Archive

Termination

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.

Production and Cure

October 27, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Termination

        “Universal primary production” (5) is how Deleuze and Guattari understand the reality of man and nature, not so much as a self-propelled and all-consuming web of production that is in and for itself but as a matrix along whose intersecting series much is produced and much is interrupted.

        The distinction is delicate and yet crucial. Production is the fundament of human reality and not its goal. It is the failure to recognise this distinction that leads to ossification and collapse. A process is begun and with it there emerges the tendency to transform it into an end in itself. Machinic production (the production of production) is subordinated to the logic of the production of a whole, of an institution or a discipline, which is to say of a perpetually ever-increasing web of functionaries and organisation of bureaucrats. Psychoanalysis, as an institution and as a practice, is an acutely poignant example here; so is the academy; so is science.

         Psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari point out, has suffered from the same symptomatology typically associated with the schizophrenic found in mental institutions: “a limp rag forced into autistic behaviour, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity” (5) hell bent on its own perpetuation and propagation. Is it any surprise that while this “limp rag” that has been romanticized by much of what has come to be known as “anti-psychiatry” is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari are not advocating? In any case, and in the context of most of what falls under the heading of psychoanalysis, what we witness today is the dogma and sectarianism that surround the field’s main figures, from Freud, to Lacan, to Klein, to Winnicott, to Kohut, and the paranoia with which their practices have been engulfed and structured. As we know it and live it, the institution of psychoanalysis is dangerously close to becoming its own end; as such, of possessing the main characteristics of what Guattari has termed a “subjected group,” a group that withdraws into itself as it suffers the mechanisms of scapegoating, leaderships, identifications, suggestions, interdictions, and disavowals (“The Transference’, 62).

        Clinically, even Freud in his later years was quite concerned with the interminable practice that psychoanalysis had become. Leading nowhere, the analyst’s directive to “go ahead and speak” has produced little other than the family circle and the figure of Oedipus. Under the heading of “cure,” we have come to observe those mechanisms of identification and internalisation designed to guarantee in the analysand the reproduction of the analyst as healthy norm (see Re-parenting on this score). Under the heading of “no-cure,” we observe instead the dislocation of a process from the supposedly trivial concerns of the everyday and its transformation, even elevation, into a goal, into something to be pursued “for its own sake.” In either case, the breakdown in machinic production is palpable. Of course, and again, psychoanalysis is not unique in this respect. The discourses of the academy and the sciences have fallen prey to the exact same dynamic.

Numbers

October 26, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Guattari, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Termination

        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.

Agility

September 19, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, Guattari, MetaTherapeutics, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Termination

        Of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze states: “we don’t claim to have written a madman’s book, just a book in which one no longer knows—and there is no reason to know—who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past, or future patient” (“In Flux”, 98). We could add to the list of unknown or unknowable characters those of the analyst, the philosopher, the lover, the political activist, the aesthete, the clown, and the historian. If not endless, the list is made up of at least a thousand different characters with unpredictable and cacophonous voices.

        Clinically, the picture that (adult) psychoanalysis has trained us to construct is altogether different as the list has remained essentially finite; in fact, it has rarely gone beyond the magic number of four: analyst, analysand, mother, and father—each as both historical figure and function. According to this latter schema, one could in fact articulate the basic task of the treatment as accomplished when each member of the cast has been given his or her due, and nothing but, when, in other words, the analysand is in a position to distinguish and integrate, cognitively and affectively, the histories, contributions, and responsibilities of each member of that cast.

        It is no wonder that the initial psychoanalytic encounter with Anti-Oedipus cannot but be fraught with risks and tensions. As with its authors, the characters that populate the book, the proper names, the concepts, the events, are too many to keep track of, too singular to categorize, and yet too relevant to dismiss.

        One is overwhelmed, flooded.

        One could cut the treatment short, make a referral, or simply write a prescription.

        One could wade through the details as quickly as possible in order to reach the safety of a working diagnosis or a hook that will order the material and render it more intelligible.

        One could break through the author-reader distinction and allow oneself to be taken up by the supposed operationality of the book; in other words, one could perform what some psychoanalytic circles advocate as a “joining.” In the process, however, one is likely to fall into the trap of what Serge Leclaire in his misguided reading of Anti-Oedipus claims to be the book’s all-absorbing, totalising, and quashing effect as a manoeuvre that dissipates all duality (“In Flux”, 102-3).

        Or, and this is the most difficult of options but, I would argue, the one closest to the material, one could approach the text as a training ground where one’s ability to juggle and to traverse is re-discovered and honed. Of psychoanalysis, Guattari writes that it “should simply give you a boost of virtuosity, like a pianist, for certain difficulties. It should give you more freedom, more humor, more willingness to jump from one scale of reference to another” (“So What”, 14). Let us note the absence of any notion of “development” or “cure” here. Of a psychoanalyst, we already understand and agree to the expectation, nay the demand, not to confuse one analysand with another, one session with another; not to trail behind the succession of words and events; but not to rush through or pre-empt the flow of experience or affect either.

        Of Anti-Oedipus and its reader, of schizoanalysis, the effect that is anticipated is not one of, at best, attachment and, at worst, enmeshment; it is one of agility.

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