Two Regimes of Madness

Two Regimes of Madness

by Gilles Deleuze



1. Guattari has spoken of a formalism of power. As agreed, I now interrupt him, but in order to say much the same thing. The question is not the same one that was still being asked several years ago. Today, we’re not asking what is the nature of power, but rather, along with Foucault, how power exerts itself, where it takes shape, and why it is everywhere.
Let’s begin with a tiny example, the puppeteer. He has a certain power, to work the puppets, but also the power he exerts over the children. Kleist wrote an admirable text on the subject. One could say that there are three lines. The puppeteer does not operate according to movements that already represent the figures to be achieved. He makes his puppet move according to a vertical line, wherein the center of gravity, or rather, of the levity of the puppet, is displaced. It is a perfectly abstract line, not in the least figurative, and no more symbolic than figurative. The line is mutant because it is made up of as many singularities as stopping points which nevertheless do not break up the line. There is never any binary relationship or bi-univocal relations between this vertical, abstract line— which is for this reason all the more real—and the concrete movements of the puppet.
In the second place, there are movements of an entirely different kind: tangible, representative curves, an arm that rounds itself out, a head that tilts. This line is no longer made up of singularities but rather of very supple segments—one gesture, then another gesture. Finally, the third line, one of a much harder segmentarity which corresponds to the moments of the story represented by the play of the puppets. The binary relationships and bi-univocal relations that the Structuralists tell us about might form in and between Segmentarizable lines. But the power of the puppeteer himself arises more at the point of conversion between the abstract, non-figurative line, on the one hand, and the two lines of segmentarity, on the other.
A banker, banking-power in capitalism, it’s somewhat the same thing. It is well known that there are two forms of money, but they are sometimes improperly identified. There is money as financing structure, or even as monetary creation and destruction: a non-realizable quantity, an abstract or mutant line with its singularities. And then a second, completely different line, concrete, made of tangible curves: money as means of payment, capable of being segmented, allocated for salaries, profit, interest, etc. And this money as means of payment will carry in turn a third segmentarized line: the entirety of goods produced in a given period, of equipment, and of consumption (the work of Bernard Schmitt, Suzanne de Brunhoff, etc.). Banking-power occurs at the level of conversion between the abstract line, the financing structure and the concrete lines, means of payment--goods produced. The conversion occurs on the level of central banks, the gold standard, the current role of the dollar, etc.
Another example. Clausewitz speaks of a flow which he calls “absolute war,” which would never have existed in a pure state, but which would nonetheless have crossed through history, irresolvable, singular, mutant, abstract. Perhaps this war flow has, in fact, existed as the unique invention of nomads, a war machine independent of states. In fact, it’s striking that the great states, the great despotic apparatuses don’t seem to have based their power on a war machine, but rather on bureaucracy and the police. The war machine is always something that comes from the outside and is of nomadic origin: a great abstract line of mutations. But, for reasons easily understood, states will have to appropriate this machine for themselves. They will put together armies, conduct wars, wars serving their politics. War ceases to be absolute (abstract line), in order to become something that is no more amusing, whether limited war, whether total war, etc., (second line, this time segmentarizable). And these wars take this or that form depending on the political necessities and the nature of the States that conduct them, that impose their ends and their limits upon them (third segmentarized line). There, again, what one calls the power of war is in the conversion of these lines.
One should give many more examples. The three lines do not have the same pace, nor the same speeds, not the same territorialities, nor the same deterritorializations. One of the principle goals of schizoanalysis would be to search in each one of us for the crossing lines that are those of desire itself: non-figurative abstract lines of escape, or of deterritorialization; lines of segmentarities, whether supple or hard, in which one either gets caught up, or moves beneath the horizon of one’s abstract line; and how conversions happen from one line to the others.

2. Guattari is in the process of plotting a chart of semiotic regimes; I would like to give an example, one that could as easily be called pathological as historical. An important case of two regimes of signs was present in the psychiatry of the latter part of the 19th century, but this case also extends well beyond psychiatry to concern all of semiotics. One can conceive of a first regime of signs that functions in a very complex way, but in a way nonetheless easily understood: one sign defers to other signs, and these other signs to still other signs, to infinity (irradiation, an ever extending circularity). Somebody goes out onto the street, he notices that his concierge is glaring at him, he slips, a small child sticks its tongue out at him, etc. In the end, it’s the same thing to say that each sign is doubly articulated, that a sign always defers to another sign, indefinitely, and that the supposedly infinite ensemble of signs itself defers to a greater signifier. Such is the paranoid regime of the sign, but one could just as well call it despotic or imperial.
And then there is a completely different regime. This time, a sign, or a small group, a little bundle of signs, begins to flow, to follow a certain line. We no longer have a vast circular formation in perpetual extension, but rather a linear network. Instead of signs that defer themselves to one another, there is a sign that defers to a subject: the delirium comes about in a localized fashion, it is more a delirium of action than of idea, one line must be maneuvered to the end before another line can be initiated (quibbling delirium, what the Germans called “quarrelsome delirium”). It is in this way that a psychiatrist like Clérambault distinguished between two large groups of delirium, paranoid and passional [passionnel].
It could be that one of the major reasons for the crisis in psychiatry had been this meshing between completely different signs in this regime. The man of paranoid delirium, one can always lock him up, he presents all the signs of madness, but otherwise he is not mad at all, his reasoning is impeccable. The man of passional desire shows no signs of madness, except on certain points that are difficult to discern, and nonetheless he is mad, his madness manifests itself in a rash acting out (for example, the assassin). Here again, Foucault has defined profoundly this difference and complimentarity of the two cases. I mention them in order to give an idea of the plurality of semiotics, that is to say, of the clusters whose signs have neither the same regime nor the same function.

3. It matters little whether a regime of signs receives a clinical or historical name. Not that it’s the same thing, but regimes of signs cross over very different “stratifications.” Just now, I was talking in clinical terms about the paranoid regime and the passional regime. Now let’s talk about social formations. I wouldn’t say that emperors are paranoiacs, nor the reverse. But in the great imperial formations, whether archaic or even ancient, there is the great signifier, the signifier of the despot; and beneath it the infinite network of signs that defer themselves to one another. But you also need all sorts of categories of specialized people whose job it is to circulate these signs, to say what they mean, to interpret them, to thereby freeze the signifier: priests, bureaucrats, messengers, etc. It is the coupling of meaning and interpretation. And then there is still something else: there still must be subjects who receive the message, listen to the interpretation, obey the chore—as Kafka says in “The Great Wall of China,” or “The Emperor’s Message.” And each time one could say that, having reached its limit, the signified generates more meaning, allowing the circle to grow.
Any social formation always appears to work well. There is no reason for it not to work well, for it not to function. Nonetheless, there is always one side through which it escapes, undoes itself. One never knows if the messenger will arrive. And the closer one gets to the periphery of the system, the more subjects find themselves caught in a kind of temptation: whether to submit oneself to signifiers, to obey the orders of the bureaucrat and follow the interpretation of the high priest—or rather to be carried off elsewhere, the beyond, crazy vector, tangent of deterritorialization—to follow a line of escape, to set off as a nomad, to emit what Guattari just called a-signifying particles. Take a belated example like that of the Roman Empire: the Germans are quite taken by the two-fold temptation to penetrate and integrate themselves into the empire—but at the same time pressured by the Huns to form a nomadic line of escape, a war machine of a new variety, marginal and non-integrable.
Let’s take an entirely different regime of signs, namely capitalism. Capitalism, too, appears to function very well, there is no reason for it not to. Furthermore, it belongs to what we just referred to as passional delirium. Contrary to what happens in paranoid imperialist formations, where little bundles of signs, big bundles of signs set off to follow lines, and on these lines all sorts of things appear: the movement of money-capital; the erection of subjects as agents of capital and of work; unequal distribution of goods and means of payment to these agents. One tells the subject that the more he obeys, the more he commands, since he obeys only himself. Perpetually one falls back from the commanding subject onto the obeying subject in the name of the law of capital. And without a doubt this sign system is very different from the imperialist system: it’s advantage is that it fills in the gaps, while carrying the peripheral subject toward the center and freezing nomadism in its tracks. For example, in the history of philosophy, one knows of the famous revolution that moved discourse from the imperial stage, where the sign perpetually deferred to the sign, on to the stage of subjectivity as a properly passional delirium that always threw subject back onto subject. And yet even there, the better it works the better it escapes on all sides. Money-capital’s lines of subjectivization never cease emitting junctions, oblique lines, transversals, marginal subjectivities, lines of deterritorialization that threaten their planes. An internal nomadism, a new type of deterritorialized flow, a-signifying particles that come to compromise any given detail, and the whole configuration. The Watergate affair, global inflation.

Translated by Robert Hardwick Weston