Last week I read Sherry Turkle’s first book, Psychoanalytic Politics, which offers a very helpful overview of Jacques Lacan’s relationship to and influence on May ’68. Having spent most of this year working on Lacan and trying to understand the finer points of Deleuze and Guattari’s break from (or exaggeration of) his thinking, Turkle has very deftly cut to the chase and helped me filter out some of the noise.
What Turkle gets to grips with are the various successes and failures of psychoanalytic discourses in orbit of May ’68, and the ways in which they were utilised by radicals, reformists and conformists alike. For example, whilst the subversive quality of (particularly Lacanian) psychoanalysis is its identification of the mainsprings of social discontent, such as the family — enclosures previously believed to be protected from or otherwise positioned above societal instability (a la Hegel and his principle of ‘natural right’) — psychoanalysis was nonetheless called upon to offer guidance to families navigating the status quo’s attempts to address a crisis of its own making. It is from this promiscuity — and the inconsistency of its application by Lacanians and others alike — that has led to so much misunderstanding around what psychoanalysis is actually for.
The error of psychoanalysis is made worse — in Deleuze and Guattari’s view at least — by its Janus-like comportment towards the family in this regard, becoming a reterritorializing accomplice for the ‘normativity’ it simultaneously calls into question. For example, whilst psychoanalysis presents the family as a source of all our problems, rather than a shelter from the chaos of society at large, in viewing the family as an interminable structure, the universality of which must be (structurally) preserved, it often undermines its own radicality. This is to say that, in retaining its focus on the societal microcosm of the nuclear family, in order to express how the various crises modern families face reflect the crises of society at large, psychoanalysis fails to attend to the ways in which society’s fragmentation has far surpassed that of the family, meaning that the “one-to-one relationships” psychoanalysis tries to draw up between self, family and society are no longer in alignment. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family is increasingly irrelevant as a mediator between the self and society. Today we should be considering this relationship in all of its complexity and stop using the family as a reductive capsule for crises that far exceed it.
The psychoanalytic predilection for using the family as a constant point of reference, even as it questions its efficacy, is thus called into question most powerfully in orbit of the events of ’68. More specifically, the problem is that this ideal rests on an Oedipal triangulation that is no longer apposite under late capitalism, and every time the question is posed in terms of a liberty in relation to the (symbolic) father, revolutionary charges towards freedom are always doomed to fail.
In paying passing attention to the various challenges brought to Lacanian orthodoxy, Turkle’s analysis of Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless leaves much to be desired. She refers to Anti-Oedipus as “[o]ne of the most powerful and … popular expressions of post-1968 naturalism”, for instance, ascribing to Deleuze and Guattari’s project a kind of diatribe in favour of a return to an Edenic ‘state of nature’ — an argument that doesn’t hold up for me, even in the context of Turkle’s own analysis. Nevertheless, the broad points she makes are nice and succinct, and I’ve been thinking about them a lot.
For example, when addressing Lacan’s affiliation with the antipsychiatry movement, Turkle writes that “Lacan’s support comes most directly from the way in which he demolishes the notion that there is a ‘normal’ self that is autonomous, coherent, its own ‘center’.” Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus at its most subversive when undermining an American ego psychology; when “it undermines the formulations of the self that are implicit in our language, and … puts each speaking subject in an intimate relationship with the fragmented self experienced by the schizophrenic.”
This is a position that reaches its limit in Lacan’s later seminars on the sinthome, wherein we find Lacan strafing closest to Deleuze and Guattari’s position in his reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and its ‘psychotic’, creole prose. But even here, Joyce is understood through microcosmic Oedipal dramas, which blunt a more fitting analysis of British imperialism in Ireland and its consequences.
It’s a position within Lacan’s writings that has been coming back into fashion recently, but this rerun tends to ignore a lot of the (much better) work that went on around him. As an aside, Maks Valen?i?’s recent project, “psychotic accelerationism”, is attempting a synthesis of Lacan and Nick Land, but is making too much work for itself in this regard. It is a project that is attempting to “refocus” accelerationism by going back to Lacan, rather than understand that the basis for Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy was already going beyond him, or what’s more, accelerating beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis’s rigid structures. “Life must never get caught in the trap it sets for itself” is a mantra invoked; Deleuze and Guattari’s position, expressed through their project of schizoanalysis, however, is that “Lacanism must never get caught in the trap it sets for itself”. And truly, as I’ve found over the last year, Lacanian psychoanalysis is nothing less than a trap for the psyche.
Lacan’s psychotic — especially right now, and especially in the context of Nick Land’s writings — is a lot less relevant here than Deleuze and Guattari’s. They avoid Lacan’s trap very successfully. Indeed, I have noticed, throughout my recent readings of postcolonial discourses, that it is not for nothing their work is far more regularly cited by the likes of Édouard Glissant when addressing a new “poetics of relation”. This is because, for all of psychoanalysis’s useful critiques of Western normativity, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is better suited to a more global purview, which gets out from under imperialist and colonial biases and enclosures of thinking. Lacan may well be subversive when questioning the ‘truths’ of Western society from within, and he may well enjoy the moments when those truths ‘psychotically’ break down, but everything is still concerned with the Father, leaving out the mechanisms of imperialism that are much more complicate,d and this is always its point of downfall.
By way of an example, Turkle, summarising these different positions, writes:
Deleuze and Guattari take Lacan’s ideas about the decentred subject and carry them several steps farther than he does. Although Lacan believes that the self is constituted by imaginary misrecognitions and rupture, he still works to diagram and even mathematically express the relationship among its elements. But Deleuze and Guattari describe a self of such flux and fragmentation that a methodology of trying to grasp discrete relationships between determinate objects is clearly missing the point. For them, the self is a collection of machine-parts, what they refer to as “desiring-machines” … Each person’s machine parts can plug and unplug with the machine parts of another: there is no self, only the cacophony of desiring-machines … Fragmentation is a universal of the human condition, not something specific to the schizophrenic.
It is on this basis that “Deleuze and Guattari advance a ‘politics of schizophrenia'”, because they believe that schizophrenia is “a privileged experience”, because “the schizophrenic, in the grip of this experience, is in touch with fundamental truths about society.” The multifaceted consciousness of the schizophrenic thus becomes of interest to Lacan in Ireland, but his position is lacking when situated within black studies, for example.
Considering the ways in which this epistemic privilege is made manifest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Turkle continues:
For them, the first way in which the schizophrenic is privileged is epistemologically. The schizophrenic has not entered the symbolic dimension: he has not accepted the epistemology of signifier to signified…
Deleuze and Guattari also present the schizophrenic as privileged politically because, essentially, capitalism cannot tolerate the multitude of possible relationships that can exist among the desiring-machines.
Since capitalist society “cannot tolerate the free circulation of this revolutionary desire”, it thus “imposes limits on it, constraining the relationships among the desiring-machines, enforcing order where there is only flux” — in this way, Lacanianism and capitalism share too much in common to ever be true opponents. But it is also capitalism itself that lubricates this free circulation. It sets up a prohibition of desire at the same time as it attempts to unleash it. It’s the sort of paradox that Deleuze and Guattari identify within the family and also at the limits of the Oedipus complex (whether Freud’s or Lacan’s).
For example, in Anti-Oedipus, they write how psychoanalysis cannot seem to think subjectivity as such without a kind of foreclosure; persons, they write, “do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them, any more than they exist prior to the triangulation into which they enter” — the triangulation of mommy-daddy-me, but also of Freud’s ego, superego, id; Lacan’s RSI; even Hegel’s triadic dialectic. “We can therefore see the property the prohibition has of displacing itself, since from the start it displaces desire.” Capitalism, in the large, functions like this by way of its reliance on an artificial scarcity. Under capitalism, you are free to desire anything you please, but unfortunately for you, you child-like pleb, resources are scarce and you need to learn to live within limits. Capitalism thus rests upon its own logic of the dangling carrot. It instigates prohibitions in order to structure desires, and this results in mundane paradoxes and traps, whereby we are told we cannot critique the form of society we actively participate in. This is why capitalism, like Lacanianism, is fundamentally structured through lack. Lacan’s theory may rest on this in order to critique it, but it also struggles to get beyond it, hence the ambivalence that later surrounds him in far more revolutionary moments.
In attempting to escape this trap, Deleuze and Guattari develop what was later explored in the blogosphere under the name accelerationism. As Mark Fisher wrote in 2013, accelerationism rejects
the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits. Accelerationism is also the conviction that the world desired by the Left is post-capitalist — that there is no possibility of a return to a pre-capitalist world and that there is no serious desire to return to such a world, even if we could.
Projected back onto Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of schizophrenia, we find them arguing for each of these points in turn. First, not everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to is — a position akin to their position regarding the family; not every mode of subjectivity produced “within” the family fully belongs to it either. There is often errancy, which capitalism attempts to contain by infinitely adding new axioms to its lawful structure (colonialism). Whereas Turkle interprets this as a naturalism, a state-of-nature return to pre-capitalist modes of sociality, the question here is one of escape rather than return. As Deleuze and Guattari write, in their book on Kafka, that “the problem isn’t that of liberty but of escape”:
The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.
The psychotic is still an interesting figure in this context, and it is certainly the figure central to Anti-Oedipus, constituting a bridge between Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan. But I am increasingly of the opinion that all historic attempts to strengthen this bridge — of which there are many — too often miss the point, replicating the Lacanian trap that Deleuze and Guattari themselves sought to escape from. The focus of my PhD is that there is another figure in their work, given far less airtime, that is rather more appropriate, less intellectually scandalous, less Lacanian, and less impotent. That figure is the orphan.
But I am less interested in the orphan right now, at least in writing all of this here — I am saving all that for my thesis. What interests me is the way in which we remain fascinated with psychosis at a pop-cultural level.
Even though Deleuze and Guattari’s project is often disparaged for the ways in which they romanticise psychosis, we all do this today, or rather, we have done until recently. Indeed, I think Deleuze and Guattari have been vindicated, and one way in which we can demonstrate that is by looking at two figures, each representative — or symptomatic — of a certain pop-cultural era: Michael Jackson and Kanye West…
To be continued…