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

Reading this book was an exercise in frustration. Occasionally productive frustration, but frustration nonetheless. While I was reading it, I referred to it as "the book I don't understand." But I think in the end I did get something out of it.

So this is Deleuze and Guattari's big attack on Freud, Lacan, and basically all of psychoanalysis. They suggest that psychoanalysis decides your diagnosis from the start (ie everyone has an Oedipus complex), and proceeds from that point. You can never finish being analysed--you are never truly 'healed'--because there's always more Oedipus complex to uncover. And if you don't uncover it, it's because you're repressing or projecting or otherwise in denial. The problem with Oedipus is that it puts boundaries on what a person can think or feel, and how they can respond to those thoughts and feelings. So far so good: I'm not much of a Freudian, and I basically agree.

But then D&G go on to say that what actually is the most fundamental element of our lives, and indeed of our entire society, including our technology, is desire. And desire occurs in these itty bitty molecular-level machines. Anything can be a machine. An organ in your body is a machine. A bee pollinating a flower is a machine. And this builds right up to things like steam engines and factories--where every worker and every truck that brings in raw material is part of that machine. And society is just the result of all these machines, acting together, at the molar or aggregate level. The problem here is that D&G believe that these machines are all real--this isn't a metaphor they're using to explain a concept, they think of it as an actuality.

And while I can get on board with the idea that we're all more than the sum of our parts, and what our parts "want" is what drives the parts to get together into bigger communities of parts, what I still don't understand is D&G's assertion that a) there is a body without organs which is inscribed with...stuff (??), and b) that there is a clear, logical, and all-but-inevitable progression from "primitive" societies up to capitalism, and once you get to capitalism you're basically stuck. People's individual desire for the system to work (ie for the status quo) outweighs their desire for breaks, changes, and revolution, and thus they act against their self-interest and capitalism just keeps on going.

D&G say that schizoanalysis is their "solution" to this problem. But it's not a very clearly defined solution (and the definition of the problem is not easy to grasp either). Even they say it's impossible to know how or whether it works. The idea is you stop putting limits on what people can think and feel, and some of them, some of the time, will follow "lines of escape" rather than circle right back around to the familiar. And these lines of escape are "schizzes", or breaks, or proto-revolutions. By encouraging people to do this, you can actually 'free' them and 'heal' them in a way that psychoanalysis can't.

But D&G never give any hint of what they see happening beyond or after capitalism. The same problem is evident in Marx, when he says that societies will evolve for thousands of years until they get to socialism, and then they'll just stop evolving because...socialism is the best? Unlikely. Similarly, D&G say that we've been evolving all this time and now we've reached capitalism and it's not great--socialism would probably be better--but we're just going to stop evolving now, because they say so. Not very credible in my opinion.

Anyway, the parts of the books I liked were how it made me have to think in a different way. I kind of had to let the prose wash over me, because there was nothing else to do--no real logical, algorithmic understanding was applicable. And I liked the ideas around territorialization and deterritorialization, once I understood them, sort of. It's this idea that every time you define something, you put walls around it, you stop it from being anything else, and that's bad because desire wants to keep changing and being in a way that definitions can't handle. That's territorialization. And deterritorialization is when new information or a new approach comes in and disrupts all the previous definitions. So what I liked is that the book did that--it deterritorialized--even as that's what it was talking about. A good meld of form and content.

I think I'll go on after this to read A Thousand Plateaus but I sure hope it won't take so much brain power just to follow a sentence or a paragraph.