Jorge Ranz Clemente

31/05/2019

Deleuze Seminar: Matters Of Life and Death

Our use of Drugs

I remember the first time I took drugs in a recreational way, interrupting the relation I
had had with drugs until that moment (by medical prescription, by paternal care, by
psychological recommendation...). It happened at the end of one winter, in the backyard
of a middle-high-class suburb with community pool, with three more friends. We all
had in our minds the pieces of advice and warnings from our parents, teachers, and even
our TV idols, that said to us –with beers and wine in their hands, cigarettes on their lips,
and ibuprofen, diazepam, Prozac... running through their bloodstreams– that taking
drugs was stupid. And they were right, they were absolutely right, we knew their
reasons. But what it was all about in that park was precisely to indulge in stupidity in
order to detoxify ourselves together from that same reason that was always right.

And why not? What did stupidity mean for them so that they wanted to protect us from
it, from a direct confrontation with it? Why should we remain in the space of a reason
that was starting to be felt more like a prison than like a shelter? They used to say
“listen to me, and trust me when I tell you that this is stupid” and, then, they normally
told some instructive story with a little pride and nostalgia. Stories of when they faced
stupidity, of when they experienced and overcame it, dominating it, deactivating it and
keeping it at home like a stuffed animal that they had hunted many years ago and were
now dusting for us. It was that experience, that taxidermy of dominated stupidity that
they kept with affection, from where they affirmed their reason, from where they
extracted it and advised us what to do. All their reason and thought drew their strength
from the intense observation of those taxidermies of a stupidity that had been dead for
years and in which they sometimes got lost, recreating themselves with them for hours.
And, to be sincere, I usually loved hearing these stories, feeling their comfort, how
easily they entered me, making me feel protected and oriented. These stories established
the coordinates from which to compare our own experience, knowing perfectly, and at
all times, where the good and evil, the right and wrong or the truth and falsehood that
guided our actions were.
We lived there, in that museum of taxidermy, our house. And from there we also took
our ideas, our judgments. But that reason seemed to us as dry and detained as the dead
stupidity from which it drew its strength. We began to see the immobilized reason with
which they tried to protect us as a sort of prison. How, feeling an enormous amount of
teenage strength and energy, were we going to confine our life to a museum of
taxidermies that, dead as they were, could not even gaze back at us? Maybe it was that
feeling of confinement, suffocation, and catatonia that made us want to wake up or
reactivate the stupidity they had killed in order to get out of our confinement and try to
confront ourselves directly with it. And so we did; we went to take drugs in a park.

The philosopher must be sufficiently perverse to play the game of truth and falsity
badly: this perversity, which operates in paradoxes, allows him to escape the grasp of
categories. But aside from this he must be sufficiently ‘ill-humoured’ to persist in his
confrontation with stupidity, to remain motionless to the point of stupefaction in order
to approach it and mime it, to let it grow within himself (this is probably what is
referred to as ‘being absorbed in one’s thoughts’), and to await, in the always
unpredictable conclusion to this preparation, the shock of difference. (Foucault 1977:
190)

We were a group of friends, sitting around a metal table, and we were together in what
we were going to do. We all watched, almost without speaking, how one of us clumsily
rolled a joint. Meanwhile, we listened to the fallen leaves scratching the ground, feeling
crossed by affections and sensations that we did not get to understand very well, that we
did not know how to categorize. We looked at each other and already felt high by the
very idea of intoxicating ourselves together. The chemical effect of cannabis and
alcohol (maybe the last thing we felt and the first one to abandon us) was a joke
compared to this first sensation. We were already high by the shared stupidity, which
we felt as a mixture of stupor and complicit perversity.

We were discovering little by little a space in which the rules of meaning of parental
reason not only did not work but could in fact be rendered inoperative. It was a space
that broke with the parental categories that organized us and our world. Hence the
stupor: we found ourselves a bit in a non-sense, feeling a huge intensity due to the
discovery that our potentialities could expand beyond the scheme of good and evil, truth
and falsehood, imposed by a parental reason that kept itself (and us) anesthetized,
narcotized, controlled, organized and safe.

LSD inverts the relationships of ill-humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner

eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference
and disintegrates the dumb show of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and
acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentred, spiraloid,
and reverberating, but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm
events. (Foucault 1977: 190)
·
In this sense, we were not taking drugs to escape from our bodies, enclosed in these
parental schemes. On the contrary, we drugged ourselves to free our bodies from the
structures and boundaries that kept them organized and separated from our corporeality.
The use of drugs appeared for us as a detoxification of the paternal reason, as a
disorganization that allowed us to feel our bodies, what they could take or not. In other
words, to come closer to their limits beyond the margins that enclosed their
potentialities. We grew up and disorganized ourselves: we mined our logic losing little
by little our will and finding our body in the void the will left behind. There was not a
closed "me" or "you" that should or must in order to can do something. We turned
around the duty that had ruled our actions; now, it was a matter of what we could do,
what our bodies could take. There was a body whose potential increased or decreased as
it approached or moved away from that parental plane of reason. There was an "us"
together in a park, cold wind in the face, leaves running on the ground. There was
smoke, and everything was moving. The stuffed stupidity came back to life; we crossed
the line from stupidity to stupefaction due to this motion.
·
Drug effects reorganize and disrupt the production of ‘sense’; they both represent and
actually figure in the challenge to Reason that Foucault identifies closely with. They
cross over the literal/metaphorical and actual/virtual divides and confuse the issue of
whether actual drug effects and figurative or cultural side-effects can ever be
disentangled. (Boothroyd 2006: 164)
 ·
Our perversity was due to our persistence in continuing doing the stupid knowing that
this was gradually going to erode the reason that had kept us in comfort, warmth and the
supposed protection that our homes should have given. Stupidity was filling our houses
with beasts that were beginning to wake up from a long dream. But it also made our
house a little less paternal and more a matter of that park, of that cold, of those leaves
that rolled on the ground, of the trees and pigeons that surrounded us. Stupidity made
our house a little more our body. This change did not mean that we left our former
homes, the school, or the Institute for that park. Neither it meant that we escaped the
whole parental sense-production regime. We could not leave that and, what is more
important, we did not want to do so either. What changed was our way of moving from
this space to other ones, our capacity to change dimensions. This new mobility was like
taking the cultural and educational plane of our educators, which seemed absolutely
rigid and flat while unfolding in us, and make a fold in it. And then, persist in making
folds in order to find new angles from which we could play with our potentialities.
These were for us the first doses of adulthood, which had nothing to do with finding
ourselves alone and sufficient in a stable identity, as self-managed-almost-omnipotent-
identities, but rather as totally connected bodies, dependent on everything that
surrounded and integrated them. For us, adulthood had more to do with opening and
being sensitive to those connections that increased our potentialities. We were on the
move. After all, stupidity filled us with energy, power, life...
·
The crucial point is the acceleration of the existential speed, a sort of flush of energy,
which is the mark of desire in the sense of the expression of potentia. What is affirmed,
asserted and empowered in the ethics of nomadic sustainable subjects is the positivity
of potentia itself. That is to say the singularity of the forces that compose the specific
spatio-temporal grid of immanence that composes one’s life. This life is an assemblage,
a montage, not a given; it is a set of points in space and time; a quilt of retrieved
material. It is the project that makes for the uniqueness of one’s life, not any deep-
seated essence. Many contemporary artists struggle with the idea that everyday reality
is just a stratified data bank of sedimented habits and that inducing changes upon them
is a question of setting mobility at the very heart of the subject. Many of them rely on
tactical decontextualization as their standard practice. This consists in removing the
subject from the expected steam of experiential data to which she or he has grown
accustomed. This dislocation of the subject opens up spaces where new modes of data
intake can be implanted, and hence new sensorial, perceptual, conceptual and ethical
insights (Braidotti 2006: 232)
·
Over time, what happened with that stupidity? What could we do, once we had faced it
and enjoyed ourselves in it, in order to avoid falling into an amorphous and monotonous
fluid without sense or form? And what could we do not to dissect it or deactivate it like
our parents? Moreover, what to do, once stupidity had returned your gaze, with the
world that it had made us leave behind? None of us wanted to assassinate it again, but it
didn’t stay reactivated in the same way for each of us. Stupidity had taken us to places
far of our daily coagulated, motionless reality without giving us any map or operating
instructions in return. It had taken us into a mobility that, to a certain extent, blew our
subjectivity, our world, our time, our space, and our speeds. In other words, we were
having adventures in dangerous worlds without coordinates; worlds in which you have
to be very fine and precise in order not to lose your way back or to destroy yourself in
the process.
·
Use a very fine file (…) invent self-destructions which have nothing to do with the death
drive. Dismanteling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening
the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions,
levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and
deterritorializations measured with the craft of surveyor.(Deleuze 1987: 223)
·
Some of us tried to stay on the intensity of that stupidity, loosing themselves in it and
still wondering at every moment why to come back to a world that makes them suffer
when they have free access to a network of artificial paradises. Others, gradually lost
interest on drugs, only to come back to them some years later, when it was no longer
their parents, high school or university who locked them up, but a job that dried their
time and desires by paralyzing them indefinitely. In this new scenario, they used drugs
to support the weight of a life that consumed their desires and the strength needed for
the effort to break down with it. The rest of us tried to continue playing with stupidity,
to keep it alive, but without being eaten by it, facing at every step the risk of being
surrounded by equivalences and ambiguities instead of by the enormous multiplicity of
differences through which we could increase our potentialities. The aim, for us, was
neither to let the body fall into endless polymorphism nor to let it rigidify; rather, we
wanted to stay inside the limits of its plasticity.
Both the ones who remained enclosed and lost in the intensity of stupidity and the ones
who used it to support the weight of their working days, separating them from
themselves, have made of stupidity a place to return, a habit. Thus, what was a non-
place of games, an increase in the mobility of the parental plane of meaning, an agent or
catalyst for becomings, eventually regained a fixed meaning for them that annulled and
erased the flow of differences, producing a drug assemblage; a space discursively
defined, coherent and materialized. But, for the rest of us as well, the more our lives
became rigidified outside the re-creative use of drugs and friends, that is, the stronger
and demanding the production, control, and request to answer to identities materialized
itself in the sense of work, responsibility, having to earn money, to be respectable, to be
men, straight... the greater was our need to create as well a coherent and closed space in
order to escape from our daily world. This was a way to deal with life by
fragmentarizing it; for a period, the whole group of friends built a plane that had
nothing to do with that fuel or lubricant we experienced before and which had helped us
to fold and break planes, to change between dimensions with a greater sensitivity to
capture our potentialities in each movement.
·
Drug addicts continually fall back into what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all
the more rigid for being marginal, a territorialisation all the more artificial for being
based on chemical substances, hallucinatory forms and phantasy subjectifications.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 285)
·
What we sought, in that moment, was merely the chemical effect, not everything we
found before. The drugs-assemblage we built provided us with a world to flee, to escape
from the world and from ourselves; from our tired, strained and apathic bodies. But in
that flee, what we found was also loss of control, erroneous perceptions, and bad
feelings. The drugs did not work as before, and the less they functioned as the fuel of
becoming that once gave intensity to our lives, the harder it was to realize this lack and
the more we abused them, looking for an effect that they were not going to give us
anymore. It was hard to realize that getting high was no longer the question. This
getaway separated us from our body and of our potentialities. The more demanding and
strong were the connections that asked our body to be stratified and aligned with
externalities, the more we wanted to leave our body, cutting all those connections. We
could not use the drug to play with these connections anymore. These disconnections
and estrangements from the body and its potentialities were, in turn, what led us to not
recognize the dead-end of the drug abuse, to the destruction to which the drug abuse
would lead us. They took us not to know the limits that our body was trespassing. We
were not able to affirm the ‘line of flight’ and make a positive choice in favor of the
materialization of life.
When our parents and other producers of the reason where we were locked up said that
it was stupid to take drugs, they were looking to protect us. Protect us from a process of
self-destruction that, if not measured correctly, could be a direct passage to death. It was
the fear of death that made them place it in the place of stupidity; an stupidity that they
kept away, stuffed, stopped and always looked from a distance that only gave back
silence. This fear expressed as protection had the counterpart of stopping life, of
keeping it locked in a sacred plane, as something necessary to maintain stopped like
another taxidermy. For this reason, life was also something that stayed away from us, in
a transcendental plane. After all, we were their children and they wanted us alive and as
less stupid as possible. In this sense, when we started playing with stupidity in the park
we were also reactivating death, approaching it, playing with it. We were interrupting
the idea of our being here forever in the center of a life without limits. As if death and
life were things external and distant to us that only occasionally we looked with fear or
even with inclination due to it's being far away, unattainable. In other words,
approaching it meant to be aware of our finitude, our vulnerability, and fragility; it
meant to explore its limits and make ourselves in charge of them for the first time. To
play with death was to see ourselves as acrobats in the line of crack, longing for a void
that no longer returned silence but the sound in it of our body. When life and death were
not remote, they forced us to take care of them, they made us take care of us and
accompany ourselves. It brought our body and its limits and put them in our hands.
Death was there, among us, as another friend whom we began to know and with whom
we began to reconcile. If before we knew it badly through the eyes of our parents as
another taxidermy represented through anguish and fear, now we reconciled ourselves
with it and it appeared to us as strength, as power, as desire. This did not mean that we
necessarily had an inclination for death, but it introduced what Bousquet and Deleuze
call a longing for death, a wish to take charge of our bodies, which were finite and that
required a constant attention that they did not have before. Longing for death was for us
to take control over our lives, not as if they were something given in which we were in
the center without limits or horizons, but as a project, a negotiation with its limits, a
constant attempt to widen them, even if it meant to think and work beyond the idea of
pain and pleasure.
·
This proximity to death is a close and intimate friendship that calls for endurance, in
the double sense of temporal duration or continuity and spatial suffering or
sustainability. Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way
of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. We build our house
on the crack, so to speak. [...] The proximity to death suspends life, not in
transcendence, but rather in the radical immanence of just a life, here and now, for as
long as we can and as much as we take. Death frees us into life. (Braidotti 2006: 211)

References:

Boothroyd, Dave (2006) Culture on Drugs. Narco-cultural Studies of High Modernity.

Manchester: Manchester University Press

Braidotti, Rosi (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1992. A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi
(London: Athlone).

Deleuze, Gilles (1990). Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New
York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel (1977). Language, Counter-memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press.

Plant, Sadie (1999). Writing on Drugs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.