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Lacan

Anti- … … …

March 3, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Condensation, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Displacement, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        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.

Ich/I/moi

February 1, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, AO-Mistranslations, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Lacan, Language, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        Back to the question of translation though this time the text is encumbered by a move from the German original. Freud’s Oedipal trinity is of the “es/it,” the “Ich/I,” and the “Uber-Ich/Over-I.” While his English translators introduced the “id,” “ego,” and “super ego,” their French cousins remained closer to the original with the “ça,” “moi,” and “surmoi.” It is interesting that the translators of Anti-Oedipus chose to comply with the English Freud instead of the French Deleuze and Guattari. “I,” “me,” and “ego” are the choices they alternate for the single word “moi” (often, it seems, without rhyme or reason). Perhaps it was their attempt to bring closer to their audiences a text that sounded strange enough already!

        Mine is not simply a linguistic concern since Freud had used the term “Ich” to refer at times to the self in its totality and at others to an agency or a part of that self. While it makes his text difficult to read, Freud’s equivocation also suggests that the two senses are co-dependent, that, in fact, one could not speak of a self, of an I, without that part, an ego, that negotiates between the demands of desire, reality, and the Law, that, in other words, and for Freud at least, to speak of a self is to speak of Oedipus. (To speak of a self, for Lacan, is to speak of and to insist on not only the necessity of the symbolic Law but also the unavoidability of a specular and imaginary “moi” without which the entire structure would also flounder.) Much like his predecessors (Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Binswanger), Freud relied on the “ego,” or its absence, to understand the schizophrenic, or at the very least to understand the schizophrenic as beyond psychoanalytic comprehension, and hence intervention.

        To be fair to Freud, in a manner of speaking, and to also be more accurate, conceptually and clinically, it is not on the “ego/moi” that the possibility of therapeutic psychoanalysis hinges. Rather, it is the capacity for object libido, which is to say for the love of an other, that Freud looked for in his prospective analysands. This is not an insignificant distinction. In classic psychoanalytic terms, the I that is capable of love is an I that has already been Oedipalised; it is an I that has passed from ego libido to object libido, from secondary narcissism to the super ego (via the ego ideal). The narcissist, the masochist, the homosexual, the schizophrenic, the woman, in sum anything that is not “Freud,” these are all quite capable of uttering an “I” but theirs has not been fixed enough by its relationship to the familial axes of Oedipus for it to be curable. It is in its endorsement of this non-Oedipal “I/moi” that Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic process is to be distinguished from both Lacanism and Ego psychology. The only “real” relationship—be it of love, hate, or what not—is a relationship of production, of desiring production, of the production of the unconscious. Though he claimed all the names of history, Nietzsche, obviously, did not fail to utter an “I” whenever he fancied it or it suited his purposes. Similarly, the handyman has rarely hesitated to acknowledge an “I fixed it” even though his primary mode is of fixing things rather than of claiming for himself the things he has fixed.

Subjects-Laws

January 26, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Subjects

        Let me draw a parallel, temporarily at least, between Lacan’s three registers (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) and the tripartite structure Deleuze and Guattari identify as the basis for the emergence and understanding of a subject: hallucination, delirium, and intensity.

        The correspondences imaginary/hallucination, symbolic/delirium, and real/intensity identify the last of the couplets as the logical priority without which the other two would be impossible. Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari would agree on this point. They would, however, part company on the status of thought and the logic it betrays.

        The symbolic for Lacan is immutable. One is born into certain linguistic structures over which one has very little if any control. Rather than the resolution, taming, or expansion of unconscious thought processes, the analytic task for Lacan consists in giving such processes expression, in articulating their truth and making them subject in and of such structures.

        In foregoing the structural distinction between conscious and unconscious—“it,” after all, is at work everywhere—Deleuze and Guattari disentangle amongst the various expressions of delirium, of the “I think,” and hence of the symbolic, the schizophrenic from the social. Whereas the Lacanian symbolic, its quality, and the fact of its presence or absence, is beyond modification, Deleuzo-Guattarian delirium is indeed subject to transformation-fetishisation: reversal, exclusivity, and ossification.

        It is worth noting here that schizophrenic delirium is not simply the counter-part or specular image of social delirium since its productive quality lies not so much in a Law that will install and ground an identity, but in a process that will lead to (se rabattre sur) and produce a subject and a meaning that are residual, aleatory.

        One of the many implications to this distinction reflects on the practice of a symbolic community. In the one case, it is a given; in the other it is produced. In the one case, it is the limit that safeguards its members from the threat of psychosis; in the other, it is the porous boundary through which much is trafficked and produced.

Subjects-3

January 17, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        While the subject does depend on the interaction between intensity (I experience), delirium (I think), and hallucination (I see), it is not the sum total of all three moments or modes; it is an offshoot and a side-effect rather than a unity precisely because it is constantly disrupted by its nature as a subject in jouissance. In the space of a few lines, Deleuze and Guattari manage to rebut a long tradition in both philosophy and psychoanalysis that has insisted on inscribing the subject as primarily grounded in thought (Descartes) or language (Lacan). This subject is one that has deluded itself into thinking in the mode of the fetish that it is at the centre of its various experiences and understandings; that it is separate from the constellation of intensities it goes through. This subject may experience, see, or think this or that but, supposedly, it is neither this nor that; it goes so far as to convince itself that it is greater than both, in charge of both, and hence capable of the repression and/or the fulfillment of both. This is what has made it possible for psychoanalysis, if not for much of human research, to gravitate around the question “what does the subject want?” and its variants “what does the woman want?” and “what does the other want from me?” The other here may stand for the state, the friend, or the god. The other also stands for the analyst as much as it does for the analysand, and for the text as much as for the reader. Clinically, and no matter how complicated or pained the presentation may be, the working assumption is that the analyst, or an analyst, is in a position to understand, to empathize, and/or to facilitate “the” subject. All parties concerned, variations on the theme notwithstanding, share the assumption that is being undermined and exposed in its moment as a fetish by the text of Anti-Oedipus, in both word and deed. On the one hand, the text argues the impossibility of a subject prior to the wanting: as much as the I is produced as forgetting, it is also produced as wanting; it does not precede it; it does not choose it; it is it. The series of questions (“what does the subject want?” and its variants, including what has become the pivotal clinical concern as to whether or not to gratify the want once it has been identified) becomes secondary and remote in comparison to the modalities and dynamics of the want itself. On the other hand, the text as an avalanche of concepts and permutations on concepts makes me think it impossible to comprehend it as a coherent communication. Note, I say impossible instead of simply difficult or arduous. The text offers a series of syntheses, structures, and topologies that are designed specifically for the reader not to “understand,” or at least to understand only insofar as they are being made use of successively as intensities. In the process, Anti-Oedipus is uncovering itself not as a static representation of a consistent meaning or the communication of a self-contained system, in other words as a textual subject, but as a series of vignettes and effects with which the reader has to constantly connect and therefore reproduce.

Subjects-2

January 15, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, AO-Mistranslations, Conjunctive Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysis with which Deleuze and Guattari were most suffused, jouissance has come to hold pride of place amongst the categories and constructs. Jouissance is neither pleasure nor enjoyment (this is yet another one of those distinctions the translators seem to have completely missed); it is what goes beyond either of these two states. Pleasure, for Lacan and for Freud before him, is a minimum of excitation and its principle is to have as little pleasure as possible, to maintain, at whatever cost, the integrity and stability of its subject. Jouissance is what motivates a striving and a going beyond the limits of the pleasure principle, a transgression, a seeking out of more pleasure and hence, and in the process, an endurance of pain. Jouissance is that paradoxical pleasure that one derives from the symptom, or the gain from the illness as Freud would think it. Put differently, and whereas pleasure and enjoyment confirm the autonomy and integrity of the subject as ego, jouissance undermines that ego’s search for balance and control; it presses upon it, it disrupts its sanctum. Rather than the guarantor of a subject’s unity and organisation, jouissance is its destabilizer.

        Interestingly enough, and in order to make the identical claim, Deleuze and Guattari choose to invoke the authority of Marx on this matter (16).

        What of the subject then? If the relations between body without organs and desiring machines are of attraction and repulsion, of miraculating and paranoid machines, the relation between the latter two is of a consuming and celibate machine whose jouissance, “sexual pleasure,” “volupté,” is the motor force behind the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis.

        Crucial here is the difference in the language-word: whereas the “celibate” evokes constraints and denials, the “célibataire” (the bachelor) is a playful suitor, as with Duchamps, hovering on the border between the respectable and the unknown, and hence suspect, that is forever produced as a new alliance between the paranoid and the miraculating, between desiring machines and the body without organs.

        In this “celibate” machine the paranoid and the miraculating reconcile, which is not to say that they cancel each other out. Both persist, but this time alongside a degree of voluptuousness, a creativity of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as states or zones of intensity.

        Hallucinations and deliriums are secondary to the experience of such zones: Schreber’s “I experience myself becoming a woman” is projected as a hallucination “I see my reflection in the mirror as a woman” and introjected as a delirium “I think I am a woman.” (I am choosing to render the French “je sens” as “I experience” instead of “I feel” in order to A) underscore the physicality of the Deleuzo-Guattarian usage and hence B) to distinguish it from the current obsession with “feeling” and “affect” in certain psychotherapeutic circles).

        This is where the I is located, as the outcome of a state and an intensity, of the lived experience of having breasts, for instance, which does not resemble having breasts (19).

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