Archive for January, 2008

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Subjects-Laws

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Lacan, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Subjects on 26 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Let me draw a parallel, temporarily at least, between Lacan’s three registers (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) and the tripartite structure Deleuze and Guattari identify as the basis for the emergence and understanding of a subject: hallucination, delirium, and intensity.

        The correspondences imaginary/hallucination, symbolic/delirium, and real/intensity identify the last of the couplets as the logical priority without which the other two would be impossible. Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari would agree on this point. They would, however, part company on the status of thought and the logic it betrays.

        The symbolic for Lacan is immutable. One is born into certain linguistic structures over which one has very little if any control. Rather than the resolution, taming, or expansion of unconscious thought processes, the analytic task for Lacan consists in giving such processes expression, in articulating their truth and making them subject in and of such structures.

        In foregoing the structural distinction between conscious and unconscious—“it,” after all, is at work everywhere—Deleuze and Guattari disentangle amongst the various expressions of delirium, of the “I think,” and hence of the symbolic, the schizophrenic from the social. Whereas the Lacanian symbolic, its quality, and the fact of its presence or absence, is beyond modification, Deleuzo-Guattarian delirium is indeed subject to transformation-fetishisation: reversal, exclusivity, and ossification.

        It is worth noting here that schizophrenic delirium is not simply the counter-part or specular image of social delirium since its productive quality lies not so much in a Law that will install and ground an identity, but in a process that will lead to (se rabattre sur) and produce a subject and a meaning that are residual, aleatory.

        One of the many implications to this distinction reflects on the practice of a symbolic community. In the one case, it is a given; in the other it is produced. In the one case, it is the limit that safeguards its members from the threat of psychosis; in the other, it is the porous boundary through which much is trafficked and produced.

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Situational Subjects

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Fetish, Insight, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Subjects, Termination on 23 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Ultimately, the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject (be it an individual, a text, a practice, or an institution) is produced as the offshoot of a particular constellation of forces of attraction and repulsion, which is to say of a surround and a situation. It is hence aleatory since the constellation itself is an effect of the ongoing process of production and its three syntheses. This subject is producible—differently, persistently; it is mutable, agile; its history knows little of linearity or development, of stages or resolutions, and often only accidentally so. This subject is situational.

        Contra the fetish that ossifies it by subsuming its relations and experiences under the heading of this or that topology or purpose, Deleuze and Guattari offer a more modest and hence potentially more flexible and productive strategy for being, for reading, for intervening. Julia Kristeva’s insistence that individuality requires that in every analysand be discovered a distinctly new classification (New Maladies of the Soul, 9) and Wilfred Bion’s recommendation to enter each session with “neither memory nor desire” in order to be best prepared for that session’s specific productions—its newness—strike a similar cord.

        In this context, the clinical concern is much less with the correction of a pathological present (as the reiteration of disruptive early childhood patterns) in favour of a pre-established adult (read: integrated) identity, and more with what that present is being made to produce or not produce; with the malleable relations and experiences it makes possible.

        The present is about much less a state of being than a deployment of being, for it too is a machine. This is not to suggest that the subject does not admit of a history; its past is a machine that is often called upon in hindsight in order to justify or make necessary, and sometimes even more tolerable, a present as an investment or a relation. Nor is this subject lacking in a capacity to observe and hence modify itself; it is not without will, though its will, and by extension its want, revolve around a simultaneously more visceral and more subtle concern than for simple advancement or acquisition.

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Subjects-Insights

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Associations, Conjunctive Synthesis, Insight, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 20 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        One of the main controversies in the history of the psychoanalytic movement has coalesced around the meaning and relevance of insight as a clinical category. A divide has often separated a more classic epistemic orientation from a concern for the analysand’s affective well being which, supposedly, may or may not have much to do with the making conscious of conflicts and/or deficits. Through the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari are effectively redefining insight and in the process rearranging the terms if not the relevance of the debate here. The conjunctive synthesis is ostensibly a “so that’s what it is!” moment of insight and a clarity identified by its effect to reorganize radically not only delirium (thought) but hallucination (perception) and intensity (experience) as well. The “so that’s what it is!” is not so much a revelation or an uncovering of the subject to itself but the making of a subject. Instead of simply eliciting in the analysand a greater sense of subjective responsibility, or a greater capacity to tolerate anxiety and its ambivalence, or even a broader affective vocabulary or repertoire, the conjunctive synthesis is quasi traumatic in its quality for it is the signpost of a radical shift in the subject’s thought, perception, and experience, which is to say in the subject’s way of deploying itself for itself and for others. Insight is that rare moment of tremor in the clinical situation that marks for both analyst and analysand a transformation, not only in understanding but also in being and in relating. However, and whereas the trauma (of war or abuse for instance) dissociates the subject from its experiences, thoughts, and perceptions, and in so doing robs it of its agility and ossifies it, insight, analytic or otherwise, multiplies the connections between the components; it produces new recordings, experiences, subjectivities; it makes such multiplications and productions tolerable.

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Subjects-3

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 17 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        While the subject does depend on the interaction between intensity (I experience), delirium (I think), and hallucination (I see), it is not the sum total of all three moments or modes; it is an offshoot and a side-effect rather than a unity precisely because it is constantly disrupted by its nature as a subject in jouissance. In the space of a few lines, Deleuze and Guattari manage to rebut a long tradition in both philosophy and psychoanalysis that has insisted on inscribing the subject as primarily grounded in thought (Descartes) or language (Lacan). This subject is one that has deluded itself into thinking in the mode of the fetish that it is at the centre of its various experiences and understandings; that it is separate from the constellation of intensities it goes through. This subject may experience, see, or think this or that but, supposedly, it is neither this nor that; it goes so far as to convince itself that it is greater than both, in charge of both, and hence capable of the repression and/or the fulfillment of both. This is what has made it possible for psychoanalysis, if not for much of human research, to gravitate around the question “what does the subject want?” and its variants “what does the woman want?” and “what does the other want from me?” The other here may stand for the state, the friend, or the god. The other also stands for the analyst as much as it does for the analysand, and for the text as much as for the reader. Clinically, and no matter how complicated or pained the presentation may be, the working assumption is that the analyst, or an analyst, is in a position to understand, to empathize, and/or to facilitate “the” subject. All parties concerned, variations on the theme notwithstanding, share the assumption that is being undermined and exposed in its moment as a fetish by the text of Anti-Oedipus, in both word and deed. On the one hand, the text argues the impossibility of a subject prior to the wanting: as much as the I is produced as forgetting, it is also produced as wanting; it does not precede it; it does not choose it; it is it. The series of questions (“what does the subject want?” and its variants, including what has become the pivotal clinical concern as to whether or not to gratify the want once it has been identified) becomes secondary and remote in comparison to the modalities and dynamics of the want itself. On the other hand, the text as an avalanche of concepts and permutations on concepts makes me think it impossible to comprehend it as a coherent communication. Note, I say impossible instead of simply difficult or arduous. The text offers a series of syntheses, structures, and topologies that are designed specifically for the reader not to “understand,” or at least to understand only insofar as they are being made use of successively as intensities. In the process, Anti-Oedipus is uncovering itself not as a static representation of a consistent meaning or the communication of a self-contained system, in other words as a textual subject, but as a series of vignettes and effects with which the reader has to constantly connect and therefore reproduce.

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Subjects-2

Posted in AO-Mistranslations, Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Freud, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 15 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysis with which Deleuze and Guattari were most suffused, jouissance has come to hold pride of place amongst the categories and constructs. Jouissance is neither pleasure nor enjoyment (this is yet another one of those distinctions the translators seem to have completely missed); it is what goes beyond either of these two states. Pleasure, for Lacan and for Freud before him, is a minimum of excitation and its principle is to have as little pleasure as possible, to maintain, at whatever cost, the integrity and stability of its subject. Jouissance is what motivates a striving and a going beyond the limits of the pleasure principle, a transgression, a seeking out of more pleasure and hence, and in the process, an endurance of pain. Jouissance is that paradoxical pleasure that one derives from the symptom, or the gain from the illness as Freud would think it. Put differently, and whereas pleasure and enjoyment confirm the autonomy and integrity of the subject as ego, jouissance undermines that ego’s search for balance and control; it presses upon it, it disrupts its sanctum. Rather than the guarantor of a subject’s unity and organisation, jouissance is its destabilizer.

        Interestingly enough, and in order to make the identical claim, Deleuze and Guattari choose to invoke the authority of Marx on this matter (16).

        What of the subject then? If the relations between body without organs and desiring machines are of attraction and repulsion, of miraculating and paranoid machines, the relation between the latter two is of a consuming and celibate machine whose jouissance, “sexual pleasure,” “volupté,” is the motor force behind the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis.

        Crucial here is the difference in the language-word: whereas the “celibate” evokes constraints and denials, the “célibataire” (the bachelor) is a playful suitor, as with Duchamps, hovering on the border between the respectable and the unknown, and hence suspect, that is forever produced as a new alliance between the paranoid and the miraculating, between desiring machines and the body without organs.

        In this “celibate” machine the paranoid and the miraculating reconcile, which is not to say that they cancel each other out. Both persist, but this time alongside a degree of voluptuousness, a creativity of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as states or zones of intensity.

        Hallucinations and deliriums are secondary to the experience of such zones: Schreber’s “I experience myself becoming a woman” is projected as a hallucination “I see my reflection in the mirror as a woman” and introjected as a delirium “I think I am a woman.” (I am choosing to render the French “je sens” as “I experience” instead of “I feel” in order to A) underscore the physicality of the Deleuzo-Guattarian usage and hence B) to distinguish it from the current obsession with “feeling” and “affect” in certain psychotherapeutic circles).

        This is where the I is located, as the outcome of a state and an intensity, of the lived experience of having breasts, for instance, which does not resemble having breasts (19).

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Subjects

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Freud, Klein, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 13 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Keeping in mind the initial definition of process as production, recording, and consumption, a third synthesis is invariably at work, a synthesis of consumption that belongs to the “subject,” a “subject” that is produced by a recording and that defines itself in terms of the recording it consumes.

        How could a recording produce a subject? To begin with, here are two examples from the history and medicalization of sexuality. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault has outlined for us the recording of homosexuality from the 1850’s onwards and how it has come to produce not only the psychiatric category of the homosexual as presumably pathetic and pathological but also the possibilities for its modern day offshoot: the gay subject. As well, Sandy Stone has given us an image of the recording of the transsexual identity from the 1950’s onwards, a recording in which the shoddily researched notion of gender disphoria (being born in “the wrong body”) has seeped from the clinic and into the discourses of psychology, politics, and popular culture (“The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”).

        Ultimately, and for us here, the most poignant recording of all is Oedipus itself. As our social delirium and fetish, Oedipus records incest and patricide as primary. Supposedly, the taboo on incest is designed to curb an already existing wish, and guilt to redress and repair the effects of that wish. Freud was quite persistent on both scores and that is precisely why he could never accept the position of the budding Melanie Klein. As far as he was concerned, she had argued that one does not feel guilty because one has murdered one’s father but rather that one phantasizes the murder of one’s father because one already feels guilty. This made no sense to him!

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