Exploding Oedipus

"English commentators seemed to have taken special offense, with Terry Eagleton retrospectively summarizing the content of Anti-Oedipus as "the most banal anarchist rhetoric," a book in whose "apodicticism of desire... there can be no place for political discourse proper," while Perry Anderson found in it nothing but "saturnalian subjectivism"" (154)"The very best critical scholarship so far has, appropriately, located Anti-Oedipus historically (especially, and most clearly, as a book written in the early aftermath of the upheavals of May 1968), but it has contextualized the book and its authors primarily in the specifics of the French national intellectual milieu" (155)"A recurrent phenomenon, moreover, has involved treating Guattari as the enfant terrible sidekick contaminating the purportedly superior, more serious academic work of Deleuze" (156)"Anti-Oedipus needs to be understood also as a psychoanalytic text, not just an attack on psychoanalysis. This becomes clearer when we look at the text's unusual uses of Reich, Klein, Fanon, and Lacan, but also when the publication of Anti-Oedipus is placed within international psychoanalytic trends of its moment" (156)"Psychoanalysis has succeeded so brilliantly in the first half of the Cold War, especially in the USA but by extension also internationally, precisely by shedding whatever socially subversive potential it had once had. Concomitantly, many leading figures in the psychoanalytic community had lost interest in seriously theorizing the complex interconnections between the self and the wider society. As Guattari was to remark in a 1985 interview: "The most singular and personal factors have to do with social and collective dimensions. It is stupid to imagine a psychogenesis independent of contextual dimensions, but that's what psychologists and psychoanalysts do"" (157)"Ultimately, prime among the ideas put forward in Anti-Oedipus would be the notion of the unconscious as more of a "factory" than a "theater" - continually churning and producing rather than symbolically representing - and of a world in which human beings are best understood as "desiring-machines" (machines desirantes). Or rather, more accurately, human beings are conceived as composed of multiple, endlessly shifting, connecting and disconnecting desiring-machines, which are in turn continually connecting and disconnecting to all other life (both human and non-human), in flows interrupted and changed by stoppages, surges, and redirections" (158)"Others have noted that the idea of the human as a machine was already to be found in Lacan's seminars from the 1950s - and indeed LAcan (correctly) gave the credit straight back to Freud. But the seemingly disconcerting merger of mechanical and natural imagery had a long history in French social thought reaching back into the nineteenth century. And certainly, Deleuze and Guattari were quite unapologetic about their blending of "mechanism and vitalism" - and both of these with psychoanalysis - at one point invoking the Noble Prize-winning geneticist and virologist Jacques Monod and his idea of "microscopic cybernetics" to buttress their argument that "it is not a matter of biologizing human history, nor of anthropologizing natural history. It is a matter of showing the common participation of the social machines and the organic machines in the desiring-machines. At man's most basic stratum, the Id" (158)"In the world of Anti-Oedipus, desire - which is sexual, yes, but also far more than sexual - is invested directly in the social field, with no need of sublimation or mediation of any kind. ... Wunschmachinen ("wishing-machines" - a reversion to Freud's original term Wunsch, which Lacan and all subsequent French Freudians had translated as désir, and which thus in turn in the English translation showed up as "desire")" (159)"Deleuze and Guattari did literally mean that also economics was a sexual matter" (159)"D+G "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgoisie fucks the proletariat; and son on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused" (159)"The iconoclast Marxist Freudian Wilhelm Reich had first proposed, in his The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), that an answer to the question of why human beings submitted to political arrangements that were not in their economic interest might lie not just in the intellectual content or even the emotional appeal of the ideological "befogging" to which they were subjected by the powers that be, but literally in the corporeal impact of ideology, especially an ideology that enforced sexual fear and self-restriction. "What has to be explained," Reich wrote, "is to the fact that man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don't steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don't strike"" (160)"But by the time they co-wrote Anti-Oedpius, Deleuze and Guattari had figured out that the concept of ideology blocked insight more than facilitated it. Their innovation was the shift attention from ideology to what they identified as the prior question of desire. As Deleuze put it in an interview given shortly after the publication of the book: "We're not contrasting desire, as some romantic luxury, with interests that are merely economic and political. We think, rather, that interests are always found and articulated at points predetermined by desire... Because however you look at it, desire is part of the infrastructure (we don't have any time for concepts like ideology, which are really no help at all: there are no such things as ideologies)"" (163)"Deleuze returned to this point: "Ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, ... but the organization of power." And: "We do not say: ideology is a tormpe l'oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions). We say there is no ideology, it is an illusion. "That's why," Deleuze continued, "it [the idea of ideology] suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power." To rely on the concept of ideology was to misrecognize what was going on" (164)"The contention put forward in Anti-Oedipus, then, was that desire was roiling continuously, in everyone, beyond and below all ideology" (164)"Deleuze and Guattari's canniest and most original move in Anti-Oedipus, however, was to blend the obviously politicized Reich with ideas taken not just from the (generally politically disinterested) Lacan - but also from the stringently apolitical (but for them enormously useful) British child analyst Melanie Klein" (165)"Her writings swirl with anarchic, and definitively socially inappropriate, urges - especially in children (though with adults by no means exempt)" (165)"Moreover, Klein emphasized just how close to psychosis and self-disintegration almost all human beings often were, filled with persecutory-paranoid and benign or reparation-intending impulses jostling with each other for supremacy - a constant state of internal war... love and hate coexisted in the same instant" (185)"From Lacan - persuasively hostile as he consistently was to the assumptions about maturity and adaptation built into US ego psychology - Deleuze and Guattari got essential ideas about the instability of all persons, the potency of the unconscious, the metonymic slipping and sliding and substitutions in chains of meaning, the constant splitting or doubling of selves and objects, and the foundational importance of misrecognition and miscommunication between selves and others" (166)"And nothing made the impoverishment of the traditional triadic psychoanalytic story clearer than a glance over the rim of the French hexagon: "It is strange that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with the missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by a white man." The footnote that followed was to Fanon" (167)"The kind of analysis Deleuze and Guattari were asking for (they called it "schizoanalysis" not because they romanticized madness - a misunderstanding they continually had to refute - but in order to call attention to the craziness in the world that required assessment as much as or more than individual craziness) took its sense of ethical clarity not least from a consideration of the lessons of colonialism and anticolonial struggles" (168)"When Deleuze in his 1972 preface to Guattari's essays asked rhetorically, "What do we not make love and death with?" what he meant, among other things, was that "our loves and our sexual choices are less derivatives of a mythical Daddy-Mommy than they are of a social reality, interferences and effects of flows cathected by the libido" - flows that were also economic, racial, political" (169)""Integrated World Capitalism" (or as he frequently shorthanded it: IWC)" (170)"Guattari... "Rather than speak of ideology, I always prefer to speak of subjectivation, or the producton of subjectivity." For: "The notion of ideology does not allow us to understand this productive function of subjectivity. Ideology remains in the sphere of representation, whereas the essential production of IWC does not simply concern representation, but also a modelization of behavior, sensibility, perception, memory, social relations, sexual relations, imaginary phantoms, etc." Yet at the same time, Guattari missed few opportunities to state not only that "subjectivity is... essentially social," but also that "in my view, there is no clear unity of the person," that it was necessary always to be "radically questioning these notions of the individual," and indeed that "Freud was the first to show how precarious the notion of the totality of an ego is"" (170-171)"To their critique of the concept of ideology, they thus added a critique of the idea of identities" (172)"Especially noteworthy, as they were writing in themidst of the sexual revolution, was Deleuze and Guattari's insistence that any movement basing itself in presumptions of inherent and bounded sexual identities was just as "Oeidpalized" and wrong-headed as the normative heterosexism it claimed to be opposing: "It is a lie to claim to liberate sexuality, and to demand its rights to objects, aims, and sources, all the while maintaining the correspondence flows within the limits of an Oedipal code (conflict, regression, resolution, sublimation of Oedius), and while continuing to impose a familialist and masturbatory form or motivation on it that makes any perspective of liberation futile in advance." Moreover, and "for example," they went on to argue: "No 'gay liberation movement' is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality... instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication"" (172)"For finally, they concluded: "Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming a hundred thousand... not one or even two sexes, but n sexes." Deleuze and Guattari unabashedly recommended that everyone could benefit from "becoming-homosexual" or "becoming-woman." This was a much more radical - or, simply, queerer - conceptualization of sexuality than was being envisioned by some of the sex rights movement emerging at the time" (172-173)"Deleuze and Guattari's mocking of Oedipus was taken as a huge affront by a French psychoanalytic community that felt incredulous that anyone could doubt the verity of this master trope" (176)"In the USA, widely read and influential neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm had already in the 1930s and 1940s dismissed the Oedipus complex as a figment of Freud's imagination, while simulatenously pushing the idea that social anxiety and the search for safety in an overwhelming and disempowering world were stronger motivational forces than sexual desire could ever be" (176-177)"Guattari, then, can be usefully understood as a crucial figure in the far larger transnational wave of Left-politically engaged revitalization of psychoanalysis that swept Western Europe and Latin America at the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s - and that he continued to develop all through the 1980s and early 1990s" (178)