Forwarded message:
>From eholland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Feb 28 13:01:33 1994
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 94 13:58:13 EST
From: Eugene Holland <eholland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: A-O/Holland #3
I proposed in my last posting (A-O/Holland #2) that we try to identify the
major organizational frameworks of the _Anti-Oedipus_, even though it means
pulling them out of the flow of the text (where they tend to appear ex post
facto) and putting them up front to guide our reading.
1) At the very end of Chapter 3 (on p.271 of the English edition), we read
"Freud is the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry." This is key for
understanding the intersection of Marx and Freud in the A-O. For according
to Marx, Luther in religion and Adam Smith and Ricardo in political economy
take important steps forward in their fields, but then take one equally
important step back. As D&G put it, "Marx said that Luther's merit was to
have determined the essence of religion, no longer on the side of the object,
but as an interior religiosity (270)"; but having made this discovery, Luther
then re-objectifies or alienates potentially free, subjective religiosity onto
Scripture. In the same way, "the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo was to have
determined the essence or nature of wealth no longer as an objective [property
of] nature, but as an abstract and deterritorialized subjective essence, *the
activity of production in general*. But [then] they objectify the essence all
over again, they alienate and reterritorialize it, this time in the form of
the private ownership of the means of production" (270). "The same thing must
be said of Freud," D&G go on to say: "his greatness lies in having determined
the essence or nature of desire, no longer in relation to [or as a property
of] objects, aims, or even sources (territories), but as an abstract
subjective essence -- libido or sexuality" (270). But then Freud, too, re-
objectifies and re-alienates this free subjective essence onto the nuclear
family and the oedipus "as the last territoriality of private man" (270).
Desire-power and labor-power are in one moment deterritorialized (de-
objectified: freed from objective determination as abstract subjective forces)
only to be reterritorialized in the next moment, alienated and determined
objectively by capital and the oedipus. This is the precise sense in which
Freud can be considered the Smith-Ricardo of psychiatry.
The ramifications of this parallelism [can someone suggest a better term?]
are several. For what Marx claims [dialectically] to have done for political
economy -- free labor-power from its last and most abstract alienation by
capital in theory, and place its freeing itself from capital in practice on
the agenda of history -- is precisely what D&G claim to do for psychiatry:
free desire-power from its last and most abstract alienation by the oedipus in
theory, and call for its freeing itself from familialism in practice. This is
why D&G (alone among poststructuralists, as far as I know) invoke "universal
history": capitalism and the family-oedipus bring labor-power and desire-power
to a degree of abstraction (as desiring-productive activity *in general*) that
makes a critical understanding of desiring-production in general possible,
shedding light on other, pre-capitalist socio-historical determinations of
desire and labor as well as carrying capitalism and familialism to the point
of autocritique. This is the sense in which D&G insist that capitalism and
familialism are "the universal of every society, but only insofar as [they
are] capable of carrying to a certain point [their] own critique -- that is,
the critique of the processes by which [they] re-enslave [reterritorialize,
recode] what within [them] tends to free itself or to appear freely" (270).
Under capitalism-familialism, the potential of labor-power and desire-power as
freely and subjectively determined forces gets subordinated to the social-
objective determinations of capital and the nuclear family; such subordination
is the main target of schizoanalytic critique and social transformation.
Schizoanalysis calls itself a *materialist* psychiatry because, like Marx,
D&D consider their critique to be grounded in, to have been made possible
[dialectically] by, specific concrete historical conditions: just as the
capitalist market produces the conditions (viz. the commodification of labor,
so that specific productive activities become equivalent as exchange-values)
under which such a thing as "productive activity *in general*" becomes
visible, so too the nuclear family produces the conditions under which libido
*in general* becomes visible: oedipal libido becomes indeterminate and
subjective inasmuch as its sole object of desire (Mommy) is forbidden and its
lone pole of identification (Daddy) remains abstract, since the objects of his
desire fall completely outside the nuclear family (except for the forbidden
mother). The tendential abstract-indeterminacy of desire-power bred in the nuclear
family is subsequently not reversed but reinforced by conditions outside it:
under capitalism, objects of desire are defined socially in terms of abstract,
fluctuating (economic) value rather than stable meaning, so desire-power is
largely free to invest and divest them at will. These are the historical
conditions -- familial as well as social -- that explain why schizoanalysis as
a "materialist psychiatry" (22) takes schizophrenia rather than neurosis as
its point of departure, and insists on reading neurosis in light of
schizophrenia rather than the other way around; why, as I said last time, D&G
will from the very beginning of the A-O present a psychotic model of the
psyche in place of Freud's neurotic model.
So Freud is the Smith-Ricardo of psychiatry in that, having discovered the
abstract subjective force of desire as libido, he nonetheless proceeds to
privilege the oedipus and neurosis, mobilizing "all the resources of myth, of
tragedy, of dreams, in order to re-enslave desire... from within" (271). As
the generative matrix of abstract, subjectively-determined desire
(schizophrenia), the family-oedipus is indeed, D&G admit, the "universal of
desire, the product of universal history"; but the potential of desire-power
can only be recognized and realized "on one condition, which is not met by
Freud: that Oedipus be capable... of conducting its autocritique. Universal
history is nothing more than theology if it does not seize control of the
conditions of its contingent, singular existence, its irony, and its own
critique" (271). The historical grounding of schizoanalysis is thus not
historicist or positivist but ironical and critical: the claim of
schizoanalysis is not to reflect or represent history but rather to intervene
in the historical processes it maps in critical and transformative ways.
2) The mode of "critique" at work in the A-O is a singular one. If oedipal
psychoanalysis is brought by D&G to the point to its autocritique in much the
same way that political economy was brought to its autocritique by Marx,
schizoanalytic critique (*pace* Lyotard) arises from a transvaluation of
Kant's critical project at the hands of Nietzsche's notion of a mostly
unconscious "will-to-power" grounded in the body. After having presented the
psychotic model of desiring-machines in Chapter One, D&G return in Chapter Two
to review the three syntheses according to which they operate: connection-
production, disjunction-recording, and conjunction-consumption/consummation.
At the end of their review of the connective synthesis of production (Chapter
Two, Section 3), D&G justify their recourse to Kantian terminology and at the
same time distinguish their materialist perspective from Kantian idealism.
Kant's "critical revolution" hinged on discovering the ways the conscious
mind actually worked, and making sure that claims to knowledge were consistent
with them. Kant thus distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate uses
of the "syntheses of consciousness" (75): legitimate uses corresponded to the
ways the mind worked, and were valid sources of knowledge; illegitimate uses
involved processes not immanent to the human mind, and were thus considered
invalid, metaphysical. In much the same way, D&G's schizoanalytic revolution
hinges on the discovery of the ways the unconscious actually works, which
enables us to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of the
syntheses of the *unconscious* (i.e. the connective, the disjunctive, and the
conjunctive). It will take some time to work through the operations of the
three syntheses of the unconscious and to learn how to distinguish their
legitimate and illegitimate uses, but it should be understood that this
framework is central to the theory and practice of schizoanalysis. The
Kantian terminology is no doubt unwieldy (especially the difference between
the "transcendental unconscious" -- defined by the immanence of its criteria
to the body or "will-to-power" -- and "transcendent" uses of the syntheses,
which are illegitimate); but relocating the syntheses in the unconscious and
the body (via Nietzsche) rather than in consciousness (as for Kant) not only
provides grounds for the critique of metaphysics in psychoanalysis ("its name
is Oedipus" [75]), it also furnishes principles and criteria for social
analysis and transformation (rather than for epistemology, as in Kant). This,
I would suggest, is D&G's renewal of and move beyond Marcuse, who proposed
that social revolution simply redress the balance between reality and pleasure
principles by eliminating surplus-repression. The Nietzschean transvaluation
of the Kantian "critical revolution" proposed by D&G offers a more detailed
and more stringent programme for social revolution. Where Kant insisted that
any and all knowledge conform to the legitimate syntheses of the conscious
mind, or else be considered metaphysical, D&G insist that any social relations
must conform to the legitimate syntheses of the unconscious and the body, or
else be considered repressive and reactionary.
3) Evaluating social relations in terms of "psychological" criteria may seem
to be quite a stretch, but for D&G it isn't a stretch at all, because there
are no "psychological" categories involved: "desiring-production" (libidinal
investments) and "social production" (economic investments), they insist, are
ultimately one and the same (30). I have used the parallel terms "desire-
power" and "labor-power" to stress this identity, just as D&G use "desiring-
production" and "social production" and "de/re- territorialization" to the
same end. Territorialization was originally a Lacanian term designating the
mapping of children's erogenous zones and erotic objects by parental care-
giving, e.g. the territorializing of the child's mouth on the mother's breast.
But for D&G, it comes to designate the investment of human energy of *any*
kind -- suckling, perceiving, working -- in any aspect of the environment.
Hence they will speak of the (re-) territorialization of peasants on the
spinning wheels and looms of the nascent textile industry in England,
following their *de-territorialization* from grazing land by the Enclosure
Acts. Ultimately, it is social organization that gives shape to desiring-
production (even in a society which largely delegates that function to the
nuclear family, as capitalism does); but social organization in turn is
constituted as such by nothing other than the investments of desiring-
production on the part of countless individuals and groups.
The epistemological issues involved in this ultimate identity of desiring
and social production will require a discussion of their own; for now let me
say that it entails rejecting a conception of desire as *lack* -- running from
Plato through Kant and Hegel to Lacan -- in favor of a quite different view of
desire derived (probably) from Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche. "The objective
being of desire," D&G insist in a crucial phrase (27) "is the Real in and of
itself." Establishing the ultimate identity of desire-power and labor-power
occupies the first two chapters of the A-O, and entails a virulent critique of
the oedipus as reactionary psychoanalytic metaphysics; tracing the differences
in regime between the two in various types of social formation is the focus of
the third chapter, and enables schizoanalysis to situate oedipal
psychoanalysis as a specifically capitalist institution. Comprehending the
ultimate identity *and* the apparent difference under capitalism of desire-
power and labor-power enables us to "discover beneath the familial reduction
the nature of the social investments of the unconscious.... To overturn the
[oedipal] theater of representation into the order of desiring-production:
this is the whole task of schizoanalysis" (271).
The next posting (#4) will present a brief overview of the four chapters in
the A-O, describing what each contributes to the argument of the whole.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1994 Eugene W. Holland. All rights reserved. Copies for personal
study only may be made of this message. This message may not be printed,
distributed, or stored long-term for public retrieval without the author's
express written permission. Not for general publication or distribution.
------------------
>From eholland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Feb 28 13:01:33 1994
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 94 13:58:13 EST
From: Eugene Holland <eholland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: A-O/Holland #3
I proposed in my last posting (A-O/Holland #2) that we try to identify the
major organizational frameworks of the _Anti-Oedipus_, even though it means
pulling them out of the flow of the text (where they tend to appear ex post
facto) and putting them up front to guide our reading.
1) At the very end of Chapter 3 (on p.271 of the English edition), we read
"Freud is the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry." This is key for
understanding the intersection of Marx and Freud in the A-O. For according
to Marx, Luther in religion and Adam Smith and Ricardo in political economy
take important steps forward in their fields, but then take one equally
important step back. As D&G put it, "Marx said that Luther's merit was to
have determined the essence of religion, no longer on the side of the object,
but as an interior religiosity (270)"; but having made this discovery, Luther
then re-objectifies or alienates potentially free, subjective religiosity onto
Scripture. In the same way, "the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo was to have
determined the essence or nature of wealth no longer as an objective [property
of] nature, but as an abstract and deterritorialized subjective essence, *the
activity of production in general*. But [then] they objectify the essence all
over again, they alienate and reterritorialize it, this time in the form of
the private ownership of the means of production" (270). "The same thing must
be said of Freud," D&G go on to say: "his greatness lies in having determined
the essence or nature of desire, no longer in relation to [or as a property
of] objects, aims, or even sources (territories), but as an abstract
subjective essence -- libido or sexuality" (270). But then Freud, too, re-
objectifies and re-alienates this free subjective essence onto the nuclear
family and the oedipus "as the last territoriality of private man" (270).
Desire-power and labor-power are in one moment deterritorialized (de-
objectified: freed from objective determination as abstract subjective forces)
only to be reterritorialized in the next moment, alienated and determined
objectively by capital and the oedipus. This is the precise sense in which
Freud can be considered the Smith-Ricardo of psychiatry.
The ramifications of this parallelism [can someone suggest a better term?]
are several. For what Marx claims [dialectically] to have done for political
economy -- free labor-power from its last and most abstract alienation by
capital in theory, and place its freeing itself from capital in practice on
the agenda of history -- is precisely what D&G claim to do for psychiatry:
free desire-power from its last and most abstract alienation by the oedipus in
theory, and call for its freeing itself from familialism in practice. This is
why D&G (alone among poststructuralists, as far as I know) invoke "universal
history": capitalism and the family-oedipus bring labor-power and desire-power
to a degree of abstraction (as desiring-productive activity *in general*) that
makes a critical understanding of desiring-production in general possible,
shedding light on other, pre-capitalist socio-historical determinations of
desire and labor as well as carrying capitalism and familialism to the point
of autocritique. This is the sense in which D&G insist that capitalism and
familialism are "the universal of every society, but only insofar as [they
are] capable of carrying to a certain point [their] own critique -- that is,
the critique of the processes by which [they] re-enslave [reterritorialize,
recode] what within [them] tends to free itself or to appear freely" (270).
Under capitalism-familialism, the potential of labor-power and desire-power as
freely and subjectively determined forces gets subordinated to the social-
objective determinations of capital and the nuclear family; such subordination
is the main target of schizoanalytic critique and social transformation.
Schizoanalysis calls itself a *materialist* psychiatry because, like Marx,
D&D consider their critique to be grounded in, to have been made possible
[dialectically] by, specific concrete historical conditions: just as the
capitalist market produces the conditions (viz. the commodification of labor,
so that specific productive activities become equivalent as exchange-values)
under which such a thing as "productive activity *in general*" becomes
visible, so too the nuclear family produces the conditions under which libido
*in general* becomes visible: oedipal libido becomes indeterminate and
subjective inasmuch as its sole object of desire (Mommy) is forbidden and its
lone pole of identification (Daddy) remains abstract, since the objects of his
desire fall completely outside the nuclear family (except for the forbidden
mother). The tendential abstract-indeterminacy of desire-power bred in the nuclear
family is subsequently not reversed but reinforced by conditions outside it:
under capitalism, objects of desire are defined socially in terms of abstract,
fluctuating (economic) value rather than stable meaning, so desire-power is
largely free to invest and divest them at will. These are the historical
conditions -- familial as well as social -- that explain why schizoanalysis as
a "materialist psychiatry" (22) takes schizophrenia rather than neurosis as
its point of departure, and insists on reading neurosis in light of
schizophrenia rather than the other way around; why, as I said last time, D&G
will from the very beginning of the A-O present a psychotic model of the
psyche in place of Freud's neurotic model.
So Freud is the Smith-Ricardo of psychiatry in that, having discovered the
abstract subjective force of desire as libido, he nonetheless proceeds to
privilege the oedipus and neurosis, mobilizing "all the resources of myth, of
tragedy, of dreams, in order to re-enslave desire... from within" (271). As
the generative matrix of abstract, subjectively-determined desire
(schizophrenia), the family-oedipus is indeed, D&G admit, the "universal of
desire, the product of universal history"; but the potential of desire-power
can only be recognized and realized "on one condition, which is not met by
Freud: that Oedipus be capable... of conducting its autocritique. Universal
history is nothing more than theology if it does not seize control of the
conditions of its contingent, singular existence, its irony, and its own
critique" (271). The historical grounding of schizoanalysis is thus not
historicist or positivist but ironical and critical: the claim of
schizoanalysis is not to reflect or represent history but rather to intervene
in the historical processes it maps in critical and transformative ways.
2) The mode of "critique" at work in the A-O is a singular one. If oedipal
psychoanalysis is brought by D&G to the point to its autocritique in much the
same way that political economy was brought to its autocritique by Marx,
schizoanalytic critique (*pace* Lyotard) arises from a transvaluation of
Kant's critical project at the hands of Nietzsche's notion of a mostly
unconscious "will-to-power" grounded in the body. After having presented the
psychotic model of desiring-machines in Chapter One, D&G return in Chapter Two
to review the three syntheses according to which they operate: connection-
production, disjunction-recording, and conjunction-consumption/consummation.
At the end of their review of the connective synthesis of production (Chapter
Two, Section 3), D&G justify their recourse to Kantian terminology and at the
same time distinguish their materialist perspective from Kantian idealism.
Kant's "critical revolution" hinged on discovering the ways the conscious
mind actually worked, and making sure that claims to knowledge were consistent
with them. Kant thus distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate uses
of the "syntheses of consciousness" (75): legitimate uses corresponded to the
ways the mind worked, and were valid sources of knowledge; illegitimate uses
involved processes not immanent to the human mind, and were thus considered
invalid, metaphysical. In much the same way, D&G's schizoanalytic revolution
hinges on the discovery of the ways the unconscious actually works, which
enables us to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of the
syntheses of the *unconscious* (i.e. the connective, the disjunctive, and the
conjunctive). It will take some time to work through the operations of the
three syntheses of the unconscious and to learn how to distinguish their
legitimate and illegitimate uses, but it should be understood that this
framework is central to the theory and practice of schizoanalysis. The
Kantian terminology is no doubt unwieldy (especially the difference between
the "transcendental unconscious" -- defined by the immanence of its criteria
to the body or "will-to-power" -- and "transcendent" uses of the syntheses,
which are illegitimate); but relocating the syntheses in the unconscious and
the body (via Nietzsche) rather than in consciousness (as for Kant) not only
provides grounds for the critique of metaphysics in psychoanalysis ("its name
is Oedipus" [75]), it also furnishes principles and criteria for social
analysis and transformation (rather than for epistemology, as in Kant). This,
I would suggest, is D&G's renewal of and move beyond Marcuse, who proposed
that social revolution simply redress the balance between reality and pleasure
principles by eliminating surplus-repression. The Nietzschean transvaluation
of the Kantian "critical revolution" proposed by D&G offers a more detailed
and more stringent programme for social revolution. Where Kant insisted that
any and all knowledge conform to the legitimate syntheses of the conscious
mind, or else be considered metaphysical, D&G insist that any social relations
must conform to the legitimate syntheses of the unconscious and the body, or
else be considered repressive and reactionary.
3) Evaluating social relations in terms of "psychological" criteria may seem
to be quite a stretch, but for D&G it isn't a stretch at all, because there
are no "psychological" categories involved: "desiring-production" (libidinal
investments) and "social production" (economic investments), they insist, are
ultimately one and the same (30). I have used the parallel terms "desire-
power" and "labor-power" to stress this identity, just as D&G use "desiring-
production" and "social production" and "de/re- territorialization" to the
same end. Territorialization was originally a Lacanian term designating the
mapping of children's erogenous zones and erotic objects by parental care-
giving, e.g. the territorializing of the child's mouth on the mother's breast.
But for D&G, it comes to designate the investment of human energy of *any*
kind -- suckling, perceiving, working -- in any aspect of the environment.
Hence they will speak of the (re-) territorialization of peasants on the
spinning wheels and looms of the nascent textile industry in England,
following their *de-territorialization* from grazing land by the Enclosure
Acts. Ultimately, it is social organization that gives shape to desiring-
production (even in a society which largely delegates that function to the
nuclear family, as capitalism does); but social organization in turn is
constituted as such by nothing other than the investments of desiring-
production on the part of countless individuals and groups.
The epistemological issues involved in this ultimate identity of desiring
and social production will require a discussion of their own; for now let me
say that it entails rejecting a conception of desire as *lack* -- running from
Plato through Kant and Hegel to Lacan -- in favor of a quite different view of
desire derived (probably) from Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche. "The objective
being of desire," D&G insist in a crucial phrase (27) "is the Real in and of
itself." Establishing the ultimate identity of desire-power and labor-power
occupies the first two chapters of the A-O, and entails a virulent critique of
the oedipus as reactionary psychoanalytic metaphysics; tracing the differences
in regime between the two in various types of social formation is the focus of
the third chapter, and enables schizoanalysis to situate oedipal
psychoanalysis as a specifically capitalist institution. Comprehending the
ultimate identity *and* the apparent difference under capitalism of desire-
power and labor-power enables us to "discover beneath the familial reduction
the nature of the social investments of the unconscious.... To overturn the
[oedipal] theater of representation into the order of desiring-production:
this is the whole task of schizoanalysis" (271).
The next posting (#4) will present a brief overview of the four chapters in
the A-O, describing what each contributes to the argument of the whole.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1994 Eugene W. Holland. All rights reserved. Copies for personal
study only may be made of this message. This message may not be printed,
distributed, or stored long-term for public retrieval without the author's
express written permission. Not for general publication or distribution.
------------------