Archive for the Connective Synthesis Category

Next Entries »

Anti- … … …

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Condensation, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Disjunctive Synthesis, Displacement, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire, Subjects on 3 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        One of the most striking qualities of the Deleuze-Guattarian schema is its trinitarian structure: production, recording, and consumption; machine, body without organs, and subject; paranoid, miraculating, and celibate; connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; and, finally, delirium, hallucination, and experience.

        The question that presents itself at this point is whether such a schema is but the latest in a series of vignettes that articulate the fundamental processes of thought (primary and secondary) Freud and Lacan had already attempted. Are we, in other words, witnessing a departure or simply a reiteration, no matter how varied, of what has been said and done, analytically and otherwise, on numerous occasions already?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s response is that the triangulations of social delirium, be they Oedipal or symbolic, are inherently static and stultifying; their forceful insistence on immutability and universality has now become drone-like and quasi-hypnotic. The schema that Deleuze and Guattari offer instead is grounded in a logic of counter-stability; its structure may be tripartite but, and forever, its modalities are infinite, its meanings multiple, and its subjects aleatory.

        I want to backtrack a bit here: what Freud had posited as his most cruicial contribution to the study of the psyche was not the fact of the unconscious. Freud had posited the fact of a dynamic unconscious as a form of thought and a process, as in primary process, as the basis for his newly elaborated project. I think that as much as Anti-Oedipus marks itself as profoundly anti-psychoanalytic, it remains most faithful to Freud’s core insights. In the name of flows and machines, the text rejects the Freudian unconscious in favour of an unconscious governed by three productive syntheses: connection, disjunction, and conjunction. However, with structural linguistics and its Lacanian appropriations for background, Deleuze and Guattari have essentially recast the Freudian mechanisms of displacement, condensation, and secondary revision in terms that, though unsettling, are no less psychoanalytic:

  • displacement, circulation along the axis of contiguity-metonymy, is now the connective synthesis (and… and…);
  • condensation, circulation along the axis of selection-metaphor, is now the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…)
  • secondary revision, the arrangement of disparate fragments into commonsensical and identitarian narratives, is now the conjunctive synthesis (so that’s what it is…).

        Deleuze and Guattari identify a psychoanalytic implementation that can only tolerate a “this and that” (mummy and daddy), a “this or that” (masculine or feminine), and a permanent “it’s me” ego. Deleuze and Guattari advance a schizoanalytic implementation where the connections and the disjunctions operate ad-infinitum and the subjectivities to which conjunctions give rise are partial and transitory.

        The anti-Oedipal criticism can be reformulated in the following terms: psychoanalysis has erected unnecessary and institutionally self-serving limits; it has betrayed its own first principle of a dynamic unconscious. It has not gone as far as it can actually go. Guattari stated as much in his notes while preparing the text. In the recently published Ecrits pour l’Anti-Oedipe, he repeatedly admonished Freud and Lacan for reintroducing the subject into the very realm from which they had previously evicted it, for subordinating the unconscious to the logic of unity and coherence, if not in fact then in therapeutic ideal. For Guattari, psychoanalysis has proven itself incapable of tolerating its own discovery of the unconscious as a primary process; it has become little more than an ossified and ossifying secondary revision.

        I want to suggest that, in adopting the notions of slip and dynamic primary process, Anti-Oedipus belongs at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition. That it rejects the Oedipal schema in which Freud encapsulated his findings makes it less Freudian but not any the less psychoanalytic. Before and since Deleuze and Guattari, many in the Kleinian and relational camps have rejected the Oedipal drama as a major hermeneutic key. This did not make them any the less psychoanalytic; it confirmed their commitment to the study of the psyche and to the intervention in its workings. Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to separate the discipline from some of its practitioners may be due to the fact that, sadly, the discipline itself has been governed by doctrinaire allegiances to those prominent amongst the practitioners. One often hears certain Freudians, Kleinians, or Lacanians declaring only members of their schools as the “true” bearers of the psychoanalytic torch; outsiders are dismissed as lost souls or impostors.

PS: see also Anti.

2 Comments »

Fetish

Posted in André Green, Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Fetish, Freud, Schizoanalysis, Sophocles on 24 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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.

Leave A Comment »

Relations

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Freud, Klein, Lacan, Mourning, Nietzsche, Schizoanalysis on 16 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        My incursion into this bit of intellectual and institutional history helps me situate Anti-Oedipus not only within the psychoanalytic context but also within that of one of the most pressing concerns that have marked the twentieth century. Deleuze and Guattari were by no means impermeable to the pressures and pleasures to take sides in the experience versus abstraction debate: Einstein/Heisenberg, Freud/Lacan. One might even extend the scenario to the artistic domain and add, for instance, Picasso/Kandinsky to the list of couplets.

        However, Deleuze and Guattari opted for the third possibility, the one that neither physics nor psychoanalysis had acknowledged. I am referring here to that possibility one finds in Nietzsche’s, or at least in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s, works. Indeed, Deleuze had already argued that Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism did not consist in the privileging of experience at the expense of abstraction since Plato himself never did dismiss experience in the first place. What the Greek philosopher had actually done was to prioritise amongst the various experiences in order to distinguish between the good copies of the ideal and universal Forms from their bad and cheap imitations.

        For those of you who might be a bit uncomfortable with my characterization of Lacan as a Platonist, you might want to keep in mind the practices of selection and valuation that the schemas of the Platonic Form and the Lacanian Symbolic discharge through the couplets good copy/cheap imitation and full speech/empty speech respectively.

        In any case, and to return to Deleuze’s Nietzsche, a reversal of Platonism is effected only when the distinction good copy/bad copy and the system of reference upon which it is based (the Form) have been dismantled. For Nietzsche, the antithesis of the duality true world (Form) and apparent world (copy) is ostensibly the duality world and nothing (The Will to Power #567).

        Consequently, “coming to know means ‘to place oneself in a conditional relation to something’; to feel oneself conditioned by something and oneself to condition it—it is therefore under all circumstances establishing, denoting, and making-conscious of conditions (not forthcoming entities, things, what is ‘in-itself’)” (#555). For Nietzsche, the world we know is a world of conditional relations and not of objects. Stripped of such relations, it ceases to exist. Translated into Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, these relations are not to be understood in causal terms; rather, they are to be subsumed under the heading of machinic production and its corollaries.

        Had Heisenberg read Nietzsche? I do not know. However, and notwithstanding his will to abstraction, the physicist recognized that the thing-in-itself, the electron, could not be represented and was hence experientially unknowable in itself. Feynman’s diagram is again the schema of an event, of a conditional relation of repulsion between two electrons. We do know that Freud had in fact read Nietzsche and that he had developed a conditional relation of envy and resentment toward the philosopher who, as he somewhere put it, had intuited the conclusions that he had had to spend an entire lifetime observing clinically. We also know that Lacan’s conditional relation to the German philosopher was one of admiration: he had read and eulogized his texts as an adolescent and then, after he had completed his medical studies, had been exposed to them once again via Georges Bataille, both at Acephale and the Collège de sociologie.

        It is rather unfortunate but perhaps not too surprising that envy, resentment, and admiration obscured one of Nietzsche’s most fundamental insights: what is to be analysed is not the unconscious as a thing in itself but the relations and the events which constitute it, and that such an analysis must itself figure among these relations and hence be the object of its own analysis. Of course, both Freud and Lacan, each in his own particular way, made extensive clinical use of such relations and events, especially in their transferential echoes. Invariably however, that use was motivated by an epistemophilic drive whose principal aim was the “truth” of the analysand’s unconscious; the interpretation (Freud) or dialectisation (Lacan) of the transference is relevant only insofar as it makes explicit the analysand’s psyche in its wishes, histories, patterns, and frustrations.

        Even within those other clinical quarters where the reciprocal relational nature of the analytic encounter had been underscored—the so-called “two person” psychologies of Fairbairn, Klein, and Winnicott for instance—the (sufficiently analysed) analyst’s share, his or her counter-transference, has been invariably filed under the rubric of the analysand’s projective identifications, reverberations, or deficits and hence, yet again, pertaining to the supposed truth of the latter’s unconscious. While indeed highly useful, such clinical strategies remain bound to the understanding of the unconscious as a discreet and knowable object merely influenced by its relations to other equally discreet objects.

        Consider, however, the dynamics of mourning and melancholia as they were first elaborated by Freud and subsequently deployed by Klein as the launch pad for her theorizing the ubiquity of ambivalence. What have remained under-investigated are much less the mourner’s responses to the experience of object loss and what these responses betray of his or her psychological structures and strategies, but rather the qualitative transformations in the relations the mourner has had to the supposedly lost object. At the level of the unconscious, neither objects nor relations ever die; they only get transformed. What is experienced is hence not so much the loss of the object but the abrupt reshaping of one’s relationship to it.

        Consequently, mourning and melancholia are amongst the vicissitudes of one’s relationship to other relations and not to objects. Such vicissitudes never occur in a vacuum; they are invariably predicated upon—which is to say produced, recorded, and consumed by—the current, as well as the long history of, relations of so-called loss the mourner has witnessed, learned, and been shaped by. The logic of the connective synthesis is as relevant here as it is in the context of the desiring machines and it is no coincidence that Deleuze and Guattari will speak of the body without organs as the unproductive, un-consumable, and imageless “full body of death” (8). The desiring machines do not cease to exist; with the emergence of the body without organs the flow of the connective synthesis is halted momentarily but only to be further reconfigured and organized.

1 Comment »

Of Applications - 2

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Freud, Lacan, Machines, Schizoanalysis on 10 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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.

Leave A Comment »

Anti-

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Disjunctive Synthesis, Productions, Schizoanalysis on 5 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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.

1 Comment »

Numbers

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Connective Synthesis, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Termination on 26 October 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        A machine is never on its own.

        One (the machine—the author, the infant, the analysand for instance) is not the originary number. A machine is always producing of a flow, of a product.

        Two (the machine and its flow—author and text, mother and milk, analysand and speech) is not the originary number either. A machine produces not only a product but also a product that is producing of another, that is itself a machine, a consuming machine to be more precise.

        Three (the machine, its flow, and the machine that consumes that flow—author, text, and reader; mother, milk, and infant; analysand, speech, and analyst) is still not the originary number. The presence of a machine presupposes not only another that it produces but yet a third by which it had been preceded and produced, and so on.

        Infinity is the originary number. The presence of a machine is made possible only in an infinite series or string (and… and… and…) of connecting, producing, consuming, and recording machines. The series itself can exist only in an immensely complicated matrix or network of production among whose components we may count sexuality, kinship, market forces, intellectual histories, legal and juridical constraints, scientific and aesthetic achievements, and physiological contingencies. Ultimately, meaning resides in such activities; it is not deferred till the moment of a product as an end.

        The clinical implication here is twofold. First, the distinction between reality and unconscious phantasy, between what belongs to the everyday and what is “properly” psychoanalytic, is in the understanding of the relationships and events between machines (production, consumption, etc…) and not in the nature of the object as such. The priority then is to appreciate that the clinical practice and its material and ideological surround are fundamentally implicated in one another. Second, the notion of termination as cure, truth, or position is never truly “terminal;” the connective synthesis is endless in its dynamic and the clinical concern, as indeed it has now become for many, is much less with an end to a process than it is with its extension beyond the point where the presence of the analyst is mandatory.

Leave A Comment »

Next Entries »