Anti-Oedipus: 1 The Desiring-Machines
Re-reading Anti-Oedipus for perhaps the third or fourth time. I’ve only ever made it halfway through though, so perhaps notes will help organise my thoughts and ensure I finish it this time.
The mechanism of desire uncovered in this first chapter is still thoroughly fascinating and well-fitted for post/hyper-modern times. Connections, disjunctions, conjunctions, the transverse nature of desiring machines, the connection between social production and the productions of the unconscious, fragmentary, whirlwind-like desire. Freud’s pseudopod libido universalised to the cosmos, freed from Oedipus, beautiful in its freedom. But here comes the crux; the enemy they are denouncing, Oedipus and psychoanalysis, no longer strikes me as a threat, or it is certainly no longer in vogue. Try and remember the last time anybody took daddy-mummy issues seriously or tried to reduce your paranoia, neuroses, to them. Bourgeois society, capital, is no longer concerned with the family, in this way, on this scale.
Although it is clear that Oedipus is not just psychoanalysis, not just this specific assemblage of repressive forces that appeared in the early to mid 20th century. Oedipus expresses the general repression of desiring-machines in society, the oft-quoted “how is it possible that desire could be made to desire its own repression?” And it is certain that this repression has not vanished, rather assumed a new mask. I am curious as to how this analysis could be applied to modern rhetoric of mental health, the self-care, the general understanding that neurosis, depression, etc. are not social problems but personal ones, ones that can be cured by taking time to yourself, by eating well, getting enough sleep. (Not saying that these things don’t help, but to me they always strike as treating the symptom rather than the cause.)
Another thing that struck me on this re-read: I still fail to comprehend the body without organs, but I am beginning to see how this is part of the point. As a concept it is something that haunts this book, that persists in the background, on which everything seems to originate, but it is murky, non localisable. Would it be going too far to say that, yes, as they describe, the body without organs is the non-productive, the agent of anti-production, that stands in the way of the concepts of this book. Every time I encounter it I stop, break down for a moment, before picking back up again, slightly changed, slightly more informed as to what it is or could be. It is a recording surface, an emanating surface, something produced by the first layer of desiring-machine connections. It persists in the Body of the Earth, the Despot, and Capital; but it is not them, it is somehow a barren Body common to all but not prefiguring them — as they write, the true Body withou Organs is something that Capital comes closest to uncovering/reconstituting/building for the very first time. I have some grasp on it, but it remains the fuzziest concept by far.
One thing, however, resonates anew when it comes to the discussion of recording. They have written that desiring-machines themselves record the flux that they cut into; that they have a code inscribed within them that adjusts and measures and reacts to this flow. This code takes up surplus value of the code of other machines. This is to say it forms chains external to the desiring machines; there is at once a material flow and a flow of signifiers, the signifying chain of the unconscious that Lacan discovers (metaphor and metonymy), but made multiplicitous as every other concept they reuse is. “There is not one signifying chain”. To what extent are the signifying flow and the material flow one and the same thing. To what extent is this abstract chain overlapping with the body without organs — it is something produced within and beyond, overtop, of the desiring-machines, constituting the recording surface.
I grow closer to the meaning of code because of this. It is signifying in the sense of a cipher; but it is also a set of instructions in the sense of the genetic code or even of computer code. It is adjustable. It is productive, and this is where it grows closest to its sense as a genetic or computer code.
That’s as far as my thoughts go for now.
