DELEUZE: MACHINES & DESIRE
MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 46
DELEUZE AND MUSIC PART 6
“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
During the 20th century philosophers of the Frankfurt School like Horckheimer, Marcuse, Adorno or Fromm among others tried to warm up and re-imagine Freud’s and Marx’s work in an attempt to come up with a synthesis. Freud, by introducing the concept of the unconscious mind showed how it was conceivable that you were not aware about basic aspects of your personality. Desires and motives could come from places you were not conscious of. In his theory of superstructure, Marx explained how it was possible that things that are created within a society, including theories, arise first of all from an economic climate in which people are born into.
Deleuze and Guattari, didn’t see things this way. They thought that like with Christianity even modernity teach us to see an eye always looking down upon us, to see things from only one point of view. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
If you relegate yourself to an “ism,” whether it’s Freudianism, Libertarianism, Nationalism, Post-Modernism, Serialism, Marxism or for that matter Capitalism, the best thing you’ll ever have is a single point of view from which you’ll spend the rest of your life debating from.
“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
In contrast to other political philosophies based on the contract (Hobbes) or the spirit of the law (Montesquieu), a theory of the state (Plato) or the problem of legitimation (Durkheim, Habermas). Deleuze and Guattari ask us to view the world through the lens of what they call machines.
MACHINES
Imagine a bicycle. By itself the bicycle just kind of sits there by itself in a garage purely virtual in terms of its potential, it doesn’t become actualized in any way. What the bicycle needs are other machines around it to make connections with. Say that the bicycle connects with the machine of a human being. That person could do a thousand different things, they could ride it around, they could take it apart and sell it as parts, they could give it to charity or see as a work of art and put on display, they could name it, they could beat somebody to death, the point is they insist that life is actually a machine made up of multiple machinic connections. Machines are multiplicities and not definable by the sum of their parts.
“Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it.
The breast of the new mother can be thought of as a machine just as the mouth of the newborn baby can be thought of as a machine each seeking connections with other machines and each using the connections with other machines to actualize themselves.
They oppose Freud’s concept of sublimation, which posits an inherent dualism between desiring-machines and social production. Their concept of sexuality is not limited to the interaction of male and female gender roles, but instead posits a multiplicity of flows that a “hundred thousand” desiring-machines create within their connected universe;
“Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.”
While individuals are representations of one specific machine type. An example of another type of machine would be a group. These two things are instances of machines in the sense that they are organizations finding relations with other machines trying to bring about an actuality.
Can we apply the same principle to political revolutions, historical events, super structures, as devices in their own right? Some sort of hyperobject? Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” – entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place and their impact on how we think, how we coexist, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.
FREUDIAN ID
According to Sigmund Freud’s, the id is the personality component made up of unconscious psychic energy that works to satisfy basic urges, needs, and desires operating on the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification.
“Psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e., those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd and defined in terms of common and external goals”
DESIRE PRODUCTION
Desiring machines and social production
The name desire production is pretty transparently just a mash up of “desire” from Freud and “production” from Marx but Deleuze and Guattari aren’t looking for some sort of synthesis. Anti-Œdipus was thus an attempt to think beyond Freudo-Marxism.
The traditional understanding of desire – which stretches from Plato to Freud and Lacan – assumes an exclusive distinction between “production” and “acquisition” insofar as desire seeks to acquire something that it lacks. Traditionally see how people have been thinking about attraction is that people always want something that’s missing in their lives. The lack of something is what produces the individual’s drive for growth. Consequently our usual understanding implies that desire is something that can be resolved through satisfaction.
In this model, desire describes an exterior relationship between two terms: the subject and the object of desire. That is, in our maternal satiation as child at the breast, we lack all desire, and lack a differentiated subjectivity. A psychoanalytic approach then posits our ongoing desire for this original state as the defining characteristic of differentiated human persons. We gain subjectivity only through our differentiation from an original blissful state.
“Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression”
“The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the production of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, the discovery was soon buried beneath the 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”
Yet Deleuze and Guattari dispute this, they will say that in general desire and development are natural, basic properties of what it is to be a machine at all which involves what it is to be a human being echoing principally Nietzsche’s will to power and Spinoza’s conatus. They argue that desire is a positive process of production that produces reality.
Desire is not a relation between terms based on lack, but rather desire is evidence of life’s constant and “difference”production. There is a plane of desire and flows of experience, and this desire produces subjects.
Desire isn’t something dictated by some standard of living outside of yourself and what you need in relation to that standard, desire is a natural process of experimentation. What this implies is that desire is not something that is located deep inside the psyche of the individual.
We tend to see desire as grounded in a specific, “desiring subject.” In confrast, Deleuze would say that the positive production of desire anticipates our formation of the subject, and hence opens out onto the world. On the basis of three “passive syntheses” (partly modelled on Kant’s syntheses of apperception from his Critique of Pure Reason), desire engineers “partial objects, flows, and bodies” in the service of the autopoiesis of the unconscious. In this model, desire does not “lack” its object; instead, desire
“is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.”
Consequently, organisms are formed through desiring machines, which connect various elements of flow, where each desiring machine is connected to others: that is, no one desiring- machine can describe an organism’s complete being.
“There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.”
Reframing the Oedipal complex
The “anti-” part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model’s articulation of society based on the family triangle of father, mother and child. Criticizing psychoanalysis “familialism”, they want to show that the oedipal model of the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of society.
Instead of conceiving the “family” as a sphere contained by a larger “social” sphere, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family should be opened onto the social, as in Bergson’s conception of the Open, and that underneath the pseudo-opposition between family and social, lies the relationship between pre-individual desire and social production.
Furthermore, they argue that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality.
So, this is the reason the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is titled Anti-Oedipus. To Deleuze, just as there’s no transcendent governing body that dictates the rules of ontology there’s no transcendent governing body external to you like Freud’s Oedipus that dictates what desires you feel or what connections you’re going to seek as a desiring machine.
Like their contemporary, R. D. Laing, and like Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression and social oppression. This Oedipal way of looking at desire has very real consequences on the societies that believe in it. Because in these societies desire becomes something that gets turned inward, towards your immediate family, what you think of as your desires is really just you misinterpreting some a psycho-sexual framework that you don’t quite understand.
The result of this on a social level being that the vast majority of the desire of the individual gets interpreted inwardly with any excess desire that someone might have, spills over into the social and political realms always subject to their limitations which are themselves controlled by the forces of Capitalism.
Desiring-production is explosive:
“there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire sectors of society”.
The concept of desiring-production is part of Deleuze and Guattari’s more general appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation of the will to power. In both concepts, a pleasurable force of appropriation of what is outside oneself, incorporating into oneself what is other than oneself, characterizes the essential process of all life.
“D.H. Lawrence had the 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 a production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of nature and production”
As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, at one end or the other in the treatment, the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side! — never did psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement social representations, and for participating inenthusiasm.
Schizoanalysis
“Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
One of the central theses of Anti-Oedipus is that libidinous and political economy are structurally one and the same thing, which means that the desire always remains a constituent part of the political-economic infrastructure of capitalism.
Deleuze/Guattari develop a sophisticated theory of the three syntheses of the libidinous and the socio-economic unconscious: while the desiring machines produce an immanent synthesis (local connections), the socio-economic machines represent transcendental syntheses (global and specific connections.
Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” is a militant social and political analysis that responds to what they see as the reactionary tendencies of psychoanalysis. It proposes a functional evaluation of the direct investments of desire — whether revolutionary or reactionary — in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical.
In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimated, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors. “The truth is,” Deleuze and Guattari explain,
“sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. […] Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.”
In the terms of classical Marxism, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural “base” of society, they argue, not an ideological, subjective “superstructure.”
Unconscious libidinal investments of desire coexist without necessarily coinciding with preconscious investments made according to the needs or ideological interests of the subject (individual or collective) who desires.
Schizoanalysis seeks to show how “in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression — whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere.” Desire produces “even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction.”
They credit capitalism with drastically improving the lives of almost everyone on the planet by abolishing the hierarchical rules and power structures of the middle ages.
“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.”
But just because somebody has the freedom to change jobs and not be subjected to the rules of a landowner does not mean that they’re free or that Capitalism as an economic system is impervious to criticism. Yes, Capitalism has deterritorialized feudalism, but then after deterritorializing these rules Capitalism then reterritorialized it with an axiomatic world of banking and finance, dictating every narrow parameter how you live your life.
FLOWS
Deleuze/Guattari are probably the only theorists whose political-economic philosophy ascribes an enormous importance to the concept of flow, which in turn has a direct connection to Deleuze’s view of the mathematics of the differential quotient. First of all, every kind of current has a specific tempo, rhythm and directional direction, and in the course of time the material whose specific characteristics, be it rhythm, direction or tempo, change.
The decisive point is that flows do not flow along lines, but according to the criteria of n-dimensional, virtual, continuous and non-numerical manifolds, each of which has only one centre. And no matter whether we are dealing with vortices, spirals or whirlpools — it is always a matter of special shapes of the flows, which are indicated by a curved, continuous declination.
Thus, flows would be understood as directed and rhythmic, a-metric and irreversible, they can flee in all directions and, as dynamic-temporalized flows, they are in balance and imbalance at the same time, they can connect or unite, they can originate from a collision or an encounter in which a current meets a counter current and bounces off, resulting in congestion and, consequently, new localizations in an open topological space.
Pure flows have a real and at the same time ideal status. The corresponding topological space refers to a vectorial and smooth space, traversed by uncountable lines, to the unpredictable distribution of events that function without centres, even following lines that deviate from the diagonal.
It also seems possible that in the vortex several currents flow together, thus creating a figure of the manifold, in which nature and culture mix indistinguishably; there are multiple currents, whereby turbulence can arise from many eddies, up to cascades, differentiating and at the same time towering unstable eddies with blurred edges,
In fact, one can imagine an extraordinarily large number of different types of streams and rivers, which in their diversity and directionality, their counter-currents and turbulence — just think of the fluid mechanics of Lucretius — are always controlled or codified in some way or another.
“In the literary machine that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.”
Thus, there is the river and the dams or dikes that control and channel the river,
Body without organs
We usually think of the world as composed of relatively stable entities (“bodies,” beings). But these bodies are really composed of sets of flows moving at various speeds (rocks and mountains as very slow-moving flows; living things as flows of biological material through developmental systems; language as flows of information, words, etc.). This fluid substratum is what Deleuze calls the BwO in a general sense
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari expand the Body without Organs image by comparing its real potentials to the egg’s :
The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors (Capitalism and Schizophrenia
For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a limited set of traits, habits, movements, affects, etc. But every actual body also has a virtual dimension: a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc.
The body without organs is “not an original primordial entity” (proof of an original nothingness) nor what is remains of a lost totality but is the “ultimate residue of a deterritorialized socius”
To “make oneself a body without organs,” then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated (or “actualized”) through conjunctions with other bodies that Deleuze calls “becomings”.
Deleuze and Guattari use the term to refer to the virtual dimension of reality in general (which they more often call “plane of consistency” or “plane of immanence”). In this sense,
“The Earth, is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles”
Deleuze and Guattari see the organism as an organ-ising of the body, which includes an organisation of space and time, as well as races, cultures, religions, and genders. In contrast, the body without organs is the undifferentiated flow of connections from which our differentiation of bodies emerges.
In other words, the body without organs is the flow that we see as existing prior to our formation of individual bodies. This is something that changes historically: in ancient civilisations the body without organs is tied to the life-giving power of the earth, which produces organised bodies and social order; in modem society, it is tied to the belief in the basis of capital, or an original system of exchange, from which we manage human identities and societies.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari insist that we need to become a body without organs. When we do so, we can think outside the organised human body, to comprehend new types of thinking, temporality, and forms of “identity.”
“Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things”
