Falling Back Onto
Before preceding any further, another note on the translation is in order.
Most critical and most misleading in the English rendering is the translation of “se rabattre sur” as “to fall back onto.” The learned footnote on page 10 of the English text lists the various meanings of the verb “rabattre” and evokes, whether intentionally or not, the very same mechanisms Freud had identified under the heading of regression in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams: temporal, formal, topographical. Indeed, the translators of Anti-Oedipus have in mind a return to a preceding position or state as they interpret “rabattre:” as a rotation followed by a reverse rotation, as a retreat, or as a reduction.
But, and if production “falls back onto” recording, and recording, in turn, “falls back onto” consumption, which, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the site where “something in the order of a subject is discerned” (16), this would imply a logic of depth through which that subject grounds the syntheses of the unconscious. This could not be any further from the French original.
Deleuze and Guattari use “rabattre” in its reflexive form, “se rabattre sur,” which means to come to or to reach something: the subject is not the ground for but rather a product of the interactions between body without organs and machines; the subject is, in other words, a product of consumption, recording, and production.
I think it is important to qualify the effect of translating “se rabattre sur” as “falling back onto” as in itself a falling back onto and a regression, ironically, to the very theory the text is disputing.
