there are lots of layers of obfuscation that cause it to be more difficult than it has to be. Talking to a friend the other day I was explaining Deleuze and I’m repeating much of what I said here for the benefit of others who are confused.

The key thing to takeaway from D&G is their focus on Desire as the key principle in all of philosophy. Their view boils down to the idea that everything in society, as well as all the structures of society, are essentially like plumbing/funnels to contain, repress, and restrict forms of raw desire.

Throughout their texts they quite literally use a kind of plumbing analogy throughout, in the form of ‘libidinal flows’. For them, your flows of desire are put down the tracks that society lays down for you. The question you are supposed to ask in the face of this is: How do you escape from this mindset?

That is really all you need to understand their mode of analyzing society. The main factor they identify as the linchpin of control is psychology and in particular psychiatry as a key component in the restriction of desire.

If you let your passion or desire or thought runaway in a way that is outside the confines of governance and societal structures restricting you, you are ‘crazy’ or ‘criminal’ for letting desire guide you rather than staying in the lanes society has laid down for you.

The title of their texts is a representation of this ‘Anti-Oedipus’, they see themselves as being in a fight against psychology and psychiatry. For them, this as the ultimate form of restricting you when you can’t be restricted by society at large, when you go too wild.

People often point out the overlap between Deleuze and Foucault, and it is true that Foucault has much the same analysis. The difference here is that Focault always writes books that are more like history books, and he tells his philosophy through a critique of the development of societies institutions/frameworks.

He goes through the history and reads his postmodern critique into that history. D&G boil everything down to ‘desire is policed’ and create an overarching critical system of society, and then they develop methods for how they think this can be overcome (Foucault does not really do this, he just speaks critically).

Most of the time D&G focus on the micro-structures of domination as opposed to this greater macrostructures. The easiest way to explain how they user this is to say that there are certain things which I desire, which aren’t actually restricted of me but I don’t do them regardless.

As an example I could rip something up or tear a door down and make a table out of it, but the microstructures of domination and value judgements which exist in my head stop me. These structures might cause me to stop even if I wholeheartedly desire to do it. The world is a complex layering of controls which cause me to do certain things inside my own desires.

Each micro thing by this description is connected up into the macro levels of control through this layering process and is roughly the same.

The things which I am ‘able’ to do in my life are thus funneled into flows of desire that are allowed. Things outside of that I’m apprehensive about or subconsciousnly mentally downgrade into things I don’t ‘really’ want to do. This can be the case even for things that don’t have a explicit negative consequence to them.

D&G place most of their emphasis on this psychic-form of control. The control of your desire in your head, and again they just skim over most of the macro unlike other thinkers. For them everything is centered largely within the micro-level of ‘desire’ in the barest form.

One of the most confusing parts of Deleuze is the so-called ‘dynamic unconscious’ or this is often called the schizo-consciousness. This kind of wording is super confusing to almost everyone, it is not literally saying that you should be schizophrenic. It is arguing for a mode of thought that they see as emblematic in a schizophrenic person.

For example, if I am schizophenic, we can go back to my previous example, I might rip the door off the hinges and make it into a table. I might for example scream at a person in the street because I decided today that I don’t like the color red and they happened to be wearing a red shirt. This for D&G is analogous to a person with a fully liberated sense of desire.

Unlike a normal person, this type of person in a mentally ill mindset does not have these societal micro-restrictions placed on them. These restrictions don’t really factor into their thoughts on what they should do in a given moment. This leads to all sorts of ‘crazy’ behaviors obviously but the craziness of the behaviors is not what the authors are actually arguing for.

Instead, the authors are arguing that this sense of non-restriction to desire flows is something that we should try to emulate. We should try to live our lives in a mode that is liberated from all these micro-restrictions that would normally limit my range of actions within the world.

The point of schizoanalysis isn’t literally to say ‘go act schizophrenic’ to say this or talk like this is totally missing the point of their texts. The point of this mode of analysis is to essentially be able to analyze a situation without restrictions in terms of the ‘raw affordances’ provided. We should take the options that we can imagine for ourselves in a literal material sense, and choose based on that in a kind of zen-meditative headspace.

The question D&G are saying we should ask is kind of like ‘what would I do if I had no restrictions as if I were a schizophrenic in this situation?’, this is really the basis for what they are trying to get at. I also want to apologize to anyone reading this who might actually be schizophrenic or have some sort of similar mental disorder. These are the words of authors writing in the 1970s, and I feel like a lot of this is quite frankly kind of insensitive.

The ultimate goal, as a book I’ll quote from puts it quite well is the following: “decentred subjects, liberated from what they see to be the terror of fixed and unified identities, and free to become dispersed and multiple, reconstituted as new types of subjectivities and bodies.”

So what does this mean? It means that they are trying to breakdown the notion of self or some form of a fixed identity. They try to create this kind of decentralized form of ‘being’, that is made up of multiple people or new ‘bodies’. They often put this as new ‘subjectivities’ in their writing (see also the work of Agamben).

They are in effect trying to create experimental modes of ‘being’ or ‘entities’ outside of what we generally are used to. The form that these take in a post-technological era are fairly trivial, and you might not think of them as creating new forms of subjectivity because they are so common place that we take them for granted.

It is easy to make up random examples, there might be a decentralized being that is a joint multiplicity that exists between me and a friend. This can be said to exist in some way and we can quantify this as a ‘body’ in and of itself.

A more pedestrian example might be creating a VR character that I portray as a Vtuber. Maybe this entity exists such that my friend plays it sometimes and I play as the character other times. We swap out our bodies/personalities constantly as we interact with one another in a VR space. All of this feels pretty standard in the world we live in though.

The goal here is not to simply do silly combinations or constructions for their own sake but to do these in order to design some new form of revolutionary warfare against society at a grand scale.

The smaller examples are a lot easier to understand and comprehend but none of these smaller examples I’m giving are what the authors want to build out. They want revolutionary tools that exist in some chaotic mode of alternative forms of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’.

I keep referencing VR but Deleuze does this very explicitly in a non-technologically minded way. He has a whole theory of ‘virtuality’ and the linkages between these experimental structures and the way they are enabled by tech, is one of the main reasons why technology is often called postmodern by philosophers.

With tech, it becomes incredibly trivial to act in this postmodern mode of being that these older philosophers envisioned. As I said before, it really is so similar that you probably don’t even think about what you are doing as being radical whatsoever.

In a historical context however, this is where the ideas and concepts originate. The texts give a much more complicated and overall larger formulation of these concepts and the possibilities of them in a non-technologically bound way.