2007 October « THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD

Of the connective synthesis of production (and… and… and…): the chain of free associations is not simply a representation of an underlying dynamic, a metaphor for latent peculiarities, or a symptom of as yet undisclosed conflicts and possibilities.

In its vagaries and detours, this chain is a machine whose flow is recorded and consumed by an ear, be it that of the analyst or the analysand. It produces an effect, an impression, and an experience that, in turn will engender further associations and impressions.

To speak of psychoanalysis is to speak of a journey along a complex and multi-layered network of such chains. At best, and though the analyst may be familiar with the terrain, it is the analysand who also steers the process, decides which nodes or junctions to traverse, or, better still, which nodes or junctions to create in order to traverse. The analyst has no way of telling in advance how the adventure will unfold, let alone end, for it is the analysand’s as well. The couch disencumbers both from some of the weight of identification.

I close my eyes as my analysand’s sounds become my images, thoughts, intensities, not so much of where or what she’s been but of what she is now making of where or what she thinks she’s been. It is not she that I see through her words but what she produces in me, which is not entirely me. What I say, if I say anything at all, and what I do not say, what of all that I do not say she chooses to hear, may or may not link up with what she already sees, thinks, and experiences. The flows of words, hers and mine, are products that not only record (speak) pre-existing, and hence consumable (heard) identities, understandings, and affects; they also produce further associations and understandings.

Of production, Deleuze and Guattari understand that in which every move and every gesture is simultaneously production, recording, and consumption. In fact, each of these three nodes is constitutive and transformative of both itself and of the other two.

Capital for instance has come to be not only the product of industry, but also the recording surface and the constituting force behind much of human interaction—stock markets and organisational divisions of labour are but two of its manifestations. The late nineteenth century’s so-called scientific recording and ordering of matters sexual has been a crucial constitutive element in the development and organisation of our present day sexual identities. For better or for worse, our histories would have been radically different without the curious taxonomies of a Krafft-Ebing.

Currently, information technology is a striking example of the generation of ever more sophisticated tools for the encoding, distribution, and utilisation of knowledge; it produces newer tools, newer knowledge, and newer patterns of relating, of experiencing, of producing.

Production is never simply of a product. It is always already the production of a producing, consuming, and recording product. If, for psychoanalysis, Oedipus is our fate, a given, a universal that may be witnessed, recorded, and understood while nothing much of it can be altered, for schizoanalysis, Oedipus is a product and, in turn, the process by which certain repressions, pleasures, and anxieties are produced and put into place.

Production is hence always the production of production. It is a producing/product identity. The ideological polarities culture/nature and man/industry must falter. In their stead there emerges a materialist participation in and understanding, even if it were a misunderstanding, of the historical moment. Schreber’s delirium did not limit itself to the triangulations of Oedipus; neither did those of Rimbaud; for both, race for instance was a principal concern expressed as fascism in the former (“the select race”) and as paranoia in the latter (“the eternally inferior race”) (“Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, 80-1). Had Freud or Lacan acknowledged the psychotic’s specificity and connectedness to history, and especially to his own history, they would have recognised the limitations of not only a biological understanding of delirium, as they indeed did, but those of an abstracted structural or symbolic one as well.

—THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD

F a d i A b o u – R i h a n , P h D

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