Delueze Review

8/12/2019 Delueze Review

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Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis by Eugene W. HollandReview by: William ScottMLN, Vol. 116, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 2001), pp. 1102-1105Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251801.

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Eugene W. Holland, Deleuzeand Guattari'sAnti-Oedipus:Introduction o Schizoanalysis.London and New York:Routledge, 1999, xii +123 pages.

Eugene Holland's second book is an eloquent and rigorously arguedcomplement to his first, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis:The SociopoeticsofModernism(Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Holland describes it, thesecond book is intended to be an introduction to reading Deleuze andGuattari'sAnti-Oedipus, ot... a substitute for it (vii). It is one of three suchbooks to appear in the last decade, including Michael Hardt's GillesDeleuze:An Apprenticeshipn Philosophy(University of Minnesota Press, 1993) andBrian Massumi's A User'sGuideto Capitalismand Schizophrenia: eviations romDeleuzeand Guattari(MIT Press, 1992). Whereas Hardt's book explores therelation of Deleuze's early work to Bergson and Spinoza, while Massumi'semphasizes the perspectives of the second volume of Capitalismand Schizo-phrenia,A ThousandPlateaus,Holland's book distinguishes itself from these byattending to Anti-Oedipus's materialist psychiatry as the combined inherit-ance of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. If Holland instead chooses to focusexclusively on the materialist critique offered by Anti-Oedipus,his is because,as he insists, its revolutionaryenthusiasm ... appears to be dampened if notsilenced in A ThousandPlateaus (ix).The book is organized into four chapters. The first is an introduction that,assuming that Anti-Oedipuss a sort of machine, describes what t can do andhow it works (3). The second is an analysis of the notion of desiring-production which situates this within an internal critique of Oedipus. Thisis followed by a third chapter which describes the external critique ofOedipus and its corresponding notion of social-production. A fourth chap-ter concludes the book by examining potentially fruitful applications ofschizoanalysiswithin areas of theoretical and political activism such as marxism,feminism and environmentalism. Throughout, Holland carefully details therelations between Deleuze and Guattari's book and its various theoreticalpredecessors, including (among others) Marcuse, Reich, Weber, Adorno,Lukacs, Klein, Levi-Strauss and Lacan. The first chapter in particular isconcerned to position Anti-Oedipusn a tradition of transcendental critiquestemming originally from Kant,yet undergoing a materialist inflection by wayof Marx, Freud and Nietzsche to become finally a critique of psychoanalyticmetaphysics. As Marx'scritique revolutionized Smith's and Ricardo's classicalpolitical economy by hitting upon abstractlabor as an analytic category whichwould allow him to speak of capitalism's autocritique within a universalhistory,so, Holland argues, Deleuze and Guattarimanage to abstracta notionof the Oedipus that allows them to explain psychoanalysis'sautocritique withina universal history. According to Holland, this is made possible because theytranslate desire and labor from their respective 'determinate systems ofrepresentation' (psychoanalysis and political economy) into the concepts of

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'desiring-production' and 'social-production,' precisely in order to stress theircommon derivation from 'production in general and without distinction' as itappears under capitalism (18). Thus, translation comes to occupy a crucialrole within Holland's book, expressed most schematically in his variousinterpretations of the operations of decoding and recoding that resultfrom capitalism's incessant work of axiomatization.The second and third chapters comprise the bulk Holland's analyses,explaining-in true Kantian fashion-the three syntheses of the uncon-scious, the paralogisms of psychoanalysis (the illegitimate uses of these threesyntheses), and the social formations which roughly correspond to thehistorical development of Oedipus (savagery,despotism, and capitalism). Thecentral themes explored here include notions of production and anti-production, the body-without-organs s a template for desiring-production,systems of (political and linguistic) representation and inscription, and thehistorically changing character of the socius, together with the variousinvestments of desire (social and psychic) that constitute it. While thesechapters are strictlyexplicatory, the fourth and final chapter, entitled BeyondCritique: Schizoanalysis and universal history, attempts to synthesize Deleuzeand Guattari'sinsights and apply them to the fields of contemporary politicaland theoretical debate. It is here that Holland's book, in spite of its otherwisealert and penetrating exegeses, leaves a number of questions unexamined.At the heart of these questions is the issue of capitalist axiomatization: thequasi-dialectic of deterritorializing and reterritorializing (or decoding andrecoding) forces that make for capitalist expansion and accumulation.Because Holland does not further specify this notion-and perhaps it doesnot permit of specification in any more concrete detail-its precise effects inthe register of socio-political theory appear difficult, if not impossible, togauge. For one thing, Holland does not consider whether axiomatization canitself be understood as a limit inherent to the dynamics of capitalisteconomies. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari, he concludes that thecapitalist system of commodity-production has no intrinsic economic limits.It continually displacesany apparent limits in the process of expanding andintensifying capitalist production all over the globe (114). However, becauseabsolutizing displacement as such is no substitute for radicalizing it to thepoint of its own autocritique, the structures of possibility for political agencyit opens up are all destined to be ambivalent at their very core, producing aswell as potentially subverting the forces of capitalist accumulation in equal(and ultimately indistinguishable) measure.This problem surfaces in several local contexts. For instance, in the fourth

socius of schizophrenic permanent revolution, where forces of anti-produc-tion continually enable social connections to be made, un-made, and re-made in accordance with the movements of molecular desiring-productionitself' (96-97), it remains unclear what becomes of the concept of death,whose mobility within the market society of post-capitalism has presumably

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been restored. Similarly, if the operation of undoing recoding to the pointof subordinating molar to molecular forms of investment (99) holds swayinthis socius, it is not clear how such a society could seriously be termed post -capitalist, when, in fact, it more accurately describes the (no less capitalistic)condition of postmodernity: namely, post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Inthis regard, for example, Holland might have considered the role played byKant's aesthetics, the famous purposiveness without purpose, as a criticalprecursor to schizoanalysis's unconscious investments of desire whereinterest alwayscomes after (102). By situating Deleuze and Guattari in thistradition-from Kant through Hannah Arendt-one might better explorethe political ramifications of capitalist axiomatization.The question of politics is perhaps most evident in Deleuze and Guattari'sdistinction between subjugated (politically oppressed) groups and subject-groups, or groups that can produce an unconscious revolutionary break[from forces of subjugation] and then be able to sustain it (105). Becausegroups in general are, by Anti-Oedipus'sdefinition, molar structures, Hol-land could have anticipated and responded to the question of how a subject-groupat the molecular level is possible in the first place. Holland signals hisawareness of this as a problem, however, when he observes that Rare,indeed, is the group in contemporary society that is not a subjugated one-and lasts long enough to be noticed (105). These questions come to a headin Holland's analysis of the politics of gender and feminist theory towards theend of the book (pp. 116-123). In demonstrating how schizoanalysis under-mines gender roles and sexual orientations, Holland infers the subversion ofidentity politics toutcourt, ncluding that which pertains to ethnic, religious,or racial groups (119). Yet, due to the relative absence of questions of raceand ethnicity in Holland's analyses, it is far from obvious where or how aconnection can be drawn from subversions of gender identity to subversionsof various processes of racialized identity formation such that an affirmationof the former would already imply, as Holland seems to claim, the achieve-ment of the latter. In support of Judith Butler's gender theory, Hollandsuggests that schizoanalysismay adduce historical and materialist contexts(120) for her work. Here again, the question is: to what extent does capitalistdecoding absolve itself from the category of race as a constitutive basis for itsmodes of accumulation? Does capitalism ever manage, or even attempt, tofully decode race ?Indeed, could it afford to?At the root of these problems is what Holland (and Deleuze and Guattari)would characterize as the paralogism of the afterward, where Real socialrelations are . . . construed merely as so many 'sublimations' of Oedipalrelations, which are supposed to be primary (as well as universal) (55). Thatis to say, the problem for Anti-Oedipus(and Holland and Butler) is thatdesiring-production, in strategic moments, is clandestinely separated fromsocial-production in order to be theorized as a determinant over it. Thisimplies a utopian idealization of decoding in general, or a fetishizing of

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decoding processes in isolation from their economic and political functionsin a context of social production. Thus, it also commits what Holland hadearlier described as an illegitimate use of the connective synthesis byextrapolating decoding as an isolatable (and unqualifiedly liberating) phe-nomenon rather than seeing it as a potential instrument in the operations ofsocio-economic containment. Further, Holland reinforces the very distinc-tion between public and private that he wants to question by assuming thatcapitalism is always to be understood as merely market capitalism, thusfailing to account for the historical changes in capitalist production that haveled to managerial forms of hierarchy, or vertically integrated corporateasceticism : [I]t is the nuclear family that produces Oedipally recodedascetic subjects in the private or domestic sphere, while decoding sponsoredby market exchange prevails nearly everywhere else (122). Although Hol-land notes that the relation between desiring-production (the body-without-organs) and social-production (the socius) is a homology that is cruciallynota relation of equivalence, expression, or reflection (122), insisting thatproduction on the socius ultimately determines production on the body-without-organs, up to this point his analyses have in fact tended to reverse thedirection of determination, appearing to suggest that the homology is indeedone of equivalence such that desiring-production can come to be equatedwith-or seamlessly translated into- production in general. As a conse-quence, Butler's position (as Holland describes it) is only viable because itpresupposes the functional equivalence of this homology.Thus Holland concludes that So it is that schizophrenia on the body-without-organs emerges at/as the end of universal history as the principlefreedom in permanent revolution (123). Still, a question remains: whatbecomes of schizophrenia on the capitalistsociusin the form of axiomatiza-tion? Would it not continually work to undermine precisely those subject-groups Holland considers whose very existence and form of operationsubvert the dominant mode of organization in power, that of subjugatedgroups (123)? If Holland's lucid and philosophically demanding bookcannot answer this question, perhaps it is not so much his fault as that of thetheory he is concerned to explicate. This book, at any rate, is a most usefultool for accessing the formidable (and seemingly cryptic) project ofschizoanalysis that Anti-Oedipusproposes.

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