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Schizoanalysis and Bergsonism: Matter, Machine, and Abstract Animal.

In: La Deleuziana vol. 14 The Ghost in the Machine: Deleuze and Guattari Beyond the Body-Mind Problem. Eds. Chantelle Gray & Aragorn Eloff, 2022.

Abstract: In this article, I show how an examination of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the abstract machine, can help us understand the relation between matter and mind. I expound Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s method, and specifically how his concept of heterogeneous multiplicity, which corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s machine, progresses throughout Bergson’s philosophy. I explain how this notion — which for Bergson indicates psychological time or durée, movement, as well as the élan vital or the original impetus of life — overcomes the body–mind distinction. I argue, like Deleuze and Guattari, that Bergson develops a machinic worldview, according to which matter always already contains mind, at least virtually, as a ghost waiting to materialize. A description of Bergson’s notion of élan vital then allows me to clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine in its relation to its concrete productions. I address the concept of becoming-invisible, as well as of the abstract Animal, the abstract machine of the organic stratum, and its relation to the idea of a diagram or map, which is central to the schizoanalytic project.

About the issue: When confronted with the mind-body problem — which refers broadly to how we understand the nature of consciousness and related aspects such as subjectivity and intentionality — many people readily turn to the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Grounded in Cartesian skepticism — and in Cartesian dualism which distinguishes be- tween thought and extension, meaning immaterial minds are seen to be distinct from material bodies — the experiment asks you to imagine that your brain has been removed from your body and been placed in a vat. Ostensibly the vat is filled with some kind of life-supporting liquid, while your neurons have been attached to a supercomputer that stimulates your brain, thus providing you with an experience of a reality. The question that is asked is: Would this experience be any different to the experience you have in a body (especially given that much of it relies on brain stimuli)? And what, moreover, are the implications for thinking about consciousness and theory of mind?

 

Although this is an age-old philosophical problem, it is by no means only philosophical. Laid claim to by many ‘representatives of the mind’ — as Isabelle Stengers calls them (2010: 88) — consciousness has been the study of psychology, the neurosciences, the cognitive sciences, psychedelics research, artificial intelligence, religion and philosophy, with the result that there is no one overriding answer to this question. In this special issue, we asked authors to think about what Deleuze and Guattari might have to say about the mind-body problem.

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