Just finished another re read of Anti-Oedipus and for the first time I feel like I finally understand everything going on.
What is impressive about this book is how singular of an achievement it is — never before has anyone placed psychic and economic structures in a single conceptual system, and described a universal human history derived from it.
And what is important to say is how NECESSARY it is to do this, especially at this moment of capitalism’s intensified surrealism, in which the psychic and economic structures are entirely unable to be extracted from each other, completely promiscuously weaving amongst each other with dizzying speeds (summed up in the phrases influencer culture, attention economy, etc., which understate the level of the promiscuity because they do not mention how these psycho-economic structures then go and effect political structures (eg Jan 6 riot agitated by Qanon influencers funded by selling masculinity supplements), thus changing the ground for economic structures themselves, facilitating a feedback loop in which no part of this is able to be set alone from the totality.)
And it is necessary to establish a universal history, because if we cannot understand sociopolitical-economic reality in terms of how we got here, then we do not understand it at all (at some point we must say: this is just how it is, which is tantamount to giving up and siding with power).
Not only does Anti-Oedipus contain the immense achievement of presenting the full picture of things, it also presents a prescription, a way forward (schizoanalysis).
Despite all this, it seems like the triumph of Anti-Oedipus has not “left” Anti-Oedipus and escaped into the rest of the world. Where are the schizoanalysts? The sort of standard line from “Deleuze people” one hears is that it’s not Deleuze’s best book, the political radicalism is off-putting, it’s very “of its time” in response to May ‘68. Even Deleuze and Guattari seem to feel this way: by the time they are writing A Thousand Plateaus, a lot has changed, central concepts from Anti-Oedipus are abandoned, and the authors are more measured and conservative in many ways.
None of that really has much to do with the fact that, even though Anti-Oedipus initially feels like a sort of deranged, manic rant — going on about schizophrenics, homosexuals, shit, and cum — when one looks more closely at it, one realizes that it actually has a very precise, deliberate structure, in which no idea is advanced from the next without its logical development absolutely hammered into the reader.
The essential problem with D&G I think is: Guattari does not know how to write in a way in which he can be understood. His solo writing is a total mess. So he relies on Deleuze to give him assistance. But Deleuze does not want to be understood; Deleuze is an obscurantist writer. So that doesn’t get us much farther either.
One of the key hallmarks of Deleuze’s style is that Deleuze never defines any of his terms; rather he “shows you how they work”. So you have to follow along very slowly and carefully. The goal of Deleuze’s books is to give the reader a new ontology, and the reason to learn Deleuze’s new ontology is to be able to think more creatively. Learning a new ontology is a radically psychoactive process that one will get very “high” on if one is doing properly, because there is no ground to refer a new ontology to, it is its own ground, it doesn’t define itself in terms of anything else. And in the total absence of an ontology one falls into schizophrenia (according to Laing), so it’s a bit of a tightrope walk.
All that is fine, but it raises the question: does Anti-Oedipus actually succeed in its goal of presenting the world with a new ontology it can use, rather than merely being interpreted as a political polemic? To actually be able to extract the ontology from the text in a way that is operational and in which one is fairly certain he is not making misunderstandings is enormously difficult; it has taken me about four reads but I feel like I have finally gotten there.
If Guattari Gang were to establish the mission of reviving schizoanalysis as a practice, it could perhaps begin by making the extraction of Guattari’s ontology and its applicability elsewhere much easier for the reader. For each element in Guattari’s system, it could describe
If the Guattari Glossary was built, it could be used in group settings, potentially with people who lack the patience, time, or inclination to read the original text, and be used to actively construct alternative economies and artistic practices.
I’m not going to go into every concept right now but I’ll make some short notes on the basic ones from Anti-Oedipus
The most fundamental perspective shift we have to undertake when we read Guattari is this: there is a conversion between code and flow; code can be converted to flow and flow can be converted to code.
What does this mean? Let’s look at the most basic way capitalism works. Somewhere in a database in Bank of America’s system, there is a number which represents my account balance. This number near-totally determines how I am allowed to live, what resources can be allocated to me from the perspective of society. If we’re going to look into capitalism, we have to think about the strangeness and absurdity of this: a number changing somewhere determines ships sailing off to a foreign country with a quantity of fireworks, an immigrant gets sent to my house driving Uber to pick me up, etc. These symbols, marks, codes are able to launch flows of resources and human bodies all around.
(For reasons not worth going into right now, in Guattaris ontology, that number in a bank account is not precisely a “code”, so this is a marginally misleading example.) But some things that are codes are:
When we read Guattari, we have to have a dizzying perspective shift in which we are not interested in words or symbols having any “meaning” aside from the flows they produce. Every syllable we utter is not primarily to be understood by someone, by God, but a means of pushing around the cosmic energy of everything in unthinkably complex ways. It’s rather like the ontology of chaos magick, sigils and so on.
This doesn’t mean that the universe is emptied of presence, it means even moreso that the universe is a cosmic poem — everything which is not in motion can be interpreted as code, nothing is more linguistic than anything else. Guattari, like a schizophrenic, is overwhelmed by signs from God.
This is the first concept introduced: everything is a desiring-machine. One of the immediate objections people have to D&G is to say that they are dehumanizing us by taking the side of the capitalists, the military, etc by saying that humans are machines. This is not really the case because the main goal of D&G’s project is to oppose the State and promote human creativity, even creativity in an infinite, cosmic form. Our creativity and potential for freedom comes from the one thing in the universe which is not a “machine”, according to D&G: the body-without-organs, which we will discuss in a moment.
What does it mean that everything is a machine? It means only that things work according to a logic based on the immanent way they are organized, which means there are no rules superimposed from above which govern how a thing operates. There are actually no laws of physics — the notion of a law of physics is a metaphor that imagines that particles are subservient to a State like we are — in reality, that is simply what particles do.
Imagine a sort of cartoon animated GIF Rube Goldberg machine or one of those big machines made of balls and tubes at a science museum with a bunch of moving parts, over here you have a scoop which moves balls from bucket a to bucket b, over there you have a fire which melts the balls into plastic, whatever. This is how we are intended to think of both social structures and peoples psyches, according to Guattari. One could describe the machine of a patients mind “Every time he is aroused in a way that feels homosexual, something compels him to think about playing Call of Duty. At that point he has the option of texting his friend to play, or joining matchmaking,” etc. It all should be understood by looking at each part and how it operates and how these operations make flows move about within the machine.
It’s also important to understand that these desiring machines are not actually physically in the brain. For Guattari, the unconscious is not in the brain; it encompasses everything. My friend put it well by saying that if someone is an alcoholic and he has an enabler, that person would be part of his unconscious — it is part of a machine, when I think I am drinking too much, I talk about it to my friend, and he gets me to not stop drinking. Anything which affects your behavior but is not consciously understood by you is part of your unconscious desiring machines.
The body without organs is notoriously the most confusing term in D&G because it’s like God, and as Jacobins they don’t want to be caught talking too much about God. Or in other words it’s the philosophical absolute of the system, the ground on which everything else rests and from where its power derived, and which conceals infinite mystery. Or the body without organs is like Buddha-nature, it’s the thing in your psyche that when you take way all desire, all awareness of the body, all activity, it’s the thing that’s left.
The body without organs plays two roles:
This whole bizarre relationship between and makings of the two terms of the system can be made a lot more clear if we understand that the point of these constructs is to establish a parallel between the relationship between the capitalist and the factories he owns and a person and his organs, to facilitate the unification of political economy and psychoanalysis. (This analogy is actually already embedded in psychoanalysis by Freud, who makes the metaphor of "investment" in desire as akin to a capitalist investing in businesses). Under capitalism, Capital (which is also rather like God) supplies the conceptual flow of money that allow all the machines in his possession to function. He transcribes the writings which allow the flows to move the way they do in his book. He takes credit for the whole system as his ingenious design. But from a socialist perspective, he has done nothing other than capture surplus-value of the hard working laborers, and things would be better if he was out of the way.
Similarly, we have the illusion that we directly invest all our organs with our intentions: my mouth moves because I want to speak, my feet move because I want to walk, etc. But Guattari would rather we experience ego death and understand that this personal will of “I” is an illusion on top of a cosmic desire that is beyond us. This illusion can only really be seen in its broken-down form in clinical schizophrenia, in which the organs are invested and disinvested erratically with libido, and do not seem to work according the plan of the person anymore. It is like the organs are proletarians who have rebelled against their master, taken over their factories, gotten him out of the way.
Guattari describes the “body without organs” as taking different forms in different phases of history. Under capitalism it is “the body of capital”, but after Guattari’s anticipated revolution takes place, we will exist in a state of “schizophrenia” in which the body without organs will become “the full body without organs”. The concepts here are very odd and the language is not exactly doing a lot to sell it.
Guattari never advocates for “communism”, but he does advocate for “a new Earth”, “one of healing”. What I interpret this to mean is that in the next phase of society this whole ontology Guattari is describing will have to be understood for what it is, and the “taking credit for” motion the body without organs does under capitalism will no longer happen. People will understand properly that their flows are moved around not ultimately due to marks in a bank account, but due to marks in the collective unconscious, the mind of God(-Man). And people will also understand that they do not act in accordance to a personal will, but to a transpersonal will that cannot be extracted from the will of every other person, and their inscriptions on the collective consciousness. It’s like a neo-shamanism, a neo-Hellenism.
Ok so we know how to describe the machines, but what are they doing, in a psychological sense?
Deleuze said that the central thesis of Anti-Oedipus is that desire is not a lack for a missing object, but desire is creative (we desire worlds; one desires a world which one might then endeavor to bring about).
What this means in the content of one’s psychic life is that, say, one might be in therapy encourages to fantasize or free-associating out loud about the type of love one wants, and by the end of the free associative chain one realizes that one wants a big titty goth gf specifically. Then one, emboldened by self knowledge, goes out and gets a big titty goth gf, and has five children with her. Look, desire is productive!
Where Guattari disagrees with psychoanalysis is here: the analyst believes that he has uncovered something in the unconscious when he draws out a desire like this. But Guattari does not believe that the unconscious can contain representations of things that can be discovered in this way (how can there be an unconscious representation — it would have to be presented to someone to be a reperesentartion). Guattari asserts that when the desiring-machines were forced to free associate by the analyst, they came up with the presentation of one’s desire in that moment as an essentially productive act.
This is one of the most interesting concepts to me in Anti-Oedipus, because it is absolutely central to the entire ontology, one of the first things introduced, and very mind-bendingly interesting to me, but it seems to have no legs outside of the text. I’ve never seen it used elsewhere, and it doesn’t make it into A Thousand Plateaus.
Why? I think this is because we get these three syntheses because in Anti-Oedipus, we still haven’t left the analyst’s couch. Even though it gets used to discuss anything and everything in Anti-Oedipus, it still seems to center the psychoanalytic experience. It feels like it comes from Lacan: the reference point for everything is speech in analysis.
We have the three syntheses:
All of this basically seems to be a way to describe how good outcomes can happen in an analytic session (how a new, creative desire is produced) without giving credit to either the analyst or the patient for having authentically discovered anything, since we don’t believe in discovering things in the unconscious anymore, just in producing new things.
The first synthesis is standard free association. The second synthesis is when free association breaks down and the analyst has to record the basic summary of a free associated chain, saving it for later. The third synthesis is when the analyst takes stock of all the recordings of the session, reads them back to the patient, and the patient discovers what they meant, understanding himself as a new man.
This has quite dizzying implications when the same structure is made a parallel with economic life. The basic picture here is: let’s say there is some kind of tribe where one group goes out and hunts, another fishes, another chops wood. At a certain point, production stops, and the tribespeople take the resources they gathered and engage in an act of recording on the collective body which can be described as “anti-production”.
What is “anti-production” in this context? This way of thinking of things seems indebted to Bataille’s general economy, but it would seem to merge two things that Bataille holds independently: stockpiling and ritual (or sacrifice). The goods are all taken account of. First there is an animal sacrifice. Then there is some manner of distributing the hunt to the various families according to custom. Then part of the hunt is set aside to the stockpile to not be consumed. Then the group tells stories and sings. The attitude here is admirable; in a better society, apart from capitalist alienation, "therapy" would be not very different than just living life and doing stuff.
The particular way in which this anti-production is then consumed is what makes one have one’s membership in the tribe. Guattari thinks being able to “consume anti-production” is what makes one feel “I am a member of my nation, one of the proud, great ones”. Guattari describes consumption as enjoyment — it is so good to be able to eat from the stockpile, it is so good to feel like one is part of the deserving ones.
Guattari in Anti-Oedipus basically seems to think that anti-production is bad and that desiring-production should go on forever. There should only be “and, and, and”. It’s bad that chains of desire in free-association stopped, it means that something broke down. Also, all territories, exclusive group identifications, classes, castes, etc. are bad and basically fascism — ideally people should be like schizophrenics, tiny free molecules, shirtless Burning Man ravers on acid consorting with Gaia, having identities & belongings as simultaneously microscopic and immense as possible. In A Thousand Plateaus he seems to relax this extreme position and have more appreciation for territories.