Schizo

Hallucinations, delusions, dreams are not
failed trials of perception to keep in touch with
the real but, on the contrary, they are the direct
penetration of the real's bubbling ferment.
Reality is not the perfectly defined boundary of
what is possible. It is not what can be easily
reduced to concepts. But, as said by Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it is the root of
possibility itself, the creative, explosive
aperture of infinite worlds: "(...) within the real
everything is possible, everything becomes
possible" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 27).
  Yet, even though the limits to the real are
imposed by language (as it is well exposed by
Henri Bergson), the latter is also capable of
revealing the scandalous metamorphoses of
reality once the conceptual fossils upon which
univocality of meaning is established are kept
from dragging it with their petrifying chains,
once words undergo the irruptive and abrupt
transformation that only poetry can grant. The
torrid and dangerous waters of an open
language, cut and split for its lack of fixed
meanings (which does not mean a lack of
penis), expose the real as qualitative change, as
flux, or moving, indomitable, unimaginable
center. The open, non-subjective language,
creates reality while exposing it as the failed
foundation of everything that is possible; that
is, as the unfounded in-itself.
  Therefore hallucinations, delusions, dreams,
are not the useless efforts of whom drowns to
retain, rebuild, and remodel that other lost and
castrated reality (Freud's lesbian), but the
crude, cruel, open, different, defiant perception
of the moving reality. Reality appears, simply,
free, seismic and hungry...and "I" seek
protection or succumb albeit obeying the
conditions of my perception, showing
connections, imposing conceptual, logical
limits...subtracting and sweeping to adequate
reality to the linguistic size of my reason.
  Reality grows eternally. It is additive, always
summing up new beings to its memory. Reality
is surprising, inconstantly novel. Reality
happens! Only an "unsuccessful" language,
wealthy for what it lacks, nutritive for its
incapacity, a language unable to establish solid
relationships, might be capable of cracking
down the security that support our generalities,
and to light new candles in the soul, clean fires
in the woods, opening new nights for new
moons.

     The "schizophrenic" is neither a subject nor schizophrenic (to prelude a critical
discussion of the traditional conception of the terms reality and normality), but, rather, he is
intensive aperture to the possible. Hence, any interpretative discourse on schizophrenic
thought ought of necessity resort to an open language (yet arcane) in which words do not
"send" to consensually accepted meanings but to relatively concrete and personal
emotions.
     Sigmund Freud pointed out that in psychosis, beside the subject's loss of reality (let us
add that rupture with reality also means rupture with subjectivity), a need appears to
remodel reality, prompting the delusions and hallucinations experienced by the psychotic.
     However, such remarks have their foundation in a very specific understanding of the
meaning of the word reality. Reality, as commonly spoken of, is everything susceptible of
being understood in terms of Cartesian reason and toyed with in order to achieve the
fulfillment of the most basic human needs. From this viewpoint, reality is external to the
subject: it is objective. It remains immutable, dead, whereas the subject transforms,
"sickens." Thus, reality (understood as the aggregate of phenomena as it is perceived by
the senses) would be just a regulatory concept whose main aim lies in drawing the limits of
health, and hallucinations the body's desperate attempt (by recreating sensual perception)
to keep its impersonal, "objective" touch with it. Thereby hallucinations would be no
more than mirages, simulacra of reality, a false representation, the indefinite internalization
of what is external to the body.
     It must be added that it is reality that creates the subject (not that reality is the
organized result of the logic inherent in subjective language), and that the consensually
legitimated as authentically real, or objective, is just that which can be manipulated
(objectified) by the subject in the flux. The traditional sense of reality includes everything
that is not real: the reduction of qualitative change to concept, denial of novelty by means
of the categorization of phenomena, and coward forgetfulness of difference through the
mnemonic safety of subjective identity.

     Furthermore, it must be observed that the de-objectified subject has ceased to be the
omniscient observer of reality to become the live flesh inherent in it (the abstract
relationship between subject and object disappears with the disappearance of the
technological grammar which pervades Aristotelian epistemology). The subject is real and
organically inscribed into reality. Language becomes expressive possibility of change and,
deeply and interactively, penetrates what is exterior to the body. Reality ceases to be
interior or exterior in relation to the subject and acquires its proper meaning as flux: active
and reciprocal interpenetration. Language is identical to reality: possibility, change, flux,
tide, affection, intensity, desire.... Reality is pierced by desires, caprices, energetic
impulses, interconnected forces: my dance brings, attracts rain; my faithful prayer grows a
frog in my enemy's stomach; honey and herbs cure the asthma of my son...due to loving or
bitter currents the wheel of destiny weaves its own vengeances and makes of any tree with
a heart carved in its trunk the blind reason for my jealousy and for the death of my rival....
     In his book Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti describes reality as it is
perceived by the "normal" subject, and also explains what it means to be a normal person.
For Arieti the logical relationship of the normal person with reality is ruled by the
principles of Aristotelian logic: reality is absolutely exterior to the subject. For the
schizophrenic subject reality is inseparable from his subjectivity; he is reality, pierced by
(and piercing) Being. Reality is not surroundings or the backdrop to his activities, nor that
susceptible of being transformed by his desires without in turn effecting his own
transformation. On the contrary, reality is ruler of his desires and consequently reproducer
of his volitions. I am intensive reality: I am every being in the universe. Spatial references
are erased. There is no distance. Reality is flux.
     As Arieti sees it, the schizophrenic subject teleologically regresses to more primitive
states of thinking, what he calls paleologic thinking. The logic that directs this type of
organization of the cognitive processes "is archaic or incomplete in comparison to the
Aristotelian" (Interpretation of Schizophrenia). However, the concept of regression, as it is
used by Arieti in relation to schizophrenic thinking, rests upon the discriminatory
assumption that progress is vertically linear (or evolutionary in a Darwinian sense). That is
to say, that it is the advance from archaic states toward more civilized ones. The line is
ascendant, vertical and teleological, impervious to horizontal forces, and servant to the
Law of Causality. The concept of regression is the intellectual consequence of Aristotelian
logic.
     Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Arieti does not understand schizophrenia as a process in
which there are no such clearly defined states of anteriority and posteriori whose directrix
would be normality; rather the process is dynamic, vital and crossed by horizontal fields of
intensity: the vital process is curvilinear. Every process implies a moving chain (Möbius
strip) of relations and rhythms definitively alien to the geometric order of Aristotelian logic
(although, truth be said, Arieti does admit to the relativity of the logical structures of
thinking and that of the concept of pure normality. He is aware of the irruption of
irrational, magnetic, dislocated forces into the logical net of "healthy" thinking).
     The schizophrenic process (preferably the process of reality or of life) is not extensive
but intensive (passionate or mute), unclassifiable, inseparable, indivisible, out of the reach
of the artificial tools of Cartesian reason.
      Any attempt to explain the movement of thought, or to express thinking without
abstracting it from its fluidity, exposes the need for open words, words melted upon life,
new words, neologisms from the jungle. Live thinking needs of torrid verbs, and
sometimes of the silence imposed by revelation, or by the loving gesture wherein "I" dies
only to reappear as the synthesis of every being in the universe. To think is wanting to talk
in-life, is wanting to say that my self-indulgences give life the color of my sexual or criminal
impulses...to talk about life means the condemnation of Socrates, wandering with nomadic
poets, or the bidding on Aristotle's head—because lust is stronger than compassion....
     Schizophrenia is an infinite process, and what Arieti calls regression is but the creative
movement of realities; not a movement toward a state prior to the appearance of
consciousness, but a movement in many simultaneous directions (the indulged paths of
thought): a movement toward the artistic synthesizing of affections and of the body, a
movement for the making of the body without organs (dis-organized) or of the dancer
without stage—the formation of style or the birth of Carmen.
     Arieti believes Aristotelian logical organization to be the limit structure of a normal
person's thought. In his view, the outcasting of such organization would imply the
regression to more primitive logical organizations. We think that distinct logical
organizations (despite the omniscient pretense of Western logic, whose aim is the
technological taming of Nature under the belief in the subject's independent existence) are
not "more" or "less" developed in reference to an axis which measures the degree of
normality or abnormality in thinking, but that they more or less coexist simultaneously and
independently, and sometimes horizontally connected by emotional and affective currents.
Currents which are intensive, curvilinear, and completely arbitrary (what Friedrich
Nietzsche called Will to Power): the bloody exchange between Europe and America, or
between Moors and Christians, or between the Catholic and Protestant churches, or
between the Roman Emperor and the King of the Jews....
     Western logic depends upon representation. The concept is the abstract general body
(the model) which excludes the individual and concrete attributes of different beings by
following the Law of Similarity. The concept is a product of the classification of diverse
beings under the same characteristics. The concept ideally gathers (represents) infinite
concrete beings following the perceptive myopia (intellectual laziness) which caters to
similarity. The concept represents the thing. The concept is the general and ideal double of
reality, but of a reality which is too ideal! Even when the tree beneath which X's brother
was executed gives to the concept tree a concrete, vivid, cruel, and nomadic meaning,
strange to any definition as a specific vegetal with a trunk seeking the sky, leaves that
reach it and roots that chain it to the earth. The witness of X's brother's death is rather a
bloody vegetal. No! The tree/the trees is/are X's brother's enemy/enemies, poison for his
thought.... Why did Caligula fight against Neptune?

     Despite Arieti's belief, Aristotelian logic is not entirely alien to the peculiarities of the
schizophrenic individual's thinking. Yet their presence in the structure of thinking is
inverse to that in the normal subject, inversely proportional. Yes, the logic of
representation is restrictive, closed, for it is solar, ocular, paralyzed by the limitations of
perception at daylight. But when the logical structures of thought develop in darkness,
when the eye is betrayed and perception loses its frontiers, when thought becomes
nocturnal and reality is not clearly, Cartesianly, perceived by the senses, representation
becomes difference and visual images acquire the color of hallucinations and dreams,
objects become anonymous and indefinite, dis-objectified.
     Solar thinking is Apollonian and lunar Dionysian. The former is formal and the latter
amorphous. The solar is representational and the lunar differential. The solar is extensive,
the lunar intensive. However, both modes of thinking are governed by the same organic
laws in the same sense in which Apollo and Dionysus are ruled by the same genetic
principle which is Zeus and a filial tie: they are brothers.
     The West gave birth to its monsters: monsters that had always been there, parasitizing,
gestating, breathing the solar light of their most perfect species; monsters that should no
longer be ignored—there is no representation without difference.
     Within the margins of the logic of representation differences are subtracted and only
the common attributes among members of the same specie remain. These attributes are
essential to the defined thing. Diverse beings are gathered under the Law of Identity.
Identity, in this case, is the fundament of difference: diverse beings (ideally) share the
same attributes. They are susceptible of conceptualization for they have identifiable
attributes with respect of one another.
     The organization of differential thinking is still representative, but emphasis is not
placed upon the identification of attributes arbitrarily assumed to be common to diverse
beings. Instead, differential thinking emphasizes diversity; rather than subtract those
attributes which do no fit the unified edifice of identification via generalization,
differential thinking adds them to it, thus creating a defiant aerial architecture heir only to
the wind. Rather than identifying attributes, differential thinking differentiates them: the
essential to the thing is change. Each being is different because it participates in change.
Being's indetermination is determination by change. Differential logic does not subscribe
to the notion of a general Idea of which diverse beings participate, only to that of a
multiplicity of beings which acquire infinite forms in virtue of their belonging to the flux.
     When emphasis is placed upon the Law of Identity, the essence remains hidden to the
eye and difference becomes shallow and easily recognizable through clear and distinct
concepts. But when the strong tone falls upon the Law of Difference, essence is precisely
that which bares itself to the eye, conceptually unclassifiable, mutation.
     Everyone knows that this is a tree and that another tree; however, the Law of
Difference reminds us that the word tree does not signify that which this and that tree have
(conceptually) in common, but at best that which makes of every tree a this and a that:
haecceity. Following the Law of Identity, this and that are nothing more than spatial modes
of differentiation and non-detrimental of the definition of the concept tree.
     Western night is the night for rest, for dreaming, for images that judge the safe
concepts which define diurnal reality. Nocturnal light is neither suited for knowledge nor
for the security of the linguistic order, but for confusion. At night forms devour each
other, transforming, transfiguring, identifying with each other, becoming each other.
Repetition succumbs to difference: a tree is a dog on the verge of flying, the tree makes
possible the winged dog, and, at the same time, the tree is only possible because it itself is
a winged dog....
     Aided by the Von Domarus principle, Arieti enhances the differences between
schizophrenic and normal thoughts. The Von Domarus principle states that the
schizophrenic identifies subjects by identifying different predicates. The subject loses his
immutability in the sentence. The subject changes with the change of its predicate: the
relationship between subject and predicate is internal, intense, and no purely logical or
structural. In this way, if a tree appears to us as a dog in the verge of flying because both
(tree and dog) raise their extremities to the sky (and the eye's shortcomings during
nocturnal vision makes the tree's features into those of the dog), then that tree is a dog in
the verge of flying.
     Schizophrenic thinking is transgressive, it breaks the laws of thought grounded in the
identity of the subject. In light of Von Domarus principle the schizophrenic identifies
different subjects in virtue of what is predicated of them, the subject is exchangeable.
     Arieti's sight is myopic for he interprets schizophrenic thinking in and departing from
Aristotelian logical notions. Schizophrenic thinking is a movement of constant
redistribution of its own logical laws and not the "failed" outcome of the exercise of
normal logical presumptions. Schizophrenic thinking exposes the absence of a rational
categorical imperative which would shelter against the "abnormal" or "incorrect"
application of thought's logical laws. Arieti does not take into consideration the
transformation of the subject, the objectified subject remains immutable. The subject
remains he from which infinite, accidental attributes are predicated.
     Within the margins of the Law of Difference, in contrast, the transformation of the
predicate necessarily produces the transformation of the subject (death of subjectivity and
triumph of the mask). Subject and predicate blend, mix, identify.