Michael Simpkins
Philosophy 352 – Report #1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Nature is a vast connection of desiring-machines endlessly linked through the coupling of flows and desires. But these flows are constantly blocked and let loose, stalled, interfered with, and dispersed. Yet they are necessary and allow the machine to function, even more, they define it. Without the disjunctions there is no machine. In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia they sought to reformulate the understanding of the world and an individual’s place in it. No longer would a split exist between man and nature and gone is the idea of “independent spheres or circuits…everything is production.”[i] They proposed a “new ontology of the social, of social being…a fundamental departure from the dominant Western ontological tradition.”[ii] Within this project also exists the complete dismantling of the Oedipal tradition and its misrepresentation of desire and repression: they expose it, proclaiming the simplicity of its structure absurd, its efficacy tragic, and the ends to which psychotherapists will go to force patients into its narrow framework laughable. The breadth of their work is remarkable and is nearly matched by the density of the writing. Words, ideas, and concepts are difficult to comprehend as “everything is absorbed and endowed with new meaning in this vast, paranoid synthesis,” with the synthesis realized “through images, metaphors, and motifs.”[iii]
Deleuze and Guattari unmercifully attack pychoanalysts and Oedipus throughout the entire work. Early in the first section they recall Freud’s position that he never liked schizophrenics because of their resistance to being Oedipalized. In opposition to Freud, Deleuze and Guattari believe they resist because they live outside of the daddy-mommy-me triangle, their “flows ooze, they traverse the triangle, breaking apart its vertices.”[iv] Their resistance reveals the gross limitations of the psychoanalytic framework. Unable to classify the particular malady of the Schizophrenic they force, if successful, him or her into the triangle, and in the end the individual is left no more than “a rag.” Empty of all of their former projections and extensions and possibilities they merely lay on the couch parroting their therapist, “yes, it is daddy and mommy and only them.” The possibilities of “Either…or…or,” are replaced by “So it is.” Those bent to these regressions have learned through habit and punishment not to challenge the supremacy of this idea, to which Deleuze and Guattari offer some truly horrific examples of therapists forcing people, children in some cases even, to accept all of this. Whereas the afflicted had moved beyond these familial issues (if they were ever present at all), they are forced back to the deal with them and become autistic.
A key split between Freudian theory and Deleuze and Guattari occurs over the nature of the unconscious. The latter “do not deny that there is an Oedipal sexuality…an Oedipal castration, as well as complete objects, global images, and specific egos. [They] deny that these are the productions of the unconscious.”[v] Whereas Freud believed the unconscious affected by the desire of one’s mother and the repression of this as the foundation of mental illness, Deleuze and Guattari believe that “the unconscious is an orphan.”[vi] The unconscious is formed through processes extending beyond the family, even children begin to understand and identify with “the economic, financial, social, and cultural problems that cross through [their] family.”[vii] These undercurrents continually expose the limitations of Oedipal theorizing which Deleuze and Guattari are attempting to supplant and move beyond. The unconscious “is the Real in itself,”[viii] and is more accurately understood when schizophrenized, that is, allowed to transcend the bounds continually constraining it through psychoanalysis. Oedipus transforms the unconscious from a “factory” to a “theatre.” The Oedipal story is played over and over again as if before an audience, destroying the productive capacities that had once existed. And to those who refuse this treatment, there is always “the asylum or the police.”[ix] Furthermore, it is not even clear what is achieved through this supposed treatment. Do the patients ever move beyond their triangulation and become cured? Deleuze and Guattari believe they are healed, but only by passing their illness on to their offspring.
The answer offered in place of psychoanalysis by Deleuze and Guattari is schizoanalysis. This can be used to identify and analyze societal problems. It seeks to explain one of the most troubling questions, how “desire can be made to desire its own repression.”[x] Here is the link showing that Oedipus is more than just a failed psychological theory, how it serves as the underpinnings of the ruling class, and is intimately connected with capitalism.
Before moving on to this analysis it will be helpful to introduce the concepts of desiring-production, the body without organs, and the socius. Deleuze and Guattari liken the body without organs to an egg which stands opposed to the desiring-machines continually acting on it. An endless string of machines connect to the body and siphon off the subsequent productions. This organization, however, is detrimental to the body and causes repression, the continual struggle, or rather “repulsion,” against these desiring-machines.[xi] As stated earlier, machines function, in a sense, by breaking down. This process, too, wears on the body without organs. In its production the surplus is taken away, manipulated and stored by other machines. The body without organs comes to desire this desiring-production, but is misled by the recording process. The socius is a body that can take any shape (that of the Earth, a tyrant, property, etc.), and forms a surface on which all the flows of desire are recorded and codified.[xii] It forever regulates the movements and limitations of these flows. The recording process is, however, inaccurate as it attributes the production to the desiring-machines rather than to the body. Capitalism intrudes upon the vulnerabilities of the socius and seeks to destroy its mechanism of recording, and in the process, “unleash the flows of desire.”[xiii] Although this unleashing occurs, it is not without new territories being continually established. This entire “process of the production of desire and desiring-machines [is schizophrenia].”[xiv] In seeking to appropriate the body without organs for its own designs it first inscribes the ideas of “races, cultures, and…gods.”[xv]
Capitalism struggles within itself. By decoding the socius from “intrinsic codes…[to] abstract quantities in the form of money,” it unleashes desire but within new parameters that are constantly shifting.[xvi] The tension drives it into constant opposition with itself, hence schizophrenia as “the absolute limit, [while] capitalism is the relative limit.”[xvii] Psychoanalysis serves the ends of capitalism by supplanting the myth of Oedipus as a distraction away from real societal problems, be they political, economic, legal, etc. It also serves to keep the problem localized to prevent the flows from exceeding their boundaries. Modern society has thus undergone a vast privatization to amass the surplus of each part. But the parts themselves, at one point, were appropriated for the entire community. For the “primitive machine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them, cordons them off, encastes them…so that the flows of exchange and the flows of production do not manage to break the codes in favor of their abstract or fictional qualities.”[xviii] This is exactly what capitalism has achieved, the rearrangement of the socius to remake itself as the originator of all production.
This belief can even be transferred from a capitalistic society to one that is not by colonization. The progenitors of the Oedipal myth travel from country to country, dissecting various cultures and fallaciously trying to find the universality of Oedipus in every local myth, legend, and custom. They miss the mark, however, not because Oedipus is not universal, but from a misunderstanding of the universal condition, that every society fears “the decoded flows of desire,” and thus works to reign in these flows in one-way or another.[xix] The myth of Oedipus can therefore be easily inscribed into the unique beliefs and practices of each society (as can capitalism). And this is the project that must come next, the complete liberty of these flows towards whatever ends may be found.
Schizoanalysis seeks to free the unconscious from the internal discord between decoded flows and arbitrary limits. The field of inquiry ceases to close in upon itself, as capitalism does, and the process of schizoanalysis “sets out to explore a transcendental unconscious, rather than a metaphysical one; an unconscious that is material rather than ideological; schizophrenic rather than Oedipal…real rather than symbolic.”[xx] It does this by recognizing the errors of psychoanalysis, its substitution of representation for production. For representation is a form of production even if endowed with myth and tragedy.[xxi] Schizoanalysis seeks a complete deterritorialization, one that is freed from the ever-resurfacing territorializations that accompany the deterritorializations found in capitalism. It is the destruction of all limits and artificial constraints, “a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage.”[xxii] It will continually work to transcend any and all artificial boundaries and constraints.
This process will take much time as everything must be reevaluated and reexamined. Indeed, it may be a process for which there is no end as Deleuze and Guattari compare it to an infinite spider-web always being undone. The end, or the process, results not in an answer to, “what does it mean?” but rather, “how does it work?” This process is grounded in the idea of schizophrenia for the schizophrenic is one who has had too much and “can no longer bear ‘all that:’ money, the stock market, the death forces…values, morals, homelands, religions…”[xxiii] They recede into their own world, never quite finding the means to make all that disappear. The revolutionary individual is similar, but in addition to wanting leave of it all he or she will also know “how to make what he [or she] is escaping escape.”[xxiv]

[i] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 4.
[ii] William Bogard, “Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian Sociology.” Sociological Theory, no. 1 (March 1998): 54.
[iii] Eugene W. Holland, “Deterritorializing ‘Deterritorialization’: From the ‘Anti-Oedipus’ to ‘A Thousand Plateaus.” SubStance, Vol. 20, No. 3, Issue 66 (1991): 291.
[iv] Deleuze-Guattari, 67.
[v] Deleuze-Guattari, 74.
[vi] Deleuze-Guattari, 49.
[vii] Deleuze-Guattari, 278.
[viii] Deleuze-Guattari, 53.
[ix] Deleuze-Guattari, 81.
[x] Deleuze-Guattari, 105.
[xi] Deleuze-Guattari, 9.
[xii] Deleuze-Guattari, 10 and 33.
[xiii] Deleuze-Guattari, 33.
[xiv] Deleuze-Guattari, 24.
[xv] Deleuze-Guattari, 85.
[xvi] Deleuze-Guattari, 139.
[xvii] Deleuze-Guattari, 176.
[xviii] Deleuze-Guattari, 153.
[xix] Deleuze-Guattari, 177 and 179.
[xx] Deleuze-Guattari, 278 and 109.
[xxi] Deleuze-Guattari, 296 and 297.
[xxii] Deleuze-Guattari, 311.
[xxiii] Deleuze-Guattari, 341.
[xxiv] Deleuze-Guattari, 341.