II. Further Applications of Spinoza
This section is organized as a conceptual roadmap to demonstrate the applicability of a substance-unconscious for a contemporary diagnosis. It begins with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of the plane of consistency and becoming-animal, connecting through Friedrich Nietzsche’s unhistorical man and horizonality to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s caution of a third unconscious arising out of the post-coronavirus crisis, which is encapsulated by Catherine Malabou’s idea of destructive plasticity that underscores the depressive and depersonalized states of the body when the mind is in distress. To conclude, I will speculate what could arise as the third unconscious. Each concept carries forward, implicitly or explicitly, Spinoza’s insistence of the body and affect, and the importance of creation with regard to the unconscious, and each philosopher offers a stepping-stone to a larger and integrated understanding of how we can conceptualize a substance-unconscious.
1. Pure Movement, Multiplicities, & the Intensive
Deleuze and Guattari are inspired by Spinoza’s definition of the affectual register as a “question of lines, planes and bodies,” and use this formulation to expound their own conception of movement.[1] In the chapter “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal” of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Spinoza’s God-Substance as the plane of consistency, “the intersection of all concrete forms.”[2] This particular plane is the ‘intersection,’ meaning it is what informs form and is prior to the articulation of beings, and is also what all beings are intersected by, or partake in. The plane of consistency consists of all bodies prior and posterior to their emergence as material in the world.
Like Spinoza, they agree that what distinguishes participation on the plane of consistency is each thing’s “movement and rest, slowness and speed,” yet their approach emphasizes “the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations,” and stresses the composite nature of all bodies.[3] Each plane is a space upon which thought and movement take place. Their method spatializes substance to the degree that various movements are conceived as planes located on top and all around each other, where every plane serves as a method of transportation that expands and contracts based off the dimensions it gains according to the multiplicities that are traversed.[4] Spinoza would say that the bodies that emerge, connect, and disconnect on each plane represent a specific kind of modality, and from these connections multiplicities arise as a composition of planes and their movements and expressions.
The multiplicity is an expansion of Spinoza’s modalities, but instead of being concerned with the individual, Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with the creative flows that incite movement and the production of ideas. A multiplicity signifies something that produces at all times, seen in how
Becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is not defined by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has […] Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogenous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors.[5]
In contrast to a multiplicity, the individual is seen as a thing that solidifies ideas onto it, and as it moves through its experiences, it collects. Deleuze and Guattari decenter a center that holds and insert the individual into the plane of consistency with the process of becoming—their system describes pure movement. “Affects are becomings,” and this activity is determined by an incessant ability to expand and disconnect, constantly changing its composition.[6] The plane of consistency grants no distinction between the body and the mind, allowing multiplicities to connect to other multiplicities and perpetually produce; in other words, it formulates an example of perpetual production.
A multiplicity is concerned with the production of ideas at all times, it reveals that there are infinite interconnections of ideas on the plane of consistency that produce more ideas, and these ideas form other interconnections of ideas, and so on. The absence of the individual does not erase extension; rather, it alternatively seeks to emphasize that everything that exists is a temporary assemblage of pure movements and consists of ever connecting and disconnecting multiplicities, as there are “smaller and larger infinities […] by virtue of the composition of the relation into which their parts enter.”[7] Everything on the plane is interdependent and is transformed by how a multiplicity connects to other multiplicities—every movement is production. Like Spinoza’s substance, everything is interconnected and ideas are immanent to the expression of all matter.
To reconceptualize the individual, Deleuze and Guattari redefine it as a haecceity. A haecceity designates a proper name “in the order of the event, of becoming.”[8] It is composed “entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”[9] The plane of consistency consists of all multiplicities, yet only certain multiplicities are haecceities. Every haecceity is a unique composition and is a being that exists in a way that is entirely new and divorced from convention. A haecceity “knows only speeds and affects,” and various haecceities connect with one another through intersecting lines of movement in order to traverse the affects and intensities that belong to other haecceities.[10] Haecceities are beings that live in direct accordance to their desire. Assemblages are formed and informed by the speeds they come into contact with, what is encountered is the intensity of the affect, where intensities are pure “asignifying particles,” pure affect.[11]
Intensities create a haecceitic movement that breaks a multiplicity through to a direct connection with the plane of consistency; intensities take place during an encounter and break through the pattern of what is given. In terms of Spinoza, the intensity marks a crescendo that clears the noise of inadequate ideas, thus allotting one to locate and use their own desire to create an adequate idea. Intensities are ‘asignifying’ as the plane of consistency is not concerned with resemblance or representation, but with pure experimentation and potentialities of ideas. The higher the intensive, the higher the frequency for movement, as one’s desire is able to express itself, given its ability to experiment—to connect and disconnect from other bodies.
The plane of consistency signifies a plane where things are entirely in becoming; it is the realm of the unconscious, for “becoming produces nothing other than itself…what is real is the becoming itself.”[12] The haecceity materializes as an assemblage of motion, shaped by the intensity of its affects. Moreover, the haecceity conceives of a being that is entirely in connection with the unconscious, one who produces freely and incessantly. Spinoza would define the haecceity as a being that has freed its desire in a moment of creation, where its entire existence consists of perpetual moments of creation.
To further illustrate how an intensity is embodied by a being, Deleuze and Guattari present the notion of becoming-animal. The process of becoming-animal is akin to the haecceity and does not concern itself with resemblance nor the ideas that already exist and circulate.[13] The animal interests itself in “modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling.”[14] It proliferates by “epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes,” singular events, and in this regard, becomes a hybrid, something that cannot reproduce itself “but begins over and over again every time, gaining that much more ground.”[15] The animal body adapts to its immediate surroundings in order to preserve its being and moves according to the direct need of its body. It traverses affect to affect, intensive state to intensive state, with the drive of preservation. Becoming-animal is a matter of becoming-intense. The animal is fully embodied in life as it is essentially a thing that moves. The reality of becoming-animal is “affect in itself, the drive in person.”[16] Animal-being renders a state of perpetual becoming—it suggests a means of practice to conceptualize a fully integrated body and mind and the movement of creation and production.
2. The Unhistorical & Horizonality
Fredrich Nietzsche, in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life has a similar notion to that of becoming-animal. He contends that an animal lives “unhistorically,”as it “goes into the present like a number without leaving a curious fraction;” it is wholly here and now for its mind is not weighed down by the past nor does it stretch itself into the future, possessing an integrated mind and body.[17] The animal lives in a kind of imperative bliss, following its direct needs and living exactly in the moment. The capacity to live unhistorically has to do with how an individual is situated to its essence and whether or not it can express its desire. Nietzsche insists that man exists separated from his body, and therefore from his desires. Man’s education installs in him prescriptive ideas or, as Spinoza would say, inadequate ideas, by which he is under the assumption that he has conceived on his own. This man carries
an immense amount of indigestible knowledge stones around him which on occasion rattle around in his belly […] This rattling betrays the most distinctive property of modern man: the remarkable opposition of an inside to which no outside and an outside to which no inside corresponds.[18]
Man is caught in a historical, inherited narrative where ideas are no longer discovered, performing ideas according to givens. The mind cannot recognize the dimension of the body, for knowledge that cannot be digested cannot be incorporated or known by the body. Self-consciousness has stalled the machine endowed to man and has led him to a pasture of infinite horizon. The absence of an enclosed horizon places the individual in a space where they are, from every angle, bombarded by givens and cannot create according to their desire, as their desire is concealed by the noise of the world. An infinite horizon marks a space where the mind can know an infinite amount of things, but the body cannot act, as the mind has the possibility to think infinity in the moment, the body cannot act infinitely in the moment. Ontology, knowledge of what one is, is force fed and mystery evaporates as every passageway is predetermined by a false and imposed light.
As man’s horizon widens he retreats into the “smallest egoistic region” due to the fact that “the excess of history has attacked the plastic powers of life.”[19] The “plastic power of a man” is “the power distinctively to grow out of itself, transforming and assimilating everything past and alien, to heal wounds, replace what is lost and reshape broken forms out of itself.”[20] Plasticity is a reassessment of one’s shape as one encounters new situations, and Deleuze and Guattari would say that it is the being’s ability to partake in multiplicity and to constantly reorganize its capacity to be here. Plasticity hardens when the mind’s ideas are solidified, when a history obfuscates the present.
The unhistorical issues a new realm where “every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful only within a horizon.”[21] The horizonal situation of the unhistorical parallels the space that creates an adequate idea, as that space concerns a being’s integration of their body and their mind. An unhistorical situation removes one from the commotion of the current time and allows them to exist in a realm of their own. The unhistorical “resembles an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life is generated only to disappear again with the destruction of this atmosphere […] a bright lightning flash occurs within that encircling cloud of mist.”[22] This light is the flash at the moment of creation, the sudden contact with the real upon which an idea arises out of substance. When the room is dark one calibrates to the animal nature of their direct body. Experience necessarily requires experimentation, one must traverse the dark territory of God with their own light extending toward their own horizon.
It appears that Deleuze and Guattari were inspired by Nietzsche’s analysis. The unhistorical approach parallels “the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming.”[23] Becoming does not exist according to a history nor historical ideas, but to transitionary states between affects,
Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a particular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone because they take on those relations. A haecceity is inseparable from the fog and mist that depend on a molecular zone, a corpuscular space.[24]
History creates its own inadequate ideas, appearing as a force that influences how beings act and think through the creation of givens. The unhistorical zone is the affectual space that is absent of givens, history, and narrative. The intensity of the experience, alongside the dark, forces the body and the mind to unify so it can locate itself. Location on the substance of God necessarily uncovers an adequate idea, meaning that when an individual can assess their mind and body according to their desire, they can create an adequate idea. The responsibility after the event is “to organize chaos” by situating one’s ideas and body alongside affect so the world becomes a more habitable place to move through—so one can experience it fully.[25] It is not to sediment ideas, but to cultivate a plasticity towards events. This organization is analogous to the assembly of common notions seen in how an individual uses their desire to create meaning and assess the world.
Deleuze remarks that Nietzsche’s overarching project is “about getting something through in every past, present, and future code, something which does not and will not let itself be recoded. Getting it through on a new body, inventing a body on which it can pass and flow.”[26] A pattern flows beneath all operations of extension and thought. What comes to be is the assemblage of matter as it crops up here and now according to the environmental and social situations that determine it. The new body is the expression of desire and plastic life in becoming. The idea of animal being, or the animal-intensive, is the recognition of an organic and possible state of being that already exists. It serves to remind us that action and creation originate from the affectual space of the body.
3. Contemporary Diagnosis & Destructive Plasticity
When a horizon broadens, it splinters the body from the mind and one’s desire ceases to be one’s own. The mind is apprehended by ready-made ideas that effect the apparatus of the body, further divorcing both movements. As Nietzsche insists, the rupture between the inside and the outside “must disappear under the hammer blows of need.”[27] In The Third Unconscious, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi portends a third unconscious rising out of the ramifications of coronavirus in 2020. As individuals were forced to quarantine for the safety of themselves and of others, life was forced indoors, but more importantly, online. The being in the world element of existing alongside others disappeared as technology became the means by which people were able to communicate and interact with one another. The exponential use of screens further increased the divide between the information the mind can know and have and how the body is able to act. There is a lack of action in this reality and an increase in what beings are exposed to due to the fact that screens are the medium of communication, news, education, and connection with others. The crisis revealed the current economic, political, and social disaster as awareness of the body returned to the center of life, for the body has direct, undeniable needs: preservation, survival, and community with others. Berardi hopes to channel attention to this contemporary space that has slid open. His work is cautionary, but not without hope as he seeks to remind us that there are approaches to living that allow an individual the harmony of body and mind.
Berardi follows Deleuze and Nietzsche, noting that “the unconscious is a realm without history,” and that the space of immanence and creation can only take place unburdened by givens while it seeks to bring forth alternate ideas and new possibilities of movement and desire.[28] It must be noted that the symptomatic unconscious is a reflection of how the human being is cut off from substance and how one’s essence works symptomatically to try to express itself, but fails while doing so. Berardi presents two former formulations of the unconscious and its relationship with the conditions of human experience.
The first rendering of the unconscious was determined by Freud to be the dark underbelly of consciousness. Due to civilization, man had to learn to repress his desires and instincts for the functioning of civil life. Repression symptomatically materialized as neurosis: the internalization of drives and desires that play out symptomatically on the body as stress, hysteria, anxiety, obsessive behavior, and other compulsive disorders. Man was severed from the ability to act on his thoughts and desires.
The second conception of the unconscious began with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They instead conceive of the unconscious as a laboratory, a “magmatic force that ceaselessly brings about new possibilities of imagination and experience” instead of its former conception as a theatre or a repository of conscious experience.[29] If Freud’s diagnosis was neurosis, Deleuze and Guattari’s was psychosis. Psychosis manifests through the incessant whirlpool of networked events that cause “nervous hyperstimulation and psychological frustration.”[30] It is linked to capitalism, over production, and the “acceleration of nervous stimulation (seduction, simulation, hyperreality)” alongside “neoliberal globalization” that all provoke “a disturbance in the sphere of experience.”[31] The horizon of experience expands beyond any means of participation. The excessive data explodes the inner world of the individual and the mind cannot keep up. The post-coronavirus individual is a spectator to the ensemble of hyper-expressivity, incessant flows of information, and unmitigated external desire. Berardi asserts that the psychopathology that emerges
is marked by anxiety, attention disorders and panic. Depression comes as the final symptom […] the intensity of the social and emotional rhythm becomes unbearable and the only way to escape suffering is to sever the link with desire, and, consequently, also the desiring link with reality.[32]
Catherine Malabou in Ontology of the Accident would interpret such severances as a destructive plasticity that serves to prompt survival of the organism midst serious trauma, where trauma can be described as a “temporary disarrangement of the cognitive chain,” a breach of composition.[33] Severing seeks to maintain the body’s biological imperative of preservation and appears hardwired into the human system as a tactic for survival. The appearance of this symptom reveals that the individual does not exist in a way that agrees with their body, as is illustrated through the widespread diagnosis of depression and other depersonalization disorders that disclose the environment is inhabitable. “Destructive plasticity enables the appearance or formation of alterity […] plasticity is the form of alterity when no transcendence, flight or escape is left. The only other that exists in this circumstance is being other to the self.”[34] Alterity is that Other, something entirely separate, than what one is. What emerges is a self that is not connected to its essence as a form of protection in harsh conditions; modern man is becoming another form of man entirely.
Malabou, like Nietzsche, regards plasticity a power that assists modification while one is influenced by external bodies. The capacity to reorganize and adjust is the requirement of life. Destructive plasticity, on the other hand, results “from the divergence in the movements that constitute the changes, the disorder of its directions.”[35] Instead of one moving higher or lower compositionally, its composition fractures, fleeing its essence and desire. This change results in a coldness or indifference, marking the emergence of depression—a severance from participation in the world.
In an environment where one’s attention is captured, “the Spinozian question ‘What can a body do?’” becomes “‘What is the extent of its freedom?’”[36] Hyper-expressivity is the product of an overstuffed mind. The body either suffers its excess or shuts down. The extent of the body’s freedom is contingent on the extent of its ability to think and act. The mind cannot think and cannot access the real or its unconscious in a bodily disconnect. A third unconscious will arise from this fissure and will form in reaction to social and environmental circumstance. Berardi imparts “that philosophy and psychoanalysis […] should assume the horizon of chaos and of exhaustion as a starting point of their reflection.”[37] This reflection uncovers that the crisis “comes from the collapse of the body,” indicating that a solution must begin in the domain of the body. Berardi proposes that “we are passing the threshold that leads beyond the cycle of labor-money-consumption […] The problem is: What are our concrete needs? What is useful for life, for collectivity, for therapy?”[38]
I speculate that the third unconscious will arise in one of two ways: the body will either be back at the center of life, where individuals will be rightfully integrated to their essence and be able to create and express their desire, or capitalism and technological advancements will continue to accelerate, further splintering the body from the mind, and individuals will live in a world entirely composed of givens, or inadequate ideas, and will enact a destructive plasticity, as outlined by Malabou, in order to preserve their sanity. As the previous conceptions of the unconscious were a theatre and a laboratory, the third conception might be something along the lines of a data center: a place that endlessly circulates old ideas without experimentation and is stuck in finite permutations on an endless feedback loop as the body and the mind cannot connect in order to create.
Berardi and Malabou pay attention to how depression and depersonalization disorders arise as consequence of the accelerating pace and limitless exposure of the mind and the inhabitability of the body in such conditions. The mind and body are divorced from a common reality and therefore are cut off from modes of expression. Depression severs one’s connection to desire as the mind essentially shuts down due to exhaustion, hyper-stimulation, and hopelessness. A reality where vast amounts of people fall ill to depression and related disorders is one that cancels out potentialities of creation and fostering a better future.
On the other hand, Berardi emphasizes that the body is where we must begin if we want a healthy relationship to the unconscious. A third unconscious could possibly be shaped in the likes of Deleuze, Guattari, and Nietzsche’s conception of the creative being, for their notions put the body and its movement at the forefront of how the mind is able to interact with the world. To focus on the body and its needs means slowing down capitalistic production so one’s desire has the space it needs to create. When computed givens that serve and maintain an inherited structure dissipate, the desire of the individual can come forth and one can create or assess a situation that is aligned with how things are in the here and now. This option for the unconscious might be a healthy plasticity where the goal is movement, change, and is constituted by creative production and expression, yet this option is ideal and would require a severe alteration of modern society and its use of communication and information technology. I believe that a forming unconscious is being shaped by how detached we are from our bodies through being online. A diagnostic allows change and the creation of possibilities for a better future. Now that we know what a body can do, we should figure out how we desire to live in it.
III. Conclusion
If we investigate the Ethics through a psychoanalytic lens, meaning we emphasize drives of desire and how the body and the mind work to parse through experience, we will arrive at a conclusion that, in terms of Spinoza, substance, or God, is akin to and functions similarly to the unconscious. God is substance; substance is everything that constitutes existence. The unconscious is production, creation, movement; arbiter and nexus of drives; it is immanent to existence and requires mediation in order to express itself. Substance thinks and acts, relates its infinite ideas through its attribute of extension, the modality of the body. The body is the medium of God’s creation, of unconscious production as it is the thing that expresses ideas and brings about action in the world.
As demonstrated in the second part of the essay, there are avenues of research that complement and expand the notion that the material of the world and existence is the unconscious, that the body constitutes a form of thinking, and since the body and the mind work to express existence, when they are forcibly disconnected, a being cannot live a healthy or creative life, as it is detached from its desire. Exploring how desire manifests itself for each individual is to track the movement of the unconscious. The unconscious crops up in moments of the here and now when it directly communes with its contemporaneous material conditions in order to create and produce ideas that confirm the reality that an individual inhabits.
Bibliography
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo.’ The Third Unconscious. New York: Verso, 2021.
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.
Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity.
Massachusetts: Polity, 2012.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980.
Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
[1] Spinoza, Ethics, 68.
[2] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 251.
[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 254-255.
[4] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 268-269
[5] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 249.
[6] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 256.
[7] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 255.
[8] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 264.
[9] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 261.
[10] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 262.
[11] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.
[12] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 238. My italics.
[13] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 233.
[14] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239.
[15] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 240.
[16] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 259.
[17] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980): 9.
[18] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 24.
[19] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 57; 62.
[20] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10.
[21] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10.
[22] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 11.
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 296.
[24] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 273. My italics.
[25] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 64.
[26] Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (New York: Semiotext(e): 2002): 253.
[27] Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 27.
[28] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Third Unconscious (New York: Verso, 2021): VIIII.
[29] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, IX.
[30] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, X.
[31] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, X.
[32] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, X.
[33] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, 60.
[34] Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 11.
[35] Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 37.
[36] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, 46.
[37] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, VIII.
[38] Berardi, The Third Unconscious, 16.
bbkafka 