Gilles Deleuze (1925 to 1995) was a French philosopher who, with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, held that desire is not a lack waiting to be filled but a productive force, and that psychoanalysis and capitalism both shrink it down to the family and to consumption. Against the ‘tree’ model of thought, with a single root and a branching hierarchy, they set the rhizome, an underground stem like couch grass that spreads sideways and in which any point can connect to any other. Therapeutic Shamanism shares their suspicion of hierarchy and of manufactured wants, whilst rooting the self, as they do not, in the Lower-World Soul.
Who was Gilles Deleuze? #
He was born in Paris in 1925 and spent most of his working life teaching there, giving weekly seminars at the experimental university at Vincennes, later Paris VIII, until he retired in 1987. His own major work, Difference and Repetition (1968), tried to build a philosophy in which multiplicity takes the place of fixed substance and events take the place of essences.1 Around 1968 he met Félix Guattari, a psychoanalyst and political activist, and together they wrote the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). He died in Paris in 1995.1
What did Deleuze and Guattari teach about desire? #
That desire produces. In much Western thought, psychoanalysis included, desire is lack: we want what we do not have. Deleuze and Guattari turned this round. Desire, in Anti-Oedipus, is a positive, creative energy running through nature, society and the psyche alike, which they called desiring-production; it is not trying to make up for anything missing.2
Their quarrel with psychoanalysis followed from this. They thought it took the wild, many-sided force of desire and squeezed it into one small story, the family triangle of mother, father and child, the Oedipus complex. Capitalism, in their account, does something similar on a vast scale. It breaks up old ties and sets everything flowing, money, goods, labour and people, and then captures those flows again, turning desire back towards the private family and the next thing to buy.2
What is the rhizome? #
An image for a different way of thinking and of organising. A rhizome is an underground stem, like couch grass, a bulb or a tuber, which spreads sideways and puts out shoots anywhere. Western thought, they said, has mostly been modelled on the tree: a single root, a trunk, branches dividing into smaller branches, everything traced back to one origin and arranged in ranks. “We’re tired of trees,” they wrote.3 A rhizome has no centre and no top; any point can connect to any other, it is a multiplicity and not the many parts of one thing, and it can be broken anywhere and start up again. Most of all, “it is always in the middle, between things”.3
The same contrast runs through their politics. In A Thousand Plateaus they set the nomad, moving through open, unmeasured space, against the State, which divides space up, fixes people in place and ranks them.4 In doing so they drew on the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who described societies that kept a State from forming, and they followed him in seeing such societies as actively warding off the rise of a power set over them, not as stages on the way to it.5
Is Deleuze’s work controversial? #
Yes, partly because it is so hard to read. In 1997 the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in the book published in English as Fashionable Nonsense, charged a group of French thinkers, Deleuze among them, with using terms from mathematics and physics in ways that made no sense, and the philosopher Thomas Nagel, reviewing the book, largely agreed with them.6
On the other side, Deleuze scholars have set out the real mathematics he drew on. The philosopher Simon Duffy, in Deleuze and the History of Mathematics (2013), traces Deleuze’s use of the history of mathematics and defends his way of doing philosophy with mathematics, though as an argument in its own right, not a direct reply to Sokal and Bricmont.7
How does Deleuze’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most clearly on hierarchy. Taker society is a hierarchy run by charismatic leaders who take more than their fair share, and the idea that hierarchy is the only way to organise people is a wonky thought, deeply ingrained.8 Hunter-gatherer bands governed themselves without it: anarchism, as distinct from anarchy, is order without top-down government, government through the cooperation of people who are truly equal.9 Under the social hierarchy lies a spiritual one, the spell that ‘up is good and down is bad’, which from a shamanic point of view is sheer and utter nonsense.10 Deleuze and Guattari attacked hierarchy as a shape of thought; Therapeutic Shamanism traces it to the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy? and How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
The rhizome has its echo in the animist web. Humans are the youngest and least wise of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, the children, and that is not about hierarchy but about family.11 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
On desire, Taker culture runs on excessive consumption, and many of the unhelpful thought-formsThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this that lodge in people come from advertising and consumer culture, such as the belief that a particular car will make people look up to you.12 The wanting is manufactured, and it is not the person’s own. See Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
And Deleuze and Guattari wrote of becoming-animal, insisting that becoming “is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something”.13 In shamanic work a common experience is a sense of becoming an animal, known as shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer; it is mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, not a physical change of form.14 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On roots. Deleuze and Guattari were suspicious of roots and origins, and critical of the idea of a single, unified self. Therapeutic Shamanism keeps the root. The most reliable anchor-point, the thing that keeps us sane and grounded, is our own Lower-World Soul and the way it is rooted in a larger, interconnected whole; in abandoning the Lower-World, Taker society set us adrift in increasingly wonky middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer stories.15 And where the tree stood for them as an image of rank, in shamanic practice going down matters as much as going up. A balanced spiritual practice, one that is not hierarchical and Fallen, works with both spiritual realms equally, the Lower-World of Soul and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this as much as the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer of Spirit.16 See What is the Lower-World?
