ABOUT SCHIZO-ANALYSIS

"Shizo-analysis, on the other hand, rejects the 'will to identity', and all signifying personological specifications, especially those relating to the family. It abandons strategies of power in favor of an organless body that de-individuates desire and is ready to see it expressed by way of non-semiotic cosmic fluxes and non-signifying socio-historical fluxes."
Felix Guattari, "The Role of the Signifier in the Institution"; page 80 in MOLECULAR REVOLUTION.

By way of clarification: the above quote in no way refers to the role of the Hereditary Chiefs in First Nations society.

Schizo-analysis was developed as an alternative to systems of semiological domination. It was particularly designed as a counter to the methodology of psychiatric models (prominent into the 1950's, 60's, 70's, and on) which explain all aspects of psychological 'dis-ease' through an analysis of family relations (patterned on the mythological paradigm of Oedipus). Schizo-analysis, also known as "material psychology", shifts its focus to an anti-psychological critique of the material conditions surrounding those undergoing conditions of 'mental un-ease'. It was also designed as a critique of the dominant and totalitarian model of Marxism, and of the (not necessarily Marxist) state bureaucracies that separate governments from the will of the people.

"What they meant to express was the simplest thing in the word: until now, you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object supposed to be the object of desire. Deleuze emphasizes that one never desires something or someone, but rather always desires an aggregate (ensemble). So they asked what was the nature of relations between elements in order for there to be desire, for these elements to become desirable. Deleuze refers to Proust when he says that desire for a woman is not so much desire for the woman as for {a paysage,} a landscape, that is enveloped in this woman. Or in desiring an object, a dress for example, the desire is not for the object, but for the whole context, the aggregate, "I desire in an aggregate." Deleuze refers back to the letter "B", on drinking, alcohol, and the desire not just for drink, but for whatever aggregate into which one situates the desire for drinking (with people, in a café, etc.).

So, there is no desire, says Deleuze, that does not flow into an assemblage, and for him, desire has always been a constructivism, constructing an assemblage (agencement), an aggregate: the aggregate of the skirt, of a sun ray, of a street, of a woman, of a vista, of a color... constructing an assemblage, constructing a region, assembling. Deleuze emphasizes that desire is constructivism. Parent asks if it's because desire is an assemblage that Deleuze needed to be two, with Guattari, in order to create. Deleuze agrees that with Felix, they created an assemblage, but that there can be assemblages all alone as well as with two, or something passing between two. All of this, he continues, concerns physical phenomena, and for an event to occur, some differences of potential must arise, like a flash or a stream, so that the domain of desire is constructed. So every time someone says, I desire this or that, that person is in the process of constructing an assemblage, nothing else, desire is nothing else.

Parnet links this to Anti-Oedipus in asking that it's the first book in which he discussed desire, so the first he wrote with another. Deleuze agrees; they had to enter into what was a new assemblage for them, writing à deux, so that something might "pass". And this something was a fundamental hostility toward dominant conceptions of delirium (délire), particularly against psychoanalysis. Since Guattari had been through psychoanalysis and Deleuze was interested in it, they found common ground to develop a constructivist conception of desire. So Parnet asks him to define better how he sees the difference between this constructivism and analytical interpretation. Deleuze sees it as quite simple, with psychoanalysts speaking of desire just like priests, under the guise of the great wailing about castration, which for Deleuze is a kind of enormous and frightening curse on desire.

In Anti-Oedipus, they tried to oppose psychoanalysis on three main points, none of which he would change at all:

1) Opposing the psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious as a theater, with its constant representation of Hamlet and Oedipus, they see the unconscious as a factory, as production. The unconscious produces, like a factory, exactly the opposite of the psychoanalytical vision.

2) Delirium, linked to desire, is the contrary of delirium linked solely to the father or mother; rather we "délire" about everything, the whole world, history, geography, tribes, deserts, peoples, races, climates, what Rimbaud referred to (in "Mauvais Sang," Une Saison en enfer) as "I am an animal, a Negro": where are my tribes, how are my tribes arranged, surviving in the desert? Delirium, says Deleuze, is geographical-political, whereas psychoanalysis links it always to familial determinants. Psychoanalysis never understood anything at all, says Deleuze, about phenomena of delirium. We "délire" the world and not one's little family. And all this intersects, he continues: when he referred to literature not being someone's little private affair, it's not a delirium focused on the father and mother.

3) Desire is established and constructs in an assemblage always putting several factors into play, whereas psychoanalysis reduces desire to a single factor (father, mother, phallus), completely ignorant of the multiple, of constructivism, of assemblages. Deleuze refers to the animal, the image of the father, and then to the Little Hans example he and Guattari used, but also to a second example, how the animal (horse, in Little Hans) can never be the image of the father, since animals proceed usually in a pack. Deleuze refers to Freud's reduction of a dream that Jung told him, Freud insisting on "the bone", singular, that he believes he heard Jung say, when Jung actually said he dreamed of an ossuary, a multiplicity of bones. So desire constructs in the collective, the multiple, the pack, and one asks what is one's position in relation to the pack, outside, alongside, inside, at the center? All phenomena of desire.

Parnet sums up by asking if Anti-Oedipus as a post-May '68 text was a reflection of the collective assemblages of that period. Exactly, Deleuze responds, the attack against psychoanalysis and the concept of delirium of races, of tribes, of peoples, of history, of geography -- all conformed to '68, trying to create an "air sain", a healthy region, inside all that was blocked off and fetid. A delirium that was cosmic, delirium on the end of the world and on particles and on electrons. Parnet continues with a reference to these "collective assemblages" by asking if Deleuze could recount some of the amusing or not so amusing anecdotes about misunderstandings that occurred, for example at Vincennes, around putting these concepts into practice. She recalls that when they undertook their schizoanalysis against psychoanalysis, lots of students thought it meant that it was cool to be crazy. Rather than recount funny stories, Deleuze links the misunderstandings generally to two points, which were more or less the same: some people thought that desire was a form of spontaneity, others thought it was an occasion for partying (la fête). For D&G, it was neither, but it mattered little since assemblages got created, even those that Parnet (and Deleuze) refer to as "the crazies" (les fous) who had their own discourse and constructed their own assemblages.

So, Deleuze continues, on the level of theory, these misunderstandings -- spontaneity or la fête -- were not the so-called philosophy of desire, which was rather: don't go get psychoanalyzed, stop interpreting, go construct and experience/ experiment with assemblages, search out the assemblages that suit you. What is an assemblage, he asks? It's not what they thought it was, but for Deleuze, an assemblage has four components or dimensions:

1) Assemblages referred to "states of things", so that each of us might find the "state of things" that suit us (he gives the example of drinking, even just drinking coffee, and that we find that "coffee drinking" that suits us as a "state of thing").

2) "Les énoncés", little statements, as kinds of style, each of us finding a kind of style of enunciation (he refers again to the Russian revolution's aftermath, with again finding a style of cinema; or new types or styles of enunciation following of May '68).

3) An assemblage implicates territories, each of us chooses or creates a territory, even just walking into a room.

4) An assemblage also implicates processes of deterritorialization, movements of deterritorialization.

It's within these components that desire flows, says Deleuze."

FROM:
L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet
(Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet)
Directed by Pierre-André Boutang (1996).

Overview prepared by: Charles J. Stivale,
Romance Languages & Literatures,
Wayne State University.

...which can be viewed here.

In shifting its focus toward material analysis, schizo-analysis employs the concept of a 'body without organs' to express the interrelations that form between externalized desire and the world. These interrelations can also be expressed through the concept of nomadic territorializations.

"Subject and object give a poor approximation of thought. Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth...The earth is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize territory...Territory and earth are two components with two zones of indiscernibility - deterritorialization (from territory to earth) and reterritorialization (from earth to territory). We cannot say which comes first."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in the section "Geolphilosophy",
on pages 85-86 of WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY,
translation copyright 1994 by Columbia University Press.

Such a shifting between earth and territory can be taken as functionally analogous to the variances in grouping patterns that are found between the partial objects in non-metrical multiplicities.

Members of the First Nations who have reviewed the examples and conclusions in the research I have forwarded to them will immediately recognize that this is particularly applicable to non-metrical image writing...especially in its function as a form of 'event-mapping' of actual, physical territory.

For the First Nations, schizo-analysis (as a process of healing) is not a reterritorialization (a creating of a new territory, or government, from the earth - as their opponents/oppressors would like to have the general public believe); it is a deterritorialization: it is the re-uniting of the First Nation's knowledge of what constitutes the nature of their traditional territories, with the physical reality of the earth upon which these territories are localized. It is a movement from the idea of territory to the reality of the earth, and the economic opportunities its resources offer.

As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari state in the last paragrph of "Anti-Oedipus":

"What, finally, is the opposition between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, when the negative and positive tasks of schizoanalysis are taken as a whole? We constantly contrasted two sorts of unconscious: the one schizoanalytic, the other psychoanalytic; the one schizophrenic, the other neurotic-Oedipal; the one abstract and nonfigurative, the other imaginary; but also the one really concrete, the other symbolic; the one machinic, the other structural; the one molecular, microphysical, and micrological, and the other molar or statistical; the one material, the other ideological; the one productive, the other expressive. We have seen how the negative task of schizoanalysis must be violent, brutal: defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy; decoding, deterritorializing - a terrible curettage, a malevolent activity. But everything happens at the same time. For at the same time the process is liberated - the process of desiring-production, following its molecular lines of escape that already define the mechanic's task of the schizoanalyst. And the lines of escape are still full molar or social investments at grips with the whole social field: so that the task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these - in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression of desire. Completing the process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing") is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed."

Now: I hope that everybody grasps that the idea here is to cultivate personal engagements with the social field of forces, and not 'to drive people insane'.
The philosophic works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is dedicated toward providing a productive alternative to the European nihilism that has attended continental philosophy since the start of the twentieth century; thus, it is very much about the clear, lucid, and philosophically rigorous production of concepts... and not about indulging the solipsistic ravings of the self-indulgent which constitute the "ego traps" schizoanalysis is designed to help people avoid.

Return to previous page ("What Is Non-Metrical Image Writing?").

Return to previous page ("An Interpretive Approach To Non-Metrical Image Writing").