CHANTIER:! THE PROCESS OF BECOMING ____________________________________ A Thesis !Presented to ! The Honors Tutorial College !Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment! of the Requirements for Graduation! from the Honors Tutorial College ! with the degree of ! Bachelor of Arts in Film ______________________________________ By !Keelan O’Sullivan August 2016 Keelan O’Sullivan August 12, 2016 Chantier : The Process of Becoming This paper serves as a companion piece to my creative thesis, the film Chantier1. It will attempt to enunciate in detail a few of the theoretical concepts which formed the stories making up the film, and are illustrated within it. Most specifically, it deals with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and the french collectives Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee as said work is related to the second, third, and fourth sections of Chantier. Each section of the paper unpacks a specific concept within the writings of these authors, and is then followed by an application, in which the concept will be used to explicate these sections of the film. Each section contained within the film deals with specific problems and ideas which are sometimes unique to that section, and sometimes carry on as an undercurrent which runs through the complete work. I have chosen these concepts to enunciate here because the process of becoming, with all its reactionary and revolutionary twists and turns, is the most prominent of these currents, and is the most readily traceable within these three sections of the film. Reduction A major part of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus deals with outlining a new metaphysics of desire and subjectivity in opposition to the dominant conception supplied by psychoanalysis. For Deleuze and Guattari, the 1 The French word Chantier translates to English as “construction site”. It has also, recently, been used colloquially in English to distinguish a gathering of partisan forces, in a specific place and period of time, to carry out a variety of activities including manual labor on one or several projects, theoretical discussion and analysis, and the communication and adjustment of short and long-term future plans. This usage derives from recent chantiers held in France by communes across the nation, which came to include all of the above activities, but originally designated a physical construction project. 2 hardened, individual subject, shackled to psychoanalysis’ holy concepts of the Oedipus complex, castration, and lack, is a violent reduction of the actual, material complexity and richness of the world. They posit instead a seething mass of machines and flows which produce desire, independent of any lack. A central question of the book, therefore, is how exactly this reduction takes place – how are the infinite, constantly changing connections of the desiring-machines codified into the rigorous social and psychological processes of control, isolation, and stasis we see today? To proceed, we should better understand the workings of the desiring- machines. From the first page of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari establish their basic opposition to the reductive, isolated approach of psychoanalysis and capitalism itself. They describe how it was a mistake to have ever conceived of the Id, when in fact the force of desire is not a contained, personified element, but an unimaginably vast multiplicity of “machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (1). These chains of desiring-machines make up the basic system of the unconscious posited by Deleuze and Guattari. They are always binary and inherently connective, made up of one machine which produces a flow, and another that limits, interrupts, or draws off a part of that flow – but which in turn is then the producer of flow for another machine in the chain. These roles can also be thought of as producer and product, meaning the product is always the producer for a different product – a very basic example of the multiplicity central to Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics. Deleuze and Guattari also stress the importance of the “third term” in the 3 cycle of production, which is actually an element of anti-production. On a macro scale, dealing with social production, this is the socius, which at different “régimes” of social production has been the body of the earth, the tyrant, and currently exists as the body of capital. This body constitutes a surface from which all social production seems to emanate. On the micro level of the desiring-machines, this is the body without organs. The body without organs is the figure of the unconscious, when understood materially rather than psychologically, that constantly works against the chains of desiring-machines, resisting their organization, and causing them to break down and reconfigure their connections in new ways. In this landscape of flows, constantly in motion, constantly interrupted and reorganized according to the production of desire, Deleuze and Guattari point to the processes carried out by the field of psychoanalysis in their situating of the Oedipal structure over the unconscious, and the analogous process carried out by capitalism on a social scale, as those which carry out the rigidification of the desiring-machines on a micro and macro level. They describe how “when psychoanalysis makes of Oedipus its dogma, it is not unaware of the existence of relations said to be pre-oedipal in the child, exo-oedipal in the psychotic, para-oedipal in others” (51). Freud and other psychoanalysts were in fact well aware of the “domain of free syntheses where everything is possible… The desiring machines pound away and throb in the domain of the unconscious” (54). However, they chose to evade the discovery of this productive unconscious, and the implications it had for the relationships between the social production and desiring production (both the way in which desiring-production 4 leads to formulations of social production, and the way in which the social machines place specific forms of repression on the desiring-machines). Instead, the structural Oedipus was erected, destroying the possibilities of desiring-production. As Deleuze and Guattari describe on page 54: All the chains of the unconscious are biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier. The whole of desiring-production is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation, and to the dreary games of what is representative and represented in representation. And there is the essential thing: the reproduction of desire gives way to simple representation, in the process as well as the cure. The productive unconscious that knows only how to express itself – express itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream. The fundamental operation being carried out here is that of reduction – the reduction of the possibilities of the real unconscious made up of the complex systems of the desiring-machines into the field of the imaginary and the symbolic. Rather than carrying out the material process of producing, the unconscious is codified to only be able to express or represent, and as such is unable to access the real. This operation is in fact very similar to the operation carried out during the rise of capitalism. At first, capital has to be purposefully injected into the process of social production, before it can eventually appear as the source of all production, rather than the specific processes of material labor that carry out this production. Oedipus must be constructed just as purposefully overtop the actual process of desiring-production, before it can appropriate this production, creating a subject in which it appears that desire could only be created out of the Oedipal structure and the lack it carries with it. 5 Application: This process of reduction is central to the struggles of the central character in my film Chantier. One of the clearest examples in the film occurs in the section titled “Manifest Destiny”, where we can see the way in which machinic processes of the desiring-machines permeating the spaces exhibited in the film are stifled by the architecture of the social machine the character exists in. The reduction takes place on numerous levels. During the introductory shots, I trace the way in which the architecture of Perrysburg, the suburb of Toledo where this section was shot, suspend Megan’s 2 body and subjectivity in a rigid formulation. The blank spaces and manicured landscape of the generic mansions echo the matrix of graves in the film’s first shot, and in turn spirals in upon the space of Megan’s body, revealing the grid of space and graves which organizes the bodies within this space. However, we also see the way in which the body without organs resists this reduction, breaking down the stillness imposed upon this organization, as Megan is launched spontaneously into a swirling, unconstrained dance sequence, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the body without organs as “present[ing] its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier” (9). We further see the containment of the flows of desire within the home occupied by the characters in the film. Though she clearly in no way possesses the desire to go through the process of preparing the meal we see, her consciousness has been fully Oedipalized, making it difficult to even imagine alternatives to these 2 As the character remains unnamed in all sections of the film, I will refer to her throughout this paper as “Megan”, the name of the actress who plays her. 6 standard actions of domestic labor. Her husband’s desires are likewise channeled into acceptable, private constructions based on objects, such as his collection of model cars, and his vague, unconvincing interest in the relationships and activities of his wife. Their desiring-machines have been organized into specific spheres that are endlessly applied to the grand symbolic images of capital and Oedipus.