Deleuze and Guattari

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Deleuze and Guattari

• Anti-Oedipus, Schizo-subject Rhizomes

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Outline

• Starting Questions
• D/Gs revision of psychoanalysis and marxism.
• Desire and Production Oedipalization vs. schizo
  nomad
• A Thousand Plateaus rhizomes
• references

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Starting Questions

• Why is D/G against Oedipus complex? How do they
  look at desire differently from Freud and Lacan?
  
• What is rhizome? How is it different from or
  similar to Derridas dissemination? Why is
  rhizome a short-term memory or
  anti-memory(1605)?
• What does D/G mean when they say that writing
  has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do
  with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet
  to come. (text 1603)

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D/G vs. Psychoanalysis Marxism

• Guattari (in essays of the 1950s and 1960s)
• insists on the libidinal nature of social groups
  
• And social nature of the unconscious (Bogue 87)
• In Machine and Structure (1969), he explores
  alternatives to Lacanian language.
• e.g. Subject ? Machine
• Desire production, desiring production, but
  not lack or acquisition.

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D/G vs. Psychoanalysis (1)

• Oedipal family structure one of the primary mode
  of restricting desire in capitalist societies
  (textbook 2 211)
• unaware of the relations pre-Oedipal in the
  child, exo-Oedipal in the psychotic, para-Oedipal
  in the others.
• Dogmatize the Oedipal connect the pre-Oedipal
  with the negative complex
• triangulation of relations

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D/G vs. Psychoanalysis (2)
Finds the nature of desire in psychotic and
neurotic patients

• Psychotics parts of their bodies as separate
  entities
• Schizophrenics
• catatonic states or
• assume new identities

• Desiring machines (textbook 2 206-207)
• The body without organs
• The nomadic subject

Replace psychoanalysis with schizoanalysis
(Bogue 91)
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D/G vs. Marxism (3)

• Desire production of production (208)
• Capitalism supported by oedipalization

• Marxism
• production ? distribution ? consumption
• Exchange value use value

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The Desiring Machine

• The schizos stroll 206-207
• Nature and industry 208 (one with nature in the
  form of production)
• The process flow and checks
• Desiring machine, partial objects and flows
• The Body without organs

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Desiring Machine

• It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly
  at times, at other times in fits and starts. It
  breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.
  What a mistake to have ever said the id.
  Everywhere it is machines. . .
• produces a flow of desire
• Connected with or interrupted by the other
  machines
• e.g. organ-machine an energy-machine the
  breast the mouth a machine coupled to it. (The
  mouth of the anorexic.) Hence we are all
  handymen each with his little machines.

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Desiring Machine

• The rule of continually producing production, of
  grafting producing onto the product, is a
  characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary
  production the production of production. A
  painting by Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine,'
  shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of
  his little desiring-machines, after having hooked
  it up to a vast technical social machine--which,
  as we shall see, is what even the very young
  child does.
• Composed of heterogeneous and independent parts.

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Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine(1954, oil on
canvas) (source)
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The body without organs

• Not an organless body, but body without
  organization, or the deterritorialized body an
  interconnected system of flows and forces.
• a body that breaks free from its socially
  articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and
  subjectified state (as an organism), to become
  disarticulated, dismantled, and
  deterritorialized, and hence able to be
  reconstituted in a new way (Kellner 90-91)

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Oedipalization Capitalism

• Capitalism a schizophrenic system
• It reduces all social relations to commodity
  relations ? deterritorializes desire by
  subverting(de-coding) all territorial groupings
  such as the church, the family, local community,
  etc. It also reterritorializes desire by
  channeling(re-coding) all production into the
  narrow confines of the equivalence-form (logic of
  exchange value) within the state, family,
  law,commodity logic, banking systems,
  consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing
  institutions. (Cf. Bogue 88 Kellner 89)

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Paranoia vs. schizophrenia

• (2)schizophrenia
• (a)non-systematic
• (b)nomadic
• (c)molecular (????)

• (1)paranoia (metaphysics!)
• (a)domination
• (b)hierarchy
• (c) molar aggregates (????)

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schizoanalysis

• Schizophrenia or schizophrenic processis not
  an illness, but a potentially liberatory psychic
  condition produced within capitalist social
  conitions, a product of absolute decoding.
  (Kellner 90)
• Schizoanalysis a decentred and fragmented
  analysis of the unconscious investments of
  individual and group desire in all spheres of
  society destroyed unified and rigid segments of
  subject and group identity liberate the
  prepersonal realm of desire.

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Nomadic subjects

• multiple personalities
• 1.consumption
• 2.when social codes e.g. Oedipus break
  down in their channelling of desire, then the
  nomadic subject is possible, traversing the lines
  of the desiring machines inscribed on the body
  w/o organs
• Model of the giant egg traversed by lines
  with a wandering point of pure intensity

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A Thousand Plateaus

• From Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus
• Includes more diverse subjects (e.g. linguistics,
  semiotics, anthropology, etc.)
• Replace molar/molecular opposition with a triadic
  scheme of rigid lines, supple lines, and lines
  of escape (Kellner 97).

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Central metaphor The Root and the Rhizome

• taproot
• Rhizome deterritorialized lines
• (textbook 1601)

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The book as an assemblage

• P. 1602
• Strata organism on the one side

• Body without organs
• A machine, in connection with other machines
• P. 1606 An assemblage, in its multiplicity,
  necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material
  flows, and social flows simultaneously . . .

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Reading

• For reading a text is never a scholarly exercise
  in search of what is signified, still less a
  highly textual exercise in search of a signifier.
  Rather it is a productive use of the literary
  machine, a montage of desiring machines, a
  schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its
  revolutionary force. (AO 106)

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The tree vs. rhizome (textbook 1603)

• Tree arborescent model of thought
• mirror reality is translucently reflected in
  consciousness
• Treeknowledge organized in systematic and
  hierarchical principles.

• Rhizome rhizomatics
• To uproot philosophical trees
• To deconstruct binary logic
• a higher unity (1604)
• Made of lines 1605
• Made of plateaus

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Schizo, Nomad, Rhizome as emancipated modes of
existence

• Schizos withdraw from repressive social reality
  into disjointed desiring states
• Nomads roam freel across open planes in small
  bands,
• Rhizomes deterritorialized lines of desire
  linking desiring bodies with one another and the
  field of partial objects. (Kellner 103)

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Rhizome

• E.g. the Internet -- any point of a rhizome can
  be connected to any other, and must be

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References

• Deleuze and Guattari. Ronald Bogue. London New
  York Routledge , 1989
• The two-fold thought of Deleuze and Guattari
  intersections and animations. Charles J.
  Stivale. New York Guilford Press , 1998.
• Postmodern theory critical interrogations.
  Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Houndmills,
  Basingstoke, Hampshire Macmillan , 1991