On Anti-Oedipus: Schizo-politics for Scallies Part 0.0001

In the aftermath of the Poll Tax rebellion some people may recall how the sense of challenge and resistance to the powers that be went through a lull period during the mid-90s. This appeared to have its roots in the demise of the workers movement which gave rise to seeking means of renewal in the writings of both French and Italian writers. A sense of ‘disenchantment’ was rife and was theorised by the likes of Paolo Virno. For me the key zone of investigation became what could be termed Marxist-Freudianism and  an ongoing engagement with Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was pivotal. What follows, written many moons ago, was an attempt to present their ideas as a means of drawing up a balance sheet and overcoming that fatalist nostalgia that took hold in our own ‘winter years’ of the mid 90s. (2024)

Texts of connection – a phrase here, a theme there…repeat and re-cap, add a little more, say a little less. Become imbibed. Breath text – find a way through its loops and overhangs. Get out of it. Dispose of the need for correct interpretation. Anti-Oedipus seems to offer ‘meaning’ as connection and desire…seek out the threads, make juxtapositions in triplicate: add, add, add. Anti-Oedipus isn’t an answer, but an amalgam of approaches that problematise the archetypes, that recognises the emptiness of ‘intelligent’ questions. Lose yourself. Anti-Oedipus shows up our ideological yearning as a neo-religious hankering after security

THE LIE OF THE LAND – SMOOTH AND STRIATED

It is an inevitable outcome of the strength and density of the writing of D&G that they would become widely influential. The influence is showing through more strongly at the moment amongst what could be referred to as ‘progressive academics’, academics who are mainly writing culture studies texts and grappling with the changing circumstances of the human/technology interface. What I would like to do here is set this often self-conscious and more visible academic utilisation of D&G alongside a tentative appraisal of the ‘political’ relevance of their writing. This relevance is for me, the crucial site of a long overdue discussion which in many instances must become the expression of a conflict of interpretation that is part and parcel of a more daring collective application of their ideas. What is becoming apparent is that some readers, who wear D&G on their sleeve, have lost sight of the fact that both Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus are works written in opposition to capitalism. It is important not to forget that the two of them were active in political initiatives that have become synonymous with the movement of autonomy whose most practical and wide-ranging implications are identified with the Italy of the 60s and 70s. The extent of this involvement is difficult to gauge, but from this limited vantage point it seems that Guattari, of the two, was more closely involved both in Italy as a polemicist and with Free Radio initiatives as well as on a daily basis as a practicing psychoanalyst at the experimental clinic of La Borde. Just as events in Italy problematised the ‘political’ and mark some kind of break with a more modernist take on ‘politics,’ so the writing of D&G can act as a further mutation of the theoretical base-line of Marx and Freud, and, articulating out along Reich’s trajectory, the political is more aptly referred to as ‘psycho-social’ or in the adapted parlance of D&G as ‘schizo-politics.’

At the outset it is possible to say that the political application of D&G is perhaps granted greatest possibility in what can be loosely termed the anarchist milieu. In the English-speaking part of the world Semiotext(e) and more recently, AK Press, the anarchist publishers, have helped to popularise the writing of D&G. These publications, particularly Nomadology, have been many peoples first point of contact. Even so, D&G have fallen foul of this milieus reluctance to embrace new directions, ones that problematise the persistent trap of the action/theory dichotomy. On the one hand we have a fetishisation of activism/militancy that sees in D&G a too theoretical and philosophical standpoint that is not readily accepted as ‘revolutionary.’ On the other hand, amongst those in the milieu more open to theory and critique, D&G are seen as part of an isolated, academic radicality, as fashionable post-structuralists.

In a different but not unrelated direction, the other publishing house that has done much to disseminate D&G is MIT Press/Zone. Whilst mainly concentrating on Deleuze, Zone have persistently included D&G in their anthology publication but they have also made available some of the texts that provided feeders into their collective work: Henri Bergson, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Georges Dumézil and Sacher-Masoch. It is these two publishing houses that have provided, to date, the main commentaries on D&G’s work:  Rolando Perez and Brian Massumi. These two books take different approaches. Perez continues Semiotext(e)’s popularisation of ‘schizo-culture’ through a focus on the D&G concepts of Nomad, Body Without Organs, Rhizome etc by using D&G’s own cultural references: Artaud, Miller, Nietzsche, Kafka. Massumi more or less avoids this ground and writes a book that occludes and limits the practical use of D&G. The academic operation of the latter text seems to have the effect of propelling Massumi into view as a D&G expert whilst Perez comes over as a fan.

Though both works are interesting and lay out paths into the texts of D&G, both have a limited perspective that disables a more practical use of the texts. With Massumi we are grappling with a reading that becomes authoritative despite itself – who can follow such an annotation of the two volumes that lays down the academic gauntlet of the ‘whole’? Massumi takes the sting out of the texts. With Perez, however, we are left to skirt the edges and become progressively bored as the body without organs and desire become stylistic metaphors. Perez makes fragments revolve around themselves. This said it would be ridiculous to take what follows as some sort of intervention between the two (such are the pitfalls of discursive language that if you’re not careful you find yourself knee-deep in the competitive shit.) In what follows I am only playing back part of the track that I heard whilst I read, and as with music, I am intensified enough to speculate about what happens when I heard those words.

MICROPOLITICS

We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces (Foucault: Live)

The approach to a ‘politics’ of D&G is as treacherous a path as doing the same with the writing of Georges Bataille – just as it implies a drawing out of subversive potential and a desire to outflank common approaches, it also threatens to delimit their theoretical speculations. To those involved in mainstream political activity of any hue, the political is too often a matter of the state, the cops, party-organisations and authorities outside of an ‘enlightened political subject’. Politics is stage managed procedure. When Foucault describes Anti-Oedipus as a manual for non-fascist living he is as close as anyone has been to stating simply the psycho-social relevance of D&G. The political is a matter of relations of power and whilst power is activated in the state, the cops, the party etc, it is not simply a matter of this power operating strictly within these confines. Power is as much within us and is dependent for its articulation on differing and ever-changing contexts.

The D&G metaphor of segments may be of use: imagine a circle and divide it into thousands of segments and imagine that in each segment there are conflicting power relations: economic, sexual, racial, linguistic, bureaucratic etc. During a day, during a moment, we may cross into and out of many of these segments. At one moment power will be operating on us, at another we will be conducting the power. Many segments will remain ‘open’ at the same time, some will pass by fleetingly and leave a trace, whilst others telescope back into history, expanding and connecting to other segments. This clumsy and inadequate metaphor is useful to the extent that it can help us draw a contrast with the more perennial metaphor of power – the pyramid. For the latter model debilitates self-criticism (power always operates elsewhere) and conveniently removes from us an awareness of our own oppressive activity, of the way power relations work as a meshing, on and through us. Moreover, these relations do not simply work in a vertical manner, but cross the segments in a multi-directional movement. The pyramid model too often leads to the positing of a domination from above that obscures the lateral, strategic relations of micro-politics, and following on from this it inculcates a sense of totalitarian domination that belittles practices of freedom and asphyxiates processes of resistance.

Thus, the SWP paper-seller sees a convenient objectification (representation) of power in say, a Tory Home Secretary, whilst neglecting to see a differing relation of power in the editorial committee that controls the paper and a different one still from those s/he attempts to foist the paper upon. Similarly, a housing officer who is on the end of harassment from a line manager moves from that relation of power to another when he tries to explain the transfer policy to a working class Asian tenant. The practical outcome of this is that through an awareness of the many ‘segments’ and the many relations that inform the operation of power it is possible to problematise more and more areas of our fives. The recognition of the appearance of power is not enough if we do not act to counter that power or at least make it known that we are aware of what is happening and offer up a challenge. If more and more areas of life are becoming felt as areas of capital’s penetration then our responses to it are intensified as the linkages become more apparent. The areas of potential conflict increase.

The challenge is resistance and resistance takes on many forms dependent upon the situation. It becomes a problem of knowing where resistance will develop, of co-joining with it in heretofore ‘apolitical’ areas. The ‘political’ approach privileges the workplace struggle or agitates around single issues as a means of politicisation. These methods can no longer take precedence. Militancy in the workplace is being replaced by quietism, fear and conformity and single-issue politics has a disquieting narcissistic evangelism around it. Tangential to this the schizo-political is informed by attention to detail: it can offer resistance in the work place as diversionary tactics, verbal game playing, small scale time-theft, the adoption of changing roles and identities and these can cross over into the inter connected realm of culture: the liberatory potential of music, underground resistance, moments of intense lived experience, experimental ambiences. What is at stake for schizo-politics is not conscious ideology but implicit social knowledge, a move from the obvious to the obtuse but nonetheless commonly and tacitly understood (Hecht & Simone: Invisible Governance).

These micro-schizo-politics come to make conventional notions of the ‘political’ inoperable. ‘Politics’ amounts to so much wandering in the swamp, so much didacticism. We may be acting but our actions are the expected responses and the site of their enactment is well laid out. See how easy the cops can manipulate a riot. Our actions become conditioned and easily read, they are without perspective, inflexible and cut away from the import of the minutest of everyday experiences. You pushed a process into a goal. Micro-politics, on the otherhand, can work to underscore a criticism of apparently coherent ideological constructs. In this way we should not be hoodwinked by an understanding of ‘micro’ as private and inconsequential, but primarily as a means through which confidence in our own experience can lead us to question the stranglehold of concepts and modes of action that come to act as reified givens. We can focus on our own subject position, we can interrogate that further in the manner of Bataille’s Inner Experience, we can approach biological multiplicities and get into the charting of microscopic notions of motion and change, but throughout any ‘interiority’ is in relationship to the wider social world: The elements of the micro-unconscious …never exist independently of the historical molar aggregates, of the microscopic social formations that they constitute statistically. The added dimension is the psychological one. It has always been present but conventional politics only seems to relate to it through the prism of ‘identity politics.’ A subtle variation of this is the way that ideas, if once uttered or acted upon by one person, are stripped of their contextual dimension and forever ascribed to that person. The self-formation of the political subject is a process that is ‘completed’ before it has begun.

If D&G often focus on the individual it is to draw attention to our several selves and to chart the way that identity is formed in capitalist society and the means by which conformity is reproduced. What makes someone “actually want humiliation”. This is a theme that was taken up in de la Boetie’s Voluntary Servitude and that shares common ground with some of the themes of Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life: repressive socialisation, radical subjectivity, the colonisation of inner life. The seemingly unchallengeable concept through which D&G follow these themes is the myth of Oedipus, its theorisation by Freud and the slow institutional development by which it became disseminated as an element of social control. It is through the rise of the Oedipus complex that D&G frame their critique of capitalism by re-activating that vector of psychoanalysis that deals with the productive role of desire. Instead of an auto-generation of desire that could transform the social, the Oedipus complex acts as a restraining force that goes as far as to offer an original reality of desire. One of several trajectories out of this leads D&G into a reassessment of the politics of desire — to conceive there must first be desire (Miller: Sexus) and into a critique of the role of ideology/belief/ representation — Oedipus is a myth that comes to act, however unconsciously, as a social force.

DESIRING-MACHINES

Elasticity of the concept and fluidity of the milieu

One starting point to a practical understanding of schizo-politics is to examine that famous graffitied phrase of May ‘68: “Take your desires for reality.” Whilst this phrase, often ascribed to the Situationists, has a close relation to contestatory surrealism, after reading Anti-Oedipus what the phrase seems to imply is that desire is somehow distinct from reality. What D&G do with Anti-Oedipus is to demonstrate that desire is intimately tied up with the social. D&G’s critique of this phrase would be closely linked to their identification of an idealist conception of desire as lack (unreal fantasy) when, for them, desires are already a reality (material emotion). Instead, D&G see an individual’s desire not as a separable yearning that is confined to the independent sphere of imagination, but as a bodily capacity that is producing and is produced – desiring production: 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. Under capitalism the idealist concept of desire reigns for it is far easier to manipulate subjects who lack; for lack is created, planned and organised in and through social production. There is a relay opening up here: a negativity of desire as lack and an economic system, capitalism, disseminating lack as “organised scarcity.” So, the slogan “Take your desires for reality” misses the fact that desire is already operating within the social and also that desire is not simply a positive force. In this way the slogan undermines an understanding of capitalism as operating upon desire through applications such as the Oedipus Complex, such as religion, such as the commodity, such as media-generated myths. It is not so much that force is wielded in the manner of physical repression, it is rather that with desire being socially produced as lack, it is placed in a situation without exit, without a perspective of its own possibility. Capitalism is not just a social oppression, but welded to this is a psychic repression: repression cannot act without displacing desire, without giving rise to a consequent desire, all ready, all warm for punishment… psychic repression is such that social repression becomes desired… Once caught in this way the transformative potential of desire – the construction of desiring machines, of situations, of composite passions – becomes bogged down in insufficiency, guilt and signification… It is easily persuaded to deny itself in the name of the more socially reproductive interests of civilization. Henry Miller: everyday we slaughter our finest impulses (Miller: ibid).

Revolutionaries too often operate from the negativity of lack – aware of the ends, they are obscured from the myriad of means by the crushing weight of a globalcapitalism that becomes a sado-masochistic addiction. How Low Can You Go. They are drawn out from practical sensuous activity, from a micro-politics of desire to notions of the whole and totality. They welcome the significance of grand narratives. From this perspective there can be nothing but anguish, disappointment and interminable treatises on value. Wallowing in the shit of the beast. What gets lost along the way is an appreciation of what it is that makes people resist, rebel; what minor fluctuations of desire flash across the social to link up with other radiances of desire: “The signifier is the only thing that gladdens their hearts. But this master signifier remains what it was in ages past, a transcendent stock that distributes lack to the elements of the chain, something in common for a common absence…the detached object…the bar that delivers over all the depressive subjects to the great paranoiac king.”

Concurrent with the idea of desire as lack is the all too accepted sense of desire as reducible to the needs of a distinct individual, conflated in the entrapment of already given ‘drives’ and all too often premised with the word ‘sexual.’ D&G take these notions on board but their investigations also articulate other dimensions. D&G write that Desire is a machine and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. This auto-production of desire has resonance with Bataille’s notion of communication: If I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning that he alone would perceive…I cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate. Desires, these inner forces of becoming, are devoid of any goals or intentions other than those which, following their own agenda, perpetuate desire and in this way they are less likely to become overcoded and subjugated. A desiring-machine is that which connects up and continually communicates, a factitious assemblage, a subject-group that inspires, that gives confidence and makes ‘political’ events out of such simple, common phenomena as encouragement and empathy. Desire is collective, it flows and surges and has very little time for results, ends, boundaries, money, coherency. Desiring- machines can easily set off a chain reaction, a qualitative flash that necessarily comes up against prohibition and offers resistance whilst being besides itself. Where Bataille speaks of “existing values that limit the possible,” D&G, in an uncanny echoing of Vaneigem, say no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude and hierarchy being compromised. Desire is the project that articulates the possible. Immanent thought, imminent action.

MACHINIC MULTIPLES

Machines don’t mean anything…they merely work, produce and breakdown… all we’re looking for is how something functions in the real.

For D&G the social is a collection of interconnecting machines that function by breaks and flows, connection and interaction. What they seem to be suggesting is not so much a dehumanization (the human as cyborg), but an expansive web-work of effects, an ensemble of productive components. For D&G the unconscious is productive… it is a kind of mechanism that produces other mechanisms. It is this sense of machine that is closest to D&G — machines that continually produce, machines that work directly on the social field, that have a practical use and are forever linking up with other machines…The question posed is not “what does it mean” but rather “how does it work.” There are arrangements that engineer, ensembles of components that co-join. Several ramifications follow on from this approach that enable us to begin to dispense with those restrictive concepts through which we negotiate the social. If everything is in a state of multiple connection there can be no isolatable spheres and the common distinctions of dualistic thought, of separable levels and of linearity become inoperable. These machinic arrangements also call into question the all-purpose schemas of discourse, the claims to universality — there can be no origin, or centre, no signifier, no hardened identity, no defining moment. Desire becomes a kind of fuel for the machines: desire is part of the infrastructure, it is not a purely personal affair.

Foucault on the Panopticon: One doesn’t have a power which is only in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone…it’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised…it becomes a machinery that no-one owns. A social machine that produces discipline, that functions with a goal in mind: the production of obedient subjects. Elsewhere we have work procedures, rule books, manifestos, text books, party-policies, conference papers. These are all machines that produce the social in that they generate standards that modify behaviour, they produce conformity and the limiting of possible action and possible thought. Bureaucratic machines, literary machines, ideology machines…when I phone why do they sound distant and unconcerned? Is that a person or a pre-recorded message? The friction between the cogs seems to produce an emanation, a reification fog, a mist of alienation that is actually palpable. This machinic of power also enables us to move away from an over personalization of power that has led to a resistance that is misplaced, misdirected and unappreciative of shifting contexts. In other words bourgeois individualism with its ‘unique subject’ has failed to take on board that the ‘individual’ is cut through by the collective effects of machines, instead it tends to coalesce around ‘unique objects’ be they the Company, the Party or the Star – an identification takes place, an individuation that D&G see as part and parcel of alienation. The machinic approach contests these ‘ideal unities’, that have no other effect than to restrict possible action, and, instead, puts multiplicities into play…a collective set-up which is at once, subject, object and expression.

What is needed is the insertion of a desiring machine. It is necessary to construct desiring-machines to short-circuit social production, to interfere with the reproductive function by introducing an element of dysfunction. D&G base their notion of the desiring-machines upon the machines and drawings made by schizophrenics. Machines that aren’t built to function with a specific purpose but as an expression of an overstuffed overflow, a continual expansion created as an experimentation of linkage.

Unvalorisable. Useless. Shocking. They build upon their idea of the machine to show how a desiring-machine is that which goes against the flow, that doesn’t allow itself to be overcoded by segments/axiomatics of power. The desiring-machine is a question of the energy that can’t be trapped and put to work, that escapes the dominant forms of expression and previously codified meanings. An energy, a ‘vital force’ (Marx), that no-one knows what to do with. Both capitalists and revolutionaries draw a blank when confronted with such practices of freedom: sound systems—the sardonic use of repetition—voluntary alienation—the passion unleashed by a record — auto-destructive art—the Watts Tower— potlatch—translucent concrete—re-patching—detournement — badly written writing—utopian realism—genre busting—phantom organisations — the poetry of acts—late night drinking sessions—disorientating strangeness—the Idiot—stuttering auto-didacts. These desiring machines accede to the insubordinate function of free expenditure. Going nowhere, where can they be caught?

This text, this magazine, was produced by turning the workplace into a desiring machine. Connecting up with the social machine and making it work for me: the fileserver with its techniques of surveillance is outwitted by the very security measures designed to protect intellectual property; the word processing package, formerly a means of making typists obsolete, creative of a speed-up no longer types rent arrears letters, disciplinary reports, probationary reviews. When this text progressed slowly it was only a matter of toggling the windows screen bringing up the text and writing under the pressure of being rumbled after one formal warning – an adrenaline machine… turning a liberal diffuse panopticon, auto-surveillance, into the means of creating intense moments of concentration.

READ IT LIKE A RECORD

Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties.

The process of reading and meander-thinking about D&G leads the reader to follow through concepts into and through each other. There is no simple linear thread to follow. Anti-Oedipus doesn’t build up towards a resolved climax, it curls back on itself and becomes a sustaining plateau phase. Themes and citations, axioms and improvisations, build into concepts and then the concepts re-transform the themes. If the unconscious is machinic, as D&G suggest, then it is dynamical rather than spiritual or biological; a combinatorial formation of memories and feelings producing a surplus of infinite variabilities. Jolts that pulse. Recovered memories. In Anti-Oedipus there is a repetition that accrues meaning with each cycle. And like music there is this intuitive understanding as a refrain sets off the memory of another refrain. There is nothing that doesn’t connect: a kind of acentric diffusion. In this way Anti-Oedipus is a very undisciplined text: there is a dissolution of categories of knowledge, eclectic juxtapositions of psychoanalysis, marxism, anthropology, history, literature, mathematics. All of which has the effect of a breaking up of the institutional structures that mask society and offerings its reader-operators an immersion in a plurality of experimental spheres. Machinic unconscious. One of the major results of this form is that the writing of D&G transmits self-confidence, its experimental aims allows readers to lose themselves in non-understanding… to recognise that knowledge always kills desire, destroys the unknown. This is a crucial aspect of schizo-politics in that it infers that there is always a new beginning, there is never any standing still, never an enrichment by means of the already known, but an uncertainty that functions to ward off dogmatic stasis: become a no-one, a know-nought. If the body without organs is not read literally as an inhuman concept but as a smooth, decoded space, then coming up against the limits of a personal knowledge the reader’s mind is continually made ‘empty’ and receptive. This form increases communication because the reader is aware that the authors are not interested in some ulterior coherency that tends towards the Universal but the promotion of an experimental thinking – concepts should not solidify into “formalised theories”… but should function as part of the collective assemblages of enunciation which produce them.

Just as D&G are seen as difficult writers, so the theory of the Situationist International (SI) is similarly seen as impenetrable. The intransigent tone of their early texts which had the avowed aim of instigating a dual power in culture can draw readers in. But the later situationists became obsessed with ideological rigour as much as they became obsessed with their own concepts. The theory of the spectacle became so central to the SI that promoting it meant that the SI could have no concern for the effects of their texts on their readers. The theory of the spectacle denies the spectator any agency. You could either write such texts and join the group or you were a Pro-Situ. The readers of SI texts are harangued for spectating and passively consuming. However valid the SI may be for today is not the purpose of these musings. What does concern me is that their texts work in a didactic way and create a barrier for those who have had their fill of didacticism in the education system and its degreed emissaries. Didacticism is a form of authoritarianism and it always returns the generation of meaning to an ‘originating’ author. The theory of the spectacle becomes a spectacle. There is a transcendentalism, a subordination to the concept and its Author-God. It is very easy to forget that the SI were part of a Marxist tradition as their didacticism never allowed them to say so, for then they would lose their authoritarian hold over their readers. What all this means in relation to D&G is that essential components of any revolution are lacking: a polyphony of communication, mutual respect and encouragement are lost in the striving after a mythic totality…the pursuit of knowledge becomes the will to be everything. Perfection. The stronger the feeling of hierarchical eminence in another’s utterance, the more sharply defined will its boundaries be, and the less accessible will it be to penetration by retorting and commenting tendencies from outside. The paranoiac kills himself… the difference between a sculpted object and fog… revolutionary intransigence becomes a pose. With D&G we do not arrive at this elitist vantage point. We can forget just who it is we are reading and move laterally along lines of desire liberating latent energy and transforming it into acts. Fuck the totality, every little particularism counts.

The SI could never have offered up their texts to be read like a record. What D&G are implying is that the reader can be intensified by words in a similar way to how forms of music are most in touch with areas of non-knowledge, of experiential and intuitive understanding, the most capable of effecting passionate over-spills. They also imply, by this, a similar communicative process. Between themselves and their collaborative text they insert the reader as the third element, the third mind – the text becomes an interspace, a kind of assemblage, a place of imminence with n participants. There is no longer the ready-made mental block of ‘everything’; the totality which leads to inaction. Instead, D&G offer us a text-track to loop, sample and transduce. Fragmentation can be positive, for partial segments must always link up as machinic multiples. One of the important ramifications of this is not that this experience of the text is simply imaginative, the expression of desire as lack, but that the text, like the track conducts an emotiveness that is contagious and lets loose a passion to reverberate and come into co-presence with other passions. Passion becomes a schizo-political factor, the fragmentary micro is consistent with the totalising macro. In this way, what is revealed to us is the crucial significance and value of things which are apparently neither significant nor valuable (Jorn: Critique of Political Economy). The reader is brought in, the reader counts, a force is liberated and new energies are ready for disposal. D&G’s offering us a text that can be played has the effect of equipping us with a confidence, a lack of fear, it puts into sharp relief the imaginary barrier between the rational and the sensual (everyone is capable of sensuousness – it certainly doesn’t depend on stockpiled knowledge.) This offer of shared access retaliates against the text positing itself solely as a source of meaning whose interpretation is reserved for specialists. If the text is like music, then, as with the track, we can take from it what we desire: the changing pace of its velocities makes the mind speed up and slow down… to break and to flow.

SCHIZO – PSYCHO/SOCIAL NOMADISM

As you make yourself, imagine another self who will make you one day in his turn. (Vaneigem)

The project of radical subjectivity is based around the struggle of people to produce themselves beyond capitalist determinations. For D&G, this auto-production (as desiring production) can be the establishing and perpetuation of a countervailing code to that of lack, law and the signifier. The motif of the schizo is used by D&G as a challenge to the forms of inherited identity, to the norms of behaviour, to the reproduction of conformity. To talk generally, one of the ways to induce obedience in a person is to channel the formation of identity (c.f. role models.) Though identity formation never reaches a ‘conclusion’ – there is always the possibility of breaches and unknown resonances – we do tend to come across those who seem to ‘invest’ a huge portion of themselves in their career. Otherwise known as professionalism, this constriction can take the form of single-mindedness and one-tracked thought and it can apply to writers and barristers alike. Henry Miller: in the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage. In a more extreme zone, the schizo identifies with everything to the extent that s/he undergoes a process of dis-identification (deterritorialisation). A multi-tracking. Without meaning to glamorise such a painful process it is possible to draw upon our own experiences and see how closely less intense schizzy-effects feed into autonomous subjectivity. Henry Miller: Nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time. Not valorising a single identity for yourself is another schizo-political factor as it implies the practical rejection of roles and specialisation. In this and other ways, the idea of multiple personalities or multiple selves is necessarily so anathema to capitalism that it either diagnoses, demonises, segregates and expels those who exhibit such tendencies or it tightens up to such a degree that it creates groups of refugees fleeing from psychological ruin and a monetary driven claustrophobia. Those that reject their place and social cohesion in favour of auto-production, do not respond to the monologue of power. They might crop up where they’re not wanted and where they’re not supposed to be. Anomalous drifters. Psycho-social nomads… No longer able to stand living in the false pretences of residence.

…schizoanalysis would come to nothing if it did not add to its positive tasks the constant destructive task of disintegrating the normal ego… it is certain that neither men nor women are clearly defined personalities, but rather vibrations, flows, schizzes and “knots”. The ego refers to the personological co-ordinates, from which it results, persons in their turn refer to familial co-ordinates… The task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the personological singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows that they would be capable of transmitting, receiving or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others. For everyone is a little group and must live as such.

It could be that the process of conformity hinges upon the way that conscious minds remain oblivious to its unconscious. Perhaps psychic space is constricted in ratio to the degrees of conformity. The more desire is stifled, the more identity hardens the further away the possibility of auto-production recedes. The mind is quiet and accepting. For the schizophrenic the mind is blurring out with noise and voices beyond comprehension: what you are stems from the activity which links the innumerable elements which constitute you to the intense communication of these elements among themselves (Bataille: Inner Experience). The schizzy effect is remarked upon by Henry Miller when he describes how he came to learn how to control the flood, to learn how to channel into writing what he describes as “attacks.” However, Miller believes that this doesn’t happen to everyone. He’s right to a certain extent, but his egotism makes him forget that there are differences of degree. Listening to music and being open to the intensification of molecules of sound is a way that psychic space is increased. Music is a flow perceptible to everyone, a means of inspiration that feeds our multiple selves.

Music changes minds. A kind of inverse of the propagandist model is sensed, a kind of flourishing of multiples, a subversion of electricity, a detuning of current, a libidinal presence. In each direction variegated elements loose themselves in each other – packs of sounds meet packs of listeners, listeners make tracks and packs compose themselves around sound waves that merge with brain waves that flow while the speaker cone breathes.

The idea of multiple selves is not so far-fetched. Each of us pass through several groups of friends, several circumstances. We carry out activities that demand differing approaches and accentuations. If we’re unlucky we have to negotiate a workplace. In former times it could have been offered that we were our ‘self’ in only one of these instances. There was an ‘authentic’ zone and others in which we were alienated from our ‘true self.’ Without getting sidetracked by a discussion of alienation, we can see that this traditional approach is very limiting and acts to deny the versatility and flexibility of people. It almost punishes people for having this sense of open-ended possibility and potential, for having a practical know-how, a self-confident energy. The multiple selves create conceptual space and enhance a plethora of possible linkages between subjectivities. So, when D&G speak of schizzy-effects they are not a hundred miles from Vaneigem when he talks of a reflex of identity through which people strengthen the wealth of their individual possibilities in the unity of federated subjectivities (for D&G this unity is heterogeneous.) Seeing a part of yourself in a part offered up by another, not in order to have your ego boosted, but in order to melt the ego-ice, increase curiosity, and enable the possible stimulus of (social) experiences to circulate. An awareness of having several selves can mean that there are more possibilities, more chances of becoming, which decreases the likelihood of identity becoming hardened, inflexible and incapable of allowing inputs. Foucault’s ‘death of the subject’ should be read in this light, not as the ‘death of the human’ but as an expression of the various forms subjectivity can take: in each case one plays, one establishes a different type of relationship to oneself. By the time D&G come to write Thousand Plateaus the schizzy-effect has mutated into the notion of becoming…You change all the time. Psycho-social nomadism is a practice of movement, of being incessantly displaced…for without movement we can go nowhere, we are unable to conceive of anything outside of the capitalist treadmill of reified finality.

BELIEF IS THE ENEMY

What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but “believe”, rather than produce? What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with “beliefs” that are not even irrational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order?

For D&G the auto-production of desire that exists in thousands of productive break-flows comes up against several restraining forces. The most oblique and persistent of these is the way that ideology acts in a factitious way: a myth working as social production, producing obedience and making desire and consequently, action and practice, follow readymade paths. These readymade paths are where curiosity is replaced by belief, where questioning ceases and finality is welcomed. However, it would be a serious mistake to reduce belief to religious phenomena only. For just as religious sentiment is a social product so other ideologies come to be constructed that are not used, weighed up and put to practical tests, but are inhabited and related to as truths. In this way, the ideological effect is a means of drawing a limit and underestimating social complexity. Belief is comforting…an indirect mechanism of rule…it provides security against political and social contingencies.

By placing the development and social effects of the Oedipus complex in an historic context, D&G show how Freud takes the Oedipus myth and transforms what is essentially a piece of classical theatre into an instrument that charts unknown territory. Freud makes of the unconscious an interior colony. If as D&G suggest, the unconscious is an orphan, then in order for capitalism to adopt it to the profit economy it needs a parent, a guiding force, a leader, a celebrity, a relative horizon, an eminent voice, an ideologue. The use of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis is, for them, nothing more than the reduction of desire to parental images – a cessation of desiring-production. A similar diminution of desire occurs as part of the celebrity operation. Here desire comes up against a socially constructed myth, a transcendent individual divorced from a common ground, which contorts desire and blocks the pathways to auto-production as it reinforces socially constructed inferiority. However, both the myth of Oedipus and the myth of the celebrity need to be believed in before they can work and there are many reasons for belief. Not least among these is the way belief works as a crutch at the same time that it bestows an appearance of independence. It is not at all surprising that Henry Miller talks of ideology as possession, for desire needs to be bound and taken over by something that can overwhelm it and stifle its auto-production: belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production. Ask why the state tolerates left groupuscules? Is it simply a matter of ineffectual size? Ask why the prisons are full of working class people who don’t believe in anything and couldn’t give a fuck? Belief asks you to forget yourself and the more sophisticated and well-respected the ideology the more difficult it becomes to question it.

No matter to what extent and in what form ideology surrounds us, schizo-politics has no reason to be appeased by any of it. Rather than ask what it means, it is surely better to ask how a belief was put together and how can it be put to use. For any theory, any myth, that comes to operate as an overarching doctrine inculcates in its believers a necessity to deny that it was constructed from bits and pieces, that it is a combined formation. Belief isn’t interested in operating upon theory by inserting a desiring-machine, by tapping off part of its flow and using the momentum in another assemblage. Belief prefers to be operated upon under anaesthetic. It is without curiosity and is always consulting the procedural grand narratives: You must learn the principles in such a constant way that, whenever your desires, appetites and fears awake like barking dogs, the Logos will speak like the voice of the master who silences his dogs with a single cry (Foucault: ibid). Belief and obedience are in close relationship. Following in their footsteps are dictionary definitions, manifestos, curriculum vitaes, and twenty-one point programmes. Measures of confinement that gather dust.

A negative hallucination is when you don’t see something that’s really there. He still has negative hallucinations but is trying to get rid of them. Like when The Witchsuddenly says what he’s thinking he never bothers to ask how did you know. Or when something is lost and he inexplicably knows where it is he no longer finds it disturbing…He believes that to get rid of negative hallucination you have to be enchanted. He believes that all people need to enchant their lives but that only those succeed who neither search nor close their mind but simply remain open to the unknown. (Ronald Sukenick: 98.6)

DISCLAIMER

As the intermittently open conduit through which this text arose I reserve the right to reject this writings apprehension as the work of a journalist, a politico, an editor, a plagiarist, a theorist, an academic, a frustrated novelist, an acolyte. It could just as well be the ‘work’ of a housing officer, an inmate of HMP High Point, a time-thief, a drunkard, a dancer, a listener, a shop-steward/mushroom, an aspiring Sunday league football manager, a doorman, a receptionist…

Part 0.001 will attempt to discuss Part 3, Section 9 of Anti-Oedipus: “The Civilised Capitalist Machine”.

Howard Slater

June 1996

As the intermittently open conduit through which this text arose I reserve the right to reject this writings apprehension as the work of a journalist, a politico, an editor, a plagiarist, a theorist, an academic, a frustrated novelist, an acolyte. It could just as well be the ‘work’ of a housing officer, an inmate of HMP High Point, a time-thief, a drunkard, a dancer, a listener, a shop-steward//mushroom, an aspiring sunday league football manager, a doorman, a receptionist… 06.96

Part 0.001 will attempt to discuss Part 3, Section 9 of Anti-Oedipus: “The Civilised Capitalist Machine”.

• Wikipedia article on Anti-Oedipus
• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1

SUPPORT DATACIDE – ORDER A COPY, TAKE OUT A SUBSCRIPTION OR MAKE A DONATION – You can do all this through the form on the right of this web page (on mobile devices scroll down), or by clicking HERE for more information and payment options. THANKS!

Related Posts