Maxwell's Reviews > Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

I loved this the first time I read it. Hated it the second time. On the third I realize that, at least, it is worth reading three times.

I’m caught in a love triangle between Deleuze (and his deformed #accelerationism brood) and their antagonists in the socialist tradition of dialectical / psychoanalytic geist-mongering. I’ve learned so much from books by Freudo-Marxists, like Adorno, Althusser and Zizek, which try to account for socialism’s dismal popularity with the very masses it seeks to emancipate, doing so through a model of the unconscious internalizing a deceitful ideological superstructure. How the malicious fantasies of the Big Other can smokescreen duplicitous regimes of violence and abuse. But I’ve felt for awhile that there is something missing from this structure of deception, and have finally returned to the seismic alterity of Deleuze and Guattari’s objection; “No, the masses were not deceived. They wanted fascism and that is what must be explained.” What can we extract from this volatile embryo of positivist desire?

Armies, flags, authority and racism were not vanishing objects miraging the hole in subjectivity; for Deleuze & Guattari, they were (and are) points of libidinal investure. The domination and bloodletting of fascism, communism and capitalism hasn’t deceived people--it has excited them. Marxian ideology, even inflected by Freud, can’t really reckon with the enjoyment people receive from sado-masochistic totalitarianism, how it inflames and enchants us, how it ravishes us with intensive states. Chalking this up to ‘ideology’ is to some extent letting people off the hook. As Michel Foucault observes in the introduction, Anti-Oedipus is not content to confront fascism as a political order, but ‘the fascism that lives within all of us’.

The register of historical materialism and psychoanalysis wheezes dust trying to liberate us from the cozy delirium of their enslavement, our ‘affection for servitude’. That said, I’m not claiming that Deleuzo-Guattarian anti-capitalist praxis has had better real world results--as Alain Badiou and other communist-conservatives will delight to tell you, there has yet to be a third world Anti-Oedipal revolution. There’s no schizophrenic Che Guevara. At least not yet. But if you want to shine a dim light on the pitch-black labyrinth of our dilapidating & hopeless circumstances, Deleuze and Guattari have a torch for you. Just bring your own helmet.

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

Desire is production. It is creative; teeming, frenetic, wild and fecund with virtual infinities of possibility across an immanent network of movement and growth. At the time of Anti-Oedipus’ publication this was a new & unique conceptual model, not insofar as it breaks from Freudo-Lacanian theory of desire as an experience of lack, the pale quiver of incompleteness, but because it gives a full account of desire as a growing, proliferating nucleus through a rigorous philosophical elaboration. Desire is the fifth element inscribing each discrete & differentiated strata of life with its vitalizing processes. Becoming and production. The pre-ontological flux of energy which modulates its flow through bodies / machines (which are ((sort of)) the same thing) and which sends an electrical current through materiality is desiring production.

I should say that there were Spinozan monisms and process ontologies in philosophy (going back at least to Heraclitus) before Deleuze & Guattari, who are part of an ‘ulterior canon’ of philosophy rather than a break from it. They aren't anti-philosophers. But D&G thumbed the nose of the faddish Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and structuralism, claiming influence from Spinoza, Hume and Nietzsche. Seems par for the course now, as bio-vitalists and spec-op realists hunt phenomenologists (sometimes in deconstructionist camouflage) to extinction like birds of prey. But it was heresy in the midcentury Parisian milieu.

The first couple chapters locking horns with Oedipus, burlesqued as the ‘mommy-daddy-me’ triangulation--the unconscious as a classical theatre--are better than I remembered, and pay their dues to Freud and his most gifted students (Melanie Klein’s object relations receives an amusing reading) but demand that we contextualize the representational melodrama of Oedipus as one dynamic vector among many in an exuberantly creative factory. They read Oedipus as the paradynamic structuralist handicap on desiring-production, the coding of the unconscious. Coding here is the articulation of desire, its capture in a thumbnail, where it is given shape and summarily limited. Desiring-production is not articulable in a structuralist blueprint and Deleuze & Guattari’s hatred for representation & identity (with Oedipus as the persona non grata of these static cartographies) seems to arise from the tendency of these dynamics to be repressed and coded as ‘nature’. Representation sinks beneath the level of awareness and is fossilized into a regime of knowledge; the way things are. The territory of natural truth. But social-collectivist commitments to these hierarchies, binaries and otherwise provisional structures, flash-frozen with artificial preservatives, are subject to the radical mutability of deterritorialization. Even since the publication of Anti-Oedipus in 1972 this has occurred; after all, who believes in Oedipus today?

It is in the third chapter, ‘Savages, Barbarians, Civilized men’ that we get a historical-anthropological account of coding and decoding, deterritorialization and reterritorialization; fluxes of desire pulsating through the social-political field. This is the most fascinating part of the book. It is an account of how the strange nocturnal alterity of primitive peoples, hunter-gatherers and nomads, is captured and legislated by state formations, or how ‘Overcoding is what establishes the essence of the state’. There is an emphasis on the primacy of writing and reading over orality in early state formations that is faintly reminiscent of Derrida’s logocentrism. By this logic, tyranny manifests as a debt-structure, enunciated as a form of inscription; Tattoos, excision, incision, cutting, sacrifice, and mutilation were among the many practices to mark possession and debt, ‘a founding act through which man stops being a biological organism and becomes a full body, an earth, to which organs grab hold, attracted, ironed, survivors of the exigencies of a socius’. This speaks to the arbitrariness of the sign, that law designates without signifying.

“What capitalism decodes with one hand, it turns into rules with the other”

Money is the lynchpin for the violent eruption of mercantile capitalism from the despotic state. There is a claim here that money is a flow which the state cannot code. The hydraulic flow of capital is what makes this system unique, it is unlike its antecedent social-formations because it lacks symbolic commitments; primitive nomads and feudal despotisms had gods & kings, thresholds & filiations which could not be deterritorialized as internal conditions of the systems. Capitalism has no such scruples, it’ll chew up & digest anything sacred; and this innate tendency toward deterritorialization has augured the stygian nightmare chamber we live in today. Compulsive decoding has not delivered a body without organs, a liberated machinic process without restrictive organizational masonry, but instead locked us into culture of guilt & resentment nourished by the Oedial myth; "Interiority rather than a new relationship with the outside”. Oedipus is a paranoid polarization, not arising from an innate structure, but imposed, "It is the paranoid father who Oedipalizes the son.” Capitalism is perched atop an overheating furnace of schizophrenic flux, a turbulent precarity which must be contained in a perilous balancing act of de-and-recoding.

On the bright side; capitalism will deterritorialze any & every overcoded flow to capture the surplus value ensconced by the coding, even to its own longterm detriment. The structures of power and oppression which secure capitalism’s hegemony are temporarily deactivated to binge-eat the marketshare possessed by minoritarian flows--think the current popularity of minoritarian art, mainstream films & netflix shows expressing dissent through queer, black & feminist stories. This gets dangerously close to a Hegelian teleology; that capitalism’s instinctive relaxing of rigid social tensions to expand indexes for profit and growth may provide a fertile epicenter for these dissenting flows to converge. The system’s collapse is to some degree prophesied by its own organization--the smooth space of the body without organs, like full communism, the kingdom of ends or Absolute Spirit, the Idea in and for itself, is incipient. What a relief.

If you’re getting impatient twiddling your thumbs as the land of milk & honey sloughs behind schedule and want to do something productive, D&G's anticapitalist praxis would push different molecular voices to speak simultaneously as a schizophrenized machinic-body--after all, they're no good to anyone on their lonesome in a disaggregated schism, as is the current situation with ‘identity politics’. To have your voice ricochet through capitalist channels (and to let them make money off it) is obviously insufficient; minoritarian solidarity is the locus for emanicpatory politics. To this end, Deleuze & Guattari are optimistic that the tendency toward deterritorialization as a short-term tactic to widen social fields to capture value & bolster production is not sustainable longterm (however long the term maybe is...ambiguous). But you can only destratify these pockets of resistance for so long before they overtake the strata itself.

To this point, if you’ll humor me for a moment, I’d like to talk about acceleration. Anti-Oedipus is the sacred text of accelerationism, the primordial soup it climbed from one clawed hand at a time. You may know what I’m about to quote next;
“But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process”
This passage is the most exciting in Anti-Oedipus--there are no other references to acceleration that I could find, it’s just this unitary utterance--which has founded an entire school of thought. For those slightly more pessimistic than D&G, for whom vitalism and the politics of joy seem a little cloying, this discloses the next step. This is why a single mention of acceleration, which disappears like a phantom from Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus, has transfixed so much attention. There are now half a dozen (at least) splintered /ACC denominations spawning blasphemous exegesis of this passage, what ‘accelerating the process’ might or should mean in philosophical and political terms. It’s been awhile since I read A Thousand Plateaus (and I’m overdue for a retread) but its erecting of finitudes and limits upon destratification seems a discontinuation if not a betrayal of acceleration’s seductive possibilities. These days it’s hard to believe the old Marxist assurance that capitalism will collapse beneath its contradictions--how are we to administer a lethal dose of...contradiction? And what has ever died of contradictions anyway?--but, if we accept the model of capitalism from Deleuze & Guattari, then we can imagine deterritorializing magmic intensive states for the combustion engine of capitalism to burn as fuel until it hits terminal velocity. It’s the last game in town.

This is a very complex book. I’ve barely scratched the surface here and I’m not even sure if my readings are adequate to the text. But reading Anti-Oedipus, seeing capitalism & psychoanalysis brought to the point of auto-critique so that they are reengineered from the inside, was a tremendous intellectual high. So am I a turncoat? Am I switching allegiances from the solar Apollonianism of dialectical-psychoanalysis to the strange midnight perversity of Schizo-Dionysus?

I dunno, TBD.