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BwO

        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).

Figure 1

        Likewise, the atom itself was understood and represented as a minuscule solar system with its own internal gravitational dynamics (Figure 2).

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.

Figure 3

        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.

        At this point, I want to underscore the quality of a Lacanian imaginary in the reader’s relationship to the text, not as analyst but as object for an attempt at a so-called analytic reading.

        Indeed, and at one level at least, we have both a duplication and a reversal of the analytic process. One approaches a text expecting it to provide knowledge much like one approaches an analyst as the subject supposed to know. As the reader reads, the text effects the analytic move of thwarting interpretation and unsettling those demands imposed upon it under the register of the textual imaginary: unity, structure, and meaning. As a body without organs, the text repels its reader’s organisation of words and concepts and forces her or him into a confrontation with and the accountability for the basic tenets of readership.

        I would like to suggest that the awareness of a similar reversal as it takes place in the clinical setting is critical: it is not only the analysand who approaches the analyst as subject supposed to know, it is the analyst as well who has already, qua analyst, approached the analysand as the subject in whose depths lies a set of truths that have yet to be consciously known. Lacanians pride themselves on the fact that what distinguishes them from the rest of their analytic counterparts is their refusal to be entrapped in the imaginary logic of the counter-transference. Their wager is that such a refusal affords them a better focus on the analysand’s symbolic underpinnings; in the process, their wager blinds them to the reality of the presence of at least two often equally thwarted imaginary registers in the room.

        In this context, we witness near the closing of the chapter’s first section what might seem like a moment of dialectical abstraction: “desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all” (8).

        Deleuze and Guattari seem to be telling us if not the truth of production then at least the truth of its vicissitudes. Supposedly, the linear series of production, recording, and consumption congeals enough to produce its own antithesis: the non-productive dis-organisation that is the body without organs. To some, this may sound distastefully, perhaps even shockingly, Hegelian. Hardly, since the production of the body without organs does not carry with it any evidence of finality; it is qualitatively eruptive and unpredictable. As we shall soon see, and in the face of the borderline’s rigid either/or, one encounters the disjunctive synthesis “either… or… or…” of the schizophrenic.

        While there is much in it that tells us what it does, there is nothing in Anti-Oedipus, so far at least, that explains what a body without organs, or a desiring machine for that matter, is. Instead, we are told what this body without organs is not: it is not a projection; it has nothing to do with the body or with an image of the body; it is not a metaphor; and it has no productive quality whatsoever (8). If Anti-Oedipus is a theory of the body without organs, it records and hence produces that which it theorizes; it is also the process by which it becomes what it theorizes. It not only theorizes the impossibility of imaging, producing a copy, whether good or bad, of the body without organs, it is itself a body without organs and as such, it is unavailable for copying. Any attempt at reproducing in its totality a theoretical image of this body is bound to be unproductive, or productive of another extension of the same organ-less body, or of another body altogether.

        Furthermore, if one accepts this schema of the connective synthesis then, and in one of its registers at least, Anti-Oedipus is to psychoanalysis what the anti-production of the body without organs is to the desiring machines. The “Anti-“ in the text’s title is a reference to its relationship as a product of, and not simply a reaction to or a rejection of, the rigid over-organization of the machines of psychoanalysis as they constitute a clinical practice and a theoretical enterprise. The “Anti-“ is hence one of neither repudiation nor substitution; its effects are momentary and the final word has not been and, thankfully, never can be spoken; the machines will invariably regroup and desire will circulate once again.

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