Anti-Oedipus II

2 Psychoanalysis and Familialism: the Holy Family

P52 neurosis 神经机能症
psychosis 1.精神病，精神错乱
2.精神极度紧张

P49 For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man. The auto-production of the unconscious suddenly became evident when the subject of the Cartesian cogito realized that it had no parents, when the socialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within the process of production, and when the cycle discovers its independence from an indefinite parental regression. To quote Artaud once again: “I got no/papamummy.”

pp. 62-63 It became evident that group fantasy was inseparable from the “symbolic” articulations that define a social field insofar as it is real, whereas the individual fantasy fitted the whole of this field over “imaginary” givens. If this first distinction is drawn out, we see that the individual fantasy is itself plugged into the existing social field, but apprehends it in the form of imaginary qualities that confer on it a kind of transcendence or immortality under the shelter of which the individual, the ego, plays out its pseudo destiny: what does it matter if I die, says the general, since the Army is immortal? The imaginary dimension of the individual fantasy has a decisive importance over the death instinct, insofar as the immortality conferred on the existing social order carried into the ego all the investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of “superegoization” and castration, all the resignation-desires (becoming a general; acquiring low, middle, or high rank), including a resignation to dying in the service of this order, whereas the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against the others (death to the foreigner, to those who are not of our own ranks!). The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity….. There results a third difference between group fantasy and the so-called individual fantasy….subject

P63 If we must still speak of utopia in this sense, a la Fourier, it is most assuredly not as an ideal model, but as revolutionary action and passion. In his recent works Klossowski indicates to us the only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx: by discovering how social production and relations of production are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself. For they are part of it, they are present there in every way while creating within the economic form their own repression, as well as the means for breaking this repression.

P67 We are not saying that Oedipus and castration do not amount to anything. We are oedipalized, we are castrated; psychoanalysis didn’t invent these operations, to which it merely lends the new resources and methods of its genius. But is this sufficient to silence the outcry of desiring-production: We are all schizos! We are all perverts! We are all libidos that are too viscous and too fluid – and not by preference, but wherever we have been carried by the deterritorialized flows.

P70 We are statistically or molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual, without knowing it or being fully aware of it, and finally we are transsexual in an elemental, molecular sense. That is why Proust, the first to deny….

P73 This common, transcendent, absent something will be called phallus or law, in order to designate “the” signifier that distributes the effects of meaning throughout the chain and introduces exclusions there (whence the oedipalizing interpretations of Lacanism). This signifier acts as the formal cause of the triangulation – that is to say, makes possible both the form of the triangle and its reproduction: Oedipus has as its formula 3+1, the One of the transcendent phallus without which the terms considered would not take the form of a triangle. It is as if the so-called signifying chain, made up of elements that are themselves nonsignifying – of polyvocal writing and detachable fragments – were the object of a special treatment, a crushing operation that extracted a detached object from the chain, a despotic signifier from whose law the entire chain seems consequently to be suspended, each link triangulated. There we have a curious paralogism implying a transcendent use of the syntheses of the unconscious: we pass from detachable partial objects to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by an assigning of lack. For example, in the capitalist code and its trinitary expression, money as detachable chain is converted into capital as detached object, which exists only in the fetishist view of stocks and lacks.

pp. 74-75 Everywhere, in this reversion, the innocence of flowers instead of the guilt of conversion….This conversion is therefore promoted by psychoanalysis first of all by making a global and specific use of the connective syntheses. This use can be defined as transcendent, and implies a first paralogism in the psychoanalytic process. For a simple reason, we again make use of Kantian terminology. In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics – its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution – this time materialist – can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis.

P86 there is no ego that identifies with races, peoples, and persons in a theater of representation, but proper names that identify with races, peoples, and persons with regions, thresholds, or effects in a production of intensive quantities. The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of “effects”: effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs….History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect – all the names of history, and not the name of the father.

P88 It is the function of the libido to invest the social field in unconscious forms, thereby hallucinating all history, reproducing in delirium entire civilizations, races, and continents, and intensely “feeling” the becoming of the world. There is no signifying chain without a Chinamen, an Arab, and a black who drop in to trouble the night of a white paranoiac….

pp. 105-106 We define the reactionary unconscious investment as the investment that conforms to interest of the dominant class, but operates on its own account, according to the terms of desire, through the segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses from which Oedipus is derived: I am of the superior race. The revolutionary unconscious investment is such that desire, still in its own mode, cuts across the interest of the dominated, exploited classes, and causes flows to move that are capable of breaking apart both the segregations and their Oedipal applications – flows capable of hallucinating history, of reanimating the races in delirium, of setting continents ablaze. No, I am not of your kind, I am the outsider and the deterritorialized, “I am of a race inferior for all eternity….I am a beast, a Negro.”
There again it is a question of an intense potential for investment and counterinvestment in the unconscious. Oedipus disintegrates because its very conditions have disintegrated. The nomadic and polyvocal use of the conjunctive syntheses is in opposition to the segregative and biunivocal use. Delirium has something like two poles, racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic. And between the two, ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings where the unconscious itself oscillates between its reactionary charge and its revolutionary potential. Even Schreber finds himself to be the Great Mongol when he breaks through the Aryan segregation. Whence the ambiguity in the texts of great authors, when they develop the theme of races, as rich in ambiguity as destiny itself. Here schizoanalysis must unravel the thread. 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. The exclamation “So it’s …!”, or the meditation of Igitur on race, in an essential relationship with madeness.

P114 One acts as if it were possible to conclude directly from psychic repression the nature of the repressed, and from the prohibition the nature of what is prohibited. There we have a typical paralogism – yet another, a fourth paralogism that we shall have to call displacement. For what really takes place is that the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the “instincts,” so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction. This is indeed the only way the law has of getting a grip on intention, of making the unconscious guilty.

P119 Psychic repression is delegated by the social formation, while the desiring-formation is disfigured, displaced by psychic repression….The family is the delegated agent of psychic repression, or rather the agent delegated to psychic repression; the incestuous drives are the disfigured image of the repressed. The Oedipus complex, the process of oedipalization, is therefore the result of this double operation. It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives. In this way the family/drives relationship is substituted for the relationship between the two orders of production, in a diversion where the whole of psychoanalysis goes astray.

P121 No, psychoanalysis invent nothing, though they have invented much in another way, and have legislated a lot, reinforced a lot, injected a lot….It is the recording of desire on the increate body without organs, and the familial recording on the socius, that are in opposition throughout the two groups. The innate science in psychosis and the neurotic experimental sciences. The schizoid excentric circle and the neurosis triangle….On a more general level, it is the two kinds of use made of synthesis that are in opposition. On the one hand there are the desiring-machines, and on the other the Oedipal-narcissistic machine.

P126 (family, 2 functions) In short, Oedipus is strictly undecidable. It can be found everywhere all the more readily for being undecidable, and in this sense it is correct to say that Oedipus is strictly good for nothing….For in any case desiring-production is the cause, the ultimate cause of both the psychotic subversions that shatter Oedipus or overwhelm it, and of the neurotic reverberations that constitute it. Such a principle takes on its full meaning if it is related to the problem of “actual factors….The following choice is imposed on us: either the actual factors is conceived in a totally exterior privative fashion (which is an impossibility), or it descends into an internal qualitative conflict that is necessarily understood in relation to Oedipus. (Oedipus, the fountainhead where the psychoanalyst washes his hands of the world’s iniquities.).…In an altogether different direction, if we consider the idealist deviations of psychoanalysis, we see in them an interesting attempt at giving the actual factors a status other than ulterior or privative. (Jung)…The actual factor is desiring-production insofar as it is caught up in this relationship, this conflict, and these modalities.

P128 We maintain that the cause of the disorder, neurosis or psychosis, is always in desiring-production, in its relation to social production, in their different or conflicting regimes, and the modes of investment that desiring-production performs in the system of social production. The actual factor is desiring-production insofar as it is caught up in this relationship, this conflict, and these modalities. Nor is this factor either ulterior or privative. Being constitutive of the full life of desire, it is contemporary with the most tender age, and it accompanies this life with every step. It does not arise after Oedipus, it in no way presupposes an Oedipal organization, nor a pre-oedipal pre-organization. On the contrary, it is Oedipus that depends on desiring-production, either as a stimulus of one form or another, a simple inductor through which the anoedipal organization of desiring-production is formed, beginning with early childhood, or as an effect of the psychic and social repression imposed on desiring-production by social reproduction by means of the family. The term “actual” is not used because it designates what is most recent, and because it would be opposed to “former” or “infantile”; it is used in terms of its difference with respect to “virtual.” And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor. It is indeed in this sense that the idea of the afterward seemed to us to be a final paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and practice; active desiring-production, in its very process, invests from the beginning a constellation of somatic, social, and metaphysical relations that do not follow after Oedipal psychological relations, but that on the contrary will be applied to the underlying Oedipal constellation defined by reaction, or else will exclude this constellation from the field of investment constituting their activity. Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactionary (reactionnel), such is Oedipus. It is only a reactionary formation, a formation that results from a reaction to desiring-production. It is a serious mistake to consider this formation in isolation, abstractly, independently of the actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.

Michael Hardt’s Reading Notes:

1. Expression vs. Production At the end of the very first paragraph of the book D&G warn us against metaphors. "Something is produced: effects of a machine, and not of metaphors" (p. 2). Why are they so worried about metaphors, and why are metaphors the alternative to machinic production? I think these questions refer to a general problematic that is elaborated throughout the second part of the book in terms of the alternative between production and expression. Schizoanalysis declares itself for production and against expression -- but what exactly is expression? In his book Spinoza and the Problem of Expression written a few years earlier, Deleuze posed the concept of expression as the key to his entire reading of Spinoza. It was an unconventional concept to choose because Spinoza never uses the terms and it had never played an important role in the long history of Spinoza interpretation. In that work Deleuze gave "expression" a very precise definition. Spinoza's being, he said, which is one and universal, is expressed through the attributes of thought and extension. What is important in this expression is that being and the world have the same essence, being is not something outside of or separate from the world. Deleuze highlights the fact here that there is an immanent notion of causality at work in this expression, in which the cause is immanent to (rather than separate from) its effect. To say then in this framework that being is expressed in the modalities of the world means that being causes or creates these modalities but not in any exterior way; being remains always within these modes, as immanent cause. Expression is thus used to mark a certain kind of production--specifically, a production in which the producer remains immanent to what is produced, in which producer and produced share a common essence. (It is interesting to note that in that book Deleuze used this notion of expression in opposition to and as a critique of semiology, in the sense that signs and sign systems are external to what they represent or signify.) Now in Anti-Oedipus D&G use the term "expression" very differently, in fact almost in the opposite sense. (I don't have any good explanation to this change of usage nor do I attach any great significance to it. In fact this later usage might be closer to our everyday usage of "expression." In any case I only want to clarify how the term is used.) In Anti-Oedipus, expression is related to representation and signification, and thus it designates precisely what is not immanent to the term or thing. Expression poses a meaning outside of and detached from the real process and hence blocks the process. As such expression is the primary enemy of production. This is what Oedipus and psychoanalysis do: substitute representation or expression for process or production. "... the reproduction of desire gives way to a simple representation, in the process as well as theory of the cure. The productive unconscious makes way for an unconscious that knows only how to express itself--express itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream" (p. 54). The expressive unconscious is what destroys the productive unconscious: "The unconscious ceases to be what it is--a factory, a workshop--to become a theater, a scene and its staging" (p. 55). (And I should probably add, only to be obstinate, that factory, workshop, theater are not metaphors here but real forms or functions of the unconscious.) Expression destroys production, or displaces it, or takes away its power. D&G's preference for production over expression is posed not even in ethical terms (production is good, expression is bad) but in properly ontological terms: the being of the unconscious is production; expression is an alienation or falsification of that essence -- "the unconscious ceases to be what it is ...." This is not just a question of the unconscious or the being of the unconscious. D&G claim that reality itself, being itself is the product of desiring machines, or more precisely it is the process of their producing. I want to flesh out further this distinction and conflict between expression and production. D&G give a rather practical key to this difference when they maintain that analysis should regard the problems of the unconscious not in terms of meaning (sens) but in terms of usage. "The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not "What does it mean?" but rather "How does it work?"" (p. 109). Consider this rule of practice in the example of the boy who puts the train in the tunnel. If we analyse this as an expression and ask what does this mean, we get the answer (at least in the oedipal framework) that he wants to have sex with his mother. On the other hand, reading this act (putting the train in the tunnel) as a production, as a machine, and asking how does this work takes us in a completely different direction--how does this machine connect to other machines, etc. Such an analytical practice is proper to the factory (questions of production and usage) rather than the theater (questions of expression and meaning). From this practical perspective it might be useful to pose this distinction as the difference between materialist and idealist conceptions and practices. "Oedipus is the idealist turning point" (p. 55). Or even more clearly, Oedipus is an idea: "Oedipus is not a state of desire and the drives, it is an idea, nothing but an idea that repression inspires in us concerning desire" (p. 115). Here we have a textbook example of the contrast and conflict between idealism and materialism. The idealist perspective poses an idea or a system of ideas as primary over and determinate of the material state of things. (In this case the idea of Oedipus is posed over the state of desire and drives.) The materialist perspective, in defense or reaction, reverses the priority such the state of things (in this case the state of desire and drives) are primary over or prior to any ideas. Compare this to the classic reference for this in Marx: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Preface to CPE). It's interesting to me, and I think important, that each of these propositions of materialism come in reaction to idealism, as an inversion or reversal of the causal process. In any case, this is the sense in which schizo- analysis is a materialist psychiatry in contrast to the idealism of Oedipus. A materialist psychiatry recognizes the state of desire and its production as primary and determinant whereas an idealist psychiatry rests on ideas and their expression. In other words, the distinction and conflict between production and expression corresponds to that between materialism and idealism along with that between usage and meaning. In fact, I think these correspondences make more clear the practical implications of the distinction. To understand the distinction between production and expression in a more general and complex way, though, we have to link it to the parallel distinction between immanence and transcendence (just as Deleuze did earlier to explain the notion of expression in the Spinoza book)--a distinction that has played a central role in the history of metaphysics and the history of the critique of metaphysics. This is the fourth set of correspondence. What we have so far is
production expression usage meaning materialism idealism immanence transcendence
Last class in reference to part 1 of AO I spoke of immanence in rather straightforward ontological terms. Being is immanent in the sense that it inheres in the world; the essence of being is identical to the essence of the modalities of the world. Being is not elsewhere, in some other world, beyond. In that way, I wanted to say that the notion of reality or being as constituted by machines is an immanent rather than a transcendent notion of being. Here in the second part of the book, D&G's use of immanent and transcendent is more difficult and refers specifically to the terminology of Kant's critique. They explain these terms in two passage, p. 75 and 109. "In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to the understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics" (p. 75 top). What they are taking from Kant here is the principle that a legitimate use of a synthesis is defined by the immanence of the criteria to the field of the synthesis (the understanding or the unconscious). If the criteria are external or transcendental to the understanding or the unconscious then the use is illegitimate. The confusing part is that Kant then goes on to define transcendental philosophy by this immanence of criteria, and in its name denounce metaphysics because of its transcendent use of syntheses. I'm not so concerned with really understanding Kant here. All I want to point out is that transcendental philosophy operates on immanent criteria and critiques transcendent uses of syntheses. It is with this in mind that D&G pose their materialist psychiatry and schizoanalysis in terms of a "transcendental unconscious," which means precisely that it is "defined by the immanence of its criteria" (p. 75). Now, you should be asking, if it is defined the immanence of criteria what is transcendental about transcendental philosophy or about this transcendental unconscious? In this case I would say that the principles or logic or schema of the syntheses by which the unconscious functions (and their legitimate usage) are what transcend that functioning itself. In this specific usage, "transcendental" (not transcendent) is not contested by D&G but affirmed. In the later passage, D&G make more clear how this question of immanence and transcendence relates to the other distinctions I've been pointing to: production and expression, usage and meaning. Then Malcolm Lowry who wants his novels to be regarded as machines. A novel can be anything you want it to be as long as it works. "But [that is true] on condition that meaning be nothing other than use, that it become a firm principle only if we have at our disposal immanent criteria capable of determining the legitimate uses, as opposed to the illegitimate ones that relate use instead to a hypothetical meaning and re-establish a kind of transcendence. Analysis termed transcendental is precisely the determination of these criteria, immanent to the field of the unconscious, insofar as they are opposed to the transcendent exercises of a "What does it mean?" Schizoanalysis is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis" (p. 109). The search for meaning points outside the unconscious and thus establishes a transcendence; the analysis of use, on the other hand, involves the determination of criteria immanent to the unconscious. Following Kant you can call the first metaphysics and the second transcendental analysis. Or, more in our framework, relate the first to expression and meaning and the second to production and use. This entire discussion about expression and production, which involves distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of the various syntheses, revealing and attacking paralogisms or false logics, began from an ontological or methodological imperative, but it comes down eventually to ethical consequences for D&G. There is a paralogism that corresponds to each synthesis (plus two extra), each paralogism or illegitimate usage leads to an error, and each error brings with it an ethical condition. "The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious" (p. 111 mid). (We should discuss later how lack results from extrapolation, law from the double-bind, and the signifier from application.) It is clear once again that the cause of the errors is a methodological error, an idealist rather than a materialist conception of the unconscious, transcendent rather than immanent criteria, a focus on expression rather than production. From these three errors, then, follow what D&G call their theological cortege: "insufficiency of being, guilt, and signification" (p. 111). Elsewhere in the text D&G characterize the ethical situation of schizoanalysis as joy and innocence. This seems to me the final payoff in the contrast between expression and production. It's true that they affirm production over expression because production is true to being (being is desiring-production) whereas expression distorts, displaces, and depotentializes being, but also and maybe more importantly the liberation of production rather than its repression in expression leads to joy. Before leaving the question of expression, I want to point to the fact that we already have in this second part the kernel of a theory of literary interpretation and evaluation. Literature (or maybe only good) literature is like schizophrenia in that it is really about production not expression; it's not important what it means but what it does, how it works. "That is what style is, or rather the absence of style--asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode--desire" (p. 133 mid-bot). Production is what is important in literature--not literary production in the sense of the socio-historical conditions of the writer and so forth, but the production of desire in or through literature. Literary interpretation, then, should only be about revealing these desiring-machines in literature: "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 ..." (p. 106 top). Literary interpretation, like a materialist psychiatry and probably all other disciplines, should involve revealing the desiring-machines at work and putting them to use productively. This is a way to conceive of an immanent literary criticism, an interpretation that remains immanent to the text in the sense that it takes up the very desiring-machines that the text creates and sets them up to work. This isn't very clear yet, but I think we'll have an opportunity later, in coming weeks, to see some examples and get a more concrete idea what such reading would do, how it would operate.

2. Liberation / revolution D&G insist on using several concepts that many might think today discredited and antiquated--in fact, discredited precisely by arguments such as D&G's. I'm thinking for example of the concepts of alienation, universality, and totality. I want to say something briefly about totality. Actually, they don't use the term totality but I think it is implicit in the argument when they are contrasting two notions of the social field, 3+1 versus 4+n. They introduce the discussion by recalling Bergson's notion of a completely open movement in the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Now, 3+1 is the formula of Oedipus, because it traps all social phenomena in the triangle (mommy, daddy, me) and then subsumes that triangle into a single transcendent notion of order. This is a closed notion of the social totality twice over -- first because of trapping all phenomena in the triangle and second because the triangle is subsequently reduced to a unity. They oppose to this closed notion of the social totality what I would call an open totality. This alternative notion "opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+n)" (p. 96 mid-top). Now, one should object here that earlier, in part 1, D&G denounced totality in the name of multiplicity (p. 42). I would say, however, that what they denounced there was a specific kind of totality that reduces the heterogeneous parts to a transcendent unity. They affirm instead an immanent notion of totality constituted by multiplicities and by parts that never reduce to a homogeneous and transcendent whole. The antiquated and discredited concepts that I am really interested in, though, are repression, liberation and revolution. These are the explicit goals of the entire book. Desiring-machines themselves, the point of departure for the book, lead to revolution or rather they are the revolution -- or rather, that the liberation of desire is revolution. "no desiring-machine can be posed without demolishing entire social sectors .... desire is revolutionary in its essence ... and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised" (p. 116 mid-top). And later on that same page: "Desire does not 'want' revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants" (p. 116 mid-bot). Let me read a little farther on this same page because they quickly explain at least a little more clearly how in what sense desire is revolutionary. "From the beginning of this study we have maintained both that social production and desiring-production are one and the same, and that they have differing régimes, with the result that a social form of production exercises an essential repression of desiring-production, and also that desiring-production--a "real" desire--is potentially capable of demolishing the social form" (p. 116 bot). There is a lot to understand in that sentence. First of all, how are social production and desiring-production the same thing but belonging to different régimes. This question of régime is one we will have to confront seriously before too long, but I don't think we have the tools to do so yet. The second part of the sentence is equally difficult: repression involves the dominance of the social form over desiring-production and inversely the liberation of desiring-production from that repression destroys the social form, that is, it is revolution. I want to pose all this now as a question for the future, and instead of confronting the general theoretical claim I want to turn rather to three examples or axes of repression and liberation that they refer to, even if briefly, in this second part: with respect to sexual difference, sexuality, and race.

3. Invisible concepts Finally I want to point to a few concepts that I find interesting here but that are invisible because of translation difficulties. The first involves their use of the word "quelconque": any, whichever, whatever. They use it either as "nature quelconque" or "valeur quelconque." Here is the first example: "Whence the idea that the stimuli are not organizers, but mere inductors: ultimately, the nature of these inductors is a matter of indifference [de nature quelconque]" (p. 91 mid). Another example: "Yes, the family is a stimulus--but a stimulus that is qualitatively indifferent [de valeur quelconque], an inductor that is neither an organizer nor a disorganizer" (p. 98 bot). Ok. I don't exactly think the translation is wrong but I think that this notion of "quelconque" might not really have to do with indifference. I would like to relate it to the term I pointed out last week in part 1, "la vie générique" which was translated as species- life. I sense that "quelconque" and "générique" are both hinting at a technical concept that is not really indifferent. I have to keep working on this but I think it's a way to rethink the concept of "the general." Second: survol, overflight. This is a rather straightforward concept, or at least it doesn't pose any real translation problems. I just want to point it out and highlight its use. The origin is in a note that refers to Jean Oury: "In his presentation, Jean Oury calls Jayet 'the non-delimited," "in permanent flight [survol]" (p. 386 n.20). Then they take the term up in the text to explain the "or" of the schizo: "The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at once, but each of the two as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides [qu'il survole en glissant]" (p. 76). "He is and remains in disjunction: he does not abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements by means of elaboration; instead, he affirms it through a continuous overflight [survol] spanning an indivisible distance. He is not simply bisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transexual" (p. 76-77). Trans- here refers to the continuous overflight between the two. And from here on overflight will always be accompanied by indivisible distances. One final example: "But if the body without organs is indeed this desert, it is as an indivisible, non-decomposable distance over which the schizo glides [survole] in order to be everywhere something real is produced ..." (p. 86-87). Curious concept -- both for its maintaining together the disjunction and also for its distance from the plane over which it flies.

Anti-Oedipus I

1 The Desiring-Machines

P11 Capital as quasi cause: BwO

P13 Disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes; but is this genealogy Oedipal, is it recorded in the Oedipal triangulation?

P18 The question becomes: What does the celibate machine produce? What is produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive quantities.

P26 Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial object, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production….(Desire) It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing…

P35 Schizophrenia is desiring-production as the limit of social production….Between the two there is nothing but an ongoing process of becoming that is the becoming of reality.

P43 Maurice Blanchot, Proust, Joyce. This drawing-together, this reweaving is what Joyce called re-embodying. The body without organs is produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes. And when it operates on them, when it turns back upon them (se rabat sur elles), it brings about transverse communications, transfinite summarizations, polyvocal and transcursive inscriptions on its own surface, on which the functional breaks of partial objects are continually intersected by breaks in the signifying chains, and by breaks effected by a subject that uses them as reference points in order to locate itself.

Michael Hardt’s Reading Notes:

connective synthesis disjunctive synthesis conjunctive synthesis (and ... and) (or ... or) (it's me ...)
desiring machine body without organs subject (intensity=0) (zones of intensity)
schizophrenia paranoia machine célibataire pleasure
production enregistrement / coding consumption anti-production forme miraculeuse
labor capital libido Numen Voluptas .m:2

Let's start with machine production. Everything is machines, machines connected to other machines. I think we should read this as a properly ontological claim, a claim about the nature of reality. What does it mean to say that all is machinic?

All is ... Take just the first half of that statement: "All is ...." The form of this statement "All is ..." already implies an ontological claim that being is one, being is always and everywhere the same, or rather that being is univocal. Nietzsche uses the same form when he says "The world is will to power and nothing else." Spinoza says very much the same thing when he says that all being is striving (conatus). And I assume it is Lucretius and/or Aristotle that D&G are referring to when they use the term flow or the Greek word hylé , which means matter: being consists of flows or matter (rather than atoms, say). [Help me if this is wrong.] (Compare this too to how Marx would say that labor is the source of all wealth in capitalist society -- but let's leave that aside for the moment.) So what is common to these three ontological claims: the world is will to power, being is striving, and being is flows or becoming. Well, first of all, there is no other to the world, to being; being or the world is all there is. There is no other world or other realm beyond this one. Second, being is one; there is no difference in nature among its parts; it is all in some sense the same. Third, the unifying factor in each of these ontological claims is not a thing but a movement: will to power, striving, flows. Clearly D&G's notions of desire and production are meant to fit in this line of fundamental ontological concepts. So, what we have so far with the statement "All is ..." is that being is all (it has no other), being is one (always and everywhere the same), and being is a process (will to power, striving, flow, desire, production). I'll be coming back to this ontological point.

Machines Let's go on now to the second half of the claim: "All is machines." Our common notion of machines, first of all, is that they are asubjective and unnatural; that is, they are distinct from the human subjects and from nature. But this is precisely the first distinction that D&G want to attack. The human, the machinic, and the natural are all one. They are all processes of production. The first great advantage of the schizophrenic is its recognition of this unity. Here D&G are following Büchner's Lenz: "There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process of that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing- machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life [la vie générique]: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever" (p. 2). First of all, the schizophrenic recognizes correctly the ontological notion that all is one, that humans and nature are all one process. In other words, there is no such thing is a human nature that is separate from nature itself. (Spinoza: imperium in imperio.) Our first definition of schizophrenia, then, is simply the recognition of this fact of being. "Schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring- machines, universal primary production as 'the essential reality of man and nature'" (p. 5). Ok. So the schizophrenic can recognize the truth of being that there is no fundamental distinction between humans and nature -- but what about machines? Why say being is machinic? Normally we think of machines being even a third realm, not human and not natural. This might be the first advantage of the concept "machine" for D&G, a kind of negative advantage -- negative in the sense of highlighting what machines are not. A being of machines is a being that does not refer to either the human or nature. In fact, human subjects and nature will only arise as effects or products of machinic being. Being itself is asubjective and unnatural, being is anonymous and artificial. But really it goes farther than that, because machines are what demonstrate that humans and nature are really one. "... we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry" (p. 4) that is, they become one in the conception of being as machine. Now, although machines themselves are asubjective and unnatural, however, we normally conceive of machines as connected to humans and nature. In fact, normally we would say that the subject that operates the machine is human and the object that the machine transforms is nature. Think of the way a human subject might use a bulldozer or a chainsaw. The human subject directs the machine to modify the natural object: to move dirt or cut wood. Now, this is not at all D&G's conception of machines. The machines here have no subject and no object, or at least not a natural object. This is the second important aspect of the concept of "machine" for D&G, a rather paradoxical aspect considering the way we normally conceive of machines. Begin with the subject part. When I say there is no subject of these machines I mean that there is no intelligence that stands behind them and directs their operation. This seems very close to a Nietzschean claim that you might be familiar with, that there is no doer behind the doing. Nietzsche means that there is no subject that stands outside of its actions as a foundation, directing them; what is primary is activity itself, or rather the field of forces. In very much the same way D&G's machines have no subject that is prior to them and directs them. The machines act of their own accord (they connect and cut), but we should not then think that the machines themselves are subjects. D&G want them to be anonymous and asubjective. Subjects do not stand behind these machines in another sense. Not only are there no human subjects that use or direct the operation of machines also the machines were not created by human subjects. If we look for their genealogy, all machines are created by other machines and back in an infinite chain of production. D&G write "desiring production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine of a machine" (p. 6). There is no original point that starts the production process; all production and machines are result of other production and machines. Now to the object part. I want to say that just as the machines have no subject behind them, they also have no objects -- but that is not quite right. Machines cut and connect. They operate on flows and on other machines. The anus is a machine that cuts the flow of shit or the infant's mouth is a machine that connects to the breast, which is a milk producing machine. These machines, then, don't operate on an object that is in any fundamental way other to or exterior to them; rather, together with the object the machine forms a new process, or a new machine. The infant's mouth connected to the milk producing breast form a new machine. A machine is a process and thus connected or cut apart the machines modulate. (Parenthetically I wonder here if there is a significant difference be a machine and a flow. Can a flow be conceived as a machine so that machines only act on other machines, connecting and disconnecting to form always new machines? Or are flows distinct because passive as opposed to the activity of machines? I would tend towards thinking they are at base the same, but I'm not sure about this.) In any case, this is all part of what I'm proposing as the second important aspect of the machines, that they do not have subjects or objects in the conventional sense. Let me read a passage that links this back to the first aspect of machines. "... man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other ... rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer- product" (pp. 4-5). In other words, producer and product have the same essence, and that essence is production. Once again, the schizophrenic is the one who recognizes this truth about being. "The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product. We need merely note that the pure "thisness" of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing" (p. 7). All is production, and producer and product are indistinguishably absorbed into this process. The first two reasons I've given for why using the concept of "machine" were both really negative: first to separate it from the division between the human and the natural, and second to highlight the lack of subjects and objects (producer and product) in the functioning of the machines. The third and most important reason for using the concept "machine" is more straightforward and positive, and that is to emphasize the productivity of being. "Everything is production" (p. 4); or more conventionally being is becoming. Being is not a fixed thing but a continually modulating process. This third aspect seems clearer to me and not in need of much explanation. At this point the connective synthesis should be rather clear. Machines connect one to another to form together new machines. "...there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast -- the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction" (p. 5). All the machines are capable of potentially infinite connections in all senses.

Desire All of this about machines sets up the central question, which is about desire. I know that they don't always use it this way, but I think it makes no sense to talk about "desire" per se in this framework. There is no such thing as desire, only desiring-machines. I mean by this that desire has to be given the same attributes that I just claimed belong to machines. First of all, desire as desiring- machine is not a thing but a process, an act of producing. That's rather straightforward and not so different from other notions of desire. Second, desire as desiring machine has no subject and no object. For example, the statement "the boy desires to have sex with his mother" is completely out of context here. In this framework there is no subject that has the desire or the desiring-machine, nor can desire really function as a verb unless somehow it could be a verb referring to no subject. The subject does not exist before desiring-machines but only after, as an effect or residue of production. Perhaps precisely because desiring machines are asubjective, with no subject behind them, we cannot conceive of the object of desire in the same way. Desiring- machines cannot be conceived as a desire to do or have an object or even achieve a state. (Hence "the object of desire" really doesn't make sense here.) Desiring-machines have no object, or goal, or telos, but rather are completely invested in the process, the production. Desiring-machines can thus never be "satisfied" or come to a completion. In this sense, desiring-machines are again very like Nietzsche's notion of will to power. The will to power is not the will to have power (such as the will to be president of the United States) nor even really the will to be powerful. If it were then the will to power could be satisfied, it could come to an end. He is made president and thus his will to power goes away. The will to power does not have an object in that way. It is a driving force. Desiring- machines similarly are focused a movement or a production, not on a goal or an object. The only object of desiring-machines is production itself. "The satisfaction the handyman [bricoleur] experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket or diverts a stream of water can scarcely be explained in terms of "playing mommy and daddy." or by the pleasure of violating a taboo [transgression]. 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" (p. 7). So desire is always about production, or even the production of production. That is why I think that even when they use the work "desire" you should always read "desiring-machine." This is also why desire here has nothing to do with lack as it does in Freudian and Lacanian terminology. Since desiring machines are focused only on their own production, there is no object of desire and hence no object lacking. "Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production" (p. 28). Lack is not cause but a result. Third, I wonder if we can turn this question of desire always being desiring-machine around. In other words, if all desire should be read as desiring-machine, that is, if there is no such thing as "desire" itself, then should we also read all machines as desiring- machines? Are all machines desiring-machines? I'm not prepared to answer that but I think the answer is yes, all machines are desiring- machines. (Is a paranoiac machine a desiring-machine?)

Body without Organs What is a body without organs? Well, first of all they take the term from Artaud, who producing organs such as the mouth, the anus, the stomach, and so forth. D&G say that the body without organs is full. The body without organs is full in the sense that it is a blank surface without the interconnected functions or parts that organs would be. It is full precisely in the sense that it lacks any depth or differentiation. Without organs this body has no means of production, and precisely D&G write "The full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction" (p. 8). Hence the "apparent conflict" between desiring-machines and the body without organs. It is important to D&G that the body without organs is actually produced by desiring machines and the connective synthesis, but I don't want to go into that. What seems interesting to me is the relation of the body without organs to paranoia on one hand and to capitalism on the other. First paranoia. "This is the real meaning of the paranoiac machine: the desiring-machines attempt to break into the body without organs, and the body without organs repels them, since it experiences them as an over-all persecution apparatus" (p. 9). While the schizophrenic follows desiring-machines everywhere on its errant walk, the paranoiac is hypersensitive, it suffers from desiring-machines, and wishes it could turn them all off. Desiring-machines are torment to the paranoiac. The body without organs is thus defined by the zero state of intensity: "intensity=0 ... designates the body without organs" (p. 21). The body without organs has no intensity, no production. Example of BwO: "eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up" (pp. 37-38). Now the two aspects of the BwO that most interest D&G are its function of recording (enregistrement) and its apparent productive capacities, that is the miraculous form, the appearance of miracles. "The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs" (p. 11). First of all, in the first half of that sentence, the BwO is a surface on which the production of desire is recorded or really on which it is coded. Desiring-machines or production becomes signification. In the second half of the sentence, they claim that because of this recording or coding of production it appears that desiring-machines actually spring from the body without organs, even though we know that they really don't. This second part, this false appearance of production is what they call the "miraculating-machine." Miracle here seems only to refer to the appearance of an impossible production. These two aspects of the body without organs (recording production and miraculous production) are both also an aspect of capital, and I think more comprehensible in this domain. Capital is a body without organs and labor is a productive machine. Capital is thus the unproductive surface on which the production of labor is recorded or on which it is coded. We might say that in this case the recording or coding means that the value of labor/production is determined on capital. For the miraculous aspect they refer to Marx's concept of relative surplus value. Marx uses relative surplus value to name a strategy of capital to increase profits by increasing the value produced during a given amount of labor time. If the labor is more productive and wages remain the same there will be more profit. One rather crude strategy of relative surplus value might be to speed up the assembly line and thus produce more in the same amount of labor time. More often relative surplus value has to do with technological advances that make labor more productive. So what D&G pick up on in Marx here is the fact that with the development of relative surplus value it seems like capital not labor is what produces capital. "It [capital] makes the machine responsible for producing a relative surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be miraculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as quasi cause. As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. [And I would add, what they are most importantly aware of is the fact that capital is produced by labor, that capital itself is unproductive.] But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on all of production. (Furnishing or realizing surplus value is the right of recording.)" (pp. 10-11). Ok. Here, then, capital is a body without organs in these two respects. First, production or labor is recorded or coded or really given value in capital, on the surface of the body without organs (the role of money will be central here). Second, while capital is unproductive, it appears to be productive as if through a miracle and thus masks the real productive processes. This second aspect of capital as the body without organs is precisely what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the fact that the production process is masked or eclipsed. "... we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends" (p. 24). We have disjunction, then, between the way a commodity appears to have been caused and its real process of production. "Production is not recorded in the same way it is produced" (p. 12). This disjunction operated by the body without organs is what D&G call the disjunctive synthesis. "The disjunctive synthesis of recording therefore comes to overlap [cover over, recouvrir] the connective syntheses of production" (pp. 12-13). It seems that in this first example of capital as the body without organs the disjunction, the either/or, is between a real process of production and a false reinsription of that process: capital is really produced by labor, but it seems to be produced by capital. My sense is that this shouldn't be understood merely as a real process versus an illusion, but ... Finally here we can arrive at Oedipus, because in the process of recording or really in the disjunctive synthesis, Oedipus acts just like capital. "... does the recording of desire go by way of the various stages in the formation of the Oedipus complex [pass through oedipal terms]? Disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes; but is this genealogy Oedipal, is it recorded in the Oedipal triangulation?" (p. 13). First of all, oedipalization and familialism involves a disjunctive synthesis in that it assigns to desiring production another (and false) genealogy. Well, I haven't talked at all about the third synthesis and its coordinated elements, but we can take that up later, along with the other questions that arise.