Schizoanalysis Explained

Schizoanalysis (or ecosophy, pragmatics, micropolitics, rhizomatics, or nomadology) (French: schizoanalyse; schizo- from Greek σχίζειν skhizein, meaning "to split") is a set of theories and techniques developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, first expounded in their book Anti-Oedipus (1972) and continued in their follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).[1] [2]

Overview

The practice acquired many different definitions, uses and articulations during the course of its development in their collaborative work and individually in the work of Guattari; for instance, in his final work Chaosmosis, he explained that "rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex", schizoanalysis "will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity" whereupon it could take on the same tasks expected of revolutionary ideologies and political projects.

Background

Schizoanalysis was developed by Guattari as an open-ended theoretical practice responding to the shortcomings of French psychoanalytic practice and as the culmination of his work with institutional psychotherapy at the La Borde clinic. Guattari was regularly confronted with the use of the Oedipus complex as a starting point for analysis, and the uneven dynamic of the authority figure of the psychoanalyst in relationship to the patient. Guattari was interested in a practice that could derive, from given systems of enunciation and subjective structures, new "assemblages [''agencements''] of enunciation" capable of forging new coordinates of analysis, and to create unforeseen propositions and representations from the standpoint of psychosis that would yield positive conclusions to analysis.

Deleuze would later begin to break away from the framework, stating that in 1973 that "we no longer want to talk about schizoanalysis, because that would amount to protecting a particular type of escape, schizophrenic escape".[3]

Concepts

In the phrasing of David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan, schizoanalysis is a project of "experiments that dissemble and dissolve the self and other configurations and modes of organisation, but that also propose that an individual is composed of a diversity of different individuations, of other durations, both organic and inorganic [...] it is schizoanalysis that reveals that a sense of self can be made and unmade".[4] Deleuze and Guattari themselves summarized schizoanalytic practice in the fourth chapter of Anti-Oedipus, "Introduction to Schizoanalysis", as prompting the questions "What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?". In this sense, they developed four theses of schizoanalysis:

  1. Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field.
  2. Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.
  3. Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments.
  4. Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac reactionary pole, and a schizoid revolutionary pole.

Schizoanalyst

See main article: Cybernetics.

See also: Family therapy.

A schizoanalyst cannot be considered a kind of deconstructionist; in Guattari's terms, they pass what is understood to be logos through a text-machine-subject having the status of a partial object to express praxis-enslavement by—in Deleuze and Guattari's French—puissance, and the experience of the process of machinic enslavement.[5] [6] Schizoanalysis addresses ressentiment by leading the neurotic subject to a rhizomatic state of becoming.[7] Schizoanalysis uses psychosis as a figurative-philosophical diagrammatic model, creating abstract machines that go beyond a semiotic simulacrum, generating a reality not already present.[8] [9] Contradistinct from the psychoanalytic axiom of lack generating the kernel at the core of the subject, schizoanalytic desiring-production of intensities decode "representational territories" by self-generating the subject-becoming-BwO as a multiplicity.[10] [11] Desiring-production is a virtuality of becoming-intense, a becoming-Other.[12] [13] Schizoanalysis deterritorializes-reterritorializes found assemblages through rhizomatic desiring-production.[14]

Body without organs

See main article: Body without organs and Plane of immanence.

The body without organs is a metaphysical concept of Deleuze and Guattari's that they considered in A Thousand Plateaus to be "the only practical object of schizoanalysis". It is state of freedom that they refer to as "the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable". Bodies without organs are produced by the unconscious when desiring-production achieves its third nonproductive stage; a body without organs is "produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes." Deleuze wrote, prior to his work with Guattari, in The Logic of Sense that "a body without organs, with neither mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being complete, at this price", is "closed on a full depth without limits and without exteriority."

Four functors

The four functors, or ontological dimensions, are concepts that were deployed by Guattari within a typical clinical model of the unconscious, which are laid out in the following schema:[15]

  1. Fluxes: material, energetic and semiotic transformations (for instance, libido)[16]
  2. Territories: finite existential subjectifications (for instance, the notion of self and the process of transference)[16]
  3. Universes of reference (value): virtual incorporeal enunciative alterifications (for instance, complexes and the process of sublimation)[16]
  4. Phylum (machinic): drive deterritorialization (for instance, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of breakdown as breakthrough, and the Lacanian sinthome)[17] [16]

The territory (first assemblage that appears by decoding) is the social field of deterritorialization and reterritorialization,[18] while the flux and phylum are the components of abstract machines. With these functors, there are four circular components that bud and form rhizomes:[19] [20]

  1. The generative component: the study of concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures and variations, making a tracing of the mixed semiotics.
  2. The transformational component: the study of pure semiotics; their transformations-translations and the creation of new semiotics, making the transformational map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings.
  3. The diagrammatic component: The Real as an Absolute synchronic-parallel diagram of Reality (or Nature), surpassing all regimes of signs by the merging of content and expression.[21]
  4. The machinic component: the study of the assemblages that effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously semiotizing matters of expression and physicalizing matters of content, outlining the program of the assemblages that distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps, and mutations.

Legacy

Nick Land

British philosopher and theorist Nick Land, whose critical work and experimental texts in the 1990s frequently cited from Deleuze and Guattari, wrote that "schizoanalysis shares in the delicious irresponsibility of everything anarchic, inundating and harshly impersonal."[22] In his 1992 essay "Circuitries", Land described the practice of schizoanalysis as a prescient theory, writing that it "was only possible because we are hurtling into the first globally integrated insanity: politics is obsolete. Capitalism and Schizophrenia hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent inevitability of viral revolution, soft fusion."[23] Land's later work in the 1990s, associated with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, also further reinterpreted and developed schizoanalysis alongside cybernetics, cyberpunk aesthetics and occultism, most prominently in his 1995 essay "Meltdown":

Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static. Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BwOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit.[24]

Bard & Söderqvist

Swedish philosophers and futurologists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist build from Deleuze & Guattari's schizoanalysis in their book The Body Machines (2009), the third and final installment of The Futurica Trilogy (2000-2009) with Lacan's empty signifier re-added as an extra +1 to a properly implemented 12+1 structure – developed in collaboration with Stockholm's Royal Institute of Art – as both the empty unifier of the psyche and the dissolution of social hierarchy. The authors argue the 12+1 model is a psychoanalytic improvement to the otherwise "Kantian all too Kantian" technique of compartmentalization in psychology. As cultural examples of 12+1 are cited the hour prior to and following the twelve hours of a clock, Christ as living present and dead absent in relation to the twelve Apostles in the New Testament, and the ace card as both superior to the king and inferior to two in a playing card series. In this sense, the socially constructed +1 is nothing but a subject's passport name, understanding capitalist subjectivity as multipolar (twelve being a random number) akin to the urban intersubjectivities explored in musical theatre pieces like Puccini's La bohème and Jonathan Larson's Rent.

Radical Black Aesthetic

See also: Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism.

John Gillespie posits that writers Amiri Baraka and Frantz Fanon are schizoanalytic under the lens of critically examining racism (e.g., Black Dada Nihilismus on Dada).[25]

See also

Further reading

Sources

Notes and References

  1. Book: Guattari , Félix . Bains . Paul . Pefanis . Julian . 2006 . 1992 . Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm . Power Publications . 127 . 978-0-909952-25-9 . [T]he ecosophic (or schizoanalytic) approach[.].
  2. Kennedy. Barbara M.. 2011. 'Memoirs of a Geisha': The Material Poesis of Temporality. Discourse. 33. 2. 203–220. 2022-07-03. Referred to as pragmatics, micropolitics, rhizomatics, and nomadology, schizoanalysis has the potential to open up new lines of flight not merely through the more molar political spaces, but in the life-flows of molecular spaces in art, literatures, and performative aural and visual media; through the understanding of the libido as an economy of flows, not an economy of lack, loss, and the abyssal..
  3. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, MIT Press, 2004 (pp. 274--280), originally published in "Relazione di Gilles Deleuze" and discussions in Armando Verdiglione, ed., Psicanalisi e Politica; Atti del Convegno di studi tenuto a Milano l'8—9 Maggio 1973. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973, pp. 7-11, 17-21, 37-40, 44-45, 169-172. Abridged and edited
  4. Book: Burrows. David. O'Sullivan. Simon. 2019. Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press. 59-60. 978-1-4744-3240-5.
  5. Cross. D. J. S.. 2017. Apocrypha: Derrida's Writing in ‘’Anti-Oedipus’’. CR: The New Centennial Review. 17. 3. 177–197. 2022-07-03. The schizoanalyst doesn't read a text to comment on it; the schizoanalyst reads for the sake of extra-textual currents of desire traversing it. 'For reading a text is never an erudite exercise in search of signifieds, much less a highly textual exercise in quest of a signifier, but rather a productive usage of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, schizoid exercise that extracts [''dégage''] from the text its revolutionary power [''puissance'']' [...] A text is only a small gear in a much larger machine. The schizoanalyst doesn’t 'deconstruct.'.
  6. Book: Guattari , Félix . Adkins. Taylor. 2011. 1979. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Semiotext(e). 159. 978-1-58435-088-0. The subject and the machine are inseparable from one another. A degree of subjectivity enters into every material assemblage. And reciprocally, a degree of machinic enslavement enters into every subjective assemblage. [...] Being-in-itself and being-for-itself are only relatively equivalent to being-for-praxis, being-for-assemblage..
  7. Kennedy. Barbara M.. 2011. 'Memoirs of a Geisha': The Material Poesis of Temporality. Discourse. 33. 2. 203–220. 2022-07-03. Schizoanalysis provides a diagnosis and healing of the man of ressentiment, the slave of neurosis, castration, loss, lack, and oedipal desire. Schizoanalysis erects the schizo, not the subject..
  8. Kennedy. Barbara M.. 2011. 'Memoirs of a Geisha': The Material Poesis of Temporality. Discourse. 33. 2. 203–220. 2022-07-03. Taken from the medical model of schizophrenia within psychiatry, concepts such as the cracks, fissures, and dissolutions experienced by patients are transversed into an empiricist and diagrammatic model [...] to explore differently conceived mechanisms of desire and pleasure. [...] a diagrammatic component. This is often referred to as the abstract machine[.] [...] Unlike semiotics and signs, the abstract machine does not function to represent, but rather to construct a reality of a different order..
  9. Book: Marriott , David S. . 2021 . Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism . Palgrave Macmillan . The Palgrave Lacan Series . 98 . 10.1007/978-3-030-74978-1 . 978-3-030-74977-4 . Lacan knew, with genius, how psychosis reversed meaning, was ensnared in ressentiment[.].
  10. Book: Penney , James . 2014 . Capitalism and Schizoanalysis . After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics . Pluto Press . 111–144 . Against this [Lacanian] emphasis [of lack via Freud], Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative account of desire as self-generating production..
  11. Sellar. Sam. 2015. A Strange Craving to be Motivated: Schizoanalysis, Human Capital and Education. Deleuze Studies. 9. 3. 424–436. 2022-07-03. Schizoanalysis conceives of desire as a productive force that constitutes subjects from multiplicity. [...] [D&G] see the process of decoding, which frees desiring-production from its representational territories, as a positive development[.].
  12. Brown. William. Fleming. David H.. 2011. Deterritorialisation and Schizoanalysis in David Fincher's ‘Fight Club’. Deleuze Studies. 5. 2, Special Issue on Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture. 275–299. 2022-07-03. In Anti-Oedipus (1983), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari advanced a radical conception of desire, no longer shackled to absence and lack, but based on a productive process of presence and becoming. [...] one in which the conventional distinctions between inside and outside, actual and virtual, and even between self and other significantly blur..
  13. Kennedy. Barbara M.. 2011. 'Memoirs of a Geisha': The Material Poesis of Temporality. Discourse. 33. 2. 203–220. 2022-07-03. Deleuze and Guattari describe the body as a set of variously informed speeds and intensities..
  14. Sellar. Sam. 2015. A Strange Craving to be Motivated: Schizoanalysis, Human Capital and Education. Deleuze Studies. 9. 3. 424–436. 2022-07-03. [D&G] identify three inseparable tasks of schizoanalysis: destroying Oedipus or the representational territorialities of desire, discovering the desiring-machines operating outside of representation and reaching the investment of unconscious desire in the social field, as distinct from preconscious investments of interest..
  15. Book: Guattari , Félix . Bains . Paul . Pefanis . Julian . 2006 . 1992 . Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm . Power Publications . 53, 125 . 978-0-909952-25-9 . The machine is always synonymous with a nucleus constitutive of an existential Territory against a background of a constellation of incorporeal Universes of reference (or value). [...] [T]he four ontological dimensions of Fluxes, Territories, Universes and machinic Phylums..
  16. Book: Guattari , Félix . Bains . Paul . Pefanis . Julian . 2006 . 1992 . Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm . Power Publications . 126 . 978-0-909952-25-9 . To speak of machines rather than drives, Fluxes rather than libido, existential Territories rather than the instances of the self and of transference, incorporeal Universes rather than unconscious complexes and sublimation, chaosmic entities rather than signifiers—fitting ontological dimensions together in a circular manner rather than dividing the world up into infrastructure and superstructure—may not simply be a matter of vocabulary!.
  17. Book: Deleuze. Gilles. Guattari. Félix. Massumi. Brian. 1987. Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 410. 978-1-85168-637-7. machinic phylum, the flow of matter, [is] essentially [...] (deterritorialization)..
  18. Book: Deleuze. Gilles. Guattari. Félix. Massumi. Brian. 1987. Of the Refrain. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 322, 323. 978-1-85168-637-7. [T]he territory [...] seems to form at the level of a certain decoding. [...] The territory is the first assemblage[.].
  19. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980, 160-2).
  20. Book: Guattari , Félix . Adkins. Taylor. 2011. 1979. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Semiotext(e). 188. 978-1-58435-088-0.
  21. Book: Deleuze. Gilles. Guattari. Félix. Massumi. Brian. 1987. On Several Regimes of Signs. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 136–142. 978-1-85168-637-7. [T]ransformations that blow apart semiotics systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive absolute deterritorialization are called diagrammatic. [...] An abstract machine [...] is diagrammatic [...] It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form. [...] The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function [...] A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression. [...] Writing now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes. [...] This Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. [...] there are no regimes of signs on the diagrammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content..
  22. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (2011, 265).
  23. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena (2011, 317).
  24. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena (2011, 442).
  25. Gillespie. John. 2018. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic. Critical Ethnic Studies. 4. 2. 100–117. 2022-07-03. [S]chizoanalysis, as written about here, should not be considered as an idea that Deleuze and Guattari conceived of but rather as a label that Deleuze and Guattari (mis)place on the actions of white artists, and Black artists like Amiri Baraka and psychiatrists like Frantz Fanon have always already been doing..

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