Deleuze & Guattari: The

Subterranean Forces of
Social Production
http://darkecologies.com/2015/06/09/deleuze-guattari-the-subterranean-forces-of-socialproduction/

To be sure, we have never dreamed of saying that

psychoanalysis invented Oedipus!
Deleuze & Guattari: Anti-Oedipus
One of the key aspects of Deleuze & Guattaris schizoanalytical analysis of
Freud/Lacan tradition of psychoanalysis is not that Oedipus does not exist, but that
it comes after social reproduction and social repression. That the family: Father,
Mother, child triangulation that psychoanalysis fixates on comes as a partial truth,
one that forces the actual truth into the strait-jacket of the Freudian framework.

Everything points in the opposite direction: the

subjects
of
psychoanalysis
arrive
already
oedipulized, they demand it, they want more. (p.
121)
This is where it gets tricky. D&G will tell us in speaking of the incest prohibition that
seems to be a cornerstone to the Oedipal mythos is founded not on familial
repression but rather on social repressive forces. Social production would need at
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its disposal, on the recording surface of the socious, an agent that is also capable of
acting on, of inscribing the recording surface of desire. Such an agent exists: the
family. (p. 120) One sees here the notion of the social body, the collective matrix
of the socious, as a recordable medium of desire upon which certain agents can act
on and inscribe the laws or norms of repression.

The key is this concept

of desire upon which the social agents, the family being one among a multitude act
and inscribe these relations of repression.
One needs to understand this key concept of desire, and why both the social and
the familial as its agent are forced to act on and inscribe the various laws, norms,
regulatory mechanisms. And to understand the concept of desire and how it is
deployed within this critique of psychoanalysis we need to first understand how it is
deployed in Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, and in Deleuzeguattaris Anti-Oedipus.
At the heart of the critique is Freuds non-empirical turn, his belief that the
problems in the life of his patients was not in the empirical realm of their everyday
lives, but rather in the fantasy life of the patients themselves. What Deleuze and
Guattari have attempted is to return us to the social world of the empirical relations
in their actuality rather than to the Cartesian Theatre of the Lacanian / Freudian
fantasy land of intentionality. In the one view (Freudian/Lacanian) the mind is a
theatre of fantasy to be deciphered by the psychoanalyst as both priest and
officiator, while in Deleuzeguattari the mind (unconscious) is a productive factory
that produces not images and representations but the veritable tensions of a
sociality that goes unrecognized in the patients empirical life.
As even Deleuze, in one of his last essays would attest: I have always felt that I
am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. (Gilles Deleuze. Pure Immanence Essays on
Life Zone Books, 2001)

FREUD ON DESIRE
One of the things Freud discovered early on was that childhood traumas: rape,
abuse, sexual predation that his patients spoke of in sessions for women
(hysteria), for men (neurosis) were not as he had at first assumed based in fact
and actuality, but instead were based in the fantasy life of the patient themselves.
Freud concluded that most of his hysteric/neurotic patients had not been abused.
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His theory shattered, he fell deeper into despair. Then, after agonizing days of selfanalysis, Freud reached a conclusion that would transform the very nature of the
theory of mental life he was still inventing: his patients, Freud now believed, had
been reporting fantasies. In most cases, there had been no abuse only conflicted
wishes and desires. As he would say: When I pulled myself together, I was able to
draw the right conclusions namely that neurotic symptoms are not related directly
to actual events but tofantasies embodying wishes. By switching from actual
seduction to seduction fantasies, Freud in his work entered the world of the mind
and the world of imagination.
Displacing the problems of his patients from the real world to the inner psychic life
of the patient led him to write The Interpretation of Dreams where he began to
develop many of the early theories of wish-fulfillment, desire, unconscious,
repression, condensation, etc. Freud would not be the first nor the last to
instill intentionality or the notion of mental events into the internal world of the
Mind. Several critics from Hans Eysencks Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire
(1985) to

Richard

Websters Why

Freud

Was

Wrong:

Sin,

Science

and

Psychoanalysis (1995) have attacked this inward turn toward the Mind. Even at the
extreme end of this Freudian critique in such books as Fredrick Crews The Memory
Wars: Freuds Legacy in Dispute (1995) Freud is brought back not as a scientist of
the Mind, but the inventor of fantasies himself. And, yet, there are other works such
as Peter Gays 1988 book Freud: A Life for Our Time who will give sustenance to the
Freudians and their legends. Probably the best of the critiques of Freud came in
1984 with Adolf Grnbaums The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical
Critique where he will attack Freud on empirical grounds, while at the same time
defending him against those like Karl Popper who thought Freuds theories were a
manifestation of pseudo-science. As one reads through most of these works one
realizes it is the notion that Freuds works are not based on scientific empiricism
that seems to be the greatest issue; yet, most will agree that his speculative
philosophical approach is still of value and that it is to this we should favor a
reception of his ideas rather than to his imposition of scientism that should be
explored.
My point being this: if one looks upon Freuds works as speculative philosophyrather
than science then his position within that stream of thought that arises out of Kant,
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Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; along with the undertow of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and others remains a valid influence to this day within the philosophical community
if not the psychoanalytical. It informs many of the debates concerning the various
approaches to materialism one sees in philosophers as diverse as Badiou, Zizek,
Meillassou and Johnston; as well as Deleuze, De Landa, Bradiotti, etc. just to
name a few. The great divide in materialism at this moment stems from these early
notions of Freud, the German Idealists, and the counter-traditions of Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, and Land. Materialism is at a crossroad: split between
scientific naturalism and its various forms of physicalism; the Freudian/Lacanian
group based on structure and lack; and the philosophers of desire such as Deleuze
and his followers under the rubric of new materialisms. One should add the Marxian
tradition as well, but that is part of another battle that is inclusive to all of these
various materialisms. In my own work-in-progress Im dealing with this tradition
that seems in our moment to be in turmoil as well as going through its own
transformations and migrations into various materialisms. To understand this
process one needs to clarify and separate, abstract out and critique the earlier
forms of materialism. Its this that drives my project at the moment.
It is to the figure of Freud as speculative philosopher rather than scientist that my
understanding of Desire and Drives turns.
Ill need to take this up in my next post