Anti-Oedipus Book

Highly recommend having some experience with Marx, Freud, and Levi-Strauss; Nietzsche, Lacan, and Saussure will also be helpful.

You don't gotta read the whole thing! The first and last chapters will give you the gist of the book's main ideas.

The takeaway: Dissolve into the flux you already are.

Summary:

Anti-Oedipus has two aims. The first is to critique the prevailing Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic model of the ego, which D&G call "Oedipus." The second is to create a new conception of subjectivity, and to offer a new method of anaylsis--schizoanalysis--to go with it. The major innovation D&G offer is to change the way we think about people. Rather than taking it for granted that people's conscious and unconscious desires are unified under the concept of the "ego," D&G want to show how egos are constructed over time by collections of free-flowing, disparate swarms of desire which aren't bound together in a unity, but are each discrete units themselves. They also want to suggest that, just as an ego has been historically created by contingent forces, so it can be destroyed and recreated anew.

For psychoanalysts, egos are the main unit of analysis. Every person has an ego. It's assumed to be a universal structure that we all possess. Psychoanalysts aim to study how egos change throughout a person's lifetime, as well as to produce healthy egos by treating them with therapy when they malfunction.

D&G want to suggest that this way of thinking about people carries normative ideas or demands about how people should function. Psychoanalysts aren't merely disinterested observers. They play an active role in constituting patients as "sick" or "healthy" and shape their subjectivity to fit the demands of contemporary capitalist society. In this sense, psychoanalysts are akin to police officers of subjectivity: they demand complicity of their subjects, and are ready to punish those mad ones who fail to comply. There is a clear correspondence, then, between the subjectivation of healthy patients and healthy citizens. So psychoanalysis intersects with sociology. The two can't be divorced from each other.

So alongside D&G's investigation of how psychoanalysts produce egos from primordial flows of desire, they'll trace a genealogy of historical modes of production as well. These two investigations, the psychic and the social, meet in the question: why do people not only consent to repression (whether it be from an analyst or a capitalist), but desire it? And how can we free ourselves from our allegiance to Oedipus?

Marx's historical analysis of the modes of production & Freud's historical analysis of ego relations
aren't two separate investigations (the mental and the physical, the imaginary and the real, the individual and the collective), but the same one. Both analyze the process by which desires are produced. D&G call this process "desiring-production."

But what is desire? Uniting the social and the psychical requires D&G to reconceptualize the philosophical concept of desire. Psyches must be shown to be material processes. And likewise, there must be something psychical about material processes.

Classical conceptions of desire establish it as something metaphysically different from matter. In the classical model, matter is taken to be absolutely positive--it is what it is, it exists solely in the here and now, it has no will, it is entirely subject to external forces. Meanwhile, desire is taken to be absolutely negative--desire wants what is NOT here and now, what is elsewhere. This distinction between the positivity of matter and the negativity of desiring psyches retains a dualism that has allowed Marx & Freud to be conceived of as separate for so long. D&G want to suggest that we think about desire differently. Instead of a negative force based on a lack of something, desire is a positive force of production that brings bodies together and separates them again. Desire can be likened to a productive machine, a "desiring-machine." If desire is a productive force, then we can speak of an economy and even a sociology of desire, just as we speak of economics and sociologies of modes of production. The difference between the two is one of scale--macro and micro--but not of kind.

Desiring-machines are infinitely productive forces that constitute our subjective experience of reality, the world that we know everday, replete with language, concepts and emotions. An ego is a collection of many composite desiring-machines that are held together by each machine's force of desire. But egos, concepts, language, and emotions aren't fundamental to desiring-machines. Rather, they're secondary manifestations, or concretions, of desiring-machines' productions. Initially, desire is non-conceptual (If you're familiar with Lacan, we can say here that desire is akin to the Real--that which precedes and excedes reality, but also that productive force which produces reality). Better to think of it in physical terms. So D&G use the language of thermodynamics or liquid dynamics to conceive of how desiring-machines operate.

Desiring-machines can be likened to a liquid undergoing phase transitions: sometimes it congeals into more-or-less viscous and solid formations, after which it can decondense into a free flow once again. It appears more like a stable "thing" in its solid forms, but we have to keep in mind that it's really at heart a chaotic force, and that it can just as easily dissolve its semi-stable forms as it can produce them. In this thermodynamic language, the semi-stable forms that desire sometimes appears in are analogues for egos and their representations of reality. Desire's more viscous states are analogues of impersonal, unconscious affective corporeal forces which disrupt or exceed our representations of reality. So we have the personal and the impersonal, the solid and the liquid. It's all a matter of how desire is arranged, what forms the desiring-machines take.

If desire can be so potentially volatile and revolutionary--that is, liquid--why is it that so many structures of our reality appear immutable and universal? Families, states, capital, markets...how do these structures survive and hold themselves together? What keeps them from dissolving?

Desiring-machines have a function, and that is to produce desire. Remember that desire is a positive force that aims to bring bodies together (into semi-stable solid formations) and to separate bodies once again (back into free-flowing liquid forms). So desiring-machines are naturally drawn to each other. They want to link up with each other and create circuits, lines, matrices, and all sorts of other structures along which desire can flow. Desiring-machines do not necessarily have any fixed or long-lasting objects of desire, so their relations with other machines can be long-lasting or very short. They connect, share flows, disconnect, and search for other machines to connect to. Sometimes, purely as a matter of chance (owing to tendencies towards stability and predictability in population statistics such as the law of large numbers) many desiring-machines can assemble into semi-stable aggregates. These aggregates are nothing more than contingent mosaics of externally-related desiring-machines. And this point is vital: an assemblage of desiring machines is not a unity, not a whole, not a totality; the machines are not parts; each functions separately from the others, any can break off at any time or reshuffle to establish new connections, new assemblages. What is novel in D&G is the eradication of any appeal to totality, to an organism as such. There is as yet no organism, no subject, no Oedipus--or rather, Oedipus is made of millions of swarming mini-Oedipuses, each their own subject.

In order to produce a unified ego from this swarm of desiring-machines, something else must happen: the "one" as a unity that transcends any one of its parts must be produced, and it must be produced by the individual desiring-machines themselves. And once they produce the one (the phallus, the despotic signifier), it becomes a really magnetic force, so real that it appears as primary to the many. An aggregate of individual desiring-machines, though not a formal unity insofar as no machine has allegiance to any other, nevertheless effects a material, almost magnetic pull towards other free desiring-machines. It draws desiring-machines to it, acting like a strange attractor or a gravitational force. Once attached to this large body, the aggregate subsumes the individual into itself as part of its behemoth consuming structure. And here we have the universality of structuralism, of myth, capital, Oedipus.

In its pull on free individuals, a reversal of the production process happens. Now, the individual desiring-machines no longer appear as the primary producers--they are now the ones being acted upon, or produced, by the aggregate (D&G alternatively describe the free desiring-machines as organs and the aggregate of desiring-machines a body-without-organs). The aggregate exerts a force greater than any individual, and thus its unity can appear to be primary to the multitude it is really comprised of (Applied to capitalism, the process is analogous to the seduction of individual laborers--desiring-machines--towards the product and eventually capital--body-without-organs--that they produce. A reversal of poles: capital, though entirely produced by laborers, is greater than any one of them taken individually, and even a large mass of them taken collectively. Here capital appears as primary to labor-power; ideology becomes the primary reality; and laborers are now willing to defend the capitalist system that oppresses them).

And this is where psychoanalysis and capitalism start: by understanding the aggregate as the primary producer, rather than understanding it as a product of many producers. Again, the status of the producers here is not that of a unified 'collective' but of a swarm of disparate 'individuals.' 'The' molar subject is really, at core, a hundred million molecular subjects.

Because the molar is the molecular, because desiring-machines have no necessary tendency towards unification, it is also in their nature to rupture their connections, their allegiance to the whole. This is of course the second phase of what it means to be a desiring-machine--to never be content with what is, to always seek novelty. Therefore, the aggregate of capital, of Oedipus--of any social structure--is continually breaking apart, rupturing, and rearranging itself as it functions. In fact, this just is part of its function. The desiring-machines do not stay put. They are moving around, making and breaking new connections, the whole time. They rarely escaping the gravitational orbit of the aggregate: most often they break free of the surface and are pulled right back into the mix. In this way, the aggregate maintains an order, a unity, through the micro-chaos of its individuals. In fact, this is the life of the whole itself--to appropriate and reappropriate all individual forces to its universal structure, its code.

Capitalism works so well because it incorporates all antitheses into its structuring--this is the formal definition of capitalism. Capitalism takes the form of a revolutionary machine. Its function is to accelerate, to increase, speed up, the process of breakdowns and recombinations, to create ever-new codes and arrangements of desiring-machines, continually surpassing itself. But capitalism is not a revolutionary machine, because each restructuring of itself (what D&G call deterritorialization) remains just that: a re-structuring (a re-territorialization). It plays on the polymorphously perverse flows of desiring-machines to produce novelty, and to appropriate that novelty for itself. It encourages an ordered chaos and entropy so that it can assimilate entropic and chaotic forces into its tool-box. In this way, it is actually the most anti-revolutionary machine in that it incorporates revolution, destructuring, into its very structure. Structure is always reasserted, and reasserted through the very production of chaos.

The task of schizoanalysis is to use capitalist and psychoanalytic modes of production to really revolutionary ends. Here the revolutionary is the schizophrenic--what cannot be coded or assimilated, what refuses and destroys structure, what scrambles codes, words, concepts, names, identities, egos, for fun; without rest, without occupation of any. Schizophrenia lives desire as flow, as pure becoming, universal difference. A schizophrenic ego functions not as a whole, a one, a totality, but as the aggregate of individuals that it already is. The task of schizoanalysis, then, is to become-molecular, become-multiple, to destroy Oedipus by breaking apart, fracturing--and not reforming.

There's still a problem, though, in that desire has two moments or aspects to it: chaos & cosmos. The cosmos may be ultimately a projection of chaos, but it is still a natural movement of desire. Schizophrenics still speak. And this is the answer: schizophrenics still speak, but as word salad. They use the code, the structure, to its own dissolution: tearing off a piece here and there and throwing them into the air, stealing bricks from walls and dropping them into rivers, agreeing to be one thing at one moment and rejecting it at the next. They are virus, destroying the body from within.

But to become-schizophrenic by oneself in capitalist society is to risk being institutionalized. Schizoanalysis cannot be an individual project. Desire, insofar as its aim is to dis/connect desiring-machines, is always social. The task of schizoanalysis, then, is to de-Oedipalize en masse, a group 'suicide' of Oedipus in order to birth--who? or what? No one in particular, because schizophrenics, desiring-machines, are the potential to be everyone, everything.

Ultimately Nietzsche wins the day: Zarathustra is mad; Zarathustra is a swarm of battling affects; and everyone is Zarathustra .

Seriously, though, just read the first and last chapter and skip the rest.