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.
Archive for the Anti-Oedipus Category
Subjects-3
Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 17 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-RihanSubjects-2
Posted in AO-Mistranslations, Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Freud, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 15 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-RihanIn 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).
Subjects
Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Freud, Klein, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 13 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-RihanKeeping 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!
Fetish-2
Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Fetish, Schizoanalysis on 6 January 2008 by Fadi Abou-RihanThe two syntheses of production are subject to fetishistic manipulation: reversal in the case of connection, and exclusivity in the case of disjunction.
The fetish is specific to a social delirium (an “I think”) of an apparent movement of, for instance, the body without organs as cause of all production (the logic of “without me you are nothing“) or of a decisive choice between two immutable alternatives (either conscious or unconscious, either inside or outside, either analyst or analysand).
In schizophrenic delirium, the two syntheses overlap; fluidity is the order of the day.
It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate. (15)
The echo here is to Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, his presentation of von Sacher Masoch from a few years prior to Anti-Oedipus, specifically to the contract the masochist draws up and proposes to the other, a contract that takes the form of the Law but is indeed designed to generate all that that Law prohibits. The scrambling of codes in this instance operates on at least two levels: at the level of the author of the contract who gets to prescribe the limits of the scene (stereotypically the active “top” but in this case the supposedly passive “bottom”); and at the level of the content and intent of the contract (impropriety, un-pleasure).
If we are in a position to qualify Anti-Oedipus itself as masochistic/schizophrenic then we should expect that everything that has been said so far to be subject to the same shifts and scramblings. What we are offered is an ever growing and ever confusing set of syntheses and much of what follows will depend on our responses to it, on what we make of it.
Falling Back Onto
Posted in AO-Mistranslations, Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Dreams, Freud, Schizoanalysis, Subjects on 5 December 2007 by Fadi Abou-RihanBefore 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.
Disjunction
Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Disjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Machines, Schizoanalysis on 27 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-RihanIn the face of this “without me, you are nothing” and instead of the all too familiar reversed and hence equally fetishistic and resentful response by the other, Deleuze and Guattari not only insist on the infinitely open quality of the binary series of machines that precludes the fixity of pedigree, they also complicate the situation through the second of the text’s syntheses, the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…), the production of recording.
The surface of the body without organs is taut and smooth. It is without itineraries, or rather, its itineraries are infinite. One can and often does slide from a given point to another in a thousand different ways: either this way, or that, or the other; and on it goes.
Contra the logic of a social delirium that demands that the itineraries be fixed, schizophrenic delirium is infinitely more flexible, but not any the less sensical, than is often assumed. Indeed, and with the disjunctive synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari explode the constraints of the sequential and binary order of a rigid linear connection: the trajectory from one machine to another is multiplied and both machines are no longer necessarily connected, and when they are so connected the link is not exclusively through the shortest route that is the straight line. The hold of the linear connections of logic (grammar) and causality (time) is loosened as the disjunctions overlay the connections; both are henceforth inscribed in a multi-dimensional space.
With the disjunctive synthesis, it is linear, chronological time that is most crucially undermined, time as a causal connector and developmental ground for both understanding and intervention, in other words, time as a fetish. For Schrödinger, the cat in the box, the cat we cannot see, is not simply either dead or alive; it is both dead and alive.
At the quantum level, thinking the physics of the overlay and simultaneity of the disjunction with the connection has given rise to such notions as superposition and the multiverse without which many of our current technologies would not obtain. While the controversy still rages on in scientific circles as to which of these two theories, recordings, inscriptions, is the more appropriate or justifiable, it would make more sense to suggest that both indeed are, that, as incomprehensible as it may initially seem, simultaneity (of states or of worlds) is not simply a peculiar characteristic of a psychological phenomenon identified by a supposedly long outdated dogma. The unconscious, as primary process, i.e., as an a-chronological form of thought that stresses the untimely rather than the serial and exclusive, is not contained within the confines of the archaic or the phantastic; it is our reality, physical as well as psychological, at its most elemental and productive.
