The Machine at the Heart of Desire:
Felix Guattari's Molecular Revolution [excerpt 2 of 4]
_Works & Day_ 2.2 (1985): 63-85
Charles J. Stivale
Wayne State University
2. Machine and Desire
In an earlier, untranslated paper, "Reflexions pour des
philosophes `a propos de la psychotherapie institutionnelle"
(Reflections for Philosophers on Institutional Psychotherapy,
1966), while outlining the importance of his theoretical work for
the study of "group subjectivity," Guattari had already referred
to the alterity of the subject as a "signifying machine which
predetermines what must be good or bad for me and my peers in one
or another area of consumption" (PT 93). He called for new
philosophical research which would determine "concepts likely to
found a field of reference responding, on the one hand, to the
demands of the objective sciences and, on the other hand, to the
demands of 'techniques' of concrete human existence" (PT 95).
Then, working in collaboration with Deleuze following May 1968,\7
Guattari undertakes this philosophical enterprise himself in the
important transitional essay entitled "Machine and Structure"
1969; MR section 2). He first distinguishes structure from
machine in an attempt to 'identify the peculiar positions of
subjectivity in relation to events and to history" (MR 111). In
turn, he derives this distinction from the complementary
categories of series" and "singularity" introduced by Gilles
Deleuze. According to this model, structure" positions its
elements, including the subject or agent of action, in an
all-encompassing system of references" consisting of two
heterogeneous series which relate each element to the others and
thereby enclose the ego-centered subject as but one of many other
enclosed elements. In contrast, the "machine is not such a
structural representation, but an event or a point of convergence
for the heterogeneous series to which the subject or agent of
action remains remote, as the "subject of the unconscious" which
exists "on the same side as the machine, or better, alongside the
machine" (MR 111-12). \8
This distinction leads Guattari to examine the fundamental
alienation under capitalism which characterizes the individual's
relation to the machine as "radical system of realignment", a
castration" of the worker, whose work exists under capitalism as
"a residual sub-whole of the work of the machine. This residual
human activity is no more than an adjacent and partial procedure
that accompanies the subjective procedure secreted by the order
of the machine" (my translation; cf. MR 113). As a result, "the
machine has passed into the heart of desire, that is, human
activity constitutes nothing more than "residual work" or the
machine's psychic "imprint" on the individual's imaginary world
(Guattari here refers elliptically to Lacan's "object small a"),
the subject henceforth locked into alternate relations of
conjunction and disjunction vis-a-vis the machinic production.
For example, in scientific research, a researcher's discovery
quickly extends beyond the individual as his proper name turns
into a common noun. This detachment of a signifier from the
unconscious structural chain to "represent" the machine "binds
the machine to the double-sided register of the desiring subject
and of its status as founding root of the different structural
orders which correspond to it" (my translation; cf. MR 114). The
human subject as adjacent part "is caught where the machine and
structure meet" in a system of anti-production relating the
different regimes of signifying chains criss-crossing the
subject, be it on the factory floor, in scientific research, in
literature or even in dreams cf. MR 114-15). Guattari suggests
that this machine process "could be a new weapon, a new
production technique, a new set of religious dogmas, or such
major new discoveries as the Indies, relativity, or the moon. To
cope with this, a structural anti-production develops until it
reaches its own saturation point, while the revolutionary
breakthrough also develops, in counterpoint to this, another
discontinuous area of anti-production that tends to reabsorb the
intolerable subjective breach," thereby eluding the preceding
order (MR 117). Guattari concludes that the machine process
suggests the possibility of a revolutionary program which would
require establishing an institutional machine with theory and
practice ensuring that it did not depend on social or state
structures, a program which, as a machine for institutional
subversion,- should demonstrate proper subjective potential and,
at every stage of the struggle, should make sure that it is
fortified against any attempt to 'structuralize' that potential"
(MR 119).
This revolutionary framework articulates the interlocking psychic
and political planes, the planes of desire and of the socius,
which Guattari and Deleuze will elaborate in _Anti-Oedipus_;
Guattari's essays corresponding to the "anti-Oedipal offensive"
of the early seventies, many of which are collected in _La
Revolution moleculaire_ (RM), all share both the dual
psychoanalytical and political program previously enunciated and
the development of an extensive vocabulary resulting from the
ongoing collaborative effort with Deleuze. For example, while the
essay "Money in the Analytic Exchange" (1971; MR section 1) would
appear, from its title, to have a primarily psychotherapeutic
orienation, Guattari exercises therein an explicitly political
analysis to problematize the question of payment between analyst
and analysand on the grounds that, given the capitalist system of
extracting surplus-value, "when the psychoanalyst is paid, he is
in fact reproducing a certain process of crushing the patient to
adapt him onto personological poles of capitalist society,...
implicitly sanctioning a way of using the structures of the
family as an instrument to crush desire production and press it
into the service of a social order governed by profit" (MR 61).
In another essay, "Psychoanalysis and the Struggles of Desire"
(1973; MR section 1), as well as in the interview with Arno
Munster, "Molecular Revolution and Class Struggle" (1973; MR
section 3), Guattari examines the inadequacies of Freudianism's
social analysis and of Marxism's analysis of desire. He suggests
that despite the trap of bureaucratic centralism in which the
workers' revolutionary movement is caught, the struggle for
political liberation can and must occur in the same terms as a
struggle against the "technique of reductive representation"
which characterizes the "Oedipus method," according to which
"every situation can be fitted into a system of representation
that is expressed in an apparently triangular mode" (MR 70), what
Deleuze and Guattari label -- in _Anti-Oedipus_ -- the
"mommy-daddy-me" triad.
As an alternative, Guattari calls for "schizo-analytic politics"
which opposes desire expressed in individual terms to a
collective enunciation of desire: on the one hand, "in so far as
the subject is bound up with a system of representation, the
individual libido finds itself dependent on the capitalist
machine which forces it to function in terms of a communication
based on dualist systems," i.e. imprisonment "in such bi-polar
systems as man/woman, child/adult, genital/pre-genital,
life/death, etc... subjected to an Oedipalizing reduction of
desire to representation" MR 72). This necessitates the
"destructive task of schizoanalysis" (cf. AO 311-21), an
annihilation of the myth of Oedipus; of ego, superego, guilt,
law, castration; of the emphasis on the unconscious as theatrical
representation; in short, of the overcoding and social repression
of libidinal desire imposed by psychoanalytic mechanisms as
factotum of the capitalist system. Therefore, and on the other
hand, Guattari proposes a totally different notion; the idea of a
collective force, a collective direction of libido to parts of
the body, groups of individuals, constellations of objects and
intensities, machines of every kind -- thus bringing desire out
of that back-and-forth between the Oedipal triangle and its
dissolution in the death instinct, and linking it up with
ever-wider possibilities of many different kinds that become even
more open to the social environment (MR 72). Guattari argues that
to the actually schizophrenic and fragmentary character of
capitalist society must respond a new socio-political,
psychiatric, and critical practice, a collective,
multi-disciplinary, multi-strategic approach (that is, the two
"positive tasks of schizoanalysis" presented in AO 322-82) to
under-mine psychic and social repression and thereby to release
flows of desire within art and institutions. The practical means
by which these tasks are to be accomplished constitute the
direction of Guattari's subsequent writing. \9
Notes
7/ Deleuze has discussed in several texts the importance of this
collaboration for his work. In "I Have Nothing To Admit," he
explains: "And, then, there was my meeting Felix Guattari, the
way we got along and completed, depersonalized, singularized each
other - in short how we loved. That resulted in _Anti-Oedipus_
which marked a new progression. I wonder whether one of the
formal reasons for the hostile reception the book occasionally
encounters isn't precisely that we worked it out together,
depriving the public of the quarrels and ascriptions it loves.
So, they try to untangle what is indiscernible or to determine
what belongs to each of us. But since everyone, like everyone
else, is multiple to begin with, that makes for quite a lot of
people" (113). Later, in _Dialogues_, Deleuze further develops
the impact of this collaboration: "I was trying in my preceding
books to describe a certain exercise of thought, but describing
it was still not the same as exercising thought in that way....
So with Felix, it all became possible, even if we failed. We were
only two, but what counted for us was less working together than
this strange fact of working between the two. We ceased being
'author'. And this between-the-two connected with other people,
different on either side. The desert grew, but while getting more
and more populated.... I ripped off Felix, and I hope he did the
same with me" (23-24; my translation).?
On their individual backgrounds, see my introduction to
_SubStance_ 44/45 (1984).
8/ See Deleuze's _Difference et repetition_ (7) and _Logique du
sens_ (63). Guattari gives the following example to distinguish
"structure" from "machine": "The history of technology is dated
by the existence at each stage of a particular type of machine;
the history of the sciences is now reaching a point, in all its
branches, where every scientific theory can be taken as a machine
rather than a structure, which relates it to the order of
ideology. Every machine is the negation, the destroyer of
incorporation (almost to the point of excretion), of the machine
it replaces. And it is potentially in a similar relationship to
the machine that will take its place" MR 112).
9/ See the bibliography in SubStance 44145 (1984) for notable
studies, in English and in French, of this schizo-analytic
project.
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