The researcher today can no longer take language for granted. The assumption that the academic text can be an objective transmitter of truth through the careful use of words, or what Lacan calls ‘signifiers’, pieced together by a morally responsible writer for the benefit of a grateful reader is certainly doubtful if not untenable. And yet this belief, or something like it, continues to exert a powerful influence on writers and readers of what are considered academically acceptable texts. How often, for example, do articles and books begin with the writer ‘objectively’ defining a key word for his or her argument by quoting from a dictionary, as if this were irrefutable ‘proof’ of the correctness of a definition? As a matter of fact, it is common practice to use the definition of a word to seek out its original meaning, maybe through its Latin root or similar, as if this original meaning somehow held the key to its real meaning today. The message to the reader is that this writer is ‘scientific’, that the method employed is ‘rigorous’, ‘professional’, even. What psychology and contemporary philosophy have revealed to us, however, is that words can never be defined. Or, as Lacan says, ‘We are forced…to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ (Ecrits 170). That is to say that the word or ‘signifier’ may have different meanings at any one time or from time to time.

Let us take the definition of the word ‘cat’, for example. Let us use the dictionary, a prestigious and famous dictionary compiled in 1755 by Samuel Johnson:
 

‘CAT: A domestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.’

Let us compare this to a definition from my aging copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary:
 

CAT: Small furry domesticated carniverous quadruped…’

Which is objectively the more correct? Clearly mice were a big problem in 1755 and the first thing a householder would associate with a cat was a mouse…to be caught! The modern definition, on the other hand, could be mistaken for a dog, a ‘small furry domesticated carniverous quadruped.’ Parts of the definition are not clear: What does ‘small’ mean? Smaller than a cow? The same dictionary defines ‘dog’ as a ‘Carniverous quadruped of genus Canis …’ and there we have our Latin! There is no doubt, however, that Johnson’s definition must surely be a cat! And if I go back to my Oxford Dictionary, published in 1979, I see that the next definition of ‘cat’ is  a ‘spiteful or malicious woman’, and then a ‘person, esp. jazz enthusiast…’ and I have to think a little before I understand the former as an aggressive male-orientated definition of woman which I cannot remember being used in conversation and the latter as being a reference to the slang use of ‘cat’ as in “cool cat!”, which I cannot remember ever having heard either. In other words, the definition of ‘cat’ is subject, despite its apparent simplicity and unchanging nature, to different definitions according to contexts, subjectivities and time. The inexorable and irreversible movement of time contributes to the multiple and ever-increasing possibilities of definition that a word might accumulate. One definition never stops developing its future possible definitions. The ‘signified’ is never sufficiently defined. The ‘signifier’ is not absolutely bound to the ‘signified’, and yet is never entirely freed of it. The signifier-signified-signifier process ad infinitum continues to develop along the ‘arrow of time’ in a way which reminds us of Prigogine’s use of this term as summarised in the following quotation from Capra’s Web of Life: ‘Prigogine’s theory shows how a particular type of chemical processes, the catalytic loops that are essential to living organisms, lead to instabilities through repeated self-amplifying feedback, and how new structures of ever-increasing complexity emerge at successive bifurcation points.’ (Capra 1997 p.179) Language is also subject to ‘self-amplifying feedback’; it, too, is ever-increasing in complexity. The seeking of the original meaning of a word in a dictionary is an attempt to reverse the clock.

Language, then, is like a living substance. If its meanings were ever to be objective and definitive, then it would die, just like a living organism dies as soon as it stops its autopoietic development through time. I would venture to say that the Newtonian physical world of cause and effect and reversibility, and the association that is made between this way of thinking and rational logical thinking, has been, and is still today, applied to the writing and appreciation of academic texts: the ‘signifier’ means the ‘signified’ and vice versa. This way of thinking denies the possibility, or at least the usefulness, of the irrational and the unconscious in academic texts.

The unconscious is, however, a language. According to Freud and Lacan, the unconscious has a language-like structure. The unconscious is an integral part of our being and cannot be separated from any attempt to rationalize. The meanings of words change in time because of their connection with the subjective mind, a mind which is, in Rafael Nuñez’s words from the recently published book Reclaiming Cognition ‘situated, decentralized, real-time constrained, everyday experience orientated, culture-dependent, contextualized, and closely related to biological principles – in one word, embodied’, as opposed to the kind of thinking many would associate with academic thought: ‘rational, abstract, culture-free, centralized, non-biological, ahistorical, unemotional, asocial and disembodied’ (Nuñez 1999 p.55). The latter sounds rather like the ‘objectivity’ which is sought after in any research method, while the former, with its ‘embodied mind’ accepts the value of subjectivity.

The legitimate study of the irrational, the emotional and the unconscious belongs to psychology. By reaching out for an understanding of what psychology has to say, the researcher is empowered to a creative understanding of what might otherwise be rejected as irrational or subjective and therefore unacceptable. Subjectivity can become a valuable tool for thought; and inter-subjectivity, between write and reader, can create its own created objectivity, the inter-subjective objectivity of a created truth rather than a reality , where reality is not equivalent to truth. In some cases, language used ‘objectively’ is uncreative and destructive: in clinical practice, for example, as expressed by the family therapist Antonio Dimalanta in conversation with Fritjof Capra:
 

‘In my practice, I am very aware of the limitations of language. The only way I can communicate something beyond rational thought is when I use metaphor, sometimes even what I call metaphoric absurdity. Now, when I communicate with a family, the clearer I become, the better they understand me, the less it helps. This is because I am describing a reality which is an abstraction.’ (Capra 1989 p.310)

That is to say, the reality is not the emotional truth. There is a clue here to how we can understand some of Deleuze and Guattari’s work where the rational basis for what should be the most rational of expressions, philosophy, seems often to give way to an expression spiced with metaphor and subjective irrationality. For what are we to make of the following from A Thousand Plateaus?
 

‘Metallurgical India. Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the earth into Swiss cheese. An image from the film Strike presents a holey space where a disturbing group of people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field mined in all directions.’ (Deleuze 2002 p. 413-414)

Now, we know that Deleuze is linking the idea of the metal-workers, the smiths, with his theory of ‘immanence’, that space which is between the form of expression, (Deleuze’s ‘smooth space’), and form of content, (Deleuze’s ‘striated space’); we know that striated space is the world of controlled society and organization, whereas ‘smooth space’ is the world of the ‘nomad’ who is free to roam the land without restrictions and directives. The images can be decoded and represented in the language of the rational. But although we can say this, we have already said too much, because the truth of the communication is in the raw power of the accumulated images which, in this extract, actually culminate in a real image, a still from Eisenstein’s film Strike . Is there anything more distant than Eisenstein’s Soviet film and the description of India as Swiss cheese? And if the reader is to be ‘objective’ and ‘rational’, the writing must be dismissed. If, however, the reader enters into a relationship, as it were, with the writer, then an understanding can be built upon another premise. Instead of deciphering the rational in the text, the reader can attempt to decode the irrational. The writer can be a source and expression of the unconscious, as Benvenuto says in Concerning the Rites of Psychoanalysis: ‘Perhaps it is only by writing to the reader as an analysand that I can transmit something as an analyst: metaphors, images, experiences to which the reader can give meaning, in the same way as our analysands convey a meaning to us just by speaking themselves.’ (Benvenuto 1994 p.23) The images need decoding, that is to say that to interpret Deleuze we need to do what Foucault describes Freud as doing:
 

‘I would say that Freud…decodes, which is to say, he recognizes that there is a message there. He doesn’t know what the message means; he doesn’t know the laws according to which the signs can mean what they mean. So he has to discover at one go both what the message means and what the laws are by which the message means what it means. In other words, the unconscious must convey not only what it says but the key to what it says.’ (Foucault 2000 p.253)

It is the decoding and eventually, therefore, the naming of the image that takes away its independence and autonomy and converts it into the property of the decoder or namer. This is well expressed by Brian Massumi in his recent introduction to the collection of essays A Shock to Thought , where the natural force of a flash of lightning, which is the result of an intensity in nature, is captured by the human eye and converted into Zeus: ‘A creator now owns the deed’ (Massumi 2002 p.xxv) and a link can be made which tells us that Zeuss is ‘like’ the lightning: ‘He is as decisive and unforgiving as his thunderbolt. They share properties. They conform and correspond. Properties: the flash has gone from the expressive to the possessive.’ (Massumi 2002 p.xxv) Eventually, when Zeus throws his thunderbolt, it is representative of his anger, his emotion. The lightning of nature has become the anger of a god, it has become part of the conscious mind: we own it. The more we own it, the tamer it becomes. Eventually it may become a commonplace, a cliché, but before doing so, it will have travelled through a process of multiple change in meaning and adaptation to context. As Massumi says, ‘The violence of the flash has been domesticated to serve the functioning of the system operating according to its own rules of formation, at a certain level of reality,’ (Massumi 2002 p.xxvi) The affect produced in the flash of lightning has come from the ‘smooth space’, through the ‘holes’ of the being to form part of the ‘striated space’ of the ‘real’ world. The language of Deleuze and Guattari is frequently probing our unconscious understanding, as if it were pure expression rather than content. Each reader is free to ‘own’ the text because Deleuze and Guattari have, so to speak, never really ‘owned’ it. The meaning is not theirs, or at least not theirs alone. The account of transpiercing the mountains, boring holes in space, Swiss cheese and Eisenstein’s Strike have a metaphorical quality, they are evocative rather than explicative, and this is how they have to be understood.

The unconscious thought processes being described here are very much along the lines of Lacan’s descriptions of the function of language. For Lacan, the words, or ‘signifiers’ do not simply have a single signified object attached to them, but they have their own life and they develop in the mind of the subject as a chain of signifiers, like the string of images of a dream. It is in this sense that the dream has a language-like structure, a chain of signifiers. In this way we can understand Deleuze’s ‘transpiercing’, ‘boring holes’, ‘Swiss cheese’, the holes in Strike, and finally the concept of ‘holey space’: as a chain of images, where the sense emerges through the reader’s sharing the development of the ‘holes’ metaphor with the writer. The ‘holes’ mean more than one thing. The writing is an example of what Lacan called ‘polyphony’. By this Lacan means ‘There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended ‘vertically’, as it were, from that point.’(Lacan 2001 p.170) Thus we have Deleuze’s ‘transpiercing ‘ becoming ‘Swiss cheese’ and eventually becoming an actual image in the film still from Eisenstein’s film. It is significant that the nature of the meanings are progressively more visual: Deleuze is writing in metaphors, the language of dreams and the language of Benvenuto as analysand. Clearly, the experience of psychology, in theory and practice, can help us to understand such a text. Any one who has shared the dreams of others will have learnt to be patient with emerging meaning though listening and feeling, through transference and counter transference. We can learn that the speech of the rational, the ‘real’, so to speak, can be put to one side in favour of the understandings of the irrational, with its own laws, waiting to be discovered. And so we can learn to be patient with Deleuze and in ourselves, letting the figurative language have its effects on us as readers, storing the effects and building the meanings in  process through time. What does ‘Swiss cheese’ suggest to you? Any feelings or associations are to be felt and stored. The text is not lending itself to ‘objective’ analysis. I could suggest that the cheese is ‘Swiss’ because Deleuze is talking about mountains, but by doing so I have already started to take away the strength of the image, its possible multiple meanings by naming it. And I have made it mine, so that others cannot participate except by accepting or denying the naming of it. That is to say, by suggesting some meaning to the image, I have interrupted the unconscious quality and laws of the dream language and replaced them with the conscious laws of everyday language. The price we have to pay for such a rationalizing of the text is the taking away of the multiple possible meanings of a chain of images to be substituted for a single, simplified, rationalized explanation.

So, although there is a possibility of using metaphorical language in academic texts,   some may argue that the text should not be so, that this is fine for the  analysand and therapy but irrelevant for research. This, however, would be to ignore the reality of our minds and the nature of language. It would be to deny the very essence of what it is to be human. Our minds are not separate machines of rationality, where the experience of the unconscious can be conveniently cut off. The human mind is not a machine manufactured by scientific knowledge and Artificial Intelligence will never replace it. The human mind is embodied: all experiences pass through the whole body, including, but not exclusively, the brain, all the time. Nothing is clear cut in the human mind, everything merges and flows, constantly. That is why the dictionary definition will never be definitive, and if a dictionary definition cannot be definitive, then what hope is there for an extended argument?

Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, was fond of pointing out the difficulty of using the human mind as if it were a machine. I quote an episode described in conversation with Fritjof Capra:

 
‘(The) whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see, when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. Just like a thermostat, a simple sense organ, yes?

…

‘If it’s on, it’s off; if it’s off, it’s on. If yes, then no; if no, then yes.’ With that he stopped to let me puzzle about what he had said. His last sentence reminded me of the calssical paradoxes of Aristotelian logic, which was, of course, intended. So I risked a jump.
‘You mean, do thermostats lie?’
Bateson’s eyes lit up: ‘Yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. You see, the cybernetic equivalent of logic is oscillation.’

Bateson continues by referring to
 

‘…the trees over there. Logic won’t do for them.’
‘So what do they use instead?’
‘Metaphor.’
‘Metaphor?’
‘Yes, metaphor. That’s how this whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.’ (Capra 1989 p.78-79)

Metaphor, then, for Bateson is the key to understanding. What the thermostat does not do is measure the subtle movements in temperature between the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’. This difference is similar to Foucault’s discussion of the definition of ‘prison’ in Discipline and Punish, where the logic of 1. This person is guilty, 2. This person must go to prison, can be questioned by the debate on delinquency, conceptual, non-concrete, prejudiced, influenced by fear and other emotions. Between the two logical actions, there is an expression which can shift and move according to context. It is the debate on delinquency, in this case, which defines human thought and language. In the case of Foucault, there is a preoccupation with madness as a crime: if the language of the mad is not acceptable, then it is a crime, then the mad should be locked away. Deleuze, Derrida and others can be similarly locked away from the rational world of debate through the denial of the sanity of their language: Don’t talk to me about Swiss cheese, I’m not crazy!

Interestingly, Bateson’s metaphor-for-trees idea finds an echo in Lacan, where the signifier, the word ‘tree’, is placed, like an equation, over the signified pictorial representation of a tree:

At first sight, the logic is clear: 1. The word ‘tree’ means 2. This image of a tree. But the line that separates the signifier and the signified is not as impermeable as it looks. Its permeability is emphasized by Lacan with a play on the word for this line separating the signifier and the signified: in French, ‘barre’ is an anagram of ‘arbre’, through which meanings filter and the clarity of the original logic is blurred. Lacan goes on to produce a chain of meanings inspired by ‘tree’, talking about the ‘significations it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesty. Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggested in the Hebrew of the Bible, it erects on a barren hill the shadow of the cross. Then reduces to the capital Y, the sign of dichotomy…Circulatory tree, tree of life…tree of Saturn, tree f Diana…’ and so on. He goes on to say that ‘What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says.’ (Lacan 2001 p.172) This ‘something quite other’ is the meaning which emerges out of the unconscious. It is the area of the line separating the signified image from the signifier. It is the movement through this barrier from the unconscious to the conscious, where the signified is converted into metaphor. As Lacan says, ‘We see, then that, metaphor occurs at the precise point at which sense emerges from non-sense.’ (Lacan 2001 p.175) It is the same logic, with its own laws, that we find in Bateson’s idea of the metaphor which holds together what he called a ‘fabric of mental connections.’

To be able to see these connections, to be able to make sense of the metaphor in the text, the reader must accept an inter-subjective relationship with the writer (or the text) which is, ultimately, a different kind of relationship with the reader’s own self because, of course, the dialogue with the text is ultimately a dialogue within the self. This is what happens when the analyst acts as a conduct for the analysand’s self revelation in the process of transference and counter transference. To act as this conduct, the analyst, according to Bion, has to work by excluding ‘memory’ and ‘desire’ in order to help the analysand understand his or her own unconscious truths.

The effect of the taking away of ‘memory’ and ‘desire’ is amusingly illustrated in an experiment in AI with a computer programme called ‘ELIZA’ (named after Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion). ELIZA was programmed, in the programmer’s words, to ‘parody the responses of a nondirective psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview.’ (Weizenbaum 1993 p.188) This role was chosen because the programmer would not have to fill the database with real-world knowledge. The programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum, goes on to explain ‘After all, I reasoned, a psychiatrist can reflect the patient’s remark, “My mommy took my teddy bear away from me”, by saying, “Tell me more about your parents”, without really having to know anything about teddy bears, for example.’ (Weizenbaum 1993 p.189) Although this playing with a patient’s unconscious mind might sound unethical, to say the least, the result of this conversation between the computer and ‘patients’ was that the ‘patients’ tended to think that they were, indeed, being understood by the machine. Apparently, says Weizenbaum, ‘They would often demand to be permitted to converse with the system in private, and would, after conversing with it for a time, insist, in spite of my explanations, that the machine really understood them.’(Weizenbaum 1993 p.189) The situation would be, of course, unsustainable, but it is interesting to see how the no-memory, non-desiring machine can begin to produce a reflection of the ‘patient’s’ self. Similarly, the text is non feeling and does not interfere with memories of a past encounter, but it can still provoke an interchange of thoughts and feelings with the reading subject, and in particular if the text is dealing with a language approximate to the dream through metaphor, because, as we have seen, the text does not state, explain or own meaning, it merely evokes what the reader is capable of responding to. The text, of course, is limited. It cannot change itself, adapt or shift meanings without the reader’s cooperation. This, on another level, was the limitation for ELIZA: the ‘patient’ was instructed to provide the computer with the kinds of statements one would normally be expected to make in this kind of interview. It could not have responded to questions outside this field. The cynic might simply have finished the interview immediately by asking the computer ‘How do you define a cat?’ to which the computer may have responded along the lines of ‘How often have you defined cats?’ The benefit of this conversation would certainly have been limited. Similarly, a text which is presented to the reader with certain expectations, for example, the Deleuze text we have been looking at, has to be approached in a certain way for the ‘conversation’ to continue and become fruitful.

The essential interchangeability of doctor-patient roles implied in reading a Deleuzian text was expressed by Deleuze himself in the following statement from Essays Critical and Clinical: ‘The writer as such is not a patient but a doctor, doctor of herself and of the world. The world is the whole set of symptoms in which sickness is confounded with humankind’.(Lichtenberg Ettinger 2002 p.215) The therapy, he continues, is fashioned through, as it were, a foreign language within a language, by a ‘becoming-other of language’ that opens ‘an outside or flipside consisting of Visions and Hearings…These visions are not phantasies, but veritable ideas constituted by the passage of life into language.’(Lichtenberg Ettinger 2002 p.215) So, Deleuze himself identifies the key to the approach to his own texts which we have been discussing:

1. The understanding of the nature of the language used, and
2. The nature of the relationship and attitude of the reader to the text ( for if the writer is his own doctor, then he is the patient too, and so the reader).

It should be pointed out here, that the nature of language used, and the consequent relationship established between reader and text might often be associated with literature as an art rather than philosophy as an academic argument. But this is precisely why the reader’s approach has to adapt itself to writing which will not limit itself to a narrowly confined genre. This is why what Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger has to say about art is also relevant to the texts we are considering: ‘The intrapsychic trans-subjective doctor-and-patient sphere with-in the artist is transported onto inter-psychic trans-individual relations between the artist and the viewer with/through the artwork…’ (Lichtenberg Ettinger 2002 p.215) In literature, or in texts that use literary modes of expression, language takes on its own life through intensity and through this intensity the mind of the reader is engaged in its own creation. This is what Walter Benjamin called ‘magic’ (‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’), when language takes on a power of its own. In the words of Alan Bourassa: ‘If language is itself a force, if it is language that opens a space of being, or language in which all of nature rests, then it is far more than an instrument.’(Bourassa 2002 p.63) the writer, according to Deleuze, ‘twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percepts from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensations from opinion.’ (Bourassa 2002 p.64)

Language, then, for Deleuze, can include the non-human, meaning the world outside human rationality. Language is neither independent nor just a fabrication of the brain. It is not just about human perception, but percepts too, that is to say, it is the object of perception itself; it is not just an account of human affections but it is affect itself; language can be more than human opinion, it can be pure sensation. This is because language is not the  product of a detached human brain, rather it exists with and within the non-human in a multitude of different manifestations, flowing through the embodied mind, to consciousness and back again, in a constantly flowing feedback cycle. Language is alive because of this. We are alive because of this. Again, in the words of Alan Bourassa ‘When it is caught up by a modality of the non-human, a force, and an event, language is not other than that force, that event. It maintains no autonomy. And indeed, if we ask whether there is a ‘pure’ language, a language free of the intensive possession by the non-human, we must answer that such a language could neither refer, express, or in fact even appear.’ (Bourassa 2002 p.75) Language, then, depends on our existence in relation to our world, what Massumi calls the ‘nature-culture continuum’ (Massumi 2002 p.xxxviii). The ideas which surface in our conscious minds need to return to their origins, through the unconscious, back to their origins to be recycled once more back to our being, so that an idea is never identical to the next.

As Walter Freeman says in his book How Brains Make up their Minds , ‘There are no fixed representations (in brains), as there are in computers; there are only meanings…A sensory stimulus from an object does indeed induce the formation of a pattern in the brain, but when it is given repeatedly it does not induce precisely the same patterns in the same brain…’ (Freeman 1999 p.29-30) So, the reader, in constant interchange with the world will similarly be in constant inter-communication with the text, the meaning of which will be constantly adjusting itself according to a constantly shifting context. In Lacan’s words: ‘I identify myself in a language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.’ (Lacan 2001 p.94) And the context, therefore, is not a mere backdrop to language, it is the source of our ‘becoming’. Deleuze puts it like this: ‘Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero.’ (Deleuze 1994 p.169) In analysis, I suppose, it is this moment of becoming which is true, even if it is not real. It is the truth of the moment rather than the ‘reality’ that is important. This is the distinction made by Dimalanta earlier in this talk and by Lacan when he says ‘One is never happy making way for a new truth, for it always means making our way into it. We are used to the real. The truth is always disturbing. We cannot even manage to get used to it. We are used to the real. The truth we repress.’ (187)

Finally, then, it seems that language is bound to the universe in an intimately unbreakable way. When Deleuze says ‘We become universes’ he acknowledges our truths as opposed to any reality external to our beings. And our truths must be created in languages, languages conscious and unconscious.

To finish, I want to touch upon the work of Jung who was particularly interested – over-interested, some would say – in man’s relationship with his environmental universes. With reference to languages, Jung points out the problem of making language part of the universe, the non-human: ‘I must resort to artificial means to determine what things are like apart from myself. Then I discover that tone is a vibration of the air…or that colour is a wavelength of light. We are in all truth so enclosed by psychic images that we cannot penetrate to the essence of things external to ourselves.’ (Ryan 2002 p.19)  Jung’s archetypes and his collective unconscious are  part of this relationship to the outside, of how our being identifies or becomes at one with the external world, part of Deleuze’s ‘becoming animal, becoming plant…’ This relationship with the world was, for Jung, most obvious in primitive man, where nature and language fused: ‘(Primitive man’s) knowledge of nature is essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic process.’(Jung 1991 p.6) There is something of a return to this language in Deleuze’s relationship to the external world, the non-human. This is why we sometimes feel that communication using the language of a Deleuzian text is a contact with nature, a created universe, a truth rather than a reality, a thinking in primordial images. Jung believed that the human psyche was a product of evolution, as much as the body, and that remains of that evolutionary process form part of our psyche, and, therefore, of our language. Jung was able to say of his relationship with his patients: ‘Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man who is in all of us.’(Ryan 2002 p.24) Just as primitive man could subjectively identify himself with his surroundings, be at one with the environment, attribute life to the inanimate, so could Deleuze contemplate an ‘inorganic life of things’ and a ‘collective brain’.(Deleuze 1994 p.212) Deleuze’s holey mountain, (not ‘holy’!), begins as inorganic but becomes, through metaphor, the embodied mind through which a new man or idea may emerge at the end of a sequence of  images which have created their own language and understandings, just like a sequence of dream images may create a language of understanding between the analysand and the analyst.

Copyright - the Author

Dedication

This article is dedicated to Tonia Raquejo, my companion in metaphors and absurdities.

Note

Parts of this article were presented as a paper in the Exploring Psycho-Social Research Methods conference on the 25th January 2003 at the University of the West of England, Bristol. The words ‘metaphoric absurdity’ have been borrowed from Antonio Dimalanta, quoted in the text.

I would like to thank Simon Clarke for his encouragement in publishing this article.

References

Benvenuto, Bice (1994). Concerning the Rites of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge:Polity Press

Bourassa, Alan (2002). ‘Literature, Language, And the Non-Human’ in Massumi (ed.) A Shock to Thought, Expression After Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.

Capra, Fritjof (1989). Uncommon Wisdom. Conversations With Remarkable People. London: Flamingo.

Capra, Fritjof (1997). The Web of Life. A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London:Flamingo

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix (1994; first 1991). What is Philosophy? London: Verso

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix (2002; first 1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum Athlone Press.

Foucault, Michel (2002; first 1965) ‘Philosophy and Psychology’ in Essential Works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, Volume 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.

Freeman, Walter J. (1999). How Brains Make up Their Minds. London: Phoenix.

Jung, C.G. (1991; first 1934). ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. London:Routledge.

Lacan, Jacques (2001; first 1966). Écrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.

Lictenberg Ettinger, Bracha (2002). ‘Trans-Subjective Transferential Borderspace’ in Massumi, Brian (ed.) A Shock to Thought, Expression After Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.

Massumi, Brian (2002). ‘Like a Thought’, Introduction to A Shock to Thought, Expression After Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.

Nuñez, Rafael (1999). ‘Could the Future Taste Purple? Reclaiming Mind, Body and Cognition’ in Nuñez, Rafael, and Freeman, Walter J., Reclaiming Cognition. The Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion. Thorverton: Imprint Academic.

Ryan, Robert E. (2002). Shamanism and The Psychology of C.G.Jung. London: Vega.

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1993). Computer Power and Human Reason. London: Penguin.

Julian Manley
British Council School
Solano 3, 5 and 7
28223 Pozuelo de Alarcón
Madrid
Spain
e-mail: julian_manley@yahoo.com