Continental
Deleuze & Guattari:
Collaboration work. Started with Capitalism & Schizophrenia 1972.
Anti-Oedipus: theoretical rapprochement between psychoanalysis and Marxism (freudomarxism). Adorno and Benjamin already did similar things.
They have a very anarchic style of writing.
New method of critica analysis: ’materialist psychiatry’ or ’schizoanalysis’.
It is mainly a polemical work, not a philosophical work. First time anyone posts openly against lacanian psychoanalysis and the left-wing politics given by the French communist party. They are trying to offer a new tool of critique, in order to emphasise how the political struggle is not on the economical base, not in the sphere of production. We have to politicise the workers.
They rather spoke about the social life of the students. The rigid social rules and regulations that were at place in famillies, the boarding schools and prisons. This is where social liberation has to take place.
Deleuze was already a recognised philosopher. He published on Proust, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In 1968 he published his own first independent systematical work: difference and repetition. Deleuze is a serious philosopher. Less related to political struggle and revolutionary fight.
Guattari was a militant who worked at psychiatric institutions. Namely in La Bord, at the Loire river in Paris. It is an important psychiatric institution, wherein since the 50s and 60s there was an elaboration between different forms of relationships between caregivers and patients. The idea was to deconstruct the hierarchical order of the people in the asylum. In La Bord, and another insitution, Saint Alban, the doctor Tosquelles being a catalan independence fighter and a trotskyist deconstructed the hierarchy in the clinic. The idea was that we cannot cure sick people in a sick environment. Institutions have to cure themselves from relationships of oppression in order to actually do their function. The psychiatrist Jean Oury opened La Bord, who was also a psychoanalyst and a social reformer. Here gathered a lot of French intellectuals. It became a meeting point for artists, revolutionaries etc. There the ideas were formed. Radical left-wing ideas outside of the factory.
Guattari was also a student of Lacan and was analysed by him. He began publishing essays of what he called le machine desirant, ie. Desiring machines which is important for the Anti-Oedipus.
They wrote multiple books together, and these collaborations are generally considered quite prolific.
The book wants to show a path towards revolution that encompasses and explains the revolt of 68. How is it possible that so many people went into revolt which was completely ignored by the communist party? They answer it through schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a label of revolutionary potential. Schizophrenising means to make revolutionary or dangerous to the system.
Desire as a political force.
What is desire not? It is not a psychological or mental process; nor is it something interior or private; nor is it the state of a subject; nor is it a representation in the subject; nor does it originate in lack.
It has nothing to do with the represented object or phantasmsic events.
Since Plato, we understand desire as a kind of energy that strives toward something that is lacking. As such, a lack is considered the cause of desire. You only desire what you have not. There is a preceding constitutional lack in the subject, and this is what causes them to be a desiring subject. Desire seeks to satisfy this lack by a certain something, some kind of realisation. Desire tries to fill the lack with a phantasm, this is what argues happens in dreams. Their task is to keep the sleeper sleeping.
Instead it is a transindividual activity of social & material production. As such, it is a force of production. Marx calls it labour, but it is a bit more than that. IT is a kind of energy that keeps people in existance, and to cling to a revolutionary process. It makes people construe a kind of insane energy needed to construct civilisation.
When people come together and achieve something, this is the result of desire.
They do not really talk about the destructive tendency in desire, however, the figure of the schizophrenic is a kind of unlivable and destructive force. They certainly do not see the destructive tendencies in the schizophrenic sickness that is theorised by the death drive, it is partially integrated but also ignored.
Since desire is a force of labour, it is analysable in economical terms of ’energy’ and ’production’.
Each time desire is at work, it is a machine that produces something. As soon as there is production there is a machine that produces.
The main queston of the book relate to the understanding about how societies restrict and repress desire and thereby hinder the revolution to take place. If desire was entirely free, there would be infinite revolution.
How is it possible that societies contain desire yet repress it?
Freudian desire is both a critique and inspiration: ”The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of deisre, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theatre was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself – in myth, tragedy, dreams – was substituted for the productive unconscious. ”
For Freud, parapraxis are expressions of unconscious desire. It is always an expression of an unconscious desire. In very early freudian writings, as a physician, invents an interpretation of psychism as a kind of machine that controls the different levels of tension that occurs within it. It measures different states of tension and tries to lower it. He sticks to this idea and elaborates it in a more semantic form.
Althusser uses the notion of the apparatus, which is also a very Freudian inspiration. The psychism of an individual is a kind of apparatus which in itself is already a plurality trying working in tandem. There are all these different instances which are contrary to one another. So it is as if there are different agents in an individual which all fight for supremacy. As such, this can all be understood as people being essentially contradictory machines.
Freud in his self-analysis understands that there is a certain incestual desire, the Oedipus. Freud takes over a myth in order to say that this is something we all have in us, as a kind of transindividual psychic tendency as a heritage of humanity. Deleuze and Guattari do not agree with this. They think he discovers the unconscious production of desire, but as soon as he discovers it restricts it to a certain normatised desire. The unconscious desire shouldn’t have to be necessarily oedipian. Our desire shouldn’t necessarily revolve around these ideas. It restricts desire to a certain setting of ideas. What is Freud’s justification for this? The fact that he feels it himself? This becomes an empirical argument it seems. They challenge that the freudian interpretation is a historically based interpretation of Vienna 18th century. Desire is not restricted to a certain idea. As such it is a kind of idealism. In freeing desire, they overthrow any mythologically based interpretation of desire. Behind this stands also a critique of the gender configuration of desire. As a sexxed male you should have to desire your mother, but why do we not want a microphone??
Schizophrenia is the moment at which we reveal the pure productivity unrestricted by desire.
In freud, that what is produced by desire, as a productive force, are representations. But restricts to one specific representation.
Desire is capable of producing the desired object but only as a production of fantasies, dreams and representations. But this is restricted to the triangular structure of mother, father, child. We need to bring someone who doesn’t desire like this back to oedipian framework. Someone who is sicker than the neurotic is fucked.
Freud continues to think along Plato’s lines of desire as a lack; that lacks reality itself, the real object. This is why it has to reproduce the object in representation. Desire by itself cannot produce something real. However, D&G thinks it can produce its real object. It is not a lack, but an excessive productive force. Everything that is produced is a product of desire. It is the source of everything. They inverse the traditional understanding of desire.
”In a word, when the theoretician reduce desiring production to a production of fantasy, he is content to epxloit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of ’industrial production’.
They try to unrestrict desire as a material and social and artistic production. All production is the cause of desire. They consider themselves materialists in the Marxist sense. This is however speculative materialism. It is a productive materialism. It is believes in matter as self-productive. Desire is a matter, but a self-productive matter. Deleuze works on the spinozist insight that nature is inherently self-productive. Natura naturata-natura naturans. The first is the produced nature, produced by God, ie. By nature. Nature is the productive force of itself. Spinoza is everywhere in Deleuze.
It is mainly an attack on the lacanian understanding of desire as a lack. Lack is caused by castration, and if you are not castrated you are not a desiring subject but a schizophrenic. Desire only works in a normatised framework, ie. In castration.
Freud desire is production but restricted to the inner sphere of the subject, who mentally represents the outer reality. It is a chain of associations between representations. Phenomenology argues against representationalism, here is another. We have to do away with a subject that is closed in itself.
”If desire produces, its product is real. IF desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.”
The entire world is built up of machines of different degrees of complexity. They organise the flow of desire. This is the result of passive syntheses. The flow of desire is cut into different pieces which appear as a discontinuous desire when in reality it is a constant flow. This is when desire sometimes momentarily crystallises into something solid. At this point, the machine transforms itself and the world. It transforms the self that we are, community etc. The machine and its production is immanent to what is produced. Not a transcendence but rather as an immanent process in the thing itself.
It is not a subject, who as a property of their constitution, become as such. The subject is something that is artificially added onto the desiring machine from the outside. The humanist subject, the subject of consciousness, and that I am responsible and closed etc. This is all something that is added from the outside to the desiring machine. The desiring machine can do without the subject however, this is what we see in schizophrenia.
In Spinoza there is the romanticist idea that agents and individuals are nothing but a vital outburst of energy.
They don’t really explain the unconscious as a kind of disguised force that produces for us without us being aware of it. However, the unconscious still acts a producing force.
There is a change in metaphysical perspective about what being is in D&G. The primary is not a world of objects upon which desire is directed, but the productive process itself. We do not start our reflection from discontinues entities that have to be related from the outside by the kantian subject. Rather, from the beginning, being is a flow and a becoming in the Nietzschean sense. Producitivity is not attached to a subject as an attribute of it, but the subject is product of production itself. This is why desire is a-subjective, the subject is only attached to the flow of desire. Furthermore, it is a non-personalised process of reality production. They extend the idea of the flow of production to nature itself. It is the elements themselves which are in a flow of production. The core of productivity and creativity is in the whole of the universe, and not in any one subject.
Substance only produces contingent stabilities and accidental objects. It is something that appears but which is not the ground of the being.
Machine & desiring-machines are both the endless process of production & the produced objects. The machine is at the same time the product and the agent of the desiring flow.
”Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a michine of a michine. Desire is a machine, and the obeject of desire is another machine connected to it?”
Deleuze earlier on describes physics and life-sciences in order to think the differential/intensive ontology. In his other works, the structure of the differential work is more detail, whilst the work we are reading is entirely polemic against psychoanalysis and Karl Schmitt.
The object of desire is an addendum to the machine. Think of the ways in which the new-born baby experiences the breast an the mouth. The new-born baby is not experiencing the breast as something external, but as an extension to itself. The differenciation of multiple bodies is not part of the baby’s experience. Deleuze argues that this is why babies cry, because they feel like something has been directly ripped out of their body. The desired object is something that is experienced as being produced by the body itself. This remains the same in sexual intercourse. Which body produces which body? Something else comes out of it, where the subjective experiences no longer respect the spatial seperation of the bodies.
The schizophrenic or schizo is the agent that combines desire, production and the machine. ”The schizophrenic is sthe universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product.”
Every agent is a desiring machine, whilst the schizophrenic is completely freed from social norms.
Schizophrenia is a ”harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning living centre of matter.
Schizophrenia is not a disease, but a productive process of desire. In the schizophrenic disorder, some part of the schizophrenic process is revealed. There is difference between the clinical property and the clinical reality of the schizophrenic process. The suffering of the schizophrenic does not come from the process itself, but rather from a society which fails to accept a free desiring. We do not give them the chance to accept the desire of the schizophrenic process.
”Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines”.
Schizophrenia is not a mental state. The label was invented by Bleuler who wrote in 1913, Dementia Praecox (the name given to schizophrenia before) and schizophrenic types. These symptoms, if they are are displayed as a syndrome, there is a progressive ”becoming stupider” of a person. It is an organic disturbance in which people lose their brain capacity. It is an illness without a positive outcome. Bleuler, through Freud, says that we should not think it in terms of a dementia with a necessary outcome, but rather as a psychodynamic splitting, ie. As the splitting of the psychism. This splitting is reversible. With the correct treatment we can bring people back to the unity of their psychism. This splitting occurs in the primary process, the process of the unconscious. Something occurs in the process of representation which leads to a split. The person with schizphrenia will turn his libido inside, and experience the world only through self-made representations, hallucination. Autism in Bleuler is the expression of schizophrenia on the level of the person. The person turns their desire inwards, and as such lacks the desire to communicate and collaborate. What they are interested in are the private phantasms. Autism for Bleuler is a secondary manifestation of schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia may behave strangely, and this is because the libido invests entirely in the representations of the interior.
They say that no! Schizophrenia is the process of creation of an alternative kind of world. Schizophrenia for them is the disturbance that is the least socially compatible. In depression we have internalised the norms of society in a very aggressive manner which is acted out against ourselves. And so depression is heavily going along with the productivity of sociality.
Schizophrenia is an overwhelming productivity and as such a revolutionary force. No established society can bear the productivity of schizphrenia. It desires the destruction of all social codes, norms and laws. The schizophrenic is at the same time the unbearable limit of every society just as its implicit goal.
The schizophrenic is so nuts that they cannot participate in a strike. It destroys all social codes, also those that revolution needs to overthrow the system. It cannot be organised, it is unorganisable.
Deleuze was one of the first professors to go to the Paris Huite.
Schizo’s ambivalence:
every social formation seeks to suppress the schizophrenic, yet is dependent on it for evolutiona and change, as the mutationary form.
Capitalist society tends to realise the schiophrenic process in its pure form:
the capitalist mode of production needs a constant tansformation of society, new markets and new products have to be sold. These markets can only be opened up insofar as social codes are deconstructed. Society becomes less and less rigidly ruled by norms in capitalism. Capitalism needs to decodify society. Capitalism has a strive towards decodification. This is what is called
’progress’. This is why capitalism works well with modernity, because it destroys and ruins traditions. As such, capitalism embraces the decodifying activity of the schizophrenic. Capitalist production has no extra-economical limits. It institutes a free floating social configuration without any boundaries or obstacles. The flow of goods is nothing else but a materialised copy of the flow of desire. Fetishism in Marx is the way through which capitalism implants itself onto desire and subverts desire onto objects. Everything goes for a a capitalist so long as products can circulate and be sold. There should be no boundaries to the pure production of random things.
This is part of the contradictory nature of capitalism.
It stimulates overproduction and produces new markets and spheres of selling, through a radical process of decoding; but on the other hand it also retards production and the opening of new markets by insinuating anti-production to every level of society. Because the capitalist process of decoding is always connected to new forms of re-codings. Decoding must necessarily be re-coded in capitalism. There is a tendency to overthrow every type of social organisation, however, there needs to be some organisation that protects one market against another. So new markets can sometimes only be explored or opened by colonisation ad the crushing of another society, and as such the re-coding of war-machines. This is the contradictory nature of capitalism. The destruction together with the necessity for new forms of social organisation.
D&G are not really sure that capitalism will ever breakdown. There is no system to whether it collapses, the schizophrenic process must be intensified to the point at which capitalism kills itself.