Schizo-Culture: The Event, The Book

by Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), David Morris (Editor)

I think "schizo-culture" here is being used rather in a special sense. Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that this is a healthy sign. -- William Burroughs, from Schizo-Culture

The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his "History of Sexuality" project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.

The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.

This slip-cased edition includes "The Book: 1978," a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and "The Event: 1975," a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Felix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvere Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Francois Peraldi, and John Cage.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

464 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2013

About the author

Sylvère Lotringer (born in 1938 in Paris, France) is a literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e); and for his interpretations of French theory in a 21st-century context. An influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, Lotringer invented the concept "extrapolationist" as a means of describing the hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Lotringer is a Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Reviews

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Priceless and totally fascinating as a historical document. I mean, transcripts of talks with RD Laing, Foucault, Howie the Harp, and Judy Clark? That's wild! It's a real window into the New Left in the 70s, in all its disarray and weirdness. In a number of these panels, they all sort of talk past one another, having their own private conversation through almost pure association (a not unfamiliar scene for anyone in the left). This gets disrupted at a few points, like when Foucault is accused of being CIA, or when Guattari calls out the paranoia of the crowd and then is later shouted down by feminist interlocutors during a panel with no women in turn. There are other talks that are live translated from French by the crowd, a solid panel on prisons, and public accusations of obscurantism.

As far as content goes, there are some great ideas from Guattari, Joel Kovel, Clark, and a few others, but, if anything, a lot of these pieces are more revealing of the chaos of the 70s New Left. That's certainly not to say we're much better off now or figured out the problems they're grappling with, but that, in hindsight, it's so much more clear to see where they got lost. What I find most interesting about all of it is reading this entire book as an exercise in translation. Everyone had something, or some approach, they believed to be of great import and this entire episode is spent struggling (painfully) in trying to translate that to others who all seem to have their own private language that only occasionally cohered into something common.