This is a paper I wrote a couple of years ago in grad school. It is on Deleuze and the unconscious. I noticed after reading it the other day that it very closely explains the DMT experience mechanically and ontologically. It is far from perfect, maybe even a bit embarrassing, but at the time I will not be fixing it. I will incorporate it into a book I am working on.

Check it out and let me know what you think please!...

It is attached as a Word document (much easier to read that way), and is below:






In this paper I will explain Deleuze’s conception of how unconscious processes operate, and the individuation, that is, personality formation, which results from this process. Deleuze was profoundly influenced by a variety of scholars, including Jung, Foucault, and especially Nietzsche. In many ways Deleuze’s works such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus can be seen as neo-Nietzschean, even as a continuation of The Anti-Christ and The Will to Power. Deleuze dismantles other scholars such as Lacan and Freud, particularly Freud’s Oedipal binding and encapsulation of the unconscious into a {Mommy, Daddy, Me} paradigm. These scholars will be used throughout this paper in order to illustrate the origin of the concepts and why they appear the way that they do.
Components/terminology of unconscious processes which produces subjects will then be explained. The components of these unconscious processes do not necessarily follow in any particular order—as they are deeply intertwined and embedded within each other—just like parts to an engine. Once these components are explained, they will then be bound together to illuminate the process which produces individuation, which is where the Deleuzean unconscious process constantly leads to: the creation of a future individual which does not yet exist.
Individuation is a constituent of metaphysics known as “personal identity,” which questions how an individual can stay the same over time from birth until death. There are different types of individuation, but in very general terms,
“It is the name given to processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to those processes through which differentiated components become integrated into stable wholes. Individuation is the process through which a person becomes his/her 'true self'. Hence it is the process whereby the innate elements of personality; the different experiences of a person's life and the different aspects and components of the immature psyche become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. Individuation might thus be summarized as the stabilizing of the personality.”

Though it must be noted that, especially for Deleuze, the self never becomes cemented into a stable, whole, but only a relative self emerges from time to time at different points in time, depending on the moments of self-monitoring and reflection.
Individuation and the becoming of, are the functions of the unconscious, and is where it is always already headed. This process refers to the continual process of building an individual: the birth and death, not of a self, but of a multiplicity of selves: such and such person is not simply good, bad, honest, a liar, selfish, comical, or plain serious, but all of these, at the same time. This is the operation, not the meaning, of Deleuze’s unconscious, which functions according to present moments which occur in rapid, non-linear, instant happenings. In this process, an individual identity is formed, at least for the time being.
The unconscious, not being an entity existing as a whole, is an assemblage of rhizomatic multiplicities. Rhizomatic basically means non-linear. This rhizome, which is a key concept in A Thousand Plateaus, is the unconscious and the external world. It is not a metaphor, but the way in which reality actually operates. And the process by which reality operates, and the operation itself, are one and the same. Linear categorization is constructed by human reason and logic, and is used to falsely depict the nature of reality, or more accurately, actuality. Deleuze calls this representation, and Nietzsche refers to this mode of thinking in his Human, All Too Human,
“Logic, too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things [we call all leaves on a tree-leaves-yet each leaf is different from the next], that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight lines or perfect circles”

Rhizomaticism is similar to Heidegger’s referential-totality-of-significance (or web-of-significance), in which the world is not constructed as a collection of facts or separate entities, as science typically suggests, and has nothing to do with representation, but only with connections in order to allow the progression of flows, and the breaking of flows, in order to redirect them into newer, hopefully better pathways of creation. “Process,” not representation, is the accurate description of the milieu of the unconscious.
The flows I am referring to are the will of unconscious processes, and the paths that these flows take are engineered by desiring-machines—which are constituted by flow-breaks—not just unbridled flows. The process as a whole is called desiring-production, which is the mechanics of how the material world is constructed—including the unconscious—which does not exist prior to desire, because the unconscious is a future-oriented process that must be driven towards production. This is the only way that the unconscious exists, only as becoming, never as a stable, complete entity. These flows and flow-breaks compose the three synthesis of connection, disjunction, and conjunction. These will be discussed a bit later, as they are operations on the body-without-organs—or the virtual dimension of the body—apart from the traits and habits that are ascribed to the rest of the body. It is where unconscious potentials are “born”.
So flows are produced, which are broken, re-routed, and which then produce more flows in an infinite Heraclitean flux, as Deleuze says,
“One machine is always coupled with another…the production of production…there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth)….Desire constantly couples continuous flows…[which are] constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows….Every “object” presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object.”

“Every object” also includes the individual, not as a subject, but as a process of individuation, as a “…fractured I of a dissolved Cogito.” This means that there are no objects which do not change or undergo transformation from one state into the next, including people.
The unconscious is also “fractured’, and must be “strung” together into forms of coherence. Since the unconscious is a constituent of a person, then it is also fractured, meaning not being a complete entity, or a set with a beginning and an end, but a collage of symbols and meanings derived from experience non-linearly, which must be “strung” together by its possessor, in order for it to provide information necessary for the next direction, or flow of becoming. These formations must eventually be brought into play because, “…unconscious social investments come out in delirium” , or,
“A pre-rational, differential and excessive, triadic logic of floating images and disparate meanings inhabiting Alice’s paradoxical wonderland. Desire is not a single drive—it is an assembly line of affects and effects; machine is not a mechanical law utilized in the production of some predetermined end imposed by a transcendental subject—instead subjects and objects are themselves differentiated and produced as the outcomes of desiring machines.”

Such movements of desiring-production lead to individuation, or the “…other in me...,” which arise from an unfolding of thoughts and non-thoughts. The latter is unconscious. It belongs not to a preexistent ego, or self, but to a disassembled assemblage of a self, which is in need of being put back together, until the next disassemblage occurs. This process occurs in constant flux.
The individual is not a self, but a multiplicity of selves. These selves co-exist by way of what Deleuze calls the virtual, and a particular self is expressed more than another at different points in time in what he calls actual, according to events, necessity, or what the present situation calls for. This is the operation, not the meaning, of Deleuze’s unconscious, which functions according to present moments which occur in rapid, rhizomatic, instant happenings. In this process, an individual identity is formed, at least for the time being.
As mentioned before, Deleuze takes issue with Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex. Even though Deleuze believed that the great discovery of psychoanalysis was productive-desire and the productive-unconscious, Freud’s conception of the unconscious was that of an entity, a separate being from the individual and of reality. According to Deleuze, the unconscious is not a representation of the inner mind, as Freud would have it, it is not a theater, but a factory: a machinic factory of the production of pathways. Deleuze claimed that Freud “imprisoned” the unconscious, trapping it behind doors of nothing but repressed desires, and even worse, confining it inside a triangle of {Mummy-Daddy-Me}. Freud’s Oedipus is a “…ridiculous claim to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to encompass the entire production of desire.” This view propelled Deleuze to seek alternatives such as that of Lacan’s.
According to Deleuze, Lacan provides a more reasonable alternative than Freud, who created a code of signifying chains instead of an enclosed entity. This code functions like a language: made up of signs that operate linearly: which trace back pathways to unconscious depths: it is a “…code of the unconscious.” Language is also a multiplicity, that is, it possesses a certain structure that does not have to follow any particular order. Deleuze agrees with Lacan that the unconscious is structured like a language, but Deleuze re-conceptualizes language to posit it as a non-linear assemblage of signs, which can be arranged in any order, as long as they effectively express. For Deleuze, this code of symbols,
“…does not sponsor what Lacan calls ‘metonymy of desire’, a vain search for some object lost in the past; it operates instead by a radically indeterminate mode of ‘free association’ among signs…so complex that we can scarely speak of one chain or even one code of desire…they do not even belong to one sign system…[as an unconscious language system]…but are radically heterogeneous….”

Because of this non-linear “free association of signs,” Deleuze’s conception of the unconscious more closely resembles that of Carl Jung’s.
Deleuze and Jung’s conceptions of the unconscious correspond well. Jung presents structures as unconscious symbolically and non-linearly, which are necessarily overlaid by their products or effects. He, like Deleuze, defied Freud’s reduction of the unconscious to a singular personal dimension, trapped in an Oedipal triangle. He commented that Freud “…was blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the unconscious, and did not know that everything which arises out of the unconscious has…an inside and an outside.” Freud only conceived of the unconscious as having an inside, as being an internal component of a mind that operated solely within its own mechanics regardless of the external/internal “blend” of a rhizomatic “meshing” of reality. This non-linear, critical thinking appealed to Deleuze. In resemblance to his conception of the unconscious as a rhizomatic assemblage of multiplicity, Jung posited the splinter psyche, or complex, which are collections of psychological material, that functions most efficiently when together, and which usually group together because they all relate to a single archetype.
Archetypes are, for Jung, symbols which repeat throughout life to form thoughts which correspond to ideal types of images. They can be hereditary, instinctual or learned. Examples of archetypes are: the hero, the maiden, the wise old man, the magician, the trickster, the enduring horse, or the devious cat. Archetypes are also dynamic patterns of the process-structure of the psyche, and exist, according to Jung, only as potential according to the event, and as categories of possible functioning only. Coincidentally Jung, the same as Deleuze, even describes reality as a rhizome,
“The life of man is a dubious experiment…Individually, it is so fleeting…Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above gorund last only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral appartition….Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see id the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

The Outside is of utmost importance for Deleuze, as its ontological status is the basis of all existence that is produced; this includes the unconscious, since it is also a part of material existence, which wills to produce life, and the furthering of, leading to individuation. As was said earlier, Deleuze and Jung agreed on the unconscious as not only having an inside, but an outside—in contrast to Freud’s belief in stable entities only consisting in one state, instead of a multiplicity of states. Deleuze, borrowing from Foucault, posited the Outside, which is made up of the possibilities of what can be created. The realm of the “as-yet unthinkable” is what constitutes the Outside, and entails deterritorialization, folds, planes of consistency, and lines of flight (to be discussed shortly). This creative aspect of constructing a future tense is once again the process of the unconscious.
Thinking the unthinkable brings an element of non-thought into thought. Though seemingly contradictory, one may be able to “…show …the possibility of the impossible…and to see borders, that is, to show the imperceptible.” This paradoxical thinking constitutes,
“ The supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think the plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the non-external outside and non-internal inside—that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought.”

The Foucaultean/Deleuzian Outside does not mean rejection of interiority (or the deep layer of the internal world permeated by Jungian archetypal forces), but just the opposite—the outside and the inside exist in a dynamic and differential relationship to each other, “The Outside is not a fixed limit, but a moving matter animated by…movements, folds, and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the Outside but precisely the inside of the Outside,” (the unconscious, and reality as folded will be further discussed in individuation). Jung, like Deleuze and Foucault, also stressed the significance of an Outside as a non-personal dimension of the unconscious, instead of a form of idealism which would posit the Outside as being the outer limit of an internal world. This discussion will now lead us into a delineation of the components of the unconscious in order to add understanding of the mechanics of the unconscious. These do not proceed in any particular order, as all are simply “parts” to the machine: the machinic unconscious.
The first and largest constituent of these, is the body without organs. The BwO is a virtual dimension of the body, apart from the traits and habits that are ascribed to the rest of the body. It is where potentials are “born”. It also serves as a recording surface for the psyche, as a “…mystic writing pad…recording networks of relations among connections, instead of producing connections themselves….” The BwO is unproductive in itself, only serving as a host or a tabula rasa for the creation of the new. It exist to dis-organ-ize the body in order to enable re-organ-ization, or no organ-ization at all. The BwO is not literally a body which has no organs, but instead is a refusal of itself as being only an organism, because to be ‘simply an organism’ determines one into a certain shape or ability. The BwO is more than just mere encapsulation and transportation for the beholder, but a “playground” of the future, of the “always-yet”. It is both desire, and the smooth, “greased” surface on which desire runs.
Deleuze uses the analogies of an egg and the Earth to describe the BwO. An egg has an Outside, but its inside has not yet formed structure—it is pure potential—it is nothing but the “…transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject…intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients.” The Earth also has an Outside form, but its inside "…is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles." Its inside has no stability—it is ever-changing—its strata are moving at various speeds, and underneath the surface is covered with fault lines, which are producing mountains, which are producing rocks, which are producing sand, which are producing beaches, which are being washed away into the sea, only to start the process all over again.
Conflicts, and what are termed “pathologies,” arise between the BwO and desiring-machines, “Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine, becomes unbearable to the BwO.” The BwO is “pure”. It is self-sufficient. Intrusion into it from the Outside only means attempts to control and force it into molds. It resists by presenting its “…smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier.” Paranoia results from desiring-machines attempting to break into the BwO, since the BwO is secure in its own fluidity, and does not want to extend its desires beyond its willing. Catatonic breakdown results from a complete refusal of desiring-machines, by withdrawing into itself and not developing, thus being immersed in a swarm of disconnected flows of desire. The pervert, regarding desiring production on the BwO, maintains unrestraint, despite outside forces; while the neurotic constrains desiring production despite the influence of the desiring-machines, remaining fixated in unsatisfaction.
The BwO is very closely related to another concept of Deleuze’s: the plane of consistency, which is,
“An immanent field enabling exchanges between multiplicities in either the virtual or intensive registers. Constructing a plane of consistency requires overcoming habitual patterns…[it is a] field of experimentation for constructing immanent and horizontal relationships: ‘rhizomes’…[it is also] an immanent virtual field subtending morphogenetic processes (machinic assemblages) and enabling the production of, and transverse communication among bodies and assemblages.”

Rhizomatics draws multiple lines between conflicting experiences in order to construct the plane of consistency, it “…is pre-rational and a-conceptual, ultimately enabling the ‘conquest of the unconscious’ during it own constructive process.” The flat, slippery surface of the plane of consistency also serves as a “launching point” for novel, intuitive ideas and psychological spheres of experience. It has a body—the BwO—but is not the creator, but is where creativity creates. It is nowhere, yet everywhere.
What constitutes the creations of the BwO and the plane of consistency is cartography, or the mapping of lines. Cartography, or mapping, opens up new opportunities to re-conceptualize the unconscious, because the unconscious is an integration of everything, and everything, according to Deleuze, has
“…its geography, its cartography, its diagram. What interesting, even in a person, are the lies that make them up, or they make up, or take, or create….What we call a ‘map’, or sometimes a ‘diagram’ is a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map.’”

Rhizomatic integration and interaction of the lines, is the actual construction of the material world. It is what “strings” us, others, and the universe together. For example, when one marries someone, that person’s family historical lines become integrated into the lines of the other person, which become interconnected. These lines then become inter-related into the lines of the community, the city, the country, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. Evolution is another good example of how these lines become entangled rhizomatically instead of linearly: species do not evolve simply from one advancement to the next, but only to coincidental, random traits that aid in the reproduction and extended survival of the possessor of the adaptive trait. Many species die off. Species that are alive today won’t be around in 30,000 years, because even though they made it this far, the Earth will have drastic changes that will require other methods of survival not being employed today. We should keep this in mind.
The desiring machines, as mentioned before, which produce lines over the BwO and the plane of consistency, therefore the unconscious, operate by what are called the three syntheses: the connective, the disjunctive, and the conjunctive. These syntheses are way of constructing the mind. The connective operates by a series of …and…and…and, and connects part objects, not whole persons or objects, sometimes not even objects within objects. What constitutes theses connections are, “An infant’s mouth at the breast…[or] between an eye and a breast, an eye an a face, and eye and a knee...[and] a mouth and an atmosphere,” or between a hole and Deleuze’s mother’s arse, as he likes to say.
The disjunctive opens pathways for desire to liberate, it is a series of …or…or…or, or a split between functions and identities. Deleuze gives an example of a mouth and a mother’s breast: once the mouth has stopped nourishing, it is now free to expel milk or inhale air, it is freed by the disjunctive. This means that objects never serve any one particular purpose, but have a multiplicity of significances depending on the moment, as Holland says, “…the tongue as organ of taste but also as organ of speech and song; the opposable thumb as organ for grasping an ax but also for operating a track-ball or signaling someone’s death.”
The conjunctive synthesis plays a major role in the formation of subjectivity or individuation, leading to Nietzsche’s views on causality and the self. It results from a constant inter-play of desire versus restraint, or production versus anti-production. It produces a sense of self, through the constant re-experiencing of a self, with each paradoxical clash of desire being restrained. It leads one to believe that he is actually doing something himself, when actually he is causing nothing. This was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, as he says, “The deed has no doer,” and “…that one is simply deceiving oneself if one thinks they cause anything at all.” What Nietzsche means by this is that no one causes anything to happen, but instead we simply infer by “retro-acting” causal connections to events that have occurred. If one has a thought to throw a pen, and then throws it, that person would be self-deceived, according to Nietzsche, that he has caused the throwing of the pen, or even the thought itself, as he says,
“ The cause is imagined after the effect has taken place…“In fact, we invent all causes after the schema of the effect: the latter is known to us—Conversely, we are not in a position to predict of any thing what it will ‘effect’… “…an event is neither effected nor does it effect….Interpretation by causality [is a] deception…[and]… “We have believed in the will as cause to such an extent that we have from our personal experience introduced a cause into events in general (i. e., intention a cause of events).”

Thoughts are actually unbounded and without limitation, they are non-linear. We falsely construct a linear progression of our thoughts out of non-linear material, and call it “reason” or “logic”, or more precisely “thought”. From these deceiving thoughts, arises a false concreteness on the nature of memory. As Nietzsche says, “The same goes with thought and memory, “…memory also maintains the habit of the old interpretations, i.e., of erroneous causality—so the ‘inner experience’ has to contain within it the consequences of all previous false causal relations.” This claim of Nietzsche’s also destroys Lacan in our previous discussion on the linearality of symbols, and the unconscious being structured like a language, which “reaches back” to our deepest memories, because our memories are constructed of passed thoughts; we dig deep down into fuzzy sets of linked thought-chains to make-believe what we want to remember.
Memories are the most deceiving of all. The reason being, is that what you remember happened, such as the expression on someone’s face, as you told them anecdotes, that you thought were important and relevant, may have made that person have a reaction that was misinterpreted by you. He may have instead thought that what you said was the most important thing he ever heard, but may have made a face of disgust or disinterest because it simply overwhelmed him at the moment (he may have left and smiled ever since). Schopenhauer sums this up nicely when he said, “The past has vanished, the future only exists in thought, therefore the present is what is most real and true.”
Nietzsche, as Deleuze and Jung, also did not believe in subjectivity as a whole, as he says,
“That a sort of adequate relationship subsists between subject and object, that the object is something that if seen from within would be a subject, is a well-meant invention which, I think, has had its day. The measure of that of which we are in any way conscious is totally dependent upon the coarse utility of its becoming-conscious: how could this nook-perspective of consciousness permit us to assert anything of "subject" and "object" that touched reality!”

Though some argue, such as Buddhist monks, that there is no subject which is different from objects—because the universe is interconnected—therefore one, Nietzsche’s destruction of the subject depends on his destruction of causality. According to him, the “inner self” that we construct is based on causal relations between thoughts, memories, feelings, and perceptions, but we only imagine the causal relations, they don’t really exist. We fabricate the connections and falsely connect them to an original source, namely—a self, as he says, “’The subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: it is we who first created the ‘similarity of these states….[it is instead], The subject as multiplicity.”
According to Holland, the conjunctive synthesis is responsible for the “feeling” of subjectivity, it is “The conjunctive synthesis of consumption-consummation thus does produce “a” subject—or rather—“some” subjectivity; series of lived subject-states—but without necessarily culminating in a fixed subject possessed of a specific identity.”
The way in which the lines, that construct the unconscious, proceed in a perpetual state of becoming, is through deterritorialization and lines of flight. “What happened?”, “What is going to happen?”, “Nothing happened, but what caused nothing to happen?”, and “Whatever could have happened for things to have come to this?,” are questions regarding how lines of flight cause responses in subtle acts of deterritorialization. These acts, or modes, occur everywhere, as Deleuze says, “…you enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. Or you know that what is in the process of happening is happening for the last time, it is already over with”. Deterritorialization is the process by which bodies leave an assemblage of a territory: or milieus of “comfort”—in order to reterritorialize and form a new assemblage, or ways of being, habits, or Humean customs. Lines of flight are the cues to which moves are made towards deterritorialization. They bring forth becoming through will and learning, since “learning only occurs in the presence of novel stimuli”.
The next few paragraphs will bring all these concepts together: the unconscious as a multiplicity is in a constant state of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, in a ceaseless effort to reach what is Outside for the progression of its possessor. It is in a never-ending strive fueled by desiring-machines as Deleuze says, “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.” In this way, the psyche will never grow “old”.
And the ultimate operation of the unconscious, according to Deleuze, is being a force of production. In order for it to resist stratification and staleness, and to will power to its possessor, it falsely creates an ego or an individual subject. It does this to create a point of reference, a place from which its “subject” can “take its next step”—becoming.
Creativity draws from a multiplicity of resources such as memory (regardless of the accuracy), and symbolism such as archetypes, to build a relative subject. The process of individuation is artistic and creative. It may include the metaphorical death of the subject, in order to deterritorialize on reterritorialization—to come back to life anew. In other words, the process of individuation may be described by the outcome of the repetitive emergence of new content. Individuation is an always-already-becoming-of-another, and is bound to multiplicity and collective assemblages, which emerges out of the syntheses. Each and every ‘and’ and ‘or’ is created by repetition, and acts as a marker for new breakthroughs, “a new threshold, a new direction of the zigzagging line, a new course for the border.”
The process of individuation, or subject-formation, depends on the dynamics of unfolding. “Being as fold,” for Deleuze, is more than a simple projection of the interior, but is an internalization of the Outside. Folding and unfolding creates a map of the original, Outside territory, exposing and integrating the unconscious into consciousness. From this, cartographical research and routing can begin, stringing symbolic coordinates and archetypes into present thoughts. Lines of flight deterritorialize and destratify in order to learn, to string more lines, and to add more subjectification.
According to Deleuze, the unconscious is a factory, a rhizomatic multiplicity, a desiring-machine being attacked by desiring-machines, and mending with other desiring-machines. It is a BwO which is cartographically traversed by lines, in an ever-state of becoming, always in a process of destratification. Its “playground” and canvas is the plane of consistency. It strings symbols and archetypes into language and thought which are rhizomatic, like the reality they occupy. It unfolds and exposes its topological layers throughout the possessors course, revealing itself through mystic fits and rhythm. It is a producer of a multiplicity of a self that has no self, only an assemblage.

References

Deleuze, Gilles (1988a). Foucault, trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1988b). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurly. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994a). Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995). Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze,...