(re)learning our alphabet: reflecting on systemic thought...

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

Human Systems: The Journal of Therapy, Consultation & Training

(Re)Learning our Alphabet: Reflecting on Systemic Thought Using Deleuze and Bateson1

Pietro Barbetta1 and Maria Nichterlein2

1. Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia and Università di Bergamo, Italy.2. AIM/CAMHS, Austin Hospital in Melbourne and University of New South Wales,

Australia

This paper discusses some of the concepts that shape the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze and explores their possible applications within the field of systemic therapy. We propose that Deleuzian ideas connect in significant ways to the more familiar ideas of Gregory Bateson. They constitute a powerful and affirmative critique of the dominant understanding of knowledge, science and practice. As Deleuze would express it, lines of flight. In his work with the anti-psychiatrist Felix Guattari, Deleuze used the term plateau – an explicit reference to Bateson – to develop an entire philosophy of life and creativity that has significant heuristic possibilities in our field to both consolidate and expand Bateson’s early insights.

The paper is organised in two parts: an overview of Deleuze’s pro-ject, and a possible integration of some key concepts into systemic practice. This is done through the concrete clinical exploration of one theme: alcoholism. The direct connection is with the letter B (“B for boisson [drink]”) in Deleuze’s Abecedaire, an improvised dialogue with Claire Parnet recorded during his last years of life. This example allows us to reflect on Deleuze’s account of alcoholism in a way informed by Bateson’s notion of the cybernetics of self. We will also be referring at that point to Foucault’s notion of dispositive. Deleuze, Bateson, Foucault: not yet “the usual suspects”, and very different in many ways amongst themselves both as to substance and as to style, but sharing the same bottle nevertheless.

1. We would like to thank John Morss for his help in smoothing our English grammar and helping us to shape the literary style of this article.

Pietro Barbetta & Maria Nichterlein400 Human Systems

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

The problem is not one of being this or that in man, but rather one of becoming human, of a universal becoming animal: not to take oneself for a beast, but to undo the human organization of the body, to cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of 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 field of family therapy. He belonged to the generation that saw Derrida and Foucault emerge in the French philosophical milieu yet, unlike them, he had no time to travel or to go conference-ing. Deleuze – like Bateson – was perceived by some as an abstruse if not aloof thinker. Yet, this is not a thoughtful – let alone respectful – view of him for perhaps, more than many of this generation – the generation of May ’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 optimism and the puissance sketched in the revolutionary project of the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1984).2

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

This is an important question to ask because it addresses a more fundamental ethical question that arises from reading Deleuze: how might one live? May’s introduction to Deleuze’s work (2005, p. 4-5) points quite well to this, indicating that this is a philosophical question that is of relevance to our times as a result of the effects that thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre had in the shaping of the Western mindset.3

2. Deleuze warns us however that one has to separate this revolutionary project from actual revolutions which, he is consistent in stating, have all ended up miserably by consolidating totalitarian regimes as their result. The revolutionary spirit that Deleuze is invoking is – as Foucault indicates in his writing – closer to what Kant referred to with his definition of Enlightenment.3. It is no longer, May clarifies, the question posed in ancient philosophy – how should one live? – which, in turn, was transformed during the modern period to how should one act?

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

The connection between Deleuze and Guattari is of relevance to us because Guattari was a renowned anti-psychiatrist who – although trained with Lacan – had an ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis being far more positive about the possibilities offered by the emergent field of family therapy (Guattari, 1989).

Their first collaborative book Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) – the first of two volumes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia – was very influential (Colebrook, 2002, p. xvii). Foucault’s prologue to the book defines it as “the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time”, an “introduction to the Non-Fascist life” (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). It is a book with a passionate, at times angry, style that offers a strong Nietzschean critique of the then prevalent Marxist and psychoanalytical ideas upheld by French intellectual circles. The critique was targeted at the psychoanalytic unconscious: “it is not theatre but a factory producing the delirium we call reality [...] an active and productive force of desire” (Foucault & Raulet, 1983, p. 446). Their critique also invoked the vital and intimate function that the psychoanalysis of that time had within the capitalist machinery: by forcing interpretation back into the family4, the expansive and creative wanderings of the desiring-machine are captured into a pre-established mould, appropriate to the State in which the individual is living5.

These ideas in Anti-Oedipus had already been pre-shaped in Deleuze’s doctoral thesis – Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994), where he articulated a critique of representational thought – what he called a static image of thought – and its manifestations: common and good sense. He carried out this critique by questioning the prevalence of identity and asserting that what is central to life is not the stability of an image/thought, but difference and variation. Thought in this thesis is no longer a representation of a stable reality – of well defined identities and quantities – but an active and productive encounter with the outside; an outside that is experienced as a problem in search of an answer. The outside cannot but present itself as a problem since it is itself fluid, fragmented and essentially undecidable. So whatever image one has of what the world is, sooner rather than later one is doomed to encounter difference, a limit in its applicability. Thought then is a complementary process to the outside: a response, a solution to the problem presented through living. And like the outside to which it relates, this alternative thought is equally fluid and fragmented, thus its name: Nomadic.

4. Which is done by reading unconscious activity as perverse desires that ultimately have to do with mummies and daddies; the psychoanalytical Oedipal psyche.5. This is in close connection with Foucault’s ideas on the construction of docile and governable bodies.


Deleuze makes a distinction between the static – State-like – thought that allows governability and this nomadic thought that is intimately connected with life. This distinction is more clearly presented in their second volume, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), published eight years after Anti-Oedipus. It constituted a very different and “much more complex project than Anti-Oedipus” (Deleuze, 1984, p. 239), perhaps completing it as an intellectual project. Rather than presenting a critique, like the earlier book, it proposes a positive project, with its most intriguing aspect perhaps being its structural openness. It is composed of playful plateaux6, where each plateau articulates a whole field of resonances and intensities that channel flows into different forms of organizations/assemblages. There are an infinite number of potential plateaux that can be formed, their only condition for existence being that “they work”. This notion of multiplicities of coexisting plateaux resonates with another – and, in our field, more popular (Hoffman, 2008) – of their concepts: the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3-25). The rhizome is a type of knowledge that is decentralized yet highly contingent and contextual. The nomadic thought that Deleuze defined in his thesis organizes itself through rhizomes, constantly expanding in unpredictable yet highly complex ways.

Troubling/problematizing the Clinic

Before addressing Deleuze’s response to the question posed earlier – how might one live? – we see some further value in referring to what it does not show us as professionals in this field. For, after all, Deleuze’s question seems to refer us back neither to family nor to systemic thinking as we know them, does it?

In Anti-Oedipus as well as in a number of other essays and interviews (Lapoujade, 2004; 2006), Deleuze and Guattari criticized the family model of psychoanalysis – the Oedipic triangle mom-dad-child – for its totalizing and capturing gesture: they criticized its claims that the family was the source of everything in the psychic life. As we indicated above, for Deleuze and Guattari psychoanalysis was not a representation of the human psyche but a reductionism of the child7 who is in fact far more interested, as (s)he grows, in understanding how the world out-there in all of its complexity works (for a late summary of these ideas see “what children say” in Deleuze, 1997).

6. This is a concept that they borrowed from Bateson. We will touch on this point later in the paper.7. The same argument is used for adults too.


With this in mind one could argue that the Anti-Oedipal question is this: is there, in the realm of life, something that flees (the famous line of flight) the psychoanalytic Oedipus? Or, in perhaps a less confrontational style, is there a way for psychoanalysis to transcend the dangers of “familialism”? And, a perhaps more direct and relevant question for us in this field, is Family Therapy the new way out of the Oedipisation of everything? The response offers an interesting opening: Family Therapy has not been able to entirely answer this question because in many ways it still remains attached to the idea that everything in life happens in the family: familialism as Deleuze and Guattari call it.

So, we are still in need of a line of flight for therapy. But what is a line of flight?

Like with any of Deleuze’s concepts, there is no simple and straight definition. An answer can perhaps start by indicating that in considering the expression “line of flight”, we have to bear in mind the idea of derivation in mathematics8 and variation in repetition. As mentioned earlier, life for Deleuze is not a straight line within an ordered world that could be grasped/understood rationally by an independent individual. Although social life appears as a straight and ordered line, life is instead a sinuous and indefinable line, a wandering of sorts; not a straight line but a line that folds, which is socially treated as a straight line9. This treatment of life as lineal is a result of social “manipulation”; the effects of living within what Foucault defines as Dispositives. In his friendship towards Foucault, Deleuze (Deleuze, 1988) defines a Dispositive as a set of heterogeneous elements, socially co-ordinated, comprising a multitude of lines that include lines of flight10. Such a definition helps to articulate the subtle and dynamic tension involved in the constitution of our subjectivities, where subjectivity is inherently social and inevitably transient in that such definitions are deemed to end and change in our ongoing – assemblage-like – relation with the world. To live a life therefore means that we need to be open to line(s) of derivation, taking care not to get stuck.

Connecting with Bateson

And we are stuck in familialism as we indicated earlier. Perhaps confirming

8. A concept that Deleuze surely borrowed from Bergson.9. Foucault would argue that this is done for purposes of governmentality, and, as such, it is not necessarily all bad.10. Note that this is a singular definition. For Deleuze, as individuals – especially so in the globalized society we are currently living in – we are constituted as a multitude and, as such, we co-exist in a multitude of such dispositives.


Bateson’s intellectual force in the field, we can find in his idea of double bind something that can help us to move forward. There are a number of connections traversing through the work of both Bateson and Deleuze that help us understand the power of the double bind as a line of flight. These are:

1. The notion of thought as a processIn our opinion, Bateson was not interested in Systemic theory but in Systemic thinking, that is, he was not interested in defining specific contents. His focus was rather on the process and the mechanisms that account for what we observe. This was also a preoccupation for Deleuze as we indicated above.

There is also a further variation on this point in that both Bateson and Deleuze saw thought not only as intimately connected with the world – not as a separate activity based on the brain – but as fundamentally dynamic. Thought is not about static realities but about evolutionary processes (for Bateson) or nomadic trajectories (for Deleuze).

2. The centrality of difference A second common point between Bateson and Deleuze is the importance that they attribute to Difference. The Batesonian dictum of “a difference that makes a difference” is well known in the field: any difference makes another difference, you see a difference, and such a difference makes a difference in your own mind, creating a meaning. Deleuze is not far from this position in his own investigations which seemed to have been developed at around the same time. As indicated before, his major thesis was an attempt to position difference – instead of identity and representation – at the centre of philosophical investigation.

3. The actualization of particularitiesIn a similar way that Bateson warns us of the use of physical explanations to describe the world of Creatura – the world of differences (Bateson, 2002, p. 7) – Deleuze warns us of the danger of metaphors of identity and representation. The world is not a static world where stable beings struggle to express their identities. Very much in line with the Batesonian notion of an evolutionary ecology of Mind, Deleuze’s understanding of the world is as an organic whole that is constantly actualizing itself through the emergence of unique particularities that are constantly changing and differing. Drawing from Spinoza (Deleuze, 1992) and from Nietzsche (Deleuze, 1986), “what is” for Deleuze then is not identities but forces of differentiation. Thus, it is not the individual that is stable but the wholeness of this world, through its endless and ever-changing manifestations. Rather than a stable self, a more


accurate representation of our condition is one of an ambiguous and fluid self that is intimately connected to its circumstances. In other words, our condition involves an openness to endless opportunities to be other(wise). It is this potential – rather than a stable essence – which is of value to our work as therapists and thus it is important not to get caught in the “ready-made” images that present to the session but to break these images down to the particulars – the emotions, the behaviours and their contexts – that construct them so as to be in search of alternative combinations.

It is in this context that Bateson’s words – “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars” (italics are ours, Bateson, 1966, p. 445 where he is quoting William Blake) – make sense. It is also in this context that both Bateson and Deleuze position practical matters – praxis, including clinical praxis – as questions of style.

4. The notion of PlateausThere is also great affinity between Deleuze and Bateson in terms of their interests and methods of investigation, so there is some logic in stating that there is a similarity between Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of assemblage, Foucault’s ideas around the Dispositive and the Batesonian idea of a System. Neither Deleuze, nor Foucault nor Bateson were interested in the constitution of systems as such11. Bateson, as Deleuze, was intrigued by observing and describing systems in their actual workings, and in finding their immanent lines of flight12. In a twist of irony, Deleuze chooses Plateaus directly from the work of Bateson (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21-2). Bateson uses this concept to describe some of the phenomena he was identifying in his ethnographic research. He writes: “some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for climax” (Bateson, 1949, p. 85). Deleuze and Guattari will quote this exact statement in A Thousand Plateau translating the word climax as orgasm (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 22. In the English version, the translation adds “[sexual]” in front of climax)13. The irony is double when we are reminded that

11. Perhaps a way of understanding this is by commenting that many of the therapists in psychoanalysis and in family therapy have adopted Parsons’ structural functionalist approach to systems, in opposition to Bateson’s view.12. The immanency of systems is central for both thinkers: a fundamental respect for the autonomy of the observed systems. One could argue that this is a connecting thread throughout the history of the radical ideas that defined family therapy.13. This has been the reason for many readers – of Deleuze and Guattari as well as of Bateson – thinking that they were hetero-sexual intercourses, comparing Western practices with oriental ones.


the observation was, in fact, about mother-child interactions, a return to the Oedipus and the problem of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest a line of flight to explore how far one can go exploring life outside the Oedipus. They call this exploration Schizoanalysis. In many ways, this was a similar line to the one that Bateson had taken when he distanced himself from the Strategic movement in order to chart a connection between madness and creativity. This arose from the well known argument between Bateson and Haley, about “power” as constitutive of pathology, and of the use of therapeutic power (Bateson, 1969, p. 462-3).

Life as Experimentation in Plateaux; To Live as an Author

How might one live? This was the question we stated at the beginning of this paper and one that perhaps we can now start to address. For Deleuze, life is an experimentation, an active engagement with the world in the constitution of a Joycean chaosmos: “a composed chaos, neither foreseen not preconceived” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 204). Life is an ethical becoming – artists seeking to create not individuals but individuations that are constantly in the process of becoming (devenir). This is a similar conception to the one expressed by Heinz von Foerster when using the term Human Becoming instead of Human Being (Cecchin et al., 2005, Barbetta & Toffanetti, 2006).

This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to with their concept of becoming, which is always “becoming other”: the emphasis is not on the expression of “what we are” but in the creation, through encounters with the other, of what we could become. This process of experimentation with one’s life is evaluated by its ability to engender unique – not before known – relationships with the outside that not only work (make sense) but also elude established forms of knowledge.

But, as with Bateson’s ideas, the individuation that Deleuze calls for, cannot be thought as separate from its ecology. The Deleuzian becoming is also a becoming of the assemblage for there is no becoming of an individual that does not imply an equal process on the other side: the becoming of oneself is paired with the becoming of the other in such a way that any distinction between these two processes is highly arbitrary. The self and the world are by-products of the same desiring machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 2).

For Deleuze, becoming is an individuation that is not self-centred but event-centred and constitutes a “logic of impersonal individuation rather


than personal individualization” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 8). A Deleuzian becoming transcends the person and presents a singularity – a moment and a circumstance – that is unique and intimately associated with a time and place outside; “a gust of wind” (Deleuze, 2001; 1995, p. 26).

Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 2) comment that perhaps a more fitting image of life is that of a schizophrenic going for a walk – encountering the outside: continents, races and politics – rather than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch, completely preoccupied with an interiority that has no external references other than the nuclear family. In this, again Deleuze and Guattari are close to Bateson and his interest in understanding mind within an ecology that is larger than the individual; an ecology that continues to be seriously endangered by this obsession to cut, alienate and exploit. Like Deleuze clarifying that their use of schizophrenia is of a different kind to the clinical presentation – which for them is a failed schizophrenic process14 – Bateson saw in the Double Bind a matrix that not only accounts for pathology but also could be profoundly therapeutic (Bateson, 1977, in particular part III).

The becoming then that both Deleuze and Bateson call for through their theories, stubbornly asserts life without any heroic humanism. Perhaps its best exemplification is one of Deleuze’s preferred pieces of literature, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Melville. Melville finishes his story with the somewhat exasperated exclamation given by the narrator of the story, the lawyer who employed the scrivener: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” (Melville, 1853, p. 74)

A Batesonian abecedaire: a joyful encounter?

In the last years of his life, Deleuze was filmed in a documentary where he was interviewed by Claire Parnet and asked to talk through the letters of the alphabet – in French: abecedaire15.

This was an opportunity for him to present his ideas in an accessible format. Nobody thought to interview Bateson in the way Claire Parnet interviewed Deleuze, nevertheless, Bateson was able to complete much of his project thanks to Mary Catherine Bateson (Bateson and Bateson, 1987), Rodney

14. It has all the elements constitutive of a schizophrenic process but it fails to work, it collapses into a heap. 15. We have chosen to keep the use of the French word for it is a well recognized reference amongst Anglo-Saxon scholars.


Donaldson (Bateson, 1991), and, more recently, Nora Bateson, who has finished a documentary about her father (Bateson, 2010).

We chose to start with the letter B of Deleuze’s abecedaire because we find a kind of unique voice connecting The Cybernetics of Self (Bateson, 1971) with the word Boisson in Deleuze’s abecedaire (as a reference in English see Stivale, 2000). It is as if the two pieces could vibrate in a common plateau of intensity never getting climax. A living thought, something to which we can always add new perspectives, like in Nietzsche’s perspectivism (Nietzsche, 1990).

Furthermore, our choice for Boisson, amongst the other letters in his abecedaire, is not casual because it refers us to a further commonality between Bateson and Deleuze: the ways of thinking of alcoholism as a life entangled in a paradox.

B as in Drink/Booze (Boisson)“B is something particular... It refers to “boisson” (drink/booze). Well… you have drunk a lot and now you have stopped doing it. I want to know what did it mean when you drank. Did it mean pleasure? What was it?”

This was the question posed by Claire Parnet: “You have drunk a lot…what did it mean when you drank?” The question is posed to a philosopher, one who creates concepts, at the same time it is posed to an alcoholic, a person who drank a lot. Deleuze was for a period of his life a big drinker. In this question, the two things run together: an alcoholic philosopher, a philosophic alcoholic16.The alcoholic knows that everything is a question of quantity. Not that anyone that is a drinker does not have their own favourite drink. On the contrary: each drinker has their own qualitative preference, a choice of sorts. Nevertheless for the alcoholic the very issue is quantity and repetition, the last is the repetition of the first and vice-versa. And how important is the penultimate (pain-you’ll-with-mate) in that list!

The pain of staying with my mate: the bottle, the symmetry with the bottle.

As a philosopher, Deleuze creates a concept, a synthesis of the previously described experience. The marvellous statement he creates is: “An alcoholic never ceases to stop drinking, never ceases reaching the last drink”. A

16. Again in a twist of 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)


philosophical concept about alcoholism, the philosophy of alcoholism: there is no ground; I am inhabited by a chasm. The centre of the chasm is the penultimate glass.

Bateson argues that there is no such self-making-man that can reach the conscious purpose of stopping to drink. Since the period of Naven (Bateson, 1958) Bateson tried to show that ideas like Self, Ego, and so on were cultural constructions of the Western world. From Naven on, he was convinced that en arché (at the beginning) there was logos: the Greek word that comes from the verb legein, that, among the other things, means “bond”, “tie”, or “connection”.

What has to do all this with drink/Booze (boisson)? If we follow the Deleuzian-Guattarian invitation to get rid of the Oedipal triangle (mom-dad-child) as a universal model, we have to rethink every social phenomenon as a consequence of multiple contexts (Pearce, 2009); as belonging to a Dispositive. It is not that in other cultural worlds people don’t drink, they probably also get the physical consequences of drinking, like Korsakoff disease, delirium tremens, liver cirrhosis; and probably die as a consequence of it. Notwithstanding this, this dynamic is not supposed to be necessarily a social drama. For drinking to be a social drama we need the cultural context of passing through the border that separates a successful Self from a social disaster. As it were, the US/ Puerto Rican border which, of course is not a geographical border but one that has a use as we will soon see. In this sense, the word border must be seen as a metaphor, as when we talk about “borderline” which is a word that has been vastly used – if not abused – from DSM to Joni Mitchell17.

Puerto Rico can be seen as a borderline country and Massachusetts as an old malign narcissistic country, converted in a healing/perfect/academic country with a lot of ghosts hanging around as Nathaniel Hawthorne has taught us18.

In this spirit, we are going to present a narrative about a family session, observing it from the position of a Batesonian/Deleuzian anthropologist: a Puerto-Rican family that is living its life in Massachusetts. It is an ordinary life of living a life as stranger.

17. Her song being a far richer and interesting use as compared to the DSM!18. ...through novels like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.


A Month of Grace (A “Clinical” Story and Reflections)

In the coming narrative we are working with different levels of discourse and we will use italics whenever we are referring to words that are not “ours”. With this gesture, we are attempting to put ourselves in an ironic position towards the Dispositive. In other words, using italics means that we are using the discourse of the welfare systems in order to construct with it a kind of Heteroglossy (Bakhtin, 1981).

One of us (Pietro) remembers a consultation in Massachusetts with a Puerto-Rican family19. The family was getting benefits from welfare for many reasons. Julio (the name we gave to the father) was an alcoholic in remission, and he had (as per his clinical file) a mild cognitive retardation [sic!]. Gracia (the mother’s name we chose) was (again, according to the clinical file) obese and paraplegic (fortunately, she had enough intelligence, at least by Massachusetts standards). The couple had two teenage nieces (Linda and Madalena) and a five year old boy (Pedro), living with them. One of the nieces was not actually with them at the time because she went missing in a pregnant state. Pedro, the five year old boy in their care, was the only child of a woman who was addicted to crack. They reported that this woman was supporting a change from a fostering situation into an adoption.

As you see from this short description, they were reporting in front of Pietro the issues of the social services, with the same language that social services usually use for the assessment of this type of situations: standardized clusters, in which any kind of ties are destroyed and where any kind of particularity concerning the subject is erased. These are the kind of practices of subjectification that happen in hospitals, in jails, in asylums and, perhaps the most terrifying of its manifestations, in concentration camps.

The first part of the conversation was done by Puerto-Rican subjectivated people in Massachusetts and even Pietro was sharing this subjectivation in this early moment. Pietro was a stranger there, perhaps more of a stranger than them for he was a practitioner, like the people in the social service. He was feeling a mixture, an ambiguity inside himself. This was a good time for spreading out a line of flight for, even when there was a need for movement, they all had some things in common that would create this as a possibility:

19. The consultation was done in a program organized by Marcelo Pakman. We not mention neither the name of the program nor the period and places involved to preserve the privacy of the people involved.


he has something in common with the services even when he does not use its classificatory language and they also have something in common with the service because they use its language, perhaps thinking that that is the language he is going to understand.

Lines of flightThe issues the family was talking about with Pietro in therapy were several: 1. The possibility of transforming the fostering into adoption. Pietro had no power to do anything about it. By his positioning as a foreigner, he could not become part of the Massachusetts Institute of Subjectification. This was the first line of flight: “If 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-useful conversation, something minor with no relevance since it is not related with the “Real Social Service”20. But they did not quit. They were generous with Pietro: welcoming. And, since Pietro was un-useful for them and the System they were entangled with, he could not impose a(ny)-thing, not even liberate them. They were creating an (un)useful space for free speech.

2. Madalena’s wellbeing. In the second part of the conversation, Gracia and Julio were showing preoccupation about Madalena, the young pregnant woman who had gone away. This was the first opportunity for stepping inside the affective – desiring – elements of the dialogue. The conversation was hard for Pietro could not understand a word of their Spanish, so he needed a translator, but Linda – Madalena’s sister – spoke English fluently. Whilst Pedro – the five year old boy – was sleeping on a chair, Linda explained that Madalena is often going away, coming back later as if nothing happened. Linda was sure this time was going be the same.

This part of the colloquium was felt by Pietro as a shift: they were talking about how to live a life in Deleuzian terms. A sister knows how the other sister operates. They share something, they have something in common. Linda can understand Madalena’s way of living and her relationships with people, the choices she can do. Perhaps, one could consider that Madalena is secretly in contact with her sister. From this point of observation, everything becomes immediately fascinating. Linda’s speech is fast, very American. Sometimes

20. A good example of the totalizing effects that ‘the real’ has . In this example, the ‘real’ is indistinguishable of the ‘royal’.


Pietro has problems to follow her even when he can grasp everything. In his view, she’s intelligent and sensible, she has all her life to live and she could become an artist, or a scholar, or a scientist. Pietro cannot but think: “what a fantastic Wille zur Macht she is spreading!”

3. The third and most important argument was Julio’s demand to go back to Puerto Rico, a demand strongly contested by Gracia: “If we go back there we lose all the benefits we get from Massachusetts, and he starts drinking again! We never will do that! He is a dangerous person, in trying to destroy himself, he ruins all of us!”

Here is coming the conflict between Gracia (the Massachusetts part-taking) and Julio (the Puerto-Rican one). This is a conflict that involves the politics of the body and of the mind: Gracia’s body and Julio’s mind… but also Julio’s body and Gracia’s mind.

In a certain sense, we could see Julio as a social body, shaped by the social services of Massachusetts. His way of talking – “Tengo cuarenta y siete años, trabajé una vida y me van a negar una vaso de Ron!”, “Bueno estaré aqui todavia, me gusta el baseball, y me consuela la nostalgia de mi casa”21 – was typical of a child who makes tantrums and then tries to repair. These utterances, his way of smiling at Pietro as “el Doctor”, his way of moving and looking around, etc.; all of these gestures seemed to be shaped to stay under the limits of toleration of Social Services Dispositive. And this way of subjecting himself was successful. Apparently he knew the limits of expressing his affections and moods. 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 of being accepted in Massachusetts, a gentile discrimination.

Pietro was thinking for himself: many years earlier, he had been there in a period of study. At the time, he was far from speaking a decent English and he neither knew many details of the lifestyle over there. In other words, he also had no manners and, like Julio, he was not behaving properly. And as he was watching Julio at the same time, as in a stream of (un)consciousness, he was following the connections by the words in italics – decent, no manners, not properly – he suddenly felt the dissonance he was feeling when he was there back

21. “I am forty-seven years old, I worked all my life and they deny me a glass of rum?” “Well, I’ll stay here, I like baseball and I get consolation from my nostalgia for my home”


in 1991: a person who had lived all his/her own life until that point elsewhere, a stranger who was assuming that his/her way of living a life was proper – and appropriate – to the social environment and who suddenly realizes that what he took for granted – even with simple phrase like “I met a girl who is studying Anthropology” – was no longer available for the academicians around him – his peers in the new environment – where secretly laughing because the word “girl” was not proper and so on.

In that moment, Pietro felt he was sharing something with Julio for he also – in living there in 1991 – sometimes got the same childish attitude of needing to ask others – in his case, colleagues – whether he was being proper in doing such or such thing. After all, they were not too far from each other: both being strangers and, in a wide sense of the word, Latinos. Yet, the childish Pietro – unlike Julio, was a clever student, eager to learn good manners.

So Pietro was in the good position of being the counsellor whereas Julio was in the bad position of being mentally retarded. It is in such position that Julio can express his own desire to go back to Puerto Rico and to do so with no consequences about his own declarations for one could imagine the Social System – the Dispositive – commenting: “you know this man… he is mentally retarded; he has no idea what he says and his statements have no consequences. So we can continue funding the family.”

After more than one hour of conversation, Pietro decided to talk with the other colleagues of the team. The team was composed of many Latino people. Cristobal Bonelli, a Family Therapist and Anthropologist from Chile, said something that moved Pietro very much, probably helpful for the family. What he said was a kind of delusional discourse, a vision. Let’s put his words as poetry:

I see a tunnel that connectsand disconnects

two places,at the exit of one side

I see a Hospital,and that’s Massachusetts.

To the other sideI see a Bar,

and that’s Puerto Rico.

He was keeping, as in a dream, the core of all the issues spreading out from the conversation.


On top of all these things, during the interval after the session was finished, a colleague from Puerto Rico approached Pietro to apologize in the name of the family. He was touched about her apologizing: he felt a sort of mark on her body, a pound of a woman’s flesh coming from her belonging to the Puerto-Rican community in Massachusetts. He thought: what about me had I been following a consultation by another colleague, let’s say fifty years earlier, with an Italian family. Would I be in the same position having to apologize? Probably. How then to respond so as not to reproduce these endless mechanisms of subjugation? A way to say something could be “I would be proud to belong to such a group of Deleuzian people, who are able to be so creative so as to 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 deterriotarialisationsMaria heard Pietro’s case as many of us practitioners do: as an afterthought and in the midst of a (practitioner’s) conversation, as part of writing this paper. Maria could not but appreciate its beauty – the beauty of a graceful (Gracia) moment (a month?... Julio) – and to wonder about the endless possibilities that this event offers us once we move away from the official story – the clinical case as is described by the system of files with clinical definitions of this family. Like in any service industry, the file represent more than just the patient, for each of the definitions assume someone – the expert(s) – defining via the use of standard tools of assessment and observation such a patient. As Pietro indicated earlier, it is a very effective institutional dispositive – as Foucault would say – that allocates status and space to all the parties. People are recruited into these roles with a frightful docility, not just the clients – who will receive the so called benefits – but also the professionals whose practices will enable them to get a salary (that partly pays for the benefits). All are acting in good faith, all hoping that somehow their efforts will help without suspecting that their actions are not as innocent and uncertain as they would wish. The institution is not “out there” but is actualized by their participation, by their docility… and ours.

For Deleuze, there is hardly any bigger power of resistance in the modern State than the one depicted in Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby says “I prefer not to” and this negative opens up for a response that suspends the certainties and the scripts already too rehearsed.

As a therapist, as a member of this collective in search of a creative exit, this is a position that is of interest. For, if there is any power in Deleuze’s idea of plateau it is that, embedded in the constitutive definitions of any of these


domains (territories), there are possible lines of flight – or movements of deterritorializations – that are open for variation, of becoming another story, other from the ones of docile bodies that construct us/them as either clinicians or patients in (anti)heroic positions. Perhaps this is what Maturana, many years ago, meant when he commented that perhaps more than asking our clients what they want to change we might need to ask them what they want to keep.

Just to open up further to such possibilities – for Pietro already commented about a dream that cuts across cultures and times – Maria commented that nothing has yet been said of the way this family of apparently disfigured people can function across time and space and present a form of life that allows a child to sleep (can we think of a gesture of more innocence?).

This gesture reminded Maria of a family she saw many years ago in Chile: maternal grandparents and a grandchild. The child had gone to live with the grandparents after the mother started a new relationship. It was a better arrangement for the child and all parties were happy until the mother got sick and moved into grandparents’ house to be looked after. The grandparents felt that, out of love to both their daughter and her son, they “needed to give way for mother to become mother of the child”. But the mother got angry and the child acted out as if they both did not want to change the arrangement. Maria mentioned this to the grandparents in the session and the child – who had not wished to talk until that moment – started to cry. She asked him if her reading was right and he nodded. And, like Pietro caught in a series of reflective recursions, she thought that at the time she was seeing this family she was reading Bateson’s Angels Fear (Bateson & Bateson, 1987) and now thinks of a sentence written by Bateson that his daughter – Nora – has included in her recent website: “the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”. After close to thirty years since she saw this family, that gesture of the child, still, makes a lot of sense.

Pietro resonates with this and comments that in Primo Levi’s Se questo È Un Uomo (chapter 9, Levi, 1947), there is a description of a prominent (the word Levi used to describe a person who was trying to survive, using any ethological expedient): Henri. Henri learned fast the way of capturing pity from “son type”, he was ever able to stay under the threshold, of what was considered tolerable by him from the point of view of the Nazis, and his way of fake became soon the way he believed. Henri can be considered the opposite of Bartleby’s “I prefer


not”. Henri was a dealer, he got goods from the English sector of the camp; he was able to make friendship with everybody who could be useful to take advantage, to survive. Julio’s soul contains both Bartleby and Henri. We mean: this is not a case that could be grasped by the Oedipus narrative; by thinking of Julio’s triangle with mother/father, and the way he was attached/abandoned by his mother, or the way his father was authoritarian/absent from the family and so on. The same seems to happen in the session held by Maria with the child and the abuelos. This is an issue that has to do with the cultural borders – not at all the “real” borders, because as we all know Puerto Rico is an island – between the two places and/or – as in the case of the Chilean family – sets of definitions.Let’s take for granted Julio had an abandoning mother and an alcoholic father. That is what happens in many cases like this. Is this something that matters substantially in a Deleuzian line of observations? If yes, then the question is: why Julio is not Charles Bukowski, Antonin Artaud or Marilyn Monroe. This could be a Deleuzian line of questioning. Julio cannot live other than this life of mentally retarded in Massachusetts. He has only one chance – going back to Puerto Rico – but this chance is bar-red. Mental retardation is his own admitted line of flight, just not to waste his life collecting tips in a bar of Massachusetts in change of drinks he cannot drink.

The reference is the hospital, where the family lives now: not the bar-red bar but the hospital is the dispositive that shapes the family as it is now. From the hospital’s point of view, alcoholism is maybe the most important problem. Not because of the problem of alcoholism but because – in the welfare’s order of discourse – if Julio drinks they lose everything. So alcoholism is the order of discourse in which they are entangled. At the same time, abstinence is the only way to continue to live in Massachusetts and, of course, drinking becomes the only way to leave to Puerto Rico: tretium non datur – a stuck system – as Cecchin liked to say.

But, is there in the hospital (and not the single practitioners entangled in the system) a trick? Yes, because, in putting abstinence as a condition (a kind of a dead-line, with no date of expiring) to live in Massachusetts, the hospital (that is, the Social Service) behaves as a humanitarian institution: protecting them economically, taking care for obesity, paraplegia, mental retardation, social, linguistic and cultural problems of the family, so they are bound to adopt Pedro as a second generation Puerto-Rican guy in Massachusetts.

Gracia is trying to cooperate; she knows that they must survive, that life must go on. But she has marks on her body: she is paraplegic and obese. So she was


at our session as usual, with her wheelchair and with all her – Pietro supposes – 80 pounds extra, just to stay fixed, to stay stuck. This is the grace of Gracia: if she had a dancer body and they were in some bar in Puerto Rico – dancing – probably this would be a dis-grace. Not walking, being fat are metonymies for her body to keep Julio out of the bar and save their own lives. A month of grace, the Mount Gracia (la montaña Gracia) with a tunnel bar-red: not to “really” go to Puerto Rico but to create an imaginary line of flight for Linda and Madalena, for they can still fly, they still have good wings.

The only way the institution can manage this case – to manage this presentation of life – is by defining them by clusters: mentally retarded, alcoholic, obese, paraplegic, and so on. They are needy persons, and they subject themselves, they answer the interpellation, behaving as if they were like these definitions, they fit, they dispose themselves like docile bodies. No way out using reality and rationality: what is rational is real and what is real is rational (wrote Hegel), that’s the double bind of the Ethic State.

Cristobal’s dream is a poetic way to describe the system, and to derail it from reality to imaginary, they can now continue to fake: like faking to be welcomed in a comfortable hospital, that is Massachusetts.

But let us not be fooled in thinking that this is something that happens only to Latinos in Massachusetts. It would a relief if this is the case, at least for some. The dynamics of the Order of the discourse, the regimes and dispositives that transform our desires and our dreams into docile bodies are not of a concrete place but belong to a style of life that does not respect our ecology of mind.

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

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