Ecosophy over at Soft Subversions has written a very interesting riff on my post about the relationship between Guattari and Lacan:
In his personal diary (published in The Anti-Œdipus Papers) the self-styled schizoanalyst Felix Guattari details a meeting with Jacques Lacan (whose method of psychoanalysis Guattari trained in) prior to the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Œdipus. In the meeting, Guattari articulated his concerns about psychoanalysis: “The point is to know if analysts will be agents of the established order or if they will stand up to their political responsibilities.” According to Guattari, Lacan replied: “I don’t care if there are any analysts. I’ve spent my whole life denouncing them.” Lacan’s point was that, by making this demand, Guattari was revealing his desire for a political form of psychoanalysis. What we find in Guattari’s work is not a desire to cure (a desire met with disapproval in Lacan’s essay ’Variations on the Standard Treatment’), but a desire to militate.
In schizoanalysis we are not, of course, negating the dominance of the effects of the castration complex. For Freud, this complex is desire that blocks itself, scares itself… But blocks itself on what? The body… Neurotics hang onto remainders, recompose rites, on their own bodies, and the Oedipus. (The Anti-Œdipus Papers, p.123-4)
The political responsibility which Guattari places on the analyst is to not allow the neurotic patient to recompose Oedipal rites on their bodies. This view can be easily translated back into Freud’s own vocabulary of binding and primary and secondary processes. If primary processes are bound on the body of Oedipus in a secondary process, then the analyst’s political responsibility is to avoid reifying Oedipus into a transcendent structure within which the individual finds a position. This is a political responsibility because it is the reification of Oedipus which then allows capitalism to suppress desire for its own purposes. For this reason, Guattari places the concept of “assemblage” (which implies a temporary, nomadic formation) in opposition to Freud’s use of the term “complex”. Perhaps a productive dialogue may begin between Guattari’s work and recent, psychoanalytically-informed political theory (Laclau, Zizek, Butler et cetera) if we found a way to talk of an Oedipal assemblage, but not a reified Oedipal complex.
Read the rest here.
Ecosophy puts the issue brilliantly– truly brilliantly –when he remarks that perhaps it would be possible to open a more fruitful dialogue between psychoanalytically inflected political theories and schizoanalysis were the question to be posed in terms of Oedipal assemblages (or in my language, networks) rather than Oedipal structures (cf. my post on this distinction here). One of the major accomplishments of Anti-Oedipus was both the linkage of Oedipal networks to the broader social and historical context, showing how the formation of subjectivity is not a private family affair, and their demonstration in chapter 3 that kinship and socio-political organization take on very different structures, are organized by very different machines, in different periods.
Here Deleuze and Guattari are targeting a central psychoanalytic dogma surrounding the transcendence and eternality of Oedipal structure. If this issue is of crucial importance, then this is because where the Oedipus is treated as a transcendent structure, were faced with what Lacan called a “forced vel of alienation”. That is, we’re faced with an either/or alternative where either choice is bad and the only choice is the lesser of two evils. In the case of treating Oedipus as a structure, were faced with a choice where, just as we must choose our life when the mugger says “your money or your life”, therefore sacrificing our jouissance, Oedipal structure gives us the stark alternative of neurotic resignation to castration or incoherent psychosis. In other words, we can choose meaning (the order of the signifier and the social) or being (jouissance), but cannot have both. As a consequence, the Oedipus becomes an apologetics for both capitalist structure and a support for the reigning status quo: “Either you accept neurosis and the reigning social order or you fall into anarchic and mute psychosis!”
I have encountered this myself in discussions with Lacanians. Thus, a year ago I got into it with two prominent Lacanians over whether or not other discourses beyond Lacan’s four were possible, and whether or not there were other forms of social organization not premised on the masculine and feminine graphs of sexuation with respect to the real and jouissance. Much to my surprise I was informed that these structures are eternal– like Platonic forms –and then that “other structures are not needed even if they are possible”, despite clear textual evidence to the contrary that Lacan himself envisioned the possibility of other discourse relations and saw neurosis as something unique to contemporary kinship structures. In other words, there was an extreme hostility to the treatment of these things as assemblages that, by virtue of being assemblages, could be changed and reorganized in a variety of ways.
In my view, the advantage of treating the Oedipus as an assemblage rather than as a structure is two-fold. On the one hand, it opens the possibility of other social formations, significantly increasing the number of political possibilities on the table. On the other hand, it responds to certain shortcomings I believe to be at work in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Based on my understanding, Anti-Oedipus poses the right question– “why do people will their own oppression” –and even gives the right answer– because of Oedipal or paranoid social structure –but it fails to give an adequate genetic or morphological account of just how subjects come to be Oedipalized or to accept the Oedipal order. If, as Deleuze and Guattari rightly argue, desire is productive, affirmative, and perpetually mobile, how does it come to occur that desiring-machines come to experience themselves as subjects, experience themselves as lacking, experience themselves as castrated, and yearn for a master? I’ve read Anti-Oedipus up and down and I simply can’t, for the life of me, find an answer to this question. The closest we get is something that sounds as if it is blaming theorists that discuss lack, castration, and the self-identical subject for these things. However, if 1) we can theorize Oedipal assemblages, and 2) we can give an account of how lack is manufactured or produced within affirmative and connective desire, then we can begin to build such an account and develop strategies for undermining this structure. The mistake, which is all too common among Deleuzians, lies in thinking that the illusions of lack and negation do not nonetheless have real effects and consequences. No doubt this mistake arises from a failure to read Kant on the topic of transcendental illusions.
Larval Subjects . 
December 5, 2008 at 1:46 am
“If, as Deleuze and Guattari rightly argue, desire is productive, affirmative, and perpetually mobile, how does it come to occur that desiring-machines come to experience themselves as subjects, experience themselves as lacking, experience themselves as castrated, and yearn for a master?”
I have a feeling this is a great question, and at the same time that you might as well be asking, “why are their mistakes in the first place?”
December 6, 2008 at 6:32 am
“If, as Deleuze and Guattari rightly argue, desire is productive, affirmative, and perpetually mobile, how does it come to occur that desiring-machines come to experience themselves as subjects, experience themselves as lacking, experience themselves as castrated, and yearn for a master?”
‘How can we sum up this entire vital progression? Let us trace it along a first path (the shortest route): the points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that converge on the desiring-machines; then the subject – produced as residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine – passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. This subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined [‘defined’ is emphasized in the text] by the states through which it passes.’ – Anti-Oedipus, 20
Deleuze and Guattari take quite seriously the role of lack and its real effects, is not the whole book devoted to determining and finding a way to undermine (‘schizo-analysis,’ a term they later abandon) the whole system of social production, anti-production and coercion that has built so-called ‘subjectivity’ of which lack is an integral part? If pressed I can find it, but at some point they write that the problem with Freud is that his system works too well. And I don’t believe they go so far as to put desire on high, they only note the continually productive element of desire. The fault they find in psychoanalysis is, perhaps, the answer to your question: the production and reiteration of machines as subjects occurs through the social process of instruction, reward and punishment (hence their love of Foucault). With the right amount of social violence and reward the comfortable mix not only produces the subject in its unstable form, but does so in a fashion that (en)joy(ment) cannot be reached otherwise without leakage. The leakages are given to the analyst to mend.
But it might be, with all due respect, wrong to give the desiring-machines some kind of subjectivity that would have them ‘experience themselves’; desiring-machines are produced into subjects. This process is a social production that the desiring-machines are hooked into and work on; it is never a simply individual project or becoming.
Their book is incredible from where I’m sitting, look at NYC. I well admit I could be wrong on this (I feel your pain, it’s a hard book), but I think the passage into subjects as we know them, the process of desiring-machines becoming Oedipalized, rests on the passage quoted above. It’s the best I can find. Hope it helps.
Best,
Ian M.
NSSR
December 6, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Yes, I understand this, but I think you’re somewhat missing the question. It is indeed the case that subjects are products of desiring-machines. This would hold for Lacan as well. The issue is rather that of how an affirmative and productive desire can ever become susceptible to such an operation in the first place. In other words, it’s a question of the mechanics of this process. While it is certainly true that Deleuze and Guattari devote their schizoanalysis to undermining these phenomena, they have little in the way of a cogent account of how these phenomena come into being. Consequently, the issue is not so much one of a failure to understand the text as it is a matter of something incomplete in the text in need of further development. I think then we have two issues here: First, there is the critic of psychoanalytic practice, wherein a certain type of analyst, rather than working with the productivity of desire, instead attempts, as you put it, to mend these leaks in desire. This, I think, is an important critique and very much in the Lacanian spirit where desire is above all productive not representation. Second, however, there is the issue of the production of castrated subjects or how such subjects can ever come to be within the ontological scheme Deleuze and Guattari develop. Here Deleuze and Guattari do not have a whole lot to say. It’s as if they begin with the fact that such subjects and social systems against (quid facti) and then proceed to develop an account of how they might be escaped. Symptomatically, I think, we can detect the absence of such an account in the secondary literature in the tendency to see the production of lack as somehow coming from analysts (no doubt assisted by their remarks about Melanie Klein and the train). No doubt analytic practice can assist in this to be sure. However, we still require a transcendental analysis, a metapsychology, that explains how this can occur. I don’t think I was trying to give desiring-machines subjectivity. On the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari extend the notion of desire well beyond anything that could be contained in subjectivity, treating desire as a metaphysical principle that would apply equally to rocks. On the other hand, the issue isn’t one of what desiring-machines experience, but of how, if you read the sentence you quoted carefully, subjects come to be produced out of this impersonal transcendental field. This was a long running project for Deleuze, appearing in the fourth chapter of Difference and Repetition as well as the two ontological geneses of The Logic of Sense. It is an incredible book, which is why I’m working on these issues following my prior book on Deleuze’s independent work. In other words, I think it’s received short shrift and has not been appropriated with the political potential that it could have been appropriated with.
December 7, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Point taken, I hope my response was not taken too strongly, perhaps my wording of it was poor. I agree with you that portraying lack as simply a production of the analyst is inadequate and the remarks on fascism in Anti-Oedipus would seem to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari would agree. But I can’t help but wonder, and this is a personal thought, that the absence of any real mechanical discussion concerning the production of castrated subjects is not a low-point on the part of Deleuze and Guattari, but is rather their resistance towards any kind of metapsychology. No doubt they play some favor towards a kind of transcendental field, but, at least in Anti-Oedipus, I’m not as convinced that this transcendental field exists apart from the social field in any defined sense; the transcendental field (say, the body-without-organs) does not transcend the social field created from it. I would be very skeptical towards the idea that Deleuze and Guattari are after some kind of reinvigorated Plato or Kant.
That said, and possibly this is in part due to personal bias, I don’t see it as any fault of Deleuze and Guattari that this metapsychology is not accounted for; I think it rather a strength. Much of Guattari’s “clinical” work is based around stripping from analysis any kind of metapsychology that would give instruction as to the manner within which affirmative desires are coded into repressive desires, instead being concerned with how to provided an arena for the expressions of desire as political action. I would guess (and this is always dangerous) that Deleuze and Guattari would hastily resist any kind of metapsychology of this process or interaction between analysand and analyst, as if to finally diagnose the real problem. Thus my question, do you think the metapsychology or ‘transcendental analysis’ you are looking for can contain the intersection between Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan that you wrote about, or might it, rather, “cross out” the ‘avec’ between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis? Could this transcendental analysis of the creation of castrated subjects in fact be a recoding attempting to produce a universal trajectory for a process that has formally the same outcome, but might always takes place in highly “individualized,” contextualized means?
Despite this all, I think you’re on to something and my personal biases towards the aims of the book shouldn’t detract from admitting its shortcomings. Even suggesting that castration could be intimately contextual still sidesteps the question of the mechanics of that production. Very interested in your thoughts.
Best,
Ian M.
December 7, 2008 at 5:42 pm
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