What we have then is a way of thinking about human life as made up of distinct sets of practices based upon the totality of discursive practices, and the integration of these
with the totality of practices of visibility. Here a representational understanding of the relation is cast out, as the distinction between what is said and seen operates between the relations of two semi-autonomous sets of practices. This is to move constructionist accounts (such as the discursive theories discussed earlier) into the realm of ontology. This disengages with ideas of singular subjects and objects, to notions of the fluid multiple, something that Mol (2002) refers to as ontological politics. So where does this leave us? Firstly, there is a need to deal with exactly how to work this distinction.
1.10.1 Content and Expression
Deleuze & Guattari (1987) focused on this distinction between discursive and non- discursive practices. The concepts they developed to think about this distinction were
content and expression. The realm of non-discursive practices are forms of content, whereas discursive practices are forms of expression. Expression works by means of signs, but not in a representative way. Crucially, to quote Deleuze & Guattari, “one cannot posit a primacy of expression over content, or content over expression” (1988: 97). They refer to distinct, yet inter-dependent, multiplicities. Multiplicity does not refer to a multiple as opposed to a singular. It is not framed in terms of there being a definite ‘one’ (i.e. subject or object). Rather, it refers to a space in which different forms of subject and object are formed, re-worked, and interact in a fluid manner. It is a way of referring to differences that do not sum up to produce a coherent whole, but which nevertheless are held together.
It is in his writings on Foucault that Deleuze (1988) introduces the concepts of content and expression, when discussing the concept of strata. Forms of expression and content both have a form and a substance, which Deleuze (1988) lays out using Foucault’s writings on prison life in Discipline and Punish (1995). Deleuze (1988) demonstrated the forms of content of the disciplinary practice of punishment through incarceration were the prison itself, along with its inhabitants. We saw earlier how the spatial organisation and design of the Panopticon allowed for and produced particular consciousnesses of being a prisoner. The forms of expression at work in this
assemblage were Penal Law, which acted as the mechanism through which people were imprisoned, and the notions of delinquency, on which Penal Law based its action. The prison is nothing without the prisoners, whilst Penal law is devoid of meaning without the notion of delinquency. Yet, each of these parts all operate at different
levels, contributing different forces of production. The discursive formation of delinquency and Penal Law provided forms of knowledge that were distinct from the forms of visibility of prison life produced by the inmates in the Panopticon. Its design producing a self-regulating embodied consciousness due to the fear of constant surveillance from the central tower. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) summed this up in stating:
‘Precisely because content, like expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing or averring a correspondent content.’ (1987: 95)
These discursive practices, designed to say something about criminality at the time, produced distinct forms of knowledge than those of the spatial organisation of the prison and inmates themselves. The concepts of content and expression refer to the way that the discursive and non-discursive operate as distinct multiplicities. Distinct
because they operate in a semi-autonomous fashion, neither being entirely reducible to the other. Multiple, because each is formed through the regularity of the inter-relating of (either discursive or non-discursive respectively) heterogeneous practices in a space in which they become recognisable as such. Deleuze describes the concept of
multiplicity as follows:
‘…multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system.’ (1994: 230)
Discursive and non-discursive practices are dependent on each other; discourse does not exist in some ethereal space completely without contact with any non-discursive substance, nor can forms of non-discursivity stand alone without the productive input of the discursive. They require each other’s presence, but are productive of different
parts of relations of knowledge. They produce distinct forms of knowledge, which themselves inter-relate in the production of wider knowledge practices. They come together in the production of knowledge and experience.
We saw earlier the example taken from Goffman’s observations of the workings of administration of ECT in mental institutions, in which forms of expression as set out in psychiatric texts on treatments produce knowledge that is distinct from the socio- embodied matrix of knowledge produced in the space of ECT administration in a hospital. Its visibility is very different to what is written about it, particularly as its content exists in a wider social space (e.g. with medical staff and audience) than the individual focus provided by texts.
1.11 Territorialisation
In considering how people become service users in the first place, it is necessary to think about the varied ways in which they become subject to forms of knowledge that mark them out as service users. The concept of territorialisation is a useful one here; as it refers to the ways that people become subject to particular forms of knowledge, and subsequently their experiences are modified accordingly. It bears similarities to Hacking’s (1999) notion of interactive kinds we saw earlier in terms of the ways it recognises that people’s experiences and actions are affected by the forms of knowledge that they are exposed to. But, like interactive kinds, territorialisation accounts for the subsequent ways that people actively re-work the kinds of knowledge forms applied to them. They are not just passive recipients, or docile bodies.
Experiences are coded, for example, when experiences such as Rob’s in the earlier extract become captured, coded, and thus territorialized through the diagnostic practice of psychiatry. Diagnostic terms, e.g. paranoid psychosis, become the forms of
expression that relate to the contents of experience. They become the psychiatric apparatus that codes experience. With this comes a whole raft of territorializing factors. For instance, media representations of people who experience mental health difficulties (i.e. as ‘risks’ to the rest of society) (Philo, 1996); medication treatments (with the negative side effects they can bring) (Rettenbacher, Hofer, Eder, Hummer, Kemmler, Weiss, & Fleischhacker, 2004; Smith, O'Keane, & Murray, 2002); cultural
stigmatisation leading to problems maintaining employment (Midgley & Milne, 1995; Pevalin & Goldberg, 2003). All these operate as territorializing forces, that link
together forms of content to modes of expression so as to make experiences understood according to apparent stable forms (e.g. diagnostic categories), despite the natural flux and fluid nature of flows of experience.
So far we have seen some of the multiple ways that service user experience is captured and coded in socio-linguistic forms of meaning. What these have done is to offer alternative reifications of mental health, as we saw in some of the critiques of
biomedical psychiatry. This though can be problematic. In wanting to steer as close to the actual experiences of service users, devising a way of thinking that offers an
alternative reification is not desirable. Rather, what is required is a way of thinking that instead of focusing on the capturing and coding of experience, incorporates a concept of process and change. This is where I will draw on the concept of affect (Massumi, 2002), which places movement and change at the heart of its thought. This will not be elaborated on now, as there are other aspects that need be covered before a full
exploration of the concept will be possible.
When analysing how experience is continually impacted upon and molded by
territorializing forces, Deleuze and Guattari were mostly interested in the moments of change, of continual becoming in different ways from before. That is why we see more of the sister concepts of territorialisation in their writing, namely deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Deterritorialisation is used to consider the ways that
experience is changed, or, to use a term more familiar in constructionist theory,
deconstructed, from previous ways of being. Whereas reterritorialisation refers to how the deterritorialised state is territorialized in an alternative, new, way.
In this way forms of content and expression are indelibly linked to forms of
deterritorialisation, as how they are continually re-worked and become is dependant on the deterritorialising forces at work in any given context. Deleuze and Guattari sum this up:
‘Both forms of content and forms of expression are inseparable from a movement of deterritorialisation that carries them away’ (1987: 97)
Deterritorialisation is really at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, as it emphasises the constantly changing fluid nature of life. New ways of thinking and being continually emerging. In this way, it is really an inherent feature of the concepts that they produce. In service use people become deterritorialised by the practices of psychiatry through which they are recruited as patients. For instance, the application of
diagnostic categories, or the exposure to media representations of the ‘mentally ill’. These are forms of knowledge that deterritorialise people’s pre-service use lives. In this thesis it is the processes of reterritorialisation users engage with in re-working their experiences that are of interest.