Anti-Oedipus Week 1

Anti-Oedipus summary: Through disjunctions and proliferations of desiring-machines, Deleuze and Guattari reject the repressive schema of oedipalization, and the internalized fascist desire to be led, in favor of the unbearably joyful process of becoming-schizo.

Passage for close-reading: “We are also of a mind to believe that everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items.” (85).

This passage occurs in the chapter, “Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family” in a subsection entitled “The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation.” I start here, as if the passage in question can be triangulated through a process of successive approximations: this chapter, and this section, at the end of this paragraph with a clear transition between what went before and what comes after. I start here, as if by locating something I have made it meaningful, I have put it into a set and crystalline relationship to something else. I start here, because it is my usual, pedagogical approach: there must be something to grab hold of here, if I only start large enough and settle everything into its proper place. My usual approach is useless here.

Rather, this act of triangulation backfires on me: the sub-chapter begins by returning to the figure of the body without organs as an egg, “criss-crossed with axes, banded with zones” (84), a reiterated observation whose refrain brings out the new overtones of a biochemistry of schizophrenia, a science that sounds more like calculus with its attention to “the distribution of field-gradient-threshold” (84). These languages in turn slides into those of travel, of the voyage of the undifferentiated body which exists from the beginning and looks forward, feels forward into the horrific depths of its own impending journey with a multiply dispersed gaze. This journey, as Beckett's characters also suggest, is both interior and exterior, although even that cozily coordinating conjunction sets the two terms apart as something separate and opposable, while Deleuze and Guattari maintain that these seeming opposites, stripped of extension, form and quality, emerge in their purity as coupled intensities, radiating with unbearable emotion in all directions, all times at once.

It is this dispersal of intensive, disjunctive flow in several dimensions and media that undermines my desire to triangulate my position in the text from the outset. Everything commingles to the point that there is no longer (if indeed there ever was) a distinct series of items on which to settle an interpretation. The very verb “commingles” blends connotations of social party-goers cheerfully interacting, with suggestions of a fermenting trash pile, where the discrete discarded things meld into the chemically-distinct “everything” of intensive flows. The rest of the sentence becomes itself a flow, consisting of the synthesis of three sets of conjunctions: the “becomings, passages, and migrations,” the ascent and descent, the pluralized flows of time, and, most notably, the partial list of items after the colon that partake of these flows. Becoming, passage, and migration are all directional terms with a suggested teleological aim: a migratory bird traces the same path season after season; the verb “becoming” encapsulates an end-term which the subject will eventually, concretely, become; and a passage suggests two endpoints with a traversable space between, be it a secret passage between rooms or a middle passage between continents. With each term pluralized and the three terms enclosed in a disjunctive series, however, this teleology is undermined by being multiplied past recognition, constructing instead a body without organs, crossed with zones of intensities, axes, thresholds. All this drift likewise both ascends and descends, where the coordinating conjunction leaves open the possibilities of the temporal order of these motions: first one, then the other? Some ascending while others descend? Everything going both directions at once?

The list after the colon is a litany of identifications, arranged in both ascending and descending order, with everything commingling in orders of scale. The list tellingly ends on “miscellaneous news items,” with the promise of journalism to tell the whole truth objectively. The newsboy's call, “read all about it!” implies not only that one can read all there is to know about a given story within the confines of a single sheet, but that through reading, “it” will become clear, it being both the specificity of the news article and the social milieu in which that article is placed. The news traditionally promises meaning through miscellany: if you read all the fragments, you too will know all you need by the end of your first cup of coffee. These news items, however, undermine such pretensions to certainty. Coming at the end of a flow of magnitudes, the news item is the smallest link, and the most prominently miscellaneous in a list constructed for miscellany. After the news items, the next sentence shifts into a list of potential becomings, each of which serves to open a potential of becoming something else. Everything shifts, from God to the daily news, and the importance lies in the ability of one to flow and shift into another, to impregnate another with meaning.

The temporal order of the sentence as a whole, despite its seeming progression from the clarity of a transition to a list of examples, undoes it own teleology from the beginning. “We are also of a mind to believe” puts me in a mind to believe that we are elaborating on the point established in the paragraph above, through the seductive appeal of the “also.” Yet, it is at this very moment that my desire for triangulation is undermined, the semantic ground shifting underfoot. The unassuming first-person-plural subject could refer to Deleuze and Guattari themselves, which, although a seemingly simplistic and even obvious denotation, already layers two subjects, two sets of intensive affective voyages, into the space of a single speaking position. Which one intones the words “we are also of a mind...?” If there is “no reason to oppose an interior voyage to an exterior one,” there is no reason to oppose interior authors to intertextual ones. The “we” of the subject includes, tangentially, the voices of Lenz, Nijinksy, Beckett, and Laing. Ultimately, their voices resonate together, indistinguishable, with only the plural pronoun standing in for the buzz which characterizes perfect unison.

The comforting “also” itself, in tune with the prepositional phrase “of a mind” and the infinitive verb construction “to believe” further layers these doubled-yet-singular, intensive-and-extensive voices. “To believe” is a verb laden with ecclesiastical overtones, as is the “law” that, elsewhere, they express hesitation to use to describe chemical processes for that very aroma of faith. Yet this spiritual, classically internal and intensive action is made grammatically dependent on the shifting ground of the phrase “of a mind,” suggesting that this belief is contingent on this mind, whose indefinite article promises any number of potential minds, in an infinite (albeit unexpressed) series of also/ands, each with their own attendant constellation of beliefs. This mind's belief, “that everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations,” takes up the rest of the paragraph, but despite that topical unity, the seeming topic sentence really exposes an infinite series of possible arguments, enacting the disjunctive sleights of hand at the heart of schizoanalysis.