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Machines

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.

Situational Subjects

January 23, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Fetish, Guattari, Insight, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Subjects, Termination

        Ultimately, the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject (be it an individual, a text, a practice, or an institution) is produced as the offshoot of a particular constellation of forces of attraction and repulsion, which is to say of a surround and a situation. It is hence aleatory since the constellation itself is an effect of the ongoing process of production and its three syntheses. This subject is producible—differently, persistently; it is mutable, agile; its history knows little of linearity or development, of stages or resolutions, and often only accidentally so. This subject is situational.

        Contra the fetish that ossifies it by subsuming its relations and experiences under the heading of this or that topology or purpose, Deleuze and Guattari offer a more modest and hence potentially more flexible and productive strategy for being, for reading, for intervening. Julia Kristeva’s insistence that individuality requires that in every analysand be discovered a distinctly new classification (New Maladies of the Soul, 9) and Wilfred Bion’s recommendation to enter each session with “neither memory nor desire” in order to be best prepared for that session’s specific productions—its newness—strike a similar cord.

        In this context, the clinical concern is much less with the correction of a pathological present (as the reiteration of disruptive early childhood patterns) in favour of a pre-established adult (read: integrated) identity, and more with what that present is being made to produce or not produce; with the malleable relations and experiences it makes possible.

        The present is about much less a state of being than a deployment of being, for it too is a machine. This is not to suggest that the subject does not admit of a history; its past is a machine that is often called upon in hindsight in order to justify or make necessary, and sometimes even more tolerable, a present as an investment or a relation. Nor is this subject lacking in a capacity to observe and hence modify itself; it is not without will, though its will, and by extension its want, revolve around a simultaneously more visceral and more subtle concern than for simple advancement or acquisition.

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).

Disjunction

November 27, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Fetish, Guattari, Machines, Schizoanalysis

        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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