#readingnote Anti-Oedipus 1–1
#Desiring-machines
The idea coined by Guattari for a productive unconscious. It is the plane of production, noting that desire is not to be identified with any signifier, but with production. Desiring-machines are the site of that production. Every machine is connected to other machine, and every machine functions to cut the flow of the connection between that particular machine with other machine, but it is also the flow itself. The flow is non-personal, and desiring-machines produce subjectivity along with their components.
“Desiring production is situated at the limits of social production; the decoded flows, at the limits of the codes and the territorialities; the body without organs at the limits of the socius.” (AO, 175)
A case example on perceiving desiring-machine as part of the mechanism of something, in how human’s sexual drive emerged not from an anthropomorphic tendency, but from a total work of the unconscious, the actions of the desiring-machine to produce in nature, as how the essence of both human and nature is production:
“Rejecting the “anthropomorphic representation of sex”, Deleuze and Guattari describe the workings of the unconscious and of the sexual drives as the actions of desiring machines . They describe the breast as a machine, the mouth as a machine coupled to it, and are at pains to point out that their use of this term is not metaphorical, because for them the essence of both man and nature is production (as opposed to representation), and desiring production is the primary form of human production. It is the production of production. Desiring production is generation.” (Hubert, 2019)
The goal of AO is to achieve a theoretical link and approach between psychoanalysis and Marxism to create a new method of critical analysis (sometimes referred to either ‘materialist psychiatry’ or ‘schizoanalysis’). To accomplish the goal:
- Introduce desire into the conceptual mechanism to understand social production and reproduction, making it the part of the infrastructure of daily life
- Introduce the notion of production into desire, removing the artificial boundary separating machinations of desire from the realities of history
#Case studies of Schreber, Lenz, and Malone
Distinguishing the schizophrenia as process and as illness.
“The disease itself, providing its process isn’t brought to an abrupt halt (through isolation in a lockdown ward), or allowed to turn in a void (through interminable analysis of the content of delusions), can give rise to tremendous flights of imagination and has undoubtedly been responsible for some of the greatest works of art throughout history.” (ARGTAO, 40)
“Essesntially, what Deleuze and Guattari want to demonstrate is this: the schizophrenic, in the full flight of delirium, reveals to us the true nature of desire as a synthetic process. The schizophrenic process, then, is Deleuze and Guattari’s model of how desire works” (ARGTAO, 40)
It is shown and perceived that we can learn a great deal from schizophrenic delirium because it lays bare the material processes of the unconscious.
The distinction between process and illness, is to identify the operative elements of the schizophrenic process; to map those elements against the unconscious process. The three case studies concluded this statement: the schizophrenic is both Homo natura and Homo historia. They are not saying sch. are organically predisposed to an interest in nature; nor are they saying that an interest in nature can be used as a sign and symptom of it.
“We are not attempting to make nature one of the poles of schizophrenia. What the schizophrenic lives, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production.” (AO, 3/9)
Lenz is not simply adoring them, the earth, the wind, the water and so on as if they are all infused and part of a life of their own, but there is something more profound, more embracing, more uplifting; something on the order of the Cosmos, and he feels to be a part of (see: Lenz by Georg Büchner, 1836)
“Everything is a mchine. Celestial Machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines — all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. ‘[Lenz] thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take himself, as into a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.’ To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others.” (AO, 2/8)
Lenz is Homo natura because he feels he is at one with the production of nature, but he is Homo historia inasmuch as he registers that production of nature as though it were somebody other than himself who was witnessing it (ARGTAO, 42).
