Barbetta&Nichterlein 2010 ((Re)LearningOurAlphabet DeleuzeAndBateson)

7/29/2019 Barbetta&Nichterlein 2010 ((Re)LearningOurAlphabet DeleuzeAndBateson)

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LFTRC & AIA Volume No 21, Issue 3, 2010, pp. 399-419

Human Systems: The Journal of Therapy, Consultation & Training

(Re)Learning our Alphabet: Refecting on Systemic

Thought Using Deleuze and Bateson1

Pietro Barbetta1 and Maria Nichterlein21. Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia and Universit di Bergamo, Italy.

2. AIM/CAMHS, Austin Hospital in Melbourne and University of New South Wales,

Australia

Tis paper discusses some o the concepts that shape thephilosophical project o Gilles Deleuze and explores theirpossible applications within the eld o systemic therapy. Wepropose that Deleuzian ideas connect in signicant ways tothe more amiliar ideas o Gregory Bateson. Tey constitute apowerul and armative critique o the dominant understandingo knowledge, science and practice. As Deleuze would express it,lines o ight. In his work with the anti-psychiatrist Felix Guattari,Deleuze used the termplateau an explicit reerence to Bateson to develop an entire philosophy o lie and creativity that hassignicant heuristic possibilities in our eld to both consolidateand expand Batesons early insights.

Te paper is organised in two parts: an overview o Deleuzes pro-ject, and a possible integration o some key concepts into systemicpractice. Tis is done through the concrete clinical exploration oone theme: alcoholism. Te direct connection is with the letter B(B or boisson [drink]) in Deleuzes Abecedaire, an improviseddialogue with Claire Parnet recorded during his last years o lie.Tis example allows us to reect on Deleuzes account o alcoholism

in a way inormed by Batesons notion o the cybernetics o sel. Wewill also be reerring at that point to Foucaults notion odispositive.Deleuze, Bateson, Foucault: not yet the usual suspects, and verydierent in many ways amongst themselves both as to substanceand as to style, but sharing the same bottle nevertheless.

1. We would like to thank John Morss or his help in smoothing our English grammar andhelping us to shape the literary style o this article.


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Pietro Barbetta & Maria Nichterlein400 Human Systems

Key words: Bateson, Deleuze, therapy, psychoanalysis, systemictherapy

Te problem is not one o being this or that in man, but ratherone o becoming human, o a universal becoming animal: not totake onesel or a beast, but to undo the human organization othe body, to cut across such and such a zone o intensity in thebody, everyone o us discovering the zones which are really his,and the groups, the populations, the species which inhabit him(Deleuze, 1973).

Deleuze is a philosopher who still is almost unknown in the eld o amilytherapy. He belonged to the generation that saw Derrida and Foucault emergein the French philosophical milieu yet, unlike them, he had no time to travelor to go conerence-ing. Deleuze like Bateson was perceived by some as anabstruse i not aloo thinker. Yet, this is not a thoughtul let alone respectul view o him or perhaps, more than many o this generation the generation oMay 68 , he was the one who did philosophy with most innocence (Derrida,2001, p. 193) and, like such a child, he was deeply committed to the optimismand thepuissance sketched in the revolutionary project o the Enlightenment(Foucault, 1984).2

So why is it that Deleuze seems to be taking such a critical presence in thesecurrent times?

Tis is an important question to ask because it addresses a more undamentalethical question that arises rom reading Deleuze: how might one live?Maysintroduction to Deleuzes work (2005, p. 4-5) points quite well to this, indicatingthat this is a philosophical question that is o relevance to our times as a result

o the eects that thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre had in the shaping o theWestern mindset.3

2. Deleuze warns us however that one has to separate this revolutionary project rom actualrevolutions which, he is consistent in stating, have all ended up miserably by consolidatingtotalitarian regimes as their result. he revolutionary spirit that Deleuze is invoking is as Foucault indicates in his writing closer to what Kant reerred to with his deinition oEnlightenment.3. It is no longer, May clariies, the question posed in ancient philosophy how should one live?

which, in turn, was transormed during the modern period to how should one act?


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(Re)Learning our Alphabet: Reflecting on Systemic Thought Using Deleuze and Bateson 401

Te connection between Deleuze and Guattari is o relevance to us becauseGuattari was a renowned anti-psychiatrist who although trained with Lacan

had an ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis being ar more positive aboutthe possibilities oered by the emergent eld o amily therapy (Guattari, 1989).

Teir rst collaborative bookAnti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) therst o two volumes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia was very inuential(Colebrook, 2002, p. xvii). Foucaults prologue to the book denes it as the rstbook o ethics to be written in France in quite a long time, an introduction to theNon-Fascist lie (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). It is a book with a passionate, at timesangry, style that oers a strong Nietzschean critique o the then prevalent Marxist

and psychoanalytical ideas upheld by French intellectual circles. Te critiquewas targeted at the psychoanalytic unconscious: it is not theatre but a actoryproducing the delirium we call reality [...] an active and productive orce odesire (Foucault & Raulet, 1983, p. 446). Teir critique also invoked the vital andintimate unction that the psychoanalysis o that time had within the capitalistmachinery: by orcing interpretation back into the amily4, the expansive andcreative wanderings o the desiring-machine are captured into a pre-establishedmould, appropriate to the State in which the individual is living5.

Tese ideas inAnti-Oedipus had already been pre-shaped in Deleuzes doctoralthesis Dierence and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994), where he articulated acritique o representational thought what he called a static image o thought and its maniestations: common and good sense. He carried out this critiqueby questioning the prevalence o identity and asserting that what is centralto lie is not the stability o an image/thought, but dierence and variation.Tought in this thesis is no longer a representation o a stable reality owell dened identities and quantities but an active and productive encounterwith the outside; an outside that is experienced as a problem in search o ananswer. Te outside cannot but present itsel as a problem since it is itsel uid,

ragmented and essentially undecidable. So whatever image one has o whatthe world is, sooner rather than later one is doomed to encounter dierence,a limit in its applicability. Tought then is a complementary process to theoutside: a response, a solution to the problem presented through living. Andlike the outside to which it relates, this alternative thought is equally uid andragmented, thus its name: Nomadic.

4. Which is done by reading unconscious activity as perverse desires that ultimately have to dowith mummies and daddies; the psychoanalytical Oedipal psyche.5. his is in close connection with Foucaults ideas on the construction o docile and governable

bodies.


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Deleuze makes a distinction between the static State-like thought thatallows governability and this nomadic thought that is intimately connected

with lie. Tis distinction is more clearly presented in their second volume,A Tousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), published eight yearsafer Anti-Oedipus. It constituted a very dierent and much more complexproject thanAnti-Oedipus (Deleuze, 1984, p. 239), perhaps completing it asan intellectual project. Rather than presenting a critique, like the earlier book,it proposes a positive project, with its most intriguing aspect perhaps being itsstructural openness. It is composed o playul plateaux6, where each plateauarticulates a whole eld o resonances and intensities that channel ows intodierent orms o organizations/assemblages. Tere are an innite number o

potentialplateauxthat can be ormed, their only condition or existence beingthat they work. Tis notion o multiplicities o coexisting plateauxresonateswith another and, in our eld, more popular (Homan, 2008) o theirconcepts: the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3-25). Te rhizome is atype o knowledge that is decentralized yet highly contingent and contextual.Te nomadic thought that Deleuze dened in his thesis organizes itsel throughrhizomes, constantly expanding in unpredictable yet highly complex ways.

Troubling/problematizing the Clinic

Beore addressing Deleuzes response to the question posed earlier how mightone live? we see some urther value in reerring to what it does notshow usas proessionals in this eld. For, afer all, Deleuzes question seems to reer usback neither to amily nor to systemic thinking as we know them, does it?

In Anti-Oedipus as well as in a number o other essays and interviews(Lapoujade, 2004; 2006), Deleuze and Guattari criticized the amily modelo psychoanalysis the Oedipic triangle mom-dad-child or its totalizingand capturing gesture: they criticized its claims that the amily was the source

o everything in the psychic lie. As we indicated above, or Deleuze andGuattari psychoanalysis was not a representation o the human psyche but areductionism o the child7 who is in act ar more interested, as (s)he grows,in understanding how the world out-there in all o its complexity works (or alate summary o these ideas see what children say in Deleuze, 1997).

6. his is a concept that they borrowed rom Bateson. We will touch on this point later in the

paper.

7. he same argument is used or adults too.


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With this in mind one could argue that the Anti-Oedipal question is this: isthere, in the realm o lie, something that ees (the amous line o ight) the

psychoanalytic Oedipus? Or, in perhaps a less conrontational style, is there away or psychoanalysis to transcend the dangers o amilialism? And, a perhapsmore direct and relevant question or us in this eld, is Family Terapy the newway out o the Oedipisation o everything? Te response oers an interestingopening: Family Terapy has not been able to entirely answer this questionbecause in many ways it still remains attached to the idea that everything in liehappens in the amily: amilialism as Deleuze and Guattari call it.

So, we are still in need o a line o ight or therapy. But what is a line o ight?

Like with any o Deleuzes concepts, there is no simple and straight denition.An answer can perhaps start by indicating that in considering the expressionline o ight, we have to bear in mind the idea o derivation in mathematics 8and variation in repetition. As mentioned earlier, lie or Deleuze is not a straightline within an ordered world that could be grasped/understood rationallyby an independent individual. Although social lie appears as a straight andordered line, lie is instead a sinuous and indenable line, a wandering o sorts;not a straight line but a line that olds, which is socially treated as a straightline9. Tis treatment o lie as lineal is a result o social manipulation; theeects o living within what Foucault denes as Dispositives. In his riendshiptowards Foucault, Deleuze (Deleuze, 1988) denes a Dispositive as a set oheterogeneous elements, socially co-ordinated, comprising a multitude olines that include lines o ight10. Such a denition helps to articulate thesubtle and dynamic tension involved in the constitution o our subjectivities,where subjectivity is inherently social and inevitably transient in that suchdenitions are deemed to end and change in our ongoing assemblage-like relation with the world. o live a lie thereore means that we need to be opento line(s) o derivation, taking care not to get stuck.

Connecting with Bateson

And we are stuck in amilialism as we indicated earlier. Perhaps conrming

8. A concept that Deleuze surely borrowed rom Bergson.9. Foucault would argue that this is done or purposes o governmentality, and, as such, it is notnecessarily all bad.10. Note that this is a singular deinition. For Deleuze, as individuals especially so in theglobalized society we are currently living in we are constituted as a multitude and, as such, we

co-exist in a multitude o such dispositives.


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Batesons intellectual orce in the eld, we can nd in his idea o doublebind something that can help us to move orward. Tere are a number o

connections traversing through the work o both Bateson and Deleuze thathelp us understand the power o the double bindas a line o ight. Tese are:

1. Te notion o thought as a process

In our opinion, Bateson was not interested in Systemic theory but in Systemicthinking, that is, he was not interested in dening specic contents. His ocuswas rather on the process and the mechanisms that account or what weobserve. Tis was also a preoccupation or Deleuze as we indicated above.

Tere is also a urther variation on this point in that both Bateson and Deleuzesaw thought not only as intimately connected with the world not as aseparate activity based on the brain but as undamentally dynamic. Toughtis not about static realities but about evolutionary processes (or Bateson) ornomadic trajectories (or Deleuze).

2. Te centrality o dierence

A second common point between Bateson and Deleuze is the importance thatthey attribute to Dierence. Te Batesonian dictum o a dierence that makes adierence is well known in the eld: any dierence makes another dierence,you see a dierence, and such a dierence makes a dierence in your own mind,creating a meaning. Deleuze is not ar rom this position in his own investigationswhich seemed to have been developed at around the same time. As indicatedbeore, his major thesis was an attempt to position dierence instead o identityand representation at the centre o philosophical investigation.

3. Te actualization o particularities

In a similar way that Bateson warns us o the use o physical explanationsto describe the world o Creatura the world o dierences (Bateson,2002, p. 7) Deleuze warns us o the danger o metaphors o identity andrepresentation. Te world is not a static world where stable beings struggleto express their identities. Very much in line with the Batesonian notion oan evolutionary ecology o Mind, Deleuzes understanding o the world is asan organic whole that is constantly actualizing itsel through the emergenceo unique particularities that are constantly changing and diering. Drawingrom Spinoza (Deleuze, 1992) and rom Nietzsche (Deleuze, 1986), whatis or Deleuze then is not identities but orces o dierentiation. Tus, it isnot the individual that is stable but the wholeness o this world, through its

endless and ever-changing maniestations. Rather than a stable sel, a more


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accurate representation o our condition is one o an ambiguous and uidsel that is intimately connected to its circumstances. In other words, our

condition involves an openness to endless opportunities to be other(wise). Itis this potential rather than a stable essence which is o value to our workas therapists and thus it is important not to get caught in the ready-madeimages that present to the session but to break these images down to theparticulars the emotions, the behaviours and their contexts that constructthem so as to be in search o alternative combinations.

It is in this context that Batesons words He who would do good to anothermust do it inMinute Particulars (italics are ours, Bateson, 1966, p. 445 where

he is quoting William Blake) make sense. It is also in this context that bothBateson and Deleuze position practical matters praxis, including clinicalpraxis as questions o style.

4. Te notion o PlateausTere is also great anity between Deleuze and Bateson in terms o theirinterests and methods o investigation, so there is some logic in stating thatthere is a similarity between Deleuze and Guattaris idea o assemblage,Foucaults ideas around the Dispositive and the Batesonian idea o a System.Neither Deleuze, nor Foucault nor Bateson were interested in the constitutiono systems as such11. Bateson, as Deleuze, was intrigued by observing anddescribing systems in their actual workings, and in nding their immanentlines o ight12. In a twist o irony, Deleuze chooses Plateaus directly rom thework o Bateson (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21-2). Bateson uses this conceptto describe some o the phenomena he was identiying in his ethnographicresearch. He writes: some sort o continuingplateau o intensityis substitutedor climax(Bateson, 1949, p. 85). Deleuze and Guattari will quote this exactstatement in A Tousand Plateau translating the word climax as orgasm(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 22. In the English version, the translation adds

[sexual] in ront o climax)13. Te irony is double when we are reminded that

11. Perhaps a way o understanding this is by commenting that many o the therapists inpsychoanalysis and in amily therapy have adopted Parsons structural unctionalist approach tosystems, in opposition to Batesons view.12. he immanency o systems is central or both thinkers: a undamental respect or theautonomy o the observed systems. One could argue that this is a connecting thread throughoutthe history o the radical ideas that deined amily therapy.13. his has been the reason or many readers o Deleuze and Guattari as well as o Bateson thinking that they were hetero-sexual intercourses, comparing Western practices with oriental

ones.


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the observation was, in act, about mother-child interactions, a return to theOedipus and the problem o psychoanalytic interpretation.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest a line o ight to explore how ar one can goexploring lie outside the Oedipus. Tey call this exploration Schizoanalysis. Inmany ways, this was a similar line to the one that Bateson had taken when hedistanced himsel rom the Strategic movement in order to chart a connectionbetween madness and creativity. Tis arose rom the well known argumentbetween Bateson and Haley, about power as constitutive o pathology, ando the use o therapeutic power (Bateson, 1969, p. 462-3).

Lie as Experimentation in Plateaux; To Live as an AuthorHow might one live?Tis was the question we stated at the beginning o thispaper and one that perhaps we can now start to address. For Deleuze, lie is anexperimentation, an active engagement with the world in the constitution oa Joycean chaosmos: a composed chaos, neither oreseen not preconceived(Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 204). Lie is an ethical becoming artists seekingto create not individuals but individuations that are constantly in the processo becoming (devenir). Tis is a similar conception to the one expressed byHeinz von Foerster when using the term Human Becominginstead oHumanBeing(Cecchin et al., 2005, Barbetta & oanetti, 2006).

Tis is what Deleuze and Guattari reer to with their concept o becoming, whichis always becoming other: the emphasis is not on the expression o what weare but in the creation, through encounters with the other, o what we couldbecome. Tis process o experimentation with ones lie is evaluated by its abilityto engender unique not beore known relationships with the outside that notonly work (make sense) but also elude established orms o knowledge.

But, as with Batesons ideas, the individuation that Deleuze calls or, cannotbe thought as separate rom its ecology. Te Deleuzian becoming is also abecoming o the assemblage or there is no becoming o an individual thatdoes not imply an equal process on the other side: the becoming o oneselis paired with the becoming o the other in such a way that any distinctionbetween these two processes is highly arbitrary. Te sel and the world are by-products o the same desiring machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 2).

For Deleuze, becoming is an individuation that is not sel-centred but

event-centred and constitutes a logic o impersonal individuation rather


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than personal individualization (Rajchman, 2001, p. 8). A Deleuzianbecoming transcends the person and presents a singularity a moment and a

circumstance that is unique and intimately associated with a time and placeoutside; a gust o wind (Deleuze, 2001; 1995, p. 26).

Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 2) comment that perhaps a more tting imageo lie is that o a schizophrenic going or a walk encountering the outside:continents, races and politics rather than a neurotic lying on the analystscouch, completely preoccupied with an interiority that has no external reerencesother than the nuclear amily. In this, again Deleuze and Guattari are close toBateson and his interest in understanding mind within an ecology that is larger

than the individual; an ecology that continues to be seriously endangered bythis obsession to cut, alienate and exploit. Like Deleuze clariying that theiruse o schizophrenia is o a dierent kind to the clinical presentation whichor them is a ailed schizophrenic process14 Bateson saw in the Double Binda matrix that not only accounts or pathology but also could be prooundlytherapeutic (Bateson, 1977, in particular part III).

Te becoming then that both Deleuze and Bateson call or through theirtheories, stubbornly asserts lie without any heroic humanism. Perhaps its bestexemplication is one o Deleuzes preerred pieces o literature, Bartleby theScrivener: A Story o Wall-Street by Melville. Melville nishes his story withthe somewhat exasperated exclamation given by the narrator o the story, thelawyer who employed the scrivener: Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! (Melville,1853, p. 74)

A Batesonian abecedaire: a joyul encounter?

In the last years o his lie, Deleuze was lmed in a documentary where hewas interviewed by Claire Parnet and asked to talk through the letters o the

alphabet in French: abecedaire15.

Tis was an opportunity or him to present his ideas in an accessible ormat.Nobody thought to interview Bateson in the way Claire Parnet interviewedDeleuze, nevertheless, Bateson was able to complete much o his projectthanks to Mary Catherine Bateson (Bateson and Bateson, 1987), Rodney

14. It has all the elements constitutive o a schizophrenic process but it ails to work, it collapsesinto a heap.15. We have chosen to keep the use o the French word or it is a well recognized reerence

amongst Anglo-Saxon scholars.


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Donaldson (Bateson, 1991), and, more recently, Nora Bateson, who hasnished a documentary about her ather (Bateson, 2010).

We chose to start with the letter B o Deleuzes abecedaire because we nd akind o unique voice connecting Te Cybernetics o Sel(Bateson, 1971) withthe word Boisson in Deleuzes abecedaire (as a reerence in English see Stivale,2000). It is as i the two pieces could vibrate in a commonplateau o intensitynever getting climax. A living thought, something to which we can always addnew perspectives, like in Nietzschesperspectivism (Nietzsche, 1990).

Furthermore, our choice orBoisson, amongst the other letters in his abecedaire,

is not casual because it reers us to a urther commonality between Bateson andDeleuze: the ways o thinking o alcoholism as a lie entangled in a paradox.

B as in Drink/Booze (Boisson)

B is something particular... It reers to boisson (drink/booze).Well you have drunk a lot and now you have stopped doingit.I want to know what did it mean when you drank. Did it meanpleasure? What was it?

Tis was the question posed by Claire Parnet: You have drunk a lotwhatdid it mean when you drank? Te question is posed to a philosopher, onewho creates concepts, at the same time it is posed to an alcoholic, a personwho drank a lot. Deleuze was or a period o his lie a big drinker. In thisquestion, the two things run together: an alcoholic philosopher, a philosophicalcoholic16.Te alcoholic knows that everything is a question o quantity. Not that anyonethat is a drinker does not have their own avourite drink. On the contrary: eachdrinker has their own qualitative preerence, a choice o sorts. Nevertheless orthe alcoholic the very issue is quantity and repetition, the last is the repetitiono the rst and vice-versa. And how important is the penultimate (pain-youll-

with-mate) in that list!

Te pain o staying with my mate: the bottle, the symmetry with the bottle.

As a philosopher, Deleuze creates a concept, a synthesis o the previouslydescribed experience. Te marvellous statement he creates is: An alcoholicnever ceases to stop drinking, never ceases reaching the last drink. A

16. Again in a twist o irony, Bateson also comments that [a]lcoholics are philosophers in that

universal sense that [they] are guided by highly abstract principles (Bateson, 1971, p. 291)


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philosophical concept about alcoholism, the philosophy o alcoholism: thereis no ground; I am inhabited by a chasm. Te centre o the chasm is the

penultimate glass.

Bateson argues that there is no such sel-making-man that can reach theconscious purpose o stopping to drink. Since the period oNaven (Bateson,1958) Bateson tried to show that ideas like Sel, Ego, and so on were culturalconstructions o the Western world. From Naven on, he was convinced that enarch(at the beginning) there was logos: the Greek word that comes rom theverb legein, that, among the other things, means bond, tie, or connection.

What has to do all this with drink/Booze (boisson)? I we ollow the Deleuzian-Guattarian invitation to get rid o the Oedipal triangle (mom-dad-child) as auniversal model, we have to rethink every social phenomenon as a consequenceo multiple contexts (Pearce, 2009); as belonging to a Dispositive. It is notthat in other cultural worlds people dont drink, they probably also get thephysical consequences o drinking, like Korsako disease, delirium tremens,liver cirrhosis; and probably die as a consequence o it. Notwithstanding this,this dynamic is not supposed to be necessarily a social drama. For drinking tobe a social drama we need the cultural context o passing through the borderthat separates a successul Selrom a social disaster. As it were, the US/ PuertoRican border which, o course is not a geographical border but one that hasa use as we will soon see. In this sense, the word border must be seen as ametaphor, as when we talk about borderline which is a word that has beenvastly used i not abused rom DSM to Joni Mitchell17.

Puerto Rico can be seen as a borderline country and Massachusetts as an oldmalign narcissistic country, converted in a healing/perect/academic countrywith a lot o ghosts hanging around as Nathaniel Hawthorne has taught us 18.

In this spirit, we are going to present a narrative about a amily session,observing it rom the position o a Batesonian/Deleuzian anthropologist: aPuerto-Rican amily that is living its lie in Massachusetts. It is an ordinary lieo living a lie as stranger.

17. Her song being a ar richer and interesting use as compared to the DSM!

18. ...through novels like he Scarlet Letter and he House o the Seven Gables.


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A Month o Grace (A Clinical Story and Refections)

In the coming narrative we are working with dierent levels o discourseand we will use italics whenever we are reerring to words that are not ours.With this gesture, we are attempting to put ourselves in an ironic positiontowards the Dispositive. In other words, using italics means that we are usingthe discourse o the welare systems in order to construct with it a kind oHeteroglossy(Bakhtin, 1981).

One o us (Pietro) remembers a consultation in Massachusetts with a Puerto-Rican amily19. Te amilywas getting benefts rom welare or manyreasons.Julio (the name we gave to the ather) was an alcoholic in remission, and he

had (as per his clinical le) a mild cognitive retardation [sic!]. Gracia (themothers name we chose) was (again, according to the clinical le) obese andparaplegic (ortunately, she had enough intelligence, at least by Massachusettsstandards). Te couple had two teenage nieces (Linda and Madalena) and ave year old boy (Pedro), living with them. One o the nieces was not actuallywith them at the time because she went missing in a pregnant state. Pedro,the ve year old boy in their care, was the only child o a woman who wasaddicted to crack. Tey reported that this woman was supporting a changerom aosteringsituation into an adoption.

As you see rom this short description, they were reporting in ront o Pietrothe issues o the social services, with the same language that social servicesusually use or the assessment o this type o situations: standardized clusters,in which any kind o ties are destroyed and where any kind o particularityconcerning the subject is erased. Tese are the kind opractices o subjectifcationthat happen in hospitals, in jails, in asylums and, perhaps the most terriyingo its maniestations, in concentration camps.

Te rst part o the conversation was done by Puerto-Rican subjectivatedpeople in Massachusetts and even Pietro was sharing this subjectivation inthis early moment. Pietro was a stranger there, perhaps more o a strangerthan them or he was a practitioner, like the people in the social service. Hewas eeling a mixture, an ambiguity inside himsel. Tis was a good time orspreading out a line o ight or, even when there was a need or movement,they all had some things in common that would create this as a possibility:

19. he consultation was done in a program organized by Marcelo Pakman. We not mentionneither the name o the program nor the period and places involved to preserve the privacy o

the people involved.


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he has something in common with the services even when he does not useits classicatory language and they also have something in common with

the service because they use its language, perhaps thinking that that is thelanguage he is going to understand.

Lines o fight

Te issues the amily was talking about with Pietro in therapy were several:1. Te possibility o transorming the ostering into adoption. Pietro had nopower to do anything about it. By his positioning as a oreigner, he could notbecome part o the Massachusetts Institute o Subjectifcation. Tis was therst line o ight: I I cannot do anything about your social situation, why

then are we here?

From this point on, they could consider this to be an un-useul conversation,something minor with no relevance since it is not related with the Real SocialService20. But they did not quit. Tey were generous with Pietro: welcoming.And, since Pietro was un-useul or them and the System they were entangledwith, he could not impose a(ny)-thing, not even liberate them. Tey werecreating an (un)useul space or ree speech.

2.Madalenas wellbeing. In the second part o the conversation, Gracia and Juliowere showing preoccupation about Madalena, the young pregnant womanwho had gone away. Tis was the rst opportunity or stepping inside theaective desiring elements o the dialogue. Te conversation was hard orPietro could not understand a word o their Spanish, so he needed a translator,but Linda Madalenas sister spoke English uently. Whilst Pedro the veyear old boy was sleeping on a chair, Linda explained that Madalena is ofengoing away, coming back later as i nothing happened. Linda was sure thistime was going be the same.

Tis part o the colloquium was elt by Pietro as a shif: they were talkingabout how to live a lie in Deleuzian terms. A sister knows how the other sisteroperates. Tey share something, they have something in common. Linda canunderstand Madalenas way o living and her relationships with people, thechoices she can do. Perhaps, one could consider that Madalena is secretly incontact with her sister. From this point o observation, everything becomesimmediately ascinating. Lindas speech is ast, very American. Sometimes

20. A good example o the totalizing eects that the real has . In this example, the real is

indistinguishable o the royal.


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Pietro has problems to ollow her even when he can grasp everything. In hisview, shes intelligent and sensible, she has all her lie to live and she could

become an artist, or a scholar, or a scientist. Pietro cannot but think: what aantastic Wille zur Machtshe is spreading!

3. Te third and most important argument was Julios demand to go back toPuerto Rico, a demand strongly contested by Gracia: I we go back there welose all the benets we get rom Massachusetts, and he starts drinking again!We never will do that! He is a dangerous person, in trying to destroy himsel,he ruins all o us!

Here is coming the conict between Gracia (the Massachusetts part-taking)and Julio (the Puerto-Rican one). Tis is a conict that involves the politicso the body and o the mind: Gracias body and Julios mind but also Juliosbody and Gracias mind.

In a certain sense, we could see Julio as a social body, shaped by the socialservices o Massachusetts. His way o talking engo cuarenta y siete aos,trabaj una vida y me van a negar una vaso de Ron!, Bueno estar aquitodavia, me gusta el baseball, y me consuela la nostalgia de mi casa 21 wastypical o a child who makes tantrums and then tries to repair. Tese utterances,his way o smiling at Pietro as el Doctor, his way o moving and lookingaround, etc.; all o these gestures seemed to be shaped to stay under the limitso toleration o Social Services Dispositive. And this way o subjecting himselwas successul. Apparently he knew the limits o expressing his aections andmoods. Pietro did not think he was mentally retarded at all in Puerto Rico;he became mentally retarded in Massachusetts. And this constituted a mis-measure: he was paying the price o being accepted in Massachusetts, agentilediscrimination.

Pietro was thinking or himsel: many years earlier, he had been there in aperiod o study. At the time, he was ar rom speaking a decentEnglish and heneither knew many details o the liestyle over there. In other words, he alsohad no manners and, like Julio, he was not behaving properly. And as he waswatching Julio at the same time, as in a stream o (un)consciousness, he wasollowing the connections by the words in italics decent, no manners, notproperly he suddenly elt the dissonance he was eeling when he was there back

21. I am orty-seven years old, I worked all my lie and they deny me a glass o rum? Well, Ill

stay here, I like baseball and I get consolation rom my nostalgia or my home


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in 1991: a person who had lived all his/her own lie until that point elsewhere,a stranger who was assuming that his/her way o living a lie was proper and

appropriate to the social environment and who suddenly realizes that whathe took or granted even with simple phrase like I met a girl who is studyingAnthropology was no longer available or the academicians around him his peers in the new environment where secretly laughing because the wordgirl was not properand so on.

In that moment, Pietro elt he was sharing something with Julio or he also in living there in 1991 sometimes got the same childish attitude o needingto ask others in his case, colleagues whether he was being proper in doing

such or such thing. Afer all, they were not too ar rom each other: both beingstrangers and, in a wide sense o the word, Latinos. Yet, the childish Pietro unlike Julio, was a clever student, eager to learn good manners.

So Pietro was in thegoodposition o being the counsellor whereas Julio wasin the badposition o being mentally retarded. It is in such position that Juliocan express his own desire to go back to Puerto Rico and to do so with noconsequences about his own declarations or one could imagine the SocialSystem the Dispositive commenting: you know this man he is mentallyretarded; he has no idea what he says and his statements have no consequences.So we can continue unding the amily.

Afer more than one hour o conversation, Pietro decided to talk with the othercolleagues o the team. Te team was composed o many Latino people. CristobalBonelli, a Family Terapist and Anthropologist rom Chile, said something thatmoved Pietro very much, probably helpul or the amily. What he said was akind o delusional discourse, a vision. Lets put his words as poetry:

I see a tunnel that connectsand disconnects

two places,at the exit o one side

I see a Hospital,and thats Massachusetts.

o the other sideI see a Bar,

and thats Puerto Rico.

He was keeping, as in a dream, the core o all the issues spreading out rom

the conversation.


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On top o all these things, during the interval afer the session was nished,a colleague rom Puerto Rico approached Pietro to apologize in the name o

the amily. He was touched about her apologizing: he elt a sort o mark on herbody, a pound o a womans esh coming rom her belonging to the Puerto-Rican community in Massachusetts. He thought: what about me had I beenollowing a consultation by another colleague, lets say fy years earlier, with anItalian amily. Would I be in the same position having to apologize? Probably.How then to respond so as not to reproduce these endless mechanisms osubjugation? A way to say something could be I would be proud to belongto such a group o Deleuzian people, who are able to be so creative so asto get attached and detached to the United States in such a creative and

deterritorialised way. Maybe they are betrayers, but they are not tricksters.

Further deterriotarialisations

Maria heard Pietros case as many o us practitioners do: as an aferthoughtand in the midst o a (practitioners) conversation, as part o writing this paper.Maria could not but appreciate its beauty the beauty o a graceul (Gracia)moment (a month?... Julio) and to wonder about the endless possibilities thatthis event oers us once we move away rom the ocial story the clinical caseas is described by the system o les with clinical denitions o this amily. Likein any service industry, the le represent more than just the patient, or eacho the denitions assume someone the expert(s) dening via the use ostandard tools o assessment and observation such a patient. As Pietro indicatedearlier, it is a very eective institutional dispositive as Foucault would say that allocates status and space to all the parties. People are recruited into theseroles with a rightul docility, not just the clients who will receive the so calledbenets but also the proessionals whose practices will enable them to get asalary (that partly pays or the benets). All are acting in good aith, all hopingthat somehow their eorts will help without suspecting that their actions are notas innocent and uncertain as they would wish. Te institution is not out there

but is actualized by their participation, by their docility and ours.

For Deleuze, there is hardly any bigger power o resistance in the modernState than the one depicted in Melvilles Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby saysI preer not to and this negative opens up or a response that suspends thecertainties and the scripts already too rehearsed.

As a therapist, as a member o this collective in search o a creative exit, thisis a position that is o interest. For, i there is any power in Deleuzes idea

oplateau it is that, embedded in the constitutive denitions o any o these


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domains (territories), there are possible lines o ight or movements odeterritorializations that are open or variation, o becoming another

story, other rom the ones o docile bodies that construct us/them as eitherclinicians or patients in (anti)heroic positions. Perhaps this is what Maturana,many years ago, meant when he commented that perhaps more than askingour clients what they want to change we might need to ask them what theywant to keep.

Just to open up urther to such possibilities or Pietro already commentedabout a dream that cuts across cultures and times Maria commented thatnothing has yet been said o the way this amily o apparently disgured people

can unction across time and space and present a orm o lie that allows achild to sleep (can we think o a gesture o more innocence?).

Tis gesture reminded Maria o a amily she saw many years ago in Chile:maternal grandparents and a grandchild. Te child had gone to live withthe grandparents afer the mother started a new relationship. It was a betterarrangement or the child and all parties were happy until the mother got sickand moved into grandparents house to be looked afer. Te grandparents eltthat, out o love to both their daughter and her son, they needed to give wayor mother to become mother o the child. But the mother got angry andthe child acted out as i they both did not want to change the arrangement.Maria mentioned this to the grandparents in the session and the child whohad not wished to talk until that moment started to cry. She asked him iher reading was right and he nodded. And, like Pietro caught in a series oreective recursions, she thought that at the time she was seeing this amilyshe was reading Batesons Angels Fear (Bateson & Bateson, 1987) and nowthinks o a sentence written by Bateson that his daughter Nora has includedin her recent website: the major problems in the world are the result o thedierence between how nature works and the way people think. Afer close

to thirty years since she saw this amily, that gesture o the child, still, makesa lot o sense.

Pietro resonates with this and comments that in Primo Levis Se questo UnUomo (chapter 9,Levi, 1947), there is a description o aprominent(the wordLevi used to describe a person who was trying to survive, using any ethologicalexpedient): Henri. Henri learned ast the way o capturing pity rom son type,he was ever able to stay under the threshold, o what was considered tolerableby him rom the point o view o the Nazis, and his way o ake became soon

the way he believed. Henri can be considered the opposite o Bartlebys I preer


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not. Henri was a dealer, he got goods rom the English sector o the camp;he was able to make riendship with everybody who could be useul to take

advantage, to survive. Julios soul contains both Bartleby and Henri. We mean:this is not a case that could be grasped by the Oedipus narrative; by thinking oJulios triangle with mother/ather, and the way he was attached/abandoned byhis mother, or the way his ather was authoritarian/absent rom the amily andso on. Te same seems to happen in the session held by Maria with the childand the abuelos. Tis is an issue that has to do with the cultural borders not atall the real borders, because as we all know Puerto Rico is an island betweenthe two places and/or as in the case o the Chilean amily sets o denitions.Lets take or granted Julio had an abandoning mother and an alcoholic ather.

Tat is what happens in many cases like this. Is this something that matterssubstantially in a Deleuzian line o observations? I yes, then the question is:why Julio is not Charles Bukowski, Antonin Artaud or Marilyn Monroe. Tiscould be a Deleuzian line o questioning. Julio cannot live other than thislie o mentally retarded in Massachusetts. He has only one chance goingback to Puerto Rico but this chance is bar-red. Mental retardation is hisown admitted line o ight, just not to waste his lie collecting tips in a baroMassachusetts in change o drinks he cannot drink.

Te reerence is the hospital, where the amily lives now: not the bar-red barbut the hospital is the dispositive that shapes the amily as it is now. From thehospitals point o view, alcoholism is maybe the most important problem. Notbecause o the problem o alcoholism but because in the welares order odiscourse i Julio drinks they lose everything. So alcoholism is the order odiscourse in which they are entangled. At the same time, abstinence is the onlyway to continue to live in Massachusetts and, o course, drinking becomesthe only way to leave to Puerto Rico: tretium non datur a stuck system asCecchin liked to say.

But, is there in the hospital (and not the single practitioners entangled in thesystem) a trick? Yes, because, in putting abstinence as a condition (a kind o adead-line, with no date o expiring) to live in Massachusetts, the hospital (thatis, the Social Service) behaves as a humanitarian institution: protecting themeconomically, taking care or obesity, paraplegia, mental retardation, social,linguistic and cultural problems o the amily, so they are bound to adoptPedro as a second generation Puerto-Rican guy in Massachusetts.

Gracia is trying to cooperate; she knows that they must survive, that lie must

go on. But she has marks on her body: she is paraplegic and obese. So she was


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at our session as usual, with her wheelchair and with all her Pietro supposes 80 pounds extra, just to stay xed, to stay stuck. Tis is the grace o Gracia:

i she had a dancer body and they were in some barin Puerto Rico dancing probably this would be a dis-grace. Not walking, being at are metonymiesor her body to keep Julio out o the bar and save their own lives. A montho grace, theMount Gracia (la montaa Gracia) with a tunnel bar-red: not toreally go to Puerto Rico but to create an imaginary line o ight or Lindaand Madalena, or they can still y, they still have good wings.

Te only way the institution can manage this case to manage this presentationo lie is by dening them by clusters: mentally retarded, alcoholic, obese,

paraplegic, and so on. Tey are needy persons, and they subject themselves,they answer the interpellation, behaving as i they were like these denitions,they t, they dispose themselves like docile bodies. No way out using realityand rationality: what is rational is real and what is real is rational (wrote Hegel),thats the double bind o the Ethic State.

Cristobals dream is a poetic way to describe the system, and to derail it romreality to imaginary, they can now continue to ake: like aking to be welcomedin a comortable hospital, that is Massachusetts.

But let us not be ooled in thinking that this is something that happens only toLatinos in Massachusetts. It would a relie i this is the case, at least or some.Te dynamics o the Order o the discourse, the regimes and dispositives thattransorm our desires and our dreams into docile bodies are not o a concreteplace but belong to a style o lie that does not respect our ecology o mind.

Please address correspondence about this article to: Pietro Barbetta [email protected] and Maria Nichterlein [email protected]

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