by Steven Craig Hickman
What we hold against psychoanalysis is that it resorts to a pious conception, based on lack and castration, a sort of negative theology that involves infinite resignation. It is against this that we propose a positive conception of desire, desire that produces, not desire that is lacking in something.
– Deleuze & Guattari, Chaosophy
loading...
“Leaders betray, that’s obvious. But why do those who are led continue to listen to them,” says Felix Guattari.1
How many times I’ve asked myself that question. Too many times and the answers seem to be perplexing and mysterious. Guattari himself will answer it this way, with another question: “Wouldn’t that be the result of an unconscious complicity, of an interiorization of the repression, operating on several levels, from power to bureaucratic, from bureaucrats to militants, and from militants to the masses themselves?” (p. 70) Unconscious complicity? Willing slaves of our own thwarted desires? Unaware of our own dark complicity in our participation in our own enslavement and slaughter? Just what is this strange complicity? Something Fabio Vighi said in his book on Zizek struck me as poignant in that he describes the task of Lacan’s materialist epistemology as the construction of a project “whose transformative potential depends on its capacity to reflect upon its blind spot – on its conviction that to be socially and politically productive it has to include its own foundations in jouissance” (p. 146).2 Of course Deleuze and Guattari based their whole Anti-Oedipus against Freud and Lacan and the notion of lack as being the object cause of desire. Zizek himself follows Lacan saying,
Symbolic castration is usually defined as the loss of something one never possessed, i.e., the object-cause of desire is an object which emerges through the very gesture of its withdrawal; however, what we encounter here is the obverse structure of feigning a loss. Insofar as the Other of the symbolic Law prohibits jouissance, the only way for the subject to enjoy is to feign that he lacks the object that provides jouissance, concealing the fact of possession from the Other’s gaze by staging the spectacle of a desperate search for it.3
For Deleuze and Guattari this whole notion leads to a treatment as a form of terrorism. In the course of such treatment “[a] the chains of the unconscious are…linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier (i.e. Oedipus)” (54). Indeed, they assert that schizophrenics who are treated this way often digress into autism, which has unfortunately been associated with schizophrenia. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the analyst and the psychiatric ward that make the schizoid sick, and turn him/her into a silent and psychologically unproductive autist. The healthy schizoid has an essentially productive (un)consciousness. Against the unconscious as a theatre of representation, they insist it is a productive factory: it produces desiring-machines, etc., rather than lost objects or fantasies that must be pursued.
This production of the real is fundamentally false within Freudian and Lacanian notions of the unconscious. Freud-Lacan see the unconscious as symbolic, fantasy laden, and dramatic filled with semiotic puzzles and ancient Greek theater. Hence, for both authors desire is associated with lack. That is to say, desire desires that which is fantasized, repressed, wished for, or absent. Desire is engaged entirely with that which is lacking and needs to be represented. Hence, “desire gives way to a representation” of that which is lacking the phallus, the Oedipal escapade, the ideal “I”, etc. (54). The schizoid, on the other hand, is incapable of experiencing lack. For him or her the unconscious is always productive and never fantastical. Desire itself produces the real and creates new worlds. Against this representationalist lack that seeks its own wish etc., Deleuze and Guattari hold the unconscious to be functionalist, productive: that it seeks nothing because it does not lack anything, in fact it produces desiring-machines and nothing else. These machines can be plugged into various socio-cultural objects, as well as unplugged or deterritorialized and reterritorialized into other objects. Zizek in Against the Politics of Jouissance will state that modern society is defined by the lack of ultimate transcendent guarantee, or, in libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic. The first one (totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute jouissance by attaining a utopian society of harmonious society which eliminates negativity. The second, democratic, one enacts a political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy”: it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms. The third one, consumerist post-democracy, tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration. Today, when democracy is gradually evolving into consumerist post-democracy, one should insist that democratic potentials are not exhausted – “democracy as an unfinished project” …. The key to the resuscitation of this democratic potential is to re-mobilize enjoyment: “What is needed, in other words, is an enjoyable democratic ethics of the political.”(269) How is this possible? Zizek will ask What we need is enjoyment: “Libidinal investment and the mobilization of jouissance are the necessary prerequisite for any sustainable identification (from nationalism to consumerism). This also applies to the radical democratic ethics of the political. But the type of investment involved has still to be decided.” (282) He’ll continue saying we have the appropriate social theory, but what is missing is the “subjective factor” – how are we to mobilize people so that they will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters, explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left practice its own “politics of jouissance.” The problem is that such an approach is an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which political choices people experience as “realistic” and feasible? (ibid.) In some ways Guattari and Zizek seem to come at this from opposing sides of a Mobius strip that twists the strange conundrum of their specific problem. Guattari asked why do those who are led continue to listen to their leaders who betrayed them, and he saw the answer in the unconscious complicity of the masses to interiorize and repress the very desire that would have set them free or at least mobilized their desires toward other possibilities. Zizek from the other direction asks why is it was on the Left cannot do just that, why can’t we mobilize the desires of the masses toward their own liberation, why can’t we unblock those repressive systems that have stopped the flows that seem stuck on the internalized Master signifier, etc. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari will discover in the work of Willhelm Reich a partial answer: that the masses had come to desire Nazism (Chaosophy p. 71). As he’ll admit “After Willhelm Reich, one cannot avoid facing that truth. Under certain conditions, the desire of the masses can turn against their own interests. What are those conditions?” (p. 71). What Deleuze and Guattari did was to reverse the Lacanian wager, they realized there exists a desiring-production which, before all actualization in the familial division of sexes and persons (Freud-Lacan) as well as the social division of work (Marx-Lenin), invests the various forms of production of jouissance and the existing structures in order to repress them (p. 72). It’s at this point that they came to the same question as Zizek: Under what conditions will the revolutionary avant-garde be able to free itself from its unconscious complicity with repressive structures and elude power’s manipulation of the masses’ desire that makes it “fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation?” (p. 72) They will look at the Freud-Lacan path that it is the familial investment in the Oedipal myth that supports such a conclusion: but will reject it both reductive and a reversion to pre-critical forms of archaic thought forms (Oedipus myth). Instead of a recursion to myth they will opt for the primacy of “history over structure, another analysis, extricated from symbolism and interpretation (anti-representational); and another militancy, with the means to free itself from fantasies of the dominant order” (p. 72). Deleuze for his part will only add that he and Guattari strove to realize the issues underlying the impasse of psychoanalysis, and they found it in Freud’s inability to understand what delirium or desire truly were: “These two reproaches really make one: what interests us is the presence of machines of desire, molecular micro-machines in the great molar social machines. How they operate and function within one another.” (p. 74). He’ll make another acute observation on Freud and interpretation, or if you will “epistemology”: “There is no epistemology problem either: we couldn’t care less about returning to Freud or Marx. If someone tells us that we have misunderstood Freud, we won’t argue about it, we’ll say too bad, there is much work to be do. It’s curious that epistemology has always hidden an imposition of power, an organization of power. As far as we’re concerned, we don’t believe in any specificity of writing or even of thought.” (p. 78).
1. Felix Guattaris. Chaosophy (Semiotext(e) 2009)
2. Fabio Vighi On Zizek’s Dialectics: Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation (Continuum 2012) 3. Zizek, Slavoj (2014-10-07). Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism (p. 218). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
taken from:
loading...
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Steven Craig Hickman - The Intelligence of Capital: The Collapse of Politics in Contemporary Society
Steven Craig Hickman - Hyperstition: Technorevisionism – Influencing, Modifying and Updating Reality
Archives
April 2020
|