Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti Oedipus

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.It is not possible to attribute aspecial form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that ispresumably different from the material reality of social production.Desiring-machines are not fantasy-machines or dream-machines, whichsupposedly can be distinguished from technical and social machines.Rather, fantasies are secondary expressions, deriving from the identicalnature of the two sorts of machines in any given set of circumstances.Thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy as institutionalanalysis+ has successfully demonstrated.And if there is such a thing astwo sorts of group fantasy, it is because two different readings of thisidentity are possible, depending upon whether the desiring-machines areregarded from the point of view of the great gregarious masses that theyform, or whether social machines are considered from the point of viewof the elementary forces of desire that serve as a basis for them.Hencein group fantasy the libido may invest all of an existing social field,including the latter's most repressive forms; or on the contrary, it maylaunch a counterinvestment whereby revolutionary desire is pluggedinto the existing social field as a source of energy.(The great socialistUtopias of the nineteenth century function, for example, not as ideal*We find in the case of culturalists a distinction between rational systems and projective systems, withpsychoanalysis applying only to these latter (as for example in Abram Kardiner).Despite their hostility toculturalism, we find in both Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse certain traces of this same dualism, eventhough they define the rational and the irrational in a completely different way and assign them quitedifferent roles.t Institutional analysis is the more political tendency of institutional psychotherapy, begun in the late 1950sas an attempt to collectively deal with what psychoanalysis so hypocritically avoided, namely thepsychoses.La Borde Clinic, established in 1955 by Jean Oury of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, served asthe locus for discussions on institutional psychotherapy, and Jacques Lacan's seminars served as theintellectual basis for these discussions "in the beginning." Felix Guattari joined the clinic in 1956, as amilitant interested in the notions of desire under discussion a topic rarely dealt with by militants at thattime.Preferring the term "institutional analysis" over "institutional psychotherapy," Guattari sought to pushthe movement in a more political direction, toward what he later described as a political analysis of desire.In any case this injection of a psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan's version) into a custodial institution led toa collectivization of the analytical concepts.Transference came to be seen as institutional, and fantasieswere seen to be collective: desire was a problem of groups and jor groups.See Jacques Donzelot's excellentarticle on Anti-Oedipus, "Une anti-sociologie" in Esprit, December 1972, and Gilles Deleuze's detaileddiscussion of Guattari's notion of groups and desire, "Trois problemes de groupe" in Felix Guattari,Psychanalyse et transversalile (Paris: Maspero, 1972).(Translators' note.)30 ANTI-OEDIPUSmodels but as group fantasies that is, as agents of the real productivity of desire,making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to "deinstitutionalize" it, tofurther the revolutionary institution of desire itself.) But there is never anydifference in nature between the desiring-machines and the technical socialmachines.There is a certain distinction between them, but it is merely adistinction of regime,* depending on their relationships of size.Except for thisdifference in regime, they are the same machines, as group fantasies clearlyprove.When in the course of our discussion above, we laid down the broad outlinesof a parallelism between social production and desiring-production, in order toshow that in both cases there is a strong tendency on the part of the forces ofantiproduction to operate retroactively on (se rabattre sur) productive forms andappropriate them, this parallelism was in no way meant as an exhaustivedescription of the relationship between the two systems of production.It merelyenables us to point to certain phenomena having to do with the difference inregime between them.In the first place, technical machines obviously work onlyif they are not out of order; they ordinarily stop working not because they breakdown but because they wear out.Marx makes use of this simple principle to showthat the regime of technical machines is characterized by a strict distinctionbetween the means of production and the product; thanks to this distinction, themachine transmits value to the product, but only the value that the machine itselfloses as it wears out.Desiring-machines, on the contrary, continually break downas they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly: theproduct is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft,and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run.Art often takes advantage of this property of desiring-machines by creatingveritable group fantasies in which desiring-production is used to short-circuitsocial production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technicalmachines by introducing an element of dysfunction.Arman's charred violins, forinstance, or Cesar's compressed car bodies.More generally, Dali's method ofcritical paranoia assures the explosion of a desiring-machine within an object ofsocial production.But even earlier, Ravel preferred to throw his inventionsentirely out of gear rather than let them simply run down, and chose to end hiscompositions with abrupt breaks, hesitations, tremolos, discordant notes, andunresolved chords, rather than allowing them to slowly wind*The word regime has a number of different meanings in French, including: regimen or form of government;a set of laws, rules, or regulations; rate of flow, as of a current; rate or speed of operation, as of a motor orengine.Since the authors use the word in several senses, the French word regime has been retainedthroughout the English text.(Translators'note.)THE DESIRING-MACHINES 31down to a close or gradually die away into silence [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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