Archive for the Disjunctive Synthesis Category

Thou Shalt not Laugh

Posted in Disjunctive Synthesis, Freud, Jean Laplanche, Klein, Lacan, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles on 8 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        In his study of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt recounts one of those anecdotes that are “true and not true, everywhere and nowhere,” in other words, one of those anecdotes that are mythic in quality and function:

The citizens of a certain town (Siena seems to be meant) had once an officer in their service who had freed them from foreign aggression; daily they took counsel how to recompense him, and concluded that no reward in their power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose and said, ‘Let us kill him and worship him as our patron saint’. And so they did. (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 15)

        Aside from its all-too-familiar and perhaps even universal juxtaposition of violence with reverence, what, amongst the countless of Burckhardt’s vignettes, marks this one in particular as both mythic and tragic is, ironically but not too surprisingly, the hefty quotient of laughter its recounting often evokes. At another time and in another place, Franz Kafka’s reading of his own quasi-mythic tales of humanity’s despair and absurdity elicited a similar laughter from his Prague audiences; ditto of the response of many a theatregoer to the performance of Ionesco’s despairing La cantatrice chauve. Let us not forget Emily Dickinson, that mistress of suffering, who could not but delight in the humorous nuances of certain stories of death and decapitation.

        One could easily argue, as many already have, that operative in these and most other comic responses is a concealment of and a shield against the poignancy, if not the pain, of the myth and its truth, that, in other words, the laughter is the very confirmation of what it tries to deny. With pain as the normatively posited response, no psychoanalytic clinician or theorist, to my knowledge at least, has entertained the possibility of a reverse and yet equally vital scenario whereby laughter is the target of concealment and tears are its limpid and unadorned but no less obscuring cover.

        And yet, throughout much of its history, psychoanalysis has rightly insisted on the inherently conflicted relationship a subject has with its object. Freud considered the perversions as always paired in the individual: sadism and masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not simply the terms we attach to the separate but presumably complementary roles we adopt in our sexual scenarios, they are co-extensive components of our identities as desiring subjects. As much can be said of femininity and masculinity for what Freud had termed primary “bisexuality” in his Three Essays of 1905 is better captured in our current lexicon as primary “bigenderism.” Klein made the case for a similar dynamic, though hers were much starker terms: sexuality and aggression, love and hate, are our inexhaustible rudiments and much of what we know of the unconscious and its positions is articulated through the ways in which the two are lived and negotiated. As for Lacan, that master of the triad wherever registers, passions, and diagnoses were concerned, he too insisted on the co-valence of the oppositional pair whenever he addressed technical questions of presence and absence, speech and silence, inside and outside,

        Puzzling then is the psychoanalytic refusal to detect anything other than the tortured and tragic in the myth of Oedipus as its founding principle. Puzzling is the discipline’s refusal to grant its hermeneutic key access to its much-treasured logic of duality and opposition, a logic that would uncover in the Oedipal script its constitutive roots in the humorous. No doubt, the clinical commitment to the alleviation of human suffering has often left little room for the consideration of anything other than the stifling and the traumatic. Indeed, there has been much seductive sense to the argument that the time for laughter and, in this case, personal freedom, is possible only after the working through of blockages and inhibitions has been accomplished. (It is worth noting here that such a working through is as much collective and cultural, considering the environment of concrete violence and destruction we inhabit, as it is individual.)

        Still, and by that very same token, the zeal and earnestness with which psychoanalysis has championed the story of the erstwhile king of Thebes as the embodiment of pathos and nothing but is itself the symptom of an inhibition that is in bad need of analysis and alleviation, an inhibition that is all the more potent precisely because of its silence and opacity, an inhibition that functions in the style of an “enigmatic signifier,” as Jean Laplanche has termed it, a constitutive communication, in this case of a clinical guideline, that remains unconscious to both sender and receiver, a communication that operates in the mode of a yet unspoken eleventh (psychoanalytic) commandment: Thou shalt not laugh.

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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.

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Disjunction

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Disjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Machines, Schizoanalysis on 27 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        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.

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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.

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