Schizoanalysis
Schizoanalysis is a set of theories and techniques developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, first expounded in their book Anti-Oedipus and continued in their follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus.
Overview
The practice acquired many different definitions, uses and articulations during the course of its development in collaborative work with Deleuze and individually in the work of Guattari; for instance, in Guattari's 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 perceived 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 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".
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". 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:- Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field.
- Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.
- Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments.
- Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac reactionary pole, and a schizoid revolutionary pole.
Schizoanalyst
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. Schizoanalysis addresses ressentiment by leading the neurotic subject to a rhizomatic state of becoming. Schizoanalysis uses psychosis as a figurative-philosophical diagrammatic model, creating abstract machines that go beyond a semiotic simulacrum, generating a reality not already present. 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. Desiring-production is a virtuality of becoming-intense, a becoming-Other. Schizoanalysis deterritorializes-reterritorializes found assemblages through rhizomatic desiring-production.Body without organs
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:- Fluxes: material, energetic and semiotic transformations
- Territories: finite existential subjectifications
- Universes of reference : virtual incorporeal enunciative alterifications
- Phylum : drive deterritorialization
- The generative component: the study of concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures and variations, making a tracing of the mixed semiotics.
- 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.
- The diagrammatic component: The Real as an Absolute synchronic-parallel diagram of Reality, surpassing all regimes of signs by the merging of content and expression.
- 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 Deleuze and Guattari, wrote that "schizoanalysis shares in the delicious irresponsibility of everything anarchic, inundating and harshly impersonal." 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." 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 their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit.