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Monthly Archives: October 2007

Of Applications

October 28, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, Schizoanalysis

       Regarding the question of the “applications,” “uses,” or “politics” of Anti-Oedipus. The question is supported by two separate yet interconnected factors, the one situational and the other textual.

        Anti-Oedipus was written as a product of and a response to a time when most Western European intellectuals were pressured to lead or at least to speak on behalf of the state, the party, or the downtrodden. Deleuze often recounted the times when his lectures at Vincennes were met with incomprehension and hostility for having failed to provide such guidance or voice. He, of course, was not alone in his predicament. Foucault, Adorno, and Lacan, among many others, were repeatedly pressured with the demand for leadership and/or representation. Nor is this demand specific to a period of crisis or upheaval as was the case in the late nineteen sixties. Indeed, one could argue the ubiquity of the logic of demand and its corollaries debt and exchange. That something in the order of the economic permeates much of human activity, including the intellectual and the psychoanalytic, is often acknowledged but rarely utilised.

        Regarding the question of “applications,” again: a defence for Deleuze and Guattari’s supposedly non-committal tone is that the text is merely a blueprint: “Can we possibly guess, for instance, what a knife rest is used for if all we are given is a geometrical description of it?” (3). The description is assumed to point to an object that in turn points to a multitude of uses many of which have yet to be produced.

        True enough. However, Anti-Oedipus is not merely a “geometrical description” pointing to a yet unknown political organisation, theoretical style, or clinical practice; it itself is an object whose brisk, provocative, unmediated, un-mediating, and declarative tone has engendered a thirty-five-year reception reverberating with the echoes of the clinically borderline with its attendant splits between love and hate, idealisation and dismissal.

        Deleuze and Guattari’s concern had been primarily with what an event or a machine can potentially produce. In a 1983 essay on psychoanalysis and everyday life, Guattari focuses on the “myths of reference” as they are to be judged according to their social functionality. Do they work? How do they work? What are they capable of producing? What can they be made to produce? Guattari extends an invitation “to all parties and groups concerned, in accordance with the appropriate modalities, to participate in the activity of creating models that touch on their lives… [I]t is precisely the study of these modalities that … [is] the essence of analytic theorizing” (“Psychoanalysis Should Get a Grip on Life,” 72). It is what happens after the theory and the event have taken place that is most relevant; as everyone is trying to overcome the shock, the revolution, or the interpretation, it is to what they may make possible and to what may succeed them that Deleuze and Guattari will pay the most attention. Rather than outcomes or recapitulations of the past, these are breakdowns and interventions that redirect a flow toward its future possibilities. Historically, Anti-Oedipus, as produced by, among other things, the breakdown events of May 1968, will in turn generate its own breakdowns (see here).

Production and Cure

October 27, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Termination

        “Universal primary production” (5) is how Deleuze and Guattari understand the reality of man and nature, not so much as a self-propelled and all-consuming web of production that is in and for itself but as a matrix along whose intersecting series much is produced and much is interrupted.

        The distinction is delicate and yet crucial. Production is the fundament of human reality and not its goal. It is the failure to recognise this distinction that leads to ossification and collapse. A process is begun and with it there emerges the tendency to transform it into an end in itself. Machinic production (the production of production) is subordinated to the logic of the production of a whole, of an institution or a discipline, which is to say of a perpetually ever-increasing web of functionaries and organisation of bureaucrats. Psychoanalysis, as an institution and as a practice, is an acutely poignant example here; so is the academy; so is science.

         Psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari point out, has suffered from the same symptomatology typically associated with the schizophrenic found in mental institutions: “a limp rag forced into autistic behaviour, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity” (5) hell bent on its own perpetuation and propagation. Is it any surprise that while this “limp rag” that has been romanticized by much of what has come to be known as “anti-psychiatry” is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari are not advocating? In any case, and in the context of most of what falls under the heading of psychoanalysis, what we witness today is the dogma and sectarianism that surround the field’s main figures, from Freud, to Lacan, to Klein, to Winnicott, to Kohut, and the paranoia with which their practices have been engulfed and structured. As we know it and live it, the institution of psychoanalysis is dangerously close to becoming its own end; as such, of possessing the main characteristics of what Guattari has termed a “subjected group,” a group that withdraws into itself as it suffers the mechanisms of scapegoating, leaderships, identifications, suggestions, interdictions, and disavowals (“The Transference’, 62).

        Clinically, even Freud in his later years was quite concerned with the interminable practice that psychoanalysis had become. Leading nowhere, the analyst’s directive to “go ahead and speak” has produced little other than the family circle and the figure of Oedipus. Under the heading of “cure,” we have come to observe those mechanisms of identification and internalisation designed to guarantee in the analysand the reproduction of the analyst as healthy norm (see Re-parenting on this score). Under the heading of “no-cure,” we observe instead the dislocation of a process from the supposedly trivial concerns of the everyday and its transformation, even elevation, into a goal, into something to be pursued “for its own sake.” In either case, the breakdown in machinic production is palpable. Of course, and again, psychoanalysis is not unique in this respect. The discourses of the academy and the sciences have fallen prey to the exact same dynamic.

Numbers

October 26, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Termination

        A machine is never on its own.

        One (the machine—the author, the infant, the analysand for instance) is not the originary number. A machine is always producing of a flow, of a product.

        Two (the machine and its flow—author and text, mother and milk, analysand and speech) is not the originary number either. A machine produces not only a product but also a product that is producing of another, that is itself a machine, a consuming machine to be more precise.

        Three (the machine, its flow, and the machine that consumes that flow—author, text, and reader; mother, milk, and infant; analysand, speech, and analyst) is still not the originary number. The presence of a machine presupposes not only another that it produces but yet a third by which it had been preceded and produced, and so on.

        Infinity is the originary number. The presence of a machine is made possible only in an infinite series or string (and… and… and…) of connecting, producing, consuming, and recording machines. The series itself can exist only in an immensely complicated matrix or network of production among whose components we may count sexuality, kinship, market forces, intellectual histories, legal and juridical constraints, scientific and aesthetic achievements, and physiological contingencies. Ultimately, meaning resides in such activities; it is not deferred till the moment of a product as an end.

        The clinical implication here is twofold. First, the distinction between reality and unconscious phantasy, between what belongs to the everyday and what is “properly” psychoanalytic, is in the understanding of the relationships and events between machines (production, consumption, etc…) and not in the nature of the object as such. The priority then is to appreciate that the clinical practice and its material and ideological surround are fundamentally implicated in one another. Second, the notion of termination as cure, truth, or position is never truly “terminal;” the connective synthesis is endless in its dynamic and the clinical concern, as indeed it has now become for many, is much less with an end to a process than it is with its extension beyond the point where the presence of the analyst is mandatory.

Breaking Down

October 10, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, AO-Mistranslations, Associations, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Dreams, Guattari, Machines, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis

        In the context of a connective synthesis, a machine or a chain of associations works only when it breaks down. It works by breaking down, continually, by having the flow it produces interrupted and consumed by another that is inevitably produced by it.

        “Breaking down” in the French original is actually “detraquée.” The word suggests not so much a malfunction but the impression of something gone awry, derailed. The “breaking down” of a machine is tantamount to the detours of slips, dreams, and symptoms that psychoanalysis has rightly marked as not so much proofs of the unconscious but rather products of its inner workings. As much as they are compromise formations designed to appease the demands of the secondary process, slips, dreams, and symptoms are odd, slippery.

        The question that has so far preoccupied psychoanalysis has been the identification and resolution, or at least containment, of the conflict that underlies such formations through a retrograde analysis; schizoanalysis marks them not only as effects but as causes and machines as well. How can they be re- or differently aligned? What can they be made to produce? What new sounds, significations, or formations do they point to? The question of effect and machine is always double: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (3).

Writing Seduction

October 9, 2007
Speaking Desire

        This one is for Jacob Russell.

        I sit at my desk wanting to write the story I’ve been carrying around for much of the day. I wonder about the parts that are the most salient, the ones I need to include for the whole to make any sense. Some things will have to be left out. That is the inevitability of this thing we call story telling.

        Once I’ve reconciled myrself with the omissions and imperfections, I realise that it is not so much what I’m telling that is most relevant but rather what I hope my telling is going to achieve. I would like to believe that, sometimes, I don’t really care all that much what others are going to say or think about my story; they could just as well tear it apart or pick it up as in a relay and re-tell it to others.

        So, what is it I’m trying to achieve? What is this telling doing for me? Is it helping me remember and sort through the details? Perhaps, but I’m not entirely satisfied with that answer. Those details, and their meanings, could vary depending on their order in the story one tells. I still want to know if not the how then at least the why of that telling.

        I catch myself reading out loud what I’ve written so far. I know this to be not just a habit but also a necessity. It’s as if Ineed to tell myself that story so that I can be seduced by it and, indirectly, by myself as its teller. I may now take pleasure in my self and my voice with less guilt than I otherwise do; I’m at least producing something; my narcissism is mediated by the words; it has become useful, tolerable.

        This notion of self-seduction strikes me as particularly relevant here, and not just as an excuse or a pretext. I remember something I had read in passing a while ago about writing as masturbation; but that’s not exactly where my thoughts are heading.

        It’s not just that I’m pleasuring myself; I’m also externalizing and doubling myself. I’m entering that murky terrain that would otherwise mark the categories “self” and “other,” “me” and “not me,” as separate and discreet. My words are not only a reflection of my thoughts or emotions; they do not even need someone else to give them a twist or imbue them with a different meaning. Together, we are already doing that. I enter into a dialogue with them. The moment I write them they will point out my strengths and mistakes. They will suggest alternatives. Sometimes, when I’m really unlucky, they will just stare back at me in what might be an utterly devastating, even deadening, silence. That is one meaning of writer’s block.

        I don’t find myself particularly guilty of anthropomorphizing language here; in fact, the charge makes hardly any sense since language is of the essence of the anthropomorphic. What I am doing instead is negotiating. At one point, I may indeed reach that block and/or drift off and get picked up by other words floating about me.

        Should my text make it into the public domain, by chance, design, or mistake, my story as it is retold by others may sound quite unfamiliar, maybe because it is being distorted but perhaps mostly because I’ve forgotten it. I might feel the need or obligation to defend it. Perhaps, the best thing I can do, and for the both of us, is to just let it be.

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