Lo doméstico como espacio de cuidados

3. An ontology of complexity offered as a corrective to structur-alist theory.

It’s from a failure to see that machinic segments are autopoietic and ontogenetic that one endlessly makes universalist reductions to the Signifier and to scientific rationality. [CM 30]

4. A political strategy of psychic and social autonomization, especially of subjectivity.

The important thing is not the final result but the fact that the multi-componential cartographic method can coexist with the process of subjectivation, and that a reappropriation, an autopoiesis, of the means of production of subjectivity can be made possible. [CM 13]

- J. W.

Bateson, Gregory

References to Bateson appear throughout Guattari’s solo writing as well as in his work with Deleuze. A controversial and interdisci-plinary thinker, Bateson trained, researched, and wrote in the fields of anthropology, psychiatry, biological evolution, animal studies, cybernetics, and systems theory. He conducted field research and laboratory experiments, in conjunction with his original theoretical work. His book Steps to an Ecology of Mind was particularly important to Guattari, who shared a similar range of interests even if he often differed in approach. Earlier in his career, Guattari took issue with Bateson and his colleagues for their behaviorist and objectivist methodology, complaining that they reduced behavior to a flux of information and were just as reliant on the signifier as the structuralists (MR 88–90). In Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari take issue with Bateson’s theory that schizophrenia may result from the double bind—the sending of contradictory messages which creates a no-win situation for the interlocutor, as when a parent signals love me but don’t love me.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the double bind describes the Oedipus complex, not schizophrenia, which for them is characterized by the refusal of any Oedipal relation (AO 79–80, 360). However, they embrace Bateson’s idea of the plateau of intensity, a continuous

state of excitation that is not orientated toward climax, which is how they define the plateaus that make up rhizomes and assem-blages (TP 21–2, 158). Later, Guattari borrows Bateson’s notion of the ecology of mind to describe the interdependence between humans and their environment, an idea which he incorporates into his own notion of ecosophy (Chaosmosis, The Three Ecologies).

The frequency with which he is cited and the variety of contexts in which he appears show the extent of Bateson’s influence, despite the sometimes critical tone of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of him. - J. W.

Becoming

(Fr: Devenir)

Contending with the nature of change, or novelty, is paradoxical, but essential, Deleuze would argue, for an affirmative existence.

On the one hand, change is not something that we can foresee or predict (utilizing our good sense), because if it were predicable, it would not be new. On the other hand, it is not something that we can recognize (utilizing our common sense), because, likewise, if it presented itself in a familiar form, it also would be determined in advance, and thus would not be new.

Taking inspiration from Nietzsche, ‘becoming’ is 1) unlimited and unending, as it has no true point of origin or destination (the world is always in ‘flux’), and 2) insofar as the past is itself considered infinite, the present counter-intuitively always occurs as the ‘return’ of recognizable and even foreseeable forms, but is irreducible to such forms precisely because becoming can never be ‘given’: it is, as Deleuze shows, always in between the past and future since ‘it moves in both directions at once’ and ‘always eludes the present’ (LS 3, 2). In this sense, becoming is not percep-tible because its onset coincides with its immediate disappearance.

Grasping this paradox is crucial for understanding why, on the one hand, Nietzschean morality affirms ‘being’ according to ‘action’

(and denies non-being according to its reaction and absence of becoming), and, on the other hand, when discussing the various types of ‘becomings’ with Guattari (becoming-animal, etc.), the

BECOMING 41

nature of the process itself is emphasized rather than ‘cause’ and especially rather than ‘result’ (since this focuses on the past and future, which are merely reflections of one another in terms of the

‘becoming’ which they indicate).

1. The central tenet of Nietzsche’s cosmological theory of existence, appropriated from the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, that (in Nietzsche’s version) asserts continual process and denies religious (messianic and eschatological) and scientific (mechanic and thermodynamic) theories of existence which presume that, in one form or another, being may have a final state. Consequently, there is no vantage point from which to judge such existence: it is never blameworthy but is innocent, despite the shortcomings and atrocities of humanity as well as the violence and severity of nature.

Straight at that mystic night in which was shrouded Anaximander’s problem of becoming, walked Heraclitus of Ephesus and illuminated it by a divine stroke of lightning. ‘ ‘Becoming’ is what I contemplate,’

he exclaims [….] He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable

‘indefinite.’ And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being. […]

Heraclitus proclaimed: ‘I see nothing other than becoming. […] You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before.’ [Nietzsche, 1998, 50–2]

If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached.

If […] in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end […]. [Nietzsche (Will to Power #1062), 1968, 546]

2.a. In Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, the form of repetition or state of being in eternal return, where being is never fixed (even when it appears to be so); any ‘sameness’ and ‘similarity’ (or link between cause and effect) is actually indicative of a continual process of change without an origin or destination.

What is the being inseparable from that which is becoming? Return is the being of that which becomes. Return is the being of becoming

itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming. The eternal return as law of becoming, as justice and as being. [N 23, 24]

past time being infinite, becoming would have attained its final state if it had one. And, indeed, saying that becoming would have attained its final state if it had one is the same as saying that it would not have left its initial state if it had one. [N 44, 47]

b. (Special Combination): becoming-active: The being of force only insofar as force is active (destruction or self-destruction), in distinction from becoming-reactive, where forced is turned against itself and nullified, resulting in nihilism (non-being of the negative).

[…] becoming is double: […] becoming-active of reactive forces and becoming reactive of active forces. But only becoming-active has being; it would be contradictory for the being of becoming to be affirmed of a becoming-reactive, of a becoming that is itself nihil-istic. […] becoming-reactive has no being. [N 66, 71–2]

3. In Deleuze’s reading of events in Carroll’s Alice books, that which constitutes the eternal time of the event, and, in accordance with Stoic logic, is reversible insofar as it is considered in itself;

that which does not regress toward an earlier state or progress towards a final state.

pure becoming […] is the paradox of infinite identity (the infinite identity of both directions or senses at the same time—of future and past, of the day before and the day after, of more and less, of too much and not enough, of active and passive, and of cause and effect). […] Hence the reversals which constitute Alice’s adventures:

the reversal of becoming larger and becoming smaller. [LS 4, 2–3]

4. In Deleuze’s perspective on history, political and social change which is, paradoxically, anachronistic; that is, it can only be recognized as novel retrospectively and in its process lacks progressive appearances or indications. [DR, NG]

Becoming isn’t part of history; history indicates only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to

‘become,’ that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. [NG 171, translation modified]

- E. B. Y.