Art Brut Works as Schizophrenic Objects
“[Gille] Deleuze’s philosophy developed as a critique of a stream of Western thought that tends to understand difference in relation to similitude. In contrast, Deleuze invites thinking of the difference in terms of a relational ontology where the similitudes and differences change constantly in response to their changing relations within different and ever-changing contexts. According to Deleuze, these two different ways of thinking of difference bring about two distinct perceptions of the world and, accordingly, two distinct perceptions of the self and the other. Whereas for the former the condition of the difference is an essential similitude or identity, for the latter the condition of similitude and even identity is an irrevocable difference.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the world consists of its perceptions, and so there is no absolute essence, identity, or difference that can be solidified within a concept or explained through. His philosophy, rather than explaining the world, provides a ground for creating new perceptions, new relations, and new meanings of the world, undermining the established ones according to Buchanan. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari (2000), argue that what changes perception, such as substance use and madness, is sources of inspiration. Without praising madness in a romantic fashion as did surrealists, Deleuze and Guattari consider madness as a method of questioning and changing the way we think of the world. They are therefore very interested in madness, especially in a specific kind of madness: schizophrenia.
Richard Greaves, Sugar Shack, Quebeck, from 1952 onwards
As distinct from the psychiatric one, Deleuze-Guattarian schizophrenia is a socioeconomic and political concept that is considered in relation to the production of desire in capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari argue that every force as well as desire is coded socially within the systems of meaning. Thus, desire is socioeconomic, and the way the capitalist system codes desire turns its subjects into neurotics. Capitalism overcodes how people feel, think, desire, and thus produce. The desire of the subject in capitalism is predetermined, and its subjectivity is oppressed so much that the subjects cannot desire for themselves; they cannot create meaning for themselves but can only consume the predetermined desires and meanings. According to Deleuze and Guattari subjects of capitalism whose subjective desire is not given an outlet fall into neurosis. On the other hand, schizophrenics, as they are presented in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, are in the natural state of the human that existed before the human/nature, subject/object, inside/outside, authentic/fake dichotomies were established. The schizophrenic is immersed in the cosmos, the schizophrenic is one with the cosmos, and it naturally tears off categorical divisions and definitions. The schizophrenic cannot stop making sense, for everything is connected to each other in the world of the schizophrenic. A schizophrenic’s desiring and sense-making mechanisms are not limited by the norm. A schizophrenic’s production is a free production that comes from the schizophrenic’s own desire. A schizophrenic is free to think, feel, desire, make sense, and produce. In this sense, schizophrenic creation and schizophrenic objects cannot be understood in terms of definite forms but in terms of the way they are produced, undermining categorical thinking and the capitalist way of producing desire. Schizophrenics who fall outside of the social codifications and normative regulations reveal potentials for a more free thought, and the freedom of the schizophrenics mirrors the overcodifications of the neurotic subjects according to Michaux. A schizophrenic thus creates a rupture within the psycho-political order of capitalism. Accordingly, what is defined as sickness by the social machine comes out as an inspiration to criticize the norms of the social order, the so-called normalcy. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari propose to become-mad, to become-schizophrenic, to think beyond the subject-object dichotomy and other dichotomies, beyond categorical thinking that reduces the difference into the forms of similitude. They suggest a perspective that changes fundamentally the perception of the self and of the other and thus of the outsider.
Psychiatric discourse is a product and a tool of the social machine to negotiate and define what is normal and what is not. In the same vein, Deleuze and Guattari argue that psychoanalysis does not cure but, on the contrary, inhibits subjects from finding their freedom and that the holders of the discourse of the healthy mind are not the healers but those who resubmit people to a neurosis that is called normality. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari think that the schizophrenic who is connected to everything, who follows the flow of desire in everything is a creative model when compared with the neurotic whose sense-making mechanisms are limited by the norm, yet who constantly submit themselves to its corrective mechanisms. Thus, as an alternative to psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari introduce schizoanalysis as an occupation to undermine the capitalistic coding of desire, instead of explaining desire, because, for them, desire is socially coded and there is no desire beyond the way it is coded in a system. Schizoanalysis thinks of desire in terms of subjectivity by looking for connections and creating connections, looking for ways to free subjective desire; it mobilizes the flux that has so far been reduced to and crystallized into normative categories that serve as tools for capitalism to control the desire of the subjects. In this context, for schizoanalysis, manifold social positions that point to the outside of the norm, such as that of the stranger, the excluded, the artist, and the outsider, have potentials to awaken different perceptions of the world as do substance use and some mental conditions such as madness. Without praising and/or mystifying such differences, Deleuze and Guattari suggest seeing them as sources of inspiration for sociopolitical change, for the formation of free subjects who are free to desire.
Artistic occupation operates within the realm of sensation and provides different perceptions of the same thing according to Deleuze and Guattari. In this sense, Buchanan and Collins, through the schizoanalysis of visual arts, point out that art is political, for every artistic activity reinforces or challenges normality with the interpretation of the world it suggests. Art Brut, being an outsider artistic creation, has certainly a political character. Yet its sociopolitical merit seems to be overshadowed within the controversial literature that is trying to understand and explain the kind of creation in question in definitive forms. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari consider Art Brut works as examples of a schizophrenic object of an unruly desiring-production that unsettles the social machine by opening up questions about our perception of artistic creation, production, and sense making in general. For the schizophrenic, being one with the cosmos, there is no distinction between production, product, and producer, all being one and the same process. The schizophrenic object cannot be separated from its producer or from its process of production, which is a desiring-production. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this radically different production expressed in the schizophrenic table of Belgian writer Henri Michaux. The schizophrenic table, for Michaux, “[goes] about its own business”; it is “a dehumanized” table that is difficult, if not impossible, to define as a table. Since in a schizophrenic object, the producing, the producer, and the product infuse each other, “the pure ‘thisness’ of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing” without a final product—like Richard Greaves’s schizophrenic architecture, a well-known Art Brut work. Greaves’s houses and Michaux’s table are like a rhizome. A schizophrenic object proliferates like a rhizome without a beginning or an end. It does not have an object or subject; it connects livings things, nonliving things; it connects between living things and nonliving things. What is unsettling about a schizophrenic object, as well as an Art Brut work is the desiring-production manifested through the thing/work/product that goes beyond the normative understanding of production, creativity, and desire. Art Brut works as schizophrenic objects are dehumanized in the sense that they amaze and block the understanding with their uncanniness—and they require a different way of thinking and perceiving to make sense of their appearance. Hence, the essentialist discourse of authenticity that tries to define the schizophrenic object in terms of categorical and definitive frameworks passes up the unsettling character of Art Brut, which undermines the prevailing ways of desiring, producing, creating, and even thinking. Therefore, such a discourse passes by its subject fundamentally.”
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