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Schizoanalysis

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

September 13, 2011
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Found Object, Freud, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Play, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Transitionals, Winnicott

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3).

Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for which the greatest threat is the distorting transformation of its status from a fundament into a goal, from a process that deploys its productions, registrations, and consumptions along typically unpredictable lines, which is to say, from a process that plays, dreams, and associates, as Winnicott understood these terms, into a stagnant and interminable “wreck” (AO, F11, E5) that can only “fantasy” and “dissociate” in its struggle for self-perpetuation and propagation.

This is one of a number of links and relays that I would like to pursue between the presumably post-Freudian project of Winnicott and the supposedly anti-Freudian project of Deleuze and Guattari.

My investment is not in a history of psychoanalytic ideas that hopes to bridge the divide between the French and the British, each a tradition that, for the most part, has thrived on recognising its other only to dispute its legitimacy as fantasmatic and/or mundane, on, in other words, dissociating itself from that other, a history, and by extension a methodology, that would invariably, righteously, grant itself the status of an integration or incorporation that is greater, wiser, or truer than both.

Nor is my investment in exposing and clarifying the ways in which each of these two traditions is, after all and presumably, a metaphor for, or, better still, the metamorphosing outcome of the other. I would much rather spare both my Winnicottian and Deleuzo-Guattarian readers the disappointment and/or irritation of witnessing their distinctive perspectives and strongly held convictions dismissed as the derivatives of some previously or elsewhere more convincingly elaborated views.

Nor do I hope to facilitate a triumphal coupling of the two sets of disparate texts and strategies with the aim of producing a clinical and/or meta-psychological offshoot—-a strange beast indeed—-that is part Winnicottian and part Deleuzo-Guattarian, part post- and part anti-, forever honouring, which is also to say forever hemmed in by, its provenance and heritage.

Nor, lastly, is my investment in a utopian “in-between” that has gripped much of the imagination amongst contemporary readers of both Winnicott and Deleuze and Guattari, an “in-between” whose advocates, I suspect, must forever struggle to keep from drowning in the treacherous waters of the Oceanus Britannicus. On this score, and though the notion of a topographical “in-between” seems to be precisely what brings both projects in line with one another, I find the Winnicottian transitional and the Deleuzo-Guattarian intermezzo, when considered primarily as psychological topographies, to be particularly sparse and unyielding. Moreover, and just as the found object for Winnicott is an experience rather than an “object” that needs to be itemised and localised, I would like to suggest that the transitional and the intermezzo are a playing and a bricolage, a basic form of living (“Playing: A Theoretical Statement”, 50) and a handyman’s tinkering (AO, F7, E1) that have little to do with spaces or locations that ought to be mapped, striated, and/or bound, and everything to do with events, processes, and experiences that are lived. Ditto for the “in-between.”

My investment is primarily in re-posing the question of found object and play and of machine and effect, while doubling its data, so to speak. Given two machines, each with its specific set of clinical and theoretical procedures, what can their juxtaposition be used for and what effects can that juxtaposition be made to produce? At stake here is a process that treats of dynamic effects as much as it treats of developmental causes, of potential products as much as of hidden aetiologies, and of eventual deployments as much as of retrograde analyses. Ultimately, my hope in posing this question is that these effects, products, and deployments may not only communicate to us hitherto unexplored yet constitutive theoretical and/or clinical components about either Winnicott or Deleuze and Guattari, but that they may also shed a new light on, if not indeed instantiate desire, and, in the process, allow us to do with that desire, or do with it differently, as much as it does with us.

In positing this reflexive implication, I take my cue from the “machines” I am considering, insofar as each, in its own way, has more or less relinquished as artificial and ineffectual the distinction between the functions of theory and practice, observer and observed, analyst and analysand. Indeed, by the end of his career, Winnicott was quite unequivocal when he declared that psychoanalysis “has to do with two people playing together” (PTS, 38), that such a doing takes place “in the overlap of the two play areas, that of the patient and that of the therapist” (“Playing”, 54), that, in other words, psychoanalysis has little to do with one subject developing, interpreting, or correcting another subject’s experience according to some externally pre-elaborated path toward truth or health, and everything to do with the playing that occurs “in between” these two subjects. Winnicottian psychoanalysis is therefore as much a practice as it is a theory of transitionality; it is therefore as invested in consolidating and legitimising an Ego, a Self, or a Subject, be it true or false, as a found object could be said to consolidate or legitimise a reality, be it hallucinatory or concrete.

Similarly, and equally forcefully, Deleuze and Guattari identified the principal task of their analytic orientation (which they termed “schizoanalysis”) as the dismantling of the distinction between a subject that emits a statement and a subject about or on behalf of whom, or which, a statement is emitted (AO, F323-324, E271). In schizoanalysis, there is no subject that imparts to another its accomplishments in knowledge, health, or experience; there is only an analytic machine that is neither an imaginary projection, as phantasy, nor a real projection, as cure, but a recurring factor of production among parts (associations, syntheses, subjectivities) functioning alongside one another and under specific clinical conditions. These are the gears that create new gears alongside preceding ones, indefinitely, even if, or even as they seem to function in discordant or opposing ways. As Deleuze and Guattari have summed it up, “That which makes a machine [the schizoanalytic sine qua non] are connections, all the connections that operate the disassembly” (Kafka, 84).

That something may be gained from elaborating a relationship between these Deleuzo-Guattarian connections and the Winnicottian transitional, between, in other words, the machine and the found object, that such a relationship can be productive precisely because it is as fractious and abrasive as it may be smooth, that, in other words, the friction between the presumably incongruous concepts and orientations may set off a spark capable of shedding light on hitherto unexplored territories, these are the principle assumptions motivating the project.

Work

April 26, 2008
Dreams, Freud, History, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Re-Parenting, Repetition, Schizoanalysis, Work

        Freud grounded psychoanalysis in terms of a collaborative uncovering of the unconscious as dynamic and over-determined. That such uncovering occurs in a fraction of the time “psychoanalysis” occupies or that it necessitates much preparation does not deny it its status as the core and defining element of the practice; if anything, it reinforces it as the however infinitesimally small but not any the less defining marker of a practice that is singular and specific, a practice that is irreducible to this or that of the modes of relating with which we are already familiar.

        That such uncovering leaves open the questions of “efficacy” and so-called “therapeutic value,” that, in other words, the uncovering does not necessarily make people “feel better,” assuming we already know and agree on what the expression actually means, the way doctors and parents are presumably supposed to make patients and children “feel better,” may be a concern for those attempting to justify the practice in the eyes of a culture grounded in the principles of expediency and comfort. But it is precisely the work of such a culture that psychoanalysis has been designed to counter. This is no less true nowadays than it was in the time of Freud. Sadly, the practice has become increasingly consolidated around the safety and satisfaction certain objects may bring to the process of reproduction and less around the complexity and unpredictability of our desires.

        It is for this reason that, I believe, the parental metaphor has continued to hold great sway over the profession. Unlike all the other models that have enjoyed varying degrees of success (I am thinking of friendship, education, witnessing, or even healing) parenting comes closest to elevating repetition from a basic physiological need and/or a pathological compulsion to the status of a stable and overarching principle of psychic life.

        However, and by the standards of not only this or that of the various leading orientations in psychoanalytic theory or practice but by those standards that the discipline itself has held as its foundational and distinguishing mark, repetition could not be any further from the either the truth of the unconscious or, for that matter, the history of its science. As regards the former, and even at those times when the unconscious is trapped in the most monotonous and debilitating of cyclical scenarios, it is still, and however minimally, an unconscious that dreams, phantasises, mourns, defers, displaces, remembers, thinks, and compromises; it is still an unconscious that works. It is a machine that affords a rest only once in its lifetime, in that very same ground where it finds its final resting place. Otherwise, it is in constant movement. As for the science of the unconscious, it has managed to thrive precisely because many of its practitioners, famous or otherwise, have resisted the institutional demands and methodological requirements for repetition and homogeneity.

Reading

March 6, 2008
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects

        From Plato and through to Hegel, the distinction that has governed the analysis of desire is that of production versus acquisition, with desire invariably subsumed under the heading of the latter. At those rare moments when it did depart from this schema, psychoanalysis could conceive of desire as productive only in terms of an internal or “psychic” reality, of a fantasy and a mimic, of a representation of the real, desired, and hence lacked object.

        Deleuze and Guattari offer us the linchpin of a critique of the notion of desire as lack and, by extension, of the subject as lacking, as well as the elements of a desire whose three constitutive moments (production, recording, and consumption) are both transitive and reflexive. Paradoxically, the anti-oedipal level of abstraction here opens up the possibility for desire as a machine whose satisfaction is not equivalent to having (consumption) or to being (performance); it is rather a matter of doing, which may include having and being but is limited to neither.

        This, I believe, is most evident in the context of the reader’s relationship to the text: does Anti-Oedipus carry with it a measure of either the descriptive or the prescriptive? The former requires an appeal to neutrality that the text has doggedly resisted: indeed, and rather than on entities, its focus has been on events and relations, and, most importantly, on its and its reader’s inevitable implications in them. In the process, the text thwarts that reader’s demand for an ethical or clinical guideline since such a demand can be satisfied only in a context whereby the agency that makes it and the agency that fulfills it are identifiable and discrete.

        If anything, the Deleuzo-Guattarian schema reverses the responsibility for satisfaction; the question that is most pressing now is the one that regards not the text’s meaning and application but the reader’s experiences and/of use. Dismantle, rearrange, and reassemble; the status of the anti-oedipal schema is that of a machine that is distinguishable from the wanderings of its meta-psychological counterparts; it is not so much that we have an account of psyche, text, and institution that can better fulfill our analytic, epistemic, or political demands; rather, we are offered and drawn into an understanding that obeys the laws of its own inquiry. If the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject is conjunctive, provisional, and indeed situational then, as a textual, theoretical, and methodological subject, so are Anti-Oedipus and its readers.

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.

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