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Monthly Archives: September 2007

Points of contact

September 21, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Schizoanalysis

        “[W]e are all handymen, each with his little machines” (1).

        Freud, and much to the chagrin of many of his followers, was a consummate handyman. The researcher and experimenter pleasured in constantly expanding the intellectual base and scope of his work by relating it to, or incorporating in it, the findings of other disciplines, even if they were unsympathetic to his project and regardless of the resulting tensions: history (cultural, military, and archaeological), mythology, literature, physiology, sexology, cell biology. Freud had insisted that psychoanalysis is not a closed system but an incomplete and always modifiable set of interventions (“Two Encyclopaedia Articles” 152).

        If psychoanalysts could overcome the initial affront of seeing their work, expertise, and long training reduced to the level of tinkering, of the do-it-yourselfer, they might read in the words of Deleuze and Guattari something that is appeasing, if not welcoming. Lacanians might very well endorse the rejection of a developmental understanding of cure; neo-Kleinians not so much the deployment of the notion of partial objects but the value of the ability to recover from one position (the paranoid-schizoid) in favour of another (the depressive); for Winnicottians, the echo of the primacy of play, that which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as bricolage, would be most appreciated.

        However, these are all but a few momentary points of contact between various systems of thought and the momentum that is Anti-Oedipus, a momentum that cannot be subsumed under the formalist logic of the incest-murder paradigm, a momentum that is far from being incapacitated or pathologised by either psychotic rigidity or neurotic doubt, a momentum in which history and production are invariably at work.

Agility

September 19, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Termination

        Of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze states: “we don’t claim to have written a madman’s book, just a book in which one no longer knows—and there is no reason to know—who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past, or future patient” (“In Flux”, 98). We could add to the list of unknown or unknowable characters those of the analyst, the philosopher, the lover, the political activist, the aesthete, the clown, and the historian. If not endless, the list is made up of at least a thousand different characters with unpredictable and cacophonous voices.

        Clinically, the picture that (adult) psychoanalysis has trained us to construct is altogether different as the list has remained essentially finite; in fact, it has rarely gone beyond the magic number of four: analyst, analysand, mother, and father—each as both historical figure and function. According to this latter schema, one could in fact articulate the basic task of the treatment as accomplished when each member of the cast has been given his or her due, and nothing but, when, in other words, the analysand is in a position to distinguish and integrate, cognitively and affectively, the histories, contributions, and responsibilities of each member of that cast.

        It is no wonder that the initial psychoanalytic encounter with Anti-Oedipus cannot but be fraught with risks and tensions. As with its authors, the characters that populate the book, the proper names, the concepts, the events, are too many to keep track of, too singular to categorize, and yet too relevant to dismiss.

        One is overwhelmed, flooded.

        One could cut the treatment short, make a referral, or simply write a prescription.

        One could wade through the details as quickly as possible in order to reach the safety of a working diagnosis or a hook that will order the material and render it more intelligible.

        One could break through the author-reader distinction and allow oneself to be taken up by the supposed operationality of the book; in other words, one could perform what some psychoanalytic circles advocate as a “joining.” In the process, however, one is likely to fall into the trap of what Serge Leclaire in his misguided reading of Anti-Oedipus claims to be the book’s all-absorbing, totalising, and quashing effect as a manoeuvre that dissipates all duality (“In Flux”, 102-3).

        Or, and this is the most difficult of options but, I would argue, the one closest to the material, one could approach the text as a training ground where one’s ability to juggle and to traverse is re-discovered and honed. Of psychoanalysis, Guattari writes that it “should simply give you a boost of virtuosity, like a pianist, for certain difficulties. It should give you more freedom, more humor, more willingness to jump from one scale of reference to another” (“So What”, 14). Let us note the absence of any notion of “development” or “cure” here. Of a psychoanalyst, we already understand and agree to the expectation, nay the demand, not to confuse one analysand with another, one session with another; not to trail behind the succession of words and events; but not to rush through or pre-empt the flow of experience or affect either.

        Of Anti-Oedipus and its reader, of schizoanalysis, the effect that is anticipated is not one of, at best, attachment and, at worst, enmeshment; it is one of agility.

Transversality

September 15, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis

        Anti-Oedipus is the becoming-unconscious-as-machine of psychoanalysis. As such, it itself is a machine; as such, it has no meaning; it does not refer to a fixed external reference from which it derives its energy and value. What it does refer to is the unlimited and hence un-foreseeable set of effects, machinic in turn, it may generate. As with any such project, the obstacles and pitfalls we face will be numerous and inevitable. They are reflections of the shifts, movements, and breakdowns of the text itself, of the unconscious itself.

        My concern is then with the effects made available through the text, with what it is capable of doing, as much as with what it means or with the theory it supposedly advances. This strategy will help circumvent the by now stale and stultifying debate in psychoanalytic circles regarding the status of theory and its relationship to analytic data. For the longest time, the divide has operated between the so-called empiricists, those that challenge the primacy of theory on the grounds that it disturbs and distorts analytic material, and the meta-psychologists, those that insist that without theory such a material could not be recognised, let alone organized and understood. To avoid the coarseness and disintegration of the former while resisting the totalization of the latter requires that we read, or listen, not so much with a certain degree of patience, awaiting the moment when everything shall be revealed and made to cohere, but with an openness to the surprise, to the interruption, and to the shift, to what they may produce and to what they may be made to produce.

        Though for the most part exegetical, the strategy that I would like to adopt is also that of a process reading, as in analytic process, of reporting the notes and associations of a listening, my listening, with the third ear, or with an evenly suspended attention as some of us clinicians are fond of saying, to the book’s opening pages on the three fundamental syntheses of desire. Hopefully, these notes will be read in tandem with the text itself, and will hence provide a space and an in-between for the reader to produce further notes and associations. At its most superficial level, this strategy is indeed part of a generalized and principled commitment to Guattarian transversality. More importantly however, and while keeping in mind the stakes and limits of such a move, I will attempt to engage the text on its own terms and by the very standards it advances and enacts. I will not go looking for the authors’ unconscious motivations as they are supposedly rendered manifest through the text. Nor will I search for the symbolic “it” with which Lacan had been so fascinated and obsessed. Maelzel’s chess-player has been retired sadly and it is not so much the man inside the machine that is my concern but the man or, more appropriately in this case the text, as a machine that is my focus, not in what its authors intended it to say or do but in what it may enable me to say or do.

The Becoming-Unconscious of Psychoanalysis

September 13, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis

        Though they call for a redeployment of the anti-modernist impetus in psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari are far from aligning themselves with the vulgates of post-modernism. The master discourse has not died and the fragmentation of identity is hardly a recent occurrence. Both phenomena have persisted, and will continue to persist throughout the course of human history—unless, that is, the perpetual re-fragmentation and re-arrangement of subjectivity, its productions, and its investments is intensified through the analytic project.

        The requirement here is that we “understand all the garbage one encounters, not only in one’s personal life, but also in institutions and groupuscules, that is to say in all kinds of power relations. And conversely … if you are not capable of understanding someone’s difficulties in light of the social investments and collective subjectivity involved, none of it can work” (Guattari, “So What”, 9). This is not a question of merely acquainting oneself with the economic and/or cultural specificities of one’s analysands for instance. Nor is it a question of an eclectic, multidisciplinary stance that allows one a more integrated and deeper knowledge of the subject the higher the pile of perspectives one accrues.

        Amongst the contributions to the schizoanalytic project that can be directly attributed to Guattari, and there are many, is the practice of transversality, of lateral intra-disciplinary moves that consist in extracting elements and procedures from one domain and transferring them onto other heterogeneous fields of inquiry (“I Am an Idea Thief”, 40).

        Transversality’s results are often unpredictable and may indeed turn out to be utterly useless. Still, one needs to allow and recognize for oneself a measure of failure.

        When schizoanalytic, psychoanalysis is no longer a codified practice, a closed set of rules that stem from and subsequently govern the private exchange between two individuals; nor is it a discourse that informs but remains impermeable to extra-clinical phenomena (“applied” psychoanalysis). Rather, psychoanalysis becomes one of a multitude of concrete machines capable of traversing various scales of reference, creating singularities, and, in the process, undergoing their own singularization.

        I think that, as much as it may be the harshest and most insightful critique of psychoanalysis we have to date, Anti-Oedipus is more profoundly a practice of transversality, a re-working of basic analytic principles and strategies in accordance with the dynamics attributed to the unconscious as a form of thought, and hence as a process rather than a locality.

        Anti-Oedipus is in fact the becoming-unconscious, the becoming-unconscious-as-machine of psychoanalysis. And this becoming has nothing to do with either the repression or the disavowal of psychoanalysis.

        Clinicians are made most uncomfortable by such a manoeuvre. Theirs is supposedly the task of going into the cage in order to tame the beast (psychoanalysis), to make it scientific, curative, reproductive. On the opposite side of the equation, many Deleuzo-Guattarians will consider this view a betrayal of the most sacrosanct of the masters’ intentions: to cage the beast in order to kill it. Ironically, or maybe not, it is a reversal of roles that we have on our hands now. Many Deleuzo-Guattarians have tamed the beast (schizoanalysis) by reducing it to the level of a normative discourse replete with prescriptions and denunciations. As for the clinicians, they have either committed themselves to a will to ignorance or simply pretended that the beast, a flash in the pan, is already dead. Needless to say, and fortunately, there are a million exceptions to every rule.

        Unlike most texts in the field, Anti-Oedipus aims at collapsing the distance and distinction between psychoanalysis and the unconscious, at transforming the one by investing it with the qualities and dynamics it uncovers in the other. The science of the unconscious must henceforth obey the laws of its own object. Again, the becoming-unconscious of psychoanalysis signals neither its death nor its repression but the transformation of its forms of thought into those of its most loved and hated other.

        Deleuze and Guattari will capitalize on the ambivalence—and how could it be anything but?—that psychoanalysis has had to the unconscious; in the process, they will distinguish themselves from, on the one hand, ego-psychology’s hatred of its object as it pursues its discipline through the regiments of development and adaptation and, on the other hand, the Lacanian idolization of that selfsame object as the unmoved mover once it has settled into its most appropriate configuration of registers.

________
Guattari, Felix. “So What?” in Chaosophy ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1995. Pp. 7-25.
Guattari, Felix. “I Am an Idea Thief” in Chaosophy ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1995. Pp. 37-50..

Flow Reversal

September 11, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Schizoanalysis

        One of the strategies adopted in the following is based in the principle of simultaneity, of the simultaneity of past and present, of thought and action, of understanding and affect, of clinic and academy. This strategy is in line with a concern that is pragmatic, which is not to say non- or anti-theoretical.

        As Foucault had indicated in his introduction to the English translation of the text, as Deleuze had reiterated in “Intellectuals and Power,” and as Guattari had stressed on many occasions, Anti-Oedipus demonstrates not the transmission of information but the communication of a conflictual and undomesticated desire through what Guattari terms a “richly expressive situation in which a whole series of semiotic components are involved” (“Desire is Power”, 16). The desire that is mine in this context is hence, and among other things, a desire to listen, to read, to think, and, indeed, to analyse.

        In response to the crypto-Deleuzo-Guattarians’ declaration (or, more accurately, expression of a wish) that Anti-Oedipus function as the Medusa into whose face psychoanalysis, and Freud in particular, cannot but stare and subsequently suffer the most abominable of deaths, I insist on the text’s inherently analytic dimension. To do otherwise would be to wrest it from its theoretical and practical matrix and reduce to the banal, reify, its authors’ richly ambivalent response to a tradition in which they rarely ceased to participate.

        Deleuze deemed Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” a “masterpiece” whose author had engaged “penetratingly” in philosophical reflection (Coldness and Cruelty, 111). Guattari’s own appraisal of the situation from a lecture delivered long after the publication of Anti-Oedipus hardly needs any elaboration: “After years of training and practice I have come to the conclusion that if psychoanalysis does not radically reform its methods and its theoretical references it will lose all credibility, which I would find regrettable on several counts. In fact, it would hardly matter to me if psychoanalytic societies, schools, or even the profession itself were to disappear, so long as the analysis of the unconscious reaffirms its legitimacy and renews its theoretical and practical modalities” (“Beyond the Psychoanalytical”, 193, emphasis added).

        Ultimately, the Freudian presence in the anti-oedipal project cannot be subsumed in its entirety under the register of neurotic stasis. Alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s mostly justifiable critique of the cynically essentialist and normalizing vein in the history of psychoanalysis, there also lies their tremendously active disavowal of some of the principal elements of Freudian thought, a disavowal that invites, even begs, to be distorted, reproduced, and ultimately disavowed. Deleuze himself had praised the practice as “nothing less than the foundation of imagination” (Coldness and Cruelty, 128) and, along with Guattari, had gone on to trace its passages and vicissitudes via Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, culminating with the anti-oedipal rubric of desiring production.

        To put it differently, if the flow from, among others, the desiring-machine “Freud” has been interrupted, consumed, or drawn off by that other machine “Deleuze-Guattari” with the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia for an outcome, the reversal, doubling, and furthering of such a flow may be, if not equally inspiring, at least productive, even if minimally.

__________
Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil in Masochism. New York: Zone Books, 1989. 7-138.
Foucault, Michel and Gilles Deleuze. “Intellectuals and Power” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. with an introduction Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Pp. 205-17.
Guattari, Felix. “Desire Is Power, Power Is Desire” in Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer.New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Pp. 15-23.
Guattari, Felix. “Beyond the Psychoanalytical Unconscious” in Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer.New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Pp. 192-201.

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