Do you think capitalism sucks? Try schizophrenia instead! That is sort of, but not exactly, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari recommend in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They lay out a dense but somewhat comprehensible description of human beings and their relationship to the capitalist system. They also explain how Freud’s system of psychoanalysis acts as a method of repression that makes capitalism function more effectively.
Deleuze and Guattari begin by describing the human as an individual. The human mind, particularly the unconscious, is made up of desiring-machines which work together to create flows. The concepts of “desiring-machines” and “flows” are both loosely defined and can be applied in a multitude of contexts thereby resisting the tyranny of the sign/signifier as the deconstructionists would say. The flows they write about are roughly equivalent to Freud’s concept of “libido” or psychic energy that circulates through the mind. The concept of “desire” is also central to their thesis. Traditionally, most philosophers, economists, and psychologists have written about desire as being a lack. A poor person desires money because they lack it or a hungry person desires food because they don’t have any but Deleuze and Guattari turn the concept on its head and analyze “desire” as being a creative force. The desiring-machines create energy that combines with energies created by other desiring machines which strive to reach full realization of their potential for completion. Desiring-machines can also be parts of the body; therefore, eyes, hands, mouths, anuses, and anything else can be a desiring-machine or a partial, detachable machine; for example, a breast-machine seeks to connect with a baby’s mouth machine so that both can fulfill their purposes to completion by creating flow, in this case, milk for nourishment for the baby. Like other psychologists, Deleuze and Guattari have a strange preoccupation with things like anuses, penises, and breasts; sometimes you have to wonder why psychoanalysis never offers any theories on knees, ankles, ribs, elbows or eyebrows.
Desiring-machines create flow that extends beyond the individual into the socius, the societal body in its entirety. Social-machines are individual humans that invest desire in the social praxis. As this desire flows through the socius it gets encoded as things like money, labor, property, or information. Outside the limits of the socius is the body without organs, a wilderness or deterritorialization without form or organization of any kind. The body without organs is the unknown and that is where Deleuze and Guattari want us to go when we become schizophrenized.
In a capitalist society, psychoanalysis has crystallized the ego in the form of Oedipus. The figure from the Greek tragedy who tore out his own eyes becomes a censor and a castrator for the desiring-machines. The ego-Oedipus blocks the flows they produce and turns them into an unconscious theater where the desiring-machines no longer produce desire but instead express themselves through symbols. This Oedipus-ego is kept under control by the authoritarian father-figure, a representative of the psychotherapist who prevents desire from flowing into the empty space represented by the mother. This Oedipus-complex, according to the authors, is implanted in the psyche by the psychotherapist himself. Since this Oedipus is under strain from blocking the flows and desires created by the desiring-machines, it is under constant risk of neurosis, a state where Oedipus is weak and gets submerged in the psychic content while barely blocking it from circulation. Failure to do so leads to psychosis.
Oedipus is like an iron-door, one that is under the control of the father. It is a barrier and an internal instrument of repression. This functions in capitalism because that politcal-economic system also has mechanisms of internal repression and control in the form of non-productive social-machines like the police and bureaucracies that function by limiting the flow of things like labor and money, otherwise defined as chains of desire produced by social-machines, encoded and overcoded by capitalism. These flows of encoded desire are controlled by the axiomaticization of the ruling classes.
Capitalism is like schizophrenia because it strives for fulfillment by breaking through onto the body without organs. It is there where the surplus value of the encoded chains of desire get decoded and deterritorialized as pure capital. The system of capitalism differs from schizophrenia because the schizophrenic seeks to go further over the body without organs, permanently plunging into deterritorialization so that others can follow but capitalism actually reterritorializes its capital by extending its limits and reterritorializing its decoded flows. Capitalism reterritorializes its flows by investing them in things like new technologies or private property, or it can recode capital to create more capital through credit and interest. Capitalism also recodes desire by expanding its internal limitations so that the working classes can never get rich or stop working for long periods of time. They become permanantly contained despite the constant expansion of their territorial limits. Factories are prisons and reterritorializing capital expands the prisons into larger and more complex prisons so that the ruling classes can keep circulating encoded and overcoded desires to continuously overcome the boundaries of the socius and generate more wealth for themselves.
For Deleuze and Guattari, there are two ways out of this dilemma. One is to navigate around Oedipus into a paranoiac molar gregarious-aggregate, a group of social machines that believe themselves to be superior to the rest of the socius. Being molar demands that its social-machines be uniform, conformist, and easy to control. This paranoiac gregarious-aggregate is their definition of fascism but other groups that demand this type of corporatist community can be molar as well. On the same axiom of resistance is the schizophrenic individual, a person whose desiring-machines flow freely without any interference as they break out of the socius into the body without organs. These individuals resist capitalism because their thinking and language are derailed, freed from the logic of repressive categories, and permanently deterritorialized, unable to be recaptured by the socius to have their desires recoded. Thus, the authors advocate a type of psychotherapy called schizoanalysis. They do not literally want to make people schizophrenic but they think an individual can liberate themselves by taking on aspects of the decoded flows that characterize people suffering from that clinical disorder. They wish to dissolve the tyranny that Oedipus has over the desiring-machines of the unconscious so that people can free themselves from the prisons and injustices of capitalism, making it possible to achieve a fuller, richer life.
So that sums up some of the main ideas in Anti-Oedipus. Where does that leave the reader? Probably confused. There are plenty of descriptions to support these ideas but it isn’t really necessary to understand all the minute details to understand the book. At first you might be impressed by the complexity of the authors’ work. It is an intricate and complete system nd you might even feel self-congratulatory for having understood a lot of it. But with a little distance, something seems to be wrong. While their argument can be understood with a good deal of effort, it appears to be disconnected from reality. There is no doubt that there are flows through the socius and capitalism does appear to succeed at expanding both internal and external limits. But are there really desiring-machines in the unconscious? By what mechanism does capitalism encode, overcode, decode, and recode deterritorialized surplus value? Who is responsible for doing this? Is it happening by instinct? Are the captains of industry conspiring with psychotherapists to operate this machinery? That would take us into the domain of conspiracy theories, wouldn’t it? How can we be sure any of this is real? There is certainly no empirical way to justify this work of philosophy. It is like a city made of vapor that blows away in the wind when you finish the book.
If we can choose between capitalism and schizophrenia, is schizophrenia really the better choice? The use of schizoanalysis to guide the patient to the body without organs certainly has its risks and could leave the individual being unable to survive. At best, they would probably be a lone eccentric or possibly even one of those homeless people yelling at ghosts on the street corner. Would this kind of deterritorialization really be a legitimate foundation for a society? One might venture to speculate that capitalism is at least stable and relatively safe despite all its horrible shortcomings. Deleuze and Guattari appear to be advocating a naive form of libertarian individualism that could ultimately lead to nothing more than the social and mental isolation of the individual. There are not many radical anarchists out there who could even entertain the idea of living naked in the woods while scavenging for bugs and wild mushrooms to eat for the sake of spiting capitalists. Deleuze and Guattari simply do not make a strong case for the idea that schizophrenia is a desirable alternative to capitalism. They actually do not even make a strong case that capitalism is inherently undesirable either. They describe capitalism in their own unique way but never say much about why it is wrong.
On top of all that, this book is written using the language of psychoanalysis and the Oedipal complex is the cornerstone of the authors’ thesis. But psychoanalysis is now considered a pseudo-science. Freud has been disproven over and over again. No one believes in Oedipus anymore. Schizoanalysis never made any headway in the psychiatric community either. It could be safe to say that the only people who even know what it is are those who have read this book. And that also revolves around the idea that they were able to comprehend it in the first place.
Gilles Deleuze once said that works of philosophy are more like works of art than arguments. They should be appreciated for their systematic structure and descriptive language. Taken at that level, Anti-Oedipus is an impressive work. But then you have to wonder why they chose to write it in the first place. Critiquing capitalism and advocating for a new form of psychoanalysis that would radically change the political system doesn’t mean much as a work of art for art’s sake. This is a work that demands its readers put its ideas into action. In the end, it is too dated and disconnected from the real world to be of real value. Even so, Anti-Oedipus is still a real accomplishment because of its intellectual rigor and the way ot forces the reader to keep thinking while goes along.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, New York: 1972.
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