I would like to return once again to the question of theory, its practices, its links and dislocations. What is the theory of the body without organs that is being proposed in the second section of Chapter One of Anti-Oedipus? What is its basis? Can one speak of it as having a basis at all?
The first synthesis, the connective (and… and… and…) synthesis of production, the producing/product identity, implicitly suggests what Deleuze had to spell out later on in a conversation with Foucault on the logic of “Intellectuals and Power.” The duality theory/practice is a producing product Deleuze insists; practice is invariably informed and driven by an often implicit but not any the less potent set of theoretical presuppositions while theory itself is a practice whose laws and dynamics are subject to transformation and interruption.
This question of the duality theory/practice is by no means specific to the fields of political participation or psychoanalytic intervention. Indeed, the break that quantum mechanics for instance effected from relativity theory in the mid 1920’s was propelled, and in one respect at least, by a reordering of the axioms of scientific priority governing experience and observation. Einstein and Schrödinger had abstracted from the phenomena of observable daily experience imagery that they then reinterpreted for the atomic realm. The macroscopic experience of two like-charged billiard balls repelling each other was transferred onto the atomic domain to explain the behavior of electrons (Figure 1).
Likewise, the atom itself was understood and represented as a minuscule solar system with its own internal gravitational dynamics (Figure 2).
In this model, experience and its figurative representation are imposed onto the theory; they shape it and ground its claim to truth. With his quantum mechanics, Heisenberg quickly came to challenge relativity theory on the basis of reality’s inherent discontinuity and dubious causality; he insisted that, as a matter of principle, neither could be accurately visualized or known. Heisenberg argued that mathematical abstraction must precede any diagrammatic representation and it in fact took more than twenty years (from 1925 to 1948) for such a representation to catch up and make its presence onto the stage.
Feynman’s diagram of two electrons exchanging a light quantum (Figure 3) could not have been drawn without the mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics. The difference between figures 1 and 3 is twofold: the first is in the order of priority (experience/representation versus theory); the second—the one of particular interest to me at this point—is in the nature of the representation itself; figure 1 is the image of two objects in motion whereas figure 3 is the schema of an event between two unrepresentable objects.
Much like Einstein, Freud relied on the accounts of everyday life and experience to ground and shape his theories. And just as much as relativity theory extrapolated patterns of experience from the macroscopic onto the atomic, Freud relished his incursions into anthropology and archaeology in order to draw homologies between the developments of the species (phylogeny) and those of the individual (ontogeny). The Platonism that quantum mechanics has come to reflect, the idea that mathematics is the true language of nature, is echoed in Lacan’s investment initially in topological constructs and subsequently, in the last decade of his career, in the formulae that were meant to encapsulate the workings of the unconscious: the mathemes. Amongst the most invoked of these are the mathemes of the four discourses—the hysteric’s, the analyst’s, the master’s, and the university’s—from Seminar 20, On Feminine Sexuality. These mathemes were designed to achieve at least two things: first, to bridge the gap between word and experience and hence make possible the transmission of knowledge, specifically, psychoanalytic knowledge; and, second, to redress the confusion to which both word and experience must inevitably give rise.
