Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - L'anti-Œdipe
25.03.2024
Started reading this months ago; however, I soon became too sick to read French philosophy and not long after was occupied with other matters. I am restarting, as I did not get very far, and this time with a reading journal.
There is at the very beginning a fascinating description of nature as machines, criticizing the man-nature dialectic. I would overall so far agree. The distinction of industrial production from natural production is entirely invented by industry itself. Mam produces man through industry: autoanthropogenesis. It is also interesting to consider the disregard of this dialectic in what writers such as Nancy McWilliams have described as the schizoid (eventually perhaps schizophrenic) description of the schizoid tendency to feel connected with their surroundings in profound and interpenetrating ways
, ascribing the supposed phantasy of omnipotence as rather a phantasy of omnipresence. There is also Roman Jakobson and Grete Lübbe-Grothues' analysis of Hölderlin's schizophrenic poetry, in which they note its truly monologic nature in the lack of "I" (whereas the use of "I" in speech implies a "non-I"). It is easy to see how this can just as easily become a fear of being "engulfed" (to use Laing's term) by the world.
Desire is described as the production of production. Understandable enough, in this framework I agree. What, however, produces desire?
The elegant answer of Deleuze and Guattari:
Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all. "An incomprehensible, absolutely rigid stasis" in the very midst of process, as a third stage: "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus." The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. We shall not inquire how all this fits together so that the machine will run: the question itself is the result of a process of abstraction.
I have thought the same of the "death drive" for a while myself. It is intimately intertwined with the desire to remake oneself. Artaud: If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again
("On Suicide").
26.03.2024
Strong description of paranoid-machines as resulting from desiring-machines and the inability to take them any more. As a shutting-down spurred much by a need to escape a global persecution, worth comparing with Laing's "killing the self" as one psychotic development of schizoidity, and the the attempt to be oneself, even in an impossible manner as the desiring-machine development?
Capital described as a body without organs encircling the globe. Some type of body without organs as a constant of social reproduction
. I would need more anthropological experience to make a judgement on this latest statement, but this is interesting in the context of the postmodern fall of great narratives. Even without a "narrative", the body of capital exists as a pseudo-natural fact according to which we must live anyways. But if we do not internalize it as a narrative, we more deeply feel its contradictions and are more likely to discover our own body without organs.
But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a quasi cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them.
A rejection of this inscription on one's own body (appropriation of it as an organ of production), would be what Berger and Luckmann call failed socialization, and what Blankenburg, in a(n insightful, but patronizing at best towards schizos)paper refers to as a lack of common sense. This socialization or common sense serves as an internalization or inscription of the fetish-driven movement within oneself as a cause and not merely a followed action.
In fact, we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of the production of recording, whose law is not the same as that of the production of production. The law governing the latter was connective synthesis or coupling. But when the productive connections pass from machines to the body without organs (as from labor to capital), it would seem that they then come under another law that expresses a distribution in relation to the nonproductive element as a "natural or divine presupposition" (the disjunctions of capital). Machines attach themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates, like a grid.
The brutality of the automobile disasters in Crash and Testuo essentially sever these connection between the protagonists and the social bodies of family-and-capital, ceasing the latter's reproduction (by the protagonists). It is this which opens them to the schizoid experience and the feeling of their own body without organs.
The schizo has his own system of co-ordinates for situating himself at his disposal, because, first of all, he has at his disposal his very own recording code, which does not coincide with the social code, or coincides with it only in order to parody it.
One sees a similar description by Laing of the schizoid observation of social norms as a parody. One could argue that Blankenburg failed to notice this when he stated that they constantly alternate between a stereotyped assuming of maxims taken from their environment and an autistic retreat into themselves
One is reminded (by this description of the celibate machine) of the "surgery is sex" mantra of Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future, the eroticism of becoming.A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces.
Every time that the problem of schizophrenia is explained in terms of the ego, all we can do is "sample" a supposed essence or a presumed specific nature of the schizo, regardless of whether we do so with love and pity or disgustedly spit out the mouthful we have tasted. We have "sampled" him once as a dissociated ego, another time as an ego cut off from the world, and yet again-most temptingly-as an ego that had not ceased to be, who was there in the most specific way, but in his very own world, though he might reveal himself to a clever psychiatrist, a sympathetic superobserver-in short, a phenomenologist.
This last in the list would appear to be a polemic against Laing, who wrote at the end of The Divided Self
:Yet, as we saw from earlier statements, she did value herself if only in a phantom way. There was a belief (however psychotic a belief it was, it was still a form of faith in something of great value in herself) that there was something of great worth deeply lost or buried inside her, as yet undiscovered by herself or by anyone. If one could go deep into the depth of the dark earth one would discover 'the bright gold', or if one could get fathoms down one would discover 'the pearl at the bottom of the sea'.
It is true that I consider the schizo- phenomenon of being disconnected (or divided) primarily as a result of feeling trapped within one's body-organs. Laing himself seems not entirely to miss it, describing the omnipotent (thought perhaps better described by later writers such as McWilliams as omnipotent) phantasy self. However, his approach was heavily phenomenological and focused on the relation with the world. It is more the experience than the process. (Is the undefinable machine at the end of Tetsuo a schizo- process?) What Deleuze and Guattari do not discuss here (elsewhere, I would not know) is that it would seem this sensed schism is what allows one to become aware of one's fixedness and potential becomings.
Deleuze and Guattari criticize the separation in concpetion of social production and desiring production (as reality is produced by desire, rational or irrational). Blankenburg perhaps approached some awareness of this, noting the inherent human vulnerability of "common sense", but nevertheless was to concerned with fixing deviancy as pathological.
29.03.2024
I've finished the first chapter. I think the description of cutting provided by Deleuze and Guattari helps better explain the different machines (paranoid, desiring, celibate or however the English version translates them).
Notable is their criticism of Oedipalism and of psychoanalytic universalism in general. How, they ask, can one think in terms of partial objects, first in infantile comprehension, and yet give primacy to the "full objects" such as mother or father? And does not the assumption of the Oedipal triangle as universal (contradicted by basc anthropological knowledge) not reinforce this very structure, trapping one within this family?
They polemicize heavily with Klein, of whom I am aware but whom I have not yet read (I will certainly have to, given her significance in the schizo- field). Their remark that the depressive position masks a deeper schizoid position (at least in regards to Proust's Temps perdu) gives much to think about (and I have often considered that the "normal" state masks the "schizoid" alienation inherent to #society, although this is perhaps not what Deleuze and Guattari meant).
13.04.2024
A while into the second chapter, which I've been reading over the past week, although I've only found time to make significant progess so far today. Very interesting, although it is also reminding me how much more reading I still need to do to be properly grounded in philosophical and psychoanalytical "discourse". The big psychoanalytic figures certainly, but also Kant (who I really should have reading already!) and Proust.
What I found particularly interesting was their description of the Oedipal triangle as a signifier which reduces the unconsciousness to only being able to represent (even sexual relations would simply be representation of the transcendant Oedipal desire) rather than produce. They also tie this to the idea of desire as lack (lack here of the Oedipal mother), rather than as something productive, which is another reminder that I ought to read Lacan for context. Also of note is the observation that the imperial Oedipus complex actually undermines excellent discoveries of Freud's such as of free association. Rather than connections being actually "free" as the articulation of some productive desire, they are forced into the Oedipal triangle.
This is definitely a work which has made me stop and "hm" out loud more than any other so far.
I definitely also need to do more reading into these "group" and "individual" phantasm, particularly as Deleuze and Guattari critique the idea of an individual phantasm and state that it is in group phantasms where singularity may actually exists. I did find the idea of subject-groups and subjected-groups compelling, so it's worth considering further.
28.07.2024
Finally back into reading this book (and I did end up reading Klein's formulation of the paranoid-schizoid position as well...). It's much better to read having gained more background knowledge, although the work still makes me wish to learn more. I also find the constant talk of "intensities" easier to understand having more an understanding of the history of philosophy and being able to compare this with conceptions of the soul being present in the body through intensities—of course, the intensities of the BwO are something much different.
I think I would tentatively agree with Deleuze and Guattari's critique of the concept of schizophrenic autism (now a separate concept from, eh, autistic autism, although the history of autism and schizphrenia is one I wish to learn more on). I found this paragraph in particular very enlightening:
But simulation must be understood in the same way as we spoke of identification. It expresses those nondecomposable distances always enveloped in the intensities that divide into one another while changing their form. If identification is a nomination, a designation, then simulation is the writing corresponding to it, a writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine. The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice. To seize an intensive real as produced in the coextension of nature and history, to ransack the Roman Empire, the Mexican cities, the Greek gods, and the discovered continents so as to extract from them this always-surplus reality, and to form the treasure of the paranoiac tortures and the celibate glories-all the pogroms of history, that's what I am, and all the triumphs, too, as if a few simple univocal events could be extricated from this extreme polyvocity: such is the "histrionism" of the schizophrenic, according to Klossowski's formula, the true program for a theater of cruelty, the mise-en-scène of a machine to produce the real. Far from having lost who knows what contact with life, the schizophrenic is closest to the beating heart of reality, to an intense point identical with the production of the real, and that leads Reich to say: "What belongs specifically to the schizophrenic patient is that ... he experiences the vital biology of the body .... With respect to their experiencing of life, the neurotic patient and the perverted individual are to the schizophrenic as the petty thief is to the daring safecracker." So the question returns: what reduces the schizophrenic to his autistic, hospitalized profile, cut off from reality? Is it the process, or is it rather the interruption of the process, its aggravation, its continuation in the void? What forces the schizophrenic to withdraw to a body without organs that has become deaf, dumb, and blind?
There is a sense of the Real (the non-symbolically captured) which cannot suffer the encroachments of organized culture. And so the withdrawal may only be outwardly paradoxical with the intensities... Incidentally (and this is part of what caught my intention in this paragraph), I believe that this in fact is what makes film viable for discussion of its own program of cruelty despite (or rather because of) its inability to perform what Artaud envisioned of the theatre of cruelty, its inability to interact. It interrupts the interactive process as forces a withdrawal to the body without organs.
They continue by suggesting that, contrary to psychoanalytic orthodoxy, the schizophrenic does not suffer from the "lack of Oedipus", but rather from being Oedipalized (a social repression which was present even before psychoanalysis, it is important to note). Of course this is analagous to many arguments on what is really the cause of a given person's mental suffering. Still, there is something to it, and perhaps worth tying to the analysis of Beckett's Film which I am planning for my paper. But that is something requiring more thought on my part. And I would agree that the family expresses already-present social alientation.
Thus it must be said of Oedipus as well as of desiring-production: it is at the end, not at the beginning. But not at all in the same fashion. We have seen that desiring-production was the limit of social production, always thwarted in the capitalist formation: the body without organs at the edge of the deterritorialized socius, the desert at the gates of the city. But it is urgent, it is essential that the limit be displaced, rendered inoffensive, and that it pass or seem to pass into the social formation itself. Schizophrenia or desiring-production is the boundary between the molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire; this limit of deterritorialization must now pass into the interior of the molar organization, and it must be applied to a factitious and subjugated territoriality. We are now able to surmise what Oedipus signifies: it displaces the limit, it internalizes the limit. Rather a society of neurotics than one successful schizophrenic who has not been made autistic. Oedipus, the incomparable instrument of gregariousness, is the ultimate private and subjugated territoriality of European man. (Moreover the displaced, exorcised limit or border shifts to the interior of Oedipus, between its two poles.)
This reminds me in a way of Laing's critique of the concept of psychotic alienation and his statement that the "normal man" is deeply alienated—alienated from possibilities. What Deleuze and Guattari refer to as Oedipus contitutues such an alienation from possibilities, in this case from the possibilities of desire (which become forcibly triangulated within the family structure).
The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to the segregatlve and biunivocal use. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two, ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in ambiguity as destiny itself. Here schizoanalysis must unravel the thread. For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring- machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.
Here I can see the traces of why they referred to Lacan as the first schizoanalyst, given his conception of analytic interpretation as something disruptive, something which forces the subject to find polyvocity in the text of their speech. As for the aforementioned oscillations, I think that one finds them brilliantly developed in the Tetsuo films and the ambiguous destruction they protray. The "human weapon" who kills his parents with the gun his own father placed within his body, who automatically kills his own son and then saves him (saves his family structure) through the annihilation of an entire city...
They make interesting use of Nietzsche here, pointing out that in Nietzsche the death of God already meanth nothing to the unconscious, for belief itself is false and stifling regarding the the production of the unconscious, and that God serves as a triangulation between man and nature.
They make reference to Pankow's consideration that tactile treatments (such as baths and massages) given to schizophrenics do not exist to satisfy symbolic desires through regression, but rather to recognize an unconscious desire through recognizing the limits of the body. For Deleuze and Guattari, this sets desiring production back in motion. An interesting connection—and one that makes me wish that my apartment had a bath, and not just a shower. I do think there is something to it.
I like Deleuze and Guattari's association of schizophrenia with literature as a production and not an expression
. That does after all seem to be what poetic language is, with its playing with ambiguities (polyvocity). And so finishes the second chapter:
What is at stake is not merely art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine will remain in extrinsic relationships that make them function in the deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or they will become parts and cogs of one another in the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled for a generalized explosion-the schiz and not the signifier.
29.07.2024
Continuing onto the third section, which deals with anthropology. I'm glad that I had that anthropology class this last semester...
I enjoy this work, but it's not difficult to see why it would have influenced accelerationists such as Nick Land:
In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes. Then again, if we say that capitalism determines the conditions and the possibility of a universal history, this is true only insofar as capitalism has to deal essentially with its own limit, its own destruction-as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least to a certain point: the point where the limit appears, in the very movement that counteracts the tendency). In a word, universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical.
If there's one thing I miss about when I was pre-psychotic, it's that I would have gone really crazy for this paragraph.
I do enjoy reading about how the privatization (social disinvestment) of organs removes them from the social field, leaving desire disconnected, leading to individual overinvestment.
A fascinating paragraph:
Cruelty has nothing to do with some ill-defined or natural violence that might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind; cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them. That is what cruelty means. This culture is not the movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly injects producuction into desire, and conversely, it forcibly inserts desire into social production and reproduction. For even death, punishment, and torture are desired, and are instances of production (compare the history of fatalism). It makes men or their organs into the parts and wheels of the social machine. The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh "writing," then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word.
It's as if someone had combined Of Grammatology with the Tetsuo films. They explain later phenomena such as dancing, marking the body, drawings, etc. as terriorial "geo-graphies" and that there is no "lack" of a graphical system in "primitive" cultures.
Deleuze and Guattari go on to discuss system of alliance (e.g. marriage) and filiation: Filiation and alliance are like the two forms of a primitive capital: fixed capital or filiative stock, and circulating capital or mobile blocks of debts.
This contrasts with the concpetion of peoples without history, as there is always a fluctuation disequilibrium marked by time. They also explain that filiation is intensive and ambiguous, whereas alliance is extensive, changing but determined. It's east to see here their way of thinking in which everything flows between deterritorialization and territorialization. The incest prohibition is something which serves to extend filiation and alliances.
In describing the impossibility of incest (incest as a transgression reliant on names which could be applied to anyone, which has nothing to do with the person), they state that revolutions have nothing to do with transgressions
. In a way, this reminds me of my problems with "edgelords"; they care simply about transgression and have no real revolutionary potential. What's more, this transgression is actually reliant on the symbolic law as such, to which it must constantly refer. The constant declaration of one's immorality is the constant transcription of the moral order.
30.07.2024
Interesting description as oral and written culture differing not based on the presence/absence of graphemes (as stated, even a dance is graphemic), but on the subordination of writing to the voice, similar to the subordination of filiation to alliance. Resultantly:
The subordination of graphism to the voice induces a fictitious voice from on high which, inversely, no longer expresses itself except through the writing signs that it emits (revelation). This is perhaps the first assembling of formal operations that will lead to Oedipus (the paralogism of extrapolation): a flattening out or a set of biunivocal relations that leads to the breakaway and elevation of a detached object, and the linearization of the chain that derives from this object.
Where territorialization codes, despotism overcodes according to a transcendental "unity", as if it were some original signifier. This is what makes incest possible: the signifier making love with the signifieds. This section is admittedly somewhat confusing for me. What is interesting is the suggestion that imperial law is not milder than the "savage" law which preceded it, it had merely subsumed cruelty in order to replace it with terror. it is the juridical form assumed by the infinite debt
.
And finally, could it be that this arbitrariness of designations, as the reverse side of a necessity of signification, does not bear only on the despot's subjects, nor even on his servants, but on the despot himself, his dynasty, and his name? ... And according to his prophecy, wouldn't the State itself be that dog which wants to die? But that is also reborn from its ashes. For it is this whole constellation of the new alliance-the imperialism of the signifier, the metaphoric or metonymic necessity of the signifieds, with the arbitrary of the designations-that ensures the maintenance of the system, and sees to it that the name is succeeded by another name, one dynasty by another, without changing the signifieds, and without a collapse of the wall of the signifier. This is why the order of latency in the African, Chinese, Egyptian, and other empires was that of rebellions and constant secessions, and not that of revolution. Here again, death will have to be felt from within, but it will have to come from without.
I am admittedly a bit murky on what death being felt from within but coming from without means here. Everything being overcoded?
At any rate this is not yet Oedipial: proper Oedipalization only occurs later, in the passing of Oedipus from despot as repressing representation to representation of desire through its internalization in subjects. How this internalization is meant to occur I am interested to see.
Seemingly this would be through the breakdown of codes private property, privatization of the subjects in general, marking the Ustaat everywhere (reaction to deterritorialization). I cannot help but be reminded of the constant self-branding (identity, aesthetics) of Current Era in this context, an endless reterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari go on to quote Nietzsche (as they have done many times):
These are the two aspects of a becoming of the State: its internalization in a field of increasingly decoded social forces forming a physical system; its spiritualization in a supraterrestrial field that increasingly overcodes, forming a metaphysical system. The infinite debt must become internalized at the same time as it becomes spiritualized. The hour of bad conscience draws nigh; it will also be the hour of the greatest cynicism, "that repressed cruelty of the animal-man made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the 'state' so as to be tamed...."
One think of Melanie Klein's formulation of the paranoid-schizoid position and agression turned inwards; this is the cynical schizoidity of capitalism demonstrated so well in Beckett's Film. (Or a result of discipline... I really do need to translate my paper and submit it for publication!)
Something I wish they had elaborated upon more:
Let us consider more in detail how the elements come together, with the conjunction of all their processes. It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. (The two taken together constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence of the social field, and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat; cynicism is capital as the means of extorting surplus labor, but piety is this same capital as God-capital, whence all the forces of labor seem to emanate.)
I need to save the section of capitalism as a language of flows for a friend's art project I am contributing to.