Book Review

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

     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. 

 

Book Review

Violence and the Sacred

by Rene Girard

     Imagine a prehistorical time when a band of early homo sapiens committed an act of violence that resonated in such a powerful way that we still feel its effects hundreds of thousands of years later. This act of human sacrifice had a profound impact on the structure of the human psyche and how societies manage conflict. Such a belief is outlined by Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred. His provocative theory is well-developed and, at the very least, plausible. Girard, however, runs into major problems when he tries to explain the disconnection between his theory and the social practices of humanity in the modern world.

     Girard develops a hypothesis about the origin of human culture based on an unrecorded event that happened so far back in history that no one actually knows what or how it happened. He claims that an act of transgression, probably a murder, occurred within a community and the members of that community retaliated by committing acts of violence against members of the opposing faction. Think of a blood feud situation in which members of an organized crime family kill off members of an enemy family in retaliation for an act of violence committed against them. The cycle of retaliatory violence spiraled so far out of control that the survival of the band of humans was in jeopardy. Then somebody realized that the key to ending the feud would be to unite the opposing sides by having them team up together to perform a ritual sacrifice, one involving a human scapegoat. The community’s collective consciousness blended and was then directed towards the sacrificial victim, channeling the murderous energy into one common direction so that it no longer dispersed throughout the society.

     Rene Girard traces the survival of this behavioral framework from prehistory into the so-called primitive societies of Africa and beyond. Mythologies were invented to explain the ceremonial killing and these myths eventually transformed into religions. As the human diaspora spread all over the globe, the diverse communities continued this ceremonial rite, taking it with them, and changing it according to their own needs and styles. Many tribes began substituting animals for human sacrifices and some abandoned the practice altogether. The ancient Greeks sublimated this ritual slaughter into tragedy and beyond that, traces of the ceremony still remain today in various forms like literature and political theory. This is a structural-functional sociological argument and the implication is that an act of violence is necessary to form tight community bonds and prevent the spread of cyclical violence throughout society.

     Girard justifies his hypothesis by comparing the places where this rite of sacrifice has survived. He applies the framework of his description to tribes in Africa like the Dinka of what is now South Sudan and the Incwala of Swaziland. A mythology of the Tsimshian Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest is also analyzed. The idea is that all of these rituals and myths are ancestrally related to the one original human sacrifice and the differences in detail are a result of cultural evolution. Up to this point this is a very tightly wound and well-reasoned theory which gets backed up with fairly legitimate evidence.

     Girard builds on his hypothesis by analyzing mimetic desire as a motivational force. The tragedy of Oedipus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex exemplify what he means. Humans learn by imitating others; first and foremost, men learn by imitating their fathers. A young boy desires to be like his father but he also builds his individuality by desiring to be different from his father. This is a double bind and the resolution of this conflict is necessary for the individual to effectively grow up and adjust to society. One of the ways he wishes to be like his father is in the possession of his mother. Therefore competition for the mother leads to conflict with the father which is the source of violence in the human individual. Sex and violence, being two forms of libidinal energy, need to be suppressed and controlled through social taboos to prevent a person from becoming a danger to himself or others. Incest taboos became a way of controlling human instincts and that is why religious practice is partially characterized by prohibitions. Girard’s contention is that religious myth and ritual are necessary to keep a society from self-destructing.

     The breaking of taboos can be dangerous and people who do so can be elevated as kings, sometimes later to be sacrificed, or degraded as marginalized individuals. Since the goal of sacrifice is the preservation of social order, victims are chosen from the periphery of a community. The victim can be a domestic animal, for instance, or sometimes it can be a human, possibly a slave, a prisoner of war, a physically or mentally disabled person, an elderly person, a child, or someone deemed to be a social deviant. In some societies, human sacrifice became too disturbing so animals or effigies were substituted for the same purpose.

     Girard’s hypothesis works well when he applies it to pre-modern myth and ritual but when he begins to critique modern society this book goes completely off the rails. From an intellectual point of view, modernism is defined as era of releasing humanity from its bindings. Industrial workers were to be liberated from economic slavery by communism. Psychoanalysis was meant to remove taboos and end the repression of mental energy that had built up over the centuries. Humanity would reach its full potential through technology and the free exchange of ideas. Nietzsche announced the death of God and religion was one of the casualties of modernism since it was seen as being one of the major obstacles to humanity reaching a higher stage of evolution. Girard’s take on all this is that modern society, where the judicial system has replaced religion as the primary regulatory institution, is off-balance and plagued by never-ending problems. He believes we need to return to religion to prevent the modern world from collapsing.

     While his analysis of pre-modern societies is provocative and well-thought out, he leads us in the direction of a conservative agenda. He doesn’t explicitly say that we should restart using human sacrifice as a means of regulating society but he sure does hint at it loudly. His hypothesis is fundamentally conservative because the rite of sacrifice is described as a method of maintaining the status quo. It pits a conformist society, massed to participate in the ritual, against a peripheral outsider who is to be sacrificed as a scapegoat. Turned on its head and looked at from the sacrificial victim’s point of view, this is not good. Social order is more important and if you happen to be the scapegoat, that is your tough luck. The victim is someone distinct from society, possibly a non-conformist, an individualist, an artist, a member of a minority group, a person who question the established order or refuses to go along with the herd. The underlying social message is that the individual risks persecution, in the form of marginalization and possibly violence, so conforming to the community reduces the risk of being singled out for an act of persecution. This is the essence of religious communities or political parties that draw a strong line of demarcation between insiders and those outsiders. Reactionary thinking of this type can lead to fascism, genocides, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other forms of crimes against humanity when taken to logical extremes. Girard does not appear to be advocating for violations of human rights when he defends a rebirth of religion in the modern world but he could easily tread that path if not cautious. In the self-critique of his own theory, he does acknowledge that rites of sacrificial violence do not always result in their intended effects and therein lies a potential for extreme danger. He would probably say that the sacrificial rite is meant to prevent those types of atrocities but still, the idea of murdering a peripheral individual to maintain the status quo of does not resonate well with moral or civilized people.

     There are further problems in the examples Girard uses to support his theory. His chapter on Claude Levy-Strauss seems like a pointless sidetrack. The ceremonies and myths he dissects are taken far out of context and appear to even be incomplete. His explanation of the biblical story of Jonah is the most obvious example. The idea of the sailors throwing Jonah off their sinking ship can loosely be interpreted as a form of scapegoating and human sacrifice but it ignores the actual meaning of the story; Girard does not mention how Jonah prays to God after being swallowed by the whale and gets regurgitated as a symbolic form of redemption. The moral of the story has nothing to do with the details given by Girard. This can be said of the Dinka ritual involving the sacrifice of a cow; the full ritual is not explained and the Dinka people’s understanding of its meaning is never examined. Girard, a literary critic, appears to have no understanding of anthropological or sociological methodologies or theories but he employs cherry picked ideas from social science texts. He interprets anthropological data the same way he interprets poetry and literary fiction, without regard to the fact that literary criticism and anthropology do not overlap as disciplines in any convincing way. He also doesn’t provide enough data to support the theory that all ceremonies are variations of the one original human sacrifice. He uses less than ten examples to support a theory that would apply to a vast quantity of data, so vast that collecting all of it is an unrealistic and unrealizable goal. We can take him at his word but only up to a certain point.

     He makes the same blunder in his definition of certain Greek words like “kudos”, for example. He makes assertions about the complexity of encoded information in lexical items from Ancient Greek but he is not fluent in Ancient Greek and borrows his material from other scholars who may not be entirely accurate in their explanations to begin with. Girard takes these words out of context to support ideas but he has no concept of how semantic systems operate. Words have fluid, not static, definitions and their meanings are heavily dependent on context. Think of how the word “like” can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or a discourse marker depending on its lexical and syntactic environment, for example. His knowledge of linguistics is laughable. You can’t take the definition of a word in a language you don’t understand and use it to make sweeping generalizations about psychology and religion that pertain to humanity in its entirety. Girard just found some writings by other scholars who said what he wanted to hear so he lifted those ideas out of their theoretical context and used them to support his own theories. This is a matter of adjusting the evidence to fit the claim.

     Finally, the idea that there was one human sacrifice that initiated all human culture, social praxis, and even language itself is an unprovable claim, at best, speculation. Girard admits himself that this can not be proven or empirically justified. Some credit can be given because he has identified and analyzed one thread of human behavior and belief that appears to run through many human societies but it doesn’t take into account all the other threads of human behavior that have, do, or will ever exist. It is one thread among many and to ascribe it the importance he does is just a little bombastic.

     The idea that culture originated in this event is not convincing either. If the people who performed the first human sacrifice used any kind of tool, even something as simple as a rock or a sharpened animal bone, then culture existed before the sacrifice. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic human elements of survival. These are biological necessities. Tools are used by humans to make the acquisition of these materials more convenient. Language is used for abstract thoughts and for the coordination of human societies to maximize the potential for survival. Since all of these innovations are rooted in biological need, it would be plausible to consider that human biology is the root of human culture. If a community leader convinced a whole society to sacrifice a human with some sort of tool, that could entail the idea that culture preceded such a happening. Girard claims that this was a religious event that caused human culture and language to develop but it is more likely that religion was a product of abstract and symbolic thought; most likely, language and culture caused religion, not the other way around.

     Rene Girard has developed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of sacrificial rites and their relation to human violence. He ends the book by claiming that his theory will revolutionize the way we think about human culture, religion, art, language, and literature. That change has not yet come. It probably never will. Girard did not recognize the limitations of his own ideas or their limited applicability in the real world. He identified and described a pattern of human behavior then made grandiose claims about its importance. He was a narrow but intense thinker and the mechanics of his ideas are plausible up to a point. It’s actually surprising that he maintained his status as a scholar since his laser focus on one idea makes him more likely to have been a fanatic, a radical fundamentalist, or a cult leader. In the end though, he was a one trick pony with an ulterior motive and his overestimation of his own importance ultimately sabotaged his ideological success. People who are predisposed to religious belief will probably swallow Violence and the Sacred as a whole without asking many questions about it; those of a more secular mind probably won’t.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1979.

 

Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

Postmodernism has taken some heat in recent years. Anyone with the capacity to say I don’t know who has taken a close look at it since it first emerged from mid-twentieth century France has considered it, at best, very silly, and some of them have bothered to say as much publicly.

Read the full article on Areo here