4-12-11 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Parts 3 & 4

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (parts 3 & 4)

Summary Part 3: D&G set up their argument for the work of schizoanalysis by tying family structure to capitalist desire production, Oedipus being the link between the two.

Summary Part 4: The work of schizoanalysis is to deterritorialize the flows of capitalist production by upsetting the way that myths produce desire.

 “That is why, inversely, schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions.  Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes.  And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent.  Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory” (314).

I’ll be analyzing the last sentence in the series (in bold); I have the others up for context since the sentence I’ll be examining is incomplete.

What is schizoanalysis?  Or rather, what does schizoanalysis do?  The above sentence(s) don’t offer us an answer to the first question, and since D&G’s explosion of both psychoanalysis and capitalism is all about the process, it becomes less important to figure out exactly what schizoanalysis is than how it enacts this process.  Last week I was concerned with how Anti-Oedipus was different from the psychoanalysis that I’ve been reading thus far, and I think this sentence begins to develop this concern.  Obviously, Anti-Oedipus is anti-Oedipal because it rejects that myth as a structuring, universalizing category.  However, that doesn’t mean that D&G are ready to throw out this category entirely: “…we have envolved in Oedipus, we have been structured in Oedipus, and under the neutral and benevolent eye of the substitute, we have learned the song of castration…” (312).  Here, we’ve learned to live in a certain way because of Oedipal structures; they’ve structured the social world in such a way as to make it all about production.  Oedipus is the socius as we know it now, and structure is the problem.  While this is the most obvious difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, further differences become more subtle from there.  The main things that I’m concerned with are mediation and the way that schizoanalysis is concerned with literature (which might need to take a back seat in this post).

The bolded sentence elaborates on the “necessary destructions” to which schizoanalysis “must devote itself”.  The process of schizoanalysis (s.a.) is violent, destructive, and brutal, destroying the Oedipal structure.  Continuing with overtones of materiality, s.a. causes explosions.  The things that are actually exploding are songs and myths, which are not material, but because D&G connect them with explosion, they point to the way that these songs and myths act as structuring agents.  Weirdly, the latin root of “explode” means to drive someone off the stage in disapproval, which would indicate that s.a. doesn’t have much to do with fire or blowing something up.  It’s brutal in a more affective sense, where the person on stage is being driven away by shame and rejection rather than being killed or blown up.  Getting back to the way that these non-material things act as structuring agents, it’s not so much about destroying the materiality of the structure than just making it public how bad the structure is.  Boo, Oedipus, get off the stage.  D&G don’t like what is happening on the stage right now, all this myth and tragedy nonsense, and they want to see that the “representative series that psychoanalysis substitutes for the line of production” (305) are revealed for what they really are: horrible actors who are trying to cover up the way they produce capitalist desire by taking on the guise of representation.  To indulge my concern with literature here (and to simplify a whole lot): D&G aren’t rejecting forms of art or literature (after all, Watt is important to their own analysis); they’re instead asking what/who the art/myth/tragedy is serving.

Why isn’t s.a. just another way of structuring then?  In the sentence, this destruction is an effect of s.a..  Schizoanalysis isn’t directly exploding anything.  It’s notable here that the subject is completely missing from this sentence.  This could be an introductory clause, which we can imagine would be followed by the subject and then maybe a being verb, or the subject could start the sentence, which would mean the verbs would have to change.  But that’s not what this sentence does.  The subject doesn’t structure this sentence and so s.a. does not structure this new kind of process that is taking place.  Therefore, the process of s.a. is not only non-structuring in terms of displacing the structure that is there, but it’s also non-structuring in a way that it’s hard to place whatever comes after the structure.

My next concern is mediation.  I want to put stress on the word “intervening” in the above sentence.  It’s something that s.a. does (although not directly, as I’ve already established, even though this construction is more direct than the previous one).  Mediation and intervention are closely related in their etymology, and they mean basically the same thing.  What is being mediated, though?  In psychoanalysis, it’s the myth of Oedipus mediates the story of an individual’s life in service of capitalism.  Intervention can also mean to come between, though, and that is how it is working in this sentence.  The intervention is happening on the stage, where s.a. is coming between myth and capitalism and stealing from both their power to carry the subject back to the factory.  If we’re talking about the way that verbs structure this sentence, carrying is the most direct one in here, connected to myth and what it is doing.  The process of s.a. is to intervene in the process of capitalism and disrupt its flow.  It also matters when s.a. is intervening, and it’s when the myth gets up on stage and starts to sing; s.a. has to intervene in order to stop this process.