Deleuze and Guattari

Anti-Oedipus, Schizo-subject & Rhizomes

Outline
Starting Questions D/Gs revision of psychoanalysis and marxism. Desire and Production; Oedipalization vs. schizo & nomad A Thousand Plateaus; rhizomes references

Starting Questions
Why is D/G against Oedipus complex? How do they look at desire differently from Freud and Lacan? What is rhizome? How is it different from or similar to Derridas dissemination? Why is rhizome a short-term memory or anti-memory(1605)? What does D/G mean when they say that writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. (text 1603)

D/G vs. Psychoanalysis & Marxism

Guattari (in essays of the 1950s and 1960s)
insists on the libidinal nature of social groups And social nature of the unconscious (Bogue 87) In Machine and Structure (1969), he explores alternatives to Lacanian language. e.g. Subject Machine

Desire production, desiring production, but not lack or acquisition.

D/G vs. Psychoanalysis (1)

Oedipal family structure one of the primary mode of restricting desire in capitalist societies (textbook 2: 211)
unaware of the relations pre-Oedipal in the child, exo-Oedipal in the psychotic, para-Oedipal in the others. Dogmatize the Oedipal; connect the pre-Oedipal with the negative complex; triangulation of relations

D/G vs. Psychoanalysis (2)

Finds the nature of desire in psychotic and neurotic patients: Psychotics parts of their bodies as separate entities; Schizophrenics
catatonic states or assume new identities

Desiring machines; (textbook 2: 206-207)

The body without organs The nomadic subject

Replace psychoanalysis with schizoanalysis

(Bogue 91)

D/G vs. Marxism (3)

Desire = production of production (208) Capitalism supported by oedipalization Marxism: production distribution consumption Exchange value = use value

The Desiring Machine

The schizos stroll 206-207; Nature and industry 208 (one with nature in the form of production) The process flow and checks Desiring machine, partial objects and flows

The Body without organs

Desiring Machine
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines. . . produces a flow of desire; Connected with or interrupted by the other machines; e.g. organ-machine & an energy-machine; the breast; the mouth a machine coupled to it. (The mouth of the anorexic.) Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines.

Desiring Machine
The rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production. A painting by Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine,' shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring-machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical social machine-which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does. Composed of heterogeneous and independent parts.

Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine

(1954, oil on canvas) (source)

The body without organs

Not an organless body, but body without organization, or the deterritorialized body; an interconnected system of flows and forces. a body that breaks free from its socially articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and subjectified state (as an organism), to become disarticulated, dismantled, and deterritorialized, and hence able to be reconstituted in a new way (Kellner 90-91)

Oedipalization & Capitalism

Capitalism a schizophrenic system; It reduces all social relations to commodity relations deterritorializes desire by subverting(de-coding) all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, local community, etc. It also reterritorializes desire by channeling(re-coding) all production into the narrow confines of the equivalence-form (logic of exchange value); within the state, family, law,commodity logic, banking systems, consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing institutions. (Cf. Bogue 88; Kellner 89)

Paranoia vs. schizophrenia

(2)schizophrenia (a)non-systematic (b)nomadic (1)paranoia (metaphysics!) (c)molecular () (a)domination (b)hierarchy (c) molar aggregates

schizoanalysis
Schizophrenia or schizophrenic processis not an illness, but a potentially liberatory psychic condition produced within capitalist social conitions, a product of absolute decoding. (Kellner 90) Schizoanalysis a decentred and fragmented analysis of the unconscious investments of individual and group desire in all spheres of society; destroyed unified and rigid segments of subject and group identity; liberate the prepersonal realm of desire.

Nomadic subjects
multiple personalities
1.consumption 2.when social codes [e.g. Oedipus] break down in their channelling of desire, then the nomadic subject is possible, traversing the lines of the desiring machines inscribed on the body w/o organs

Model of the giant egg traversed by lines with a wandering point of pure intensity

A Thousand Plateaus
From Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus
Includes more diverse subjects (e.g. linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, etc.) Replace molar/molecular opposition with a triadic scheme of rigid lines, supple lines, and lines of escape (Kellner 97).

Central metaphor: The Root and the Rhizome

taproot

Rhizome deterritorialized lines (textbook 1601)

The book as an assemblage

P. 1602 Strata; organism on the one side; Body without organs; A machine, in connection with other machines; P. 1606 An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously . . .

Reading
For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force. (AO 106)

The tree vs. rhizome

(textbook 1603)

Tree: arborescent model of thought

mirror: reality is translucently reflected in consciousness Treeknowledge organized in systematic and hierarchical principles.

Rhizome: rhizomatics
To uproot philosophical trees To deconstruct binary logic a higher unity (1604) Made of lines 1605 Made of plateaus

Schizo, Nomad, Rhizome as emancipated modes of existence

Schizos withdraw from repressive social reality into disjointed desiring states Nomads: roam freel across open planes in small bands, Rhizomes: deterritorialized lines of desire linking desiring bodies with one another and the field of partial objects. (Kellner 103)

Rhizome
E.g. the Internet -- any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be

References
Deleuze and Guattari. Ronald Bogue. London New York : Routledge , 1989 The two-fold thought of Deleuze and Guattari : intersections and animations. Charles J. Stivale. New York : Guilford Press , 1998. Postmodern theory : critical interrogations. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan , 1991