The Shape of Enthusiasm

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes All reproductions of the images in this text are thanks to the Editions l'Arachnéen, who own copyright for all of Fernand Deligny's maps. They have generously ceded copyright for the use of the images throughout, very much in the spirit of Deligny's work. 1 Jim Sinclair, ‘Autispeak’. Originally published in Our Voice, the newsletter for Autism Network International (now offline). Reprinted in Amanda Baggs’ blog 18/08/2010. 2 Amanda Baggs talks of thought as a perceptual field of prearticulation existing in the beneath of words. See Amanda Baggs ‘Up in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 30:1 (2010), 11/12/2010. Also see Erin Manning, ‘Ethics of Language in the Making’ in Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance (Durham and New York: Duke University Press, 2011). Autist Roy Bedward describes it like this: ‘I have vision that sees beyond the immediate context and hearing that hears more than just sounds. It is difficult to describe but I can tell you that there is so much more to the universe than you will ever know by just using narrow vision and limited hearing. When you open your senses to all that exists more comes to you than you can ever imagine’. Given at the talk Communication Makes or Breaks a Life: This Boy's Life-Saving Typing (May 2008), reprinted online 2/12/2010. 3 Francis Tustin, ‘Autistic Shapes’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 11 (1984), p.278. 4 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010), p.6. 5 Francis Tustin, ‘Autistic Shapes’, p.279. 6 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.8. 7 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.68. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), p.318. 9 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Institute, 1995), p.72. 10 Francis Tustin, ‘Autistic Shapes’, p.280. 11 Francis Tustin, ‘Autistic Shapes’, p.284. 12 Francis Tustin, ‘Autistic Shapes’, p.278. 13 Roy Bedward, Communication Makes or Breaks a Life: This Boy's Life-Saving Typing 2/12/2010. 14 Francis Tustin, ‘Autistic Shapes’, p.280. 15 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Mineola, 2007), p.20. 16 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.8 17 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), p.23. 18 While at La Borde working with Jean Oury and Felix Guattari in 1966, a young autist by the name of Jean-Marie is entrusted to Deligny by the child's mother. An immediate bond ensues, and Deligny begins to conceive of a project of taking autists out of the institutional frameworks of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. ‘He commits his life and that of a group of people without professional identities that he lures toward an experience that can be summed up in one sentence: “to live in the presence of Janmari”’. On 14 July 1967, Deligny leaves La Borde with Janmari and a few others to move to Gourgas, a large house in ruins bought by Felix Guattari. Guattari's project was originally to make of Gourgas a meeting-place for militants, intellectuals, artists, and workers and to hand over the task of organizing it to Deligny. See Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, ed. Sandra Alvarez Toledo (Paris: Collection Arachnéen, 2007), p.641. 19 The first children were sent by Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni and Emile Monnerot. Since the psychiatric institutions that housed the children closed during the summer vacation, the children could be sent to the Cevennes to Deligny. Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, p.673. 20 Jean Oury remembers Deligny's frustrations with the language of psychoanalysis while still at La Borde, particularly in any encounter where patients’ dossiers are foregrounded. For Deligny, what matters is the technicity of a project, not the past or how the patient has been evaluated in an institutional framework. ‘What matters, he would say, is the project. We couldn't care less about thought’. Jean Oury quoted in Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, p.638. 21 Whether or not the tracings were actually drawn-into by the autists is not clear. ‘About the tracings – which he calls act-signs – we do not always know whether they concern the adults or the children. The border is mobile’. And yet, the tracings are absolutely a collaborative enterprise, a drawing-with of emergent spacetimes of recomposition. The traces, and especially what Deligny calls the ‘lines of drift’ (lignes d'erres) allow the territory to ‘become seen’, they map into it its resonance as more-than a pre-existent territorial enclosure. See Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, p.644. 22 Deligny's concept of ‘camérer’ (to camera) is very interesting in this context. Deligny suggests that we have not yet moved into the time of the image, where the image exceeds its representation, exceeds language. ‘No matter what they say’ he writes, ‘ours is not the time of the image’ (1990). Available online 4/1/2011. See also Deligny's film Le Moindre Geste (1971). 23 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pp.62-64. 24 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable – Voix et Voir’, Recherches, 18, April (1975), p.7. 25 Fernand Deligny, Œuvres p.798. 26 Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, p.798. 27 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, Multitudes, ‘Mineure Fernand Deligny’, 24, Spring (2006), p.187. 28 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (New York: Athlone, 1987), pp.127-128. Brian Massumi translates ‘lignes d'erre’ as ‘lines of drift’; whilst in Dialogues, translated the same year by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam as ‘lines of wandering’. I've re-translated them here as ‘lines of drift’ to keep the text consistent. Though ‘erre’ does have the sense of wandering, I like the sense of drift as not being necessarily activated by the human, but also in the environment, in a movement-with of emergent spacetimes. 29 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable – Voix et Voir’, p.3. 30 Anne Querrien, ‘Fernand Deligny, Imaginer le Commun’’, Multitudes, ‘Mineure Fernand Deligny’, 24, Spring (2006), p.172. 31 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.188. The quotations from Anne Querrien and Beatrice Han are in their own words, not those of Deligny. But they are a poetic paraphrasing of his thoughts, and insofar as they are written as a tribute to his work, they are, in a sense, the tracings of his thoughts. 32 For more on the ‘thinking-feeling of what happens’ see Brian Massumi's The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: Toward a Speculative Pragmatism (forthcoming MIT Press). 33 Deligny's texts are never ‘about’ the tracings. They take place in a beside that is, in a sense, beneath the words of the moving drifts. His own words are always tentative, themselves drifting in a together that creates a complicity between the tracings and the words. This complicity draws out tendencies but never seeks to explain or to organize. It is an orientation in the way I describe throughout. As Toledo writes, ‘Deligny's legends (his texts) do not clarify the maps; they intensity their ambiguities’. See Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, p.800. 34 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable 3 – Au defaut du langage’, Recherches, 24, November (1976), p.24. 35 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.188. 36 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.188. 37 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.188. 38 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.11. 39 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.188. 40 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.190. 41 Fernand Deligny, Œuvres, p.798. 42 Beatrice Han (Kia-Ki), ‘Deligny et les cartes’, p.192. 43 Deligny makes much of Janmari's open circles. He calls them “cernes d'erre” referring to the growth-line of the tree, and to the circling that is not quite a circle, a Nietzschean circling of eternal return perhaps, linking this spiral-circling to the idea of the common, or what I am calling the commoning. 44 Fernand Deligny in Joseph Isaac, ‘L'innocence efficace’, Recherches, 18, April (1975), p.43. 45 Fernand Deligny in Joseph Isaac, ‘L'innocence efficace’, p.51. 46 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable 3 – Au defaut du langage’, Recherches, 24, November (1976), p.8. 47 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable 3’, p.9. 48 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable 3’, p.10. 49 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.23. 50 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable 3’, p.11. 51 Australian aboriginal art, and in particular the works of Clifford Possum (“The Map Series”) challenge Euclidean mappings, foregrounding something quite similar to Deligny's lines of drift through the concept of the Dreaming. For an engagement with Possum's work, see Erin Manning, ‘Relationscapes: How Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art Moves Beyond the Map’ in Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (MIT Press, 2009). 52 Fernand Deligny, ‘Cahiers de l'immuable 3’, p.25. 53 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.23. 54 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.8. 55 Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality, p.25. 56 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology 1929(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p.68. 57 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.69. 58 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.203. 59 Deleuze explores the idea of the ‘now here’ as an inversion of Samuel Butler's ‘erewhon’. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (NewYork: Athlone, 1994), p.285. 60 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.204. 61 Anne Querrien, ‘Fernand Deligny, Imaginer le Commun’, p.168. 62 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.202. 63 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.205. 64 Anne Querrien, ‘Fernand Deligny, Imaginer le Commun’, p.169. 65 Anne Querrien, ‘Fernand Deligny, Imaginer le Commun’, p.170. 66 Anne Querrien, ‘Fernand Deligny, Imaginer le Commun’, p.170. 67 Fernand Deligny, Les enfants et le silence (Paris: Galilée, 1980), p.19.