Anti-Oedipus Week 2

Anti-Oedipus summary:

“Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men”: Deleuze and Guattari delineate the ways in which, by flattening the voice onto writing, desire is inscribed onto the full body within the territorial machines of primitive societies.

“Introduction to schizoanalysis”: Deleuze and Guattari outline a practical ethics of schizoanalysis, promulgating the use-value of a malevolently destructive desire that purifies as does a curettage.

Passage for close-reading: “Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn't effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary—withdrawal, freaks—provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle” (277).

This passage occurs early in what Deleuze and Guattari call their “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” which, naturally, comes at the end of their tome on the subject. In the first few pages of the first section, one might classically assume that the positioning of this passage suggests it is of an at least preliminary importance for outlining what schizophrenia is and how it progresses.The chapter traces three points of view, that of regression, that of the cycle, and that of the disjunctive or at least potentially disjunctive community, before claiming that the familial investment is simply an “application of the unconscious investments of the social field” (277) through which application the child, who can be considered neither a precursor nor a basis for the adult, sets into motion “a delirious interplay of disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments” (277). The sentence in question appears at the end of a paragraph devoted to outlining two different poles of social investment around which the child, or the adult who supplants and surrounds but never succeeds him, can construct these delirious interplays. Last week, I started with this situation of the text in context as a way to elucidate the ways the rhetoric of the passage pulls out that semantic ground from underfoot, performing the schizoanalysis which it, on another level, recommends. This week, I chose to start here again because I am interested in the line of flight, and in order to talk productively about an escape, it seemed necessary to discuss the setting from which the text would stage its escape, an escape that is both internal to this text and this sentence, and eccentric to it, both forming and breaching a double barrier. Throughout the second half of this book, I've noticed the figure of the line of flight appearing as a briefly lucid tangent to the ostensible purpose of the discourse, so here I'd like to try to follow at least a short stretch of this movement, and the ways in which the line of flight, like the curettage Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere compare to schizoanalysis, structures by means of pulling out the insides of a rhetorical position.

The phrase “line of escape” first appears in this context as the qualification of the second type of social investment. If the first pole is that of the “paranoiac fascisizing” type that disinvests any potential figure of desire by flattening and homogenizing it into presumed universal desire through the sibilant reassurance of “yes, I am your kind,” then the second pole inverts this process to invest in the figure of the Other. By claiming flatly, “I am not your kind” the schizorevolutionary type speaks from an already-established eccentric position, and follows the centrifugal line of this tangent through the motions of desire, “breach[ing] the wall and caus[ing] flows to move” (277). This drift along a line of escape is immediately contained by the beginning of the sentence in question, where the proverbial “good people” tell us not to flee. Here, the “good people,” by their very universality and the banal simplicity of their descriptive adjective, take on a matronly air, suggesting cozy church matriarchs who dispense wisdom about the value of integrating oneself into the status quo. The “good people” provide us with a litany of such proverbial reminders: “we must not flee,” “to escape is not good,” “it isn't effective,” “one must work for reforms” (277). Taken together, these gentle reminders serve as a sort of pedagogical plea, with their repetitive parallel structure as verbal complements serving to lull the listener into a position of receptivity, as does, for example, the refrain of a children's song. The soothing quadruple repetition is coupled with basic syntax and vocabulary within each clause: the binaristic “good” against the implied “bad” of escape, the pedagogical “must not,” the generalizing appeal of the “one” who must “work for reforms,” with the promise that if one does so, one will be celebrated as a productive member of society. Even in the clause, “it isn't effective,” the longest word in this sentence is packed between two other clauses that clarify the meaning in context, in much the way that a teacher surrounds a complicated new vocabulary word with the contextual clues her students need to begin to develop an understanding of its meaning. In this way, the sentence places the “good people” in a maternal role at the same time as it structures the listener or reader into a child's position, pedagogically directing the reader away from their hopes of escape along the line of a lullaby.

Despite the comfortingly repeated simplistic adjective “good,” this paradigm serves to both infantilize and entrap the potentially schizophrenic revolutionary, so that the line of flight must take its trajectory directly away from these nostalgic associations of this family in order to be truly effective. Within the space of the next few words, the rhetoric does exactly that, with the subject growing up from a undifferentiated child in relation to a maternal figure to a “revolutionary” who emerges intact from this social fabric, who “knows that escape is revolutionary” (277), provided one unsettle the comforting layers of maternal, or more broadly, familial, subjugation as one does so, not only rejecting the “good people”'s doctrines but tearing apart the lines of the song from the inside out as one emerges. Even the interjection within the sentence instantiates the necessary aggression of this trajectory. Inserted between the sentence's main clause and its attendant supporting details, the interjection “withdrawal, freaks” unsettles what might otherwise be a simple counter-pedagogy. Unlike the four parallel terms of the “good people”'s lyrical advice, the two terms here, bursting from the text of the sentence between a pair of dashes, also have an uncertain and arrhythmic relationship to each other. Are they a pair of nouns in a series, separated by a comma, and hence slightly pushing aside the grammatical rules, lacking both a third term and a coordinating conjunction? Do they instead form an imbedded imperative sentence which reclassifies the revolutionary of the main clause as a “freak” which would be even more radically removed from the oppressively comforting paradigm of the good people? In either respect, the revolutionary interpellated by this interjection functions to disrupt the stable pieties of the familial system as represented by the matriarchal “good people” who settle their children into comfortingly soporific positions. In this way, he thereby purifies these relations by reducing them to rubble, in the hopes that “a piece of the system will get lost in the shuffle,” (277) leaving a hole that the most careful reconstruction of the paradigm would be unable to rectify.