TSElosophers meeting on 11.06.2018, Otto Rosendahl, Kari Lukka, Joel Hietanen

”Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Chapters 1 (The Desiring-machines) and 4 (Introduction to Schizoanalysis).”

“Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (Deleuze & Guattari 1977) is a book that needs to be understood in its historical context. Lyotard, Baudrillard and Irigaray had just published books that strongly challenged scientifically rationalistic foundations. Guattari was a creative psychologist, who felt that psychoanalytical tradition of that time was too constraining. Deleuze was the philosopher who wrote down and refined Guattari’s abstractions. Their co-operation produced one of the most complex scholarly best-sellers of all times.

The book starts with building a distinctive and peculiar non-humanistic ontology in order to criticize psychoanalytical practices of their time. A paradigmatic role is given to the unconscious production of “desiring-machines” – a notion that lies at the heart of the book. All desiring-machines are a fleeting part of the universal schizophrenic flow, which they occasionally arrest with neurosis and perversions. Neuroses refer to holding on to one form and perversions to creating a multitude of forms, for example DNA reproduction or DNA mutations.

D&G present capitalism as a (phenomenological) social machine that feeds the desiring-machines and continuously increases their schizophrenic, neurotic and perverse productions. Capitalism differs from territorial and despotic machines, because it runs with an abstract code, i.e. money, which compels increasing desire-production as its requirements develop more flexibly. For example, capitalism provides ample opportunities for thrilling, enjoyable or comforting schizophrenic escapes with experiential consumption, impulsive shopping and social media. Especially social media provides easy and gratifying targets for both neurotic interventions and perverse interpretations, often against the public displays of schizophrenic production. Consider the public outrage that resulted from a Facebook picture of a 12-year old American girl standing victoriously beside a giraffe she had hunted down.

D&G’s method is aimed against preconscious interests of social machines, which repress desiring-machines to celibacy. Celibate joys and sorrows are very real, but neurotically determined by success in producing intensifying quantities in alignment with the social code. An uncommon celibate alternative for quantity production is schizoid thinking: artificial balancing of joys and sorrows (authors suggest Kant as an example). However, D&G’s ontology highlight that even abandoning the “miraculating” social machine does not lead to a discovery of a true miracle machines. Rather, it leads to the production of intensifying abstractions and feelings. Many pitfalls for production disorders wait there as well, such as paranoiac, borderline and histrionic. The last is exemplified by Nietzsche who thought “everything is part of I”, in contrast to D&G’s ontology that posits conscious subject as an insignificant by-product of desiring-machines.

One of the beginning statements that “desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down” (p. 8) slowly starts to make sense. The book is refreshingly outspoken by assigning us all with varying level of mental disorders (whether one is successful or unsuccessful in the production of quantities) and thereby succeeds in alleviating the (phenomenological) external neurotic pressures. For example, Freud’s psychoanalysis was commonly used in the 70’s as a celibacy-inducing mechanism that narrated all problems with childhood and the aim of the treatments were to get people back to producing intensifying quantities. In contrast, Guattari encouraged his patients – a word he detested – to play different games, which let them some detachment from preconscious interests, and attach to and be guided by their unconscious desire-production.

We discussed whether D&G are for or against capitalism. They outline that capitalism compellingly moves towards cosmic death (note: our interpretation to “body without objects”) with intensification of abstract quantities. However, they elaborate few details how to avoid it. Perhaps human consciousness may/should strive, although its ability to do so is strongly questioned, to steer production from the deleterious effects of producing intensive quantities towards well-selected production of intensifying feelings and abstractions. Perhaps consciousness is not able to do better than listen music on the deck chairs of Titanic, because the ice berg cannot be avoided. Accelerationists even argue that why try to turn the ship instead of colliding to ice berg directly.

We concluded that the early parts of the book are more descriptive, but that it gains more normative overtones for the schizophrenic escape with the presentation of their method: schizoanalysis. However, later Deleuze and Guattari clarified that they do not want to speak about schizoanalysis in order not to promote schizophrenic escapes. Hopefully, the combination of desiring machine production could help to create and upkeep influential virtuous abstractions – that are sometimes aligned with and sometimes against the prevailing social machine. For example, the clairvoyance brought by a schizophrenic escape, the neurosis that demands the righteous hero to continue and the perversion that saves the day.

Ps. Just to give a clue of the writing style, here is a relatively clearly written excerpt: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. […] He [the schizophrenic] does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever (p.6).”