So, you get the idea of what sampling is – it’s sort of like a symphony of errors – and heaps of different artists do it in lots of different ways – and The Avalanches have a really unique way of doing it.

I find it fascinating, because sampling involves taking the smallest snippet, sometimes the most insignificant little fragment or scrap of a recording, even taking an error, the skipping part of record, or an interruption, and then giving it an entirely new destiny in the realm of combination. In effect, what they’re doing is uprooting the fragment from the whole, which I don’t think is a foreign concept to psychoanalysis.

And it’s perhaps what’s being done all the time here at the School - and maybe it’s what psychoanalysis helps us to do well – to be well-spoken, as Lacan says. And Lacan, as Ben McGill said to me not long ago, something which was part of the inspiration for this presentation – as was his own presentation of not too long ago, where he spoke of the music group Kraftwerk and their machinic metamorphosis -  Ben said that Lacan was a great montagist (or collagist?). And I think that’s what this phenomenon of sampling brings out for me. That with these little fragments, these little scraps, or errors – even though they have nothing in common with one another – it becomes possible to construct a message through their combination. And that message might be an assemblage, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term – an assemblage of enunciation. It might be a School.

But perhaps also it might be a machine, an analytic machine – which I think is really the basis for the work David Pereira is doing in his seminar, and which again forms the basis for this paper.

-—

Now, the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, explores their concept of the rhizome, which again, I think bears on this question of sampling, of an machinic assemblage of fragments combined into an enunciation, of parts uprooted from their exclusive reference to a whole, and then spliced together to produce to a saying.

I said uprooted. And this distinction between the root and the rhizome is what I want to look at now.

So, for Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizome is basically a constellation of parts, or part-objects, that have no necessary affinity with one another, no common root and don’t form a delimited whole. The root structure, on the other hand, is comprised of parts which are united by reference to the common whole.

Now, Deleuze and Guattari, who of course we read in David’s seminar, one of their definitions of a rhizome goes like this:

“A principle of connection and heterogeneity [where] any point can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.”

For instance, an order of psychoanalysts – And in his paper at the homage a few years ago, David Pereira made a distinction between The Psychoanalyst singular, and psychoanalysts plural – arguing that a School is not in the first instance a group of like-minded psychoanalysts, but a collectivity of Ones, a multiplicity, of The Psychoanalyst.

Which again, we might call a machine or rhizome.

So, for Deleuze and Guattari, the root – the common root that connects like with like – imposes a dualistic order into the multiplicity of the rhizome, and not the other way around – which means that the rhizome for them is primary – and the fixed, coherent dualism of a familiar likeness comes after. And this reminds me of, a few years ago – maybe at the same homage, when Ben McGill again, presented his artworks – which as most of you will have seen, display bodies, usually human bodies, which sort of explode, mutate, leak into different dimensions, and form very strange and unhomely connections – and becoming very incoherent. And what David noted back then was that it’s not that you start with a coherent body with two arms and two legs and then distort it, but rather this incoherence of the body is in fact primary, and that the static, and recognisable form of the body is imposed onto this chaos – and forces it to con-form to a structure with determined boundaries and predetermined laws of combination – which we could think of as specularization – that coherent image we see in the mirror that contracts and tightens that disorganized incoherence that Lacan tells us is our primordial experience of having a body.

—-

Ok, so for Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome or machine breaks free of this categorical order of likeness, of coherence, and, I quote, “brings into play diverse modes of coding and not only different regimes of signs, but also states of things of differing status (e.g. biological, political, economic, etc).”

End quote.

So there’s a blurring, of different modes of coding, a kind of cross-pollination of different fields or assemblages. I quote again:

“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” 6

Now it makes me think of Frontier Psychiatrist, this strange con-fusion, between fragments from film, music, television, different genres, different eras, and so on. And it makes me think of reading Lacan – particularly his Anxiety seminar, where one moment he’s talking about the human infant and the grafting of the breast onto the mother – which I suppose is in itself a machinic act of sampling – the next moment he’s talking about platypuses, then about Buddhist statues, and then in the same breath he talks about the cause of leaking taps, and why Piaget didn’t understand the function of mythology.

And I think this is rhizomatic sampling, taking samples from the arts, the sciences, from social struggles – from the biological, the political, the economic, and permitting them to establish new, connections with different, unrelated fragments. This is the kind of enunciation, the kind of remixing of discourses, that psychoanalysis makes possible – based on an assemblage of pieces which don’t usually fit together, which are then mis-fitted – to play on a term I’ve often heard used in the School – that it is a membership of misfits.

That the right fit is not what is sought here, not roots but rhizomes.

-—

The same thing interests me about Deleuze and Guattari: that they are two, and yet, as they say, not really two, but quite a crowd – an assemblage. They stress for us that the difference between the root and the rhizome is the difference between dualism and multiplicity – all of this really, which is something being worked in David Pereira’s seminar, as I said, namely through Sloterdijk, and his concept of foam – which is a rhizomatic sort of proliferation.

So, in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, you never really know who’s writing because it’s not a dichotomized authorship, an alliance between one and the other, but a rhizome or multiplicity tht s[plits of itno many direction – and samples from all over the place.

So, they are not allies, but anti-allies, which is to say, an-allies. The an-allies-ing machine of Deleuze and Guattari works by uprooting, or perhaps deterritorializing the root – and ultimately of dissolving a conventional form of love made between two. And a little snippet from the context of my own analysis: my analyst never tired of telling me, to pull your head out of an us.

-— 

Which brings me to the next part of this paper: because I want to talk about an important moment in psychoanalytic history where this rooting, this conventional form of love between two, this alliance, seems to have won out over the possibility of a rhizomatic proliferation – of a foaming, or foamation – to use David’s term. Oscar Zentner speaks of it in his paper on Caracas Station, where Lacan screws up, in his Seminar of 1976-77, where he incorrectly writes the discourse of the analyst like so:

a > S1
$      S2

In writing it incorrectly, he produces an error from a sample of his own teaching. However, after being alerted to his mistake by Jacque Alain Miller, he wastes no time correcting it – and Zentner says that through this exacting correction of Lacan’s error, something novel in Lacan’s teaching did not come to pass. Miller, we might say, “plots a point, fixes an order” establishes a root – where something began to foam.

And reading David’s 1994 paper on Lacan’s style, along with A Thousand Plateaus, I think we could also say that Miller demands a root from Lacan – that is, loves his teacher a little too conventionally, partially, demandingly, which prevents him from being able to read him. To quote from this paper:

“…the love that Lacan poses as an obstacle to reading, is a conventional, let us say, limited love”

That is, that love between two.

Now, I don’t think David is specifically addressing what was going on in 1977, but he does go on to say:

“In the encounter with the Other as the locus of knowledge, a sign of that knowledge is demanded – a correlate of the demand for love.” And then, “The colonization, conquest and possession of the Lacanian teaching, impedes the effects of Lacan’s discourse.”

End quote.

So perhaps this is what is happening in 1977 when Miller roots Lacan’s discourse, makes love to it in a conventional sense, and thus prevents love, I quote, from “being thrown onto the axis of desire”, and thus into the possibility of transmission – a possibility which, David notes, is contingent upon an unconventional type of love.

The type of love, I’d say, which isn’t just looking for a root – which doesn’t demand a root.

Was Lacan to refuse [this demand for a root], and I quote again, it may have “pushed us to the point of an encounter with a lack in the text – the text as absolute Other – and produced a point of discordance.”

End quote.

In other words, when the demand for a root is refused – then, perhaps less a lack in the text than a difference in it, is allowed to emerge: a discordance in the order of the psychoanalytic discourse – s(A) - a change in discourses for which an error, is the sign.

And so, Oscar Zentner argues that something of Lacan’s teaching that was lost in 1977 managed to be transmitted 3 years later in Caracas – when Lacan botched it again, this time saying the word frog instead of toad – and no one corrected him – that is, when they bothered to read him.

That “the signifier,” [of a discordance in analytic discourse] “… produces this subject of a reading, for the text.”

End quote.

So, it was in Caracas that the founder of this School, Oscar Zentner, made his acquaintance with a discordance in Lacan’s text, a small fragment, or sample of error: the frog – and thus did something with that error, other than attempt to root it.

And here we are, in a School that rhizomatically proliferates from that discordance, as Jesse really brought to my attention the other day, that we’re still sort of surfing on the foam of that wave here at the Freudian School.

Here, we participate in the work of a School that dissolved its own Seminar in order to disassemble the tangled roots of theoretical alliances, of conventional love affairs to Lacan’s teaching, and to allow for the continuing emergence of something new – for the foamation of an analytic unconscious – and I might add, the continuing possibility of turning the tables on psychoanalysis.

Discussion.