oedipalisation

  ---- by Tamsin Lorraine

  In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe human beings as unfolding processes of individuation in constant interaction with their surroundings, and they characterise three syntheses of the unconscious: connective syntheses that join elements into series ('desiring-machines', for example, mouth and breast), disjunctive syntheses that resonate series in metastable states ('Bodies without Organs' (BwO), for example, mouth and breast or head and arm or milk and stomach resonating in a state of bliss), and conjunctive syntheses that gather metastable states into the continuous experience of conscious awareness. They propose that Oedipal subjectivity is but one form that human sentience can take. The syntheses they describe have anoedipal as well as Oedipal forms. 'Oedipalisation' is a contemporary form of social repression that reduces the forms desire takes - and thus the connections desire makes - to those that sustain the social formation of capitalism.

  Capitalism's emphasis on the abstract quantification of money and labour (what matters is how capital and labour circulates - not the specific form wealth takes or who in particular does what) encourages desire to permute across the social field in unpredictable ways. Oedipalisation reduces the anarchic productivity of unconscious desire to familial forms of desire. Productive desire that flows according to immanent principles becomes organised in terms of 'lack', thus reducing the multiple forms desire can take to those forms that can be referred to the personal identities of the Oedipal triangle. On the BwO, desire is the only subject. It passes from one body to another, producing partial objects, creating breaks and flows, and making connections that destroy the unity of a 'possessive or proprietary' ego (D&G 1983: 72). Oedipalisation makes it appear that partial objects are possessed by a person and that it is the person who desires. Productive desire that would fragment personal identity is reduced to the desire of a person who wants to fill in a lack. Oedipalisation thus ensures that the innovations of deterritorialising capital are constrained by the tightly bound parameters of personal identity and familial life (or the triangulated authority relationships that mimic Oedipus in the public realm).

  According to Deleuze and Guattari, Oedipalisation constitutes an illegitimate restriction on the productive syntheses of the unconscious because it emphasises global persons (thus excluding all partial objects of desire), exclusive disjunctions (thus relegating the subject to a chronological series of moments that can be given a coherent narrative account), and a segregative and biunivocal use of the conjunctive syntheses (thus reducing the identity of the subject to a coherent or static set of one side of a set of oppositions). The subjection of desire to a phallic paradigm results in a subject who experiences himself as 'having' an identity that is fixed on either one side or the other of various oppositional divides (male or female, white or black), and who designates the various pleasurable and painful states through which he passes in terms of the attributes of a fundamentally unchanging identity.

  Capitalism's drive for ever-new sources of profit fosters innovating flows of desire that, if left to themselves, could so alter capitalist formations that the latter would evolve into something else. Oedipalisation is a form of social repression that funnels the productive capacity of the unconscious back into the constricting channels of Oedipal desire. Following Oedipal subjectivity to its limits and beyond entails liberating unconscious production so that desire can create new realities. Whereas Oedipal desire constitutes the subject as lacking the object desired, the goal of anoedipal desire is immanent to its process: it seeks not what it lacks but what allows it to continue to flow. In order to flow, anoedipal desire must mutate and transform in a self-differentiating unfolding implicated with the social field of forces of which it is a part. Deleuze and Guattari reject the psychoanalytic contention that the only alternative to Oedipal subjectivity is psychosis and instead explore anoedipal flows of desire and the schizo who is a functioning subject of such desire. Their notion of the unconscious suggests ways of approaching its 'symptoms' that point to possibilities for creative transformation inevitably linked with social change.

  Connectives

   § body without organs

   § capitalism

   § desire

   § deterritorialisation / reterritorialisation

   § psychoanalysis

   § subjectivity