Anti-Oedipus: 2 Psychoanalysis and Familialism
Chapter two delves more deeply into the Oedipal triangle and social production, and all the ways they trap desiring production in order to maintain the status quo. Each of the three syntheses of desire (connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive) are said to have legitimate and illegitimate uses. It is through Oedipus that the illegitimate uses come about, or rather it is through the illegitimate use that Oedipus appears. I think this clarification is rather important, for if their entire analysis depends on Oedipus, then it becomes much harder to apply in the 21st century where Oedipus is no longer ‘in vogue’. If, on the other hand, the illegitimate uses of the syntheses can and do flourish without any sort of psychoanalytic ‘Oedipus police’, then the critique of social repression still stands.
The Connective Synthesis of Desire
The first synthesis, the connective, finds its illegitimate use in the desire for ‘global persons’, in contrast to the legitimate desire for ‘partial objects’. Instead of desire as an unconscious flow, a connective chain, it is converted to a familial tool, a tool for the creation of alliances and unities.
The issue I have here is that Oedipus is claimed to create the first global persons, the mother and the father, in the same movement by which it bans them. But surely, with the dissolution of our belief in Oedipus (because it certainly can be said that society has ‘forgotten’ Oedipus, has become an-Oedipal), these global persons would have vanished. Yet still they persist. Whence, then, the origins of global persons?
The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording
The disjunctive synthesis has to do with the creation and the recording of identities on the surface of the Body without Organs (no, you still cannot ask me wtf that is). It lays down chains of production, a kind of memory of desire. Each chain demarcates a different section on the Body without Organs, a section that might be associated with a name like father, boss, banker, worker, Napoleon, Cleopatra. The point is that all these identities coexist whilst maintaining their difference. A person is not all at once; nor are they one and only one of them. Rather, the schizophrenic experiences all these identities in themselves, as an experience of “difference without exclusion.” The option of switching your desiring machines to another track always exists. Whereas in the illegitimate use of this synthesis, identities are laid down as a single entity. Here is where you are, here are your parents, here are your siblings, and over there is the king. The other option is the void, pure undifferentiated being, no identities whatsoever. Again, it is a question of Oedipus at once constituting the mother and father, whole identities in general, and that which is outside them, the boundless void; while all along it can be said that neither the void nor the exclusive entities exist, at least on the plane of real desire.
The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption
The final synthesis deals with the subject, the one who says ‘I’. In the legitimate use the subject drifts across the various zones on the BwO demarcated by the recordings of the disjunctive synthesis, sampling a little here, a little there, always on the move, always taking some kind of enjoyment in this. In the illegitimate use, every zone that the subject would enjoy is reduced to the father or the phallus, some transcendent signifier which guarantees all identity. The zones are segregated, cut off from one another. I don’t quite understand this, but it can be summed in this way: “The social field can only be reduced to the familial tie by way of an enormous archaism, an incarnation of the race in person or spirit, yes I am one of you.”
Here they discuss more clearly the question of social repression, and the pressing problem of how desire can be made to desire its own repression. They discuss the difference between preconscious interests which appear to belong to whole persons, and unconscious desires. The two need not ever align, and this is how class interest can be subordinated to racist desire. Where antagonisms should run on class lines they are instead made to run on nationalist, racist ones. “It is not a question of ideology, of saying the masses were fooled, since it is a question of desire and desire is part of the infrastructure.” Which is to say that the illegitimate use of desire comes before there are even masses or whole persons who can be fooled by ideology. Desire immediately invests flows of material, of wealth, of shit and piss and cum. This is to say that those who are ‘aroused’ as it were by money have nothing to do with Oedipus; this is simply how desire works; it already loves capital. (Here I find my worries about the previous two syntheses assuaged. Supposedly, yes Oedipus constructs global persons and coherent identities; but it in turn depends on this infrastructure, this behaviour, of desire.)
I find this section enormously interesting — it feels like the first time class and race are discussed and counterposed in a rather classically Marxist way: ‘The lower classes are made to blame outsiders for their woes, when really it is the upper classes of the same nation that have fooled them.’ (Paraphrasing, but roughly what is said.) And it is unconscious desire which becomes invested in the ‘paternal’, Oedipal, figure of the fatherland.
Social and psychic repression; and social and desiring production
The chapter moves to a discussion of how social and psychic repression are in part the same thing, that psychic repression is merely the internalisation of social repression, which is required by a given civilised order to maintain its dominance. ‘Civilisation must be understood by way of a given social repression inherent to a particular form of social production, which then bears on desire by way of sexual/psychic repression.’ (My paraphrasing.) They state that any legitimate exercise of desire must thus necessarily rupture the social field, which brings to bear a whole new range of questions. Why is it that a society, our particular capitalist society, must necessarily Oedipalise (or not even Oedipalise, but simply make use of the illegitimate syntheses), when all along it is stated that capitalism is what finally unleashes desire? Why is it that repression has featured at every step of the way of human development? What would a ‘revolutionary’ society look like? A Landian positive feedback loop? No control?
This chapter in particular also helped me think more about the connection between social and desiring production. Desiring production means desire considered on the side of action. There is no flow without some desire, it is desire which causes flows to run, desire is synonymous with flows. And so social production is in some ways the large scale coordination of this desire. But it requires repression to ensure that the flows keep running just so; there is something personified about social production, it wants something, wants itself, wants the status quo. Hence its turning back upon desiring production, the macro/molar feeding on the micro/molecular in order not only to produce but to reproduce. Why is it that all society has so far been reactionary? Even capital displaces its limits…
Final thoughts
This chapter illuminates and casts shadow at the same time (that is, it is exactly the same as every other fucking thing I have read by Deleuze and Guattari). I still cannot follow at all how they (D & G) still believe in Oedipus when they rail so against it. They say it exists so long as we believe in it, alive or dead, and yet they seem to believe so strongly in it themselves, some false thing to be rid of. They say that Freud was wrong in stating Oedipus must be repressed or accepted, yet they continue along with it, killing it merely in another way.
Yet their analysis of the illegitimate uses of the syntheses is true and still holds today. Whole persons, exclusive difference, and entrapped subjects exist. It appears as a question of the right symptoms and the wrong causes. It remains true that capital deterritorialises, decodes desire, only to recode it on new territories. It is true that there is no such thing as sublimation, that desire immediately invests the real. And it is true that literature is a machine capable of producing affects, not some stuffy fucking hermeneutic exercise.
The question appears even more desperate when a figure as ridiculous as Oedipus is no longer the cause, and rather these things appear immutable, solid. Need I dig deeper to find the ‘actual’ causes? Or will the next chapters reveal more? I fear we will be given a history of the development of the false story of Oedipus next…
