Anti-Oedipus personal notes: Chapters 1.1 and 1.2

 

            I started reading “Anti-Oedipus” by Deleuze and Guattari on my own and I will start noting down my summarized understanding of what I am reading while I am doing it. I’m doing this for myself in order to better remember what I read, by jotting down my thoughts, but I’m also going to share it with others such that they can also learn from it, introducing the people who do not know D&G to their thought, or at least offering my own perspective to the people who have already read the book.

 

CHAPTER 1.1: THE DESIRING-MACHINE

 

Deleuze & Guattari start their book by introducing the concept of the machine. D&G distinguish between machines, mechanisms and organisms. An organism is a whole made up of interconnected and interdependent parts which are self-sustaining. A machine, however, is nothing but the connections that it forms. A machine has no beginning and no end, no identity and no stable or fixed purpose. A machine is simply its connections that it forms with other machines, transmitting or stopping flows from circulating. A mechanism is something in the middle. A mechanism is a machine “frozen in time”, for example, a machine which has been assigned a particular purpose.

A bicycle is a machine. When used for traveling, it can be considered a mechanism, but you can use a bicycle for other purposes, like to display it on a museum for people to admire it… A machine is nothing but the connections it forms: when connected to the human-machine it forms the larger human-bike machine that can travel in space.

Machines start and stop flows from circulating. D&G give the example of the mouth of the anorexic: it is “undecided” whether it’s an eating machine, a breathing machine, a sucking machine, a speaking machine, etc. If you were to fixate it on a particular purpose (ex: eating), it would be a mechanism. But as a machine, it is nothing but the connections it forms, and thus, it starts and stops the flows from circulating. The mouth starts and stops flows of air from circulating. The penis starts and stops flows of urine or sperm from circulating. The anus starts and stops flows of shit from circulating. D&G view the entire universe as this set of interconnected machines.

D&G provide a sociological theory for the etiology of the medically diagnosed schizophrenic, explaining how schizophrenia is caused by unnecessary interruptions, or the opposite, unnecessary prolongations of this process. Quote: “Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely—which, strictly speaking, is tantamount to ending it abruptly and prematurely— is what creates the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions: a limp rag forced into autistic behavior, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity. D. H. Lawrence says of love: "We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. . . . The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish."5 Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature.”

D&G go on to explain how nature and industry are not completely separated, but are inherently interconnected. This is how they introduce their concept of desiring-production. For D&G, desire is not a lack, as it is for Lacanian psychoanalysis. Desire is a positive force. This is influenced by Deleuze’s anti-Hegelian philosophy of affirmation that was inspired by Nietzsche (see: Gilles Deleuze – Nietzsche and Philosophy). Hence, they view desire as a positive set of flows that “gets things moving”. The laborer-machine is interconnected with the factory-machine in order to get labor moving. Man and nature are in a constant exchange of these fluxes of energies, man works with and shapes nature, thus creating “industry” or “production”. Desiring-production is ultimately the production of production itself.

This constant interconnection of machines is what D&G call “the first synthesis”, more specifically, the connective-synthesis. It is a synthesis of machines, it is characterized by a conjunction: “and, and, and…”.

The connective-synthesis ends up in a circuit of uninterrupted flows until it reaches some sort of deadlock or blockage that stops the production. This is the first way they characterize the Body without Organs (BwO). I quote: “Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down”. Despite Deleuze hating Hegel, I can’t help but notice the dialectical reasoning here, as if each process has a certain destiny that it has to “finish”? Either way, the moment a previously interrupted process of flows circulating between machines (desiring-production, the connective-synthesis) reaches its end, it turns into anti-production, and this is the BwO for D&G.

Overall, I loved this quote the most: "A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world."

 

CHAPTER 1.2: THE BODY WITHOUT ORGANS

 

            D&G characterize the BwO by contrasting it with the paranoid-machine. For D&G, the paranoid-machine is their nickname for Freud’s “primary repression”. They think that Freud discovered the paranoid-machine without realizing and called it “primary repression”. The paranoid-machine, for D&G, is a body without organs that rejects its organs. Perhaps it is my Lacanian influence, but I can’t help but think of the other metaphor which I used in the past to describe the Lacanian real: the singularity of a black hole. You can never reach it, but the event horizon circles around it. Is this the BwO? If it is, then the paranoid-machine would be a singularity which would repeal everything that circles around it. This is the difference between an attractor and a repulsor. Not all BwOs want to get rid of their organs. The paranoid-machine is ultimately repulsive. This is not merely a question of projection, as Freud thought it were, but one of repulsion, of wanting to take something out of yourself, so to speak.

            D&G go on to describe the difference between desiring-production and social-production. They say that the difference between the two is merely phenomenological: they are quite literally the same in reality, but we perceive them differently.

            Then they describe their concept of the “miraculating-machine”, which is one of the functions of the BwO in relation to capitalism. This is the most interesting part of the book so far, for me. They quote Marx here, and explain how Marx viewed the relationship between labor and capital in capitalism.

            The idea is this: capital merely records the products of labor, but retroactively posits itself as the cause for it. This is definitely true in our common thought: we tend to think that money (or other forms of accumulated capital: factories, etc.) are the cause for certain products like technological advances. We tend to think that the world revolves around money in capitalism (in Lacanian terminology: money is the master-signifier of capitalism). We even have a saying “money makes the world go round”. To “make the world go round” would imply desiring-production in D&G’s terms. But Marx points out that it is not money that “makes things move”, but labor. What we call capital is simply a description, a recording for the activity of labor. It is the workers laboring at those machines that the world actually “moves” – and the money or capital that accumulates merely records the activity of their labor, giving the retroactive illusion that money caused the things to move.

            D&G go on to explain how capital is one example of the BwO in this case. They explain how another function of the BwO is to present itself as something that causes a circuit of desiring-production, when in reality it merely records it. Hence the phrase “miraculating-machine”, since it seems to us that it almost does miracles.

            This is where D&G introduce their concept of the second synthesis, the disjunctive-synthesis, that is based on the logic of “either/or”. This is the part I understood the least. The way I understood it is that the disjunctive-synthesis does not imply a real choice between multiple things-in-themselves, but simply a repermutation or rearrangement of our subjective perception to the way things are currently (which reminds me of the Lacanian/Zizekian view of fantasy and ideology). Quote: “Whereas the "either/or" claims to mark decisive choices between immutable terms (the alternative: either this or that), the schizophrenic "either . . . or . . . or" refers to the system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift and slide about.”

            This reminds me of the coffee jokes from Zizek and Zupancic. A man enters a cafeteria and orders a cup of coffee without milk. The waiter replies: “sorry but we’ve run out of milk, would you like a cup of coffee without cream instead?”. Coffee without cream and coffee without milk are materially the same, and yet different at a metaphysical level. From what I understood, D&G seem to imply that the disjunctive-synthesis (which has something to do with schizophrenia as well) is the ability to choose between “coffee without cream” and “coffee without milk”, i.e. that “system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift”. But I may be completely off.

            D&G connect the ideas of recording and production to the two synthesis. Production is a product of the connective-synthesis between machines (“the production of production”: and, and, and…) while recording is the disjunctive-synthesis (either/or). In the context of capitalism, production is done by labor (the workers are the ones who “make things move”), and hence, labor would be the connective-synthesis. Capital merely records the products of the worker’s labor, and hence, it is related to the disjunctive-synthesis. This seems to imply that D&G explain how viewing capitalism as the cause of production is an ideological illusion that is merely a choice of how we perceive things, hence “disjunctive”. In reality, there is no material difference between coffee without milk and coffee without cream, it is merely a choice for us to perceive it as without milk or without cream, hence “disjunctive”. This makes sense to me since an act of recording is merely an act of human perception. Let me give the examples of some optical illusions to illustrate the way I understand this:

 

 

Do you see a vase or two faces above? Do you see a duck or a rabbit above? Clearly, neither choice is more “objectively correct” than the other, it is merely a choice to perceive it as one way or another. This is the way I understood D&G’s disjunctive-synthesis: a recording of production, a filter we put on top of reality. From my understanding, there should be no difference between their disjunctive-synthesis and Lacan’s fantasy (and subsequently, Zizek’s ideology).

D&G finish this sub-chapter by talking about Oedipus. They seem to imply, although not stating it explicitly, that Oedipus also functions as a BwO for psychoanalysis. It presents itself retroactively as the cause for neurotic symptoms when it merely is a recording for the social structures that already exist in capitalism. The family-unit of mother-father-child is socially constructed, a surplus of the desiring-production of the current system, it merely records whatever goes on in capitalism, but presents itself as the cause of mental illness and such. Quote: “The full body without organs is produced as antiproduction, that is to say it intervenes within the process as such for the sole purpose of rejecting any attempt to impose on it any sort of triangulation implying that it was produced by parents. How could this body have been produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such eloquent witness of its own self-production, of its own engendering of itself?”. It should be stated that this is my interpretation however since D&G have not (yet?) explicitly stated that Oedipus is the BwO, they do talk about how it is related to the BwO, however.

They go on to talk about schizophrenia as subversive to this recording of desiring-production since the “schizo” goes straight for the BwO, not caring to conform to the codes imposed on them by society. In Zizekian language, we might say that society tells the schizophrenic “here is your coffee without milk” and the schizo replies “I want coffee without sand”. Quote: “It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate.”

 What do you think? If you are familiar with this book, am I on the right track or is my interpretation completely off?