Groys writes about Stalin’s regime not being pluralistic, but polyphonic.²⁷ He says pluralism implies a difference of opinion, a complete recoding of discourses, that there can be several centrifugal forces. But not in polyphony, that is, there is one centrifugal force, but the voices are different. That is, if the avant-garde is pluralism after all, then Stalinist culture is polyphony. Interestingly, the term polyphony is used in psychiatry for schizophrenia. Stalin was in fact a deeply pathological personality. He had a series of paranoid ideas from his youth. Many psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and neurologists investigated his mental health, however after his death but the neurologist Bekhterev examined him during his lifetime, diagnosing him with severe paranoia.

Schizophrenia, and more specifically Paranoid Schizophrenia, is the cognitive disruption of the prefrontal lobe, with massive amounts of dopamine ‘short circuiting’ the system. This leads to certain functions –especially pattern recognition–, to go haywire. It is in this heightened sense of pattern recognition one could become paranoid. Seeing things at the corner of your eyes, feeling connections that aren’t there, and an overall sense of conspiracy. A schizophrenic in the height of their psychose, no longer has an idea of context. One could say that here they see the true flow behind things.

Bureaucracy is the ‘thing itself’ of schizoanalytic desire. The ‘Machine of desire’ concept in schizoanalytic philosophy is based on the same principle as technical production. The unconscious is also instrumental. Deleuze/Guattari writes: “The subconscious does not raise problems of meaning, but only problems of use. The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but ‘How does it work?’ <...> the greatest power of language was only discovered when work was understood as a machine producing some effects, adapted for some use.” ²⁸

Thus, returning to Apollo and Dionysus, we can see that the relationship between them is not dialectical. Dionysian, as some principle that can be called a revolution and as a bunch of all sorts of potentialities which has its desire to somehow turn around and assert itself. But when it unfolds and asserts itself, it becomes Apollonian. They are in a very specific situation in some kind of interdependence at the same time, and they cannot live without each other. If there was no Apollonian, there would be no Dionysian. It will not begin to be defined. The Apollonian appears as a kind of wall that holds back the flow. But also directs this flow. The Apollonian is some kind of Dionysian channel, like a pipe. The water in the pipes is Dionysian, and the pipes themselves are Apollonian.

“Imagine going into a basement filled with rotten smells, filth, and seeing there a multitude of pipes, an endless sewer, interwoven outlets, entrances (you can look at this as an endless text, too). And you see yourself there, as a little pipe. But that bundling system is very flexible, if you cut a piece out of it, it won’t collapse in the slightest, it will immediately meld together in an optimal way. And no one will actually notice if you rip your tube out of it. It’s a gigantic map, billions of times more powerful than google maps, which includes not only geography, but also labels of phenomena. It contains culture, disease, ideas. A climate map, a political map, a temperature map, but all on one plane, on one sheet.” ²⁹ The map Roman Mikhailov is talking about here is very similar to what we call ‘the bureaucratic apparatus’. This apparatus is metastable. It is self-actualizing in an attempt to shake and demobilize it. He mentions that the only true weapon against this map is schizophrenia.