Zen Chaosmosis

^{This short presentation is excerpted from the paper, “Félix Guattari, Zen and Chaosmosis,” China Media Research 17/3 (2021): 41-54.}

 

The collapse of two states, one of chaos, the other of complexity, indicates a position between spasm and Zen that Guattari sought in schizoanalysis. Wagering on some kind of reconciliation between the two states, Guattari found in Zen a partial solution. The schizoanalyst pays close attention to congelations of chaosmosis, and attempts to extract from them Zen points. He puts it this way in the chapter “Schizo Chaosmosis” in Chaosmosis (1995, p. 85):

It is thus equally from a hotchpotch of banalities, prejudices, stereotypes, absurd situations – a whole free association of everyday life – that we have to extricate, once and for all, these Z or Zen points of chaosmosis, which can only be discovered in nonsense, through the lapsus, symptoms, aporias, the acting out of somatic scenes, familial theatricalism, or institutional structures.

The schizoanalyst has the task of detecting such chaosmotic congelations, which Guattari calls Zen points. Congelations indicate a soft semiotic substance, one of the figures of relative stasis and slow processuality that he will employ, borrowing from his fascination with Japan. The congelations can be discovered in a number of places (in economics, informatics, art, religion, philosophy) by following collapses of sense into nonsense, for instance, which releases promising mutations beyond signification. For Guattari it is always such a collapse or rupture that is at issue and that calls into question therapeutic work as a remodeler of loose fragments and pathic apprehension through empathic submersion. For the schizoanalyst is a diver plunging into the depths toward the seabed of chaos.

Chaos and complexity co-exist and their oscillation shows something of the paradoxicality of chaosmosis. Existential stasis oscillates with slow processuality, between catastrophe and redemption, signifying Guattari’s key to creative evolution in which complexity enriches itself by plunging back into chaos, while chaos dreams of its future in complexity.

For Guattari, the tendency of paranoid grand narratives, sports fandoms or racist phobias to become mixed up make them the “daily bread” of schizoanalysis. Hence, his emphasis on “un fatras,” a jumble, a hodgepodge, typical of everyday life, from which “Z or Zen points of chaosmosis” will be extricated through access points like “nonsense, the lapsus, symptoms, aporias, the acting out of somatic scenes, familial theatricalism, or institutional structures” (1995, p. 85). Compositions of chaos are also characterized by Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994) as choids. Composition here entails slowing down and management of variables as they appear and disappear. Chaoid states (i.e., concepts, creative assemblages) are provisional because they are continually unmade, cast back into the depths. The struggle against chaos is therefore infinite.

When Guattari uses the term ‘Z point’ he is referring to a collapse away from heterogeneity. A Z point is the lowest point and closest to zero (measured in speed, energy, etc.). Yet it is not negative or nothing. In a discussion with Kuniichi Uno, Guattari explained: “The zero of intensity risks chaotic abolition. Chaosmic movement, which consists in permanent comings and goings between chaos and complexity, does not stop inevitably at the zero point” (Guattari 2012, p. 89). In schizoanalysis, collapses may be detached from their “chaosmic vertigo,” as Guattari explains. And in this detachment their heterogeneity may be restored as their virtual force of potential is empowered, in a way that eludes capture by homogenetic ontology (capital B-being) or capitalist discursivities (technolibertarianism, neoliberalism, etc.). In order to apprehend the virtual through its potential for transformation as such, a Zen point exposes a “virtual nucleus of complexity without bounds” (1995, p. 84) and is apprehended in a congealed state. Schizoanalytic pragmatism is attuned to the chaosmic and creative emergence of an infinity of virtualities from Z points.

Throughout my book on Guattari and Japan, Machinic Eros (2015), Guattari utilized Zen in many ways: the “Zen fires” of Min Tanaka whose Buto dances are extractions from the cosmos, or the remarkable heterogeneity and diagrammatic promises of Keiichi Tahara’s photographs – “a windowpane shatters into kanji gesticulations, then solidifies as a futuristic Zen temple” (2015:69). Guattari’s adjectival deployment of Zen is for a specific purpose: to underline moments of chaosmosis (osmosis and chaos) in select Japanese art. Zen points may be detected and then detached or, again, extracted. Why does Guattari use Zen to name such a point? Guattari reaches out for Zen as a reminder to the schizoanalyst neither to betray the schizo journey nor become distracted from it, and to give a name to a deformable point amidst an infinite backdrop of what must appear as a reversible process of dissolution and reformulation, softly delineated.

There is no detection and extrication without the schizoanalyst’s submersion into the depths and intensities of immanence. Paradoxical textures irrupt in chaosmic experience in which an event has a texture of both catastrophe and redemption, of complexity and dereliction.

A schizoanalyst can detach congealed points of chaos and complexity in the course of undertaking an analysis. These points appear Zen-like in a way that Alan Watts tried to evoke in his descriptions of cosmic consciousness, in which he meditates on commitment to the “uncontrolled and ungraspable background” (1973, p. 39) of human existence together with measured restrictions, plunging into the depths or “earthing.” For Watts in This Is It, in rare moments one merges into the background, through a controlled chaotization, which is stratified by the foreground of restraint (1973, pp. 37-9), even if this latter complexity sometimes turns out to be that of a “refusal of motion” characteristic of catatonia. In reverse, when complexity is released from its signifying obligations and the control of meaning, it can result in a gesture or action in Guattari’s estimation, that goes nowhere. There are many reactive approaches that help distraction and misrecognition succeed and thus prevent the detection and liberation of Zen points. These points begin in the “primordial soup” of chaos/immanence and are among the “virtual potentials of complexification” that are released from it (Guattari, 2013, pp. 103-5). This is not to say that they do not relapse into it. Detachment entails reversibility and readiness for another emergence and detachment. Guattari constructs psychotic events as irruptions with a “pathic consistency that leaps at your throat” (1995, pp. 77-8). These irruptions expose subjectivity’s relationship to the ground, to “earthing,” or to the depths, especially crises and catastrophes, but also drug use, trances (2013, p. 115), and perhaps even to satori, by which is simply meant an emancipatory enlightenment experience, as Daisetz Suzuki summarizes it in Zen and Japanese Culture (1973, p. 16).

 

Both schizoanalytic pathic apprehension and Zen practice need to overcome obstacles. The first grapples with a teeming “hodgepodge” of banalities and distractions, while the second wades through “sediments” of sense, intellect and morality (Suzuki, 1973, p. 17). The schizoanalyst must surmount inherited models of psychosis just as the Zennist must avoid abstractions, those “conceptual scaffolds” around reality (1973, p. 361). The issue is that clearing the way to insight is preparation for extrication. The relationship between Zen and the artist’s work in extracting chaoids is suggestive. For both struggle with chaos, defined in terms of speeds, infinity and undoing consistencies, whereas for Suzuki “what Zen does is to delineate itself on the infinite canvas of time and space” (1973, p. 17). The comparison is with the painter who leaves on canvas a composed trace of an encounter with chaos, as Suzuki explains, the artist creates “forms and sounds out of formlessness and soundlessness” (1973, p. 17). The idea that artists share something with the chaos from which they borrow is worth considering, since this sharing is expressed well in Zen through the recognition that, despite intrusive “opinions” about the role that “tranquility” apparently plays in Zen artistry towards nature, “the aim of Zen is thus to restore the experience of original inseparability” (1973, p. 359). To reach back to the pre-discursive “fusion” of subject and object, which Guattari found in both phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and some anthropology, but also in hypnosis, is to find a pathic transitivist subjectivity, full of non-discursive intensities, and identificatory equivalences.

It cannot be expected that extracting Zen points of chaotization is akin to selecting and then plucking a pre-formed entity which is then relocated. Rather, such points are indeterminate since they channel two forces moving in opposite directions at once, one towards chaotic dissolution and the other toward reformulation as a discursively coordinated assemblage.

To be stuck at such a point of dissolution is a psychotherapeutic predicament; but conversely, those who suffer from normopathy do not know points of chaosmosis. Zen points cannot be extracted as if they were static and fully formed. They must be experienced through contact, in their dynamism and intensity, and neither treated as objects from the outside, nor assigned a place in an aggressively applied frame. To “surf around the infinite” is the practice, to follow Peter Pál Pelbart, of the schizoanalyst, to “install a multiplicity that calls into question the dichotomies inside and out … the form and its dissolution, the unlivable speed and its interruption” (2015, p. 186). A schizoanalyst engages in a Zen-like daily practice of diving into homogenetic immanence and liberating heterogenetic coefficients. As this dive goes deeper, it perhaps reaches and witnesses the fusion of subject-object, de-differentiated, non-dualistic, in all its precariousness. These Zen points of potential heterogenetic repositioning are the dynamic congelations that the schizoanalyst liberates by extraction, deploying them as supports for subjectivation and encounters with alterity. Zen points of chaosmosis are, then, fundamentally creative, even those closest to a point of “Z collapse,” poised before blockages rather than openings.

In Suzuki’s (1996, p. 315) description of emptiness (sunyata) as it may be experienced in Zen Buddhism, he emphasized the following factors of overcoming conceptualization (philosophical logic bearing upon reality) and advocated a “method” that he described by “in all nakedness plunging right into sunyata itself,” beyond the subject-object, being-nonbeing, permanence-change dualisms. Emptiness neither implies nihilism nor eternalism. Guattari does not perform this overcoming of contradiction in a synthesis of opposites, here in the shape of fullness and emptiness or immanence-transcendence. Rather, he eschews the construction of pure oppositions, such as discursive-non-discursive, homogenesis and heterogenesis, chaos and complexity, by directing the schizoanalyst to dive into chaos and to come back after “rediscovering” something from this wellspring of infinite speeds, bearer of hyper-complexification, and “reservoir of existential operators” (2013, p. 104). Guattari approaches the plane of immanence, the primordial soup, by neither assigning fixed and static forms to chaos, nor by asserting a pure formlessness in which anything stable must necessarily dissolve.

References

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1994). What is philosophy? H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, Félix (2015). Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan, G. Genosko and J. Hetrick (eds.) Minneapolis: Univocal.

— (2013). Schizoanalytic cartographies. A. Goffey (trans.). London: Bloomsbury.

— (2012). Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie. Paris: Lignes/IMEC.

— (1995). Chaosmosis. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Palbert, Pál Peter (2015). Cartography of exhaustion. Minneapolis: Univocal.

Suzuki, Daisetz (1996). Selected writings. New York: Doubleday.

— (1973). Zen and Japanese Culture. New York: Princeton University Press.

Watts, Alan (1973). This is It. New York: Vintage.