This was a really interesting piece because I have thought a lot about perpetuator guilt, shame, trauma, and the effects of becoming complicit in a historical legacy, regardless of one's true internal politic. Similarly, I spend a lot of time thinking about how Jews, as a people centered around memory and sharing in grief, don't really seem to heal from this practice, or, alternatively, how the process must be so much longer than the span of an individual's life - lending to the idea of cultural transgenerational haunting.
Schwab's identification with Nazi Germany is unsettling, sympathy inducing, bitter, and an attempt at taking responsibility, all at the same time.
"I am one of the 'children of the enemy,'" (178) instilled and reinforced in her by her elders "telling the same stories, over and over again." (178) which she repeats throughtout the article. A repetition of a repetition of a repetition.
I am very intrigued by this idea of psychic haunting, intergenerational trauma, but the way children not only hear their parents stories and respond to their parents trauma-responsive parenting techniques, their language, their behaviors, etc., but also come into a "lived reality" - a sort of intergenerational ghost which they come into possession of through stories, traditions, rhetoric, ideologies. A "processing" of "familie's stories as psychic reality." (178) I am all too familiar with this as the receipient and keeper of my ancestors stories, the fear in their eyes as they would hear the clop of cossack horses, the slash of swords, the way my grandfather's hand would press into his knee as he detailed the weight of his mother's body pressing him into the wall, a fervent attempt to disappear.
It's sort of uncanny how familiar the emotion of Schwab's writing feels, how much I empathized with the telling of these stories, this analysis, the tension of being at once victim and perpetrator.
I think of my own mother's way of excusing her whiteness and the legacy of her ancestors (colonizers, slave owners) by putting on the performance of Judaism when it suits her purposes, assuaging the guilt and shame she can't face as a descendant of violent colonizers. This ethos is pervasive on her side of the family - the phrase "my best friend in school was black" is used by multiple family members who voted for Trump. Twice.
I think of my father rejecting the idea that his ethnicity has ever played a role in his experiences in education or professional work. I think of his father's insistence that his rejection from the University of Pennsylvania was due to an already filled quota of Jews, surpassing which would result in a stain on the admitted class of students. My grandparents' generation was vocal in response to WW2 - we shared our grief collectively and still do. Making pilgrimage to death camp sites to say a mourner's kaddish for the unnamed dead, bringing all those lost into our families, a refusal to let them not be remembered. My parents' generation is more apt to forget, to silence, to insist that we're all over it and have moved on. Then again, my bubbe was apt to remind me that her father achieved his American dream and if everyone worked that hard, they too would never know poverty. My great grandparents were similarly silent. When my grandfather would ask why they left the old country, his father's response was simply that "we don't talk about it anymore. We're American now."
This silence - it seems to haunt all sides. Our last name changed four times, its origins a mystery. The only family "history" an imagined historical fiction courtesy of Uncle Ed, my grandfather's cousin, who wrote down the family immigration tale with as much detail and emotion as if he had lived it. We reeanct our traumas this way, retelling, telling the same stories, over and over. I sometimes wonder if it is unhealthy, whether this "psychic condition" can really "render one virtually insane with impossible mourning." (183)
Schwab discusses this at length - the idea that "traumatic narratives can become chaged melancholic objects that sustain the tie to old traumatic injuries while deflecting from the urgency of addressing new violent histories in the present." (188) She claims that this leads to the importance of addressing trauma across national and communal levels, because the internalization of these narratives cannot be address by the individual - it isn't their trauma, alone, to bear. But she also seems to talk about this process of speaking trauma, externalizing it as a group, as though it will lead to some kind of healing. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this makes sense. Talk therapy is the standard for a reason, because silent rumination only creates cycle of despair.
All of that said, I wonder how these types of ghosts, narrative memories, functionally change when imagined as artefacts, rather than experiences or stories. If national and collective mourning was, in fact, a way of undoing the "treachery of silence", wouldn't we/I feel a bit better at some point? What happens to this process of uncovering secret ghosts when those ghosts are the only things we have left. For so many Jews, these ghosts are the only things that remain of our families. An impossible mourning, to be sure, but also one that I don't know a lot would want to let go of. I suppose Schwab isn't necessarily encouraging this process as a way of letting go, though.
Claiming a voice, on the other hand, is so complicated. I found myself angry at how easily I identified with Schwab's experiences. A child of perpetuators with my own oppression to carry and bear, my whiteness practically luminous in a lot of settings, the weight of genocide I carry simmering gently below the surface. I didn't want to identify with her. And yet I did. Claiming a voice in these spaces can be so precarious when communal dialogue often comes down to identity politics, of who had it worse, of whose issue is the most pressing, the most salient, who needs the most recognition, whose trauma supercedes the rest, whose voice should be heard.
And in many instances, we choose silence. Silence is often encouraged. Listen first, speak last. Listen more, speak less.
I'm losing my train of thought...looking forward to class discussion.
Education as a tool for reconstructing postwar Germany and German subjectivity
“The only open critics of such a refashioning of Germany were the teachers of German literature who shunned the Anglicization of German language and forbade us to use ‘foreign’ words. They also lamented the fact that postwar children grew up without German literature after it had almost instantly been replaced in school curricula with those allegedly ‘uncultured’ books by new American authors such as Hemingway, Steinbeck or Pearl S Buck.. This deep ambivalence is symptomatic of the transformation of German culture after the war. Our teachers resisted the colonizing impetus of the American re-education program, but they did so in terms of an old and problematic nationalism. While we students, by contrast, resisted our teachers’ nationalism and actively embraced foreign cultures, we also unwittingly submitted to the propagandistic aspects of the re-education program.” (182)
Silencing and Speaking
“Used to thinking of myself as ‘the girl without words,’ it still haunts me to this day. Now I feel the effects in displaced forms, the most insidious being the guilt and fear associated with claiming a voice as the descendant of a perpetrator nation. The more distant a topic from my own history and concerns, the easier it becomes to speak.” (184)
“My town’s erasure of history had caught up with me despite the fact that, as soon as I learned about the genocide of Jews and the concentration camps, I was shocked into defiance and suspicion against my country, my parents and teachers, and the people of my childhood town. And yet, I had never given a thought about what happened to the Jews, simply assuming the town had always been as it was when I grew up.” (193)
A Foreign Presence in the Self as the Site for Healing
“Abraham argues that a person can manifest symptoms that do not directly spring from her own life experiences but from a parent’s or ancestor’s psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets.5 Speaking of a phantom, a haunting or a phantasmatic haunting, Abraham uses a rhetoric of ghosts to suggest a foreign presence in the self.” (185)
“He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic ‘cult of ancestors’ (as defined by Rand)7 that allows the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom from their ghostly hauntings. Yet, to achieve this freeing from the past requires one first to awaken the dead and to revisit the trauma. This process in fact is what we commonly call mourning. To facilitate a collective mourning, communities and nations develop the need to establish a culture of memory. Recognizing the psychic life of our ancestors in our own psychic life means uncovering their unspoken suffering and secret histories, as well as their guilt and shame, their crimes.” (186)
“an archeology of the psyche is indispensable for allowing the children of perpetrators to address the unfinished business of their parents. Only then can they gain the agency to deal with the past in their own terms. Without such agency they are bound to remain unconsciously fixated to their parents’ traumatic deformation.” (187)
"the traumatic effects of growing up among a generation of children of a perpetrator nation... I am one of the 'children of the enemy,' invoked in Ursula Duba's poem" (178)
"Moreover, it seems important to acknowledge that the German Holocaust, even though unmatched in its cold, mechanistic and industrialized machinery of death, draws on a relentless drive to subjugate or annihilate other people that reveals many affinities to Western colonialism and imperialism more generally. Ultimately one would need to ask where the drive to subjugate and annihilate the other comes from, a question that reaches beyond the scope of this article" (179)
"We know that a pervasive silence weighed on Germany after the war, bespeaking a futile attempt to avoid facing the atrocities of the war. Yet, one cannot escape collective shame and guilt and their transmission across generations. The more the acknowledgement of shame and guilt was silenced in public debates, the more they migrated into the psyche and the cultural unconscious. For the generation of perpetrators, the knowledge of the Holocaust was relegated to a 'tacit knowledge' (Polanyi) that became taboo in public debates in any but the most superficial ways. For the postwar generation, it became something like a national secret, only to be revealed as brute fact, usually in the early teens, in the cold abstraction of history lessons" (180)
"I think we need trauma discourses that look at the dynamic between victims and perpetrators and see that both of them are suffering from the psyche deformations of violent histories, albeit in different ways and with different responsibilities. Pervasive in violent histories is the transgenerational transmission of trauma or, as Abraham and Torok put it, a history of ghostly hauntings by the phantoms of a silenced past. This haunting transmission of trauma across generations will be the more narrowly defined focus of my article" (181)
"This ambivalence is not unlike the ambivalence Fanon describes about the reception of Shakespeare in colonial education. Literature, we need to remember, is a highly ambivalent and risky tool of colonization or re-education since it can so easily be appropriated for a much more critical reception than the one intended by the powers that be" (182)
"The German word Widerrede refers to one of the worst transgressions of children against their parents. The word means 'talking back' or simply 'arguing.' Thou shalt not argue with your parents' as the hallmark of German authoritarian education reaches back of course at least to the Bismarck era. However, this silencing of children took on a new quality and urgency after the war when arguing carried the threat of exposing the parents' active or passive complicity as perpetrators" (182)
"It became nearly a philosophical problem to explore whether language could become a poisonous substance" (184)
"psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. Traumatic historical legaices may be transmitted individually via unconscious fantasies of parents and grandparents as well as collectively through the cultural unconscious. Psychoanalysts have theorized such transmission as a form of psychic haunting, arguing that both children of victims and children of perpetrators of trauma unwittingly live the ghostly legacies and secrets of their parents and parental generation" (184)
"The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok develop their concept of the crypt, that is, a psychic space fashioned to wall-in unbearable experiences, memories or secrets. Abraham talks about the 'phantom effects' that haunt the children of parents who have lived through a traumatic history" (185)
"In violent histories, the personal is inseparable from the collective and the political" (185)
"Abraham's concept of the phantom is particularly relevant for an analysis of the transmission of historical trauma through the cultural unconscious" (185)
"Finally, Beloved demonstrates that trauma cannot be healed individually but needs communal support and a joint effort to face the ghosts of the past. In order to deal with collective historical trauma, we therefore need a theoretical framework with a transindividual perspective. Abraham and Torok's concept of the phantom and of transgenerational haunting not only moves psychoanalysis beyond individual life experiences and their intrapsychic processing, it also deals with the cultural legacies or the unfinished business of one or more generations of a people and their transmission to the descendants" (185-186)
"Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission. Abraham speaks of a haunting that spans generations. He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic 'cult of ancestors' (as defined by Rand) that allows the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom from their ghostly hauntings. Yet, to achieve this freeing from the past requires one first to awaken the dead and to revisit the trauma. This process in fact is what we commonly call mourning" (186)
"In this case it becomes a tacit knowledge, shared by everyone yet treated like a taboo subject. People who bring it to the surface are often treated with passionate hostility as if they threatened a fragile sense of balance" (186)
"Psychoanalysis is, of course, a practice based on an ethics of contained uncovering. It works with the assumption that violent or traumatic events that are repressed or denied will continue to come back in haunting ways until there is a proper working through. The latter requires both taking responsibility for one's actions and mourning of losses. In uncovering traumatic histories, psychoanalysis at times resembles paradoxical 'unburial', that is, a digging into a community's or a nation's deadly secrets, or into the secret life of a dead person that has never been properly buried" (186)
"The exhumation of the ghosts of the past is, in other words, also indispensable for trying to avoid the repetition of traumatic history or its displacement onto other people" (187)
"Language is the first tool and mode of introjection. Abraham and Torok point out that even the starving infant is less helpless once it finds a way to voice the feeling of hunger, or once 'the empty mouth can be filled with words.' But how can one find a language for something that is unconscious? How can one tell the story of a history of which one is a protagonist without ever having experienced it directly?" (187)
"In 'Notes on the Phantom,' Abraham speaks of this language in terms of a 'staging of words' that speak traumatic experience... "We must not lose sight of the fact that to stage a word - whether metaphorically, as an alloseme, or as a cryptonym - constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm"" (187)
"The 'staging of words,' while it may contribute to socio-psychic health, is not yet a solution in itself and may, in the worst case, obscure real political processing. Traumatic narratives can become charged melancholic objects that sustain the tie to old traumatic injuries while deflecting from the urgency of addressing new violent histories in the present" (188)
"Perhaps because I have experienced the guilt of claiming a voice, I have come to believe that both the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators need to break the silence. They also need to escape their mutual isolation and begin talking about their different traumatic histories together, thus creating a dialogue that may help to trace what Abraham calls 'shared or complementary phantoms'" (188)
"In his pathbreaking study on the psychology of colonialism, Ashis Nandy points to that, while the broad psychological contours of colonialism are now known, the concomitant cultural and psychological pathologies produced by colonization in the colonizing societies are less well known" (188)
"Abraham and Torok define encryptment as a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur on the side of victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture or genocide. They can also occur on the side of perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame" (189)
"Ultimately, she took revenge on me for having lost him because I did not bring him back" (191)
"Only those who dig deep into the archeology of this town's cultural unconscious can see what the plates tell without telling, the town's hidden history of genocide" (194)
Schwab (2004) wrote about trauma from the complicated position of oppressors. Schwab opened up about the ghosts in his family tied to the violence of his hometown, in post-war Germany. Schwab emphasized the importance of reparative work and open discussion to address the ghosts that many families keep after traumatic periods of history. Ultimately, Schwab’s piece challenges the binaristic categories of oppressor and sufferer by detailing the legacies of trauma for those on seemingly opposite sides of violence. Below were some thought-provoking quotes from this article:
186 - “Most cultures share a tendency to silence traumatic histories. Traumatic amnesia seems to become inscribed as cultural practice. Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission, Abraham speaks of a haunting that spans generations. “
188 - “The damages and cultural deformations of these violent histories of colonialism, imperialism, war, genocide and slavery manifest themselves on both sides of the divide, and only if both sides work through the legacies of these histories can the vicious cycle of repetition be disrupted. Recent postcolonial theories as well as critical race theories have argued in a similar vein.”
Questions: I enjoyed reading this piece because of how it challenged static notions of aggressor and oppressed/victim/survivor. In times of collective or systemic violence, there are multiple registers of trauma. It actually reminded me of a recent article I was reading about PTSD in those who have administered the death penalty or were involved in the administration of it. What are the multiplicitous traumas that arise out of systemic, state violence? What is at stake by using binaristic frames (oppressor and victim) for understanding systemic violence?
As the only theory able to trace the effects of unconscious experience, psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. (184)
This dynamic also underlies, I believe, the psychological deformations of perpetrator cultures more generally. One of the most common deformations is the internalization and hence internal repetition of patterns of violence in the perpetrator culture. (188)
To account for this psychological deformation of perpetrators and their children, it is necessary to expand Abraham and Torok’s notion of the ‘crypt’ to include cultural or national crypts. Abraham and Torok define encryptment as a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur on the side of victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture or genocide. They can also occur on the side of perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame. Just like intrapsychic crypts, cultural and national crypts harbor the repressed or denied memories of violence. Once the latter are walled off from a conscious politics of remembrance and public debate, they can no longer be worked through and transformed into a politics of redress. Collectively established crypts become the sources of a cultural and national haunting that cannot be addressed unless the crypt is opened and the silence broken.
Perhaps it is important to stress here that silence need not be complete in order for this dynamic to operate. There may even be—as there was in Germany after the war—an open politics of acknowledgment of war crimes, including the Nuremberg trials and the process of ‘de-Nazification’ as well as the monumentalization of victimage and official politics of reparation. But unless these acts include a psychosocial politics that addresses the responsibility, complicity, guilt, shame and psychosocial deformation of the culture at large, it in fact only helps to perpetuate a politics of silencing and denial. In the worst case, historical monumentalization may even aggravate such politics by providing a safely contained outlet to alleviate unconscious feelings of guilt and shame. (189)
--> what is harm if to cause harm or be complicit is also harmful?
“My mother and grandmother’s stories about the war have merged with my childhood memories. Memory implants that I retain as the first inscriptions of my history”
-home is usually the first historian individuals encounter
“My memories of these stories have an almost eerie quality of a lived reality. I remember them differently from the way I remember other stories. Almost as if I had lived through them myself, I remember concrete images, details, fragments of a history I must have hallucinated at the time, thus processing my family’s stories as psychic reality.”
-at what point does a memory transform into a process of psychic reality? What are the key features that capture this intergenerational transmission of trauma?
“as I see the coverage of this new war, memories resurface, the atmosphere of fear and terror, the starvation and despair, the stories of which marked my early childhood years.”
-triggers that may not only impact the survivor but all those who recognize the signs of what these triggers represent and meant form oneself or family
“Denying Germany the status of the ‘civilized world,’ it aligns the German people with a discourse of savagism and barbarism. This discourse continues a familiar legacy of colonialism, casting Germany as the first instance of a ‘barbarism’ that emerges from within the civilized world. While the rhetoric of barbarism suggests that Germany broke away from the values and achievements of Western civilization, the NSDAP in fact, as Agamben and others have convincingly demonstrated, worked within the logic of modernity and used deeply modern elements to generate the Holocaust”
“However one interprets the Nazi assault on the values of Western civilization, the Allied sign challenges the developmental thesis implied in colonial narratives of civilization and progress, raising not only the question of what causes civilization to be undermined from within, but also another question regarding the role of the Allied forces in relation to the people under occupation whom it declares as ‘un-civilized.’”
“What Germany witnessed after the war was rather a pervasive cultural re-education and imposition of the values of the occupying forces.”
-exactly, and when it’s an occupation providing the education what value does it hold and is it lasting? US occupation has rarely (if ever one could argue) been a success for the people whose land they occupied.
“Denying Germany its status as a civilized nation rests on a claim that the persecution of Jews and other minorities, the camps and the Holocaust were aberrations from the values of Western civilization.”
“Exceptionalism rests on the assumption that Germany was either never part of or fell away from mainstream Western civilization because it never took the political turn toward democratization (or French republicanism) or the philosophical turn toward humanist rationalism.”
“it matters whether or not German people see themselves as a deviation from Western civilization when they face or refuse to face their own role in a nation of defeated perpetrators”
“one cannot escape collective shame and guilt and their transmission across generations. The more the acknowledgement of shame and guilt was silenced in public debates, the more they migrated into the psyche and the cultural unconscious.”
-or the denial of that shame and guilt like in the US in response to history of slavery
“The psychic economy of Germany’s isolation from the rest of the West is rather transparent, since it allows other countries more easily to avoid confronting their own violent histories and legacies of colonial atrocities and genocide.”
-Yep
“While we students, by contrast, resisted our teachers’ nationalism and actively embraced foreign cultures, we also unwittingly submitted to the propagandistic aspects of the re-education program”
“In some of its aspects, the parental generation displaced this fear onto the generation of postwar children. The parents’ fear that the children would take over was, in turn, intimately related to the fear that the silenced history might surface and lead to a confrontation by one’s own children—a fear that eventually turned real in the 1960s and 1970s and that gave the student movement in Germany its particular transgenerational dynamic.”
“Psychically, these efforts served a veritable manic defense, mobilized to ward off unbearable feelings of loss and defeat, guilt and shame. This manic defense went hand in hand with the ghostly silence about the war atrocities that descended on the defeated nation, a silence that, in turn, generated the crippling ‘inability to mourn’ that Frankfurt School psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich analyzed in their book with the same title. The German people after the war had become hardened to a point where they were unable to mourn not only the loss of the six million lives in the camps they had caused. They were equally unable properly to mourn and acknowledge their own losses. How after all can one mourn the loss of a few lives in one’s own family if your people were guilty of trying to exterminate a whole other people?”
“But since one couldn’t make them disappear either, they were repressed, split off, and pushed into the cultural unconscious.”
-intrigued by this idea of a cultural unconscious in response to trauma; particularly in how it informed parent-child dynamics
“In violent histories, the personal is inseparable from the collective and the political.”
“Traumatic amnesia seems to become inscribed as cultural practice. Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission, Abraham speaks of a haunting that spans generations.”
“Traumatic narratives can become charged melancholic objects that sustain the tie to old traumatic injuries while deflecting from the urgency of addressing new violent histories in the present. This is why it becomes increasingly important to address violent and traumatic histories across national, ethnic and cultural boundaries and across the divide of victims and perpetrators.”
Preface, Michel Foucault
"It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much-heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one we are told we "need so badly" in our age of dispersion and specialization where "hope" is lacking). One must not look for a "philosophy' amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel" (xii)
"[whom the book combats] (1) ... Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth. (2) The poor technicians of desire - psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom - who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack. (3) ... the strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us" (xiii)
"a book of ethics" (xiii)
"Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life" (xiii)
"a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
"The traps of Anti-Oedipus are those of humor: to many invitations to let oneself be put out, to take one's leave of the text and slam the door shut. The book often leads one to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives" (xiv)
Chapter 1: The Desiring-Machines
1 - Desiring Production
"Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines" (3)
"For the real truth of the matter - the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium - is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregisterment), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself" (4)
"This is the first meaning of process as we use the term: incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them the productions of one and the same process" (4)
"Second, 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, just as they do within the life of man as a species" (4)
"This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other - not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product" (5)
"This will be the case, however, only on one condition, which in fact constitutes the third meaning of process as we use the term: it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself. Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely - which, strictly speaking, is tantamount to ending it abruptly and prematurely - is what creates the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions: a limp rag forced into autistic behavior, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity" (5)
"schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature." Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another" (5)
"Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object" (6)
"Producing is always something "grafted onto" the product; and for that reason desiring-production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine" (6)
"When Claude Levi-Strauss defines bricolage, he does so in terms of a set of closely related characteristics: the possession of a stock of materials or of rules of thumb that are fairly extensive, though more or less a hodgepodge - multiple and at the same time limited; the ability to rearrange fragments continually in new and different patterns or configurations; and as a consequence, an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved" (7)
"The art of making do with what's at hand" (7)
"Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all" (8)
"For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. We shall not inquire how all this fits together so that the machine will run: the question itself is the result of a process of abstraction" (8)
2 - The Body Without Organs
Translators note: "We have likewise chosen to translate investir as "to invest" instead of "to cathect"" (9)
"In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface. Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money" (10)
"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. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on (se rabat sur) all of production" (11)
"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" (11)
"So true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy" (12)
"In fact, we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of the production of recording, whose law is not the same as that of the production of production. The law governing the latter was connective synthesis or coupling. But when the productive connections pass from machines to the body without organs (as from labor to capital), it would seem that they then come under another law that expresses a distribution in relation to the nonproductive element as a "natural or divine presupposition" (the disjunctions of capital)" (12)
"The process as process of production extends into the method as method of inscription. Or rather, if what we term libido is the connective "labor" of desiring-production, it should be said that a part of this energy is transformed into the energy of disjunctive inscription (Numen). A transformation of energy. But why call this new form of energy divine, why label it Numen, in view of all the ambiguities caused by a problem of the unconscious that is only apparently religious? The body without organs is not God, quite the contrary. But the energy that sweeps through it is divine, when it attracts to itself the entire process of production and sever as its miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and every one of its disjunctions" (13)
"does the recording of desire go by way of the various stages in the formation of the Oedipus complex? Disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes; but is this genealogy Oedipal is it recorded in the Oedipal triangulation? Is it not more likely that Oedipus is a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable?" (13)
"Desiring-production forms a binary-linear system. The full body is introduced as a third term in the series, without destroying, however, the essential binary-linear nature of this series: 2, 1, 2, 1.... The series is completely refractory to a transcription that would transform and mold it into a specifically ternary and triangular schema such as Oedipus" (15)
using poetry, literature, music, painting, art as evidence
"It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal Code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate" (15)
3- The Subject and Enjoyment
"Conforming to the meaning of the word "process," re-recording falls back on (se rabat sur) production, but the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of consumption is produced in and through the production of recording. This is because something on the order of a subject can be discerned on the recording surface. It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. "It's me, and so it's mine..." Even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of self-enjoyment" (16)
"the celibate machine first of all reveals the existence of a much older paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its dark shadows, its ancient Law. The celibate machine itself is not a paranoiac machine, however. Everything about it is different: its cogs, its sliding carriage, its shears, needles, magnets, rays. Even when it tortures or kills, it manifests something new and different, a solar force. In the second place, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the "miraculating" powers the machine possessses due to the inscription hidden inside it, though it in fact contains within itself the most impressive sort of inscriptions (cf. the recording supplied by Edison for Eve future). A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces" (18)
"what produced by means of [the celibate machine]? ... intensive quantities. ... These are often described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think...) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content - an "I feel that I am becoming a woman," "that I am becoming a god," and so on, which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory but will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions. [W.R. Bion is the first to have stressed this importance of the I feel... Elements of Psycho-analysis]" (19)
"How is it possible that the schizo was conceived of as the autistic rag - separated from the real and cut off from life - that he is so often thought to be? Worse still: how can psychiatric practice have made him this sort of rag, how can it have reduced him to this state of a body without organs that has become a dead thing - this schizo who sought to remain at that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives its every intensity, consumes it? And shouldn't this question immediately compel us to raise another one, which at first glance seems quite different: how does psychoanalysis go about reducing a person, who this time is not a schizophrenic but a neurotic, to a pitiful creature who eternally consumes daddy-and-mommy and nothing else whatsoever?" (20)
"How could the conjunctive synthesis of "So that's that it was!" and "So it's me!" have been reduced to the endless, dreary discovery of Oedipus: "So it's my father, my mother"? We cannot answer these two questions at this point" (20)
"There is no Nietzsche-the-self, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: "every name in history is I..." The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the center is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return. A residual subject of the machine, Nietzsche-as-subject garners a euphoric reward (Voluptas) from everything that this machine turns out, a product that the reader had thought to be no more than the fragmented oeuvre by Nietzsche. "Nietzsche believes that he is now pursuing, not the realization of a system, but the application of a program... in the form of residues of the Nietzschean discourse, which have no become the repertory, so to speak, of his histrionicism." It is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time Nietzsche-as-subject exclaims: "They're me! So it's me!" No one has ever been as deeply involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way. He consumes all of universal history history in one fell swoop. We began by defining him as Homo natura, and lo and behold, he has turned out to be Homo historia" (21)
is semiotics only about recognition?
4 - A Materialist Psychiatry
"A truly materialist psychiatry can be defined, on the contrary, by the twofold task it sets itself: introducing desire into the mechanism, and introducing production into desire" (22)
"The theory of schizophrenia is formulated in terms of three concepts that constitute its trinary schema: dissociation (Kraepelin), autism (Bleuler), and space-time or being-in-the-world (Binswanger). The first of these is an explanatory concept that supposedly locates the specific dysfunction or primary deficiency. The second is an ideational concept indicating the specific nature of the effect of the disorder: the delirium itself or the complete withdrawal from the outside world, "the detachment from reality, accompanied by a relative or an absolute predominance of [the schizophrenic's] inner life." The third concept is a descriptive one, discovering or rediscovering the delirious person in his own specific world. What is common to these three concepts is the fact that they all relate the problem of schizophrenia to the ego through the intermediary of the "body image" - the final avatar of the soul, a vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism" (22-23)
"The ego, however, is like daddy-mommy: the schizo has long since ceased to believe in it. He is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems, rather than immersed in them. And wherever he is, there are problems, insurmountable sufferings, unbearable needs" (23)
"Even Freud never went beyond this narrow and limited conception of the ego. And what prevented him from doing so was his own tripartite formula - the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mommy-me. We may well ponder the possibility that the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex led Freud to rediscover, and to lend all the weight of his authority to, the unfortunate misapplication of the concept of autism to schizophrenia. For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers - "an undesirable resemblance"" (23)
"The fact is, from the moment that we are placed within the framework of Oedipus - from the moment that we are measured in terms of Oedipus - the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself - in myth, tragedy, dreams - was substituted for the productive unconscious" (24)
"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. The schizophrenic appears all the more specific and recognizable as a distinct personality if the process is halted, or if it is made an end and a goal in itself, or if it is allowed to go on and on endlessly in a void, so as to provoke that "horror of... extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish" (the autist)" (24) semiotics
"Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines" (24)
"To a certain degree, the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object" (25)
"Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis. On the very lowest level of interpretation, this means that the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a "dreamed-of object behind every real object," or a mental production behind all real productions" (26)
"In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of "industrial" production" (26)
"If desire produces, its product is real... The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. 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: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire in another machine connected to it" (26)
"The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible. Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to the be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has few needs" (27)
"Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on (se rabat sur) the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack (manque). It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy" (28)
"There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other. The only connections that could be established between these two productions would be secondary ones of introjection and projection, as though all social practices, or as though mental practices were projected upon social systems, without either of the two sets of practices ever having any real or concrete effect upon the other" (28)
"The Marx-Freud parallelism between the two remains utterly sterile and insignificant as long as it is expressed in terms that make them introjections or projections of each other without ceasing to be utterly alien to each other, as in the famous equation money = shit. The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else" (28-29)
"That is why 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?" how can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread?!" As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for" (29)
"desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production. It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production. Desiring-machines are not fantasy-machines or dream-machines, which supposedly can be distinguished from technical and social machines. Rather, fantasies are secondary expressions, deriving from the identical nature of the two sorts of machines in any given set of circumstances. Thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy - as institutional analysis has successfully demonstrated. And if there is such a thing as two sorts of group fantasy, it is because two different readings of this identity are possible, depending upon whether the desiring-machines are regarded from the point of view of the great gregarious masses that they form, or whether social machines are considered from the point of view of the elementary forces of desire that serve as the basis for them" (30)
"revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field as a source of energy. (The great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function, for example, not as ideal models but as group fantasies - that is, as agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to "deinstitutionalize" it, to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself)" (31)
"schizo" --> Povinelli v. Luhrmann; "cybernetic model"; how do anthropologists take up Deleuze and Guattari?
"The artist is the master of objects; he puts before us shattered, burned, broken-down objects, converting them to the regime of desiring-machines, breaking down is part of the very functioning of desiring-machines; the artist presents paranoiac machines, miraculating-machines, and celibate machines as so many technical machines, so as to cause desiring-machines to undermine technical machines. Even more important, the work of art is itself a desiring-machine. The artist stores up his treasures so as to create an immediate explosion, and that is why, to his way of thinking, destructions can never take place as rapidly as they ought to" (32)
"A technical machine is therefore not a cause but merely an index of a general form of social production: thus there are manual machines and primitive societies, hydraulic machines and "Asiatic" forms of society, industrial machines and capitalism. Hence when we posited the socius as the analogue of a full body without organs, there was nonetheless one important difference" (32)
"The body without organs is not an original primordial entity that later projects itself into different sorts of socius, as though it were a racing paranoiac, the chieftain of the primitive horde, who was initially responsible for social organization" (33)
"the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius. The prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated. When the primitive territorial machine proved inadequate to the task, the despotic machine set up a kind of overcoding system. But the capitalist machine, insofar as it was built on the ruins of a despotic State more or less far removed in time, finds itself in a totally new situation: it is faced with the task of decoding and deterritorializing the flows" (33)
"Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the "free worker." Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. by substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialized field. It is correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?" (33)
"There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality - as reconstructed in the analyst's office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor). The pervert is someone who takes the artifice seriously and plays the game to the hilt: if you want them, you can have them - territorialities infinitely more artifical than the ones that society offers us, totally artificial new families, secret lunar societies. As for the schizo, continually wandering bout, migrating here, there, and everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of deterriotrialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs. It may well be that these peregrinations are the schizo's own particular way of rediscovering the earth" (35)
"He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire" (35)
"And if materialist psychiatry may be defined as the psychiatry that introduces the concept of production into consideration of the problem of desire, it cannot avoid posing in eschatological terms the problem of the ultimate relationship between the analytic machine, the revolutionary machine, and desiring-machines" (35)
5 - The Machines
"A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures)" (36)
"In a word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production" (36)
"Also we must not think that the machines themselves are proof of the loss or repression of desire (which Bettelheim translates in terms of autism). We find ourselves confronted with the same problem once again: How has the process of production of desire, how have the child's desiring-machines begun to turn endlessly round and round in a total vacuum, so as to produce the child-machine? How has the process turned into an end in itself? Or how has the child become the victim of a premature interruption of a terrible frustration? It is only by means of the body without organs (eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up) that something is produced, counterproduced, something that diverts or frustrates the entire process of production, of which it is nonetheless still a part. But the machine remains desire, an investment of desire whose history unfolds, by way of the primary repression and the return of the repressed, in the succession of the states of paranoiac machines, miraculating machines, and celibate machines through which little Joey passes as Bettelheim's therapy progresses" (38)
"every machine has a sort of code built into it, stored up inside it" (38)
"(The basic text in this connection is [Lacan's] La lettre volee [The Purloined Letter]). But how very strange this domain seems, simply because of its multiplicity - a multiplicity so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even one code of desire. The chains are called "signifying chains" (chaînes signifcantes) because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a jargo, an open-ended, polyvocal formation. The nature of the signs within it is insignificant, as these signs have little or nothing to do with what supports them. Or rather, isn't the support completely immaterial to these signs? The support is the body without organs. These indifferent signs follow no plan, they function at all levels and enter into any and every sort of connection; each one speaks its own language, and establishes syntheses with others that are quite direct along transverse vectors, whereas the vectors between the basic elements that constitute them are quite indirect" (38)
"Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it "extracts" a surplus value, just as the orchid code "attracts" the figure of a wasp: both phenomena demonstrate the surplus value of a code. It is an entire system of shuntings along certain tracks and of selections by lot, that bring about partially dependent, aleatory phenomena bearing a close resemblance to a Markov chain. The recordings and transmissions that have come from the internal codes, from the outside world, from one region to another of the organism, all intersect, following the endlessly ramified paths of the great disjunctive synthesis. If this constitutes a system of writing, it is a writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real: a strangely polyvocal kind of writing, never a biunivocalized, linearized one; a transcursive system of writing, never a discursive one; a writing that constitutes the entire domain of the "real inorganization" of the passive syntheses, where we would search in vain for something that might be labeled the Signifier - writing that ceaselessly composes and decomposes the chains into signs that have nothing that impels them to become signifying. The one vocation of the sign is to produce desire, engineering it in every direction" (39)
"breaks that are a detachment (coupures-detachements), which must not be confused with breaks that are a slicing off (coupures-prelevements)" (39)
"When we noted a moment ago that the schizo is at the very limit of the decoded flows of desire, we meant that he was at the very limit of the social codes, where a despotic Signifier destroys all the chains, linearizes them, biunivocalizes them, and uses the bricks as so many immobile units for hte construction of an imperial Great Wall of China. But the schizo continually detaches them, continually works them loose and carries them off in every direction in order to create a new polyvocity that is the code of desire" (40)
"Like all the other breaks, the subjective break is not at all an indication of a lack or need (manque), but on the contrary a share that falls to the subject as a part of a whole, income that comes its way as something left over. (Here again, how bad a model the Oedipal model of castration is!) That is because breaks or interruptions are not the result of an analysis; rather, in and of themselves, they are syntheses. Syntheses produce divisions" (41)
"The desiring-machine is not a metaphor; it is what interrupts and is interrupted in accordance with these three modes. The first mode has to do with the connective syntehsis, and mobilizes libido as withdrawal energy (energie de prelevement). The second has to do with the dijunctive synthesis, and mobilizes the Numen as detachment energy (energie de detachemenet). The third has to do with the conjunctive synthesis, and mobilizes Voluptas as residual energy (energie residuelle). It is these three aspects that make the process of desiring-production at once the production of production, the production of recording, and the production of consumption. To withdraw a part from the whole, to detach, to "have something left over," is to produce, and to carry out real operations of desire in the material world" (41)
6 - The Whole and Its Parts
"Maurice Blanchot has found a way to pose the problem in the most rigorous terms, at the level of the literary machine: how to produce, how to think about fragments whose sole relationship is sheer difference - fragments that are related to one another only in that each of them is different - without having recourse either to any sort of original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about? It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring-production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity" (42)
"Hence Proust maintained that the Whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on these other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries" (43)
"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" (43)
"The whole not only coexists with all the parts; it is contiguous to them, it exists as a product that is produced apart from them and yet at the same time is related to them" (44)
"Melanie Klein was responsible for the marvelous discovery of partial objects, that world of explosions, rotations, vibrations. But how can we explain the fact that she has nonetheless failed to grasp the logic of these objects? It is doubtless because, first of all, she conceives of them as fantasies and judges them from the point of view of consumption, rather than regarding them as genuine production. She explains them in terms of causal mechanisms (introjection and projection, for instance), of mechanisms that produce certain effects (gratification and frustration), and of mechanisms of expression (good or bad) - an approach that forces her to adopt an idealist conception of the partial object" (44)
"In the second place, she cannot rid herself of the notion that schizoparanoid partial objects are related to a whole, either to an original whole that has existed earlier in a primary phase, or to a whole that will eventually appear in a final depressive stage (the complete Object)" (44)
"Partial objects unquestionably have a sufficient charge in and of themselves to blow up all of Oedipus and totally demolish its ridiculous claim to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to encompass the entire production of desire" (44)
"The psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: "Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won't you?" Instead he screams: "Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein" (45)
"Oedipus thus becomes at this point the crucial premise in the logic of psychoanalysis" (46)
"The unconscious is totally unaware of persons as such. Partial objects are not representations of parental figures or of the basic patterns of family relations; they are parts of desiring-machines, having to do with a process and with relations of production that are both irreducible and prior to anything that may be made to conform to the Oedipal figure" (46)
"The problem has to do with the sexual nature of desiring-machines, but with the family nature of this sexuality" (46)
"It is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers. It is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within (rabattre tout le jeu des machines desirantes dans) the restricted code of Oedipus" (47)
"It is in this sense and this sense only that the child relates the breast as a partial object to the person of his mother, and constantly waters the expression on his mother's face. The word "relate" in this case does not designate a natural productive relationship, but rather a relation in the sense of a report or an account, an inscription within the over-all process of inscription, within the Numen" (48)
"By boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms that have an immediate bearing on teh unconscious: in particular, the entire interplay between primal psychic repression, the desiring-machines, and the body without organs. For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man" (48-49)
"We have seen how a confusion arose between the two meanings of "process"; process as the metaphysical production of the demoniacal within nature, and process as social production of desiring-machines within history. Neither social relations nor metaphysical relations constitute an "afterward" or a "beyond"" (49)
"Let us keep D.H. Lawrence's reaction to psychoanalysis in mind, and never forget it. In Lawrence's case, at least, his reservations with regard to psychoanalysis did not stem from terror at having discovered what real sexuality was. But he had the impression - the purely instinctive impression - that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a "dirty little secret," the dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of Nature and Production. Lawrence had the impression that sexuality possessed more power or more potentiality than that" (49)
"Insofar as psychoanalysis cloaks insanity in the mantle of a "parental complex," and regards the patterns of self-punishment resulting from Oedipus as a confession of guilt, its theories are not at all radical or innovative. On the contrary: it is completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology, linking madness to the "half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family," deciphering within it "the unending attempt to murder the father," "the dull thud of instincts hammering at the solidity of the family as an institution and at its most archaic symbols." Hence, instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all"" (50)
Foucault in the preface:
“I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular "readership": being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.” (xiii)
Why Schizoanalysis and not psychoanalysis:
“A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.” (2)
“What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all anyone specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production” (3)
"How is it possible that the schizo was conceived of as the autistic rag--separated from the real and cut off from life-that he is so often thought to be? Worse still: how can psychiatric practice have made him this sort of rag, how can it have reduced him to this state of a body without organs that has become a dead thing-this schizo who sought to remain at that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives its every intensity, consumes it? And shouldn't this question immediately compel us to raise another one, which at first glance seems quite different: how does psychoanalysis go about reducing a person, who this time is not a schizophrenic but a neurotic, to a pitiful creature who eternally consumes daddy-and-mommy and nothing else whatsoever?" (19)
It is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within de- siring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within (trabattre tout Ie jeu des machines desirantes dans) the restricted code of Oedipus. How does the child first come to define the places and the functions that the parents are going to occupy as special agents, closely related to other agents? (47)
Body without organs/"flows" (reminds me of primordialism)
“Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being.. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe.” (10)
“the full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine.” (8)
“In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as "primary repression" means precisely that: it is not a "countercathexis," but rather this repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs.” (9)
On desiring our own repression
"the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? (29)
“But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a quasi cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them. So true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy.” (12)
Deleuze and Guattari (1983) dissect the value of psychoanalysis in the social and political skape of their time. The two thinkers look at how psychoanalysis had become a tool of the elite. They invoked Marxist critique of the field by stating how it had mirrored capitalist production. “Hence, instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all” (50). Ultimately, the two thinkers underline the problematic history and undertaking of psychoanalysis with a critique of its relation to ongoing social, political, and economic violence. Below are useful quotes for understanding their arguments:
14 - “We cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this respect: it continues to ask its questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena.”
17 - “We must examine how this synthesis is formed or how the subject is produced. Our point of departure was the opposition between desiring-machines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these machines, as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave way to an attraction in the miraculating machin.”
33 - “Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?”
34 - 35 - “And if materialist psychiatry may be defined as the psychiatry that introduces the concept of production into consideration of the problem of desire, it cannot avoid posing in eschatological terms the problem of the ultimate relationship between the analytic machine, the revolutionary machine, and desiring-machines.”
Questions: Why was schizophrenia so central to Guattari and Deleuze’s book? Why is schizophrenia such a fascinating base for thinking through psychoanalysis? What inspired this book and what were the socio-political and academic stimuli? Why did the two find Marxist thinking so relevant for thinking through psychoanalysis? What was foreclosed in their intense focus on mainstream psychoanalysis and capitalism?
"Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: "and ..." "and then ..." This is because 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" (5)
"Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place-and then the whole process will begin all over again." (7)
"Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down." (8)