A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Free
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FREE A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA PDF Gilles Deleuze,Felix Guattari | 619 pages | 21 Dec 1987 | University of Minnesota Press | 9780816614028 | English, French | Minneapolis, United States A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze Deleuze and Guattari analyse the relationship of desire to reality especially through schizophrenia and psychosisand to capitalist society; they address human psychology, economics, society, the creative arts, literature, civilization, psychiatry and history. They also detail their different organisations of production, "inscription" an act inflicted on all social bodies which corresponds to Marx's "distribution" and "exchange" and consumption, and they develop a critical practice that they A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia schizoanalysis which the book proposes. LaingDavid Cooperand Pierre Clastres. Anti-Oedipus became a sensation upon publication and a widely celebrated work that shifted contemporary philosophy. It is seen as a key text in the micropolitics of desire, alongside Lyotard's Libidinal Economy It has been credited with having devastated the French Lacanian movementalthough "schizoanalysis" has been regarded as flawed for multiple reasons, including the emancipatory claims Deleuze and Guattari make for schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari's " schizoanalysis " is a militant social and political analysis that responds to what they see as the reactionary tendencies of psychoanalysis. In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimatedor to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors. Unconscious libidinal investments of desire coexist without necessarily coinciding with preconscious investments made according to the needs or ideological interests of the subject individual or collective who desires. A form of social production and reproduction, along with its economic and financial mechanisms, its political formations, and so on, can be desired as such, in whole or in part, independently of the interests A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia the desiring-subject. It was not by means of a metaphor, even a A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia metaphor, that Hitler was able to sexually arouse the fascists. It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconsciousand that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy the military—industrial complex. And ideologyOedipusand the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. Schizoanalysis seeks to show how "in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression—whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere. The traditional understanding of desire assumes an exclusive distinction between "production" and "acquisition. This dominant conception, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a form of philosophical idealism. Like their contemporary, R. Laingand like Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression and social oppression. By means of their concept of desiring-production, however, their manner of doing so is radically different. They describe a universe composed of desiring-machines, all of which are connected to one another: "There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale. This dualism, they argue, limited and trapped the revolutionary potential of the theories of Laing and Reich. Deleuze and Guattari develop a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatryand Freudo-Marxism with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of sexuality is not limited to the interaction of male and female gender rolesbut instead posits a multiplicity of flows that a "hundred thousand" desiring-machines create within their connected universe; Deleuze and Guattari contrast this "non-human, molecular sexuality" to "molar" binary sexuality : "making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand," they write, adding that "we always make love with worlds. The "anti-" part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model's articulation of society [ clarification needed ] based on the family triangle of fathermother and child. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they argue that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself [22] and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. However, they oppose a non-clinical concept of "schizophrenia" as deterritorialization to the clinical end-result "schizophrenic" i. Since desire can take on as many forms as there are persons to implement it, it must seek new channels and different combinations to realize itself, forming a body without organs for every instance. Desire is not limited to the affections of a subjectnor the material state of the subject. Bodies without organs cannot be forced or willed into existence, however, and they are essentially the product of a zero-intensity condition that Deleuze and Guattari link to catatonic schizophrenia that also becomes "the model of death". They argue that this case demonstrates that psychoanalysis enthusiastically embraces a police state : [24]. As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, at one end or the other in the treatment, the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side! Oedipus is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high priests. Deleuze and Guattari address a fundamental problem of political philosophy : the contradictory phenomenon whereby an individual or a group comes to desire their own oppression. Less bread! The astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? To address this question, Deleuze and Guattari examine the relationships between social organisation, powerand desire, particularly in relation to the Freudian " Oedipus complex " A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia its familial mechanisms of subjectivation "daddy-mommy- me". They argue that the nuclear family is the most powerful agent of psychological repressionunder which the desires of the child and the adolescent are repressed and perverted. This explains the contradictory phenomenon in which people "act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat". If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia no desiring- machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence — desire, not left-wing holidays! The family is the agent to which capitalist production delegates the psychological repression of the desires of the child. Psychological repression is strongly linked with social oppressionwhich levers on it. It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism. The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression. Although like most Deleuzo-Guattarian terms deterritorialization has a purposeful variance in meaning throughout their oeuvre, it can be roughly described as a move away from a rigidly imposed hierarchical, arborescent context, which seeks to package things concepts, objects, etc. Importantly, the concept implies a continuum, not a simple binary — A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia actual assemblage a flexible term alluding to the heterogeneous composition of any complex system, individual, social, geological is marked by simultaneous movements of territorialization maintenance and of deterritorialization dissipation. Various means of deterritorializing are alluded to by the authors in their chapter "How to Make