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Anti-Oedipus

Subjects

January 13, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Freud, Klein, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        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!

Fetish-2

January 6, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Fetish, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis

        The 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

December 5, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, AO-Mistranslations, BwO, Deleuze, Dreams, Freud, Guattari, Schizoanalysis, Subjects

        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.

Disjunction

November 27, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Guattari, Machines, Schizoanalysis

        In 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.

Fetish

November 24, 2007
André Green, Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Fetish, Freud, Guattari, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Sophocles

        It is in terms of this tension that Deleuze and Guattari will understand the fetish, not as an object, a commodity, or a body part; but as the movement, event, and relationship that reverse the connective synthesis and fix the machine as fatefully miraculated, as, in other words, owing its existence to some body without organs without which it cannot survive.

        Oedipus is a telling example of such a fetish. Indeed, many a post-Freudian reading has further complicated our understanding of the tumultuous relationship between father and son: André Green for instance reminds us that Laius was not simply the innocent victim of patricide but the plotter of his own son’s murder as well. In this context, much remains to be said of Jocasta’s collusion with her husband’s plot and of the ideological silence that surrounds that collusion to this day.

        Still, the structure and logic of the myth persist to the point where it has become virtually impossible to experience the familial, either phenomenally or ideologically, without its Sophoclean recordings. However, and should art or history be our guide and inspiration, then let us not overlook the episode that Herodotus tells of Hippocrates who refused to abide by the prophecy’s warning that he not father a son or if he already has one to disown him. Pisistratus, his offspring, would go on to conquer Athens and serve as its ruler. Neither father nor son in this case was any the poorer for disregarding the codes of the deities and the directives of their prophets (Histories, Book One #59-64).

        To put it bluntly, the logic of the fetish here is the intolerant and singular logic of the “without me, you are noting” that one party fosters and with which another colludes. Author and reader, teacher and student, analyst and analysand, parent and child, ruler and ruled; these are some of the structural couplets that breathe in the stagnant air of resentment without which, and in an ironically doubled and nested move, the corresponding institutions of Literature, Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Family, and State would not exist.

        “Without me, you are nothing” is the logic of quasi-causes, of boundaries and restrictions, of confinements and regulations, through which the leak is construed as a threat and the crossing is supposedly a crossing into illegitimacy, chaos, fragmentation, and disintegration. But it is precisely the impermeable boundary itself that divides, consolidates, and reifies the functions of dictator, father, and super ego. Often enough, the crossing is not into chaos but into a more liveable and freer sanity. Instead of health or truth, it is territoriality and power that are the fundamental concerns of the institution and its fetish.

        Ostensibly, this “without me, you are nothing” is but a thin veil for a deep and desperate projection: “without you, I am nothing.” To admit that much is to renounce the fallacy of the hierarchy that allows me to identify myself as your superior (in health, truth, or wealth); it is to renounce my investment in my phantasy of my superiority over you, which is to say, it is to recognize my aggression toward you as someone I wish to subordinate. Freud’s elaborations on the mechanisms of projection and paranoia in his study on Schreber still hold true, as long as one inscribes them within the circuit of the conditional relations of the inter-subjective.

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