Deleuze & Guattari: Accelerationism – Diagnosis and Cure?

by Steven Craig Hickman

​To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

– Anti-Oedipus

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We left off yesterday In the Time of Capital acknowledging the fact that the thought-experiment of an out of control acceleration of the processes of capitalism beyond the territorial limits of its external horizon was an impossible task. Why? Capitalism has built-in safeguards that impose and restrict such a maneuver. I’ll explain that in this post, but will also provide Deleuze and Guattari’s plan of escape: Schizoanalysis. So all those on the Right or Left who seek to install this notion as a program for escaping the limits of capital are going to be in for a little shock when it doesn’t happen. Why? Deleuze & Guattari will put it into words: Oedipus at Last. In the last section of their book on the political aspects of the Anti-Oedipus project they’ll reiterate the basic thematic of the diagnosis but not yet the cure: the outer and immanent limits of capitalism as the schizophrenic horizon beyond which all flows begin to decode and deterritorialize, and the internal limits of desiring-production in capital as itself as the immanent limit. They also show through their account of anti-production that there is a massive regulatory system of State, Bureaucracy, and Army that form the nexus of capitalism’s police force regulating both social-production and desiring-production in its external and immanent social and familial context. But this is not all. They will introduce another limiting factor:

​But capitalism still needs to displace an interior limit in another way: precisely in order to neutralize or repel the absolute exterior limit, the schizophrenic limit: it needs to internalize this limit, this time by restricting it, by causing it to pass no longer between social production and the desiring-production that breaks away from social production, but inside social production, between the form of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction to which social production is reduced, between the social aggregate and the private subaggregate to which the social aggregate is applied. (p. 266)

Reading this one sees a nested set of protracted security protocols at work within the anti-production machine to police these various mechanisms of the regulatory process internally to the limits themselves; an endless series of loops, feedback mechanisms, controls, blockages etc., as if it was already part of some vast algorithm or viral agent whose only mission is to produce unfreedom at the very heart of the capitalist project. Is Democracy itself the viral agent abroad in the world today? The world democracies (even in their altered forms in Russia and China) situate this system of capital at the core of their States. Is this by design or intention? Have we been under the illusion that democracy was about freedom, when in fact it is a system of command and control that produces only unfreedom and slavery in the world.

Ultimately the way capitalism controls these internalized limits of the schizophrenic horizon is through the Oedipal limit itself: “Oedipus is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself be captured.” (p. 266) In other words the very enemy of the schiz becomes the limiting factor that captures her desire and regulates its potential to accelerate beyond the horizon. There is no escape from capital, it has already developed the capture points for the accelerated break-flows of the schiz who would escape through the wall into freedom.

The mechanisms of control in this system comes not as in the savage and barbarian forms of despotism, as shit and incest, but rather in the decoded flows of capital-money itself – the mechanisms of infinite debt (p. 267). They’ll reiterate the various ways in which the Oedipal machine has captured desire from the beginning in the savage, barbarian, and now capitalist modes of production and reproduction, etc. Here they follow Freud-Lacan realizing that the sheer inventiveness of their path through the regressive machine that is Oedipus reveals the two aspects of the signifier: “a barred transcendent signifier taken in a maximum that distributes lack, and an immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the uncovered field (somewhat similar, in traditional terms, to the way one goes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus)” (p. 268).

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​Ultimately the way capitalism controls these internalized limits of the schizophrenic horizon is through the Oedipal limit itself: “Oedipus is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself be captured.” (p. 266) In other words the very enemy of the schiz becomes the limiting factor that captures her desire and regulates its potential to accelerate beyond the horizon. There is no escape from capital, it has already developed the capture points for the accelerated break-flows of the schiz who would escape through the wall into freedom.

The mechanisms of control in this system comes not as in the savage and barbarian forms of despotism, as shit and incest, but rather in the decoded flows of capital-money itself – the mechanisms of infinite debt (p. 267). They’ll reiterate the various ways in which the Oedipal machine has captured desire from the beginning in the savage, barbarian, and now capitalist modes of production and reproduction, etc. Here they follow Freud-Lacan realizing that the sheer inventiveness of their path through the regressive machine that is Oedipus reveals the two aspects of the signifier: “a barred transcendent signifier taken in a maximum that distributes lack, and an immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the uncovered field (somewhat similar, in traditional terms, to the way one goes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus)” (p. 268).

What this process describes is none other the spiritualization of infinite debt that we described in two earlier posts (here and here): all of this describes the modern European man or Capitalist as show in Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Miller (p. 266): “the hypnosis and the reign of images, the torpor they spread; the hatred of life and of all that is free, of all that passes and flows; the universal effusion of the death instinct (desire-become-death); depression and guilt used as a means of contagion, the kiss of the Vampire: aren’t you ashamed to be happy?” (p. 266). All of this guilt, penalty, self-accusation and self-deprecation, neurosis, depression leads inevitably to the core of the “ascetic ideal” (p. 269).
​
Psychoanalysis did not invent Oedipus it only provide the couch and the Law, the psychoanalyst as despot and banker. (p. 269) What capitalism has done effectively is to include the Marxian critique of society as its internal Law thereby providing “the critique of the processes by which it re-enslaves what within it tends to free itself or to appear free” (p. 270). Deleuze & Guattari will see Freud’s reduction of this process to the family romance of the Oedipal triangle as a stroke of luck for the capitalist regime, for in reducing the decoded flows to the incestual relations of mommy-daddy dynamic, the power to escape the limits was turned inward upon the family instead: “Throughout psychoanalysis, the discourse of bad conscience and guilt always rises up and finds its nourishment – what is called being cured” (p. 270). Capital’s cure is re-enslavement to the very system the schiz in its break-flows had at first sought to escape, absolved only of the guilt and shame attendant to one’s incestual desires:

Freud is the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry. He mobilizes all the resources of myth, of tragedy, of dreams, in order to re-enslave desire, this time from within: an intimate theatre. (p. 271)

They’ll tell us that the thing Freud left out is Oedipus’s own autocritique that led to blindness: “Universal history is nothing more than theology if it does not seize control of the conditions of the contingent, singular existence, its irony, and its own critique” (p. 271).

What are the conditions for such an autocritque? To discover below the family romance the social investments in the unconscious, the group fantasies below the individual, to push the “simulacrum to the point where it ceases to be the image of an image, so as to discover the abstract figures, the schizzes-flows that it harbors and conceals” … to ” substitute, for the private subject of castration, split into a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement relating only to the two orders of personal images, the collective agents of enunciation that for their part refer to the machinic arrangements … to overturn the theatre of representation into the order of desiring-production: this is the whole task of schizoanalyis” (p. 271)

In other words the diagnosis and cure is the overthrow of Oedipus for the break-flows of schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis is the mode of acceleration as the break-flows that can surpass the limits of capitalism’s self-incurred chains, the way out of the autocritique that imposes and reduces the schiz to the asylum of capital. This is the other side of the accelerationist ethic that the original statement in the preamble leaves out. This is why most critiques of Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationist strategy seem weak at best, for they leave out the full import of their diagnosis as well as their cure exposed in the last section of the book Introductionn to Schizoanalysis. From psychoanalysis to schizoanalyis… I’ll take up this in the next post.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin, 2001)

taken from:

socialecologies

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