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.