Stephen Overy - The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy; a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire (Thesis)
Nick Land/Secondary Sources/Texts/PhD Theses/Stephen Overy - The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy; a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire (Thesis).pdf
The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy: a
psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire.
Stephen Overy
Submitted in fulfilment of the degree Doctor of Philosophy
Philosophical Studies,
University of Newcastle
July 2015
3
Abstract
In recent years the philosophical texts of Nick Land have begun to attract increasing attention,
yet no systematic treatment of his work exists. This thesis considers one significant and
distinctive aspect of Land's work: his use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary, which is deployed
to try and avoid several problems associated with metaphysical discourse. Land's larger
project of responding to the Kantian settlement in philosophy is sketched in the introduction,
as is his avowed distaste for thought which is conditioned by anthropocentricism. This thesis
then goes on to provide a genealogical reading of the concepts which Land will borrow from
psychoanalytic discourse, tracing the history of drive and desire in the major psychoanalytic
thinkers of the twentieth century. Chapter one considers Freud, his model of the unconscious,
and the extent to which it is anthropocentric. Chapter two contrasts Freud's materialism to
Lacan's idealism. Chapter three returns to materialism, as depicted by Deleuze and Guattari in
Anti-Oedipus. This chapter also goes on to consider the implications of their 'schizoanalysis',
and contrasts 'left' and 'right' interpretations of Deleuze, showing how they have appropriated
his work. Chapter four considers Lyotard's works from his 'libidinal period' of the late sixties
to early seventies. These four readings, and the various theories of drive and desire they
contain, are then contextualised in relation to Land's work in chapter five. This final chapter
considers Land's theory of 'machinic-desire', and evaluates if his construction of the concept,
via psychoanalysis, offers a superior approach to anti-anthropocentric positions constructed in
metaphysics. The role of psychoanalytic thought in constructing Land's cosmological theory
of thermodynamic entropy and extropy is also considered.
5
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my parents, grandparents, and Heather, without whose support this thesis would not
have been possible.
Thanks to the staff of Philosophical Studies at Newcastle University, who have allowed me
the space to peruse this line of research. I especially thank my supervisor Lars Iyer, who has
borne my various periods of enthusiasm and indolence with good humour, and has helped me
to craft this thesis into its present form.
I would also like to thank Kenneth Smith and Joris De Henau for their help reading though
various drafts, particularly Joris' ability to spot a missed diacritic with almost perfect
accuracy.
6
Contents
13
0. Introduction
◦ The Philosopher of the Outside
14
◦ A Philosopher Without Friends?
24
◦ The Metaphysical and the Psychoanalytic
30
◦ Outline of the Thesis
40
◦ The Trap of Anthropocentricism
44
◦ Anti-Anthropocentricism and Anti-Academism
47
1. Freud: the Constitution of the Unconscious
51
◦ Discovery and Populations
55
◦ Topographies
71
◦ Processes: Instinct, Drive, Desire
75
◦ Anthropocentricism and the Death Drive
96
◦ Conclusions
107
2. Lacan's Return to Freud
109
◦ Objectives
111
◦ Structural linguistics: Metaphor and Metonymy
114
◦ Lacanian Desire
130
8
◦ The Lacanian Drive
139
◦ Lacanianism
144
3. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: A Theory of the
149
Productive Unconscious
◦ The authors' Intended Purpose of Anti-Oedipus
152
◦ The Dangers of Oedipus
165
◦ Schizo-Desire is Materialist Psychoanalysis
177
◦ The Implications of Materialist Psychology: Deleuze and
184
the Virtual, Desire, and Difference
◦ The Left Deleuzian and Right Deleuzian Positions.
201
◦ Reconciling Deleuze-Guattari with Freud-Lacan: Desire,
208
Desiring Machines, Drives, Assemblages.
4. Lyotard: Towards a Libidinal Economics
218
◦ The 'Figure'
221
◦ The 'Libidinal Period'
225
◦ Key Readings
231
◦ Libidinal Economy
238
◦ The Death Drive Revisited
249
◦ Summary: Emma and Drive Theory
252
9
256
5. Land: Machinic Desire
◦ Wintermute and Neuromancer
256
◦ Land's Philosophical Project: Encoulage
264
◦ The Drive Economy on the Edge of the Subject
272
◦ The Desire Economy of Objects
282
◦ Deploying Libidinal Materialism
289
◦ Critique of Land at Accelerate
294
◦ What is Left for Philosophy?
301
◦ Bibliography
305
10
Figures
1. Outside In
2. Psychoanalytic and Metaphysical Genealogies
3. Desire is no longer a property of the subject
4. Condensation: the overlapping part of the chain 'Picnic' and the chain 'Paris' is 'Brie'.
5. The censor as a barrier
6. Positions of the censor
7. The censor in three models
8. A topography of the process of the psyche
9. A physiological stimulus
10. An instinctual impulse stimulus
11. The path of the drive
12. The Remains of Troy
13. Relationship between Pleasure Principle, Reality Principle and Death Instinct
14. Axis of Metaphor
15. Axis of Metonymy
16. Components of Lacan's Signifying Chains
17. Signifying Chains – The Hyper-linked Notions 'Diana's Death' → 'Government'
18. Balls on a Rubber Sheet
19. Avoiding the Freudian Censor
20. 'Chained' Stations
21. Freudian Displacement
22. Psychoanalysis' Position Between Two Tendencies of Philosophy
23. The Graph of Desire (1)
24. The Graph of Desire (2)
25. The Graph of Desire (3)
26. The Graph of Desire (4)
27. The Cybernetics of Foxes and Rabbits
28. A Positive Dynamic Between Theory and Practice
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29. Anti-Oedipus
30. The Intersection of Casework and Metapsychology
31. The Triangular Structure of the Complex
32. Deleuze and Lacan's Methodology
33. Epistemic Directions
34. Actual → Virtual
35. Actual → Actual 2
36. Responses to Deleuze
37. Water on a Hydrophobic Plane
38. Rivulets on a Beach
39. Pressure on the Actual
40. Land's 'Black' Deleuzianism
41. Time as a spiral
42. Major Theorists of Drive/Desire
43. Deleuze/Guattari and Lyotard on the Unconscious
44. Cybernetic Versus Serial Repetition
45. Kurzweil's Countdown to Singularity (I)
46. Kurzweil's Countdown to Singularity (II)
47. Land's Time Spiral
Tables
1. Land's Philosophical Projects
2. Key processes in Freud's three hypotheses
3. Opposing characteristics of the primary and secondary processes
4. Characteristics of Freudian drives
5. Comparative Terms in Freudian and Lacanian Models of the Unconscious.
6. The Four Propositions
7. The Two Poles and Their Relationship to Deleuzian Concepts
8. A Summary of Lyotard's Libidinal Period
12
Introduction
The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of
production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built.
Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian
production, the desiring production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity
(it is not a matter of what things are like for us).1
Thematically, this thesis is predominantly about the development of psychoanalysis in the
twentieth century and the various formulations of the theories and desire and drive by its key
proponents: Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari. It might therefore seem strange
to begin with this introduction about Nick Land, a relatively obscure philosopher from the end
of that century. Yet I hope to show how Land's philosophy utilises this lineage of
psychoanalytic thought for a specific purpose, and this thesis will be a discussion of the extent
to which psychoanalysis is capable of fulfilling the requirements he places on it.
Land is a philosopher whose body of work, by the standards of the genre, is not a substantial
one, and though he is still writing today, there is little prospect of any significant additions to
this corpus, as: “According to the present-day Nick Land, the person who wrote [his
philosophical] texts no longer exists”.2 The task of contextualising Land’s work in relation to
the greater history of philosophy is therefore a task which has been left to later scholars who
come across his work. This thesis will consider one of the fundamental questions which is left
unanswered in Land's work, which is about the suitability of psychoanalysis for fulfilling the
role which Land assigns to it. I shall show how Land treats Deleuze and Guattari's
schizoanalysis, and its conceptions of desire and drive as a modular 'plug in', which he
imports into his philosophy as if both concepts are fixed and unproblematic, when in fact
there was a century of heated debate about the nature of both. I shall go on to argue that
1 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 321-322
2 Mackey, R. 'Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism' (available at http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nickland-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus)
13
Land's deployment of psychoanalysis is a strategic gambit to escape the tendency of
metaphysics to degenerate into idealism. However, psychoanalysis has its own tendency
towards idealism, found in Lacan’s reading of Freud. This raises the question which the
present thesis addresses, about the validity of this transplantation of psychoanalysis into
Land’s philosophy, given its own internal contradictions between a mechanistic, materialist
and positive conception of desire and its converse, which posits desire in terms of negativity,
idealism and language.
This thesis considers whether Land’s reading of psychoanalysis provides a valid foundation of
his theory of ‘machinic desire’, which is a crucial component in his reaction to Kantian
philosophy. This is necessitated by the fact that in Land’s writings there is not a great quantity
of critical analysis of the genealogy of these concepts and terminology he borrows from
psychoanalysis. This thesis is therefore neither an open-ended overview of drive theory in the
twentieth century, nor an overview of Land’s philosophical system in general, but is limited in
scope to an evaluation of how drive theory is used by Land in part of his larger philosophical
project. Such a choice of a psychoanalytic genealogy implicitly involves the rejection of a
metaphysical approach to the topic. I will touch on this issue a number of times, looking at
why psychoanalysis is positive whilst metaphysics is negative for Land, but again, a complete
description of Land’s metaphysics is outside the scope of this thesis. I do not intend to argue
that it is impossible to approach Land’s philosophy in a metaphysical register, but rather to
posit that a psychoanalytic one offers a superior methodology. With these goals in mind, I
intend to introduce this thesis with a brief characterisation of Land's thought in the context of
contemporary philosophy and explain why it represents an important moment, and how
psychoanalysis can be used to clarify at least one aspect of the system he proposes.
The Philosopher of the Outside
Nick Land is a philosopher whose importance is becoming increasingly recognised. Although
now semi-retired, working as a journalist in Shanghai, his texts represent a “ferocious but
short lived assault” whose reverberations are still being felt in continental philosophy.3 Whilst
the answer to whether Land is “the most important British philosopher of the last 20 years” is
beyond the remit of this study to answer, regarding the thesis that he is “the most
3 Ed. Brassier, R. and Mackey, R.; Land, Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 4
14
controversial philosopher to have emerged from the fusty culture of anglophone philosophy in
the last 20 years”, few competitors present themselves.4 Land's active years as an academic
philosopher were between 1987 and 1998, when he worked in Warwick University, during
which he published one monograph on Bataille, The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), and
several articles, now collected in Fanged Noumena (2011). This period cumulated in his
involvement in the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), an avant-garde research unit at
Warwick University whose membership included several other thinkers of importance. Core
memebrs of CCRU included Steve Goodman, Mark Fisher, Robin Mackey, and Sadie Plant.
Warwick academics affiliated with it included Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, Keith
Ansell-Pearson, and Kodo Eshwun. All have gone on to produce important contributions to
philosophy. Since Land's retirement from academia he has continued to engage with a variety
of philosophical debates in new media and traditional press but these encounters – no longer
in the register of academic convention – are more partial and fragmentary engagements than
the texts bequeathed to us from his time at Warwick. Land's academic career began with his
dissertation on Heidegger but his interest rapidly moved on to exegeses of Kant in 'Kant,
Capital and the Prohibition of Incest', 'Delighted to Death' and 'Art as Insurrection' in the
period 1988 to 1991. Yet despite the brilliance of his reading of Kant, his notability as a
philosopher derives from his position as a unique reader of Deleuze: one who, beyond all
others, emphasises Deleuze's materialism, a position which Land considers to have its
strongest articulation in Anti-Oedipus. During Land's later period in academia, between 1993
and 1995, he produced a series of essays including 'Machinic Desire', 'Making it with Death'
and 'Cybergothic' which are expositions of Deleuze's schizoanalytic materialism. Such texts
are attracting attention from a number of current movements in philosophy, the most notable
of which are from thinkers associated with speculative realism and accelerationism. Land's
interpretation of Deleuze attracts this level of interest because of his absolute rejection of all
concepts derived from the ideational or subjective, which shall herein be defined as antianthropocentricism. The accusation of anthropocentricism is a critical position which many
philosophers deploy against logical fallacies which stem from reification of contingent
subjective concepts, but Land uses the term in a positive sense, actively trying to define a
philosophical position which is stripped bare of any notion inherited from the experience of
4 Kodo Eshwun quoted in Fisher, M. 'Nick Land: Mind Games' (Dazed and Confused magazine) (available at
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games)
Ed. Brassier and Mackay in Land, Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 3
15
being a human subject (I shall return to the notion of anti-anthropocentricism shortly, in a
clarificatory discussion of its attributes).
Land's ‘theoretical’ Deleuzian essays were co-produced with a series of texts made under the
rubric of a praxis which posited how an anti-humanist future would be engineered by
materialist auto-production: 'Meat', 'Meltdown', 'Kataϛonix', and 'A Ziigothic X-Coda' (1994
to 1997). These essays represent a move away from the traditional philosophical standards of
evaluating arguments in terms of logic and ideational content, to a model based on predictive
ability. Land's methodology here mirrors that used by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus,
in which they trace the history of desire by considering what it has produced (what it does)
rather than what it represents (what is 'thought' about it).5 Such an intensely materialist
method of philosophising, named 'schizoanalysis', analyses the flows and fluxes which are
produced and is therefore concerned with productive quantity (which is positive) rather than
the correspondence between concept and truth. Taking up the schizoanalytic method, Land's
positions and textual style are more extreme than Deleuze and Guattari's relatively sober
analysis of the history of desire. In a short period of time Land's theory-praxis moved from
the unorthodox yet comprehensible sci-fi dystopianism of 'Meltdown' (1995) to the textual
chaos of 'A Ziigothic X-Coda' (1996).6 By this point Land's articles contained little that can be
reconciled with the mores of traditional academic practice; though still loaded with references
to philosophers and critical theorists, nothing in them approaches a traditionally structured
argument. Land was therefore a philosopher determined to exit academic convention not only
on a personal level, but also on a theoretical level. His work is sometimes considered to be of
considerable difficulty, because it does not appeal to the same standards as a reader of
philosophy might expect to judge a text by.
5 This method can be seen in Chapters 3 and 5
6 An example of the former's style; “As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration
crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis.” Land, N. Fanged
Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 449.
Which can be contrasted to the latter: “- - = to-the--AlwAls-Ahen--tensII I I-CuntIng-pRQCeDuRcmQ.stApt - to-CQnveC t- mAteRIAl-fRom -thefRQzen=Qut- bQDI=pQtentIAls-Into-metACCQRD=seCuRI
tI=spACe=--” Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 475
16
Land's philosophical output can be classified into three categories (see Table A). The first set
would be his critical engagements with metaphysics, which provide the impetus for a second
set comprising of his reworking of Deleuze's schizoanalysis into a predictive philosophy of
production: 'machinic desire'. The third set of texts are the demonstrations of Land's
philosophical praxis, “codes, number patterns, messages of the Outside, neo-calandric
schedules, Amxna mappings, Qwernomic constructions”, which represent his attempts to
show what a productive and non-representational philosophy can do.7 His trajectory through
these three projects, which took place in a span of about ten years, represents the foundations
of, the building of a machinery for, and finally the active pursuit of a philosophy of the
'outside'.
Project
Critical engagement
Dogmatic
with Metaphysics
amendment of and engagement with
defence of
Experimental praxis and
'outsideness'
schizoanaysis
Notable
'The Thirst for
'Machinic Desire',
Hyperstition, 'Barker
texts
Annihilation', 'Kant,
'Making it with
Speaks', 'Qaballa 101',
Capital and the
Death',
'Quernomics', 'Tic-Talk',
Prohibition of Incest',
'Cybergothic'
'Meat', 'Meltdown',
Aims
'Delighted to Death',
'Kataϛonix', 'A Ziigothic
'Art as Insurrection'
X-Coda'
Delineate the
Amend Deleuze's
Practical attempts to
weaknesses of
schizoanalysis and engage with 'the outside';
traditional
reconstruct it as a
use of diagram, number
metaphysical
theory of
and cybernetics to avoid
approaches.
impersonal
representational thought.
'machinic desire'
Table A: Land's Philosophical Projects
7 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 633
17
What drove Land to this retreat from the conventions of academic philosophy? Whilst Land
clearly exhibits a distaste for the “hyper-rational prison of academic philosophy” in his texts,
which are “entirely lacking in the dampening caution and cynicism which makes so much
careerist academic writing dull”, his is not merely a stylistic rebellion against established
norms.8 Land's work is motivated by a belief that contemporary critical theory and continental
philosophy was methodologically flawed. This critique maps onto a distinction between the
inside and the outside. The binary inside / outside is identified by Brassier and Mackey,
Fisher, and Ireland as the fundamental directional difference between Land's thought and that
which he argued against in contemporary theorists.9 The distinction is a complex one because
it refers not just to two territories, but to two different processes between these territories. The
outside, which Land argues towards, comprises what cannot be known to the subject.
Situating this in relation to existing concepts in the Western philosophical tradition, it is the
realm of things in themselves – the Kantian noumenal, and the the space of 'materialism' in
which production occurs. The opposite of this domain of things is the domain of ideas or
appearances, the Inside. The inside comprises of what is or can become apparent to the
subject.10 It is therefore the domain of thoughts, ideas, sensations, reasons, opinions and
8 Fisher, M. 'Nick Land: Mind Games' (Dazed and Confused ) (available at
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games)
Goodman, S. quoted in Fisher, M. 'Nick Land: Mind Games' (Dazed and Confused magazine) (available at
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games)
9 Respectively in Ed. Brassier, R. and Mackey, R; Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York:
Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 8 – 10; in Fisher, Nick Land: Mind Games (Dazed and Confused magazine) (available
at http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games); and in Ireland, A.
Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde (2013) (available at
http://www.academia.edu/3690573/Noise_An_Ontology_of_the_Avant-Garde)
10 The notion of the subject, used throughout the present thesis, is not unproblematic in the history of
philosophy. When used outside of a specific philosophical context, it refers to the Cartesian subject – the
rational, autonomous self – rather than the Freudian subject divided into unconscious and conscious. The
difference is depicted in Derrida's 'To do Justice to Freud' in Ed. Dufresne, T. Returns of the French Freud
(Routledge: New York, 1997) pp. 133-168. This Cartesian subject is viewed as more susceptible to the
tendency of anthropocentricism, as Land states: “The Cartesian ego in its function as indubitable foundation
18
prejudices. Land depicts Western philosophy's predominant goal as bridging from the inside
out, from self towards the real. It holds that the good, knowable concepts are those in the
inside, and that the task of philosophy is clarifying them and demonstrating their validity. This
task can be completed by remaining inside – a kind of epistemological spring cleaning,
devoted to the sharpening of concepts – but is more commonly done by hypothesising about a
correlation between the contents of the inside and the outside.11 For Land the initial impulse
of traditional philosophy has been to begin with the contents of the subject, and to work
outwards towards the object. This finds its clearest expression in Kant's critical philosophy, in
which an apparatus within the subject is constructed and depicted in such a way that the
validity of the subject's perceptions derives from the subject's internal characteristics. In the
essay 'Noise: An Ontology of the Avant Garde', Amy Ireland depicts Land's frustration with
the post-Kantian settlement of philosophy, which is that:
For Kant specifically, this ‘signal from the out-side’ is cleaned up by the pure forms of
intuition and the twelve categories, which obtain in all human creatures … thus
underwriting the homogeneity and the intelligibility of the world as it is for us … We
no longer discover the order of phenomenal nature; we make it.12
Post-Kantian philosophy is therefore, for Land, conditioned by the rule that “the outside must
serves to equilibriate reason and existence, or rather, carries the inherited and uninterrogated certainty of this
equilibrium forward into secular reason. This coherence of existent knowing has always been taken by
philosophy to be the evident principle of ontology, or the harmonious reciprocity of knowing/being.” Land,
N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 81
11 Land characterises phenomenology as utilising the former method: “Rigorous phenomenology of the
Husserlian type, whereby all questions of reference are replaced by an analytic of intentionality, leads straight
to idealism and solipsism and thus, as Schopenhauer persuasively suggests, to the madhouse (although it is a
rather insipid insanity they offer us)”. Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992) p.7. The latter corresponds to Kantian critique, with which Land's philosophy has a more
complex relationship.
12 Ireland, A. 'Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde' (2013) (available at
http://www.academia.edu/3690573/Noise_An_Ontology_of_the_Avant-Garde) p. 3
19
pass by way of the inside”.13 In the tradition of philosophy, this is a useful method of
clarifying the subject's relation to the outside world, under which the rules of reason
determine and stabilise the unknown exterior. The task of philosophy is therefore to hone,
ground or expand the understanding of how this process happens under the rubric of 'reason'.
Land's objection is that this method privileges the structures of the inside, treating them as
conditions of an absolute truth rather than 'how things are for us'. It is in this context that he
asks “if reason is so secure, legitimate, supersensibly guaranteed, why all the guns?”14 For
Land the very effort which philosophy has to exert to maintain the coherence of the law of the
inside is a demonstration that such a project is potentially incoherent. Land reads philosophy
as a series of “Platonic-fascist top-down solutions”, ruthlessly suppressing, ignoring, or
desperately (and illegitimately) trying to reincorporate periodic eruptions of outsideness.15 A
Landian reading of the history of philosophy would compare the philosophers who attempted
to express this outsideness “the philosophy of desire, has a marked allergy to academic
encompassment. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud all wrote the vast bulks of their works in
a space inaccessible to the sweaty clutches of state pedagogy” with philosophers of the state,
who – even if unwittingly – were tools used to contain this attack on order.16 For Land, the
foremost representatives of this later class are Kant and Hegel.17 This struggle, Land notes, is
as old as philosophy is: “[libidinal materialism] has been the menace that provoked even the
most ancient philosophy – already Anaximander as Nietzsche suggests – to anticipate the
police”.18 In this war of ideas the victory of academic philosophy – attained by force rather
13 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 320
14 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 150
15 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 442
16 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.10
A notable absence from this list is Spinoza, who Land would categorise as another philosopher of the outside.
17 An extended discussion of the role of Kant and Hegel can be found in Chapter 1 of Land, N. The Thirst for
Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)
The more recent representatives of this tradition would include Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida. A discussion
can be found in Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 16; and in
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 177
18 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. xxi
20
than veracity – leads to “the slaving of reality to ideality”.19 For Land, this is not a positive
situation. Reality itself, which is the domain of how the world actually is, is always distorted
by the conceptual apparatus of the subject. It is therefore misunderstood by philosophy.
Ireland's depiction of these two directions of philosophy – Inside-Out and Outside-In – in
'Noise: An Ontology of the Avant Garde' depicts the inversion of traditional philosophy
attempted by Land's defence of outsideness. Figure 1, taken from Ireland's essay, depicts the
trajectory of the 'signal' produced by reality. Once the signal passes the 'Epistemological limit'
(enters the inside) it is worked over by the processes of the mind and is therefore distorted
when it is rendered to the subject as appearance.
Figure 1: Outside In20
Land therefore postulates that there is more in the Real/World than can be apparent to the
subject, which is conditioned in such a way that it fails to grasp the underlying structures of
reality-as-it-is, instead grasping a subjectively constructed reality-as-it-must-appear. Ireland
19 Ed. Brassier and Mackey in Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 8
20 From Ireland, A. 'Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde' (2013) (available at
http://www.academia.edu/3690573/Noise_An_Ontology_of_the_Avant-Garde) p. 3
21
states that:
Land [theorises] the productive element of Being as a pre-individuated, generative
excess that precedes the mental processing which, under the direction of
Enlightenment rationality, filters from it all that is inefficacious or problematic for the
consolidation of the category known as 'the human', serving up experience as a single,
anthropocentrically calibrated, signifying channel.21
Under Land's reading of philosophy, a theory is of value insofar as it works to strip away
these layers of subjectivism through which the outside is filtered, which explains his hostility
to many positions and schools in its tradition – he considers they work in the opposite
direction. Singling out a few of Land's more famous antagonists, he variously castigates Plato,
Descartes, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger for their speculative, idealist or phenomenological
positions.22 Even Kant, who “went to his grave with his speculative virginity intact”
ultimately fails to create an apparatus which allows the outside to pass in.23 His critical
philosophy regards any attempt to probe the noumenon as: “hopelessness and waste … It is
for this reason that he says the 'concept of a noumenon is … merely a limiting concept'”.24 A
sustained depiction of Land's relationship to Kantian philosophy, though undoubtedly worthy
of further engagement, is beyond the scope of this thesis. The briefest sketch would note that
his grudging respect for the 'humble citizen of Köningsberg' reveals his ambivalence about
this citizen's critical project. For Land, Kant came as close as any metaphysician hereto has to
the epistemological limit, but he ultimately lacks the will to pass beyond it. Schopenhauer
said of Kant's theology, that he was like a “man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying
21 Ireland, A. 'Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde' (2013) (available at
http://www.academia.edu/3690573/Noise_An_Ontology_of_the_Avant-Garde) p. 9
22 Plato: Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.90; Descartes: Land,
N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.81; Hegel: Land, N. The Thirst
for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 23(!!)
Husserl: Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.7; Heidegger:
Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 10.
23 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 125
24 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 109
22
on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she
throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife”.25 In regards to metaphysics, this is
Kant's specific intention; he will go to the limit without showing any desire to surpass it.
This irruption of outsideness staged by Land's own philosophy began to gather sympathetic
interlocutors to Warwick in the 1990s. The group of graduate students and fellow academics
who would later form the CCRU under his aegis believed that Land's philosophy “[had] this
potential to strip back all the crusted, dead layers of the catastrophe that we usually refer to as
the human race”.26 This fight, against the philosophical impulse – as Land said of
phenomenology and the critical theory he believed it had birthed – “to distill out everything
for which proper subjectivity cannot claim responsibility, and thus entrenching the humanistic
dimension of Western philosophy ever more rigidly” would, if successful, be of significant
importance in the tradition of Western philosophy.27 However, as noted above, Land's
ambitions began to outstrip 'pure' philosophical debate and his interests spread to a wide range
of “experimental praxis oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown”.28 Most of
Land's works of theoretical philosophy were written before 1995, the exception being
'Cybergothic' (1998) “at a certain point in the mid-90s, it was as if someone had thrown a
switch, re-routing Land away from any known circuit of philosophical study”.29 The problem
Land faced was quite simple, yet fiendishly difficult to overcome: if language and ideas are
considered to be the enemy, it is hard to come up with a coherent description of how to escape
them. His practical attempts to do so, now “the subject of rumour and vague legend” ranged
from inter-disciplinary collaborations in visual and sonic arts to “[deep] polydrug abuse”.30
25 Schopenhauer, A. On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1998), p.
103
26 Goodman, S. quoted in Fisher, M. 'Nick Land: Mind Games' (Dazed and Confused magazine) (available at
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games)
27 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 176
28 Ed. Brassier, R. and Mackey, R. in Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011)
p. 6
29 Mackey, R. 'Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism' ( available at http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nickland-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus )
30 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) Cover inscription
23
A Philosopher without friends?
What can we make of Land's journey from his role as the head of the most radical philosophy
unit in the UK to his current exile in Shanghai? I do not make the suggestion he has no friends
in the sense of acquaintances, but in the sense of philosophical allies who inhabit similar
conceptual positions. The group of like-minded philosophers who followed his project has
dissipated, and even Land himself has retreated from his explicitly philosophical
commitments. Though it is not quite the case that no lasting impact endures from Land's time
at Warwick and in the CCRU, it is certainly not of the order that one might expect of such an
incendiary new way of thinking. How did Land, described by many of his contemporaries as
the most innovative and exciting force working in philosophy, become so isolated from his
former discipline? Simon Critchley, perhaps Britain's most famous philosopher of the
continental tradition said that “Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind,
endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical
position”.31
Perhaps we can answer the question by looking at the conditions of Land's rise to infamy. This
was primarily a function of the novelty of his works, which attracted those excited by
newness in general and, even more so, by those interested in newness in the study of
metaphysics, which is a rare occurrence. Land's metaphysical recalibration from Inside-Out to
Outside-In was undoubtedly an attractor in a philosophical world which is desperate to
endlessly consume the new, jokingly characterised by Land as an idea which can “last longer
than an automobile”.32 However, eventually, Land's texts proved too radical for even this
same group of thinkers who were initially attracted to his project. Almost all of the CCRU
members were ultimately unwilling to follow Land's philosophy to its conclusions. Hereto,
Land, .N Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 631
An amusing summary of these legends and their veracity can be found in Mackey's Nick Land – 'An
Experiment in Inhumanism' ( available at http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-iminhumanismus )
31 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) Cover inscription
32 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 2
24
the discussion has been limited to Land's metaphysics, which have been characterised as an
inversion of traditional philosophy. Yet this might have been Land's least controversial
position. Land's positions in other areas of philosophy are equally controversial. As described
above, Land's metaphysical intervention was not a mere paper-war, a purely hermeneutic
attack on the philosophical tradition carried out in its traditional method: “with [Land] – and
rightly so – philosophy infected every area of life”.33 It is this theoretical and practical
consistency in Land's philosophy which has driven his former 'friends' away. Land's
commitments to philosophical positions beyond his metaphysics of outsideness are always
constrained by the conclusions which such positions dictate. Unwilling to compromise the
absolute otherness of the outside when compared to the inside of anthropic convention, Land
refused to mitigate any of his conclusions towards social, political or academic norms. A
demonstration of how this would go spectacularly wrong can be seen in Stivale's report of the
Virtual Futures conference in which Land was a plenary speaker.34 It was not only Land's
philosophical position which seems to have raised opprobrium but also his attitude towards
other participants, and the demands he made outside of what usually constitutes philosophical
debate “to the point that one’s personal habits (e.g. non-smoking, in my case) might be called
into question as some sort of failure to engage in ‘necessary’ deterritorialization”.35 Land's
trajectory to what he terms 'outsideness' has implications across a wide number of domains of
philosophy. Aesthetics is reconfigured as a vehicle for representing invasions of outsideness,
rather than its traditional clarification of insideness.36 Traditional ethics is revealed to be a
defence mechanism: a wave of oughts patrolling the inner sanctum of the subject, policing its
homoeostasis.37 Political economy becomes a practical engagement with the entities which
occupy the site of production, now external to the subject and named the 'primary process'.38
All of these positions are atypical of academic philosophy, and highly controversial.
33 Critchley, S. in Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) Cover inscription
34 See Stivale, C. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, (New York: Gulilford, 1998) pp. 90-99
35 Stivale, C. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, (New York: Gulilford, 1998) p. 92
36 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.22
37 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.xx
38 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 441-459
The primary process is a Freudian concept which depicts matter and its operations before they are transposed in
the subject to the secondary process, where they are manifested as ideas.
25
The fissures between Land and former members of the CCRU are exemplified in the essay 'A
Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism'. Written as a response to Mark Fisher, Land's
critique attacks the aesthetics of 'hauntology', a concept derived from Derrida's Spectres of
Marx.39 Hauntology shared the science fiction, horror and Gothic aesthetics which provided a
touchstone for the CCRU, but there is a difference between Land's positive reading of the
tropes of these genres and hauntology's negative reading, which invokes the lost elements of a
utopian past. In his own reading, Fisher utilises Land's depiction of outsideness as a diagnosis
of ills rather than a depiction of the underlying reality of production: “This is theory as
cyberpunk fiction: Deleuze-Guattari's concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing
that haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the timebending of the Terminator films”.40
Though there is an ambivalence in Land's between dark and bright aesthetics, which can be
seen in his enthusiastic commitment to the 'Decopunk' cityscapes of Blade Runner, which
serve as a model for an aesthetics of modernity, one constant commitment is to
representations which depict the production of the future rather than a regression to the past.41
The figures which haunt Land's aesthetics are visitors from the outside or visitors from the
future, rather than ghosts of the human past.
Another fissure is demonstrated by the recent debate surrounding 'accelerationism'. The
contemporary essays in #Accelerate, the acceleration reader can be divided into those written
by Land, and those written against him.42 Simon O'Sullivan posits this difference as being
between ‘Right’ accelerationists (a position held only by Land), and all others who are to the
'Left' of this position. O'Sullivan defines Land's accelerationism as a decision to work on
behalf of a capitalism which works to achieve 'Technomic Singularity', a post-human state
which the internal logics of capitalism inevitably lead to. This impulse is rejected to some
extent by all of the other writers in the reader, who try and control, divert or mitigate the
forces unleashed by acceleration of capital into projects and frameworks which work on
behalf of varying conceptions of humanism. The detail of the argument surrounding
acceleration and capitalism is, again, a topic beyond the scope of this thesis, and the topic is
39 Derrida, J. Spectres of Marx (London; Routledge, 2006)
40 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) Cover inscription
41 The concept of 'Decopunk' is elucidated in Land, N. Templexity (Time Spiral Press, 2014)
42 And most fall into the latter category.
26
mentioned here as an illustration of the split between Land and his former colleagues, who
make up much of the commentators on acceleration:
Land looms over many of the accelerationist writers – at least those collected in the
Reader. Iain Hamilton Grant, Mark Fisher, Luciana Parisi, Robin MacKay (one of the
co-editors) and Ray Brassier were all at least partially intellectually formed in that
moment at Warwick University where Land taught in the 1990s.43
On the surface, it seems that this split between Land and his Warwick colleagues is political,
one which is about left versus right in politics alone. There is definitely a division in that
respect, exacerbated on Land's side by his sometimes hyperbolic goading of the left and
unwavering commitment, despite (or even because of) its apparent excesses and failings, to
the free operation of capital, as expressed in tweets like: “The scenario we’re given – the one
being made to feel inevitable – is of a hyper-capitalist dystopia.[*Mouth watering*]”.44 But
underneath this political veneer, there is also a deep metaphysical disagreement between the
contesting parties. Land's laissez-faire politics are determined by his belief that the
interrogation of ideas should properly be undertaken by reality rather than anthropic
principles; or perhaps more simply, that an idea should never tested by another idea, but by
that idea's involvement with reality – how it survives in the outside, not how it relates to the
inside.
Most of the accelerationist writers of #Accelerate are associated to some extent with the
'speculative realist' movement whose metaphysics aim at engineering an engagement with the
noumenal world (therefore towards Land's outside). This post-Kantian project runs parallel
with Land's – it has the same initial impulse, to get towards objects and describe them as
metaphysical actors rather than (unknowable) unknowns – but often ends up in even stranger
43 O'Sullivan, S. 'The Missing Subject of Accelerationism' in Mute 12 September 2014 (available at
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism)
44 Land, N. @UF_blog, 26 Feb 2015 5:18 PM. ( available at
https://twitter.com/UF_blog/status/571117026904649728 )
27
places because of the constraints of the metaphysical language it works within.45 Yet again,
the detail of speculative realism is beyond the scope of the present thesis, and rather than
explicitly engaging with it, I shall limit myself to noting that it represents a philosophical
debate which is influenced by Land, who was troubled by the post-Kantian settlement in
metaphysics, according to Ireland, “fifteen years before a single theorist uttered the word
‘correlationism’, [Land told us] the ontological condition of the moderns comes down to the
following fundamental premise: ‘the outside must pass by way of the inside’”.46
Correlationism is the term Meillassoux used to denote a set of metaphysical concerns about
the abandonment of the noumenal, and philosophy's subsequent turn to idealism.47 Ireland's
quote reveals the difference between the two approaches: Land's description of 'passage' is
couched in terms of production and what the outside does in time, whilst correlation is
metaphysical, offering a critique of the comparison of ideas. This, again, is indicative of a
fundamental split in methodology between Land and the former CCRU members still working
in metaphysics.
A quantification of Land's impact on contemporary philosophy is a difficult thing to assess.
Most of the engagements with his work can be described as shallow rather than sustained
45 Discussion of speculative realism can be found in Bryant, L. Harman, G.. and Srnicek, N. The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: Re.Press. 2011)
A critique can be found in Wolfendale, P. The Noumenon's New Clothes (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014)
46 Ireland, A. 'Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde' (2013) (available at
http://www.academia.edu/3690573/Noise_An_Ontology_of_the_Avant-Garde) p. 4
47 Meillassoux's critique of correlation is detailed in After Finitude. A summary of its points can be found in
Clemen's J. 'Vomit Apocalypse', Parrhesia 2013 Vol 18 pp. 57-67 available at
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia18/parrhesia18_clemens.pdf
28
ones, utilising it as a tool to perform a limited role rather than as a systemic philosophy.48
Why does the present work pick up Land's thought? Above all else, it is the belief in the
brilliance of his work, which offers a methodology by which we can, uploading Deleuze's
schizoanalysis in the place of Kantian critique, begin to construct a philosophy which can
engage with the outside. Brassier and Mackey end their introduction to Fanged Noumena
calling to “a new wave of thinkers who are partly engaging the re-emerging legacy of Nick
Land's work”.49 Perhaps now, after the passage of time, Land's philosophy will be taken up by
those who were personally distant from the firestorm of his brief engagement with academic
philosophy. One such scholar is Ireland, whose work aims at presenting Land's philosophy
simply and clearly, situating it in the context of post-Kantian philosophy. This move towards a
clarification of Land's philosophy is overdue, moving Land's work beyond the position of the
ideological other of former CCRU members, instead considering it as something which can
stand alone.
Land's unpopularity in contemporary academic philosophy is derived not from his anti48 The most sustained analyses of Land's work are as follows: (1) the Editor's Introduction to Fanged Noumena
(Ed. Brassier, R. and Mackey, R. Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York; Urbanomic, 2011));
(2) 'From Schizoanalysis to Rhizomatics' in ' Stivale, C. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari,
(New York: Gulilford, 1998); (3) 'Drafting the Inhuman' by Negrastani, R. in Ed. Bryant, L. Srnicek, N. and
Harman, G. The Speculative Turn (Melbourne, Autsralia: Re-press, 2011); (4) in Noys, Malign Velocities
(UK: Zero, 2014); (5) in the later parts of Ed. Mackay, R and Arvenessian, K #Accelerate: the accelerationist
reader (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014).
Reviews of Land's work include: the sympathetic Banham, G. 'The Thirst For Annihilation' Journal of
Nietzsche Studies No. 11, Conscience and Pain, Tragedy and Truth (USA: Penn State University Press, Spring
1996) pp. 53-63; the more reserved Bailey, D. 'The Field of Battle' Journal of Nietzsche Studies No. 4/5, The
Work of Müller-Lauter, W. (USA: Penn State University Press, Autumn 1992/Spring 1993), pp. 155-165; and
finally, the hostile: “a barbarous denunciation of philosophy, and Freud for their alleged cooperation with the
police” in Riechel, D. 'Nietzsche and Modern Thought' German Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (USA: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, October 1993), pp. 557-558.
49 Ed. Brassier, R. and Mackey, R. Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York; Urbanomic, 2011) p.
54
29
humanism, but instead his willingness to follow this position to its political consequences. It
seems obvious that an anti-anthropocentric philosopher will say some denigrating things
about humanity – especially one with Land's polemical rhetorical style – but there are other
philosophers who have depicted the failings of humanity in similarly negative terms without
attracting the opprobrium which academic philosophy has bestowed upon Land. I will go on
to consider Land's objections to anthropocentricism in philosophy in due course.
The Metaphysical and the Psychoanalytic
Land's work suffers from a reputation as being “polemical … [with] disregard for the
properties of sober reflection”.50 It is also considered to be partial or fragmentary, as
everything not contained in The Thirst for Annihilation is strewn across a series of essays, ebooks and blog posts. Several former CCRU members' conception of Land's work is as being
primarily concerned with praxis, and a call to practical engagement in the manner of Deleuze
and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus rather than a coherent theory. This recasts Land's
machinery as a set of tools which can be used across a range of interdisciplinary contexts,
rather than as a grand theory of philosophy. As a result, there are no treatments of Land's work
which contextualise it as a unified project, save for some constants noted in Brassier and
Mackey's editorial which introduces Fanged Noumena. The present thesis shall claim that
there is a clear and coherent thread of argumentation discernible in Land's work. In this
reading Land's philosophy is an attempt to correct Kant's failure to engage with the outside.
As the previous discussion of Kant noted, the productive ground of Kant's philosophy is
within the subject, operating according to the categories of understanding and the conditions
of space and time. Land wants to move this productive space to the site of interaction with the
outside, the primary process, thereby escaping the constraints of subjectivity, and providing a
platform to map what is 'real' rather than what is 'apparent'. Land's method in constructing this
possibility of engagement with the outside is to replace Kant's metaphysical conception of the
subject with a psychoanalytic conception of production. This operation can be depicted in
three stages. Firstly, Land claims that Kant is stuck in a metaphysical register, as various
concepts in his metaphysical system rely on certain other metaphysical concepts to provide
50 Ed. Brassier, R. and Mackey, R. in Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011)
p. 5
30
their foundations. This leads to the accusation that Kant's argument is circular. More
problematically for Land, it remains inside, and never ventures outside:
The vocabulary that would describe the other of metaphysics is itself inscribed within
metaphysics, since the inside and the outside are both conceptually determined from
the inside.51
Secondly, this metaphysical register prevents Kant from conceiving the nature of production
over time, which is the defining quality of the outside (material) realm. For Land the notion of
time, and the fact that things made in time are produced, will offer the chance to jump beyond
the 'snapshot' metaphysics of Kant, where the contents of consciousness are considered as
they are in an instant. Instead, Land will show that the noumenon is only unknowable if is
unproductive (at zero intensity), and so long as it produces, the operation of base-matter can
be hypothesised:
This is seen in Kant's philosophy: In the end it is the domesticated character of the
Kantian notion of time which forestalls the lurch of this thought to a base materialist
conclusion. Purity conditions the a priori, which hypostasizes time as such, which in
turn idealizes intensity. Flow as such is thus fixed as an eternal form of representation,
frozen in an endless descent to zero. It is for this reason that Kant has an entirely
ahistorical comprehension of intensity, failing to grasp the positive order of its
repression: the inhibition of flow (continuity). In other words: he does not raise a
problem of the object with sufficient radicality to escape from the cage of
epistemology in the direction of a libidinal or base materialism. He does not
acknowledge that between the noumenon and zero intensity there is no difference, or
that neither are susceptible to isolation.52
Thirdly, that the language of 'intensity' and productive 'flow' which Land needs to depict the
process of impersonal, 'outside' production will come from psychoanalysis rather than a
refinement of metaphysics. The first two stages can be found throughout Land's writing, but
most closely correspond with those described in Table A as Land's 'critical works'. The focus
51 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 71
52 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 118
31
of the present thesis is however with the third stage of the argument above, which is found in
Land's engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis. For Land, psychoanalysis
offers a language which can be used to bypass the problems of the metaphysical register,
which has an inherent tendency to revert to utilisation of the productions of the inside to
explain the outside. If such a substitution is possible, there are two signifiant consequences.
Firstly, it is possible to plot a meta-theory of base-matter (outsideness) and depict its actions
in terms of the production it is capable of enacting.53 Secondly, agency in the human is
displaced from its traditional position in the subject and moved to its periphery where the
drives and instincts of the unconscious interact with base material. The former reconfigures
our understanding of the world at large, the processes by which it operates, and the extent to
which we can 'know' them. The latter determines the manner in which the subject interacts
with the world, re-conceptualising its mechanism as formal and automatic instead of the
traditional conception of distinct human agency.
Psychoanalysis is the preferred register for a depiction of 'the outside' because it provides a
speculative approach which tries to pass beyond the problematic of knowing its own 'outside',
the unconscious. This practical approach differs from traditional metaphysical arguments
which are more susceptible to the argument that it is is simply impossible to pass over the
threshold of the epistemological limit.54 Returning to Ireland's depiction of the Outside-In in
Figure 1, psychoanalysis is utilised by Land as it provides a platform to pass beyond the
metaphysical argumentation which traditionally depicts the processes within 'transcendental
conditioning' and 'appearance', which are the subject and its productions. Instead the lexicon
of psychoanalysis describes the signal itself – outsideness – as measurable, quantifiable and
predictable production. Psychoanalysis is capable of performing this task because of the
structural similarity between the metaphysical binaries inside-outside and phenomenanoumena and the psychoanalytic binary conscious-unconscious. In each case the second is to
53 The concept of base-matter is drawn from Bataille's works, and will be discussed later in the present thesis.
54 Indeed, this division characterises metaphysics in even its simplest definition in the Oxford English
Dictionary: “Metaphysics has two main strands: that which holds that what exists lies beyond experience (as
argued by Plato), and that which holds that objects of experience constitute the only reality (as argued by
Kant, the logical positivists, and Hume)” 'Metaphysics' at Oxford Dictionaries ( available at
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/metaphysics )
32
some extent 'unknowable', but can nevertheless be the subject of speculative investigation.
But when psychoanalysis speaks it is not trapped in “the ghost landscape of metaphysics,
crowded with divinities, souls, agents, perdurant subjectivities, entities with a zero
potentiality for triggering excitations, and then the whole gothic confessional of guilt,
responsibility, moral judgement, punishments and rewards”, and is therefore free from the
baggage associated with metaphysics.55
However, psychoanalysis is by no means immune to controversy, nor is it devoid of its own
forms of idealism. The substitution which Land attempts is therefore not a simple switch in
which something controversial is replaced by something unproblematic. It is such a question
regrading the lineage of Land's conception of 'machinic desire' which provides the impetus for
the present thesis: is Land's use of psychoanalysis based on a consistent reading? In Land's
work Freud, Deleuze and to a lesser extent Lyotard are the key figures in the formulation of
the vocabulary he uses from psychoanalysis: that of desire and drives. These three thinkers'
conceptions of psychoanalysis are at the very least partially amenable to a materialist reading.
However, in any history of twentieth century psychoanalysis Lacan and Lacanianism have to
be considered, and Lacan's 'return to Freud' can be read as a recasting of psychoanalysis as
idealism.56 There is therefore a need to both anchor Land's use of drive and desire within an
internally coherent line of psychoanalytic reasoning, and also to defend this line externally
against other psychoanalytic interpretations.
The present thesis aims at clarifying a genealogy of Land's use of psychoanalytic language to
show how the concepts which he borrows from it are grounded in its tradition. To this point,
no one has attempted a systematic treatment of Land's thought, and the present thesis begins
to provide the context in which his work can be related to the history of philosophy. Hopefully
55 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.1
56 Such a recasting relates psychoanalysis to an entirely different philosophical tradition than Land does. BorchJacobsen describes these Lacanian influences stating that “[Lacan injected psychoanalysis] with massive
doses of Hegel, Heidegger and Kojève”. Borch-Jacobsen, M. in Ed Dufresne, T. Returns of the French Freud,
Freud Lacan and Beyond, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997)
Lacan is also situated as an idealist by Fisher, D. Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition p. 11 ( USA:
Transaction, 2009 )
33
this will provide a basis for future comparative approaches to Land's work, as well as further
investigations into the metaphysical commitments engendered by his use of the
psychoanalytic lexicon. When commentators have contextualised Land's work it has been in a
brief treatment, providing only the most concise contextualisation. An example would be
Fisher's situating of Land's philosophy as one that: “[is] in a nutshell: Deleuze and Guattari’s
machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwardscompatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will.”57 These very complex and
cryptic situations require unpacking before Land's writing can be more readily systematised.
Fisher's depiction of Land's work makes it very clear that Deleuze and Guattari provide the
framework on which he builds his own philosophical system. The importance of Deleuze and
Guattari in this respect is another reason for this genealogical reading, as it allows the
commentary in the present thesis to go beyond Land's use of their theories as components in a
philosophical system to a discussion of the genesis and validity of these components. Land's
reading of Deleuze can be related to a larger debate about the implications of Deleuze's
philosophy. Deleuze, who enjoyed exploiting ambiguity in philosophers' works to open up
space for his own distinctive readings, has been subject to the same impulse from the first and
second generation of anglophone writers who are trying to 'fix' his position in the
57 Fisher, M. in Ed. Mackay, R. and Arvenessian, A. #Accelerate: the accelerationist reader (Falmouth, UK:
Urbanomic, 2014) p. 342
34
philosophical canon.58 If there is a point at which Land's philosophy most explicitly engages
with 'normal' academic philosophy it is in determining these interpretations of Deleuze. Land
was in the first generation of Deleuze scholars in the United Kingdom, and along with AnsellPearson, offered a distinctive reading of Deleuze as a cybernetic theorist.59 This positioning of
Deleuze's work was challenged by the next generation of Deleuzians such as John Mullarkey
who wrote that “the type of microreductionism that underscores work in cybernetics [..]
thereby leads to a great misunderstanding of [Deleuze's] work on machinic desire”.60 I shall
go on to closely consider these rival interpretations of Deleuze's work in Chapter 3.
Deleuze and Guattari's text Anti-Oedipus is their most explicitly psychoanalytic writing, and
is the source of much of what is distinctive in Land's cyberneticist reading of Deleuze. This
58 This refers to Deleuze's infamous remarks on his 'buggery' of previous philosophers. I shall return to this
topic in Chapter 5 when discussing Land's own tendency to read in this manner.
There are several discussions of Deleuze's buggery remarks which can be found in: Smith, D. 'The Inverse
Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan', Criticism (2004): "Deleuze's all-too-well-known image of
philosophical "buggery," which makes thinkers produce their own "monstrous" children"; Sinnerbrink, R. (in
'Nomadology or Ideology? Žižek’s Critique of Deleuze', Parrhesia 1 (2006): 62-87) describes the "popular
topic" of Deleuze's "notorious remarks"; Callen, R. (in 'The Difficult Middle', Rhizomes 10 (Spring 2005))
describes "intellectual buggery" as "what Deleuze himself famously said about his encounters with the works
of other philosophers." Deleuze's buggery analogy is also cited by, among many others, Massumi, B. A
User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (USA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 2; Žižek, S. Organs without
Bodies (UK: Routledge, 2003), p. 48; Buchanan, I. A Deleuzian Century? (Duke UP, 1999), p. 8; JeanLecercle, J. Deleuze and Language (Macmillan, 2002), p. 37; Lambert, G. The Non-Philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze (UK: Continuum, 2002), p. x; Colebrook, C. Understanding Deleuze (Australia: Allen & Unwin,
2003), p. 73; and Stivale, C. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (USA: McGill-Queen's, 2005), p. 3. [this list is
taken from Deleuze's Wikipedia entry ( available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze#cite_note-30
on 10/03/2015 )]
59 See Dosse, F. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (USA: Columbia University Press, 2010)
pp. 479-480
60 Mullarkey, J. 'Deleuze and Materialism' in Ed. Ian Buchanan A Deleuzian Century? (USA: Duke University
Press, 1999) p.61
35
genealogy is to demonstrate the basis of the psychoanalytic tradition from which Land's
thought emerges, and in situating in such a manner, it aims to show that Land's philosophy is
not merely an interdisciplinary toolkit or a hook for novelty in the art world. It therefore
disagrees with Brassier and Mackey's claim that:
Land developed the conceptual innovations of Deleuze-Guattari as the trans
disciplinary innovations they are, rather than recontextualising them (as is,
unfortunately, now all too common) within the restricted histories of philosophy,
psychoanalysis, or cultural theory.61
Whilst this does depict how Land's work is currently treated, it does not represent how it must
be treated. Indeed, just pages later, Brassier and Mackey themselves treat Land's work as
systematic and philosophical, placing it within the context of the wider philosophical
discussion of the conditions of experience:
Land credits Anti-Oedipus with recasting the problem of the theory of experience as a
problem concerning the caging of desire – with the latter read as a synonym for the
impersonal, synthetic intelligence ('animality', 'cunning') that Land seeks to distinguish
from the will of 'knowledge' to order, resolve, and correlate-in-advance.62
The genealogical approach will provide the means to describe how Freud's concepts of desire
and drive transform into 'impersonal, synthetic intelligence' in Land's formulation yet remain
broadly consistent with Freud's metapsychological theses.63 This generally evolutionary
account will also consider the development of psychoanalytic concepts in relation to their
encounters with metaphysical approaches to desire in the works of Lacan, Lyotard, and
Deleuze and Guattari. In its historical consideration of psychoanalysis, the present thesis will
provide a context for the psychoanalytic vocabulary which displaces the metaphysical. This
61 Ed. Brassier R. and Mackey, R.; Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p.5
62 Ed. Brassier R. and Mackey, R.; Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p.8
63 A depiction of a Foucaultian genealogical method can be found in 'The Genealogical Analysis of the Human
Sciences and Its consequences for the Revising of the Critical Question' in Han, B. Foucault's' Critical
Project (Stanford: USA, 2002) pp 109-146
36
will allow, in Chapter 5, a sustained discussion of Land's claim that the lexicon of drives,
desires, impulses and animality best depict the forces where the metaphysical 'rubber meets
the road'; that the instant of contact of the human with the outside isn't in the rarefied
productions of subject's consciousness (inside), but in the drive economy and instinctual
behaviour of the unconscious at the subject's periphery. Moving the site of synthesis outside
of the subject requires this new language of production, but also a new way of thinking about
processes of production and their agency.
37
Figure 2: Psychoanalytic and Metaphysical Genealogies
Genealogy, a methodology most notably expounded and utilised by first Nietzsche, and later
Foucault, is characterised by the investigation of the relationship between power and
knowledge. There is some conflict over the concept, but much more simple misuse, as the
term 'genealogy' is frequently applied to what would in fact be a solely historical
methodology. The problem of the criterion or final reference for judgement has a long history
in philosophy, from ancient skepticism to Lyotard's modern formulation, and the genealogical
approach suggests that all too often the answer to this problem is that power dictates truth.64
The genealogical method, when no longer directed at an exclusively evolutionarily account of
knowledge, offers a sound metholodological approach to the question the present thesis poses
because it gives due importance to power relations and the role that they have in a society.
The intellectual space in which drive theory has had to compete is conditioned by
anthropocentric perspectives and the predominance of idealism, which seeks to crush its
destabilising revelations. These anthropocentric conditions are contrasted to the more abstract
models of cybernetic and teleonomic prediction which would serve as criteria for Land.
However, this genealogy shall also have some traces of a historical approach, following
Foucault's approach which was not a-historical, but instead would emphasise that history is
not a linear progression, but instead a series of competing concepts backed by conflicting
agencies. The present thesis claims that aspects of Land's conception of machinic desire can
be read in all of the philosophers in the lineage presented, but in all it is a repressed, minor
element. In Freud concerns of clinical practice and controversy over the role of
psychoanalysis obscure it; in Lacan the dominant narrative of structuralist linguistics does so;
in Deleuze and Guattari the agent is the social concerns of the soixante-huitards and the
emphasis on difference as difference and not production; in Lyotard it is the indifference or
hostility to his libidinal period. I shall show how these repressed elements can all be related to
one another and subsumed into Land's greater project.
As the present thesis notes the contemporary discourse (both with the original texts and of the
present thesis) surrounding these texts contains lacunae, there is a need to return to the
64 For the former see, for example, Striker, ‘The Problem of the Criterion' in Everson (ed.) Companions to
Ancient Thought 1: Epistemology (UK: Cambridge, 1990) pp. 143–60. The latter is delineated in Lyotard, J.F.
The Postmodern Condition (UK: Manchester University Press, 1984).
38
original texts in bringing out these contradictions if they are not discussed elsewhere. This is
particularly the case with the works of Freud, which will require a larger degree of exposition
than the later philosophers because the machinic and cybernetic aspects of his drive theory
were ignored by contemporary scholars. Though Foucault's method is the predominant
approach in the present thesis, Deleuze also invented a methodology, which will be used here.
Regarding his monographs on philosophers, he noted that:
It was really important for [his readings to be the philosopher in question's] own child,
because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to
be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations,
and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.65
There is also a sense of this approach here, tracing how Land, attempting to answer Kant's
challenge of accessing the outside, turned to the unemphasised but nevertheless present parts
of the philosophers in the lineage I will examine, as they wrestled with this perhaps
impossible challenge.66 If there is a single text which provides inspiration for its style, if not
its exact organisation, it follows Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, which utilises
philosophers' works to bring about a reading they may have not explicitly intended, but which
can be deployed to construct a psychoanalytic theory of Landian, productive desire.
The present thesis' methodology shall also utilise diagrams wherever possible, as genealogy
lends itself to depictions of its stages in linear progressions, as shown above. A genealogy is
ripe for diagrammatic method which allows representation of the relations, whether
differential or sequential, between conceptual apparatus. It also follows the style of Deleuze
and Guattari, and Lacan, who made use of diagrams in their own work, and of many readers
of their texts who also follow this method.67 A final objective in my use of diagrams is to
65 Deleuze, G. Negotiations. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) p.6
66 It is doubtlessly the impossibility of this challenge which means that few philosophers explicitly take it up in
their work.
67 Deleuze, and Guattari’s two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are particularly diagrammatic, and
Lacan's works are studded with various Schema and his Graphs of Desire. Examples of secondary readings
include: Watson, J. Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought (UK: Bloomsbury, 2007); or O’Sullivan, S. On the
39
deploy them in support of clarity in my reading of Land and his influences, helping to depict
the interrelation of his theories as simply as possible. When used this way the diagrammatic
approach – like Land's use of the psychoanalytic – can be used to avoid the obfuscation and
circularity which can characterise metaphysical discourses.
Outline of the Thesis
The main body of this work will therefore be a genealogical reading of the psychoanalytic
tradition depicted on the right hand side of Figure 2. This is organised into four chapters,
each dedicated to a discussion of one thinker in this line. These discussions will relate the
concepts investigated to the other thinkers in this genealogy, looking forwards to anticipate
the deployment of the concepts in their refined forms, but also backwards to compare the
fidelity of these later iterations with their precursors. This is particularly pertinent in
psychoanalysis, as all of the major thinkers considered situate their work in relation to Freud's
initial discoveries and conceptual machinery. The goal of the present thesis is not to present a
general lineage of psychoanalysis, but to present a specific lineage of psychoanalysis which
cumulates in a materialist reading of drive and desire. The importance of this task is noted in
Land’s reading of the history of psychoanalysis as being tainted by a certain
anthropomorphism and idealism:
In its early stages psychoanalysis discovers that the unconscious is an impersonal
machinism and that desire is positive non-representational flow, yet it 'remains in the
precritical age', and stumbles before the task of an immanent critique of desire, or
decathexis of society. Instead it moves in exactly the opposite direction: back into
fantasy, representation, and the pathos of inevitable frustration. Instead of rebuilding
reality on the basis of the productive forces of the unconscious, psychoanalysis ties up
the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality.68
Psychoanalysis provides the conceptual machinery for Land’s development of schizoanaysis,
but the history of this conception is constantly inhibited by the tendency to move in the
Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation, (Basingstoke and New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
68 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 302-303
40
“opposite direction” which is named by Deleuze and Guattari as 'Oedipus'. In Chapter 1 I
shall provide a groundwork for my reading of the different post-Freudian schools of
psychoanalysis. Any discussion which operates in a psychoanalytic register necessarily uses
the terminology bequeathed by Freud. The preliminary gesture of the thesis will be to identify
these Freudian processes which populate the unconscious and begin to define firstly what they
can do in terms of production and secondly how their operation can be conceptualised.
Chapter 1 is largely an exposition of Freud’s models of the unconscious and the dynamic
processes which traverse these models, as the comparative readings of the later
psychoanalytic thinkers in the present thesis require an anchored depiction of the these models
and processes as Freud conceptualises them. This reading of Freud’s metapsychology reveals
that the most important aspect of Freud's psychoanalysis for the construction of a materialist
reading of his work is the introduction of drive theory, which describes the productive
potential of the unconscious. Drives represent the productive pathways in the unconscious
which provide the possibility for desire to operate. I shall therefore provide a reading of the
bases of drive theory. Once the model of the drive is established, a distinction will be made
between the 'pleasure principle' and simple positivism of the unconscious and the 'death
drive', which describes its exceptional operations. The death drive will be a recurring theme in
the present thesis, as it is a general term used to capture any exceptions to the expected
operation of the unconscious. Each of the philosophers I consider has a slightly different
reading of its operation, and establishing Freud's position is essential to understanding these
later amendments.
In Chapter 2 I go on to consider Lacan's thesis that ‘the unconscious is structured like a
language’ and investigate the two directions in which such a concept can lead. The first is a
structuralist view that considers the unconscious to consist of an abstract set of relations
which can be analogised to the linguistic processes of metaphor and metonymy. The reading
is amenable to a cybernetic conception of the unconscious, something which Lacan came
close to in the 1950s, before abandoning such a methodology.69 The second reading, which
reflects Lacan's later output and that of the wider Lacanian School is to conceptualise the
unconscious as consisting of linguistic elements; that is not like a language but is a language.
69 Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) (available at
http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf ) pp.38-55
41
This second reading is therefore more amenable to an anthropocentric reading of the
unconscious as a 'little consciousness', which does not operate according to formal, cybernetic
rules, but according to the logic of the ‘inside’, comparing ideas to ideas. A discussion of this
distinction is important in the construction of a materialist theory of desire because Lacan
represents the return of psychoanalysis towards idealist philosophy and, in Deleuze and
Guattari's reading, towards social conservatism. Lacanianism therefore represents the
tendency in psychoanalysis which Land is emphatically arguing against. Exploring how
Lacan's psychoanalysis is prone to slip towards anthropomorphism will help clarify Land's
reading of Deleuze and Guattari.
Chapter 3 is devoted to Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of psychoanalysis, concentrating on
Anti-Oedipus, which introduces the concept of schizoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari argued
that psychoanalysis, following Lacan, had descended into conservatism (Oedipus) and a
negative, idealist conception of desire. I shall contextualise Anti-Oedipus in relation to
Freudianism and Lacanianism, before considering Deleuze and Guattari's positive theory of
productive desire, and the schizoanalytic register in which they attempted to track and
describe its productions. Land's reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and his use of schizoanalysis
in the construction of machinic desire will be contrasted with alternate readings of Deleuze
which produce a more anthropocentric view of his commitments. I shall consider the reading
of Deleuze by Ansell-Pearson, who posits an anti-anthropocentric reading of Deleuze's
Difference and Repetition in Germinal Life.70 This superbly argued exposition of the
metaphysical anti-anthropomorphism which marks Deleuze's 'middle-period' philosophical
works depicts his re-working of Kant under the influence of Bergson, Spinoza and Nietzsche
into an elaborate conceptual apparatus which: “[Grants] primacy not to the receptive capacity
that receives impressions and experiences sensations but to the contractile power of
contemplation that constitutes the organism before it constitutes the sensations that affect it.”71
I shall go on to consider Land’s reading, as a 'Black Deleuzian' who takes up Deleuze's ideas
of impersonal and machinic production and marries them to cybernetic and teleological
circuits of accelerative production. This synthesis of Deleuze and cybernetics provides the
basis for Land’s reading of the transformative power of modernity. For Land, the difference
70 Ansell-Pearson, K. Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999)
71 Ansell-Pearson, K. Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999) p. 67
42
between pre-modern and modern societies is that the affect of desiring production is visible in
the latter. In the shock waves caused as production punches through various thresholds, we
can trace the true force of desire which works through and around the individual subject
“passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756,
1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011”72.
I shall contrast these anti-anthropocentric readings of Deleuze with the more conventional
ones of Buchanan and Colebrook to demonstrate what I conceptualise as being a split between
'left' and 'right' Deleuzianism. The first chapter of Buchanan's Deleuzism (2000) begins with
an excellent depiction of Deleuze's anti-representational method and his philosophy as a
philosophy of production. This reading however pirouettes into a reading of Deleuze as a
philosopher of the body and the joy of the body for which we must attain a: “conversion of
inadequate ideas (passions) into adequate ones (desire)”.73 For Buchanan the body represents
the whole human body and desire some kind of wish in that body rather than the impersonal
desire described in the preceding pages: “[t]his correlation of desire with production” which
flows through unindividuated material.74 It is no small effort to follow Deleuze's antianthropocentric metaphysics without backsliding, and many interpreters succumb to this
temptation of reintroducing the metaphysical panoply of subject-derived concepts. Baudrillard
notes that the conclusion of libidinal philosophy had a tendency to be:
“You've got an unconscious and must learn how to liberate it.
You've got a body and must learn how to enjoy it.”75 [This quote retains the formatting
of Baudrillard's original text]
This obviously represents a misreading of the impersonal and productive unconscious as it is
set back in the service of anthropocentric goals related to the enjoyment of the subject.
Deleuze and Guattari's theory of machinic desire results in their positing of desiring machines
72 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York; Urbanomic, 2011) p. 443
73 Buchanan, I. Deleuzism (USA, Duke University Press; 2000) p. 31
74 Buchanan, I. Deleuzism (USA: Duke University Press, 2000) p. 15
75 Baudrillard, J. Forget Foucault, (New York: Semiotexte, 2007) p.39
43
as “black boxes”.76 The black boxes are the site of a series of syntheses, and their production
can be measured, but this is as far as our functional knowledge of them extends. The subject
of Chapter 4, Lyotard, is an important figure in the genealogy of psychoanalysis because he
returns to the psychoanalytic, Freudian, tradition and begins to reconstruct what the internal
processes governing these black boxes might be. His description of these unconscious
‘primary processes’ will be considered, particularly with reference to the concept of the
figural, the term he uses to designate the transformation of the latent content of the
unconscious into the manifest content of the subject (primary process into secondary).
Lyotard's position in the history of philosophy is currently as a philosopher of language (in Le
Differend, 1988), and as the author of The Postmodern Condition (1984). The writings of his
'libidinal period', disowned by their author, have attracted little commentary in anglophone
philosophy. I shall consider two of the strongest readings of the libidinal period, by Williams
(1998) and Bennington (1988) which both reflect the tendency to contextualise Lyotard, even
in this libidinal-psychoanalytic period, as a philosopher of the 'event', which tends towards the
metaphysical. He himself came to believe that his libidinal period could not be defended, and
I shall conclude by considering his self-criticism and his relation to anthropocentricism.
Though it will be discussed in relation to the concepts introduced in the previous chapters,
Land's philosophy will be depicted systematically in Chapter 5. Land's readings of other
philosophers will be considered, before the consequences of his productive theory of desire
are discussed. This evaluation will consider the implication of Land's psychoanalytic reading
of machinic desire in terms of both the subject and its interaction with the outside, and also
the ability of schizoanalysis to map the desiring productions of objects themselves.
The trap of Anthropocentricism
“There is one simple criterion of taste in philosophy. That one avoid the vulgarity of
anthropocentricism”.77 It might be asked why the present thesis considers 'Land's antianthropocentric philosophy' rather than 'Land's philosophy of outsideness' as detailed above.
Irruptions of the outside take a number of forms in Land's work, raging from objects which
are out of their time to hints of alien subjectivities or the evolution of artificial intelligences
76 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 323
77 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. xx
44
(AI).78 Of course, for Land, the most important actor of the outside, which is the non-human
realm, is capitalism itself.79 Similarly, there are numerous apparatus of recapture by the inside:
the conservatisms of social control and tradition; the Turing Police preventing the rise of AI; a
whole range of interventions made on behalf of metaphysical idealism. In the present thesis
anthropocentricism is taken as being a subset within this larger group of operations defending
insideness. It refers to operations in thought, primarily philosophical thought, which try and
reconcile conceptions of the world-as-it-is with the representation of the world-as-it-appearsto-us. In its most simple sense it is common sense and everyday perception in which the
world's presentation to the subject is considered unproblematic. In metaphysical discourse it is
the introduction into any discourse of anthropic concepts which are not grounded by
referencing the real. It simply takes our anthropocentric conception of the world as an
unproblematic given, something which Land scrupulously avoids: “Level 1, or world-space is
an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted
reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly”.80 Under the present thesis' reading, antianthropocentricism is a critique of philosophical trajectories that work from the inside out,
which are stuck within the humanist world-space at 'level 1'. Landian (and as Chapter 3 shall
argue, Deleuzian) schizoanalysis-machinic desire is a positive philosophy of production
which maps the process which will upload the post-human to level 2.
A term closely related to (anti)-anthropocentricism is (anti)-anthropomorphism, which is used
occasionally in this text either in response to its use in another work (for example, in Land's as
quoted above), or where the concept discussed is closer to its philosophical usage as placing
the form of appearances to the subject as unproblematic. Anthropocentricism is the preferred
term of the two as anthropomorphism already has a distinct place in philosophy to denote the
fallacy of equating the thoughts of humans and non-human animals, believing the latter to
have similar intentional states.
78 Objects out of time are explored in 2014's Templexity ( Land, N. Time Spiral Press, 2014) and the defunct
website Hyperstition; alien subjectivities and artificial intelligences are discussed widely at Xenosystems
(xenosystems.net) and Urban Future (ufblog.net)
79 Capitalism is a recurring theme in Land's work. Perhaps the best depiction of its outsideness is found in
'Meltdown' in Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011)
80 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p.456
45
Anti-anthropocentric philosophy therefore aims to reduce the importance of subjectivity and
the role of the Cartesian 'I am' in our understanding of the world. Mackey states that this
project of entirely removing the subject is, of course, paradoxical in any philosophical system:
Mackay: This is a thing which Land doesn't just remove as an option, he very
deliberately abjures it. For Land there is no agency. There is a paradox – there is a
strange expression of subjectivity which his project seeks to practically erase … the
aim of his project is towards the obliteration of this problematic thing. It is selfrefuting to some extent as he wants to close this void or incision into the world.81
However, the present thesis does not aim to finally strip subjectivity from Land's
philosophical position. Its aim rather is to show how certain tendencies in philosophy
introduce a multiplicity of anthropocentric concepts which are situated in relation to each
other. By stressing the psychoanalytic and the theory of desiring-production it by-passes the
need to concentrate on the contents of subjectivity. Essentially, it will claim that an idea
should not be contrasted to another idea – in Landian terms, the inside interrogating itself;
instead an idea must be tested by reality – we must look to the outside and check its effects
and productions. This outside is reminiscent of Bataille's base matter:
In order to differentiate between the real correlate of the object, or epistemologically
determined real substance, and the unconditioned unknown, Bataille does not refer
merely to matter, but to base matter; a materiality so alien to the epistemological
framework that it is utterly without dependence upon the form of the object (the
thing).82
Rather than the correlate of the object of perception, base matter is a flow of becoming which
surpasses the anthropocentric perspective; it is a force of production. By investigating base
matter which cannot be 'perceived', we escape the anthropocentric prejudices of the 'monkey
81 Mackey, R. in a comment at Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College:
London, 14 September 2010) ( available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-raybrassier/ )
82 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 169
46
trap' which attempts to maintain humanity in 'level 1': “The Monkey Trap is an ‘intelligence
equilibrium’ […] My problem — ‘equilibrium’ and ‘trap’ have almost identical meaning.”83
Ultimately Land aims to maximise intelligence – defined as the differentiation of base matter
and the capability of base matter to become further differentiated – a process which, as
Chapter 5 shall show, base matter automatically tends towards, if cut free of the constraints
imposed on it by anthropic tendencies towards conservatism.
Anti-Anthropocentricism and Anti-Academism
Land's reading of the history of philosophy is of a series of repressions in which irruptions of
outsideness – a means of escape from the prison of the anthropocentric belief that our ideas
about the world are true representations of the world – are always suppressed by the desire of
philosophers, and humanity in general, to guarantee that the world is as it appears to us.
Another noted reader of Deleuze, John Protevi, also notes this tendency in the history of
philosophy: “[A] historical figure... does not grasp, or backs away from, the radical
implications of what he has written in a "furtive and explosive moment"”.84 The story that I
shall trace of the interplay between irruption and recapture of the outsideness radical
psychoanalysis posits can therefore be situated in the context of this wider metaphysical
tendency. This tension between inside and outside can be seen in the commentary about
Deleuze's materialist conception of desiring production, which provides the foundation of
Land's 'libidinal materialism', and his sustained attack on anthropocentric trends in
contemporary philosophy.85 Though Deleuze took a step back from the radically anti-humanist
consequences of his theories, Land does not, and proposes that we should follow them to their
ends, accelerating the removal of anthropocentricism from thought.86 To do this, we should
therefore take every opportunity to open up the 'inside' to invasion by the 'outside'. Land's use
83 Land, N. at Xenosystems, 2013 (admin Reply: September 2nd, 2013 at 8:09 am at
http://www.xenosystems.net/the-monkey-trap/)
84 Protevi, J. Coursework Materials (Protevi.com, 2007) ( available at www.protevi.ocm/john/DG )
85 This range of interpretations of Deleuze will be considered in depth in Chapter 3.
86 The 'retreat' made by Deleuze and Guattari after they assessed the initial impact of Anti-Oedipus is described
in 'Making it With Death' in Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp.
277-287
47
of the anti-anthropic outsideness of drive theory has many aspects: it strips ideational content
from the genesis of desire; it demonstrates an irrationality in the subject-driven conception of
the decision making process; and it relegates consciousness temporally to the status of an
after-effect of the unconscious process. The present thesis posits that the overall tendency of
Land's radical drive theory is to further move the intentionality of desire from its traditional
anthropocentric conception as being a capacity of the Cartesian subject, thereby dethroning
the conscious self as the master of its own wants and the site of the subject's interaction with
the world (see figure 3 below).
Figure 3: Desire is no longer a property of the subject.
Despite the growing interest in this radical tendency of anti-anthropocentric metaphysics as a
48
philosophical position, there has not been a corresponding shift in societal norms and praxes.
This, again, seems to be because of the tendency for such radicality to be captured by
conservatism. If one is to take this position of Land's libidinal materialism,
anthropocentricism must be regarded as a philosophical trap, a backsliding towards the pit of
“vulgarities”.87 Philosophy, insofar as many of its central questions remain unresolved (and
are unresolvable) is a series of dichotomies between opposed concepts. For Land, if we are to
avoid “[siding] with cages” we must take up fixed positions on the side of antianthropomorphism, and rigorously defend them from recapture by the partisans of the
idealism and humanism.88 One of Land's core claims is that the academy works against
radical philosophy, trying to neuter its revelations and seal up the 'wound' which it opens. As
such, 'outside' philosophy cannot enter into a debate with established philosophy – academia –
but must model its interaction as an insurrection or assault:
[F]or the university considers its other to be incompetent, whilst the part of this
other—admittedly a very small part—that has seized and learnt to manipulate the
weaponry of philosophical strife, considers the voice of the university to be
irremediably tainted by servility. 89
Obviously the academy is Janus-faced in one respect because its members can be both the
instigators of the breach or irruption of the outside, but then also the force which seals it. And
as neither is necessarily more powerful than the other, it is the combination of both which
creates the disfigured and contradictory positions which are studded throughout philosophy.
In this reading Land again follows Deleuze:
Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche develop the opposition between the private thinker,
the thinker-comet and bearer of repetition, and the public professor and doctor of law,
whose second-hand discourse proceeds by mediation and finds its moralizing source in
the generality of concepts (cf. Kierkegaard against Hegel, Nietzsche against Kant and
Hegel…).90
87 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. xx
88 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. xx
89 Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.11
90 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition Trans. Paul Patton (UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) p. 8
49
I shall consider two movements of recapture which the academy utilises, and consider how
they operate to neuter the more radically anti-anthropocentric theories which emerge. The first
action is conducted by the philosophers who open the breach themselves. In both Freud and
Lacan this can be seen in the division between their critical and clinical work. As Evans
states: “Lacan’s backsliding shows a curious parallel with Freud’s own intellectual journey”.91
In the case of Lyotard and Deleuze, both philosophers step back from their most radically
anti-anthropocentric positions and publish later works which shy away from the consequences
of the breaches they initially made.92 The second recapture is conducted by the later
interpreters of a philosopher. Recent developments in speculative realism provides a model
through which we can view this mechanism. Firstly, the irruption of the new is adopted by
experimental art, and becomes a matter of praxis rather than theory. Its influence is then
apparent in the work of avant-garde scholars across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines.
These recapitulations tend to use 'stripped down' versions of its concepts and models which
are used as tools, maps or components in a practice which is a bricolage. The antianthropomorphism which permeates the initial philosophical irruption is lost as humanities
and other subject-centred disciplines relate its conclusions to their own epistemological
assumptions.
91 Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp. 38-55. Available online
at ( http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
92 In the case of Deleuze, Land situates this backsliding as being between the publication of Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus. See Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York; Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 278,
280.
A discussion can be found in Fascist lines of the tokkotai by Michelsen, N. in Deleuze & Fascism: Security:
War: Aesthetics Ed. B. Evans, J. Reid (UK: Routledge, 2013) pp. 158 - 163
50
Chapter 2. Freud: the Constitution of the Unconscious
This genealogy begins by examining the texts of Freud, as psychoanalysis begins with his
works. They represent a distinctive point at which its lexicon is fixed and the discipline
emerges as an independent field of study. However, as a genealogy this is more than a simple
time-line or evolutionary account of the development of psychoanalysis. Though it is true that
psychoanalysis has its own cladistics and subsequent psychoanalytical theories must be
contextualised to the extent to which they are plesiomorphic or apomorphic in relation to the
common ancestor which is Freudianism, the discipline cannot be contextualised as a liner
progression towards a final 'truth'. In this respect it mirrors philosophy proper, whose central
debates have never been decisively resolved in favour of one position or another, and whose
history is of the cyclical return of concepts back to fashion.93 Similarly, in psychoanalysis this
conflict over its concepts is always-already there, and happens in real time as Freud makes his
discoveries and the clinical, philosophical and socio-political actors of the time battle to
define the effects of the operation of the new unconscious. In the context of philosophy's
interest in the discipline, the materialist–idealist schism, as outlined in the introduction, preexists psychoanalysis, and its partisans have read the unconscious – as the present thesis
examines – from the perspective of their respective camps. The genealogical method deployed
here will allow consideration of why these readings persist as well as the structure of these
objections, and is an essential prelude to the readings of Deleuze and Guattari's critique of
Freudianism presented in Chapter 3.
The passage through Freud's psychoanalytic work is fraught with sources of complexity and I
shall begin by noting some of the methodological problems which arise for interpreters of
Freud's body of work. Three of the most significant problems are: (1) the fragmentary nature
of the work. The Standard Edition is chronological rather than thematic, and one is forced to
jump between texts to explain Freud's thoughts, rather than be able to follow a definitive line
of inquiry. This is closely related to (2) the tendency of psychoanalytic concepts to be only
explicable in relation to other psychoanalytic concepts. This leads to the problem of having to
93 An apt example of this is the rise of speculative realism, as described in the Introduction.
51
occasionally introduce new terms to my analysis which will only be explored in the fullest
manner at a later point, along with the vexed question of picking a point at which to start. In
response to this question, I have chosen to begin with Freud's 'discovery' of the unconscious
in his analysis of neurosis, and his early analysis of the dreamwork, as this allows the crucial
notion of censorship – which defines the boundary between conscious and unconscious - to
be explored. Finally, (3) the polemical nature of interpretation of Freud's texts means that a
'neutral' reading is almost impossible to offer. As this whole thesis follows the development
and interpretation of Freud's models of the unconscious and its processes, I have chosen to use
secondary texts which are considered canonical interpretations of Freud, rather than to
consider some of the most trenchant or polarised critiques of his work when citing
authoritative readings of his work. Similarly, wherever possible, I shall refer directly to
Freud's words rather than recapitulations of it.
Freud’s decisive contribution to psychology and philosophy was his formulation and
explication of the first modern theory of the unconscious.94 Just as ‘modern’ philosophy dates
from the Cartesian exposition of the philosophical subject, psychoanalysis – and, arguably,
philosophical post-modernity – begin with Freud’s decentering of this subject, undercutting its
supposed foundation in universal reason by exposing the ‘pit’ of the unconscious upon which
it uncertainly rests. I will begin with a description of this discovery in Studies in Hysteria
(1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).95 In these early works Freud introduces the
entities and processes which populate the unconscious and begins to demonstrate how their
effects can be observed. I shall then turn to the spatial elaboration of these concepts in Freud's
later depictions of the unconscious. These models of the psychical system are outlined in the
‘metapsychological’ papers Freud published during and after the Great War; the period 1914 –
1923. The most important are: Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), The Unconscious
94 A historical account of Freud's importance can be found in Ellenberger, H. The Discovery of the
Unconscious (London: Fontana, 1994) pp. 418-571
95 As Freud's works are systematised in the standard edition by year of publication, I have included the date of
each of his works' publication in German to provide a sense of the geological development of his thought, but
also to allow the reader to identify their place in the Standard Edition. All references are to the Standard Edition
edited by Smith, I. which is available online under a free licence. All of Freud's texts referenced here can be
found in that volume.
52
(1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and The Ego and the Id (1923). The overall
structure of this chapter is a division into three stages: a discussion of populations in the
unconscious, then of topographies, and then finally processes in the unconscious. The most
important stage is this final depiction of the processes of the unconscious as drives, as drive
theory is the crucial concept in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, however, the preceding stages are
essential to defining how the drive-economy can be conceptualised.
This chapter aims to introduce the language of psychoanalysis which will be deployed by
Land in his description of 'machinic-desire' (“drives are the functions of nomadic cybernetic
systems, not instincts but simulated instincts, artificial instincts”), but will also consider the
tension between anthropocentricism and anti-anthropocentricism in Freud's own thought.96 If
psychoanalysis has the quality of being able to bypass the anthropocentricism of metaphysics
it must be possible to read Freud's systematisation of the unconscious as formal and
productive rather than idealist. This tension between anti and pro-anthropocentric positions
can be seen in two separate lexical registers in Freud’s work which have limited points of
interaction. When dealing with a concrete case of mental illness in applied psychoanalysis,
Freud adopts a terminology which describes the mental processes of the patient in terms of the
ideas which they carry and the changes in the state of these ideas. These state changes tend to
be described abruptly rather than gradually, and as a change in the location or the quality of
the information contained in the idea. They therefore relate to an idealist philosophy as their
currency is very much the comparison of a set of mental intuitions or ideas within the patient's
psyche, and it operates as an attempt to calculate and then influence the extent to which they
correspond in their unconscious and conscious apparatus. The second register is used when
Freud discusses the evolution of mental illness in the patient, or begins to move from single,
observed cases to a more general set of rules which describe universal processes in the
psyche. When Freud refers to the change of the organism over time and the formation of
complexes, and when he constructs a theory of psychoanalysis; the language of this change is
one of energeticism: of force, pulsion or drive. As these changes correspond to quantity and
force rather than of idea, they are not idealist, but are materialist. Though they may become
ideas, when in the unconscious they are not yet so, and it is unhelpful to conceptualise them
as such at this point. A further complication to universal understanding of Freud is that a third
set of terms is occasionally used to describe the processes of the psyche. When Freud makes
96 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 330
53
the transition between these two lexicons described above, he tends to use the language of
structural biology as his bridge. Freud refers to networks, patterns and connections,
particularly referring to neuronal and nerve connections within the body. Freud is not unaware
of this problematic series of shifts in description between terminologies in his work – in The
Unconscious (1915), he states his wish to see them unified in one single vocabulary, a
metapsychology:
We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our
account of psychical phenomena. Besides the dynamic and topographical points of
view, we have adopted the economic one. This endeavours to follow the vicissitudes
of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their
magnitude.
It will not be unreasonable to give a specific name to this whole way of regarding our
subject matter, for it is the consummation of psycho-analytic research. I propose that
when we have succeeded in describing a process in its dynamic, topographical and
economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychological presentation. We must
say at once that in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at
which we succeed in this.97
Yet despite the obvious desirability of a complete metapsychological model, there are few
points (as he acknowledges) at which Freud managed to fully describe both psychical
operations and the observed manifestations of the complex in the subject in this way. Instead,
we must interpret different parts of Freudian metapsychological theory according to the
languages and processes specific to the unique register of the model Freud is working within
(see Table 2 below).
Table 2: Key processes in Freud's three hypotheses
Economic Hypothesis
Dynamic Hypothesis
Topographical Hypothesis
97 Freud, S. The Unconscious from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p.3004
54
Drive
Censor / Repression
Ego
Desire
Metaphor / Metonymy
Id
Instinct
Dreamwork
Super Ego
This chapter shall describe the three hypotheses of the unconscious' operation depicted in
table 2 and consider the extent to which they are anti-anthropocentric, moving from his early
work on hysteria through to his mature depictions of the drive. I shall argue that the key
criterion for determining anthropomorphism in Freud's thought is the extent to which the
unconscious is equivalent to consciousness; to which its productions are qualitatively the
same as consciousness (that they are ideas). Whilst there is scope to question the radicalness
of some of Freud's earlier work by looking at the question of depth – the idea that the
unconscious is qualitatively the same as consciousness, but is merely located in a 'deeper',
inaccessible area – I shall show that in his later work there is a distinctly anti-anthropocentric
tendency which is caused by the separation of two economies on the primary and secondary
process: those of cathected and tonic energy. Establishing the model of the unconscious found
in The Unconscious is vital for the present thesis as it forms the basis of Deleuze and
Guattari's conception of the unconscious:
Freud conceives the unconscious in three interrelated ways: dynamically,
topographically and economically. However, it was not until his 1915 paper 'The
Unconscious' that he brought these strands together in a systematic way. This same
paper is credited by Deleuze and Guattari with the discovery of 'desiring-production',
which as will become clear in what follows is the essential conceptual bedrock of their
position.98
Discovery and Populations
As stated above, vacillation between lexical registers is nearly universal in Freud’s work. We
can observe it in the earliest of Freud’s texts, those inspired by his work on hysterical
98 Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2008) p. 27
55
patients.99 The fundamental process responsible for the hysteric’s condition was hypothesised
to be the repression of a fact which would be so damaging to the patient’s sense of self (the
ego) that the mental apparatus could not allow it to become known to the conscious subject.
In The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894), Freud sketches a tripartite model of this
mechanism of hysteria:
1. An idea is loaded with such a level of ‘effect’ that it becomes dangerous to the psyche.
2. A splitting of the idea from its current associative connotations takes place, and the
idea is cut loose of its previous associative links in the psyche.
3. Once it has been cut-off the level of ‘charge’ in the psyche must be dissipated by other
means. If no stable formation can be found within ‘normality’, it manifests itself as
hysteria.100
Even in this early work of Freudian psychoanalysis, we can see the split in the Freudian
system between the economic description of the cause of illness and the non-economic
description of the nature of the symptoms. The first proposition begins in in one register with
a “sum of excitation” which is “put to work”, leaning on economic terminology; yet, when
talking about the nature of the patient’s changed mental state, Freud talks about dislodged and
transposed terms, a spatial description.101 Freud’s narrative begins with an ‘economic’
observation about excess energy, but the conclusion he derives from this hypothesis is the
existence of a ‘knowing’ force of censorship which, understanding the potential of ideas to be
dangerous, separates them along the binary divisions of safe/harmful, good/bad, allowed/not
allowed, and finally candidates for the conscious thought/those which are solely unconscious.
99 The most important of which are: A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism (1892), The NeuroPsychoses of Defence (1894), and Studies on Hysteria (1895)
100 These stages surmises Freud's depiction in Freud, S. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) from Complete
Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf )
pp. 304 - 306
101 (a) Freud, S. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online
text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 304
(b) Freud, S. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 309
56
This duality is repeated in the second stage of the argument. As soon as ‘the idea is separated
from its affect’, Freud changes his register from the economic to one of the qualities of
information.102 Again, the growth of the complex is economic, yet the force of the censor is
spatial, moving ideas away from consciousness. In the conclusion of The Neuro-Psychoses of
Defence, Freud refers to “a quantity... which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement
and discharge, and which is spread over the memory traces of ideas” here he reverts to a
'drive' theory, which is explained in terms of the economic hypothesis.103 So long as the
psyche is working correctly, economic terminology is sufficient for Freud. But as soon as
there is a breakdown in the system and Freud has to relate the transformation of healthy ideas
into unhealthy ones, or vice versa, Freud reverts to the linguistic register. The notions of ‘the
censor’ and ‘repression’, these two forces which are concerned with the evaluation of subconscious ideas have no definitive description in Freud's economic vocabulary at this stage.
Freud’s alternate use of these two registers is consistent with his desire to make
psychoanalysis both a new science (necessitating pseudo-scientific terminology), and a new
practice of treatment (speaking to the layman). Rather than resolving these contradictions
definitively, Freud pragmatically prioritises the development of the psychoanalytic movement
above the quest for a unified vocabulary of the analyst.
Despite this lack of meta-theoretical resolution, it is possible to delineate the point at which
Freud's work passes towards anti-anthropocentricism. Freud's work on hysteria is subject
centred because it is patient centred; because it focuses on a complex which must be resolved
by the psychoanalyst.104 Freud's major discovery in relation to treatment was that the talking
cure was possible if the underlying mechanism of repression could be demonstrated to the
patient. Yet if this was the extent of Freud's contribution to medicine, there would be no scope
for a thesis to dissect his anti-anthropocentric tendencies, as the talking cure remains in the
anthropocentric domain of the manipulation of ideas. It is Freud's later study of the
102
Freud, S. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online
text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 307
103
Freud, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (1894) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 314
104
See 'Complex' in Laplanche and Pontails, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993)
pp.73-74
57
unconscious' processes which distances psychoanalysis from idealism. The conception of the
unconscious as an independent mechanism undercuts the metaphysical assumption of a
human subject as the centre of volition and decision making, instead moving agency to a
bizarre, alien zone. Freud's subsequent work investigates this 'other place' and the way in
which it operates, and as his concerns become more abstract and more coldly theoretical, he
shows the unconscious as being nothing like the conscious system, and that some of its
contents are nothing like thoughts.105
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud introduces the processes of the 'dreamwork'
which describes how the unconscious can manipulate and change its content. The processes of
the dreamwork were used by Freud to create a more advanced model of the workings of the
psyche than the binary notion of repression in hysteria. Hysteria was treated by identifying a
symptom which was often starkly apparent, and therefore provided many relatively simple
cases, however, in certain cases the true nature of the repressed had been so thoroughly
hidden by the operation of the unconscious that Freud required a much more detailed study of
the unconscious' mechanism.106 Freud believed the 'royal road to the unconscious' was found
in dreams which, as they are not so determined by sensoral stimuli as wakefulness is, are a
combination of the conscious and unconscious impulses of the psyche. Freud's clinical use of
the dreamwork is as a tool which allows him to engage in a more detailed investigation of the
complex in a patient. Yet the true importance of the dreamwork is that it begins to consider
the simplest transformational mechanisms and processes which exist in the unconscious – and
they operate not only in dreams as an exemplar but, as Freud shows, in its quotidian, waking
operation as well.107
The radical strangeness of the unconscious, the other place, provides the first formulation of
105
A recurring metaphor in the present thesis is Freud's description of the unconsciousness as 'eine andere
Schauplatz' (an-other place), which captures the strangeness and qualitative difference of its operation.
106
See 'Symptom-Formation' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:
Karnac, 1993)
107
Freud elaborates the fact that the functions of the unconscious are the same in the complex as in daily
life in his further investigation of parapraxes and jokes (See Freud: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1904) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)).
58
Freud's topographical model, which distinguishes between a primary process
(Primärvorgang) at the root of the unconscious, and a secondary process (Sekundärvorgang)
which revises the products of the primary process as they make their way towards
consciousness. This topographical model is characterised by its depth - at the deepest level,
the primary process, we have the alien unconscious; at the shallowest we have fully formed
'ideas' available to consciousness. In relation to anthropocentricism, the question is where is
the 'work' of the dreamwork done? The higher up it is done, the more idea-like its productions
are, and the more like conscious thought it is.
Freud uses the dreamwork to depict this work of the unconscious as it tries to evade the
censor, and its operations only make sense when we remember that there is a force of
repression – as previously identified in hysterics – which the unconscious is trying to work
around. To effect this it needs to transform that which is repressed into something which is
not, but which can do the work of the repressed, which is to allow the achievement of the
desired cathexis.108 For this process to be possible, there must be an associative arrangement
in the psyche, through which the unconscious can re-route a charge of affect. It is along these
associative lines that energy shall pass as it attempts to avoid repression by the censor.109
The first stages of the dreamwork are condensation and displacement. Freud assigns these
processes to the domain of the primary process, the pure unconscious. Processes which are
revisions to this first stage of the dreamwork take place in the higher, secondary processes,
therefore these two are the basic operations of the dreamwork. Condensation (Verdichtung) is
108
In Freud's original German the term used is Besetzung, which is translated by Strachey as cathexis but
can also be rendered as occupation, charge or investment of energy captures the operation of the unconscious
according to economical and mechanical metaphors. The unconscious operates as a system whose role is to
distribute these charges or effects according to its internal rules. A discussion can be found in 'Cathexis' in
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J., The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993)
109
This is consistent with Moretti's depiction that “The 'formal' conciliation is not the means, the simple
medium of pleasure: it is its end, its true and only substance. The pleasure does not lie in having 'slackened'
the grip of the censorship a little, but in having redrawn with precision the spheres of influence of the various
psychic forces.” This description, with its terminology of spheres of influence is congruent with the
definition of cathexis above. Moretti, A. Signs taken for Wonders ( London: Verso, 2005) p. 39.
59
the combination of several different ideas into one single idea.110 It is one of the most
fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis, as it describes the most basic manipulations of
intensity or information in the psyche. The idea presented after condensation is singular, but
represents a number of intensities. Laplanche states that the condensed idea is a nodal point
which represents a common factor held by two separate chains of conjoined ideas.111 The
common term in these different associative chains takes over from all of the other terms
represented by the latent content of the dream, and presents itself in their place as the manifest
content of the dream. In the case where the dream's latent content is a picnic and a trip to
Paris, the manifest presentation after condensation might be a Brie (see Figure 4 below).
Figure 4: Condensation: the overlapping part of the chain 'Picnic' and the chain 'Paris' is
'Brie'.
The status of the components of the dreamwork are contested by the philosophers considered
in this genealogy. Their exact nature is one of the key questions of the present thesis, as the
extent to which they are 'ideas' or 'like ideas' is the key measure of the extent of their
anthropocentricism. In The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis Danon-Boileau
stresses that a product of condensation “is not a chimera”; not a composite image of its
110
See 'Dream-Work' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993)
111
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p.81; see also
Mitchell, M. and Black, S. Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought, (USA: Basic
Books, 1995) p. 9
60
components, but is one single term which stands for all of the others.112 This reading is
contested by Lyotard in 'The Dream Work Does Not Think', his rejoinder to Lacan's
subsumption of the dreamwork as a quasi-linguistic process.113 For Lyotard condensation does
not happen to discourse (signifying chains and language) but instead to figures (images),
which are, by their nature, composites in which aspects of the original elements can be
determined (I shall consider Lyotard's depiction of the dreamwork at length in Chapter 3).
Condensation's effects can be seen in Freud's analysis of the case of Little Hans in Analysis of
a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909). That there are chimeric figures in dreams is
demonstrated when he likens the blackness around the mouth of Hans' dream horses to a
moustache; this being a facial feature of his father. This shows that a product of condensation
can escape its repression by the censor if the new investment is sufficiently unlike the latent
content which creates it. Displacement (Verschiebung) works in a similar way, enabling an
idea to escape the censor. In the case of displacement a whole chain of investments are lifted
from their association with the repressed concept and are reattached to a different concept.114
An example of displacement would be the animal fears of Little Hans or the Wolf Man.115
Freud hypothesises that in the case of Hans, it is his fear of castration by his father which has
been displaced onto the image of being bitten by a horse. Hans has no conscious idea of his
fear of the father, because the only idea which is allowed to be presented to him when
unpleasure about the prospect of castration is triggered in the primary process is a secondary
cathexis of energy into the concept of 'horse'. While quite effective as a way of permitting the
father to be seen without triggering the displeasure which he would otherwise cause, the
unfortunate side effect of this is a traumatic experience at a time where it would not be
expected, that is, seeing the representation of a horse (be it in dreams or in waking-thought).
Censorship operates on the border between the primary and secondary processes of the
112
'Condensation' in Ed. de Mijola, A. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (USA: Macmillan,
2005)
113
Lyotard, J.F. 'The Dream Work Does Not Think'. Trans. Lydon, M. in Ed. Benjamin The Lyotard Reader
and Guide (Oxford UK: Blackwell,1989)
114
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) pp. 121-123
115
The 'Wolf Man' case is described in Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918)
61
psyche. Neither condensation or displacement are part of the censor's work. These two
processes are simply the agents which work on an idea in such a way that it can bypass the
censor. The productions of the primary process, as I have stated, are not yet like conscious
ideas in their nature. Before the product of the dreamwork can become known to the subject,
it must be worked over by pre-conscious processes so that it can be presented in a form which
is recognisable to the subject. The product of the primary process must be represented in
images before it can become the content of a dream and the stock of images available for this
presentation is derived from mnemonic traces in the primary process – particularly those
associated with wishful impulses – and recent memories, usually from the day preceding the
dream.116 Transference of the ideas which are highly cathected in the primary process can take
the form of a replacement by older, childhood memories, but the dreamwork will use more
recent memories if there is no longer a mnemonic trace available of the original object of an
impulse of the primary process. This leads to an additional working over of the content of the
dream, replacing one picture-presentation with another. Laplanche's description is that: “For
example, the replacement of the term of ‘aristocrat’ by that of ‘highly placed’– which can be
represented by a high tower.”117 Even after considerations of representation have been taken
into account, one last process is involved in creating the final manifest content of the dream in
a form which can be read. This final process, secondary revision (Sekundäre Bearbeitung), is
located on the boundary between the pre–conscious and conscious areas of the psyche.
Secondary revision is concerned with taking the dream images - which are at this point
fragmentary and incoherent – and presenting them in a form which can be narrated. Freud
likens it to an intellectual function, taking a series of images from the dream and providing an
explanation of the reasons behind their transition into one another where disjunctions would
otherwise exist. This means that aspects of the dream are added which have nothing to do
with the latent content of the dream. They are merely added to the dreamer's recollection so
that the series of images which have been experienced in the dream can be related in
language.
Assessing the anthropomorphism of the dreamwork requires a clarification of Freud's
conception of the primary and secondary processes. If the primary and secondary processes
operate in the same way, and the first is simply deeper or antecedent to the latter there is less
116
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) pp. 247-249
117
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p.389
62
support for a radically anti-anthropocentric reading of Freud. The dreamwork may seem to be
a reworking of the primary process' wishes which are equivalent to the secondary process'
thoughts, though they operate below the level of consciousness and are only apparent in their
form as its productions. Yet if the unconscious is like consciousness, and is a domain of ideas,
we might ask why censorship is necessary, and question why are its productions suppressed,
unknown and opaque?
The censor is the gatekeeper between what is repressed and what is not in the psyche. It
therefore exists at a boundary between different parts of the unconscious, differentiating that
which cannot become conscious and that which can, and is both a borderline and an active
agent on that borderline which interacts with unconscious productions. For some thoughts the
censor is unproblematic, and they simply pass through the border (see path '1' in figure 5
below), yet others are blocked at the threshold by censorial entity (see path '2' in figure 5
below). The demonstrated existence of the censorship in Studies in Hysteria (1895) leads to
two questions about its role in the psyche: the first is the question of its 'depth' and essentially
asks 'to what extent are the areas immediately above and below it like ideas'? The second is
about its formal operation and how that which is and that which is not censored is determined.
Figure 5: The censor as a barrier
The censor's traditional position is between the unconscious and conscious thought, and its
role is to prevent harmful content passing to the conscious system. This is how it was
conceptualised in the Studies on Hysteria (1895) as being the barrier which the talking cure
needed to bypass (see figure 5 above). However, we have already seen that Freud's theoretical
63
models of the unconscious go beyond this simple (Un)conscious binary. The strand of Freud’s
thought currently being examined is the one which runs from his early analysis of hysteria,
through his studies on paraphrases, and on to his work on dreams.118 The terminus of this
thought is the mature tripartite topographical model as outlined in The Ego and the Id.
Freud’s goal is to trace the process by which an idea in the unconscious can be repressed from
consciousness and, vice versa; how a conscious act's ordinary motivation in the unconscious
can be inferred from its manifest content in the patient’s actions. These operations traverse the
barrier between conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche in opposite directions, but
their paths are traced through the same mechanism, that of repression, carried out under the
agency of the censor. In hysteria there is always an idea which cannot be allowed to come to
consciousness. If doing so, it would be so contrary to the ego-ideal of the patient; it would
catastrophically unbalance the psyche. Yet this description in terms of the dynamic model
appears problematic, as the patient is already in possession of knowledge about how this
unconscious idea might affect the conscious psyche; it is as if the psychical system works ‘out
of time’, testing the idea’s future effects before rejecting it.119 An answer is that the repression
is the exhibition of a complex and has been laid down over time, and as such, the complex
obscures the conditions of its genesis. In this model, rather than operating on each case and in
each instance, the censor begins to subdue impulses which are contrary to the ego-ideal over
time, and therefore slowly effaces undesirable production. Each new instance of the thing to
be repressed does not lead to a new calculation, but is responded to by censorship by
following an established pattern. This would again collapse the role of the censor into a
topographical role, as it determines the position of the psyche's contents rather than actively
sorting them.
In the case of parapraxes Freud produces further evidence of accidental actions escaping
repression, thereby showing that the censor does not have this immediate efficaciousness, and
118
This period extended from his earliest woks to the pre-war period (circa 1910), and is characterised by
Freud's focus on processes rather than topologies and models.
119
In Chapter 2 I shall show that this future testing, in the form of the question 'che vuoi?', characterises
the Lacanian model of the unconscious.
64
the ability to totally subdue an unwanted association in its first instance.120 Yet in the case of a
dream, the repression is of a wished for idea.121 In most cases, this wish is not as destructive to
the ego-ideal of the patient as a hysteric's suppressed idea. Therefore in this instance, the
repression must take place along different lines. This distinction between the repressed
content of the dream and repression in a clinical case is also problematic, as Freud considers
these two operations as parts of the same rule of psychical life. Freud moves seamlessly from
hysteria, and then to dreams, and then finally to general mental operations. Quotidian
operations of the psyche are inferred equally from instances in which the psyche has broken
down, in the ill patient, or when the subject sleeps:
Repression – relaxation of the censorship – the formation of a compromise, this is the
fundamental pattern for the generation not only of dreams, but of many other
psychopathological structures; and in the later cases too we may observe that the
formation of compromises is accompanied by processes of condensation and
displacement and by the employment of superficial associations, which we have
become familiar with from the dream-work.122
The various psychical processes listed above provide evidence of the censor’s existence
insofar as there is something being repressed, and that this process of repression requires
some form of agent. At this stage however we have no definitive picture of the operation of
the censor, beyond a sense that it is positioned somewhere in the psyche, and is preventing the
content of the unconscious from rising any further on the route towards conscious perception
(see figure 6 below).
120
Parapraxes – unwilled or accidental actions – are described by Freud in The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1904)
121
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) pp. 481-483
122
Freud, S. On Dreams (1901) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 1089
65
Figure 6: Positions of the censor
In the above figure, the transition between stages 1 – 3 show the censor rising through the
boundary levels. Although '1' may appear to be the least anthropocentric position, in which the
censor is submerged in the (unknowable) unconscious, so long as there is one quality of
information in the unconscious which rises up through levels of intelligibility, there is no
radical outsideness or anti-anthropocentricism in this model. Ultimately, no matter where we
place the boundary of censorship between the processes of the unconscious, preconscious and
conscious systems (respectively Ucs, Pcs and Cs), the distinction which the topographical
model allows us to make is one of degree rather than type and leads to an anthropocentricising
of the unconsciousness.123 This is because it merely pushes the contents of the unconscious
away from the conscious thought, rather than show how it is unlike it. It is like a coffee
plunger: though it forms a barrier, the content and quality of the liquid both above and below
it is the same. For the 'other place' of the unconscious to be truly anti-anthropocentric, it must
123
The abbreviations Ucs, Pcs and Cs are used extensively by Freud when discussing topographies of the
unconscious. These abbreviations are also used here when discussing topographies.
66
be more than an 'unknown place'.
To escape an anthropomorphisation of the censorship regime, we must return to the primary
process / secondary process distinction and reassert the explanatory primacy of the economic
hypothesis regarding the contents of the psyche. For Freud, the system of repression in the
psyche is (at least) dualistic.124 This is because there are two separate economic systems in the
unconscious, and two distinct charges or affects which they individually manipulate. The
instinctual impulse in system Ucs remains in system Ucs – in this case of ‘primal repression’
it is repulsed by the censorial forces of the Pcs. The energy in system Ucs therefore also
remains in system Ucs.125 It cannot pass through to a higher level of the psyche, so must
remain in purely unconscious formations. It is this incompatibility between the two systems,
like the gap in Enschede Station between the German and Dutch rail systems, which means
that the products of the system Ucs are radically different to those of the Pcs and Cs.
Unconscious psychical energy is ‘unbound’: it can rapidly switch between different
instinctual impulses in system Ucs, presumably when there is a stimulus from within the
organism (need) or from without (opportunity). A second energetic is at play in system Pcs,
where energy is tonically bound in fixed patterns. As system Pcs is in an area of the psyche
which is capable of holding 'ideas', these patterns correspond to the conjunctions and relations
between these ideas in the psyche. They are grooved by memory and association, tying
together ideas which occur simultaneously, or which are related to each other. These links in
Pcs are not timeless and immortal like the instinctual impulses in Ucs but instead are
permanently amended in secondary repressions when they break the limits of the censorship:
Our hypothesis is that in our mental apparatus there are two thought-constructing
agencies, of which the second enjoys the privilege of having free access to
124
In The Unconscious Freud notes that three levels of censorship may exist. Freud, The Unconscious
(1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3014
125
And it is this energetic investment which characterises the operation of the unconscious: “In the Ucs
there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength”. Freud, The Unconscious (1915) from
Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3009
67
consciousness for its products whereas the activity of the first is in itself unconscious
and can only reach consciousness by way of the second. On the frontier between the
two agencies, where the first passes over to the second, there is a censorship, which
only allows what is agreeable to it to pass through and holds back everything else.
According to our definition, then, what is rejected by the censorship is in a state of
repression.126
Though both are agencies are described by Freud as 'thought constructing' this does not
commit either to being equivalent to 'thoughts' any more than a pile of wood is a finished
cabin. The important distinction in the text above is between the two systems – one of which
can communicate with ideas and consciousness and one cannot, unless it passes by this area.
The primary repression is a simple economic action, an anticathexis repressing the sexual
impulse, yet this is followed by a secondary repression which operates by association. The
substituted idea which the psyche attempts to protect itself with – using it as a shield against
the object of the primary repression – is the nearest association which the psyche can make to
the repressed, without being so close to it that it also falls foul of the censor.127 Freud gives the
example of animal fear being a displaced fear of the father – perhaps ‘uncle fear’ would be
closer as an idea to ‘father fear’, yet this may be so close to the original thought that it would
allow an easy segue back to that which must be repressed.128 The route to this secondary idea
is the key to understanding the most basic operation of the psyche. How do we go from idea
(i) which is censored, through a string of rejected ideas from (ii) to (xvii) which are all too
close to the original idea (i), and end up with the no longer censored idea (xviii)? I shall look
at Lacan’s answer to this in the second chapter of the thesis. For Freud however, our answer is
that xviii was possible; that it proved efficacious for discharging the mobile charge in the
secondary process. Instead of asking why the idea does the work, we must ask why the work
of discharge was performable economically. The censorship is therefore an economic
126
Freud, S. On Dreams (1901) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 1089
127
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3005
128
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3005
68
apparatus because it does not consider ideas, but is a mechanism for (re)routing forces. Yet the
problem remains that in many interpretations censorship is compressed into a 'depth' model of
the psyche as the economics of the dual energetic systems of the psyche are stripped out of it.
And though this 'short' description of the psyche might be expected when Freud treats a
patient by explaining the mechanism of repression, its absence in more formal works serves to
anthropomorphise the unconscious insofar as its processes become a question of depth rather
than kind. Conversely, an energetic censorship is anti-anthropocentric because its rules are
formal rather than cognitive. As shown in figure 7 below, in the accounts which are dynamic
(3) and topographical (2) ideas are 'understood' by the censor which can therefore 'think'. This
idea of what 'thought' is in this sense shall be discussed further in chapters 4 and 5,
particularly in the former when Lyotard's claim “The Dreamwork Does Not Think” is
discussed. At this stage it is our task to follow this line of argument about the economic
hypotheses, and show that there can be an energetic description of the psychical machinery, as
this would allow the 'work' to be done by charge or cathexis, rather than idea and
understanding, as model (1) below illustrates. The path through the topographies of the
unconscious must therefore be traced as a drive or pulsion rather than the slow clarification or
formation of an idea.
69
Topographies
An anti-anthropocentric topographical model of the unconscious must emphasise that the
distinction between primary and secondary processes in the psyche caused by its economic
operation, the most important of which make the distinction between these two processes of
type and not degree. The topographical distinction therefore differentiates the primary
process, characterised by its otherness in opposition to the more 'homely' (anthropocentric)
secondary processes. In figure 8 below the difference between these contents is clear: those in
the primary process – labelled as 'the unconscious' – are mechanical and allude to forces,
whilst those above in the area 'pre-conscious' relate to ideas.
Figure 8: A topography of the process of the psyche
71
Freud's topographical theory is described in The Unconscious (1915). Freud divides the
psychical system into three areas: the Unconscious, Preconscious and Conscious; these parts
correspond to what can never become known to the subject, what may become known to the
subject, and what is known to the subject.129 The first division between these areas proceeds
from his discovery – as recounted above in the cases of Hysteria he encountered – of impulses
which were not known to consciousness: unconscious ideas. As Freud's systematisation
progressed, he also distinguished between unconscious ideas which were like those in
consciousness, and designated the area of these thoughts – potential thoughts – as the
preconscious. Conversely, those items in the unconscious which would be alien or
irreconcilable with normal thought; these are the contents of the unconscious. Freud uses the
metaphor of a building, in which the entry into the closed space from outside – consciousness,
takes place through a prescribed entrance – the preconscious.130 At this point we encounter
two essential components in Freud's topographies of the psyche, the ego and the id. The
primary role of the ego (Ich) is to inhibit the primary process (the id, (Es)).131 The subject is
the victim of a dualism in which its true desires in the id (primary process) are blocked by a
set of learned principles which, perversely, it takes to be the essence of itself, its ego (the
secondary process). Hereto this chapter has discussed the role of clinical psychoanalysis,
which is to free the subject from the tensions caused by the inherent contradictions within this
duality. We shall now move on to consider the role of philosophical psychoanalysis, which is
to disavow the notion that the secondary process – the Cartesian / Kantian subject of thinking
– is a stable ground upon which philosophical hypotheses can be built. In fact, it is the
primary process – the true origin of instincts and desire – which is the proper object of
philosophical investigation, whether it be ontological, epistemological, ethical or aesthetic.
Any interpretation which anthropomorphises the contents of the unconscious is an attempt to
129
Mitchell and Black argue that Freud's move to topographies of the unconscious is the defining moment
in psychoanalysis' evolution as a distinct theoretical discourse. Mitchell, M. and Black, S. Freud and Beyond: A
History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought, (USA: Basic Books, 1995) p. 6
130
Freud, S. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-1917) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I.,
2000 (online text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3369
131
Laplanche S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 339
72
collapse this dethroning of the subject.
The topographical model of a primary/secondary process distinction is a developmental
model. It provides a summary of the effects of drive theory and the economic model, though it
does not inform us how the economic model operates and is therefore analogous to a border,
which is is the consequence of a historical process of creation. As the secondary process
develops over time as the organism develops in early childhood, it acquires more and more
capability to damn up the excess energy of the primary process and fix it into steady
formations.132 Secondary processes: 'waking thought, attention, judgement, reasoning,
controlled action' work to repress the desires of the primary process.133 The nascent secondary
process begins by making only small modifications to the behaviour of the infant (the process
of reality testing), yet by late childhood the behaviour of the subject is wrapped up within the
learned conventions of its culture and primary instincts are dominated by the ego.134 This
restriction is necessary: for healthy psychic well-being, the secondary process must fulfil this
role of restraining the excesses of the primary process, which, unchecked, would make the
ineffective, self-destructive or socially unacceptable bids for cathexis which are demonstrated
by various mental illnesses.
Primary Process
Secondary Process
Ego
Id
Reality principle
Pleasure principle
Memories / Ideas
Drives
'Bound energy'
'Free' energy
Table 3: Opposing characteristics of the primary and secondary processes
132
Freud states that: “[P]rocesses which are only made possible by a good cathexis of the ego, and which
represent a moderation of the foregoing, are described as psychical secondary processes”. This text is not in
Smith's complete Works. It can be found in Strachey's Standard Edition: Freud, S. 'Project for a Scientific
Psychology' (1950a [1895]): Anf., 411; S.E., I, 326-27.
133
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 339
134
See 'Reality Principle' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:
Karnac, 1993) p. 379-382
73
The secondary process, though it has the censor as its agent, is not omniscient in its control
over the output of mental processes. There are still ways in which the original formations of
the primary process may escape the censor's determination and express themselves. The
passage of a blocked wish to intelligibility is a convoluted one, but a passage which
nevertheless allows some aspects of the original wish-formation to be determined after proper
analysis of the manifest content of the form in which it is finally allowed to be represented:
usually a dream, but also in jokes, verbal tics or stutters, and perversions. Freud's descriptions
of this process centre around dream analysis, but he intimates that the processes of the
dreamwork are analogous of those in waking thought. Therefore, the interpretation of dreams
is the method by which we can know how the unconscious works in its quest to realise its
desire. The form these 'quests' take is as the drive and, at this point in this chapter, having
discussed the populations and topographies of the psyche, a depiction of these dynamic
investments of desire which traverse it can now be undertaken. My concern with analysis of
the dreamwork at this point in the present thesis is that interpretation of Freud's hypotheses
about the dreamwork form the basis of not only his own conceptions of drive theory, but also
both Lacan and Lyotard's theories of desire, described in Chapters 2 and 4. For Lacan,
condensation and displacement are the key concepts in his transformation of an economic
model of the unconscious to a quasi-linguistic one. Lyotard contests this by describing the
dreamwork as a process which can plastically alter the image-figures which he proposes – in
opposition to ideas - as the true representatives of desire.
The topographical model is a map which describes the psyche positionally, but does not
provide an adequate description of the processes which operate within it. It is analogous to a
map of a glacial valley which represents the contours, and can be used as a shortcut to
navigate it, but which does not only fail to capture the essence of the formation of that
landscape under the extreme pressures of the ice floes, but gives no hint of them. To
understand the forces active in the unconscious we must build upon the economic model by
considering drive theory, which begins to depict the workings of this alien primary process
and its strange demands which are uninterested in even reality itself.135
135
The demands of the primary process are posited as being so strange and unacceptable to the secondary
process that they are regulated under the aegis of the 'reality principle'. See 'Reality Principle' in Laplanche,
S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 379-382
74
Processes: Instinct, Drive, Desire
The previous discussion of the anthropomorphism of unconscious has not solved our
uncertainly regarding the distinction between differences in position and differences of type
regarding its contents. In this section I shall offer a solution to this impasse by describing the
operations of drives in the unconscious. Drive theory traces the genesis and development of
the unconscious' productions. I propose that it is the superior model in Freudian analysis of
the psyche because drive theory provides both a description of the most elementary processes
in the unconsciousness and depicts their quotidian operation.136 The resulting 'complete'
economic hypothesis, which provides a model of the psyche based on the progression of
drives, is not as abstract as the previous models, as its scale of analysis is much smaller,
considering the micro operation of the unconscious.
Because it aims at the depiction of a series of processes, the economic model is more
technical than the cartographies of the unconsciousness described above. Untying the Gordian
knot of Freud's terminology is the first step to providing a complete definition of a drive and
its economic effects. This task is difficult because of a number of complications: firstly there
is the problem of translation, as the language of drive moves between German, French and
English capitulations. Secondly, there is also a problem of meaning, understanding how words
are used in a specifically psychoanalytic context. In the next section I shall provide a
foundation for my analysis of drive theory by considering its lexicon, defining key terms, as
well as mapping these terms on to biological and psychoanalytic mechanisms, before
considering the extent to which their use is new or conventional. It shall also prove important
for my goals in the subsequent chapter as it will provide a foundation for analysis of Lacan
and his modification of Freud's drive theory.
A key resource for any consideration of the terminology of psychoanalysis is Laplanche's
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Laplanche bridges the divide between the Freudian and
Lacanian schools and therefore offers definitions which provide reference points between the
136
Indeed, once established by Freud, drive theory becomes the “fundamental building block for all his
subsequent theorising” Mitchell, M. and Black, S. Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic
Thought, (USA: Basic Books, 1995) p. 13
75
two differing models of the unconscious. When my reading differs from Laplanche's I shall be
careful to note the sources of the alternate reading which I construct. Much of Freud's
terminology was borrowed from terms utilised in the scientific parlance of his time, and
although Freud invented several terms (such as anaclisis) or was careful to show with others
how he was using them in a specific way (e.g. repression), concerns regarding intelligibility
meant that he had to borrow the majority of his concepts from contemporary biology or
psychology.137 Instinct, Freud tell us, is “[a] conventional basic concept... somewhat obscure
but which is indispensable to us in psychology”.138 Instinct is always already tied up with the
concerns of biology, and is noted as being similar to stimulus, the automatic response of an
organism to outside conditions.139 The difference between an instinctual stimulus (figure 10
below) and a physiological stimulus (figure 9 below) is that the former derives from the
internal condition of the organism, rather than as a response to sensations caused by external
factors.140 In almost all cases, a motor response is sufficient to relive the organism of a
physiological stimulus. Though this motion is found in an organism as a reflex, it is important
to note that for Freud, even the most elementary biological reaction to stimulus is one which
reduces the adverse effect it causes and works towards the return of a homoeostasis in which
excitement within the organism is minimised. Instinctual impulse, as well as deriving from
within the organism, is constant rather than intermittent. Another term for such an impulse,
Freud states, is a “need”.141 As this need cannot be physically escaped, nor will it abate in
time, its resolution must come in the form of satisfaction. For Freud, this instinctual impulse
(Triebregung) “appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the
137
Which partially explains why Freud's writing is more comprehensible than that of Heidegger, who
invents a greater proportion of his terminology, or invests what he borrows with entirely new meaning.
138
Freud, S. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2957
139
Freud, S. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2958
140
See also Mitchell, M. and Black, S. Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought,
(USA: Basic Books, 1995) p. 13
141
Freud, S. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2958
76
somatic”.142
Figure 9: A physiological stimulus
Figure 10: An instinctual impulse stimulus
In the Strachey translation of Instincts and their Vicissitudes the instinct (Trieb) of instinctual
impulse (Triebregung) is transposed to English as 'instinct' rather than, as is common in later
renditions 'drive'.143 The use of instinct to describe two differentiated processes (Instinkt and
142
Freud, S. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2960
143
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 198
77
Trieb) fails to capture the differences between the two.144 I will be adhering to the
contemporary convention of translating trieb as drive, because its connotations with
possession, direction and movement capture its tendencies more aptly than the more static or
passive term instinct.
Freud follows his evolutionary account of drive as instinctual stimulus with a hypothesis
which aims to breakdown the stages of the internal mechanism of a drive, the famous fourfold
conception of the drive.145 The drive's primary cause is pressure (Drang). Pressure is
quantitative and dynamic; there is a certain quantity of it in any drive and it is always actively
demanding its own satisfaction. The pressure is resolved by attaining the aim (Ziel) of the
drive. Freud tells us that the aim of each drive is fixed, though the object (Objekt) of the drive,
the route which the drive will take to reach the aim is not fixed; on the contrary, objects are
malleable. Given the rigidity of the aim of the drive and the pressure emanating from its
source (Quelle) and seeking resolution, Freud's hypothesis about drives operates on the same
basis as the reflexive response to physiological stimulus – that is, its aim is to reduce the
pressure to the minimum level and restore homoeostasis. Conceptualising this model, we are
presented with a sequential traversal of a pathway from the source to the aim, which is
enacted at every stage by pressure – this pressure diminishing as we get closer to the aim. 146
144
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 196
145
Freud's discussion of the stages of the drive can be found in Freud, S. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
(1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2960 - 2961
146
See 'Pressure' in Laplanche, S and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993)
p.330
78
Figure 11: The path of the drive. The width of the bar is proportional to the quantity of
pressure
The key questions about anthropocentricism in Freud's drive hypothesis revolves around how
the drives as they exist in the primary process have 'knowledge' about their possible
realisation. If we look at the unconscious as being a biological machine, our first hypothesis
might be that the source is 'hard wired' to the aim in the brain: it is an innate property the
subject is born with. This seems to capture the universality which – along with other
psychoanalysts – Freud and Lacan attribute to the most basic drives.147 Yet hard wiring does
not explain why the objects are malleable rather than fixed, and that they are subject to change
or, if the drives are products of evolution, why their objects can be so convoluted – hence the
vicissitudes and travails attributed to the drive. A more plausible explanation would be that
the path to the object is created in the subject by trial and error. In this reading, development
of the organism is a slow process in which it learns from failure and successes, repeating
actions which can enact a return to homoeostasis. Positive feedback is the salient factor in
determining what will remain and negative feedback determines what will be effaced. This
model is therefore cybernetic.148 Feedback of this type in a biological system is indifferent to
147
Examples would include drives relating to infantile feeding and excrement, familial relations, and
sexual instincts.
148
Cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems governed by feedback and communication, is a key
concept in the present thesis, especially in the later chapters. Its modern use dates from Weiner, N.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.(Cambridge USA: MIT Press,
1961)
79
the constitution of the object by means of which it can be released; it does not aim at objects,
but at internal affects and its own cybernetic stasis. When Freud describes the unconscious –
the other place – as lacking anthropocentric traits associated with the secondary process, such
an absence of 'thinking' is only possible if it is regulated by formal rules like those of a
cybernetic system. As such, the unconscious calculates its goals not in terms of plans, ideas or
preferences which all tend towards the anthropic; it mechanically selects the most rapid path
to the aim. In this mechanism, the rules of the unconscious are brutally simple: in the case of
success a pathway is created or reinforced – as Freud proposes, either chemically or
mechanically – along whatever route proves the most efficacious in realising the aim of the
drive. In the case of failure, it re-routes until cathexis can be achieved.
A final reading of the drive is that the object is established in a system of connections between
the source and the aim which are established logically. This final reading would be consistent
with a Lacanian interpretation of Freud. This reading seems problematic regarding the genesis
of the drives in the child, as we might ask at which point does the child exhibit drives rather
than reflexes? The instincts which the drives are based on appear to be before language, or at
least mark a transition of the subject to language, yet once they are capitulated as drives these
instincts become ideational. Freud's contention that objects can carry multiple drives to their
aim would seem to point towards an economical explanation of the drive rather than a logical
one. If the object has fidelity to numerous drives, and if the drive can posses numerous
objects, acquisition of the object would fail to reach the aim of the drive. Once a system of
drives had been established in the subject, the myriad inter-connections of the objects of their
desire would result in a paralysis of the system. I shall re-consider Lacan's conception of drive
more sympathetically after my exposition of Freud; for now, it will suffice to note that Lacan's
reading of Freud – that the unconscious is a language-like structure rather than a biological
mechanism – requires the abandonment of seeing the formation of the drive as taking place in
chronological time, this register being replaced by logical time.149 I shall return to this key
distinction when talking about Lacan's theories of complexes and imagos.
The apparent biologism in Freud's view of the drive is reinforced by the remainder of Instincts
149
See Lacan, J. 'Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism' (1945), in
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English [trans. Bruce Fink], (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
2006)
80
and their Vicissitudes. Freud specifically says that the source (Quelle) is either chemical or
mechanical – whichever of these processes may be the case, both are rooted in the organic
body and are biological. Freud's final summation of drives re-emphasises the biological.150
Freud's discussion of the neuroses which the drives can affect in Instincts and their
Vicissitudes could be considered more amenable to Lacanianism, an interpretation I shall
consider in due course. Yet before arriving at that point, I shall follow the economic
progression of Freud's theory of instincts and drives in their transition out of the purely
unconscious, and to their presentation as wishes, as is elucidated in The Interpretation of
Dreams. We have seen that the terminus of a Freudian drive is reached at a discharge of
pressure enabled by traversing the passage through the object. The drive is indifferent to the
method of its discharge, preferring only that the process is accomplished as rapidly as
possible. A wish (Wunsch) is an unconscious formation – as is the drive – but a wish is
connected with an object (confusingly, not in the sense of the object of a drive described
above, but an object in the sense of something which can be the intention of a thought).151 As
a result of this, a wish is in some way comprehensible to conscious thought, whereas all
speculation about the nature of a drive is ultimately unable to grasp its true nature.152 Yet the
wish is often blocked from fully manifesting itself in consciousness by the censor, the agent of
repression described above whose role is to patrol the border between the unconscious and the
later processes of thought. However, as we have seen, manifestations of wishes, though
blocked on their path to consciousness in the awakened subject, are able to present themselves
150
"We may sum up by saying that the essential feature in the vicissitudes undergone by instincts lies in the
subjection of the instinctual impulses to the influences of the three great polarities that dominate mental life.
Of these three polarities we might describe that of activity-passivity as the biological, that of ego-external
world as the real, and finally that of pleasure-unpleasure as the economic polarity". Freud, S. Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2974
151
The term 'idea' would be useful in this context, if it was not otherwise employed by Freud.
152
“When we […] speak of an unconscious instinctual impulse or of a repressed instinctual impulse, the
looseness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean an instinctual impulse the ideational
representative of which is unconscious, for nothing else comes into consideration”. Freud, S. The
Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3000
81
– albeit in a distorted form – in the content of dreams.153 For Freud, the wish is laid down in
mnemonic traces from the subject's infancy which are associated with the earliest satisfactions
of the child.154 As they derive from memory, wishes are not indifferent about their realisation,
instead trying to repeat the conditions of their genesis. The wish can be associated with the
satisfaction of component instincts (Partialtreib) via the acquisition of objects or with
replication of a disposition or scene. The interventions which drives may make regarding the
behaviour of the subject are unknown to it, as they are rendered unintelligible by virtue of
their place in the primary process and blocked by repression from ever escaping it.
Satisfaction of the drive results in the economic consequence of a reduction of psychic
pressure in the organism; and this satisfaction is its only objective. Even after their resolution,
the drives themselves remain unchanged in the organism, as Freud explains in The
Unconscious.155
In the case of a wish, the content of the mnemonic traces associated with it may pass from the
domain of the primary process to the secondary process so long as they do not conflict with
the reality principle (Realitätsprinzip).156 The reality principle is created in the psyche after the
primary processes are laid down. Drives operate according to the pleasure principle
(Lustprinzip), seeking the pleasure that derives from their resolution. Once the objects of a
drive are known to an infant, the child's immediate strategy will be to hallucinate the objects
which will allow them to realise the drive. Though this strategy might be initially successful,
it will eventually produce no satisfaction because there is no passage to the aim through this
imaginary-object. Freud's example of this failure is the child's weaning.157 Once the child is no
153
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3010
154
Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 626
155
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3009
156
Though Moretti notes that the reality principle “is already uncertain and unstable in Freud himself” its
operation in this model is as a mediator of the pleasure principle. Moretti, A. Signs taken for Wonders ( London:
Verso, 2005) p. 39
157
Freud, S. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online
82
longer satisfied by the imaginary breast which it can hallucinate, it must take into account the
conditions of the external world rather than its own internal mental representations if it is to
acquire access to the breast. One key objection to this genesis of the reality principle is why
hallucination should lose is efficacy, and the child needs to abandon the strategy. Laplanche
argues that contrary to Freud, the reality principle might be the first to be established, in the
case of weaning investing the breast as an object of need which fulfils the child's desire to
reduce hunger.158 Development of the sexual instinct takes place as the survival-instinct is
fulfilled and the partial object of the drive is enjoyed. The question here is one of the
differences between self preservative and sexual instincts, and which are the initial set of
instincts. An alternate solution to picking one or the other is to place these two sets of instincts
on the same level, attributing the infant's satisfaction, derived as it is from any component
instinct's satisfaction, to be one of polymorphous perversity. From a strictly biological
perspective, no differentiation is possible between drives based on their role in the organism's
survival and those regarding its replication. Instead, the return of pleasure they offer the
psyche can be explained by their ability to produce chemical states in the brain.159 No matter
which instinct is originary, it eventually comes to pass that the subject must temper its
attempts to immediately maximise its pleasure according to the knowledge which it has
learned through experience. The failure of hallucination requires the child to test a new
strategy, which, strictly working towards its goals, is concerned with discovering the simplest
ways to acquire satisfaction. Some strategies will fail and be disregarded, others will produce
rewards and be repeated. The child will learn not only how to call to maximise the chance of
alerting its nurse, but also when to call, learning that targeted appeals can be more effective
than permanent ones. The reality principle is plastic, evolving throughout the child's
text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 4286
158
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 380
159
The production of neurotransmitters. I shall return to this in the final part of this study. I introduce it
now to allow a general overview of the progression of this writing, wherein neither Freud's 'hydraulic'
economy or Lacan's structure of semantic links will be found as convincing a model for the operation of the
unconscious (both in terms of its processes and that which is processed within it) as the model of a cybernetic
machine introduced by Lyotard and developed by Land. Freud was always careful to note that future
developments in neurobiology would be be of considerable help in determining the mechanism of the
unconscious.
83
development.
The unconscious is a system whose purpose is the minimisation of the tensions in the
organism derived from internal stimuli: the “'reduction of tension', which, according to Freud,
characterises all forms of pleasure”.160 The shortest and swiftest path to this draining of
pressure – cathexis – is for the primary process' demand to be presented to the secondary
process, and for it to be realised: economically, this exhausts the energy attached to the drive.
The organism's strategy if the object of the drive cannot be immediately attained so simply
can be the hallucination of the object; an attempt to convince the primary process that the
demand has been met yet if this fails to produce satisfaction the primary process will remain
agitated and there will be disequilibrium which causes displeasure: there must therefore be a
binding of the cathexis attached to the drive by the secondary processes. Secondary process
binding is coalescence into stable formations which persist in the psyche: ideas.161 The
retention of cathected energy in the secondary process is determined purely by the efficiency
of the cathexis, therefore the nature of the cathexis – which ideas it occupies – is irrelevant so
long as it does its work. For example, a sexual drive could be sedentarised by the idea of
abstinence before marriage, courtly love, or any other idea which is effective in reducing the
discomfort the pressure of the drive causes the organism. That there are two different areas of
the psyche which deal with the cathexis of libidinal energy is problematic for Freud because it
introduces a dualism into the energetic hypothesis. How, we might ask, does the unbound,
free ranging energy of the primary process become transformed into the the stable circuits of
secondary process formations? Freud described the eternal qualities of the drive in The
Unconscious. These descriptions set out the basic tenets regarding the status of investments in
the unconscious which provide the basis of anti-anthropocentric readings of its operation:
The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally,
are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all.
Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs.
160
Moretti, A. Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 2005) p. 39
161
'The primary and secondary processes can be defined in purely economic terms–the primary process as
immediate discharge, the secondary process as inhibition postponement of satisfaction and diversion.'
Laplanche S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 338
84
The Ucs. processes pay just as little regard to reality. They are subject to the pleasure
principle; their fate depends only on how strong they are and on whether they fulfil
the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure regulation.
To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of
cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality – these are
the characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system
Ucs.162
And that:
The processes of the system Pcs. display – no matter whether they are already
conscious or only capable of becoming conscious – an inhibition of the tendency of
cathected ideas towards discharge. When a process passes from one idea to another,
the first idea retains a part of its cathexis and only a small portion undergoes
displacement.163
The opposition between primary and secondary processes corresponds to that between the two
ways in which psychical energy circulates, according to whether it is ‘free’ or ‘bound’. It
should also be seen as parallel with the contrast between the pleasure principle and the reality
principle.164
Breuer assume[s] the existence of two different stages of cathectic energy in mental
life: one in which that energy is tonically "bound" and the other in which it moves
freely and presses towards discharge, I think that this discrimination represents the
deepest insight we have gained up to the present into the nature or nervous energy, and
162
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3009
163
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3011
164
Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1993) p. 339
85
I do not see how we are to evade such a conclusion.165
We are left with another decisive question about anthropocentricism in the unconscious,
namely how unconscious drives move into, and become settled in the secondary process,
when the secondary process is so unlike the the primary process in respect of the nature of its
energy and the likeness to 'ideas' of its contents. Freudian psychoanalysis must explain the
transition between the intense and volatile state of energy which moves through the id and the
constrained energy within the ego. Though considering solutions to this disjunction raises
more questions than provides answers at this stage in the present thesis, I shall note some
potential solutions here, as these lines of inquiry are followed throughout this work.
The first solution to this problem is to accept the synchronous dualism between the primary
and secondary processes: that they act in parallel with each other; unpleasure is removed by
each according to its own methods. As the primary process receives mechanical relief through
the removal of the pressure by arriving at the aim of the drive, a separate symbolic relief
provided by the recreation of the wished for memory traces takes place in the secondary
process. The flaw of this solution is that it only seems to work with drives which can be
simply realised. Once the drive is blocked from resolution by the ego instincts and the
psychical process hereto considered, something very different to a wishful image must be
created. Perhaps then, the process of the dream work, or of fantasy, are the agents which allow
a draining of cathexis which cannot be realised through the acquisition of the object. In this
reading that the process of the dreamwork provides hallucinatory satisfaction of the subject's
desires is proof of the ability of the image to perform the cathexis of energy in the psyche.166
However, this again fails to describe all operations of the psyche as dreamwork and fantasy
can sometimes reiterate the subject's failure to achieve satisfaction, acting as intensifiers of
the energetic disequilibrium. In the case of Little Hans, the fantastic fear of the horse only
intensifies his fear of the father and the worsening of his 'nonsense'.
165
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3011
166
And this goal of cathexis is seen even in such extreme cases as the “Father, don't you see I'm burning”
dream. Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) pp. 945 - 947
86
The primary process / secondary process divide can be conceptualised from an energetic
standpoint as a change in state of psychic energy: This would be analogous to a phasetransition, the solidification of the energy attached to drives by the secondary process. As the
'watery' liquid drives of the primary process transfer to the secondary process they become
'icy', solidified. Their properties change though the base material of which they are made does
not. Yet, as has been repeatedly stated, drives are constant and unchanging, If their energetic
product is merely calcifying in 'solid' formations once it moves to the secondary process, then
either these formations must constantly grow (as the drive's energy is constancy produced by
the primary process), or quantity of energy has a minimal effect when in the secondary
process – which goes against Freud's energetic hypothesis and the idea that the pleasure
principle attempts to achieve return to equilibrium at a homoeostatic zero of energy.
Perhaps the energetic hypothesis itself is a poor analogy for mental activity. When Freud talks
about evolution, neurones, or chemical states of the brain, modern biology can be used to
support what he says. When Freud talks about energy: in reservoirs, channels of it, stores of it,
it freely roaming around the primary process, in these cases it is hard to think these ideas can
relate to actual stores of energy in the brain. In the next chapter I shall show how Lacan
attempts to replace the role of energy as the motor of the unconscious with his conception of
desire. In essence, this replaces the economic with a linguistic motor which drives the
unconscious. As we shall see, there are many reasons for supporting Lacan's psychoanalytic
theory. However, when the psyche is described as dynamic rather than energetic we might
object by inquiring where the end of a dynamic process which merely translates information
into different states might be? An energetic system has a goal: pressure ceases to exist once
the aim has been reached. A linguistic system of substitution has no end. The organs which are
the part-objects of component instincts are driven by biological processes, not linguistic ones.
A final strategy would be the replacement of Freud's homoeostatic zero to which the primary
process wants all pressures to be reduced with a variable level of tension which can be
tolerated. Instead of seeing the unconscious as a perfect system which will cathect all energy
by one way or another – even if that way must be through the path of madness – it would be
better understood as a failing system, capable of breaking down at some moments and overperforming at others. If this is the case there is no need to expect that the primary and
secondary processes will work in perfect parallel, like a pair of synchronised swimmers
87
bobbing in the depths of the psyche. With the introduction of the death drive (Todtstrieb) in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud indicates that the unconscious is capable of
working towards disequilibrium. I shall return to this when considering Lyotard's defence of
Freud against Lacan's interpretation.
Hereto, the operation of a number of the contents, constituents or processes of the
unconscious has been delineated, including fourfold drives, wishes, and the economic
systems of primary and secondary processes. It is now our task to consider the evolution of
the drive from its origins as a true instinct through to its presentation in the mature psyche as a
wishful impulse. The topographical model allows us to speak of the manifest content of an
idea, whether this idea can be designated in the systems Ucs, Pcs or Cs, and allows us to
speculate about the nature of the latent idea which may have lead to the production of the
manifest one. It also assesses the desirability of an idea with regard to the ego-ideal. Because
it assumes the existence of an unconscious system underlying conscious representation,
Freud’s description of the economic model requires the notion of censorship and repression as
outlined in the topographical model: forces which establish the barrier between the realm of
the unconscious and the domain of the subject. Without this evidence from applied
psychoanalysis, the existence of a set of unconscious desires would be conjectured; and
therefore unsuitable for use as the basis of a drive theory.167 However, through the
hypothecation of the existence of this space in the psyche, holding strange impulses which are
alien to the normal ‘thought’ of the subject, we have built a model of thought – or the genesis
of thought – beginning deep in the unconscious and terminating with the effects of these
unconscious processes in the subject’s actions. What qualities can we attribute to the
unconscious, the space in which drives operate at their most basic level, which would
demonstrate its anti-antropocentricism? For Freud: “The nucleus of the Ucs consists of
instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, of wishful
impulses”.168 Here we have three components: (a) instinctual representatives (b) cathected
167
Freud uses “parapraxes and dreams in healthy people” and “symptom[s] or obsession[s] in the sick” as
his justification for positing an unconscious. Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed.
Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2991
168
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3009
88
energy (c) wishful impulses. The formula given is therefore as follows:
(a) Instinctual representative + (b) psychical energy = (c) wishful impulses
To fully understand the anti-anthropcentricism of the Freudian psyche according to the
economic model we need to understand these components and define how (a) the instinctual
representative is formed and how (b) energetics in the unconscious system operate, before
going on to trace the travails of (c) a wishful impulse through its path towards realisation. As
we have seen, Freud’s explanation of (a) and (b) owes a lot to biology.169 The biological base,
which is essentially animalistic is a legacy of pre-human species which did not have a distinct
consciousness. This, above all others, is the area of Freudian theory which Lacan most
explicitly denounces – for Lacan, desire is very specifically human. Because of this
divergence, one of Land’s primary objections to Lacan is that he ignores Freud’s biologism,
severing the connection between the animal instinct at the base of the drive and the form of its
final object of desire. But for Freud an instinctual impulse (Triebregung) is an instinct (Treib)
which can be stirred (regung). Stirred is used here in the sense of an awakening or growth of
emotional charge. Instinctual impulses are therefore the primary inhabitants of the subject’s
unconscious. They exist there with the constant potential to become aroused, should the
possibility of the realisation become feasible. In many instances this is very unlikely, as they
are repressed by the preconscious, yet they still remain alert, waiting for an opportunity. The
unconscious is therefore populated by numerous entities whose origins are found in precongnitive animalistic impulses. The genesis of these impulses is therefore antianthropocentric as it is before 'thought'. Furthermore, though they go through changes during
the life of the organism, their modification takes place along mechanical lines – they are
modified insofar as they are able to find opportunities to discharge themselves under the rule
of repetition. In this formal process repetition, again, is quite unlike the thought of the
Cartesian subject whose volition is determined by the use of reason.
Instinctual impulses are subsumed into the economic model by Freud in Instincts and their
Vicissitudes, where their ability to create affect is coupled to the amount of pressure which
they exert (attempt to cathect).170 In Instincts and their Vicissistudes Freud situates the
169
For example: “Freud’s book is still haunted by biology” Bowie, M. Lacan (UK: Fontana, 1991) p.5
170
Freud, S. Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
89
instinctual impulse between: “[T]he three great polarities that dominate mental life. Of these
three polarities we might describe that of activity-passivity as the biological, that of egoexternal world as the real, and finally that of pleasure-unpleasure as the economic polarity"171
This should not be conceptualised as a triangulation or Venn diagram, where the instinctual
impulse is equally subject to or determined by three different systems. Instead, these three
polarities make the separate registers which Freud uses to describe the creation, existence, and
attempted realisation of an instinctual impulse. The biological determines the initial creation
of the pulsion, the economic describes its attempts at realisation and, finally, the ego blocks or
allows this realisation.
Instinctual impulses derive from biological instincts. These simple biological urges such as
nourishment, defecation, or erotic contact are the goal of the developing child. These instincts
are heavily – though the child does not yet know it – incentivised by the dopamine system in
the brain. As the child develops, it learns that the route to the realisation of one of these
instincts is never devoid of the presence of auxiliary objects and phenomena. Nourishment
must come from the breast, which is part of the mother – and the nourishment is never timely
without the baby’s cry, or other associated rituals of feeding. As the organism grows, more
and more phenomena become associated with the satisfaction of its instincts, and the number
of instinctual impulses populating the unconscious can grow. The instinctual impulse, then, is
the germ of desire in the child, and later in the adult to enact these connections of objects
which have brought past satisfaction. Their products can be extremely ‘simple’: the
acquisition of a glass of pure water, or incredibly convoluted – as many clinical cases attest.
Because they can be formed in early infancy, Freud describes the instinctual impulses as
polymorphously perverse. Polymorphous perversion is explained by the infant’s inability to
compartmentalise its instincts. Instead, anything which enables the fulfilment of a component
instinct (these instincts are essentially, as Lacan memorably describes them, towards the
stimulation of the holes in the human body) becomes erotic to the child. As the instinctual
impulse is in the system Ucs, it is ‘mute’. Its demands are never for a thing, or an idea, or
even a set-up [dispositif] – not for anything that can be enunciated – but are rather the desire
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf )
171
Freud, S. Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2974
90
to act, to begin the creation of such a set-up.172 It is a motor of action, causing the organism to
try and repeat past strategies for satisfaction. These characteristics of the drive provide the
basis of a reading of the drive as being anti-anthropocentric because it, unlike the Cartesian
subject, does not operate on the basis of what it wants: there is no will, no thing aimed for, no
volition. All that the unconscious possesses is desire to act in the sense of achieving suitable
cathexis of its energies, and a set of pathways which have been previously established to enact
this. Operating under the rubrics of pressure and repetition, it is formal and automatic rather
than idealist, as illustrated in the table below.
Stage of drive
Formation
creation
Process
Biological
Method of
Problem of
Method of
realisation
realisation
amendment
Mechanical
Censorship
Formal change
based on formal under repetition
Does it involve No (though they No
criteria
compulsion
No
No
No
No (though
present as
ideas
needs, their
formation is
biological)
Does it involve No
No
subject can
volition
become super
invested in the
repetition
(addicted))
Is it before
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
consciousness
Table 4: Characteristics of Freudian drives
172
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3001
91
The unconscious has other distinct characteristics which separate it from the rest of the psyche
which are: “[E]xemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobile cathexis),
timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality”.173 I shall return to these later
in the thesis, sufficing to note at this point that all are very different to anthropocentric
thought and conscious ideas. Yet the characteristics which most separate it from system Pcs or
Cs are the plurality of the processes, namely that there are a multitude of them in concurrent
operation, and that the unconscious is therefore filled with them. These entities in the
unconscious wait like terracotta guards of Qin Shi Huang: steadfast, eternal, unmoving. This
plurality is especially strange when coupled with the fact of their concurrent operation:
“These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate with one another, exist side by side without being
influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction.”174 Freud’s greatest
metaphor might be his likening of these impulses to the build up of a city, in which the
modern layers may be on the surface, yet below them still exist all of the previous foundations
of older versions of the city. Like the ruins of Troy (figure 1.5), the unconscious consists of
immortal formations for which, despite the possibility of a later version having been
constructed, all previous versions still stand, and even more than still being in existence, can
still create affect should they be cathected. With this metaphor we see how instinctual
impulses are at once both timeless and malleable. Once the organism has learned a path to
satisfy a component instinct, it never forgets it, it never gives up its knowledge of the
compulsion to put it together, yet it might have found other, superior strategies as it has
evolved to get to the satisfaction of the instinct by other routes: “[A]lthough the ultimate aim
of each instinct remains unchangeable, there may be different paths to the same ultimate
aim”.175
173
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3010
174
Freud, S. The Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3009
175
Freud, S. Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 2960
92
Figure 12: The Remains of Troy176
System Ucs is therefore populated by a number of entities, all of which are constantly
‘scanning’ for the opportunity to enact themselves.177 This opportunity presents itself if the
instinctual impulse’s favoured creations are activated in the psyche, by stimulation during the
day, or at night, as part of a dream construction.178 The degree to which the instinctual impulse
aims to enact itself is related to the quantity of pressure which is acting upon it. This pressure
is very mobile in the system Ucs, and can quickly pass from impulse to impulse.
At this point, Freud’s economic terminology must be clarified. For Freud, the concept of
176
From Pcs.org (available at http://www.pcs.org/blog/item/was-there-a-real-troy/ )
177
The characteristics of these entities are described in Section V of The Unconscious. See Freud, S. The
Unconscious (1915) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) pp. 3009 - 3012
178
In this latter case, the instinctual impulse may be the originator of the stimulus.
93
pressure is – metaphorically – like a hydraulic apparatus, and the pressure is the force which
is built up in the psyche. As the psychical system’s primary role is to ensure the correct and
safe circulation of this force in the psyche, the psyche aims at the cathexis (draining) of any
pressure which would not be damaging to the organism. This cathexis manifests itself as
pleasure.179 The awareness of the psyche about the nature of the drive and how pressing the
force behind its release is allows an ordering of the drives in the higher levels of psychical
operation, in the Pcs. When the instinctual impulse escapes the confined of the system Ucs,
and gains the possibility of moving to Pcs or Cs, it becomes instinct or pulsion [Trieb],
Freud’s more general term for these wishful constructions.
As we have seen, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915) Freud describes four components
of a drive: pressure (Drang), aim (Ziel), object (Objekt), and source (Quelle). Pressure and
aim correspond to (a) (instinctual representative) and (b) (psychical energy) as described
above – in the case of pulsion as well as the instinctual impulse – as the motor apparatus
driving the pulsion is situated by Freud in system Ucs. The development of the pulsion over
time – according to the principles above, a multiplication of inhuman entities rather than static
cycle of effacement and replacement, is described by variations in the 'object' component of
the drive. Source relates to somatic functions in the body. The variations in source partly
explain the differences between different groups of instincts, for example, the difference
between the sexual organs and the digestive organs partially explains how the vicissitudes of
these drives go through different pathways: the difference between the structure of satisfaction
in the strip club and the restaurant is in part related to the nature of the organ through which
pleasure is to be attained.
It is quite possible to speak of all parts of the pulsion in terms of economic and biological
models except the object, which, being a thing, is obviously most closely aligned to idealism
and the products of consciousness. Yet so long as the biological side of the instinct is satisfied
according to the economics of the psyche, the exact nature of the object through which this
achieved is a matter of indifference to the system Ucs. As a result, the selection of an object in
a drive is conditioned by its ability to ensure the cathexis that the other three require, and, as
has been demonstrated, the product of a formal process rather than a cognitive or rational one.
Whatever the nature of this object may be is quite arbitrary; so long as it works, it suffices as
179
See footnote 115.
94
a component of the drive.
At this point in the present thesis, it has been demonstrated that even the quotidian operation
of the unconscious is anti-anthropocentric, insofar as it is generated by a set of precognitive
principles. The effects of this are far reaching, and destabilise many of the concepts which
philosophy had previous taken for granted such as the extent of volition, the status of subject
as the seat of reasoning consciousness, and, of course, that nature of what it is to desire or
want. They serve to decentre the traditional subject of philosophy, and to place importance in
unconscious rather than conscious thought. As we have considered Freud's theoretical
depiction of the psyche we have seen that there are many aspects of its operation which are
very unlike traditional conceptions of consciousness. However, the question of depth still
remains problematic as the unconscious – in practice rather than in theory – could be, and
indeed was treated like a rational entity whose products were ideas.
Freud's model of the psyche makes its most decisive break with the idea of a rational
Cartesian conciousness in the model of the death drive. Death drive is the ultimate avatar of
the non-human instinct underneath the subject: it is variously conceived as a compulsion to
repeat, ruin, suffer, return to a state of nothingness, breakdown and to revisit trauma. It is also
Janus-faced, being described as both the motor of creation and destruction in the psyche.
What death drive is not however is, as in its most facile reading, a simple desire for what
consciousness would conceive of as 'death'. I shall therefore devote the remainder of this
chapter to a consideration of Freud's depiction of the death drive, to provide the basis of a
reading of its importance as the most radically anti-anthropocentric part of the Freudian
apparatus, following Land's emphasis on its extreme otherness to the Cartesian subject of
philosophy:
The death drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the
dissipation of intensities. In its primary dynamics it is utterly alien to everything
human, not least the three great pettinesses of representation, egoism, and hatred. The
death drive is Freud's beautiful account of how creativity occurs without the least
effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blindest and simplest of
tendencies, how desire is no more problematic than a river's search for the sea.180
180
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 282
95
Anthropocentricism and the Death Drive
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) was considered by Freud to be a work of biology, as he
explicitly states in the introduction to The Ego and the Id.181 His methodology is to propose a
hypothesis which explains a newly observed tendency which was not adequately described by
current psychoanalytic theory, namely the compulsion to repeat horrific experiences. There
were a surfeit of such cases which had been attributed to shell shock acquired in the Great
War. Beyond the Pleasure Principle presents the final capitalisation of Freud's mature model
of the psyche, and it moves drive theory beyond the domain of pleasure, exploring the
interrelation of repletion and the psyche's operation.
Up to this point, Freud's model of the mind and its mechanisms of repression posited a
borderline between thoughts which were available to consciousness and those which resided
purely in the domain of the unconscious, and which could only have effects of the psyche by
influencing the productions of consciousness. Hence, we have patients like Anna O, who was
unable to drink water without ever having access to, in consciousness, the reason for this
inability. This recollection had been pushed by the dynamic forces in the psyche over this
borderline between conscious and unconscious. Yet investments which take this journey can
become tied to secondary objects which provide a link between the consciousness and the
repressed thought, hence the triggers of hysterical episodes.
The role of the unconscious here seems to be a rather useful one evolutionarily. The
instinctual economy, as previously shown in Figure 10 is a closed economy confined within
the organism. Traumatic transfer of this energy is problematic within this circuit because there
is not possibility of externalising it. In the unconscious regime we have a force, censorship,
which prevents – usually effectively – the recollection of unpleasant or damaging episodes in
the life of the subject. In a clinical setting the unconscious is a mechanism which the analyst
is tasked with keeping in an optimal state of order, providing cures to those patients who have
come to a point where the mechanism of repression has broken down, in which case they are
181
Freud, S. The Ego and the Id (1923) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at
http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3966
96
suffering from an excess of force and affect in their internal psychic economies, which is
failing to cathect the products of its pulsions. This breakdown is fundamentally caused by the
tying of the repressed memory to the secondary object whose distance is so far from the
unconscious' objectives that it can not function as cathexis in the secondary process. Because
the talking cure aimed to bring a more originary object back to the memory of the subject, if
there was a movement to unlock the repressed content, it would cure the patients symptoms.
The first example of a tendency to deviate from the pleasure principle observed by Freud is
that found in traumatic neurosis. Freud was afforded a number of sufferers of this condition
which had been caused by their experience of trench warfare in the Great War. The
recollections of these former soldiers of the traumatic events in the trenches while they dreamt
seemed to go directly against the pleasure principle: they were recalling memories which were
very unpleasant to them. Again, we see that Freud has collected a number of cases which
provide evidence of a psychological problem which goes against what was then thought of the
model of the psyche; indeed, this particular example provided him with many patients as
examples. When we hear later of the case of Little Hans and the Fort/Da game there are
questions which must be asked about the validity of making a speculative conclusion based on
only one case. In the instance of war neurosis this is not a concern as the number of cases is so
large. Freud’s first concern is to eliminate the possibility of mechanical causes for war
neurosis. The correspondence of physical trauma and later problems in “railway disasters and
other accidents” might lead to the mistaken conclusion that neurosis derives from that
trauma.182 In the case of shell shock and other near-hysterical problems suffered by the
returning soldiers it was no longer the case that all were the victims of an injury, many instead
having been subjected to only sensory experiences of the horrors of the trenches.
The tendency to go against the pleasure principle seen in these psychical formations, if not
attributable to a physical breaking down of a normal structure, must indicate that there is
either: (1) a tendency to go against the instinct to seek pleasure in the brain, that is, a ‘death
drive’ which deliberately aims at some other goal; (2) a perverse pleasure which is gained
either through mastery or repetition of the event (3) that the psyche is intrinsically a flawed
system which cannot efficiently, accurately, or regularly guarantee the correct cathexation of
182
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3718
97
control of psychic energy. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud vacillates between the first
two of these, attributing shock and Little Hans’ game to potentially being forms of
masochistic pleasure, only considering the repetition compulsion as clear evidence of the
latter. This particular case is made with reference not the observations of subjects of analysis,
but to his biological speculations regarding the structure of the human psyche and its
evolutionary development.
Thus far then we conceived of a psychological process which represses the unpleasant and
tries to prevent the subject reliving it. Yet prior to the revision of the theory of the drives in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had to deal with a number of clinical cases in which this
did not seem to be the case. The former soldiers who seemed to endlessly re-live their
experiences in the hellish conditions of the Great War were showing quite the opposite
compulsion, which was to repeat the experience rather than to repress it. This goes directly
against the 'pleasure principle', which states that the mind functions in such a way as to reduce
the amount of unpleasure it suffers from at all times.
In their first Freudian iterations, all drives were considered functions of the pleasure principle,
striving for either the relief of adverse conditions like hunger or fatigue, or towards discharge
of cathexis in the acquisition of objects which held an erotic affection for the subject. By the
end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud will have revised this previously unquestioned
tenet of psychoanalysis, showing: “[T]he opposition between the 'sexual instincts,' which are
directed towards an object, and certain other instincts, with which we were very insufficiently
acquainted and which we described as the 'ego instincts'” as his analysis develops.183 These
other instincts are placed on the side of the death drive (Thanatos), while the 'sexual instincts'
are assuredly in the domain of Eros, the pleasure principle.
The economic aspect of the psyche is described by Freud as one conditioned by and
functioning along the pathways of drives, whose motor is the pleasure principle.184 The
pleasure principle is generally negative in the sense that what the mind seeks to reduce is the
183
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3752
184
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3715
98
build-up of 'unpleasure' rather than to actively seek out a source of pleasure. This immediately
places it in the domain of the unconscious as, again, we are considering the formal processes
which govern an economy rather than ideational content. If the pleasure principle was in
consciousness and simply dealt with ideas like hunger, the need for rest, or affection, it could
be rationally worked out, and there would be no need for a psychoanalysis which would deal
with, for example, the hysterics upon whom many of Freud's first theories were based upon.
Furthermore, the economic model is concerned with the transference of the feeling of pleasure
or unpleasure. This corresponds to a change in the amount of 'excitation' in the psyche. In the
classic Freudian model this works towards an absolute minimisation of the energetic flows in
the brain. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud will reconsider this and wonder if this
'Nirvana Principle' works to “[R]educe, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to
stimuli”.185 it is clear that the pleasure principle, although described by Freud as being a
primary process in the psyche, does not operate without severe constraint. The immediate
regulator of its operation is the reality principle and its opposite (or indeed, its 'beyond') is the
death instinct.186
185
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3745
186
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3717
99
Figure 13: Relationship between Pleasure Principle, Reality Principle and Death Instinct
The reality principle operates in all the topographical spaces of the psyche. As well as being
the set of social norms which the super-ego concerns itself with (and therefore very
anthropocentric), there is a regulation within the id (which is anti-anthropocentric), which
manifests as a blocking of desire in the form of the censorship regime, and also in the
vicissitudes of the drive by which the unconscious formally creates new drive dispositions
based on their effectiveness at reliving tension in the secondary process. A case in which there
is an apparent incongruity between observed actions and the maxim that all psychic processes
work towards the fulfilment of the pleasure principle is the case of the play rituals of Freud's
grandson Ernst. The Fort/Da game involved Ernst throwing away a spindle, which Freud
clearly linked with the production of a quantity of displeasure. This goes against the pleasure
principle: once the subject begins to repeat an unpleasurable event, the interplay of the
pleasure and reality principles can no longer be said to be the sole rule of the unconscious.
The Fort/Da game's primary element was the removal of the toy from the child's sight,
simulating the loss of the mother, while the reclamation of the toy was secondary, despite
Freud's observation that “[t]here is no doubt that greater pleasure was attached to the second
act”.187 Fort/Da notably differs from other examples of the death drive because it takes place
187
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3720
100
as a quotidian operation rather than as an exception or symptom of a complex. Freud posits
two possible reasons for this game being played: firstly that it is a method by which the
psyche can normalise the otherwise painful disappearance of the mother, the will to repetition
in the act allowing the child to become accustomed to the mother's departure, and allowing
the formation of stable circuits of cathexis through which the unpleasure of the mother's
passing can be released. The second is that the repetition of this unpleasant operation allowed
the child to feel that he had a sense of mastery over the event of the mother leaving: “by
repeating it, unpleasurable as it was, through a game, he took on an active part”.188
Yet both of these drive-figures can be reduced to functions of the pleasure principle. Freud
explains we cannot be sure that the repetition of the act of mother disappearing does not offer
“a yield of pleasure of another sort, but nonetheless a direct one”.189 In this case, there is no
evidence of a drive which diverges from the drives of the pleasure principle in this observed
action. Here we can see why the death drive is not necessarily the drive to cause suffering or
to annihilate or to nullify, though all of these negative and destructive affects are conjured by
the name 'death drive'. In such a shallow reading, as simply the desire to die, the death drive is
easily misrepresented. It is more properly the anti-life drive – the force which operates in
cases where drives deviate from operating under the pleasure principle. What is important to
take from the example of the Fort/Da game is not a definitive proof of the death drive but a
deeper understanding of the system of how drives can work. In this instance we see the
possibility of concomitant drives working towards quite different ends in the child's psyche.
One, towards a mastering of the trauma of the mothers disappearance, and another towards
the nihilistic instinct of renunciation of the mother and the pleasure she offers. Freud is unable
to distinguish between these two speculative hypotheses when presented with the evidence of
the child's actions, and concedes that a mixture of the two is perfectly possible. Rather than a
single erotic drive witch tries to achieve cathexis though one object alone, we see again, as
with the 'ruins of Troy' metaphor, that there can be a series of drives which exist in the
unconscious, never coming into contact with each other, and often operating in quite different
directions: the example in this case being one towards the mother and one renouncing the
188
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3721
189
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3721
101
figure of the mother.
A particularly crucial concept in both Land and Lyotard’s interpretations of Freud is the nature
of this force, which is called either the death drive or death instinct. Thus far we have seen
that Freud’s inquiry into this force in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, provides observational
evidence of a tendency which would not be fully explained by reference to the pleasure
principle alone, before offering speculations about the nature of the psychical process which
might be responsible for such a tendency. Interpreters of Freud hold widely differing opinions
on the nature of death drive, Lyotard’s view being particularly unique. It is my intention to
read the death instinct with Lyotard in Chapter 4, and to concentrate on Land's reading in
Chapter 5. These readings emphasise the plurality and plasticity of drive as mentioned above.
The first error of interpreters of the death drive is the literal interpretation, namely that the
death drive is a force which aims towards destruction or elimination of the subject, described
by Moretti as “the tendency to let oneself go and sink back into nature”.190 In Freud’s own
work there is a significant trend of apocalyptic pessimism which reaches its zenith in
Civilisation and Its Discontents which would ameliorate the error of the shallow reader in
taking this view of death drive.191 Ansell-Pearson notes the importance of the First World War
in this demand for a diagnosis of the savagery and violence which were shown to be in the
subject.192 The second fallacy is the refutation of the first and taking its simple negative: death
instinct as not necessarily the push to destruction, but an impulse to change. This is a kind of
Tarot Card positivism, putting an affirmative ‘spin’ on what would otherwise be, if considered
in the first interpretation of death drive, an often morally, politically or socially inconvenient
theory. It will become my contention that this kind of interpretation is more likely to be used
as a political convenience than the product of dispassionate analysis. This is particularly a
problem of many of the psychoanalysts after Freud, who lacked the scientific rigour which
Freud held. By this we mean not necessarily the quality of his experimental work, but his
190
Moretti, A. Signs taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 2005) p. 138. See also Lear, Freud, (UK:
Routledge, 2005) p. 161
191
Noted by Lyotard in 'On a Figure of Discourse' in Lyotard, J.F. Ed. Harvey and Roberts, Towards the
Postmodern, (New York: Humanity Books, 1993) p. 13
192
Ansell-Pearson, K. Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 112-113
102
insistence in having an investigative approach where he did not take pre-conceived opinions
into his work, tailoring conclusions to match already-held beliefs, alongside his rigorous
efforts to present his hypotheses as provisional rather than absolute: for example, his warning
about placing too much weight on the Fort/Da game: “No certain decision can be reached
from the analysis of a single case like this”, or the lengthy remarks as to the veracity of what
he had hitherto written at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.193 This second view
seems to be logically insufficient. It fails to capture how the death drive is shown to be largely
negative in its character in Freud’s experimental observations. It also lacks suitable
physiological or neurological evidence for us to accept that this might be the case.
Speculatively, it is neither evolutionarily or practically useful to imagine this trend in humans.
Lyotard’s position is that death drive represents a kind of breakdown in the psychic system,
wherein a drive fails to attain its goal by being broken off, collapsing in on itself, or reverting
back to an earlier state. In this view we see death drive as an effect of an imperfectly
constructed psychic system where drives are never whole, reliable and uniform, but are the
consequences of a fragmented and inefficient human mind. Lyotard's clearest formulation of
this is from the essay 'On the Figure of a Discourse':
The death instinct is simply the idea (as opposed to the concept) that the machine for
collecting and draining energy is not a well regulated mechanical device. In this regard
Freud points to the repetition of acts, situations, discourses or gestures (nightmares,
repetition of failure) that cannot be fulfilments of desire (of “pleasures”) in the
equivocal sense of the term (the first theory of desire), but that, on the contrary, are
associated with the most extreme suffering, the grinding of the psychical apparatus,
and the “subject's” scream.194
Lyotard’s view is from position (3) listed in section 1.6 ('that the psyche is intrinsically a
193
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online
text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3721
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) pp. 3761 - 3762
194
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 13
103
flawed system'), and therefore that what is called the death drive or the beyond of the pleasure
principle is in fact evidence of the failings of the psychic system to work efficiently and
always properly provide the pre-conscious-consciousness system with not only the tools to
complete its goals, but even an understanding of what these goals might be. The second
example (trauma being the first) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the ‘beyond’ of the
pleasure principle is demonstrated by Freud's grandson, Little Hans. Little Hans' case, as
argued above, is more useful for us as an example of the polyvocal nature of drives. A series
of separate desires may operate upon a single object: “The phantasy contains several forms
that are simultaneously active”.195
Freud also considers a third set of cases which show a tendency away from the pleasure
principle are those connected to repetition. Initially Freud speaks about cases of transference
in his patients which repeat the structure of the earlier neurosis but remove it from its original
context and place in their relationship with the therapist.196 This is explained as working along
the same basic mechanism as the original repression. Rather than remembering the trauma as
a past event, the ego, trying to defend itself against the unpleasant revelations the trauma
brought about in it will try and reconstruct the original repression:
There is no doubt the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under
the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be
produced by the liberation of the repressed.197
This places the beyond of the pleasure principle firmly in the realm of the unconscious id, the
primary process. If there is to be a death drive, it will be found in this zone of eternal,
unchanging drives.
195
Lyotard, J.F. 'Fiscourse Digure: The Utopia behind the Scenes of the Phantasy' Trans. Mary Lydon.
Theatre Journal Vol. 35, No. 3, The Poetics of Theatre (USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press October,
1983) ( Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207215 ) p. 334
196
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3724
197
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3725
104
The repetition compulsion is the most interesting part of Freud's theory for Lyotard, which he
discusses in the initial chapters of Libidinal Economy.198 Unfortunately, Freud often assigns
these compulsions as consequences of the biological structure of life itself, rather than looking
at more cases of this very interesting repetition compulsion as observed in patients. Lyotard's
own reference to repetition takes place in his discussion of 'the labyrinth' most notably in the
story of his “Italian friend”, compelled to re-circulate around a gallery with an unexplained
sense of unease until he finally (consciously) notices a picture of an ex-mistress on a wall.199
This is an incident of the type which Freud mentions: the benefactor abandoned by his
protégés, however much they differ from one another (considering his relationship with his
own disciples, one imagines Freud to perhaps saying this a little bitterly); the lover whose
affairs always follow the same course; the woman who marries only to find her husbands
become seriously ill shortly after. In these compulsions, we see complex situations in which
several distinct figures of drives can be seen, with some not following the pleasure principle's
simple aim.200
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, there is clear evidence of Freud's attempt to collapse the
seemingly hostile and negative teleologies of the death drive (a charge towards destruction)
into localised desire for repetition. Freud returns to the question of war neurosis and pinpoints
their cause as being the traumatic event itself bringing such an excess of excitation to the
nervous system that it is in some way damaged. The repetition of the traumatic event in the
patients' dreams is attributed to the desire to master the event, although Freud states that this
instinct may be “[M]ore primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding
unpleasure”.201 Here Freud moves away from the teleological constraints of the pleasure
principle. In speculating that a system might be distinct from the previously overriding
pleasure principle he allows the conception of a mind which has a multiplicity of evolved
198
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone, 1993)
199
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 32
200
These examples appear in Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed.
Smith, I., 2000 (online text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3726
201
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3734
105
purposes, working alongside each other, rather than a unified one to which all others are
subordinate. Certain aspects of dreaming must fall outside of pleasure's remit and are also
considered from an evolutionary standpoint of perhaps existing before the hegemony of the
pleasure instinct.202
Other forms of repetition are more clearly beyond the pleasure principle. Distinguishing
between the mobile energy in the primary process and the bound energy in the secondary
process, we are offered the hypothesis that repetition takes place as a means of binding the
excess energy of the primary process in stable formations in the secondary. This impulse kicks
in when the body is threatened by a surplus of energy which would otherwise catastrophically
unbalance it, in the forms such as neurosis. The question we ask here is if repetition is the best
strategy for changing this situation? Merely completing the act over and over again seems to
be a poor way of resolving something which was not dealt with in the first occurrence.
Lyotard's death instinct is very much a property of the unconscious. Its mechanisms and most
strikingly its productions seem to be very different from the processes we would associate
with conscious, rational capabilities which traditional philosophy has endowed consciousness
with. Nevertheless, it is somewhat internal to the individual subject. It conditions their
interaction with the world as an internal force, and here we remember the twofold nature of
the drive economy: (1) drive formations 'scanning' to release primary process energy and (2)
repetition and reality principle working to cathect energy in the secondary process. The death
drive is therefore another anti-anthropocentric property of an individual, albeit one which is
masked and repressed by the tendency to anthropomorphise it.
Ansell-Pearson, in his reading of Freud's death drive in Germinal Life, concentrates on the
view that it is a desire of the organism to regress to its original state.203 This rather myopic
reading of what are a series of diverse tendencies is necessary to support his argument that
Deleuze's re-framing of the death drive as a force of repetition-creativity represents a break
from Freud which in turn allows him to present a metaphysics of the unconscious which he
202
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3721
203
Ansell-Pearson, K. Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999) p. 113
106
opposes to a drive-theory of the unconscious.204
Conclusions
Freud's “far-fetched speculation” that “consciousness may be, not the most universal of
mental processes, but only a function of them” has been rendered commonplace by advances
in not only psychoanalysis but also in the wider context of psychology and neuroscience since
it was written.205 Such a revelation is a perfect example of the fissure Freud opens under the
foundations of subject-centred, Cartesian, anthropocentric philosophy. Unfortunately, it has
not fully made the transition to philosophical research, where the subject is still taken as the
ruler of the conscious mind, replete with the ability to fully control its own destiny and that of
the body it is attached to. This chapter has begun to sketch a Freudian perspective which can
be contrasted to the metaphysics of subjectivity. It has shown that a consistent model of the
unconscious can be conceptualised which: operates according to formal process and rules; can
be likened to a machinic or energetic system; that the drives' pathways which traverse it
originate in instincts. The vicissitudes of the drive over time are the consequence of the
general compulsion to repeat, which is, for the machine of the unconscious to cathect, and the
success or failure of this repetition in both the internal conditions of the psyche (the reality
principle) and the material circumstances the subject is constrained by (reality proper). The
consequences of this migration of the drive is not that the new formation replaces the old, but
that the new exists in parallel with the old, operating alongside it rather than effacing it.
Historical drive pathways or possibilities of cathexis, though potentially uninvested, retain the
possibility to repeat should considerations of reality begin to favour them again.
Repetition is the defining process of the unconscious. Once established the drives remain,
their pathways laid down, and the system always looks for opportunities to pass along, so its
essential shape is carved by the rules that it (1) repeats and (2) when it encounters censorship
or resistance it tries to re-route. This rubric of repetition forms the basis of Land's conception
of the drive and conceptualisation of his key claim that “drives are the functions of nomadic
204
Ansell-Pearson's thought, introduced briefly here, will be taken up in Chapter 5 when discussing
Land.
205
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3728
107
cybernetic systems, not instincts but simulated instincts, artificial instincts”.206 They are
artificial instinct formations, born of a compromise between the desire to repeat and reality.
As such they can be opposed to the Lacanian School's common understanding of drives – as
explored in the next chapter – which are much more like ideational content. An example is
Žižek's description of 'unknown knowns' – “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene
practices we pretend not to know about, although they form the background of our public
values”.207 These productions, as “beliefs, suppositions” are much more complex than the
energetic unconscious produces, and really belong in the upper areas of the psychical system.
The unconscious does not know ideas, and though its energetic pathways and mechanisms
may lead to predicable dispositions of cathexis, it does not think.
Freud's depiction also refutes the often held belief that the death instinct is a destructive one
which seeks to end the organism's suffering. On the contrary, the death instinct is seen from a
biological point of view as being the founder of “self preservation, of self assertion, and of
mastery”, that “these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death”.208 The
death instinct: “[S]truggles most energetically against events which might help it attain its
life's goal rapidly – by a kind of short circuit”.209 In fact, the only really necrotic element of
the death drive is in its name – all of its forces are turned towards the preservation of life in
the organism. When death finally arrives; the 'proper death' of the organism which the death
drive works to facilitate, these functions of the Freudian death drive are still fighting to
prolong the organism's survival.
206
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 330
207
Žižek, S. 'Philosophy, the "unknown knowns", and the public use of reason'. in Topoi. Vol. 25, No. 1-
2, (2006) p. 137-142
208
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3741
209
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3741
108
Chapter 2. Lacan's Return to Freud
This chapter has two goals. Firstly it will briefly consider the nature of Lacan's 'return to
Freud' and his use of Freudian vocabulary. The remainder of the chapter is then dedicated to
an analysis of Lacan's own model of the unconscious. The objectives of and methodology
used in this second part are surmised in the section below, Objectives.
Lacan repeatedly stated that his aim as a psychoanalyst was to faithfully follow Freud. Such
professions of fidelity to the 'father' of the movement were commonly heard from
psychoanalysts. These statements can be interpreted in a number of ways; perhaps most
temptingly as an act of Oedipal devotion. Lacan – among many other analysts - claimed to be
the ‘heir’ of the Freudian system of analysis as the psychoanalytic movement fractured into a
series of post-Freudian schools. As each interpretive position fought for recognition of their
own analysis as the most truthful or effective method, all made arguments from authority
appealing their fidelity to the letter or spirit of Freud’s work. The theoretical foundation of
Lacan's claims to fidelity derive from the nature of Freud's creation of Psychoanalysis. In
some respects, Psychoanalysis was created 'overnight'. The discipline did not evolve, or
slowly cleave from an established branch of science. Instead, it rapidly grew after the 'big
bang' of Freud’s initial discovery of the analytic unconscious. When selecting the terms which
he would use to describe the psychoanalytic concepts he was deliminating, Freud's
methodology was often to work by analogy. The words which Freud used to describe the
processes of the unconscious were not always as easy to coin as 'unconscious', a simple
negation of the already established notion of consciousness as the primary space of thought.
Instead, the language of psychoanalysis was acquired by Freud's borrowing of terms from
other disciplines which were is some way 'like' the psychoanalytic concepts he was trying to
elucidate. Terms like drive [Trieb], censorship [Zensur] or wish [Wunsch] are not only
metaphorical in their operation, but are sourced polymathicly. Freud borrowed terms from
such diverse disciplines as philosophy, biology, mechanics, economics, popular psychology
and myth to indicate to the reader what the underlying psychoanalytic terms might mean. As a
result the underlying meaning of Freud's language can be difficult to understand – particularly
when it was freshly minted and there were not so many secondary interpretations as have been
generated subsequently. With the passing of time these concepts have become more
entrenched in language for their psychoanalytic use, and this process has been driven by
psychoanalysts following Freud who try to take his conceptual framework and re-present it in
109
less metaphorical language. Lacan's 'return to Freud' or 'fidelity to Freud' is best considered in
this sense: his aim is to take the Freudian concepts which lie underneath his linguistic,
metaphorical descriptions, and offer them to the reader over-again, giving an extended
analysis 'in the wake' of the Freudian definition: “I can only write this introduction—this
Einjuihrung, to use Freud's term—in the wake of Freud, in so far as this notion is absolutely
new in Freud”.210
In both Lacanian and Freudian analysis a tripartite structure is used to describe the processes
of the unconscious. In Lacanianism this structure consists of need (Besoin), drive (Pulsion),
and desire (Désir). The Freudian counterparts to these three are are instinct (Instinkt), drive
(Trieb), and wish (Wunsch). The extent to which these two models are synonymous with each
other (and their commonly used English renditions) is widely discussed in psychoanalytical
commentary regarding the equivalence of the terms between different languages.211 Yet
beyond this recognition of simple linguistic difference, there are far more important
considerations of how these two psychoanalytic systems, though superficially appearing
equivalent due to their broadly similar structures, are in fact very different in their portrayal of
the mechanisms of the unconscious. Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ cannot be read as a dogmatic
restoration of Freudian orthodoxy, nor as an attempt to transpose Freud’s often clumsy use of
terminology onto the contemporaneous psychoanalytic lexicon. Instead, the return to Freud
must be considered as an exegesis of the Freud’s works in which Lacan offers a certain (re)reading of Freud. This hermeneutic approach emphasises parts of Freud’s works in
proportion to their ability to support Lacan’s central psychoanalytic insight, namely that “the
unconscious is structured like a language”.212
As we have seen, Freud presents three meta-psychological hypotheses in The Unconscious
(1915): the economic, the dynamic and the topographic. Dynamic processes in the
unconscious are concerned with the translation and transformation of information within the
210
Lacan, J. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans.
Alan Sheridan. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977) p. 162
211
As discussed in Chapter 1
212
“L'inconscient est structuré comme un langage”. From Lacan, J. Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001) pp.
449-495).
110
unconscious. These process are described as dynamic because they involve a change in the
state of the information, rather than a physical relocation of the process to another component
of the psyche (topographic change). Freud's descriptions of these changes in the dynamic
hypothesis are the most useful to the Lacanian goal of describing the unconscious as a quasilinguistic system.213 Examples of dynamic mechanisms of the unconscious would include the
censor and the processes of the dreamwork.214 It is the present thesis' contention that Lacan's
re-emphasising of the dynamic elements of the unconscious has a correlate strategy of deemphasis of aspects of the economic hypothesis. In his description of the unconscious as a
language like structure Lacan considers at length the mechanisms by which the unconscious
substitutes terms along metaphoric and metonymic axes. This theory owes much – as is
commonly noted – to both Saussurian linguistics and its re-interpretation by Jacobsen.215
Lacan's decision to take linguistics as his meta-model has serious consequences for his micromodels of the processes of the psyche. His explicit denunciation of the biological bases of
psychical structures as envisaged by Freud, and the replacement of these bases with linguistic
constructs is a change in register. If something is to be thought of as like a language, a host of
secondary concepts related to language become prominent in out attempts to interpret the
theory. Superficially, languages seem to be about signs, and signs are ideas; our intuition is to
think about languages in the register of conscious thought. In fact, signification is a more
abstract concept, and is about the relationships or bridges between signs. Nevertheless,
anthropocentric bias tends to pull the signifier to the sign, and reduce the net of siginfierrelations in the unconscious to a sign-matrix of ideas.
Objectives
213
I am using the term quasi-linguistic to describe Lacan's rewriting of Freud to emphasise the
importance of 'like' in that famous quotation of Lacan in the footnote above 'The unconscious is structured
like a language', which is often misinterpreted to mean that the unconscious is a linguistic entity, rather than
that it bears some resemblance to the structural framework of language.
214
Depicted in Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
215
Bennington, G Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988)
pp.80-81
111
The present thesis shall argue that, firstly, Lacan's dynamic account of the unconscious lacks a
satisfactory account of the economic aspect of the unconscious which undertakes the 'work' of
this quasi-linguistic substitution; and secondly, that another set of problems arise when we
consider how the mechanisms of the dynamic unconscious finally alight on a chose representation of a signifier which it encounters. Both of these accusations could be broadly
classified as criticisms of Lacan's anthropocentricism. In reference to the first, Lacan's theory
of desire fails to describe convincingly why the unconscious will occasionally leave its
'gloomy hermeneutical depths' and effect a change in the behaviour of the subject.216 Freud
emphasises the extreme mobility of the primary process, giving examples in the case of the
parapraxes regarding how the unconscious might intervene at any moment in the subject's
existence. Lacanian chains of signifiers, especially in their applied use, seem rigid in
comparison. I will argue that this rigidity would reduce the role of the unconscious to being a
black box of neuroses which effect the subject sporadically, and that this is not the case.
Regarding the second objection, philosophers such as Deleuze, Lyotard and Land have written
extensively about the myriad, bewildering possibilities which the unconscious is observed to
choose as the objects of its investment – not only by reinterpretation of Freud's canonical case
studies, but also in wider contexts. Their conclusion is that the unconscious is an essentially
inhuman entity – in Freud's terminology, the other place (Eine andere schauplatz) – and
while Lacan is certainly aware of this claim made by Freud, his marginalisation of the
economic and promotion of the dynamic aspects of the unconscious transform the purposeless
forward movement of the unconscious drives as demonstrated by Freud into a system
concerned, like a language, with fixing meaning and sensibility in relation to a subject.217
While Lacan does not rule out the possibility of uncommon or heterogeneous desires, it is the
case that in the majority of his psychoanalytic interpretations he plays the role akin to that of
the detective: to provide the evidence which can be used to convince a jury, which is
concerned about motives rather than processes, and the form in which he presents these
observations to the 'jury', the reader, is in the form of anthropocentric stories of love, lust
216
217
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 328
As exemplified by Lacan's contention that the signifier is "that which represents a subject for another
signifier” Lacan, J. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans.
Alan Sheridan. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977) p. 207
112
anger or treachery.218
Chapter 1 showed how Freud's writings can be divided into theoretical works which were
abstract, mechanistic and posited the unconscious as anti-anthropocentric, and those works
which were clinically centred and treated the unconscious as a hidden consciousness, and a
site of ideas. In doing so we make something of a binary distinction between these two
opposing conceptions. With Lacan's works there is no such simple distinction. Instead, they
can be conceived of as a grey scale, in which any definite position on either end of this
spectrum tends to be pulled back towards the middle, whose indefiniteness is made all the
more oblique by the calculated sense of mysteriousness and obscurantism Lacan cultivates.219
Lacan's methodology which is proffer his work as clues, riddles and tangential approaches to
the question of the unconscious prevents a definitive reading of several part of his theoretical
apparatus. However, the consequence of uncertainty is not always suspension of judgement –
even if they are infamously hard to interpret, Lacan's works of psychoanalysis are interpreted
by a number of scholars who identify as Lacanians or post-Lacanians.220 In this process of
interpretation, readers of Lacan have identified a series of points which help to signpost a
general theoretical direction in his work.221 The concepts used by these readers of Lacan,
following his decision to liken the unconscious to a language and to theorise in a linguistic
manner (in his riddling style), conditions the interpretation of his work towards
anthropocentricism. The very nature of a metaphor is inertly idealist: this idea is like another
idea. If we were to posit that a theory is only as anti-anthropocentric as its softest take on the
218
The objection could be made that most psychoanalytic cases are of a banal nature and require an
interpretation which relies on 'normal' human desire. The present thesis shall demonstrate that this is a only
concern of clinical psychoanalysis, and not relevant to the philosophical foundations of the practice.
219
A number of commentators have noted the 'density' of Lacan's writing, for example: "the
impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be
understood". From Stevens, R. Sigmund Freud: Examining the Essence of his Contribution (UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008) p. 191n
220
The 'official' Lacanian school is headed by his editor J.A. Miller, but there are also a number of
prominent intellectuals such as Žižek who identify as Lacanians.
221
Such as: 'the unconscious is structured like a language'; 'quilting points'; the trio real-imaginary-
symbolic; the phallus.
113
centricism of the human subject allows it to be, where would Lacan's work be situated? I shall
argue, following Land, that the answer to this question is that Lacan's position – and even
more so that of Lacanism – is as an anthropomorphising tendency, pulling psychoanalysis
away from its radical Freudian origins:
It is Lacan who insists on Oedipalizing the Fort-Da game, in the general process of
Oedipalizing desire to its foundations; ripping all the energy, hydraulics, pathology,
and shock out of Freud, and substituting lack, the pathos of identity, and Heideggerian
pomposity, whilst deepening the role of the phallus, and trivializing desire into the
cringing aspiration to be loved.222
Having noted that I intend to consider Lacan's theory of desire critically, I shall begin by
providing the reader with an exposition Lacan's conception of the unconscious as being
structured like a language, before moving on to consider the dynamic aspects of Lacan's
theory of desire, with particular emphasis on the celebrated 'graph of desire' (graphe du désir)
from Seminar V and the Ecrits in the second section of this chapter. The third section will
build on these models, and consider the difference between the depictions of drive in Freud
and Lacan. The fourth and final section will conditioner the academic reception of Lacan, and
some notable tendencies of the Lacanian School. This account will provide the basis of my
criticism in later sections in the present thesis of the more anthropocentric tendencies of
Lacanian psychoanalysis and its interpreters – a reading which is influenced by the
interpretations of Lacan's work by Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Land.
Structural linguistics: Metaphor and Metonymy
Lacan combined Freud’s theory of the unconscious with structural linguistics, describing the
processes of the dreamwork as described in Chapter 1 as analogous to the processes of
metaphor and metonymy as described by De Saussure and Jakobson. The two initial processes
of the dreamwork – which, as shown in Chapter 1, Freud universalises as the basic
transformational mechanisms of the unconscious – are displacement and condensation.
Lacan's redefinition of these terms moves away from the energetic-fluid-mechanical language
of Freud and instead, these basic operations of the unconscious are presented by Lacan in a
222
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 282
114
lexicon which borrows terms from linguistics. Lacan reinterpreted Freud by combining his
ideas with those of the linguist Roman Jakobson, who had compared the processes of the
dreamwork to metaphor and metonymy.223 Linguistically, the former describes the
replacement of one concept by another similar concept (see figure 14), while the latter
describes the linking of concepts sequentially to make a descriptive sentence (see figure 15).
Figure 14: Axis of metaphor
swift
↑
bounds
↑
The quick brown fox jumps over the bush
↓
↓
dashing
vaults
Figure 15: Axis of metonymy
The → quick → brown → fox → jumps → over → the → bush
These two poles of language describe how each specific word is chosen in any sentence in
preference to all of the other words which may have been used. Metaphorically it is selected
as best representing the concept to be signified; that is, it has the correct association.224
Metonymically it is selected as it gives the sentence meaning according to its previous
structure; that it offers contiguity.225 When the unconscious cannot simply present its impulses
in language – in some cases, due to censorship, but also because there is no precise linguistic
223
See 'Displacement' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:
Karnac,1993) pp. 121-124
224
'Displacement' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993)
225
'Displacement' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993)
115
correlate of its contents, it therefore uses these two mechanisms to change or determine what
it produces. Lacan takes Jakobson's likening of metonymy to displacement and condensation
in the dreamwork and makes a further redefinition. Metaphor is tied to displacement, and
metonymy to condensation.226 These two notions are combined with Lacan's description of
the unconscious as being 'like a language', and his notion of the signifier. For Lacan, the
unconscious consists of an ocean of signifiers, linked together like rings in a chain. These
links are constituted on a horizontal axis, where they represent the combinations of terms that
are often coexistent (cold – snow – white – winter), or vertically as terms which can replace
one another (grief – woe – misery). Each signifier in the unconscious can be (and is) chained
to many different concepts in both directions. Lacan uses metonymy and metaphor to describe
movement along these chains, as one signifier becomes replaced by another (figure 16).
226
See 'Displacement' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993); and Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p. 218
116
Metonym
Metaphor
O
↕
O↔O↔O↔O↔O
O
↕
O
The unconscious
O↔O↔O↔O↔O
↕
↕
↕
↕
↕
O↔O↔O↔O↔O
↕
↕
↕
↕
↕
O↔O↔O↔O↔O
Figure16: Components of Lacan's signifying chains
In the above model, the unconscious' content is a matrix of conjoined signifiers which are
linked associatively. The mechanism by which these terms are associated parses a chain of
information, changing its contents as it moves through the associated terms. This happens
according to Lacan's dictum that the signifier “represents a subject for another signifier”.227
As the signifier is not a sign (which “represents something for someone") that is, correlate
with an idea, it rather represents as relationship between ideas.228 The signifiers which
construct the unconscious are therefore arbitrary links and bridges between various notions
which are conjoined in the psyche. They can be relatively common bridges which are shared
by a number of subjects, but also can be distinct to particular subjects. Signifying relations,
taken in this sense, seem to be timeless, unchanging constructs, like drives in the Freudian
model. However, Lacan does not provide a description of the processes by which this
structure is laid down in the psyche, and it is rather take as a given proposition which
227
Lacan, J. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. A.
Sheridan. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977) p. 207
228
Lacan, J. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. A.
Sheridan. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977) p.207
117
necessarily exists in any subject. This is a problem we find in the linguistic model if stripped
of its biological basis. Without the economic model of the unconscious and its considerations
of formal efficacy, the conditions for the generation of these signifying links is unknown. In
Lacan's model the unconscious, as a matrix of these relational bridges, becomes very difficult
to speak about. The tendency is always to collapse the essence of the signifier into the sign,
and to return the model borrowed from linguistics explained above where one notion or idea
substitutes for another. The idea that one formal relation substitutes for another is decidedly
more complex. At various points even Lacan is guilty of committing this reduction of
relations to ideas. The consequence of this move towards an idealist theory of signs in the
unconscious is, again, a tendency to anthropomorphise the complex, arbitrary, and alien
processes in the unconscious.
Lacan understood the unconscious as a matrix of signifiers, linked together is such a way that
one signifier could substitute itself for another. This transition was described by Lacan as a
‘sliding’ of the signifiers beneath consciousness. Lacan’s description of the unconscious
deliberately ignores the parts of Freud in which the unconscious is analogised to a hydraulic
machine, which is driven by force, pressure or energy. Against Freud’s energeticism, Lacan
posits an unconscious which moves through phases-changes in states of information, working
to match symbols together – to solve a riddle – rather than to dissipate energy. The
consequences of this decision are evaluated here – is Lacan, as he claimed, showing fidelity to
Freud’s true intention, or is he misinterpreting Freud’s intentions in the service of his own
project?
Movements along chains of signifiers in Lacan's model lack the references to force or
mechanical pressure which characterises Freud’s modelling of the unconscious. Traversal of
the signifying chain in neither driven by cathectic energy, nor is the system powered by
underling cathectic energy. Instead, as a linguistic system, it works comparatively, identifying
terms which are similar or appropriate, at which point the sliding of signifcation stops and a
fixed idea is generated. While Lacan can conceivably reinterpret the metaphorical analogy of
elements of the dreamwork and remain loyal to Freud, wholesale change of the unconscious
to a system driven by formal quasi-linguistic rules altering states of information is not
obviously prefigured in Freud. Bowie correctly identifies that though Freud’s language about
the levels of the unconscious uses linguistic metaphors (translation, inscription), displacement
118
and condensation are plainly related to hydraulic mechanics.229 Condensation and
displacement are markedly different in their operation in Lacanian psychoanalysis than they
are in classically Freudian terms. For Freud, displacement involves the transference of
“cathectic energy... along associative pathways”.230 Lacan's description strips the energetics
from this Freudian unconscious machine, and instead the points at which the sliding of
signifiers stop, the quilting points [points de capiton], are performatively efficient; though
they are areas at which the individuals unconscious is likely to fix associations there is no
energetic structure or instinct which defines them. Instead, the quilting point is characterised
by the density of signifiers conjoined to one another. The 'gravity' of these points of massed
signification curves the 'space/time' of the unconscious causing its movement to stop. The
example below (figure 17) shows this formation in a (much) simplified signifying chain, in
which the initial idea 'The Death of Diana' connect to the hyper-linked notion of
'Government', around which all other signifiers cluster. This paranoiac fantasy would be a
likely quilting point in the subject trying to make sense of this notion if the unconscious had
this structure; of course, other structures are equally possible depending on the construction of
the subject – it wouldn’t be hard to get to notions like 'Decadence' or 'Paparazzi' using the
model of the signifying chain.
229
Bowie, M. Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p. 69
230
'Displacement' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993)
119
These quilting points, linked by multiple signifiers, are akin to the balls on a sheet a teacher
might use to demonstrate gravitation. As the density of signification increases, the ability of
the quilting point to pull meaning towards itself – that is, to become the basis of an idea in the
psyche increases. Hence we see the nature of the complex in a psychoanalytic patient: it
works as an attractor which reinvests a diverse range of impulses in the subject in a single
knot of signifiers and signs.
Figure 18: Balls on a Rubber Sheet
If the content of the unconscious is a network of chained signifiers, 'displacing' movement
along the metonymic axis – terms becoming substituted for each other – is the most basic
action which the unconscious undertakes. For Lacan, this traversal through signifiers
underpins the ability to have the linguistic structure which defines the unconscious, whereas
for Freud, the ability to displace cathectic energy from one idea to another is also the most
simple dynamic force in the unconscious. For both displacement allows the true force of an
idea to be 'falsely' passed onto another, and understanding this gap between what is desired
unconsciously and the final affect known to consciousness is the aim of psychoanalysis.
In Freud’s model, the movement of displacement can only be understood as the consequence
of the drives interaction with the censor: “Is fecit cui profuit. We may assume, then, that
dream-displacement comes about through the influence of the same censorship–that is, the
121
censorship of endopsychic defence”.231 The drive is prevented from proceeding along its
course by the censor, and switches track so that it can reach a destination (cathexis). In the
case of displacement, where energy is cathected from one idea to another, the train seems to
'jump' the tracks, switching to the next possible element. In the case of condensation, there is
no 'jump', but a switch to a related idea (Figure 19, below).
Figure 19: Avoiding the Freudian Censor
Lacan's notion of censorship therefore differs from Freud's. Rather than encountering a
blockade, an erasure or a force which essentially says – 'no', the Lacanian subject begins as
split (this construction is shown between Graphs 1 and 2 below). Instead of a censorship,
protecting the psyche from the horrors of uncontrolled energetic flows in the unconscious,
Lacan posits the question 'che vuoi' which can only come from a conflict between a notion of
the self and an other. To continue the above analogy of the train, Lacan posits the existence of
a driver (moi) and passenger (autre) and the point of destination is determined by the question
asked by the driver of the passenger “where does he want to go?” However, the passage down
the associative chain is no longer linear, along the lines of 'drive' (Lacan's notion of which is
231
Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 780
122
given consideration later in this chapter). Instead, there is a slide down the signifying chain
until and acceptable notion is reached; to return to the train metaphor, all conjoined stations
along all connecting lines are parsed until the destination is shown to be perfomatively
efficient in the sense that an answer to the question 'che vuoi' is generated (again, it is 'the
signifier which represents the subject for another signifier'). Instead of a driver, we have a
guide, who takes the other to their imagined destination. If we image the guide to be at
Holborn Station (see Figure 20 below), if they were to see Sherlock Holmes on the platform
and asked themselves what he wanted, moving down the possibilities of chained stations, they
would alight on the notion of Baker Street – four links away – as fulfilling our criteria: 'as a
guide, I take Holmes to Baker Street'. However, if Holmes is returning a broken digital
camera, the guide would select Tottenham Court Road – for Lacan, the signifiers slide until
the solution to a riddle is reached.
Figure 20: 'Chained' Stations
In Lacan's model there is only the starting concept, a chain of associations which it is drawn
to, and a locus of subjectivity which interrogates these chains: “[F]or Lacan there is no
hydraulics of the mind: its pressures can be coherently described only in terms of the interface
patterns that occur between one signifying order and another”.232 These signifying orders in
the subject are constructed (chained) linguistically over its existence and are therefore
232
Bowie, M. Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p.71
123
arbitrary and unpredictable – the stations are connected in a random order – but the 'quilting'
force which determines meaning does so in relation to a notion of a subject. Conversely,
Freud’s unconscious doesn’t ask 'che vuoi?' (what do you want?). Instead it asks 'can it
cathect?': the resting point of a motion of displacement is determined by the minimum number
of moves which are required to escape the censorship. The subject then passes along the tried
and tested conditions for cathexis – so long as the reality principle is adhered to – and tries to
reach its aim as rapidly as possible in these pre-set patterns (drives). Freudian desire is
essentially unidirectional, as depicted in the figure below, passing towards suitable cathexis,
whereas Lacanian desire is a multi-directional, complex construct which mediates between
the subject, other subjects and the signifying chain (this construction is explored in the section
'Desire' below) .
Figure 21: Freudian Displacement – energy passes from one pathway to another on its route
to cathexis.
The use of displacement as an analytical tool is difficult. As terms are replaced by one another
along chained concepts or switched in contents of parallel drives, it can require a skilled
124
analyst to trace them back to their latent origins. More easily analysable content is generated
by condensation, whose products “reinforce the underlying idea” and are therefore closer to
the latent content.233 For Freud condensation is not secondary to displacement. It “must
probably be pictured as a process stretching over the whole course of events till the perceptual
region is reached. But in general we must be content to assume that all the forces which take
part in the formation of dreams operate simultaneously”.234 However, the work of
condensation is certainly aided by displacements of cathexis because, for Freud, drives are
always numerous and parallel. The unconscious generates meaning through the interaction of
these drives, as energy passes through them and concentrates in points of common
conjunction. Condensation, for Freud, can start as displacement and is the point at which two
chains' substitutions meet.235 Condensation and displacement are very similar in Freud’s
model. They are both effects of the transference of cathexis from one pathway to another.
Lacan ties condensation to the idea of metaphor, a pathway towards the substitution of terms
for one another which signify similar ideas. Instead of moving to the next signifier, signifiers
are substituted and the production of meaning becomes 'possible'.236 Lacan offers the
example of “the coupled terms swimmer and scholar and then terra firma and truth” operating
according to the rules of metaphor.237 The meaning, in terms of the relation between the two,
is equivalent, and the latter two terms can signify the former. Evans renders Lacan's formulae
for metonymy and metaphor as:
‘[Metonymy states that] the signifying function of the connection of the signifier with
the signifier is congruent with maintenance of the bar.’238
233
'Condensation' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993)
234
Freud, S. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000
(online text available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 1750
235
'Displacement' in Laplanche, S. and Pontails, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1993)
236
Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Taylor and Francis Online, 2006)
p.115
237
Lacan, J. Ecrits, Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 756
238
Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Taylor and Francis Online, 2006)
125
'[Metaphor states that] the signifying function of the substitution of one signifier for
another is congruent with the crossing of the bar.'239
In terms of the production of meaning, these process become a binary pair. Metonomy is the
transfer along the signifier from one position to another. Once this move down the chain is
made if no 'meaning' is generated (the binary '0', meaning off or no), the system cycles on. If
'meaning' is found, the answer is yes (the binary '1'; on or yes) and the bar of signification is
crossed, and some meaning is derived.240 At this point, we have described the operation of the
unconscious as an informational machine, operating in a cycle, and as something which is
capable of being modelled cybernetically. Here, again, Lacan differers from Freud, whose
conception of the unconscious as a network of neuronic connections which cathect energy
doesn’t allow this open ended cybernetic processing. Instead, the neuronic pathways are fixed,
and the products of their activation – the signification produced – is a function of the
interactions of the particular drives which have unbound energy which requires cathexis. If
there is a truly anti-anthropocentric aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is this cybernetics of
the unconscious.
It is therefore possible to read the linguistic unconscious as a development of the antianthropocentric fissure opened up by Freud's topologies of the unconscious. Structurally,
Lacan's basic thesis that the unconscious is linked by signification is compatible with antianthropomorphism. Signifiers are arbitrary links, but some of them, for the unconscious to be
capable of generating meaning, must be structured in common patterns. Although others can
be wild flights away from sign to another, some, indeed most must be the most basic bindings
between concepts. For example, 'cow' is chained with: (1) a number of semiotically related
p.117
239
Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Taylor and Francis Online, 2006)
p.115
240
“Metaphor is, quite radically speaking, the effect of the substitution of one signifier for another in a
chain. nothing natural predestining the signifier for this function of phoros apart from the fact that two
signifiers are involved, which can, as such, be reduced to a phonemic opposition.” From Lacan Ecrits Trans.
B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 756
126
concepts: pow, low, bow; (2) a selection of common associations: mud, farm, milk, grass; (3)
a few subject specific uncommon associations: school, mother. The set that Lacan is
concerned with in his role as an analyst are the latter set, which are specific to the patient and
are exhibited in the patient in the form of the complex – his symptoms. The specificities of the
patient's complex come closest to the linguistic use of metaphor and metonymy, which is an
anthropomorphising tendency because it compares ideas, and comparing ideas – thinking or
rationalising – is the exemplary property of the subject of philosophy.
Yet according to the letter of Lacan's pronouncements, metaphor and metonymy are not
analogous to the operation of the unconscious because they represent process by which ideas
can be exchanged for other ideas, for instead that they represent traversals or journeys by
which one concept may leap to another in a pre-ideational domain. The most obvious way to
conceptualise this leap is a as a pure displacement in an economic sense, as this allows us to
conceive of it as a formal and mechanical process – cathexis is spatially transferred. However,
Lacan's refusal to consider the psyche as an energetic system leads him to replace this model
with a cybernetic model in which the formal processes are the rules of 'crossing the bar'. The
conception of the unconscious as a series of linked ideas is certainly convivial to Freud's
models of the unconscious, and Lacan's description of travel through these links, as a jump
away from a notion (displacement) or towards a knot of associated notions (condensation)
isn't in itself anti-Freudian. That 'the unconscious is structured like a language' can be a
metaphor which helps understand how unconscious makes leaps along signifiers (relations
between terms) defined by their context and, again, is not too far from Freud's theory.
But again, the choice of the metaphor as being like a language contains the seed of many of
the problems we see in interpretations of Lacanianism. As soon as we say 'language' there are
a raft of concepts which the idea of language is tied to: elements of section, ideas, choice,
comprehension, understanding. All of these concepts are, in turn, considered to be properties
or processes of the Cartesian subject.241 Of course, making this leap is a misunderstanding of
certain parts of Lacan's texts as analogising condensation and displacement to the sliding of
language in a sentence is misleading as makes us think of swapping words and therefore
241
This, again, highlights the dichotomy between the subject of Freudian analysis and the Cartesian
subject, as described in the introduction. Lacanianism's philosophical position tends to return to the Cartesian
subject and treat it as a given.
127
swapping ideas. Such an interpretation obscures Lacan's claim that the unconscious isn't
arranged as signs; he claims that rather signification is the model of the laws and connections
of the unconscious. Additionally, it must be considered that, even more so than with Freud,
Lacan's work is centred around the treatment of the patient in psychoanalytic practice. The
generalisation of Lacanian theory beyond the therapeutic setting risks conflating the abnormal
with the quotidian, and interpreting the actions of a 'normal' unconscious with those of one in
failure mode.242 The crossing of the bar is a feature of the four discourses between analyst and
patient, and the subject of these discourse is, naturally, the complex of symptoms which the
patient demonstrates.243 Displacement and condensation as observed in the manifestation of
the complex are characterised by their abnormality and are therefore much more dramatic
leaps across the bridges of signification. Lacan's psychoanalysis is therefore only an
improvement on Freud's in relation to treating the patient for the complex he exhibits as a
subject, rather than to theorise the inhuman aspects of the unconscious. This, again, links to
Lacan's de-emphasis of the biological foundations of the drive, and also to the philosophical
lineage Lacan situated his work in reference to. The patient presents himself to the analyst as
a 'given' subject, with the complex 'ready made'. Effective treatment therefore takes the
existence of the complex as a existing construction and does not try and conceptualise it from
its inception as a biological need rather situating it in language. Similarly, in the clinical
setting the patient, face to face with another person, treats the patient as a subject – albeit, for
Lacan, as a split one.244
Lacanian analysis interacts with philosophy, but it is with a philosophical lineage that is
concerned with the human subject and its situation as the locus of thought, a school which I
defined in the present thesis' introduction as the 'inside' lineage of philosophy which tends
towards anthropocentricism and Cartesianism (see figure 22 below).
242
This incomparability with generalisation did not stop Lacan becoming a prominent intellectual who was
willing to theorise outside of his discipline. Indeed, some Seminars contain very few explicit references to
psychoanalytic treatment.
243
Lacan discusses the four discourses in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (New York:
Norton, 2007)
244
See 'Split' in Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Taylor and Francis
Online, 2006) p. 195
128
Figure 22: Psychoanalysis' Position Between Two Tendencies of Philosophy
Lacan's turn towards idealist (inside) philosophy is entirely deliberate: “[B]ecause recourse to
the idea of matter is but a naive, outmoded form of authentic materialism”.245 If this
association with inside philosophy and rejection of biological basis of the drive is to be
validated, it must be superior to the Freudian model as a method of explaining the
unconscious. Dylan Evans (whose Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis is considered to be
a foundational resource in interpreting Lacan's writings) turned away from Lacanian
psychoanalysis because of Lacan's failure to consider biological – and therefore materialist –
bases of the psyche.246 It is interesting to note that Evans situates Lacan's 'return to Freud' as
being an attempt maintain those Freudian concepts which were not biologically defensible
such as the death drive: “'Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology’, [Lacan]
245
Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 73
246
Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp.38-55. Available online
at ( http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
129
claimed”.247 This, like Deleuze's reading of the death drive, continently forgets that the death
drive – as evidence of problematic repetition – was formulated in many ways, and entirely
provisionally in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Indeed, it's first line “What follows is
speculation, often far-fetched speculation” is hardly a dogmatic assertion of a specific
biological process.248 Instead the death drive is an attempt to solve the problematic nature of
repetition, insofar as the compulsion to repeat can have negative consequences for the
organism. This spurred Lacan to pursue his culturalist reading of Freud even further. Every
biological term in Freud’s work was reinterpreted as a metaphor for some cultural
phenomenon. Freud’s remarks on the phallus, Lacan claimed, had nothing to do with
something so banal as a mere biological organ; they referred to a cultural symbol.249
Lacanian Desire
I have established that the contents of the Lacanian unconscious are signifiers and that the
mechanism by which it operates is a sliding between different signified elements either
laterally or vertically. The final part of Lacan's model is the mechanism which makes this
sliding take place; this is desire, the motor which drives the unconscious, and determines
when the 'crossing of the bar' takes place. Lacan's dynamic model of the unconscious is
illustrated in the infamous ‘graph of desire’.250 In the graph of desire Lacan describes the
movement of the substituion of signifiers for one another along the axes of metaphor and
247
Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp.38-55. Available online
at ( http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
248
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) from Complete Works Ed. Smith, I., 2000 (online text
available at http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf ) p. 3728
249
Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp.38-55. Available online
at ( http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
250
The most important sources of this theory in Lacan are: The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic
of Desire Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 ( New York: WW Norton, 2002)
130
metonymy.251 These processes can be read as ones which operate automatically, and are
therefore ‘without thought’, as the unconscious replaces censored signifiers with others in
which is essentially a cybernetic system, changing the state of information. However, I shall
argue that a level of ‘thought’ is introduced in the Lacanian notion of ‘the crossing of the bar’,
the moment at which the unconscious thought moves to consciousness. Following Lacan’s
dictum that “A signifier represents a subject for another signifier”, the role of the ‘subject’ in
determining the productions of the unconscious is critically analysed.252 Lacan's theory of the
unconscious is described topographically by the its construction by metonymic and
metaphorical links as depicted above, but they are not sufficient to understand its operation
dynamically. The graph of desire sites unconscious production at the intersection between the
chain of signifiers and a vector along which the subject is constituted. The signifying chain
represents the contents of the unconscious, the network of ideas conjoined by metonynmic
and metaphorical links described above.253
This reading is not to merely provide an exegesis of Lacan's thought, but is to set up a contrast
between the theories of Lacan on one side and Deleuze and Land on another about the nature
of desire. Lacan's model of the unconscious is propelled by desire, as is Deleuze's, but the
nature of this desire is entirely different. In Lacan's case desire is the desire to create meaning
within a certain system (the unconscious of signifiers) and is therefore the desire of the
subject to create itself. On the other hand, we have Deleuzian desire, which will be explained
251
Several commentators have produced readings of this crucial Lacanian mechanism. A typical treatment
can be found in Eidelzstein, A. The Graph of Desire (London: Karnac, 2009). See Also Kozicki, B. Lacan’s
Che Vuoi? Graph in (Re-)Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies Vol. 6 Ed. Ragland, E available at
http://return.jls.missouri.edu/Lacan/ReturnVol6/Front_Matter_Return_Vol6.pdf;
252
Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p.693
253
Lacan's starting point in The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire is such a conception
of the unconscious' mechanism: “[T]he mechanisms described by Freud as those of the primary process, by
which the unconscious is governed, correspond exactly to the functions this school of linguistics believes
determine the most radical axes of the effects of language, namely metaphor and metonymy-in other words,
the effects of the substitution and combination of signifiers in the synchronic and diachronic dimensions.
respectively, in which they appear in discourse.” From Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW
Norton, 2002) p. 676
131
in Chapter 3, which has its origin in both the biological and the instinctive. In this later model
the subjects constitutes itself after the work of desire has taken place, thereby establishing an
ontological order in which desire prefigures the creation of the subject, whilst Lacan's model
starts from the construction of the subject and explains how the subject constrains and
interacts with desire. A pictorial depiction of Lacanian causation can be found in the arc of the
graph of desire which passes from right to left, “from desire to need passing through demand
from need once again to desire – via the need for becoming the cause of the others desire”.254
The traversal of this loop indicates that the subject constitutes both its conscious, speaking
self, and its germination through the split subject of the unconscious. If the goal of this this is
to depict machinic desire, a key question is why this machine operates. In Kozicki's reading of
Lacan it is because the subject makes itself:
The Complete Graph is a topological representation of vectors, which participate in
circuits which in fact become a series of systems that interact with one another. The
synchronous systems in it are closed due to their temporal aspect, but in the diachronic
moments and systems there comes into play a degree of openness and autopoesis.255
Here the unconscious is depicted as a series of interacting circuits – circuits represented in the
graph of desire as its vectors – which are to some extent synchronous. In this motion of
'autopoesis', there is no distinction of depth or time between the operation of the unconscious
and the creation of the subject. Instead the subject is already there, determining its own
creation at the onset. This can be opposed to a reading of Deleuze, regarding whom Smith
says of his ethics, but the point can be generalised to all aspects of Deleuzian thought, that
“For Deleuze, conscious will and preconscious interest are both subsequent to our
unconscious drives, and it is at the level of the drives that we have to aim our [...] analysis.”256
For Deleuze, as for Freud, the unconscious precedes and constitutes the subject, which is
generated temporally after the unconscious' operation.
254
Eidelzstein, A. The Graph of Desire (London: Karnac, 2009) p. 272
255
Kozicki, S. 'Lacan’s Che Vuoi? Graph' in (Re-)Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies Vol. 6 Ed. Ellie
Ragland available at ( http://return.jls.missouri.edu/Lacan/ReturnVol6/Front_Matter_Return_Vol6.pdf )
256
Smith, D.W. 'Deleuze and the Question of Desire' in Parrahesia 02 (2007) p.69 ( available at
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia02/parrhesia02_smith.pdf )
132
Figure 23: The Graph of Desire (1)257
The vector of the subject represents the selection process along which this data becomes
changed and used. In the simplest version of this graph, the relationship between these two
chains is demarcated. Vector S → S' indicates the signifying chain. Its vector is left → right,
indicating the predominance of metonymy as the conjunction of unconscious signifiers (the
next thing follows from the former). The vector of the subject ∆ → $ passes – indirectly, in a
loop rather than a line – in the opposite direction, indicating that the subject is, in some way,
constituted retroactively. The Lacanian subject is constituted dialectically in the relationship
between the point at which the chain S → S' first crosses the subjective vector and the second,
later point.258 These points correlate to the answers to the questions 'what do I want to say' and
257
From Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p.681
258
Lacan: “If we conduct the subject anywhere, it is to a deciphering which assumes that a sort of logic is
already operative in the unconscious, a logic in which, for example, an interrogative voice or even the
development of an argument can be recognized”. From Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW
Norton, 2002) p. 673
133
'what am I expected to say'. The former relates to the initial content of the unconscious – in
Freudian terms, the latent content – intersecting with the signifying chain. The latter is related
to the manifest content, the production of the unconscious, which is determined in relation to
what is expected of the subject by an other.
Figure 24: The Graph of Desire (2)259
Lacan describes the upper part of Graph 1 as the 'button tie' [point de caption] which stops the
sliding of the chain of signifiers.260 This zone is recapitulated in Graph 2, in which a circuit is
formed between s(A) ↔ A indicating the circularity of the production of meaning. The
signifier is constantly interrogated in relation to the central question 'che vuoi?’, represented
by the upper line; as clarified in Graph 3.
259
From Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 684
260
Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p.683
134
Figure 25 The Graph of Desire (3)261
That the motor of desire – this mechanism of transferring affect from idea to associated idea
through the matrix of signification – is in relation to what is acceptable for the constitution of
the subject 'che vuoi?' has an antecedent in Freud's model. Lacan's idea of the other correlates
with Freud's (super)ego formation, and the interplay between the subject's ideal image and the
images which it can produce. Yet Lacan's divergence from Freud is expressed in the upper
transversal bar which characterise the final iteration of the graph of desire (Graph 4 (the
Complete Graph), below). In the lower loop, the interplay between the ego and the image
moves towards the fixed point of the ego-ideal because the Other is considered complete. If
the subject is to be produced, it is produced in relation to some form of answer to the question
'che vuoi?', and it is this question which defines the very nature of desire: “The original
question of desire is not directly "What do I want?", but "What do others want from me?
What do they see in me? What am I for others?"”262 However, the constitution of the subject
is not even defined as compromise between the signifiers about the self and those about the
expectation of the other. In the upper loop, the subject has identified the incompleteness of the
261
From Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 690
262
Žižek, S. 'From desire to drive: Why Lacan is not Lacaniano' from Atlántica de Las Artes 14 · Otoño
1996 Section 5 (available at http://www.caam.net/caamiaaa/cgibin/articulo.asp?idArticulo=231&idioma=EN. )
135
Other, and recognises that they fail to guarantee meaning; the contract is no longer
underwritten. The subject must now be constituted through fantasy as fantasies are elaborate
constructs through which the individual attempts to attain satisfaction, approaching the object
which is deemed to be demanded. Yet all such attempts fail if there is no stable signification
of the position of the other. The upper loop of Graph 4 (d → $◊A), which represents the
travails of the drive, can be seen to correspond to the lower half of the graph (i(a) → m). For
Lacan the structure of the drive is constituted linguistically and its content is defined not
organically, but as the residue of an organic pulsion: “The drive is what becomes of demand
when the subject vanishes from it”.263 Sitting on top of language, the drive's vector towards
fantasy represents the construct made by the unconscious to cope with the failure of language
to satisfy need.
263
Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 692
136
Figure 26: The Graph of Desire (4)264
Lacan's unconscious is driven by desire. In his formulation, desire is the name given to the
movement of unconscious signifiers along the pathways alluded to in the Graphs of Desire:
'Because metonymy is a linguistic operation, desire is in its essence a feature of the
sliding of the signified under the signifier.'265
“One could define desire as exactly this process: as the difference between the original
message and that which arrives at the end. The key here is that desire is not the
message itself. It is neither the original sentence nor the final one, but the process or
structure of distortion itself”. 266
Desire is no longer a specific process within the unconscious, but the general operation by
which the unconscious works. The spasms of unconscious operation which constitute the
subject are driven by the subject's desire; the wish to cross from signifers to a comprehensible
signified: “Desire, as [Lacan] came to call it in preference to all other terms, is what keeps the
chain of signifers moving.”267 This movement is terminated by the quilting of signifiers, in
which the relationship of the Other and the ego is fixed. If this point is not achieved it is
because the lack of an Other prevents the crossing of the bar in signification, and there is no
final decision. In this case, the creation of the subject is made upon the endless metonymic
tracks of language, along which it travels always-asking 'what next?'. Chiesa states that this
strategy represents:
[A] positivisation of lack on the part of the subject. The child manages to ‘positivise’
the lack that surfaced with the unconditionality of the demand for love, and in so doing
264
From Lacan, J. Ecrits Trans. B. Fink 2002 (New York: WW Norton, 2002) p. 692
265
Lacan, J. quoted at lacanonline.com ( http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-
about-desire/ as accessed 08/12/2012 )
266
Leader, D. Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post, (UK: Faber & Faber, 1996) pp. 108-110
267
Bowie, M. Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p. 122
137
he subjectivises himself and emerges as a desiring lack-of-being [manque-a-etre].268
When the subject is constituted along the traversal of the higher reaches of the graph, it is
constituted in relation to lack. The failure of the other → signifier relationship leads to
constant flux along the upper vectors in which drive and demand are destined to be met by the
incompleteness in fantasy and the lack in the other. The terminus of Lacan's analysis of desire
is the creation of the subject. By following the evolution of the graph of desire through the
four stages, we have passed form the formal depiction of the unconscious as 'like a language'
through to a constitution of something like the Cartesian subject of philosophy. This
encapsulates a crucial problem Land sees in Lacanian analysis, which is that it always slides
back towards anthropocentric principles and subjectivity. Though the letter of 'the
unconscious is like a language' is amenable to anti-anthropocentric interpretation, it is a
metaphor which is tainted from the very beginning because of its tie to language, the
linguistic, and to the common modules of language – which are signs – all of which lean
towards the subjective.
The present thesis has shown how an anti-anthropocentric reading of Lacan could be
constructed, but such an endeavour requires a great effort because of the tendency of Lacan's
concepts to backslide towards subjectivity. Whilst there are parts of Lacan which are
amenable to a 'hard' anti-anthropomorphism, they are only parts. The cybernetic cycling of
signification is valuable to anti-anthropomorphism in its simplest form, however, once it is
tied down in the language of the (split)subject, discourse, and other it becomes
anthropocentric. Yet Lacan is a theoretician of considerable importance in the evolution of
drive theory in the twentieth century. Both Deleuze-Guattari and Lyotard consider much of his
work to be of insight, and of the later philosophers I am considering in the present thesis, only
Land is outrightly hostile.269 Lacan's psychoanalysis is not systematic and his positing of a
number of foundational concepts which tend to collapse into one another is a significant cause
of his reputation as a 'difficult' philosopher. In terms of Lacan's technique in presenting his
theory of the unconscious, there are six factors which work towards the tendency for his work
to become anthropocentric. They are: (1) linguistic metaphor, described above, of the
268
Chiesa, L. Subjectivity and Otherness (USA: MIT Press, 2007) p. 155
269
Deleuze and Guattari's, and Lyotard's encounter with Lacan's thought is explored in the subsequent two
chapters.
138
unconscious as like a language. (2) His reliance on obscurity when presenting concepts and in
riddles when elucidating them. Riddles evoke a mode of thought which is focused on signs
and not signifiers; ideas and not relations. (3) Lacan's status as a practising clinician means
that he clinically treats the object of psychoanalysis as a subject. (4) Many of Lacan's
concepts are illustrated by use of examples based on characters in literature, in which the
protagonists are, again, treated as subjects. Such examples also contribute to the accusations –
considered in the next two chapters – of the 'theatricality' of the Lacanian (Oedipal)
unconsciousness. (5) His philosophical influences tens to be philosophers of subjectivity
(inside philosophers). All of the previous five are questions of technique rather than
theoretical positions, yet the sixth and most consequential anthropomorphising tendency is
Lacan's theoretical decision, affirmed so often, to abandon Freud's biologism. For Land, this
is the root of several failings of Lacanian psychoanalysis.270 Once cut adrift of its biological
roots, it is very difficult to conceive of the drive in the linguistic unconscious as anything
other than an anthropomorphising tendency.
Freud
Name of phase Motor of Mechanism of Reason for
Reason for
- change
change
change
continuation
stopping
Displacement
Drive
Neuronal
Bound energy in
Eludes
and
networks /
drives remains.
censorship /
Condensation
pathways
Tonic energy
is cathected
Lacan Metaphor and
Desire
Cybernetic
Metonym (bar not Metaphor (bar
Metonymy
crossed)
crossed)
Table 5: Comparative Terms in Freudian and Lacanian Models of the Unconscious.
The Lacanian Drive
My exposition of Lacan’s work terminates with analysis of his (re)interpretation of Freudian
270
See Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 261-287 and pp. 319-
344.
139
drive theory in the section ‘The Transference and the Drive’ in Seminar XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977). Here Lacan denies that the drives have a
biological origin, stating that satisfaction cannot be attained by acquiring the object of one’s
desire. For Lacan, the drive is never satisfied, passing through a transitory sublimation back
into an impossible pursuit of the lost object, the object 'petit a'. In Lacan’s model, the
unconscious is no longer a machine which regulates the organism’s pursuit of its primal
desires, but a labyrinth in which these desires are lost. In The Deconstruction of the Drive,
Session 13 of Seminar XI, Lacan's method is to re-read Freud’s theory of the drive, stripping
out all of the references to hydraulics or mechanistic force.271 The Freudian depiction of drive
is of an ordered progression through the phases of the drive to the aim. Against this, Lacan
breaks these moments of the drive apart into entirety separate phases. Thrust is recharacterised as a non-energetic, constant pressure rather than a spasm of energy needing
discharge. If the pressure is constant, Lacan reasons, it is impossible to describe it
biologically, because all needs wax and wane depending on their satisfaction or lack
thereof.272 In this disavowal of biologism Lacan rejects the division between free and bound
energy (which would explain the duality of the drive in being constant and able to be
discharged) and the notion of the drive going through a vicissitude or adventure (therefore
being able to move away from a biological basis). Lacan's concept of a drive is clearly distinct
from the Freudian drive explained in Chapter 1. To recap, the important characteristics of the
Freudian drive as [Pulsion or Trieb] were shown to be:
Its immutability. Freud's drives are laid down like the layers of Troy; nothing is ever
erased, even if a pattern is abandoned of its energy.
The plurality of drives. The unconscious is the 'home' of numerous drives, all trying to
realise themselves. Their scanning of sense data for the potential to do this – according
271
Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Taylor and Francis Online, 2006) p.
47
272
“The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always
has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night,
no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force.” Lacan, J. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute
of Psychoanalysis, 1977) p. 165
140
the rules of the reality principle – never ceases.
A basis in instinct. The drive is related to some biological system, even if its
vicissitudes have twisted it far from such a beginning.
A division between free and bound energy in the primary process, and an unconscious
system, whose goal is to process and distribute these energetic investments which is
the deepest, and therefore primary (first) process which operates in the economy of the
unconscious.
For Lacan, these are not the essential characteristics of the drive. Following his reading of
Freud such ideas are simplifications or deliberate misconstructions which would try and pin
down drive/desire in erroneously stable formations. For Lacan it is absolutely clear that the
drive is:
[N]ot an instinct, not a quasi-biological 'libido', not a variable flow of neural energy or
excitation, not an appetite, not the concealed source from which appetites derive and
not, as it had been for the late Freud, the life principle itself.273
In contrast to the Freudian construction of the drive we can now posit a Lacanian construction
of the drive whose characteristics are quite different. Whereas Freud's first principle is that the
unconscious consists of drives and energy, Lacan's is that it is structured by the chaining of
signifiers.274 Lacan is, as noted above, implacably against the idea of a drive as evolved
instinct.275 For Lacan the metonymic nature of desire means that the elements of fantasy are
constantly updated in relation to the lack which they inevitably encounter. The plurality of the
drives, which Freud is so determined to stress, can be effaced by the graph of desire, which
posits a single line along which subjectivity is constructed. However, Lacan warns the reader
that the graph is a simplification – the positions of the loci are not 'fixed' either in place or
time, so the graph is a two dimensional rendering of a four dimensional apparatus – there is
nothing in Lacan's commentary which disavows the notion of several vectors of desire
operating at the same time. Yet despite being scalable up to the a plural conception of drives,
the tendency of Lacanian interpretation is to consider the products of the drive economy
273
Bowie, M. Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p. 122
274
Bowie, M. Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p. 131
275
Bowie, M. Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) p. 130
141
singly rather than as composites.276
Perhaps the most prominent contemporary Lacanian – particularly within public discourse – is
Slavoj Žižek, who depicts drive and desire in the following manner:
Desire is historical and subjectivized, always and by definition unsatisfied,
metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I
want – what I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded
moment of its satisfaction. Drive, on the other hand, involves a kind of inert
satisfaction which always finds its way; drive is non-subjectivized ("acephal") –
perhaps, its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing at one's
own sweat, sticking one's finger into one's nose...) which bring us intense satisfaction
without us being aware of it, or, insofar as we are aware of it, without us being able to
do anything about it, to prevent it.277
Such a conception of drive is totally distinct from Land's contention that “drives are the
functions of nomadic cybernetic systems, not instincts but simulated instincts, artificial
instincts” and, perhaps more surprisingly, totally different to other notable Lacanian's
interpretations of Lacan's drive theory.278 The Lacanian drives detailed above by Žižek are
simply instincts which have undergone no travails or vicissitudes. Lacanianism – even more
so than Freudianism – is beset by contradictions and competing interpretations. There is a
distinct split between its clinical application and those in other disciplines who wish to
commandeer it, as Evans noted; scholars who believed that:
The value of Lacan's work lay not in any ability to describe the facts, but in its power
to produce novel ways of interpreting literary texts. For scholars steeped in literary
theory, this was I suppose a natural response, but to me it seemed clearly at odds with
276
Chapter 4 will show how Lyotard considers this to be a problem in Lacan's works.
277
Žižek, S. 'From desire to drive: Why Lacan is not Lacaniano' from Atlántica de Las Artes 14 · Otoño
1996 Section 7 (available at http://www.caam.net/caamiaaa/cgibin/articulo.asp?idArticulo=231&idioma=EN. )
278
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 330
142
the whole thrust of Lacan's life and work. For Lacan was not a literary critic, but a
practising psychoanalyst.279
Nevertheless, even in a strictly clinical setting, differences can be observed between the
consequences of Freud's 'scientific' methodology which, whilst it produced contradictory
hypotheses, aimed at their resolution, and Lacan's hermeneutic method which attempts to
interrogate the 'text' of the unconscious and relate its concepts to those in the Lacanian
system. This hermeneutic approach emphasises explanatory capacity – the ability to provide a
descriptive framework – above consistency, as it selectively deploys the tools of Lacanian
analysis (object petit-a, imaginary-symbolic-real etc.) on a case by case basis. Žižek claims
that this 'Lacan' deployed in critical theory is not a misreading, but a choice of emphasis,
involving a distinct selection regarding which Lacanian concepts will be deployed.
"The predominant reading of Jacques Lacan reduces him to a kind of "philosopher of
language" who emphasized the price the subject has to pay in order to gain access to
the symbolic order [...] This predominant reading of Lacan is not a simple misreading,
external to what Lacan effectively accomplished: there certainly is an entire stratum of
Lacanian theory which corresponds to this reading".280
Lacanianism can be likened to a holy text, of which different parts can be preached depending
on the objectives of the priest. Yet conflict of ideas and ambiguity is not a sufficient reason to
abandon hopes of interpretation – as theology shows! However, the process of tracing a
general line of argument in Lacanianism, despite exceptions, is still possible. In general terms,
this trajectory would emphasise the role of the subject, language, and idealism, all of which
are antithetical to Land's depiction of a productive unconscious.
279
Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp.38-55. ( Available at
http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
280
Žižek, S. 'From desire to drive: Why Lacan is not Lacaniano' from Atlántica de Las Artes 14 · Otoño
1996.
(available at http://www.caam.net/caamiaaa/cgi-bin/articulo.asp?idArticulo=231&idioma=EN. )
143
Lacanianism
Despite the proliferation of concepts and extended analytical framework it adds to
Freudianism, Lacanian psychoanalysis is ultimately a dead end when considered from a
Landian standpoint. Lacan and Lacanism is not formal, impersonal, mechanical, plural, or
rooted in the scientific method, and most damningly is trapped as an inescapable correlate of
idealism. This explains why Land's engagement with Lacan is brief, as the role of Lacanian
psychoanalysis is simply that of an other to which Deleuze's pre-personnel and productive
psychoanalysis (as depicted in Chapter 3) is contrasted. Land's discussion of Lacan focuses on
the consequences of Lacanianism's amendments to the practice of psychoanalysis and the
effects on psychoanalytic practice of a “Lacan, who had already transformed the jungle
wilderness at the heart of psychoanalysis into a structuralist parking-lot”.281
Structuralism is the target of Land's critique because it formalises relations between
components in such a way as to reaffirm and deepen them. If structuralism is a 'parking-lot'
rather than a jungle it is because its tendency is towards increasing fixity of telos and
interpretation, whist the 'jungle' of psychoanalysis is subject to the possibility of rapid change
if it is subject to runaway feedback. Land's accusation against structuralism is that it posits
ideas as gravitating towards other ideas (meaning that the signifiers have a certain fixity) and
is therefore essentially idealist, whereas Freudian psychoanalysis (especially when modified
by Deleuze) is concerned with the measurement of production as its primary operation, and it
is only after the consequences of production are measured that they should be interrogated by
ideas. The practice of Lacanianism, which imposed the complex as the fundamental structure
which both determines and represents the form of the patients unconscious processes leads to:
Oedipalizing the Fort-Da game ... Oedipalizing desire to its foundations; ripping all the
energy, hydraulics, pathology, and shock out of Freud, and substituting lack, the pathos
of identity, and Heideggerian pomposity ... trivializing desire into the cringing
aspiration to be loved.282
281
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 282
282
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 282-283
144
Here, again, Land is concerned with the role of idealism in Lacanian thought. The Lacanian
complex, exemplified by the Oedipus complex, is constructed by a network of ideas, and its
diagnostic function is to retroactively explain that observed production took place according
to the predetermined dynamics of the complex. The interpretation of reality therefore takes
place under a preset pattern, and psychoanalysis' role is to preserve the pattern rather than to
modify it. Hence, Lacan's recasting of the Fort-Da game under the aegis of Oedipus makes the
general error of interrogating an idea with another idea. This can be opposed to Freud's
methodology where, though Beyond the Pleasure Principle sees Hans' toy-throwing game as
its central problem, the text is concerned with the explanation of production – in this instance
a production which cannot be matched up to prexisting theoretical ideas – and it is due to this
disparity that Freud speculates about various solutions to the problem. In his experimental
method, Freud is therefore interrogating reality using ideas and, upon finding these ideas to
be insufficient, interrogates these ideas using reality.
There is no scope for idealism in Freud's casting of the unconscious as an energetic-hydraulic
system which operates according to its formal rules as a system. An engine or mechanism
does not ask what or why it is producing in the same way that in the classic cybernetician
model of foxes and rabbits (see Figure 27 below) the rabbit does not ask how many foxes will
there be next year before reproducing.283 The system is blind, and its primary action is
material production: “The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman.
In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced”.284 In the cybernetic system
below there is no controlling body akin to a subject which determines populations according
to fixed ideas. Instead, there are only material relations between the entities involved, and
though the system tends towards stability, there is no coordinating entity which plans this
equilibrium.
283
A description of this cybernetic system can be found in Clemson, B. Cybernetics: A New Management
Tool ( UK: Tumbridge Wells, 1984) p. 34
284
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 321
145
Figure 27: The Cybernetics of Foxes and Rabbits285
There is a neurotic and conformist stratum in Freud of course, but it floats upon the
impersonal flows of desire that erupt out of traumatized nature. Where are the flows in
Lacan? Where would one be less likely to find anything that flows than in the gnarled
post-Saussurian fetish of the signifier that dominates his texts?286
For Land, the flows of productive desire described above are 'impersonal' insofar as they are
pre-personal, taking place in an unconscious which is not the subject, which contains little
trace of the subject, and which occurs temporally before the construction of the subject.
Conversely, for Lacan all of these processes already include the subject, which is produced
simultaneously with the unconscious, as was shown in the reading of the Graph of Desire
above. The primary reason for Land's dismissal of Lacan's thought is therefore that it operates
as a tendency towards idealism in psychoanalysis and, concentrating on ideas rather than
production, effaces the quality of being able to plot desire as material-production-in-itself
285
From Clemson, B. Cybernetics: A New Management Tool (UK: Abacus, 1984) p. 32
286
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 283
146
which psychoanalysis offered. Is it possible to defend Lacanianism against this critique? The
history of philosophy contains several philosophers whose effects in the public sphere have
been very different to the letter of their philosophy. Indeed, many of them are precursors of
Land's thought, most notably Nietzsche. If a defence of Lacan is possible, it would stem from
the possibility of emphasising the cybernetics which Lacan's early works hint at, yet this is
never considered by Land, the arch cyberneticist, to be useful material. The only answer can
be that the Lacanian 'brand' is simply too toxic, and too poisoned with anthropocentricism to
be helpful. If Lacanian cybernetics were deployed by Land, it would be in relation to the
regulation of the machinic process of the Freudian psyche, yet Evans opposes Lacan's
cybernetics to Freudian hydraulics:
Yet, as with his early hunches about the importance of ethology, Lacan soon
abandoned his interest in cybernetics and computational theory. Perhaps he sensed that
the language of information processing did not sit easily with Freud’s hydraulic model
of the mind.287
Given such difficulties of determining Lacanianism's position in relative to other theories,
even to the extent to which one cannot be sure if it is complementary or dissimilar, the only
method of making it a coherent discourse would be to withdraw to a purely psychoanalytic
position, and to make the sole metric by which its productions are judged to be the efficacy of
its cure in relation to the specific patient. Evans states that this was the defensive strategy used
by Lacan when confronted with questions about psychoanalysis' interactions with wider
critical theory:
Lacan railed against what he saw as the `hermeneuticization' of psychoanalysis,
arguing that psychoanalysis was not a general hermeneutics that could be `applied' to
any area of enquiry, but the theory of a specific domain, namely, the process of
287
Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' to Darwin in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of
Narrative, eds. Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp.38-55 (
available at ( http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
147
psychoanalytic treatment.288
The consequences of this 'bleeding out' of psychoanalysis into other discourses and its effect
on the social and political order is the subject of Deleuze and Guattari's critique and then recapitulation of psychoanalysis, as outlined in the next chapter.
288
Evans, D. 'From Lacan to Darwin' in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds.
Gottschall, J. and Wilson, D.S. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) pp.38-55 ( available at (
http://beta.finance-on.net/upload/ver/ver4480020c6d2b2/lacan.pdf )
148
Chapter 3. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: a theory of the
productive unconscious
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari's first collaborative work, is a text which, as its authors
undoubtedly intended, straddles the political and the psychoanalytic. It combines normative
and positive psychoanalysis, and offers prescriptions-about as well as descriptions-of the
operation of the unconscious. At its most basic level, this dissertation builds upon the answer
to the question 'how does the unconscious operate?', rather than the question 'how would one
wish the unconscious operates?'; it is therefore at the level of psychoanalytic theory rather
than political or ethical theory. Any contributions I shall make to the latter topics, I shall save
until the very end of this work. My initial aim in my reading of Deleuze and Guattari is to
extract the purely psychoanalytic analysis and critique (particularly that which is
metapsychological) from the political/psychoanalytic hybrid which is the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This task is made considerably more difficult by much
contemporary commentary on Deleuze and Guattari's project which is often at least as
intrinsically political as the primary work. My methodology will therefore be to present some
of the major readings of Deleuze and Guattari's work and to show the bias which dominates
academic commentary on their collaborative work, which is presented in parallel to a Landian
reading of their essential concepts. I shall focus on Claire Colebrook's Understanding Deleuze
and Ian Buchanan's Deleuzism and A Guide to Anti-Oedipus.289 Colebrook and Buchanan's
interpretation of Deleuze sees his philosophy put to work in support of a progressive political
programme.290 I shall contrast this to Land's “mad black Deleuzianism” whose goal of cutting
289
Colebrook, C. Understanding Deleuze. (Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002); Buchanan, I. Deleuzism
(USA: Duke University Press, 2000); Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum,
2008)
290
For example, the section 'Sexual Difference' in Colebrook, C. Understanding Deleuze (Australia: Allen
and Unwin, 2002) presents a reading of difference amenable to feminism. This thesis is not explicitly
political, and the 'Progressive' and 'Landian' positions which are distinguished here are done so because of the
genealogical methodology utilised herein, which claims that a dominant discourse – in this instance, the
progressive tendency of the academy – works to become a totalising discourse.
149
auto-production free of all constraints has no idealistic or utopian political outcome – indeed,
as Chapter 5 shall show, Land actively works towards dystopic teleologies.291 This reading
will have a dualistic relationship with academic Deleuzianism, as it will be deployed at times
as the other of Land's position, yet in other instances it is shown to be sympathetic to his
position, and the present thesis' framing of Deleuze's productive psychoanalysis as Land's
antecedent.
The theoretical critique contained within Anti-Oedipus must therefore be disentangled from
the political programme which motivated its authors and its later interpreters. I will undertake
this textual analysis because, programmatically, my main objective in my reading of AntiOedipus is to initially identify the extent to which it is anti-Lacanian or anti-Freudian
(building on the two previous chapters), before going on to delineate which, if any, parts of
Freud and Lacan, as described hereto in the present thesis, are compatible with Deleuze and
Guattari’s theory of machinic desire and Land’s libidinal materialism. In this respect, Land
asks:
[I]s Freud ever really engaged in Anti-Oedipus? Is it not rather Lacan, who had already
transformed the jungle wilderness at the heart of psychoanalysis into a structuralist
parking-lot... Of course, Oedipus is peculiarly nauseating Viennese nursery pap, but
where is Oedipus in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? A question which could be asked of
the majority of Freud’s texts.292
Land’s question is rhetorical: insofar as it is psychoanalytic, he believes that Anti-Oedipus is
fundamentally Anti-Lacan, and, furthermore, that the apparatuses ensuring desire’s repression
are Lacanian rather than Freudian. For Land, the Freudian 'Oedipus' as investigated in AntiOedipus is a misstep, a dead end in theorisation which Freud stumbled into late in his writings
(circa 1923) and which is eclipsed in its importance by the earlier, metapsychological texts of
1915-1920; and from this perspective Oedipus becomes even more problematic when it is
291
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September
2010) available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
292
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 282
150
deployed by Lacan, Klein, and later analysts. Buchannan concurs that Anti-Oedipus takes the
Freudian unconscious as its starting point: “Deleuze and Guattari preserve this basic model of
the unconscious; they even keep to Freud's tripartite way of thinking about it”.293 Yet AntiOedipus rapidly moves beyond Freud's model, and provides a depiction of the failure of
Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis to provide a theory of drive-desire in the unconscious.
Instead of counter-presenting a complete solution – a master key to understanding the
unconscious in a Lacanian sense– Anti-Oedipus shows that Oedipality is a partial,
fragmentary diagnosis of one type of unconscious operation which became generalised as the
basic model for the functioning of all unconscious operation.
The present thesis has moved beyond my initial explication of Freudianism and Lacanism and
is now concerned with a sustained critique of these theories in operation, and this will proceed
in parallel with the denotation of concepts which can begin to provide a new theory of the
machinic unconscious. As such, the key questions I hope to answer in this chapter are:
[A] Why Deleuze and Guattari believed the intellectual predominance of Lacanianism
needed to be challenged in the late 1960s.
[B] To what extent does Anti-Oedipus critique Freudianism and Lacanianism as being
repressive or having the potential to be applied repressively?
[C] To what extent does Anti-Oedipus utilise or synthesise elements of 1) Freudianism
and 2) Lacanianism into its own theory of machinic desire?
[D] To show how the answers to [B] and [C] correlate with the distinction from
Chapters 2 and 3 between Freudian-mechanistic drive theory and Lacaniansemiological drive theory.
[E] To explore Deleuze and Guattari's theory of productive, machinic desire. Two
interpretations of Deleuze-Guattari are delineated: the predominant 'left' reading in
which any expression of desire is considered positive; this is compared to a
minoritarian 'right' reading of Deleuze-Guattari in which desire flows to a fixed
destination.
293
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum: 2008) p. 27
151
[F] To consider what is absent in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the unconscious,
and to consider what may need to be added to create a complete theory of machinic
desire.
The aspects in [E] will form the basis of the final chapter, in which other theorists of desire –
particularly that of Lyotard depicted in Chapter 4 – are utilised, along with concepts from
Chapters 1 and 2, to begin to produce a complete theory of the Landian machinic
unconscious.
The authors' intended purpose of Anti-Oedipus
In 1972 Deleuze and Guattari published Anti Oedipus, as a critique of the contemporary
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as practised by members of the IPA and EFP294.
Deleuze and Guattari attacked these schools of psychoanalysis because of their apparently
reductionist approach, which tended to re-frame all general problems into particular instances
of fixed complexes, particularly the Oedipus complex.295 When utilised in this way, Oedipus
re-situates the individual’s desires in relation to a quasi-familial order and, analytically, offers
psychoanalytic solutions based on the resolution of the resultant ‘Oedipal triangles’ (fathermother-child) by fixing dynamics in which desire deviates from ‘normality’. This approach is
characterised methodologically by its derivation from clinical settings and the act of clinical
psychoanalysis. The necessity of ‘normalising’ the patient in this milieu of praxis – offering a
prescription for a cure – meant that meta-social applications of psychoanalysis were grouped
around attractors derived from the most efficacious solutions to the modal problems of preexisting patients. Deleuze and Guattari describe the obvious problem with this, namely that
societies or groups are not the same as individual neurotics. Treating the individual as a
294
The IPA is the International Psychoanalytic Association, the largest Freudian association of
Psychoanalysts. The EFP was the École Freudian de Paris, Lacan’s school set up in opposition to the IPA.
295
For a longer treatment of the historical context of Anti Oedipus see 'Deleuze and Guattari in Context' in
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2008)
152
Oedipal problem might 'work' for the analyst in most cases, but may equally obscure the true
issue, and prevent a cure in some patients. Treating a social group as if it were a patient will
not work in most cases, as groups are defined by their plurality, and the patient is singular.
In the 1960s practitioners of psychoanalysis, though their quotidian role was to work in an
institutional context with with ‘sick’ patients, became increasingly influential in public
discourse.296 Psychoanalysts’ interactions with other academic disciplines in this time of
‘public intellectuals’ presented a view of society which methodologically began with the
procedures of applied analysis, and then recoded the political and social in the terminology of
the personal and psychological297 Freud’s own work on psychoanalysis can be divided across
a similar line into: analytical, patient centred works and broader, metapsychological texts.298
Freud’s intention in the production of his writings was that the theory and practice of
psychoanalysis would be shown to reaffirm each other in the application of the complex to the
individual; and conversely in the association of the language of the individual with the
psychoanalytic structure of the complex (Figure 28). A central accusation of Anti-Oedipus is
that subsequent Freudian and Lacanian analysts abandoned this reciprocal relationship, and
instead take only the complex in its established, final, pathological form, and use it to
overcode the underlying reality of all aspects of analytic theory and practice.299 They are no
longer willing to modify their theory if the patient does not fit it. If the patient deviates from
the box they are placed in, 'the complex', practitioners were unwilling to adapt the theoretical
296
Particularly in France, where the influence of Lacan was strongest.
297
Bettencourt Pires notes that the tradition of the public intellectual in France was fixed in the aftermath
of the Dreyfus Affair. See Bettencourt Pires, M.L. 'Public intellectuals – past, present and future' in
Comunicação & Cultura, n.º 7, 2009, pp. 115-130
298
The former would include Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1895) or The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (Freud, 1904); the latter, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920) or The Ego and the Id
(Freud, 1923).
299
This, again, is an example of an idea interrogating another idea, as opposed to an idea interrogating
reality.
153
framework, and simply amended the discourse of the patient.300
Figure 28: A Positive Dynamic Between Theory and Practice
The first strand of Anti-Oedipus I shall examine is critique; the second is a positive ontology
of desire (See Figure 29 below).301 Deleuze and Guattari posit the unconscious as a positive,
productive system, analysing these productions across social and political bodies. Their
productive ontology of universal desire – situated by Michael Hardt in the tradition of
300
A problem explored by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus' second chapter One or Several
Wolves and The Interpretation of Utterances in Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University
USA: Semiotext(e), 2006)
301
Deleuze and Guattari describe Anti-Oedipus as critical and then materialist: “Schizoanalysis is at once a
transcendental and a materialist analysis. It is critical in the sense that it leads the criticism of Oedipus, or
leads Oedipus, to the point of its own self-criticism. It sets out to explore a transcendental unconscious, rather
than a metaphysical one; an unconscious that is material rather than ideological; schizophrenic rather than
Oedipal; nonfigurative rather than imaginary; real rather than symbolic; machinic rather than structural. An
unconscious, finally, that is molecular, microphysical, and micrological rather than molar or gregarious;
productive rather than expressive.” Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 109
154
Nietzsche’s will to power or Spinoza’s conatus – posits material as substance which, over
time, becomes arranged in ever more complex dispositions by the work of desiring
machines.302 In this schema, desire is therefore the name given to the becoming of
complexity.303 As such, it is wholly unlike the desire of the subject of Oedipus which is
always already anthropocentric desire.304 Oedipus is the desire of the broken subject of
analysis, suffering through its lacks. Such desire, idealist and negative, is the opposite of the
positive, materialist conception of desire as production which Deleuze and Guattari will
formulate.
302
Hardt's text is available online as 'Reading Notes on Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism &
Schizophrenia', part one ( available at http://people.duke.edu/~hardt/ao1.htm )
303
This Nietzchean-Spinozist genealogy is noted by Deleuze, G in Negotiations. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995) p.6. It is also noted by Massumi, B. in A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (USA: MIT, 1992) p. 82
304
Therefore it is also isomorphic with Land's conception of the tendency of organised matter towards
auto-genesis and the creation of 'intelligence' as described in Templexity. See Land, N. Templexity (Timespiral
Press; 2014)
155
Figure 29: Anti-Oedipus
This ontological re-framing of desire as materialist and as the object of schizoanalytic critique
is the final objective of Deleuze and Guattari’s project in Anti-Oedipus. The present thesis
shall emphasise the primacy of depicting material-productive process, following a Landian
reading of Anti-Oedipus. This could be contrasted to Buchanan's reading, in which Deleuze
and Guattari's primary aim was “a theoretical rapprochement between psychoanalysis and
Marxism … which the authors provocatively refer to as either 'materialist psychiatry' or
'schizoanalysis'”.305 A Landian reading would invert this, to be of a text primarily concerned
with 'a theoretical rapprochement between materialism and psychiatry … which protectively
refers to Marxism'. To accomplish this aim, Deleuze and Guattari undertake a negative
reading of some parts of Freudian psychoanalysis so that they can use the remnant of Freudian
theory in their positive theory (see figure 30 below). This division of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Freud
again follows the division in Freud’s corpus between accounts of casework and
metapsychology. Watson notes a similar ambivalence about Lacan in Guattari’s solo
305
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus ( London: Continuum, 2008) p. 27
156
writings.306
Figure 30: The Intersection of Casework and Metapsychology
Deleuze and Guattari contend that Freud effectively misapplies his own theory when dealing
with certain patients such as ‘Little Hans’, the 'Wolf Man' or Judge Schreber because of his
reliance on the Oedipus complex.307 Deleuze and Guattari show that, in practice,
psychoanalysis often compromises itself by failing to acknowledge what the patient is
306
See Watson: “Reflecting on this phase of his own thought in a 1985 interview, Guattari remarked that he
"gradually came to question Lacanism, but less on theoretical grounds than in practice". In Anti-Oedipus he
and Deleuze rethought psychoanalysis in terms of psychosis rather than neurosis.” Watson, J. Guattari's
Diagrammatic Thought (UK: Bloomsbury, 2007) p. 17
307
Freud describes the Little Hans case in Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (Freud; 1909); The
Wolf Man in From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Freud; 1918); Judge Schreber in Psycho-Analytic
Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Freud; 1911).
157
actually saying . The analyst sits and listens to the patient, waiting for 'trigger words', or other
set points they can map onto the general structural pattern of the pre-existing complex. I shall
be considering, as I follow Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Oedipus, to what extent the
theoretic underpinnings of psychoanalysis are flawed because of this tendency. Is
psychoanalysis, if it is Oedipal, an imperfect application of a sound theory, or are both
practice and theory compromised? Before embarking on this close reading, the preliminary
task is to define what the ‘Oedipus’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is considered to
represent and why it is considered to be so dangerous. Oedipus is a place holder for a number
of tendencies that Deleuze and Guattari identified in psychoanalysis, all of which share a
proclivity to repress desire.
For Deleuze and Guattari the most damaging tendency in post-Freudian Psychoanalysis is that
where the theoretical and proscriptive framework is exemplified by the ‘Oedipus’ they are
steadfastly Anti; hence the title of their first collaborative book which denotes their intent to
embark on a critical engagement with psychoanalysis.308 Anti-Oedipus was produced by
authors who considered psychoanalysis a reactionary tool, abetting a counter-revolutionary
tendency; a use demonstrated in the events of May 1968 and the reaction to these events.309
This view was shared by other Soixante-Huitards (participants in the failed 'revolution') like
Rose: “The unconscious is politics," said Lacan in '67. This was analysis's bid for universality.
It's when analysis takes on politics, that it most blatantly legitimates oppression”.310 Deleuze
and Guattari therefore went beyond contemporary critiques of psychoanalysis which attacked
its ability to aid the patient. They showed that psychoanalysis did not only restrict desire in
the subject micro-politically, but created macro-political structures of repression.
308
For a longer treatment of the historical context of Anti Oedipus see Deleuze and Guattari in Context in
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2008)
309
Colebrook notes the importance of the events of 1968 in Deleuze's philosophy as the point in which he
moves away from a more general philosophy of difference and becomes an explicitly political 'post-1968
thinker'. Colebrook, C. Understanding Deleuze (Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002) p. XXXii
310
Rose, Quoted in Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p.
228
158
The tendency of psychoanalysis to apply an Oedipal framework to analysis of societal
dynamics reduced political disorder to a simulacrum of a psychic disorder – even more
problematically, to the specific disorder of the neurotic patient – in which the political
subject’s condition was conceived as a reaction to sexual-familiar pressures and repressions.
This infantilisation of the revolutionary subject on one hand misrepresented and demeaned the
desires of the revolutionary element; on the other, it recoded the power of authority as a
natural and inevitable paternalist force whose role was to police the population in the service
of a reactionary tendency. The Oedipal structure, diffusing into the apparatus of the state,
serves to create unacceptable barriers to the flow of desire, ideologically demanding the
collaboration of the professional class as ‘analysis’ 'storm troopers’: “Every category of
professional is going to be urged to exercise police functions which are more and more
precise: professors, psychiatrists, educators of all stripes, etc”.311
Anti-Oedipus’ critique is post-Marxist and post-Freudian: while it does not doctrinally follow
either philosopher, it works in the intellectual space opened by these philosophers.312 After
Marx, economics cannot ignore questions of capital, class and power; after Freud, a
conception of the unconscious cannot escape the terminology of drive and desire the present
thesis operates within. When navigating these spaces, Anti-Oedipus' engagement with both
philosophical inheritances is often ambivalent. While it acknowledges a great debt to both
Marx and Freud, it also rebels against the direction some of their thought opens. These
philosophers – along with Darwin and Nietzsche – delineate the revolutionary advances in the
theoretical apparatus through which desiring production’s operations can be analysed and
311
Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 210
312
Both Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge this methodology most readily in regard to Marx:
“Asked if he is a Marxist, Guattari replies that he belongs to no religion, but that "I go on using ideas and
ways of making ideas work, drawn from any kind of theory, particularly from Marx. Marx was an
extraordinary genius who interpreted history, economics, and the production of subjectivity in a way that was
entirely new" In another interview, Deleuze [says] he feels that he and Guattari remain Marxists of a sort: "I
think Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists"”. Watson, Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought (UK:
Bloomsbury, 2007) p. 135
159
quantified.313 Their status as ‘prophets’ of materialism means that they are essential for
understanding the genesis of Deleuze’s conception of desiring production; though, famously,
Deleuze’s methodology was to use inherited concepts from these philosophers rather than to
follow them in a historical reading.314
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari sort through their post-Freudian and post-Marxist
inheritance and begin to identify a number of dualities: practical and meta-psychological
analysis; desire predicated on lack versus positive, productive desire; neurosis and
schizophrenia (the latter two explored in Anti-Oedipus' second chapter). Once they have made
these distinctions, their method is to divide these binaries into productive and unproductive
parts of the Freudian unconscious-machine, so that the unproductive parts can be discarded.
The rubric which determines which side or the other they lie upon reduces to the simple
political question: 'does this help or hinder the repression of desire?' This question is political
because of the immediately post-revolutionary context of Anti-Oedipus. The book itself is an
attempt to provide and answer to a political question, albeit through a psychoanalytic and
economic interpretive framework. As such, this question is perhaps an improvement on what
Deleuze and Guattari identify as the analyst's question 'how can I apply the universal solution
(Oedipus)'? Unfortunately, neither approximate the still unanswered psychoanalytic question
'how does the unconscious operate?', which remains open after our investigation of Freud and
313
In the terminology of Land, these philosophers represent 'accelerative thresholds' – a concept which will
be discussed in Chapter 5.
314
(a) Deleuze and Guattari’s turn to materialism in noted by Chatalet in the essay 'Deleuze and Guattari
Fight Back': “Furthermore, I felt this eruption as an eruption of materialism. It's been too long since we've
witnessed such a thing.” Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p.
210
(b) See footnote 58 regarding Deleuze's methodology.
(c) “To formulate an answer, we realized that we couldn't just hook a Freudian engine up to the MarxistLeninist train.” Guattari, F. quoted in Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK:
Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 217
160
Lacan. I shall read Anti-Oedipus 'archaeologically', trying to separate these three layers:
critique of psychoanalytic method, critique of psychoanalytic theory, and political
prescription. This reading will terminate in the observation that Anti-Oedipus makes a
significant contribution to our understanding of the unconscious' operation by re-framing the
question of the unconscious into one of production (what it makes) rather than of content
(what it (re)presents) and, as such, makes a vital contribution to post-Freudian theorisation
regarding the role of the drive.315 Deleuze and Guattari consider a productive model of the
unconscious to be superior to the Oedipal, theatricised model because the complex is all too
easy to correlate to a fixed, triangulated representation.316 The theatrical analogy shows how
psychoanalysis collapses the complexity and indeterminacy of the unconscious' production to
a flat theatrical (one stage, one show, one script) plane in which the only variables are which
role the various actors play. Such simple correlationism can be deployed politically and
socially to repress desire because the avoidance of complexity aids the imposition of the
right/wrong dialectic of classical morality. At the end of the Oedipus path, Deleuze and
Guattari state that we always find priests and cops whose dialogue is characterised by the
prohibition of 'wrong'.317 Deleuze and Guattari, witnessing the riots of May 1968, saw how
authority is terrified by the presence of crowds. The first step in quelling group unrest is to
transform the complexity of the group into a simple narrative, which can be reabsorbed by
authority. Just as this happened in the political sphere to dissenters, they believed it was also
the methodology of the psychoanalyst crushing a patient's multiplicity of desires into a pre-set
pattern.
There are certainly objections to the situation of Anti-Oedipus as a Freudian-Marxist theory
about the failure of May 1968 which must be noted at this point, though I do not believe that
they are fatal to the project. Firstly, there is a tendency in the commentary on Anti-Oedipus,
particularly when considering Deleuze’s input, to position the book as being entirely opposed
to Freud. Kerslake notes that Deleuze, before his collaboration with Guattari, uses the
315
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 55
316
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 55
317
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 81
161
unconscious as a concept, yet is wholly silent on the Freudian unconscious.318 However, the
fact that Deleuze so readily agreed to work with the psychoanalyst Guattari in 1969, and that
Deleuze’s understanding of Freud is so solidly grounded by 1972 shows that, on balance,
Deleuze’s exposure to Freud probably pre-dates this period .319 In fact, a much stronger case
can be made regarding Deleuze's exposure to Freud, as aspects of the Freudian unconscious
occur in Part II of Difference and Repetition, which Deleuze published in 1968. Watson
unequivocally states that Deleuze’s shared interest with Guattari was reading
psychoanalysis.320 Deleuze’s relative silence about Freud before Anti-Oedipus is an example
of Deleuze’s iconoclastic approach to philosophy and his methodological preference for
encountering outside, marginalised parts of philosophy rather than engaging in dialectics with
the molar. Yet by 1972, with the publication of Anti-Oedipus, along with contemporaneous
shorter critiques of Freud, it is clear that Deleuze’s intention is to explicitly critique, rather
than to ignore Freud. Watson emphasises that Deleuze’s introduction to Guattari represented
an opportunity for Deleuze to escalate his burgeoning interest in conventional
psychoanalysis.321
A second, stronger, objection is that Deleuze’s conception of the unconscious is so dissimilar
to Freud’s that there is nothing in the Freudian machine that Deleuze would wish to save.
Kerslake’s reading of Deleuze’s earlier encounters with the unconscious situates him in
318
Kerslake, K. Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum, 2007) p. 189
319
(a) See Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 309
(b) Deleuze’s fluency is demonstrated in discussions like Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back Deleuze, G.
Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 216
320
See Watson.: “They certainly shared many interests. Guattari was a reader of philosophy, and Deleuze a
reader of psychoanalysis.” Watson, J. Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought (UK: Bloomsbury, 2007) p. 2
321
Deleuze was attracted not only to Guattari's desiring machines, but also to his critique of
psychoanalysis. He later explained to an interviewer that “Oddly enough, it wasn't me who rescued Felix
from psychoanalysis; he rescued me”. Deleuze, G. Negotiations. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995) p. 144 (see also 13, 15).
162
relation to Jungian and Bergsonian conceptions of the unconscious.322 However, the lexicon
of Anti-Oedipus is both critically and positively that of Freudianism above all other discourses
of philosophy of the unconscious; and Lacan is the only other primary influence who
contributes a significant number of concepts, many of them re-interpreted from Freud. My
contention is that many of Deleuze’s statements about moving away from Freudianism are
tactical rather than strategic; pragmatic rather than ideological. Getting involved in debates
about the correct reading of aspects of Freudianism represented a trap to Deleuze which he
was eager to bypass: “Nor is there an epistemological problem: we're not worried about a
return to Freud, or to Marx. If they tell us we've misunderstood Freud, we'll say: "Ooh well,
we have too much else to do."”323 The metaphysical engine driving Anti-Oedipus – to be
differentiated from the political aspect which is a critique of Lacanianism and power
structures – is the attempt to rewrite the critique of Kantianism in Difference and Repetition in
a psychoanalytic rather than metaphysical vocabulary.324 The resulting composite of Kant,
Freud (and several other philosophers whom Deleuze's thought follows) is therefore a
compromise between various lexicons, but ultimately must be consistent with a coherent postFreudian depiction of the unconscious if it is to do the work Deleuze would wish it to.
An obvious danger to the progressive political message of Anti-Oedipus in the period around
its publication would be to become dragged into a narrow, dialectical encounter with
psychoanalysis. When questioned about their exact relationship to psychoanalysis Deleuze
and Guattari were keen to avoid being recaptured by the psychoanalytic apparatus and
classified as a dissenting position regarding Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ in which they were
pitted as the 'other' to Lacanianism. A sustained dialectical critique of Lacanianism would
ultimately entrench it rather than pass over it, and would mire Deleuze and Guattari in the
realm of critique of theory rather than production of theories. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari
pick what is useful to them in Freud and Lacan – the depictions of impersonal unconscious
production such as drive theory or the 'A' schema – and deploy it against anthropocentric,
322
Kerslake, K. Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum, 2007)
323
Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 221
324
For elucidation of this argument see Hughes, J. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, (London:
Continuum, 2009). I shall return to this topic in Chapter 5 when discussing Land's project.
163
correlationist psychoanalysis.
Therefore, while Anti-Oedipus can be easily read as a political reaction to Lacan, it is not so
easily classifiable as a directly psychoanalytic critique of Lacan. Watson notes that Deleuze
and Guattari worked through Lacan and Freud in Anti-Oedipus: through the space his
concepts opened to a position on the other side: Deleuze acknowledged that both he and
Guattari owed a great deal to Lacan, remaining indebted to his "creative side," and borrowing
heavily from his line of thought even as they proceeded with their "demolition".325 I shall
argue that there are parts of Freud which are useful to Deleuze and Guattari, but they have to
be carefully extracted from the points at which they are implied in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, as the tendency is to pass over them in silence rather than acknowledge Freud,
and risk a backward slip to Oedipus. Deleuze explicitly differentiates the ‘letter’ and the
‘becoming’ of Freud: what Freud wrote, and how it has been interpreted. This difference is the
key to understanding what the Oedipus of Anti-Oedipus stands for. Oedipus is the tendency to
triangulate a given case within the collar of a pre-existing complex.326 Rather than Oedipus
the historical figure or the Oedipus complex named after him – these specific things –
Oedipus is a tendency in the interpretation of Freud which focuses on the family and tradition,
and treatments which operate within the context of both:
However, if one examines not the letter of Marx or Freud, but the becoming of Marxism
and the becoming of Freudianism, we see, paradoxically, Marxists and Freudians
engaged in an attempt to recode Marx and Freud: in the case of Marxism, you have a
recoding by the State ("the State has made you ill, the State will cure you"—this cannot
be the same State); and in the case of Freudianism, you have a recoding by the family
(you fall ill from the family and recover through the family—this is not the same
family).327
As Deleuze and Guattari criticise a tendency towards a certain application of Freud, they
325
Watson, J. Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought (UK: Bloomsbury, 2007) p. 42
326
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 53
327
Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 253
164
implicitly favour a reading of Freud which emphasises the opposite of the ‘Oedipus’
tendency: towards the impersonal, machinic flow of energy/desire delineated in his
metapsychological works. The aspects of Freud and Marx which are subject to critique are
those which work politically against the operation of desiring machines, reining back
desiring-production, and shackling its free operation. Freeing desire is the commonality
between Guattari’s critical-analytical and Deleuze’s positive-ontological interests before the
writing of Anti-Oedipus. Later in this chapter I shall demonstrate that Deleuze and Guattari’s
critique and ontology have similar positive applications in the liberation of desire. Both serve
the cause of freeing desire, removing false obstacles to its uninhibited flow (Oedipus) and
providing the conceptual tools needed to understand the migrations of energy on the plane of
desire (Schizoanalysis).
The Dangers of Oedipus
Felix Guattari, writing both on his own and with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, developed
the notion of schizoanalysis out of his frustration with what he saw as the shortcomings
of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely the orientation toward neurosis,
emphasis on language, and lack of socio-political engagement.328
Watson is perhaps guilty of a lack of nuance in the above interpretation of Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the period of Anti-Oedipus' production after the events of 1968,
there certainly was a socio-political engagement being undertaken by psychoanalysis.
However, this engagement was a broad and shallow recoding of the socio-political in the
image of Oedipus: a familial, patriarchal recoding which was essentially conservative.
Lacanianism was socio-political insofar as it was a bulwark against deviation from social
normality. Therefore, what Deleuze and Guattari found lacking in Lacanianism was militant
engagement of the kind they were politically engaged in.329 The Oedipus cure in its style as a
soft, bourgeois recoding had no explicit aims beyond ending the patient's treatment and
328
Watson, J. Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought (UK: Bloomsbury, 2007) p. 1
329
The militant ideology of the Soixante-Huitards is the subject of a number of works such as Harman, C.
The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (London: Bookmarks, 1988) or Singer, D. Prelude To Revolution: France
In May 1968 ( New York: Hill and Wang, 1970) which characterise its main features.
165
reintegrating them as a normal member of society. When this pattern was transcribed to the
political domain, psychoanalysis, mimicking its clinical setting, offered a diagnosis of a
condition from which it also claimed there was no escape vector beyond capitulation to
Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari characterise the structural imposition of Oedipus as 3+1,
representing the familial triumvirate and the phallus.330 Structuralist interpretations of the
political would therefore, as in figure 31 below, always follow this cookie cutter template of
triangulating “desire, object and law” (3) and establishing the signifying regime in which they
were related (+1).331 Modern man was a familial construct and that was that: disorder would
always creep in as people misconstrued their true Oedipal construction, and the only solution
was a recapitulation to the underlying 'truth' of familiality. In the same pattern, society
becomes the subject of an analysis based on the pattern of a pre-existing complex. In more
complex cases, where the patient seemed to break free from familiality, the easy applicability
of Oedipal theatrics could be relied upon to collapse the case back into the same triangulated
structure.
Figure 31: The Triangular Structure of the Complex
Deleuze and particularly Guattari (having encountered patients thus repressed in the clinical
setting) were politically motivated to re-frame analysis in a manner which would make it
330
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 52
331
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 52
166
critical of what they considered repressive or conservative methods of biopolitical control;
forms of control they saw in the apparatus of contemporary Western States:
If it is true that the social revolution is inseparable from a revolution of desire, then this
changes the question. We now must ask: what conditions will enable the revolutionary
avant-garde to free itself from its unconscious complicity in repressive structures, and
undermine Power's manipulations of the desire of the masses who "fight for their
servitude as though it were their salvation"? If the family and the ideologues of the
family have a crucial role to play here, as we believe they do, then one cannot
overestimate the function of psychoanalysis in this respect, since it was the first to raise
these questions—and the first to stifle them, privileging instead the modern myth of
familial repression through Oedipus and castration.332
The 'stifling' effect of the imposition of Oedipus became a philosophical-epistemological
problem, as Oedipus deceives us about the underlying truth behind our conscious
representations of reality. For Deleuze and Guattari, epistemological understanding isn't
acquired through the critique of the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic (as it is for
Lacan) but between the real and the virtual, that is, between a materialist conception of
existence and the the critical frameworks which allow humanity to understand it in its most
concrete, abstract forms.333 Their aim is to “shatter the iron collar of Oedipus and rediscover
everywhere the force of desiring production; to renew on the level of the real, the tie between
analytic machine, desire, and production”.334 Deleuze and Guattari's critical approach aims to
eliminate the anthropomorphism and inherited 'small 'c' conservatism' engendered by an
analysis which began with an abstract 'Oedipus the man' theory that would be applied to each
'real' patient. Figure 32 below shows how Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan's epistemological
approaches are each other's converse. Deleuze and Guattari, in their investigation of the real,
only use a tool insofar as it can demonstrate the singularity of the real. For Lacanians, the
332
Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts (Cambridge UK: Semiotext(e), 2004) p. 218
333
This was explicitly stated by Lacan in Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on
Technique 1953-1954 (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 137
334
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 52
167
Oedipal tool is the universal truth of analysis, and any individual case is to be understood by
the application of this model.
Figure 32: Deleuze and Lacan's Methodology
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the consequence of the application of a pre-determined,
general theory to all individual cases is both an epistemological problem – that it covers up
the underlying truth of the real – and a political problem in that it reproduces any social
dynamic which that theory would be instrumental in the cultivation of. I shall go on to show
that it is this epistemological critique of Lacanism which is the key concern of Land in his
reading of Deleuze. For Land, political oppression is a secondary concern when compared to
the suppression of epistemological truth; that is, the actuality of matter and its virtual
becoming. Politics, insofar as it is important to Land, is limited to the removal of elements
which overcode and misrepresent epistemological reality.
The lecture Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis presents Deleuze and Guattari's major
critiques of psychoanalysis, and in doing so demonstrates four major axes of engagement
168
which are present in Anti-Oedipus.335 The Oedipus under attack in Anti-Oedipus functions as
a place-holder for these four transgressions which, for Deleuze and Guattari, are represented
by his proper name. This lecture, and the article based upon it are particularly revealing as
they show, in part, the extent to which either Freud or Lacan is the target of any given critique
– a separation which is often difficult to see in their other works. Deleuze and Guattari's
attitude to Lacan is ambivalent, as noted above, because their unequivocal dislike of the
political effects of applied Lacanism conflicted with their theoretical respect for some of his
models of the unconscious such as the 'A' schema and the object petit-a. The Four
Propositions are as follows:
1) Psychoanalysis stifles desire, sorting desires into the good and the bad before trying to
suppress what it considers to be bad: “You always have too many desires, you are a
polymorphic pervert. What you must be taught is Lack, Culture, Law, in other words the
reduction and the abolition of desire”.336 In the concept of polymorphous perversion we can
see two distinct tendencies in Freudian analysis. The first is a dispassionate, mechanisticbiological view of the operation of the unconscious: the unconscious simply wants to connect,
to lay down and to follow the paths of drives. Yet Freudian polymorphous perversion alwaysalready includes a negative connotation of perversion, as if the desires shown are in some way
‘wrong’ when they are expressed by a patient. Freud is to be condemned for his ambivalent
attitude towards desire, but the apparatus of control critiqued above are Lacanian: ‘Lack,
Culture, Law’, and this is especially true if culture is considered in the Lacanian, linguistic
sense. For Deleuze and Guattari all desire is on the same plane – the machinic, pre-symbolic
plane – and as such it is not the role of the analyst to create a typology of desire but to help
liberate desire – without a pre-existing schema of different ‘good’ and ‘bad’ notions of desire.
This relates back to their productive model of desire, in which it (desire) is said to be good or
bad only insofar as it produces or is blocked from producing.
2) Psychoanalysis impedes the formation of utterances. Deleuze argues that the flows of
desire are punctuated not by signs but by becomings; yet when the patient speaks of these
335
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 79
336
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 80
169
becomings they are recaptured by the psychoanalytic apparatus – Oedipus – and recast in the
fixed terms of the complex. Again, Freud is condemned, this time for his reduction of the
complexity of the patient’s actual speech to the apparatus of his therapeutic cure (in the next
section the ‘Little Hans’ case is discussed in more depth), but the true target of Deleuze and
Guattari’s criticism are “the Partisans of the Signifier”, Lacanian analysts using a narrowly
semiological register to interpret the utterances of the patient; taking phonetic units as the
basic content of discourse and changing statements like “groupe hippy (hippy group)” to
“gross pipi (big weenie)”.337 Deleuze believes that the analyst only ever hears what they hope
to, and not what the patient actually says. This is problematic because what they hope to hear
are the trigger words which will allow them to constrain the patient's desires into a theatrical
representation, recasting their words into a play on the Oedipal stage. This recasting
anthropomorphises and simplifies the patient's desires, reducing them to moral categories of
good or bad which are defined by their relation to normality: fitting with family, society, law
and order is good, whilst the rejection of these mores is bad.
3) The model of the split subject is a simplification, which covers and suppresses its plurality.
Two versions of the Propositions exist, one from a transcription of Deleuze’s lecture, and a
second set based on Deleuze’s revised notes.338 The most significant difference between the
two is the change of language of this third point in the latter text to be less explicitly antiLacanian. Deleuze counters the Lacanian idea (described in the previous chapter) of a single
split subject operating in different registers by restating the importance of multiplicity in
desiring production. I shall show that Deleuze and Guattari believe that the subject of
analysis is transversed by tribes, masses, mobs, and can speak from the perspective of either a
component or a group within any of these assemblages. In this criticism, Deleuze and Guattari
again demonstrate the division between the theoretical apparatus of Freud and Lacan, which
always speaks of polyvocity and plurality in the unconscious, and practised psychoanalysis,
which reduces all of these voices to the strongest one, and again, situates it in the constraints
of a universal complex.
337
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 85
338
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 402
170
4) Psychoanalysis treats itself as a contract between analyst and analysand and is therefore an
expression of liberal-bourgeois social conduct. Psychoanalysis never becomes militant
because its participants are a priori not interested in radical change. The productions of
psychoanalysis are therefore fundamentally conservative. The role of schizoanalysis
(described later in this chapter) as a normative political project is clearly demonstrated in this
text. Deleuze repudiates the idea that Anti-Oedipus' critical payload, as noted previously, was
a refined combination of or return to Marx and Freud. Schizoanalysis is posited as a distinct,
original, theoretic praxis with which Deleuze and Guattari hope to replace psychoanalysis. In
the remainder of this chapter I shall consider the validity of the first three of these critiques
(ignoring the fourth as it relates to the practical application of psychoanalysis).
Critical
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
The splitting of
Psychoanalysis
proposition
stifles desire
impedes the
the subject
treats itself as a
formation of
contract
utterances
Subject of
Political and
Psychoanalytic
Psychoanalytic
Political
critique:
Psychoanalytic
Theoretical
Practical
Theoretical
Practical
Lacanian
Freudian and
Lacanian
Freudian and
political or
psychoanalytic
Subject of
critique:
theoretical or
practical
Subject of
Lacanian
critique:
Lacanian
Freudian or
Lacanian
Critical use in
Moving
Demonstrating
Showing that
the present
analytical
the asymmetry
Lacanian Drives
171
None
explanations
thesis
between
away from items Lacanian theory
and absences.
tend to become
singular
and the practice
of Lacanian
analysts.
Productive use
Re-framing
Separating some Reaffirming the
in the present
desire as a
theoretical
thesis
productive force elements of
None
plurality of
drives
(Freudian drive) Lacan –
rather than as a
particularly the
lack (Lacanian
'A' schema from
Drive).
their applied
consequences.
Table 6: The Four Propositions
Critique of the applicability of the universality of the Oedipus complex and the consequences
of its application to patients can be considered at three levels. The first, Deleuze and
Guattari’s assertion that psychoanalysis had dangerous political implications is an objection to
professional psychoanalysis and its practice, yet is not in itself theoretically damning. A
second, the accusation that Oedipus represented only a narrow section of psychoanalytic
disorders rather than the universal primordial mechanism of the unconscious, is much more
serious from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, though it offers a space in which
Oedipus can still be shown to be applicable in some cases, notably neurotic patients. The
third, taking this critique further still – and perhaps the most damning objection of Deleuze
and Guattari to Oedipus – is that it does not exist at all, even in those patients taken to be its
exemplars by Oedipalist theoreticians. The Interpretation of Utterances offers a double
reading of Freud’s Little Hans case notes and Klein’s Richard in which the ‘words’
(utterances) of the patient are presented alongside the interpretation of the analyst.339 Here
339
The former is found in Freud, S. Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909); the latter in Klein,
172
Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate the disconnection between the speech of the patient – and,
implicitly, the meaning of his speech – and the interpretation the analyst places (perhaps
forces!) upon it.
The first case to be critiqued is the 'Little Hans’ case. In Hans’ testimony, Deleuze and
Guattari see no evidence of desire towards the mother or fear of the father/castration. The
point at which these fears are introduced is in the interpretation of Hans' words by his father
and the professor (Freud). In this way, they recode all of Hans’ polysemic desire to one fixed
interpretation in the pattern of the Oedipus complex. It is their words, as they question Hans
and his utterances, which introduce all of the obsessions which they claim Hans is bound by.
Hans’ interest in Madriel and the “Urbane Lady” are recoded by Freud as aspects of desire
for his mother, though Deleuze and Guattari note that his attempts to reach them are in fact a
trajectory away from his mother and not toward her.340 Freud's determination to treat his
patient as a bearer of the Oedipus complex has lead him to reverse the meaning of the Hans'
words. The solution offered by father and the professor is that he sleeps with his parents in
lieu of the other girls: “he is inoculated by the Oedipus virus”.341 Hans did not enter
psychoanalysis with an Oedipus complex, he was exposed to it during his treatment.
The analysis regarding castration is similar: Hans’ machinic interest is in “the pee-maker”,
which Deleuze and Guattari situate as a productive process rather than a fetishised organ.
Hans' belief when he enters analysis is that Mother has a pee maker, all the other girls have a
pee maker... yet the professor steps in again: Hans must learn the difference between boys and
girls. The idea of castration and sexual difference is introduced to Hans by Freud and his
father, not by Hans' own testimony. Under Freud's guidance, Oedipus recodes Hans’ desire in
terms of the symbolism of phallus and castration, and at the same time it destroys his belief in
“n sexes”, a polymorphous, combinatory view of sexuality and desire. Hans’ sexuality was
univocal, all sexual objects were on the same plane and described in the same register, be they
M. Narrative of a Child Analysis (The Writings of Melanie Klein vol 4) (New York: The Free Press, 1984)
340
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 90
341
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 90
173
“locomotive, horse, sun... girl or boy”.342 Again, Freud's treatments as a practitioner of
psychoanalysis do not match with his theoretical models of the unconscious, because plurality
of the drives does exist in his texts in the metapsychological period.
Deleuze and Guattari understand the horse as Hans’ gambit to escape his domestic state, a
horse-becoming that would let him get onto the street (I shall return to this conception of
becoming-production in the unconscious in the next section). They contend that
psychoanalysis as practised in the Freudian – Lacanian school has no conception of this
positivity, because it is only interested in representation – things standing for other things –
and lack. As such, the horse must be recoded as part of the Oedipal-familial complex.
Selectively listening, analysis waits for its own trigger words in Hans’ discourse. The horse’s
eyes become father’s; the horse's penis quickly follows.343 Oedipal analysis cares only about
its social goals: to bring Hans back to his family and to normalise him in relation to an
idealised family. Whatever Hans says is irrelevant – indeed, his testimony is ignored or
misrepresented if it is not of use to the pre-determined goal of the analysis: “You could not
even say that Freud interprets poorly; while interpreting he is at no risk of hearing what the
child says”.344
Deleuze and Guattari tell us that, for Freud, “desire cannot bear “intensities””.345 As Chapter 1
showed, Freud’s energetic-hydraulic unconscious operates to reduce the intensities and the
flows of desire rather than to liberate them. The foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis –
Freud’s treatment of hysteria – has therefore conditioned the therapeutic process into a
narrow, familial, normalisation and (correct, healthy) suppression of desire. Hans’ resigned
acceptance to analysis isn’t indicative of a cure, just his boredom with the process, it isn't
working for him. The reality of desire in Hans' case is the desire of Hans to make productive
connections outside of his home – he wants to escape the Oedipal system and start to create
machinic assemblages, making productive couplings outside of his current limits. Freud and
his Oedipus complex work only to restrain Hans, to pull him back to the ever-same.
342
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 93
343
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 96
344
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 96
345
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) p. 96
174
Richard, the subject of Klein’s analysis, is caught in the same bind. Richard’s utterances about
names, territories or machines are broken down and recast as fantasies in the same Oedipal
model Hans was trapped in. Proper names become father, ports mother’s genitalia.346 Deleuze
and Guattari read Richard’s position as paranoid-schizoid rather than neurotic-depressed, a
position which psychoanalysis’ Oedipal apparatus cannot treat. Instead, psychoanalysis
recasts Richard's positive, schizo-desire in terms of lack, which is its norm.
Should Hans and Richard be satisfied by the supposed ‘cure’ offered by Freudian analysis? An
obvious rejoinder to Deleuze and Guattari’s reading would be to re-affirm the success of the
treatment. In this case, Oedipus and Anti-Oedipus have a different perspective. Freud, at
various points, is keen to promote small ‘c’ conservatism as the goal of psychoanalysis,
protecting society from the unspeakable consequences of the unconscious escaping the
mechanism of repression (as demonstrated in Chapter 1, Freud's conception of the dark drives
of the id necessitates their censorship). For Freud, the cure is sometimes finding or shoring up
the right kind of repression. Deleuze and Guattari’s goal is very different. As revolutionary
psychoanalysts, they aimed to transform society rather than to preserve its mores. The
Freudian-Oedipal complex is critiqued in these cases because it prevents the liberated flow of
desire, which they posit as productive and pre-conscious. Why do Deleuze and Guattari want
machinic desire to flow without restriction? In Anti-Oedipus it is not a question of arriving at
some kind of super-humanistic expression of authenticity. Instead, the new assemblages and
connections they would allow to proliferate would provide a truly revolutionary moment,
moving society away from the symbolic, hyper-patriarchal overcoding which characterises its
contemporary form. In Anti-Oedipus, western history is transcribed as a history of
repressions, in which the desire(s) of groupings have been harnessed by despots, priests,
sovereigns, bureaucrats, cops and shrinks. In 1970, Deleuze and Guattari don’t know what the
open desire would do to society, but they are engaged in an experimental praxis which aims to
find out.347
346
Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) pp. 103-105
347
Land likens this instinct to that of the character 'Case' in Gibson's Neuromancer (United Kingdom:
Grafton, 1986), as I shall discuss in Chapter 5.
175
Yet again we discover the crucial distinction between psychoanalytic theory and practice in
the Hans and Richard cases. The Freud who cannot bear “intensities” is the doctor who tries
to stabilise the patient overcome by them and also the chronicler of civilisation who sees it
being thrown into instability by them. He is not however someone whose schema of the
psyche lacks an understanding of the importance of intensity in propelling the system of
drives. Drives are forged by intensities, travel to intensities and have their vicissitudes shaped
by the build-up and discharge of intensities. Politically however, the translation of a drive into
an utterance is a dangerous thing, because the process of translation itself has an aim, a
source, an object. As we have seen, for Freud drives are always plural, ploy-vocal, eternal. To
reduce all of drive-desire to one simple idea, the Oedipus instinct of small 'c' conservatism;
the protection of the ever same, this would be as far away from the truths of Freud's drive
theory as it is possible to get. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the reduction of the patient's
thought to a fixed complex as the imposition of theatricality. In this theatrical set-up, the
participants are forced into specific, pre-determined roles which are fixed like those of
characters in a play. In the clinical context 'patient' and 'doctor' immediately become two of
these roles. The patient's testimony is then further transposed and re-worked to fit into a
predetermined characterisation: “a universal metaphoric structural relation”, the most
infamous of which is Oedipus – though there are others.348 The reduction of the subject's
unconscious to a theatrical set up prevents an analysis of the patient's true desire, because it:
(1) anthropomorphises desire, though the productions of the unconscious are pre-subjective;
(2) categorises the analysis of desire into the patterns of pre-made, fixed complexes; (3) and
therefore simplifies the true complexity of the patient's desire.
Deleuze and Guattari offer us a path to escape this impasse. They posit that a better solution to
the management of desire would be to remove the discursive elements of psychoanalysis: the
obsession with expressing the motivations of material productions in a re-framed form as
ideas or concepts, and their replacement with an impersonal survey of merely what the
unconscious produces, without emphasis on why it might produce it. To get to this point
though, Deleuze and Guattari need to escape the inherited Oedipality of the modern subject.
To do so, they show us a way of being which is not tainted by the cultural reproduction of
Oedipus, which is the subject of the critique which they call 'Schizoanalysis'.
348
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 307
176
Schizo-Desire is Materialist Psychoanalysis
Anti-Oedipus proposes the replacement of the Oedipal unconscious with a Schizoanalytic
unconscious; a concept which, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, must not be taken literally.
Anti-Oedipus’ injunction is to become like a schizo, not to become a schizo. The schizo
condition is posited as being immune to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious: it
exists in a pre-symbolic state, in which the analytic game of things representing other things is
no longer applicable. The schizo is “without any gods at all, without a family, without a father
or a mother”.349 The essential nature of the schizo is therefore an inability; an absence of the
structure which conditions desire and which is considered to be inherent in ‘normal’ members
of the society. Outside of societal conditioning, rather than experiencing the world as symbol
or code the schizo plugs into a purely productive way of being and instead of chasing after
ephemeral ‘lack’ and objects which are not at hand, the schizo uses what is at hand in the most
productive, positive way available. Buchanan states that “schizophrenic delirium could not
take the forms it does if the unconscious was not, as they put it, machinic.”350 Whereas the
'normal' subject is constituted by a conscious force that suppresses and restricts the
unconscious, the schizo subject “is produced ... as a residuum or spare part that sits alongside
the desiring-machine, which ... now occupies centre stage”.351 The schizo is therefore not
constituted as an effect of the force of repression – Oedipus – but by the machinic production
of the unconscious, and is therefore a window into the pre-subjective, pre-idealistic and
therefore anti-anthropocentric process of the unconscious as desiring-production.
Competitively, the role of classical, Oedipal psychoanalysis could be described as a bulwark
against deviation from normality. The average citizen is 'right' insofar as they have the correct
unconscious, an unconscious capable of (re-)producing the correct formations. Mental illness
is considered a deviation from a conservative normality which replicates the salient elements
of the social order. As such, Oedipal psychoanalysis is an idealist system. Subjective
349
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 3
350
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p. 39
351
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p. 40
177
productions matter insofar as they can be seen to replicate or correspond to modal ideas.352
For Deleuze and Guattari our current social order cannot be considered 'normal' in a positive
sense. Normality exists as a conserved (replicated) state only because reactive and repressive
forces work to maintain such stasis and when an unconscious affected by mental illness
deviates from this normality it can therefore go in two directions, either reacting against the
pattern of normality or, conversely, going beyond normality to a hyper-normal position. The
avatar of this first tendency is the schizophrenic unconscious. Schizoanalysis is therefore a
materialist psychoanalysis because it is concerned not with ideas, but with production and the
mechanics of production.353 The proper use of schizoanalysis is to apply it to the analysis of
the social and political field, using the characteristics of the schizo to understand the libidinal
investments in a given field.354 From a Deleuzo-Guattarian, materialist perspective, the schizo
has two qualities which are efficacious in the formation and proliferation of desiring
machines. Firstly, they have no predetermined set of rules which will condition and restrict
their ability to connect abstract machines, and secondly they have no resistance to the
underlying materialist motivating force which make them maximise the forms of
connection.355
Deleuze and Guattari use the model of a sphere with two poles to represent the desiring
connections of the Schizo. The bottom pole represents a state of catatonia in which there are
no effects, nothing is conjoined, everything is pure potential. This is called the body without
organs. It essentially represents undifferentiated matter before the process of desire works
upon it. The second pole is that of connection, of the establishment of desiring machines. For
Deleuze and Guattari only the schizo is capable of being in the unique position of being free
of Oedipus, that is without predetermined overcoding which would organise matter, and also
being capable of conjoining matter in the production of desiring machines whenever this
second pole of connection takes over, that is, when they skip between states. Schizo
production is then the ability to utilise these two polarities of the schizo in the unconscious. If
352
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 24
353
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 22
354
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 105
355
This, again, situates Deleuze's materialism in the Spinozist-Nietzchian tradition.
178
there are no barriers to their operation, no societal repressions (Oedipus) preventing desire's
free flow, the process world work in the following two stages:
1. Lower pole. The BWO is determined. The machines available in the real are
identified. Everything present to the schizo is reduced to pure potentiality as a vessel
of transmission and investment of desire.
2. Upper Pole. Once the field of investment potential has been determined, the second
action is to connect the desiring machines in whichever specific connection will be the
most rewarding.
This bipartite method has similarities to both Freud's description of libidinal investment in his
hydraulic drive theory (the eternal drives constantly scan the social field, and will invest in
anything they have the option of investing in) and capitalism (the mutability of money into
any specific capital investment once a means of exchange is established). The use of the
sphere in this example is revealing. A sphere is opaque, showing no machinery which could
connect the two poles, no pathway through which the traveller might venture. Instead we have
an input and an output. Pure potential on one hand, and specific production on the other. How
we get between the two is not Deleuze's primary concern in Anti-Oedipus (even if the names
of the connective syntheses of the unconscious are catalogued, the motivations behind them,
beyond pure productions, are undermined).356 Instead, what is emphasised is that, if allowed,
the schizo does operate in the sphere between these two poles and in the process comes up
with his own desiring machines. More importantly, his own non-Oedipal desiring machines:
nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience; the actual, lived
emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them.357 The schizo
does not chase the lacked object, but positively uses and enjoys the objects he comes into
contact with.
356
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 77
357
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 9
179
Schizo state
Capitalist mode
Deleuze and
Conception of
Guattari's'
space
terminology
Bottom pole
Catatonia
Commodification Body without
Striated space
Organs
Top pole
Connection
Capitalism
Desiring-
Smooth space
Production
Table 7: The Two Poles and Their Relationship to Deleuzian Concepts
Deleuze and Guattari's description of the schizo state goes beyond the post-Freudian, that is,
psychoanalysis, and uses post-Marxist terminology to make its analogies. In Anti-Oedipus the
relationship of schizophrenia to psychoanalysis is therefore compared to that between
capitalism and despotism.358 The neurotic, trapped by psychoanalysis, has a fixed framework
of interpretation (Oedipus) as inflexible as the law of the despot. Conversely, the schizo takes
on the duality inherent in capitalism by which codes are both given and produced; in Deleuze
and Guattari’s terminology, there are movements of de-territorialisation accompanying those
of territorialisation. In this analogy we see schizoanalysis showing its political purpose – it
promises a liberation: just as capitalism liberates the serf from the land and the feudal law, the
schizo offers a liberation from the familial hierarchies and social conservatism instituted by
the rule of Oedipus.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that Freudian analysis cannot understand the Schizo, who is
defined by things and production (materialism) rather than words and concepts (idealism).359
The Schizo makes decisions without criteria, without the weight of Oedipal expectations and
as such, their unconscious is a superior cypher for the pure production of desire as they lack
the apparatus to impede it or restrict its flow. Conversely, Lacanianism, conceiving lack
358
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 33
359
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 23
180
[manque] as the cause of desire, fails to understand desire as a real-material-productive
process. If we could get to a purely schizo desire, we would escape Oedipus and the trap
which it binds society in.360 We are again left with the question of where this kind of freedom
might lead us. For the 'left Deleuzian' it is a kind of liberation ideology, leading us away from
patriarchy into its other “outside the limits of marriage... unimagined ways of bodies moving
together”.361 Conversely, rather than concentrating on achieving desired ends, the 'right
Deleuzians' stress that what is important is the release of impersonal, productive desire from
its confinement in the Oedipal cage. The revolutionary aspect is that in his state without
Oedipus, desire works through the schizo. The pieces already want to be pulled together, they
always did, but they were blocked by the Oedipal security system. The schizo, he's just the
tool to do it, the cypher; it is, again, analogous to Cage cutting Wintermute loose.362 For Land
there are forces far more powerful than the individual unconscious. It is not a case of what
humanity wants now, but what the future wants for humanity.
Deleuze and Guattari's schizo-desire, because it is a materialist conception of desire, is
radically different to the common psychoanalytic concept of desire. As previous chapters have
demonstrated, for Freud the subject is constituted through traversal of a foundation of
unconscious desire, as depicted in his metaphor of the layers of Troy. For Lacan, the content
of the subject's production is determined by an unconscious interrogation along the 'A'
schema. Both of these constitutions of the subject are idealist because the trajectory of drives
and signifying chains is a passage from the unconscious to the pre-conscious – the realm of
becoming-idea. For Deleuze and Guattari however, desire is simply the material production
which occurs before the production of the subject and, therefore, before the production of
'ideas'. The subject is “produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a
spare part adjacent to the machine”.363
Oedipus is a slippery slope: if the relation of productive mechanisms to the objects produced
360
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) pp. 26-27
361
Massumi, B. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (USA: MIT, 1992) p. 36
362
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986)
363
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 20
181
(which can be represented as the relationship between drives and symptoms, or between
materialism and idealism) becomes the defining question of analysis, we again slip into the
trap of Oedipus, and portray the unconscious as a theatre rather than a factory. Deleuze and
Guattari do not want the unconscious to 'express itself', in ideas, but want to measure its raw,
material productions.364 They reject idealism as it is always tainted by the semiotic confusion
and interrelation of concepts; by the associations laid down by language or society; and by the
position of the interpreting agency. A psychoanalysis based on desire-lack [manque] “is
created, planned and organised in and through social production”.365 A materialist
psychoanalysis can break free of these constraints because it has no preconceived framework
of interpretation (Oedipus); it does not lack anything in advance. Schizoanalysis is therefore
an experimental praxis because it would seek to follow schizo breaks and lines-of-flight
which demonstrate a world other than our own anthropocentric prison, showing the outside of
the societal, cultural and linguistic constraints we are trapped beneath. It is a process rooted in
critical philosophy, because it interrogates the real and in doing so defines the limitations and
flaws of idealism.
Because it aims towards a state of affairs which we cannot easily access or intuit
schizoanalysis is also a speculative enterprise. The role of schizo-analysis is to posit, chart or
conceptualise tendencies, movements or pressures in which pure material (or GNoN, or the
Will to Power) is observed pushing to surpass its incarceration in the Oedipal stasis which
society has bound it in.366 Schizoanalysis is therefore inherently political, because it posits
364
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 23
365
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 28
366
Will to Power is often characterised as a pre-cursor of Freud's conception of the unconscious, see for
example Leibscher 'Friedrich Nietzsche's perspectives on the unconscious' in Thinking the Unconscious:
Nineteenth-Century German Thought, Ed. Nicholls A. and Liebscher, M. (UK: Cambridge, 2010)
Lands conception of GNoN is expounded in the post 'The Cult of GNoN' at Xenosystems.net
(http://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon/). GNoN, 'the God of Nature Or Nature' represents the
primacy of material and the rules of matter as the decision making (executive) force in the cosmos. As Land
states in the post in question “Primarily, and strategically, it permits a consensual acceptance of Natural Law,
unobstructed by theological controversy.”. If this thesis claims that an idea should not be interrogated by an
182
that there is a repressed order beneath our societal conventions. Schizoanalysis does not
restrict itself to investigating the topology of this repressed order of desire-production but
actively encourages its excavation. When schizoanalytic critique is undertaken, it is done with
the goal of removing the repression of desire.
Deleuze and particularly Guattari were militants before the Anti-Oedipus period and would be
situated on the political left. Their militancy was not a product of their exploration of the
Oedipus apparatus, but a motiving factor behind their decision to undertake such a critique of
psychoanalysis. Such militancy, coupled with their methodological understanding of
philosophy as a tool for affecting change rather than as purely abstract theory, meant that they
were committed to producing a philosophy which always-already had political aims which
could be described as being of the left. I claim that critical analysis of Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophy of desire has been, due to leftist bias in both their politics and also amongst their
subsequent interpreters, unable to achieve a dispassionate analysis of this desire. In a properly
rigorous critical philosophy the relationship between the act of critique and the application of
critique should be unidirectional, application only proceeding after a disinterested, cool,
critical analysis of the real (see Figure 33 below). The critical framework must be established,
providing an epistemological foundation, before a political conception of its consequences is
considered.
idea but by reality, GNoN is the set of mechanisms in reality by which any proposition in reality will be
tested.
183
Figure 33: Epistemic Directions
The Implications of Materialist Psychology: Deleuze and the Virtual, Desire, and
Difference
The relationship between desire and the virtual-actual in Deleuzian theory is essential to
understanding the genealogies of the two strains of Deleuzianism I shall be comparing, which
are: (1) the pre-eminent leftist interpretation favoured by most commentators and (2) its
alternate, the rightist interpretation of Land. As stated earlier, Deleuzian desire can be
understood as an heir of Nietzsche’s will to power or Spinozist power-conatus.367 It functions
as the name of the force which animates material.368 As such, it is the conduit through which
the actual – the disposition of material at the current point – could become the virtual, which
is a potential disposition of material in the future. The virtual is an interpreted understanding
367
Deleuze depicts Spinoza's conception of conatus in his monograph Spinoza. See Deleuze, G. Spinzoa:
Practical Philosophy (New York: City Lights, 1988) p.99.
368
Deleuze And Guattari considered Anti-Oedipus to be a materialist critique of the idealist Oedipal
apparatus: “And that a revolution - this time materialist - can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus”.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. pp. 75)
184
of a potential actual. There are therefore multiple virtualities, which may or may not
correspond with the actual. Any positive analysis of desire – an analysis of what desire
produces – must determine how desire works to produce the actual.
Figure 34: Actual → Virtual
For Deleuze, the actual-virtual distinction is a consequence of his Spinozist materialism.
Desire is the flow of matter; it is the automatic productions and disjunctions which matter is
capable of enacting. In the diagram above it is represented by an arrow, capturing its power as
a transformative force between two states. This transformation encompasses any force which
has the capability of moving the disposition of material and therefore extends from simple,
calculable physical laws (such as gravity) to the complex productions and interactions of
living material (such as the flow of money, libido and organisms across a casino floor).
Larger scale organisations, up to the size of the society itself, are simply the aggregates of the
productions of individual instances of desire. Deleuze and Guattari give the example of
Women’s Liberation when depicting the constraint of desire within a society.369 Their formula
is that liberation requires the promotion of “unconscious desire” (productive desire), and an
understanding of how desire invests the “social field”, leading to the ability to enact a
“disinvestment of repressive structures”.370 This structure mirrors the schizo-dynamics of the
369
As Mullarkey notes, Deleuzianism and feminism have a complex relationship exceeding the position
sketched here. Mullarkey, J. in Ed Buchanan, I. A Deleuzian Century, (London: Duke, 1999) p. 65
370
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 61
185
'two poles' model explained above: first the field is interpreted (decoded, understood), and
then it is reinvested. This formula also fits into the structure illustrated above. Women's desire
would transform the actual into a new disposition (which therefore is, to an observer in the
actual, a virtual future) if it was not constrained. This constraint takes the form of the
repression of women's desire, predominantly because of the primacy of patriarchy (accused
under the name Oedipus). Oedipus then becomes a virtual which constrains the actual, and
prevents the realisation of a series of alternate virtuals (other power structures in society).
The example of Women's Liberation demonstrates how desire could, if released, enact
significant changes of society; it would shift the actual towards a number of new virtualities.
Deleuze and Guattari limit their commentary to noting desire's power to affect change.
However, philosophers who have followed this Deleuzian-Guattarian analytic approach have
been prepared to take a speculative approach to the problem of constrained desire and have
therefore posited potential patterns in the new dispositions which would be created if desire
was liberated in a society. Such speculative approaches can be grouped into two categories:
those which derive from political assumptions, and those which produce economic depictions.
I characterise this as the distinction between 'left' and 'right' Deleuzians. Of this dichotomy,
the left Deleuzian position is currently the pre-eminent interpretation. It is primarily derived
from pre-existing ethical commitments to the promotion of equality and emphasises that once
freed, desire could form a number of dispositions, all of which would be considered of equal
value.371 Conversely, the right Deleuzian position is derived from an economic interpretation.
It claims that desire, once freed, would follow laws of nature and therefore form new, stable
patterns according to such laws.
This difference between a left and right reading of Deleuze can also be seen in differing
approaches to the possibility of interacting with otherness;.372 The tendency of the left is to
371
This 'leftward' progression has obviously been immensely socially beneficial over the 20th century, with
the spreading of both the electoral franchise and individual rights through society.
372
Laurie, T. 'More Human than Human: The Ethics of Alienation' (2009). ( Available at:
http://www.academia.edu/4006097/More_Human_than_Human_The_Ethics_of_Alienation_in_Octavia_E._
Butler_and_Gilles_Deleuze_conference_proceedings_2009p. 184 )
186
regard that which is supplemental to or other than a standard notion of 'humanity' to be
something which should become the subject of physical exploration. Texts focus on the idea
of the body without organs as a method of enabling physical connection, plugging the existing
body into new situations and alterities.373 On the right, the tendency is to regard outsideness
as a theoretical domain – for Land, it is like ('isomorphic with') the outside (noumenon)
delimited by Kantian critical philosophy – which cannot be the subject of physical interaction,
but only the subject of critical speculation.374 The 'body without organs' is therefore a map
rather than a territory; a way of discovering and interpreting connections and productions
which would otherwise have been overcoded and suppressed.375
The schism between left and right Deleuzians is epistemologically defined by the position of
desire and the virtual in their teleology of the transition between the actual as it is and a
posited future actual. This is derived from two very different interpretations of the operation
of desire between the virtual and the actual. Left Deleuzianism starts with the premise of
Deleuze's earlier work on difference and states that, as difference is primary and
undifferentiated, the virtual consists of a series of potential actualities, all of which present
competing interpretations of difference which are distinct from the current actual. As there is
only difference between these states, and difference is primary and indistinguishable, none
can be called the preferred or natural state. An example of this process in action would be an
analysis of sexuality. In our current, patriarchal, Oedipalised society, sexual interactions are
ordered as a 'normal' heterosexuality and this state's 'others', a whole range of other non373
See: Buchanan, I. Deleuzism (USA, Duke University Press; 2000) p. 31
374
Land's description of this isomorphism was that: “It takes a bit of getting used to -- the crucial key for
me was realizing the rigorous isomorphism with Kantian critique. Where Kant rejects the 'mystical'
possibility of Intellectual Intuition, they envisage contact with the thing-in-itself (BwO) ...... as the core of the
'schizophrenic' apocalypse situated at the horizon of history (= of capitalism).” Land, 2014 in a twitter
conversation. ( Available at https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/477129651437838337,
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/477121038199689216,
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/477129950776930306 )
375
Defining the problematic notion of the body-without-organs is beyond the remit of this thesis. See
'Body Without Organs' in Ed. Parr, A. The Deleuze Dictionary (UK: Edinburgh, 2010) pp. 37-39
187
cisgender sexual practices: “[T]he male part of a man can communicate with the female part
of a woman, but also with the male part of a woman, or with the female part of another man,
or yet again with the male part of the other man, etc.”376 These other practices are considered
to be the virtual states which would be attainable if desire was not constrained in the actual to
prevent their adoption. To arrive at our preferred location, illustrated below as Actual2, we
must use our conception of these virtuals and enact a removal of any obstacles which prevent
their being possible. This conception of difference is happily congruent with the desired
progressive politics of 'inclusion' in which minoritarian groups, decisions and choices are
considered to be equal. Colebrook notes that Deleuze and Guattari, in their readings of key
texts, would be more concerned with the way in which the text could be put to work than its
meaning.377 Under such a rubric, a political deployment of Deleuzian theory would be valid if
it enabled the progression of societal norms towards a pre-determined goal.
Figure 35: Actual → Actual 2
How does desire work in this system? It is a repressed force which would otherwise transform
376
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 69
377
Colebrook, C. and Buchanan, I. Deleuze and Feminism (UK; Edinburgh University Press, 2000) p. 3
188
the actual into one of the multitude of virtuals.378 Because these virtuals are considered equal
and none to be the 'natural' terminus of desire, each specific work of desire is singular and
local, and proceeds in its transformative capacity to engender new condition which is
distinctive to its own genesis. Yet in this analysis, desire takes on a problematic duality. It is
both a blind desire, always working in an individual situation, and also a knowing desire
which produces a heterogeneous set of potential outcomes, being careful to not become fixed
in any new pattern, or to exclude any potential terminus.
Figure 36: Responses to Deleuze
We can understand the duality of desire by considering the three elements in this system in
more depth: repressed desire (the 'now'), the apparatus of repression (Oedipus), and free
desire (a future state). As illustrated above in Figure 36, the refusal to accept that desire is
repressed in current society, and that Oedipus is natural, leads to the kind of conservative
position Deleuze and Guattari attributed to mainstream Lacanianism, as described earlier in
this chapter. In opposition to this tendency of applied psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, as
378
A process described in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) pp. 77 and
129
189
outlined so far, demonstrates that desire is indeed repressed.379 Deleuzians of both sorts would
agree therefore that desire is repressed everywhere by the Oedipal apparatus and that a future
state which is different to the now is attainable.
If we therefore accept that desire is repressed in our current society, we are left with a
speculative choice about the destination of desire if it was freed of this repression. This choice
is intrinsically speculative because we do not only live in a society in which desire is
repressed in various ways, but because a society without repressive apparatus – a property
which all social apparatuses have – is not conceivable. The cleave between left and right
Deleuzianism is determined by the response to this speculation about desire. Left Deleuzians,
primarily motivated by political and ethical considerations favour this model of flat desire, in
which desire has no preference between a variety of competing formations. Conversely, right
Deleuzians, concerned with teleological consequences, have a conception of desire as a force
which is propelled towards certain definable ends. Desire would therefore not become flat,
pooling at random points like beads of water on a hydrophobic plane, but would instead flow
like water down a beach, in a distinct rivulets towards its source (see figures below).
379
As demonstrated in Chapter 1 in the discussion of drive, polymorphous perversion, and the
establishment of the complex.
190
Figure 38: Rivulets on a Beach
Land's right Deleuzianism can be situated in contrast to the prevalent left reading of Deleuze
which I have characterised as being concerned primarily with arriving at a politically
progressive position. Right Deleuzianism differs in its answer to the primary epistemological
question, which is how is it possible to construct an explication of the mechanics of desire,
where desire is the name of the animating force which connects matter? Such a reading is
supported by the historical context of Deleuze's thought, whose two most important
antecedents are Spinoza and Nietzsche. Spinoza's Ethics is a study of matter, and insofar as it
makes claims about what is good (joy), it is concerned with the agglomeration and
complication of matter. Spinoza provides the model of materialist 'desire' in which matter
proceeds to compound according to the laws of nature: “[F]rom the standpoint of nature or
god, there are always relations that compound, and nothing but relations that compound in
accordance with eternal laws”.380
380
Deleuze, G. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (New York: City Lights, 1988) p. 87
192
For Land Deleuze's metaphysics add a Nietzschian concept of cyclical time to the Spinozist
concept of power-conatus, and it is this temporal element which is stressed by the right
Deleuzians.381 Instead of a uni-directional flow of matter towards its future state, Land defines
the now as also being generated by the future.382 Land's model of causality has the standard
conception of the past causing the present, but adds to this the idea that the future also causes
the present. His justification is that once universal laws of nature are introduced in a model of
how matter evolves over time, it can be said to have a fixed terminus, in a posited future state
of affairs. Deleuzian 'desire' as material flux and production then becomes the force which
propels matter towards this point. Yet matter's progression through time is not a steady march
towards its posited end. The point in which we exist, the actual, is trapped between he
conservative forces of societal stasis and inertia (the Oedipal array: family, patriarchy etc.)
and the future it is being pulled towards in which only the laws of nature determine the
distribution of material.
Figure 39: Pressure on the Actual
In the Landian model, depicted above, temporal causation is multi-directional – it can be said
that the future creates the present as much as the past does, because the future is not a
381
Land, N. Templexity (Timespiral Press, 2014)
382
See Land, N. Templexity (Timespiral Press, 2014)
193
temporal point, but a collection of attractors towards which the distribution of material is
pulled.383 In Land's depiction of Deleuzian desire, as illustrated, the forces on the right – the
laws of GNoN and the future actual, work to move the present towards its future state. The
forces on the left, the virtualities which represent Oedipus or other apparatus of repression
work to prevent the realisation of the future and mire the present in stasis, trapped between its
destiny and its possibilities. The progress of time is therefore conceptualised as a dichotomy
between the forces of change and those of conservatism, rather than one between a past and
future, as past and present are characterised by the same eternal rules, whereas the
conservatism of the now is enacted due to a set of arbitrary repressions, which the history of
desire shows to be usually imposed under the aegis of anthropocentricism.
Figure 40: Land's 'Black' Deleuzianism
If we add temporality to this model, it can be depicted as the dynamic system in Figure 40
above. The two forces propelling change (desire) through time – which is represented by the
383
And because these attractors – the consequences of the laws of the universe - are unchanging, the past
and future are essentially equivalent.
194
movement from left to right – are GNoN (purple) and the virtual future (green), while
Oedipus (red arrows) works in the 'now', to prevent change. The virtual future therefore loops
back into the past to realise itself. An obvious objection is that this model turns our normal
assumptions about time on their head. A standard model of causality sees the past as the sole
determinate of the now. However, this Landian interpretation should not be considered a right
Deleuzian model of classical causality.384 It is a model of the body without organs, and
therefore an exploration of the processes by which the outside might operate. Passing beyond
the realm of human cognition, it begins to depict the manner in which material itself organises
itself over time and speculates about the tendencies of matter in-itself.385 As such, the virtual
future can be subject of speculative investigation in the present.
Actual 2 (the future) is defined in this model not as a future point in time, but as the pattern of
the distribution of matter at a future point in time. As such, there will be areas in which matter
is distributed in the actual (now) which are more like the general distribution in the future, and
areas which are less like it. These advanced areas which are 'before their time' form the virtual
future, and therefore provide us with a model of the more general state of the future. A simple
example may be the proliferation of a certain technology whose benefits are so great that its
future adoption will certainly be widespread (for example, a mobile phone in the 1980s, or
perhaps Google Glass today). Other virtual futures may be more obscure: a supremely
effective trading algorithm which will grow to dominate a market; a new synthetic narcotic
being developed by a narco-cartel or Big Pharma; it may be a fictional entity which will
eventually realise itself.386 An interesting diagrammatic of a virtual future is noted by Land in
Meltdown: “Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future”, so even philosophy and
384
Causality of one of Kant's categories of understanding, and is therefore part of the anthropomorphic
system of understanding. Trying to escape such limitation requires a transition to the realm of intellectual
intuition, or speculative philosophy. See Footnote 660.
385
Land's discussion of the tendencies of matter over time can be found in the electronic pamphlet
Templexity. Land, N. (Timespiral Press, 2014)
386
In Land's terminology, a Hyperstition: a fictional entity which can reify itself. The notion of
Hyperstition is explored in Land, N. CCRU Writings (Timespiral Press, 2015)
195
its concepts can function as a catalyst for the realisation of the virtual future.387 Like the ruins
of Troy depicted by Freud, the virtual future is something already existent, to be painstakingly
uncovered by speculative reason.
Figure 41: Time as a spiral
In this Right Deleuzian abstract machine, the level of development within a space at a given
point in time can be measured as a relative quality of futurity, that is, how much it reflects
distribution of matter at a certain future point, as represented by the width of the black line in
figure 41 above. This final stage of the Landian model incorporates the notion of cyclical
time, in which the forces of GNoN and the virtual future propel desire through the moment of
the actual/present.388 The goal of schizoanalysis is shown as the removal of obstacles or
repressions which would prevent to realisation of the maximum futurity in the near future.
Such a removal results in a positive time spiral, a cybernetic virtuous circle in which the
future is ever more fully realised, intensifying the cycle. For Land, this is necessary:
387
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011); p. 442
388
Land's theory of cyclical time will be discussed further in Chapter 5.
196
Entropy (considered, properly, as an inherently teleological process) is the driver of all
complex systems. Capital Teleology does not trend towards an entropy maximum,
however, but to an escalation of entropy dissipation. It exploits the entropic current to
travel backwards, into cybernetically-intensified pathway states of enhanced
complexity and intelligence. The ‘progress’ of capitalism is an accentuation of
disequilibrium.389
The pressure exerted by GNoN is a constant, pushing one state of nature into the next; while
the virtual future has a accelerative effect if it is able to realise itself. How can this aim be
achieved? The removal of Oedipus, the anthropocentric choke point, would allow a wave of
automatic production to break free and reconfigure the social body. For Deleuze and Guattari,
the primary mechanism of automatic production is designated as the body of the earth.390 The
earth's machines were producing and connecting before the advent of humanity – material
made its own merry way before the advent of man and his society.391 Anti-Oedipus posits the
subsequent history of humanity as a series of repressions and revolutions against the
proliferation of desire undertaken by forms of social organisation. As these repressions are
removed, mankind would accelerate towards its future.392 The right Deleuzian models predict
that this future would become increasingly specific as repression was removed, insofar as it is
instrumentally extropic. The virtual future is capable of influencing the conditions of the
present, but the number of potential virtual futures decreases as the number of Oedipal or
repressive virtuals decreases over time. This is because extropic, (re)productive and intelligent
mechanisms would out-compete less 'fit' methods of distribution in Land's Darwinist
conception of matter: “Suppression of either variation or selection is intrinsically maladaptive
389
Land, N. 'Freedoom prelude 1a' at Xenosystems.org, (2014) (available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/freedoom-prelude-1a/ )
390
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 141
391
As Land believes it will do after the decline of mankind, following John Michael Greer. For a
discussion of this see 'Time-scales' at xenosystems.net ( http://www.xenosystems.net/time-scales/#more-3043
) and the post it is based on, ( http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.hk/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html )
392
This is the essence of Landian accelerationism, as described in Chapter 5.
197
to the cosmos. Maximization of the interlocked functions of experimentation and eradication
of error is the only value to which the ultimate nature of things subscribes”.393 If we cannot
see runaway amplification of these selective mechanisms (which is the case in modern
society), it must be because an equally force is set against it, and it is this force which is
'Oedipus'. This force (abstract machine) has a plurality of virtuals which condition and repress
our progress towards the future: “Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactional, such is
Oedipus” when it is constructed now.394 Over time however, once Oedipal barriers are
removed, there could be fewer virtual futures because more and more material in the present
is arranged in its future state.
Land's right Deleuzianism aims at liberating the forces of auto-production rather than actively
establishing a new set of human possibilities. This is because it is rigorously antianthropocentric and is concerned with the removal of societally created blockages in the
productive flow of desire. Any potential future conceived by an individual would be flawed
because it would be tainted by human subjectivity. Instead, the future is to be realised by
releasing the impersonal forces of desire-production. Such auto-production is an effective
reaction against Oedipus precisely because it is inhuman (the work being done by forces like
Capitalism and GNoN), whereas any choice between solutions to Oedipus is, in some way, a
return to Oedipus.
For Colebrook Oedipus is a misunderstanding of difference and a privileging of one particular
set of differences. The desired end-state would be one in which all potential virtualities were
able to be actualised. Conversely, for Land, Oedipus is a code for the forces which prevent the
true future actualising itself. Therefore, for left Deleuzians, as exemplified by Colebrook, the
virtual is a non-specific field of total, unelectable difference and is therefore the short term
target of social change, whilst for Land, the virtual is a 'battleground': it is both the place
desire wants to go and is being dragged towards, but also the forces in the present which
would repress it. The political objective of left Deleuzianism is delineated by the meta-politics
of difference, but this position requires a second controversial reading of Deleuze and
393
Land, N. 'Coldness' (at xenosystems.net, 2015) ( available at http://www.xenosystems.net/coldness/ )
394
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 129
198
Guattari - their relationship to psychoanalysis' traditional conception of desire. Freud and
Lacan posit the unconscious as a pre-subjective collection of drives which filter pre-conscious
information and verify if it can be utilised in pursuit of one or more pre-existing drives. As
such, while they do not take a Cartesian approach to the subject, the motor of this pre-volition
is still located inside the individual. Desire then, is the libidinal economy which invests this
already existing drive circuitry. It is internal to the specific unconscious and exists as bound or
unbound energy; there is therefore a fixed quality of energy in the psyche, and external stimuli
and the mechanism of the unconscious keep this quantity of energy endlessly circulating on
the vicissitudinous pathways of the established drives. Psychoanalytic desire is simply the fact
that the unconscious system is dynamic; that energy passes through it, and rouses the subject
into whatever course of action the drive dictates.
Deleuze and Guattari invert this model of an unconscious centre scanning outwards and
looking for potential connections. In the models presented in the section above the subjective
unconscious has no privileged position as an actor in the flux of matter. For Deleuze and
Guattari, desire is not the 'fuel' propelling the individual unconscious, but is the general
tendency of all matter to arrange itself into complex connections: the abstract machines of
Anti-Oedipus. In this model the active force is not the unconscious, acting outwards towards
the world, but material itself, which makes connections (in one way amongst others) through
the unconscious. The unconscious then, rather than being a set of laid down drives – that is,
rules about how an end is achieved – becomes nothing more than the connection between
input and output in a subject. To determine the disposition of an unconscious they ask 'what is
produced by the unconscious' rather than 'what does the unconscious mechanism want'. In
doing this they revoke the anthropocentric (pre)subject centricism of psychoanalysis and place
the unconscious subject on the same ontological plane as anything else which is capable of
making connections through abstract machinery: the movement of tides, living matter, or the
flow of capital in an automatic trading circuit.
This concern with production which takes place in the realm of matter rather than that of ideas
can be seen in the metrics used by Deleuze and Guattari to determine the products of desire:
(a) the desiring machine; (b) the social machine and (c) assemblages. Desiring machines (a)
are observed on the periphery of the subject, and denote its productive exploits, through flows
199
entering and leaving it. These flows can be force, sound or matter which passes between an
individual and the outside.395 System (b), social machines, are the repressions of desire or the
re-routings of desire: “The prime function incumbent on the socius has always been to codify
the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see that no flow exists which is not
properly dammed up, channelled, regulated”.396 Psychoanalysis' 'Oedipus' is the avatar for this
type of repression when used by Deleuze and Guattari in their critique of Freud and Lacan.
The third form of desire (c) can be seen in the creation of assemblages. For Deleuze, the
creation of an assemblage is the construction by the subject of a composite scene or
tableau.397 The production of assemblages is determined by the subject's compulsion to
repetition and is not therefore production or repression of production in itself but is the
reproduction of previous productions. I shall return to the problem posed by repetition later in
this chapter.
Anti-Oedipus is the first part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and it is from the relation to
capitalism where the difference between the left and right interpretations of Deleuzianism are
most easily extracted. Underpinning the leftist reading is a conception of desire which
resembles the plasticity and convertibility of money. Money, once established as the means of
exchange, can be converted to any other product within the economy. This is the model of
desire of the left Deleuzian, who sees flat desire as a currency like force which can be
exchanged for anything, without tie or condition. Conversely, on the right, desire is
considered to be an investment. While it could theoretically be exchanged for anything, such a
random approach to investment would result in the desire being wasted. Unless it becomes
capitalised, it cannot replicate itself, and the impulse will rapidly become marginalised within
the economy, or will die. For Land, desire is therefore more than a simple exchange because it
is the effectiveness of exchange, and the force which enables exchange to enact itself – autoproduction.
395
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 32
396
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 33
397
'D as in Desire' in Parnet and Deleuze (1996). L' Abécédaire de Deleuze. [TV programme]. Arte
channel. November 1994 to Spring 1995.
200
The Left Deleuzian and Right Deleuzian positions.
To this point in this chapter a sketch of the distinction between left and right Deleuzianism
has been presented. This distinction is a topic worthy of a thesis in its own right, and an
exhaustive investigation is beyond the scope of this work, but I shall revisit it once more to
consider the consequences of the various anglophone readers of Deleuze. As the present thesis
asks why a psychoanalytic approach to a description of machinic desire is better than one in a
more traditionally metaphysical register, the answer to this question will be framed in terms of
the negative consequences of non-Landian readings of Deleuze. Here we return to the dispute
posed by Brassier depicted in the final section of the present thesis' Introduction; Land's
argument that metaphysics can be hung up on concepts rather than solutions, ignoring
'machinic practice' and the favourable outcomes a philosophy of production can generate.398
This discussion will posit that the space between left and right Deleuzianism is a continuum
rather than a dichotomy, and therefore there is also a central position between these two
schools. Left Deleuzianism will be shown as too tied into pre-existing ideas and concepts, and
therefore to contain a degree of irreality, as its theoretical productions are not intended to
match up to reality. The central position, whilst not containing the same plethora of starting
intuitions, is nevertheless also concerned with the creation and interrogation of concepts. It is
because right Deleuzianism is concerned with production and the mapping of ideas to reality
that it will be shown to be the interpretation Land builds his theory of machinic desire upon.
For Deleuze “The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts” and
he deployed these concepts over the breadth of philosophy, from metaphysics (Difference and
Repetition) to aesthetics (Cinema) to politics (A Thousand Plateaus).399 The distinguishing
factor between the left and right Deleuzianism is the extent to which these concepts map onto
cybernetic and productive processes and therefore attempt to describe the outside. Land's
accusation against rival interpretors of Deleuze is that they do not deploy philosophical
398
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism,(Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September 2010)
available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
399
Deleuze, G. Negotiations. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) p. 136
201
concepts solely for this purpose, but in a more general sense, and theorise about a whole range
of topics.400 If this is the case concepts are deployed as transient tools of critique in relation to
specific issues and therefore operate in a social and political register rather than that of
philosophy. This tendency can be seen in Buchanan's 'Transcendental Empiricist Ethics',
which deploy Deleuzian concepts across a range of political issues such as the Holocaust
which, understandably, he has a pre-conceived stance regarding.401 The textual inspiration for
such a (re)construction of transcendental empiricism is sourced from across the Deleuzian
corpus whilst, for Land, the primacy of Anti-Oedipus is clearly established in his comparison
of its position on fascism with that of even A Thousand Plateaus, in which the latter is seen as
tainted by an idealism: “Any politics that has to police itself has lost all schizoanalytic
impetus, and reverted to the sad interest-group based reforming which characterizes the loyal
opposition to capital throughout its history”.402
The present thesis aims at exploring different approaches to drive/desire in Deleuzian theory
with the aim of tracing a genealogy of Land's thought, rather than as a historical arbiter of the
'correct' interpretation of Deleuze, which is beyond its scope, and does not claim that the
tendency toward left Deleuzianism is wrong, merely that is not an antecedent of Land's
position. In many respects philosophers such as Colebrook and Buchanan are important
readers of Deleuze's metaphysics and its consequences. One strength of the left approach is
that it positions itself more sympathetically closer to the metaphysical domain of the Kantian
settlement, with an autonomous subject which is constituted by the application of reason to
the contents of experience.403 It has no intention of reconfiguring Kantianism to try and access
outsideness/the noumenon, as Land does.404 But at the same time it places the 'ethical cart'
400
For examples of the Social Sciences' magpie approach to Deleuze's philosophy see Ed. Coleman and
Ringrose, Deleuze and Research Methodologies (UK: Edinburgh University, 2013) which contains many
egregious uses of his work.
401
Buchanan, I. Deleuzism (USA, Duke University Press; 2000) pp. 73-89
402
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 277-287
403
The Kantian subject is framed this way by the 'Paralogisms of Pure Reason' in Kant, I. Critique of Pure
Reason Trans Smith, N. ( Available at http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/Kant/CPR/15.html#368 ) p. 368
404
Levi Bryant investigates the difficulties of investigating the Kantian noumenal in his monograph on
202
before the 'philosophical horse' and invites in the prejudices of philosophers involved.405 As
such, it can be as intrinsically idealist – in the sense of remaining in the domain of the
conceptual – as Lacan's thought is. For example, in contending that:
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003, for instance, was blatantly in the interest of the
ruling elite in the US inasmuch as it offered a tremendous opportunity for personal and
corporate enrichment by pushing up the price of oil and providing a colossal windfall
of lucrative 'no contest' and virtually 'no oversight' reconstruction contracts to swell
the coffers without providing any tangible benefits for the Iraqi people footing the
bill.406
Buchanan is importing a set of very anthropic contentions about the nature of the 'ruling elite'
and its ability to “push up the price of oil” and “swell coffers” via the use of the notoriously
unpredictable geopolitical lever which is armed conflict. Whilst the casus belli of the Iraq War
is far beyond the remit of the present thesis, even the briefest inquiry regarding the
correspondence of Buchanan's depiction to the reality of the causes and consequences of the
conflict reveal his depiction fails to fully capture the true material causes.
Land's Deleuzianism has a strange place in the history of philosophy, as his work was almost
Deleuze Difference and Givenness. Bryant, Difference and Givenness (Northwestern: USA, 2008). Bryant's
conclusion that this is possible as the subject is constituted in time is a metaphysical answer which shows
striking similarities to Land's arguments in 'The Death of Sound Philosophy' in The Thirst for Annihilation.
Land is certainly aware of the difficulties of such a philosophical operation: “This is why every variant of
modern thought exhibits a complexion of retardation, critique, and aberration, since if it does not inertially
resist the seduction of modernity’s critical resources it is torn between the twin lures of harmonizing with
them, or venturing into the expansive obscurities beyond.” Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and
New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 10
405
Of course, Land's teleological approach could be accused of the same thing, simply reading the
philosopher's pre-conceived prejudices into the interpretation of the ends of processes.
406
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2008) p. 23
203
too controversial for academics to even explicitly attack.407 Land's positions tend to be
attacked by their name rather than the proper name of their author, in essays like Mullarkey's
Deleuze and Materialism.408 This essay was based on a paper from a 1996 symposium in
Dublin where a number of 'left leaning' Deleuzians gathered. Mullarkey lists Buchannan,
Goodchild, Marks and Massumi as present during this paper against cyberneticist
interpretations of Deleuze.409 Several of these philosophers such as Mullarkey himself (who
collaborated with Ansell-Pearson, who in turn collaborated with Land) are closer to Land's
position than 'left' Deleuzianism. In Deleuze and Materialism Mullarkey investigates
Deleuze's metaphysics, emphasising their specificity and arguing against “a more general
problem in the reception of Deleuze's work: often, his categories are mistaken for those of
more orthodox theorists”.410 Such an approach emphasises that Deleuzian concepts must
become the object of detailed investigation as, if each concept is singular and without
correspondence in ordinary language, the operation of determining how it works can only be
achieved after due metaphysical consideration. This can be opposed to Deleuze's intention
that Anti-Oedipus would be a work of “Pop Philosophy” which could be readily and quickly
applied to the world on the basis of 'how it worked' – a matter of praxis – rather than as a
concept in relation to another concept.411 It is also opposed to Land's mapping of productivedesire onto cybernetic-productive processes. Mullarkey ties Deleuze's philosophy to the
creation of concepts and tools, which interact with other concepts, so ultimately remain in the
domain of ideas corresponding to ideas. In much academic Deleuzianism the relationship of
idea – concept – tool is problematic. The truly defining shift in Deleuze's thought in AntiOedipus is the abandonment of the mixed metaphysical and psychoanalytic approach of
407
See Footnote 48 in the Introduction, regarding this lack of commentary.
408
This may be the case for more thinkers. I have been told anecdotally that Simon Critchley stated that he
always took Land to be his antagonist relating to his philosophical positions, and sought to write against him,
even though Land is never mentioned explicitly in this sense in his works.
409
Mullarkey, J. 'Deleuze and Materialism' in Ed. Buchanan, A Deleuzian Century, (Duke: London, 1999)
p.79
410
Mullarkey, J. 'Deleuze and Materialism' in Ed. Buchanan, A Deleuzian Century, (Duke: London, 1999)
p.65
411
Deleuze, G. Negotiations. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) p.7
204
Difference and Repetition, in which “he was working - 'rather timidly' in his own estimation 'solely with concepts'”.412 Insofar as they were concerned with material production,
“Guattari's ideas were a step beyond where his thinking had reached”.413 Ideas in Buchanan's
A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus are Kantian like conceptions of abstract processes, but they
have a tendency to slide towards concepts, and therefore begin to represent ideas – acting
almost as Lacanian signifiers, tying together diverse notions – rather than as abstractions
about material. This is noted by Willat in his review of Buchanan's A Readers Guide to AntiOedipus:
We need to be brought to see that desiring-production is not about the transcendence
of material situations by flows. Buchanan emphasises “the political and historical
content” (35) of desiring-production but is this material or ideal? I would argue that
Deleuze and Guattari first of all present the immanence of desire and matter. They rethink these two notions through each other. There is a danger of missing the full effect
of this move, which will bring thought “as close as possible to matter”.414
Land reconfigures Deleuzian philosophy's toolkit to represent productive processes, therefore
to match reality rather than ideas. In this regard it is certainly Land who occupies an 'extreme'
position when compared to academic Deleuzianism. In putting the correspondence of the
explanatory framework with real-production at the centre of his project he leaves the Kantian
settlement and attempts to interrogate the noumenon, a process Kant posits as impossible. The
metaphysical validity of this investigation is beyond the scope of the present thesis – indeed,
it may be beyond the scope of any philosophical work to finally settle – and it is not because
of validity or invalidity that Land's approach is considered superior here.415 Instead it is the
practical application of Land's post-psychoanalytic theory of machinic desire – and, as will be
investigated in Chapter 5, its predictive ability – which makes it preferable to the conceptual
412
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p.38
413
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p.39
414
Willatt, E. 'Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus' in Shibboleths: a Journal of
Comparative Theory and Criticism 3.1 (2008-2009) pp. 69-73.
415
Again, further study of Mullarkey and Ansell-Pearson against Landianism would be valuable as
complexity is by no means a reason to discount the validity theory.
205
regress which can plague the realm of pure metaphysics.
In terms of philosophical praxis, there is therefore a distinction between the approach of left
Deleuzians who hold that as (1) the unconscious is a productive space and (2) all productions
of the unconscious are equal (as difference is absolute across all potential virtuals) then (3) a
politics of the unconscious requires the removal of any hierarchisation (arboresence) in the
unconscious space and its replacement with a 'rhizomatic' form or 'smooth' space. Conversely,
right Deleuzianism is concerned with the flow of matter through these abstract machines,
rather than its destination: as Land states, “Tomorrow can take care of itself”.416 Instead of
concentrating on the productions of the unconscious as something to be moralistically
evaluated, right Deleuzianism asks what the unconscious produces if cut free of the ties of
restrictive, proscriptive morality and anthropocentricism.417 It shares with left Deleuzianism a
distrust of the established, arbosrecent pattern of society codenamed Oedipus, but instead of
imagining a future in which all potential desiring connections are equal; in which the subject
should have as many potential desiring connections as possible, and not be stuck with a given
set, it imagines a transformation away from the current attractor (Oedipus) to a new alternate
attractor. Land's philosophy therefore has a strong teleological belief about how matter will
progress.418 It is no longer a question of moving towards a future, but instead of moving
416
CCRU, Swarmachines, in Ed. Mackay, R. and Arvenessian, A. #Accelerate: the accelerationist reader
(Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014)
417
See CCRU (1996): “[Th]e future as virtuality is accessible now, according to a mode of machinic
adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress” CCRU, Swarmachines, in Ed. Mackay, R.
and Arvenessian, A #Accelerate: the accelerationist reader (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014)
418
Land stated that: “There’s only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve
been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial
intelligence.” Land, at Incredible Machines (Vancouver: Canada, 2014) (available at
http://incrediblemachines.info/nick-land-the-teleological-identity-of-capitalism-and-artificial-intelligence/ ).
Capitalism and AI are posited by Land to be the most dynamic agents moving material, and therefore the best
exemplars, but teleology operates across all productive processes: “Equilibrium is the telos of those particular
dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis, which is to say: by a dominating negative feedback
206
towards the future. Land's right Deleuzianism is the most extreme example of this tendency,
the outlier on a continuum of theorists who have proposed an idea of 'accelerationism'.
Accelerationism moves the motor of desire away from the Freudian-Lacanian pre-subjective
unconscious and puts it into impersonal force of matter. 'Man' generally operates to maintain
the ever-same under its Oedipal tendency, which is intrinsically anthropocentric.419 The force
which has done the most to change the disposition of matter – in Deleuzian terms, to shape
the actual – is in fact capitalism.
The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance
rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.
Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in autosophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics
modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through
a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman
Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the
Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases.
Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.420
For Land, modern history is a history of the increasing sophistication of capital and its
dissolution of Oedipal assemblages which would block it. History is not determined by
individuals; it passes through them and around them. I shall outline Land's Accelerationist
ontology in detail in Chapter 5. The final aspect of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the
unconscious to be interrogated here is the nature of desire. To conclude this chapter I shall
consider Deleuze and Guattari's description of desire and the drive and outline how and why it
mechanism. Such systems are, indeed, in profound accordance with classical Aristotelian physical teleology,
and its tendency to a state of rest.” Land, N. Freedoom prelude 1a (Xenosystems.org, 2014) (available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/freedoom-prelude-1a/ )
419
For a description of left and right accelerationism and the Accelarationist movement see Ed. Mackay, R.
and Arvenessian, A. #Accelerate: the accelerationist reader (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014)
420
CCRU (1996). Swarmachines. Reprinted in Ed. Mackay, R. and Arvenessian, A. #Accelerate: the
accelerationist reader (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014)
207
diverges from Freud and Lacan's conceptions, situating it within the wider genealogy of
Landian machinic desire. I shall note one problem posed in their reading, namely that Deleuze
and Guattari can ignore the internal machinery of the unconscious in favour of quantifying its
input and outputs. In the next chapter I shall describe one solution to this problem offered by
Lyotard, who analyses the libidinal economy both in terms of Deleuzian abstract production
and Freudian drive theory, showing how important desiring production emanates from the
subject’s failures to act as an impartial and efficient connector of matter to matter.
Reconciling Deleuze-Guattari with Freud-Lacan: Desire, Desiring Machines, Drives,
Assemblages.
Freud and Lacan based their models of the operation of the unconscious on theories of the
drive. Aside from the existence of the unconscious itself, no other concept is so central to their
psychoanalytic description of the subject’s motivation. It might be expected that AntiOedipus, with its conception of machinic desire and antipathy towards the fixity of the
complex would simply bypass drive theory, rewriting its own conception of the unconscious
over it. Instead, Anti –Oedipus’s discussion of ‘drive’ notes two concepts in contemporary
psychoanalysis as being potentially revolutionary: Lacan’s schema ‘A’ and Klein’s ‘partial
object’.421 Deleuze and Guattari engage with, rather than propose the replacement of drive
theory. As a psychoanalyst, Deleuze and Guattari consider Klein to be an insider of the IPA,
and therefore intractably engaged in the creation of Oedipus.422 Nevertheless, the concept of
the partial object is sympathetic with their discussion of the flow of desire as a stop-start,
partial process of connections between different machinic apparatus. Whereas Klein subsumes
all of the partial objects into parts of the greater complex, bringing them back to “Answer
daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you”, Deleuze and Guattari want these partial
connections to remain discreet elements without such overcoding: “[Partial objects] are parts
of desiring-machines, having to do with a process and with relations of production that are
421
Respectively in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) pp. 38-39; and
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 45
422
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 45
208
both irreducible and prior to anything that may be made to conform to the Oedipal figure”.423
This Spinozist-Materialist plane in which the desiring apparatus and its partial-objectmachines operate is pre-linguistic and before symbolism. The first synthesis in this plane is
the possibility of production – production produces first, meaning can only be applied (much)
later. In this critique, Deleuze and Guattari use Oedipus to represent to the point at which
psychoanalysis becomes idealist rather than materialist, reopening their investigation into the
'two Freuds', the metaphysican on one side and the physician on the other: “Oedipus is the
idealist turning point”.424
If drives exist in the Anti-Oedpial unconscious they are partial drives: temporary productions
which spring up without purpose or plan, rather than overcoded, predetermined parts of the
fixed complex. Oedipal analysis is accused of always-operating at a stage too late, forgetting
the economy of the drives and unconscious production in favour of an 'expressive
unconscious'.425 A drive economy is distinguishable in Anti-Oedipus' depiction of “desiring
machines, which are in their own way cognates of the Freudian notions of the drive and the
symptom”.426 The position of the drive as the pre-linguistic potential for the combination of
desiring machines means that this drive is psychoanalytically closest in conception to Freud’s
primary process.427 However, it is unlikely that Deleuze and Guattari would want to bring the
political consequences of the Freudian primary process into contact with their militant
conception of the unconscious as a plane of positive desire; desire in Freud’s model is a
darker thing, sometimes a beast best repressed, locked in these dark spaces rather than
423
(a) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 45
(b) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 46
424
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 55
425
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 55
426
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p. 27
427
Freud, S. The ego and the Id (1923)
209
brought to light.428
Hence, “The Question posed by desire is not what does it mean but how does it work”.429 At
this point, we might note that Deleuze's models of desiring production – be they in the
terminology of a machinic unconscious, striations, or partial machines, begin to resemble the
unfolding complexity of Lacan's 'A' schema, which is first depicted as being a single drivedesire toward a fixed end, yet, in the final version of the theory, becomes a set of polyphonous
drives-desires which are far more complex than one single line of connection. The concept in
which Deleuze and Guattari depict desire as plural is in the production of assemblages. The
first characterisation of a Deleuzian assemblage is as a construct which the subject's conscious
or unconscious tries to bring into existence (produce). It differs from a Freudian-Lacanian
desire conceived as fulfilling a lack insofar as it does not aim at a single object or thing but at
a complex construction in which things interrelate. The products of desire are therefore scenes
or tableaux in which numerous elements combine and they are produced mechanically and are
optimised for the connection of the subject's desiring machines.430
The second characterisation of an assemblage is as a situation which can be understood and
analysed with reference to the plurality within it. Assemblages are formed when the
unconscious identifies with plurality rather than the singular. One of Anti-Oedipus' most
common accusations against Oedipus is that it recodes any mention of groups or plurality and
recasts them as singular. This reinforces the imposition of the complex, and its structural
dynamic, and minimises the interpretive power of models of the unconscious which
428
(a) However, as noted by Mackay, R. and Avanessian, A. (in #Accelerate, 2014; p. 20), reintroduction of
this 'darkness' of the unconscious is characteristic of the approach of Land. I shall return to this theme in the
next chapter.
(b) The difference between Freud's dark unconscious and the Deleuze – Guattari model is also noted in
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus ( London: Continuum, 2008) p.27
429
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 37
430
D as in Desire in Parnet, C. and Deleuze, G. L' Abécédaire de Deleuze. [TV programme]. Arte channel.
November 1994 to Spring 1995.
210
emphasise plurality and synchronicity in unconscious processes (the two avatars of this
tendency, as discussed in the previous chapters, would be Freud’s dive theory and Lacan's 'A'
schema):
It is as if the so-called signifying chain, made up of elements that are themselves
nonsignifying – of polyvocal writing and detachable fragments – were the object of a
special treatment, a crushing operation that extracted a detached object from the chain,
a despotic signifier from whose law the entire chain seems consequently to be
suspended, each link triangulated.431
Deleuze and Guattari are, finally, sceptical about any investigation of the unconscious which
proceeds from linguistic or semiological perspective.432 The critique that “The three errors
concerning desire are lack, law and signifier” could hardly be more explicitly directed at
Lacanian analysis.433 Reduction to the signifier takes place above the level of unconscious
desire and its syntheses and as such it is not the proper object of schizoanalysis; the reduction
of the unconscious to the signifier transforms its polyvocity and its assemblic constructions to
single ideas, and it is therefore complicit with the tendency described in the Introduction to
431
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 73
432
A lengthy critique of the idea of a linguistic unconscious can be found in Anti-Oedipus:
“The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not
"What does it mean?" but rather "How does it work? " How do these machines, these desiring-machines,
work, yours and mine? With what sort of breakdowns as a part of their functioning? How do they pass from
one body to another? How are they attached to the body without organs? What occurs when their mode of
operation confronts the social machines? [..] It means nothing, but it works. Desire makes its entry with the
general collapse of the question "What does it mean?" No one has been able to pose the problem of language
except to the extent that linguists and logicians have first eliminated meaning; and the greatest force of
language was only discovered once a work was viewed as a machine, producing certain effects, amenable to
a certain use.” Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 109
433
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 111
211
psychoanalytic correlationism.434 The products of the unconscious are likened to the products
of consciousness, which is a metaphysical simplification, hiding the truth about the role of the
unconscious in determining reality.
As a work of critical-materialist philosophy, Anti Oedipus’ historical-psychoanalytic (postMarxist and post-Freduian) explication of the world traces the historical production of the
connective syntheses of the unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari therefore escape the FreudianLacanian trap of becoming fixated on the construction of the complex; the one-size-fits-allsubjects Oedipal interpretation. Instead, they define the historical production and replication
of the complex and demonstrate the productions of the unconscious on a societal level,
showing how the despotic, the feudal and the capitalist social systems are invested with
desire. As such, they are archaeologists of desire, seizing upon its buried products and
demonstrating that they were produced to fulfil a purpose. Such an approach is in-keeping
with the genealogical method of the present thesis, which attempts to uncover the antecedents
of machinic desire in a history of drive theory which tends towards subjectivism rather than
auto-production. However, there are problems with this macro-conception of desire, in which
production is traced at the level of the social system, and how much it can tell us of the microdesire in an individual subject.435 Returning to our archaeological analogy, the discovery of a
434
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 110
435
(a) This would mirror the criticism made by 'Austrian School' economists about the veracity of macro-
economic claims. They claim the macro is nothing more than an amalgamation of its micro components.
(b) Deleuze and Guattari's three unconscious syntheses offer only the most micro-level description of the
processes of the unconscious, and remain within the general observation that 'the unconscious produces'. The
expansion of the syntheses of production to a macro level; for example, that in Buchannan's A Readers Guide
to Anti-Oedipus where in the film Jaws “the shark, fully as much as the demonized Native Americans in
actual westerns, is not meaningful in itself; it is a mechanism whose purpose is to bring about a connective
synthesis” (p. 77); or that “Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, say, or Dawson and Joey in Dawson s Creek”
(p.81) represent the disjunctive synthesis seems to apply these mechanisms on too large a scale. Instead, we
might ask, on a psychoanalytic scale, what the general rules of the subject's unconscious would be, beyond
the facticity of production. Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008).
212
pottery fragment tells us that someone required a pot, that they needed to store water, and that
they had the capability of sculpting from a particular material in a particular mode.
Discovering yet more pots, we might have a model of the production of the pottery of a timeplace. But what this approach does not tell us is why this specific pot or that specific pot was
created. Deleuze and Guattari present a theory about the meta-production of production rather
than a theory about the apparatus of an individual production. The unconscious becomes a
'black box', whose specific workings are mysterious. If we want to know about the rules of
production, we don't look at the singular case, but the commonalities between a series of
singular cases, meta rather than micro production. This is a perfectly good riposte to the
Oedipal problem “boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex”, but it doesn't
address Freud's greater question: “Why do we desire what we desire?”436
The clearest description of the operation of desire in Anti-Oedipus is in the lengthy passage
quoted below:
Desiring-machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are
functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation;
chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly (montage), operating by
nonlocalizable intercommunications and dispersed localizations, bringing into play
processes of temporalization, fragmented formations, and detached parts, with a
surplus value of code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a
part apart or, as Butler would say, "in another department" that fits the whole over the
other parts; machines in the strict sense, because they proceed by breaks and flows,
associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects, inducing –
always at a distance – transverse connections, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal
conjunctions, thereby producing selections, detachments, and remainders, with a
transference of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are the
schizzes-flows.437
436
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 287
437
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 287
213
Deleuze and Guattari 'strata-analyse' desire by demonstrating that it is the productive
potentiality of 'desiring-machines' which, in turn, are the simplest components of larger
machines. A distinction is introduced between the molar machine and the molecular machine,
the former being an aggregate of the later.438 Interpreting the work of the desiring machine
does not take place at the molar level. As “All molar functionalism is false, since the organic
or social machines are not formed in the same way they function” analysis of the work of
desire must consider its micro-productions.439 These micro productions are materialist: “But
in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its
intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself”.440 They operate according to the laws of
cybernetics, specifically a “microscopic cybernetics” which is depicted as being rooted in
biological processes.441 This brings Deleuze and Guattari close to the energeticist Freud,
whose drives are rooted in biological satisfactions, and, indeed, their reading even pushes
beyond that of Freud as Deleuze and Guattari update the aims of Freud's drives from energetic
cathexis to manipulation of biochemical stimuli.442 Stimuli offer a binary model of desire, as
neurotransmitters either flash 1 or 0, on or off. In this reading the machines which can be
constructed by desiring production loose their base anthropomorphism and become ever more
inhuman, approximating the dark, eternally lurking drives laid down in Freud's Id.443 Deleuze
and Guattari conclude that the unconscious can not aim at anything that can be represented,
much less anything that it considers is 'lacked': “When Freud brings to the fore the study of
the psychic apparatus, the mechanisms of the drives... his interest in myth and tragedy tends
to diminish”.444 If the Deleuzian unconscious produces an assemblage, it does so because the
libidinal investment produces a biological affect; positive feedback is produced in its
cybernetic system.
438
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 286
439
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 288
440
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 283
441
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 288
442
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 84
443
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. pp. 295
444
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. pp. 300
214
Such a Landian reading departs from Buchanan's depiction of the relationship between
Freudian unconscious and Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the unconscious. Regarding the
former, Buchanan questions why “it doesn't account for where thoughts go when they become
unconscious, nor does it account for why some thoughts and not others are condemned to
confinement in the unconscious”.445 Following the goal of the present thesis in explaining the
need for an anti-anthropocentric theory of the production of machinic desire, we can see
where Buchanan's error emerges: in the view that there is a place in the unconscious for
anthropocentric ‘thoughts’ to exist – entities which, as Chapter 1 demonstrated, are not
required to exist in a conception of the unconscious. Buchanan's view approaches the
Lacanian model rather than the Freudian one, a model in which the the 'graph of desire'
posited a synchronous conscious-and-unconscious production operating back and forth which
is both theoretically and scientifically unlikely.446 Indeed, Buchanan answers his own
question when conceding that “On the economic view of things, unconscious thoughts are
conceived as a quantity of psychic energy that is looking for an outlet to discharge itself – this
is what Freud means by cathexis.”447 This collapses his dichotomy between “these two ways
of approaching the unconscious (as reservoir of repressed thoughts and fantasies or as a
productive process which gives rise to machines)” and allows us to return to the unconscious
as a Landian 'reservoir of repressed energetic and cybernetic circuits and therefore as a
productive process which gives rise to machines'.448
Deleuze and Guattari's depiction of the unconscious is an abstract machine which they use to
produce a theory of history and as such it is efficacious when used to describe the changes in
societies over the ages, but is it as effective when considering a single subject? For Deleuze
and Guattari, trying to delve deeper into the unconscious' mechanism is pointless:
445
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p. 30
446
Theoretically in the sense that the Freudian – Landian model is the preferred explanation of both the
present thesis and Deleuze and Guattari themselves. Scientifically following Libert-type experiments which
have shown that the parts of the brain associated with consciousness 'fire' after those associated with
unconscious processing.
447
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p. 31
448
Buchanan, I. A Readers Guide to Anti-Oedipus (Continuum: London, 2008) p. 34
215
“unconscious representation can never be apprehended independently of the deformations,
disguises or displacements it undergoes”.449 We must therefore consider if Anti-Oedipus'
model of desiring production has provided the foundation for a complete model of the
machinic unconscious. This chapter has shown the importance of Deleuze and Guattari's
thought in several respects: the political critique of Lacanianism; the psychoanalytical critique
of the 'Oedipus' tendency; the role of production and time in the 'right Deleuzian' model; and
finally the role of productive-desire as the engine of the drive economy. However, though
Deleuze's materialism is a crucial waypoint in the genealogy of the Landian conception of the
unconscious, as the pivot upon which Freud's legacy swings away from recapture by idealism,
there are still several lacunae in Deleuze and Guattari's model as: (1) no model of the
unconscious' workings is produced: “What takes place in this factory, what this process is, its
spasms and its glories, its labours and its joys, still remain unknown”.450 We must ask if it is
desirable to consider something so vital as the mechanism of the unconscious to be a black
box which can never be opened or investigated? (2) The plurality of drives is also seen as
something which prevents knowledge about their operation, the unconscious remains:
“something that is uncodable by virtue of its polymorphism and polyvocity”.451 Deleuze and
Guattari's emphasis on the difference between the molar and molecular – their strata-analysis
– is investigated in greater depth than the polyvocity of the drive. (3) Repetition is not fully
explored, and some of the consequences of their cybernetic model are not drawn out. I shall
return to this when looking at Land's interpretation of Deleuze. (4) The speculative questions
about what happens when desire is freed (left vs right Deleuzianism) have not been answered
satisfactorily. What Deleuze and Guattari provide is a theory of psychoanalytic catallaxy,
showing how the desire will create and join, so long as it is not dammed up and regulated. If
left unregulated, they argue, it'll pull us towards the future. Yet, just as Austrian economics
tends to dissolve into impossible complication once the market analysed is more than a
personal, micro economy, Deleuze and Guattari's attack on the prohibitive, Oedipalist
psychoanalysis that characterised Lacanianism also fails to adequately deal with the question
of multiple actors – polyvocal drives – and their consequence of the complexity of the
449
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 313
450
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 113
451
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 301
216
unconscious. If our goal is to find an inhuman operation of the unconscious which will break
us out of the Oedipus trap, Lyotard's Libidinal Economy demonstrates that the solution does
not have to be the abandonment of the subject to impersonal, machinic production, but can
come about by returning to the depths of the unconscious itself. The present thesis shall
therefore go on to consider Lyotard's answers to the first two objections outlined above, which
is the final genealogical reading of the theory of desire, before considering Land's theory of
machinic desire in relation to the second two questions in the final chapter.
217
Chapter 4. Lyotard: Towards a Libidinal Economics
The next philosopher of drive theory I shall consider is Lyotard who is a more minor figure in
its academic history than the subjects of the previous three chapters. The several reasons for
this are not because of the acuity of his theoretical contribution to drive theory. They are that:
firstly, Lyotard later repudiated the drive-philosophy of his libidinal period and became a
post-Wittgensteinian philosopher of language. His major place in the history of Twentieth
Century philosophy is currently as a philosopher of the postmodern, and works devoted to his
philosophy generally relate to this later period. Secondly, the complexity of his libidinal
philosophy, and the – deliberately – at times obscure and at times scandalous style in which
they are presented have produced a philosophy which rejects any attempts at systematisation;
Lyotard, again, considered this a design feature rather than a flaw. Thirdly, the focus on the
individual event – the moment of the 'libidinal economy' rather than the flow of 'becoming' in
the Deleuzian sense – means that it creates a microscopic rather than a macroscopic analysis
which is not always germane to the goals of critical theorists. Nevertheless, Lyotard is of
significant importance and interest in the context of the present thesis because of his own
'return to Freud'. Thus far we have considered Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari who were
loyal to the spirit if not the letter of Freud. I shall show how Lyotard tries to be loyal to both,
and creates the most 'pure' interpretation of Freud's drive theory.
The goal of this chapter is to offer a reading of desire, drive and the systems of the
unconscious as posited by the final philosopher in the lineage we are considering. This will
provide a starting point in my analysis of Land's machinic desire in the next chapter, but it is
also intended to – in investigating the final philosopher of desire – complete the narrative of
the history of materialist interpretations of psychoanalytic drive and desire in the Twentieth
Century (see Figure 42 below). Though the main original contribution of the present thesis is
intended to be the depiction of Land's attempt to construct an anti-anthropocentric drive
theory as machinic desire through a materialist psychoanalysis, a secondary goal is that by
providing this genealogy depicting the emergence of an anti-idealist interpretation of
psychoanalysis in the first four chapters, the present thesis also provides a summary of an
important and hitherto largely unexplored intellectual trajectory.
218
bases rather than in the critical theoretical or post-structuralist traditions. Lyotard is positioned
as the last drive theorist in the lineage – there have been no major contributions since. As
Lyotard's recapitulation of drive theory represents an end point, it will be considered in
relation to the theorists before him. Following this chapter, there will be a short summary of
the present thesis' analysis of desire and drive theory and an evaluation of its
anthropocentricism, creating a sub-conclusion and platform before the present thesis embarks
on a discussion of Land's work.
The abundance of secondary interpretations of the subjects of the previous three chapters
meant that I produced a selective reading to support my argument about
(anti)anthropocentricism and drive theory. In relation to Lyotard's libidinal works, nothing
like Buchanan's Reading Guide to Anti-Oedipus exists. As there is so little secondary material
about Lyotard's theories of drive and desire I shall offer a comprehensive account of that
which has been written about his libidinal philosophy later in this chapter. I shall distinguish
between the general readings of Lyotard's philosophy which skip over his Libidinal Period
(Sim, 1996; Malpas, 2003) or contextualise it within the narrative of post-structuralism
(Dews, 2007); and those which specifically engage with Lyotard's libidinal philosophy and
situate it in relation to the philosophy of drive-desire of Freud, Lacan and Deleuze and
Guattari (Bennington, 1988; Williams 1998; Sim, 2011). Preparing for such a reading, this
chapter begins with a summary of important sections of Discours, Figure, Lyotard's earliest
critical engagement with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Like Deleuze and Guattari,
Lyotard is Lacanian in the sense that his work is a reaction to Lacan's. Lacan's terminology
proves inescapable, and even though Lyotard believes his interpretation of Freud is partially
wrong, Lacan is recognised as the dominant figure of post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Against
Lacan's Freudianism, which Lyotard characterises as being excessively attached to the
linguistic metaphor (discourse), he pits a return to Freud which emphasises the non-linguistic
(figural). After considering the mechanism of Lyotard's drive theory I shall go on to consider
the context in which Lyotard deploys it. A number of articles from Lyotard's libidinal period
share a similar structure: Lyotard begins with an explication of Freudian drive theory, before
applying it to analysis of a work of art, and analysis of these works give a sense of Lyotard's
aims and methods in the libidinal period. After comparing Lyotard's use of drive theory to the
major interpretations of his work a groundwork is established which shall allow a reading of
Libidinal Economy – a book described by Land as “a major philosophical achievement, by far
220
the most significant response to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus” – specifically in the
context of its (anti)anthropocentricism.452 As Williams states, this is a significant challenge
due to the (intended) difficulty of the book.453 The final part of this chapter is a return to the
idea of the death drive, and a further evaluation of Lyotard's anti-anthropocentricism.
The ‘Figure’
Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Period’, which encompasses the time between the publication of the first
parts of Discours, figure in 1968 until his move to a more linguistic approach with the
publication of Just Gaming in 1979, can be read as a sustained attack on the structuralisminspired psycho-linguistic theories of Lacan.454 It is broadly similar to Deleuze and Guattari's
criticisms of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, especially in its critical diagnosis of the problems with
psychoanalytic practice. Lyotard also follows Deleuze and Guattari in positing desire as a
positive, productive factor which was misrepresented by Lacan's models of the unconscious.
However, despite these similarities, there are major methodological differences between
Deleuze and Guattari's and Lyotard's approaches. Whist Chapter 3 has described the
Deleuzian model of the unconscious as somewhat of a 'black box', Lyotard returns to Freud
and tries to conceive of the process of the unconscious in specific terms, rather than as a
general series of syntheses. In so doing he reinforces the philosophical importance of the
unconscious as the entity beneath the subject which interacts with the world – and this again
differs from the impersonal, external, productive unconscious of Deleuze and Guattari.
Indeed, I shall argue that the salient feature of Lyotardian unconscious is its tendency not to
always successfully produce – that is, it is prone to breakdowns and failures – before
analysing it in comparison to Deleuze and Guattari's model.
It is possible to broadly classify Lyotard’s philosophical output in the Libidinal Period as
452
Land, N. in Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy, Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) cover
inscription.
453
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 38
454
Between Le travail du rêve ne pense pas in Revue d’esthétique 21 (1968): 26-61; and Au Juste:
Conversations. Christian Bourgeois, (Paris: 1979)
221
following one or the other of two dominant axes. The first is his opposition, as suggested by
the title of his doctoral thesis, of discourse to figure. The former, due to the pre-eminence of
Lacanian psychoanalysis at the time, was the basic component used to describe the material
which would be manipulated in the primary process of the psyche, and defined the nature of
the most basic contents of the unconscious. Programmatically, Lyotard opposes Lacan's
unconscious' structural reliance on linguistics, which he claims comes at the expense of the
image, though this opposition does not aim at an overturning of this established order and the
replacement of discourse with figure. Instead it aims at showing how both of these elements
are crucial to understanding the productions of the unconscious. The proof of this argument's
validity is provided by Lyotard's description of the mechanism by which a dream is produced
by 'the dreamwork' and shall be considered below.
The second axis is Lyotard’s emphasis on the importance of ‘drives’ as conceptualised by
Freud. For Lyotard, Lacan is guilty of misreading Freudian drive theory when he puts it to use
regarding his own concept of desire.455 Here, Lyotard is concerned with a return to Freud’s
drive theory and the refutation of Lacan’s theory of desire, about which it claims the
importance of lack is over emphasised. The aspect of Freud’s theory which Lacan
misrepresents is Freud’s energetic hypotheses, which designates considerable importance to
the role of ‘energy’ in the psyche.456 This energy, according to the principles of ‘consistency’
or ‘inertia’ is the motive force which drives the processes of the unconscious, all of which
work to reduce the tension which such an energetic build-up creates. Opposing this, Lacan’s
unconscious is concerned with the processing of signifiers – bridges between symbolic units –
455
Lyotard's attack is primarily directed at the Lacan's reworking of the fourfold model of the drive – as
described in Chapter 2 – in 'Deconstruction of the Drive' in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
456
This energeticism is an essential component of Land’s psychoanalytic insight. I refer back to this
excerpt quoted in Chapter 2: “Freud, too, is an energeticist (although reading Lacan and his semiological ilk
one would never suspect it). He does not conceive desire as lack, representation, or intention, but as a
dissipative energetic flow, inhibited by the damming and channelling apparatus of the secondary process
(domain of the reality principle). Pleasure does not correspond to the realisation of a goal, it is rather that
unpleasure is primary excitation or tension which is relieved by the equilibrating flux of sexual behaviour
(there is no goal, only zero).” Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)
p. 45
222
which takes place as drives become fixed in complexes, as described in Chapter 2 of the
present thesis. I shall go on to show how Lyotard – building on the foundations established in
Discours, figure – makes a further division in Libidinal economy between the types of desire
in Freud, wish-desire and libido-desire. Libido desire, particularly the component which
operates under the principle of the death drive, escapes the circuitous orbit around the
signification of a lost object – a homoeostatic system – and thereby becomes a conduit for
cyberpositive, runaway feedback.457
In both of these axes of thought, Lyotard uses the term ‘figural’. Several commentators define
‘the figural’ in the context of a historical approach to philosophy, situating it within the field
of post-structuralist thought somewhere between Derrida’s conception of différance and
Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs.458 It follows the programmatic aim of these
philosophies in opposing the narrowness of any structuralist interpretation of the truth of an
event, and structuralism’s innate tendency to reduce difference which is the result of this. This
is the approach taken by Bennington in Lyotard: Writing the Event, where the figure
represents the ambiguity of meaning which structuralism cannot convey:
This then is the figure, and the difference it traces[... ]It will come as no surprise that
this force and its disruptive effect are seen as the trace of a work which will soon be
linked to the dream-work, to the primary process and the death drive. This, then is
what structuralism in all its forms represses, and that repression can now be described
as the accomplishment of its own desire.459
Such a broad historical perspective, while showing us how Lyotard’s work can be
incorporated in the narrated history of modern ‘continental’ philosophy, nevertheless reduces
the complexity of Lyotard’s work. In its genealogical approach, the present thesis aims to look
beyond such a purely historical narrative, and brings out elements in Lyotard which are
considered 'minor', yet are of considerable significance in the construction of a machinic
theory of desire. Rather than treat Lyotard’s work as one unitary attack on Lacan – an
approach taken by both Bennington and Dews in two of the most celebrated analyses of the
457
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 298
458
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p.71
459
Bennington G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p.71
223
Lyotard – Lacan debate – I intend to show two distinct senses in which he uses ‘the figural’,
which broadly correlate with the two axes mentioned above.460 Splitting the use of the figure
into these two components allows them to be evaluated separately. In turn, this division
allows a more psychoanalytic reading of their efficacy than is offered by existing secondary
literature. Dews’ final evaluation of Lyotard’s libidinal thought attempts to triangulate it in
terms of the philosophies of difference, Derrida and Adorno.461 This abandonment of the
Freudian framework Lyotard works in leads to the rejection of psychoanalytical concepts on
metaphysical grounds.462 Yet the argument that figural elements – in terms of images – are the
components which are manipulated by the unconscious, and that this fact is ignored by Lacan
is an argument which must, eventually, be decided according to psychoanalytic criteria. This
psychoanalytic register must be considered in its own right before its consequences can be
applied philosophically.463
Does Lyotard succeed in his aim of breaking free from the tyranny of the Lacanian
unconscious' linguisticism? It is clear that he uses the Lacanian terminology and his work is
identifiably post-Lacanian. When we refer to the matrix-figure we are talking about the
complex way in which desire relates to signifiers: the signifier cannot be reduced to a single
meaning when so many concurrent but disparate drives can utilise it in ways which may be
radically different. The matrix figure is the confusion or play between the possibilities of
selecting any one or other of these different meanings for the signifier when it is presented in
the dream. Yet despite this register of signification, Lyotard's description of the dreamwork
lacks the quintessential Lacanian position of 'the other' as the second party of the discourse of
the unconscious. Lyotard's unconscious is concerned with its internal rather than external
relations, and operates according to a formal set of rules – like Freud, those of energetic
quantity – rather than an ideational understanding.
460
Dews, P. in 'The line and the Letter' in Logics of Disintegration (UK: Verso, 2007); Bennington in
'Discours, figure' in Lyotard Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988)
461
Dews, P. Logics of Disintegration (UK: Verso, 2007) pp. 169-175
462
For example, Dews’ comment that “Lyotard can give no account of the forging of the ego, but is
obliged to attribute it to an inexplicable cooling and retroversion of energy”. Dews, P. Logics of
Disintegration (UK: Verso, 2007) p. 173
463
See the discussion of ontology and epistemology in the Introduction
224
The 'Libidinal Period'
During his libidinal period Lyotard published a series of essays in various journals. Several of
these essays had structural similarities which demonstrate Lyotard's philosophical objectives.
The essays begin with a description of Freud's model of the unconscious, usually emphasising
its plurality, tendency to repeat and the role of the death drive. This interpretation of Freud is
pitted, explicitly or implicitly against the Lacanian model of the unconscious structured 'like a
language'.
Lyotard's short philosophical introduction provides the basis of a reading of an artistic or
political event. This reading is situated in the space between the 'truth' and the 'referential
story' of the event in question.464 The former corresponds to what actually happens, and the
latter is the misrepresentation of this reality by the narrative (secondary) process. The
'libidinal economist' can produce this reading by – in the same way the dreamwork can be
analysed as demonstrated above – working back form the manifest content of the referential
story to trace the 'truth' of the libidinal economy which gave rise to the event as it is in itself
without this 'narrative' support. The truth is therefore the primary process or the thing in itself,
which is effaced and changed by the secondary process.
Lyotard's intention in these articles is a demonstration of the extent of his antianthropomorphism. If the reality of an event is the remainder when narrative is subtracted
from the referential story of the event, we must ask: of what is this remainder composed? For
Williams it is as a feeling rather than as an idea: “Desires... are designed to be felt rather than
understood”.465 What else can remain once ideational content is removed? Lyotard's use of the
artwork to represent the revelation of truth infers that there is also an aesthetic impulse
(appreciation of a remanent of the image-figure) akin to a sense of judgement of form.
Both of these residual concepts, though not 'ideas' in the conventional sense, are still
somewhat more anthropocentric than the remnants left in the primary process by Freud and
464
The 'truth' of an event for Lyotard equates the the material reality of what took place in the event. This
truth is always effaced by narrative, and must therefore be uncovered. This process is described in the article
'Jewish Oedipus' in Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 35.
465
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 36
225
Lacan. For Freud the primary process is alien, strange, unknowable. For Lacan it is a given set
of signifying links whose construction is arbitrary. For Deleuze and Guattari the contents of
the unconscious are unimportant: all that matters are the syntheses by which it can enact
production. Lyotard wants to bring out what is written over or forgotten, the 'truth' of the
primary process, but this hidden content is not outside of human experience in the same way
Freud posits the primary process: “there are words that are unpronounceable because they
lack “signification””.466 Though it is not 'known' it is felt, and the truth of the unconscious
which the libidinal economist tires to uncover is a feeling the we are ultimately asked to
evaluate. It is in this moment of evaluation, of the application of artistic, political, or other
criteria by which the primary process is revealed as being 'true' or 'not' that a step back to
anthropocentricism and the sovereignty of the subject is taken.
Lyotard's critical project, which is to demonstrate how society has channelled and blocked the
flow of desire, is similar in its objective to Deleuze and Guattari's and is indeed in many ways
a superior critique as it is more specific than their general critique of 'Oedipus' and specific
famous psychoanalytic casebooks. Lyotard's application of his critique to individual cases like
that of Pierre Overnay (see 'A Short Libidinal Economy' below) certainly convinces the reader
that there is a conservatism in society which represses the libidinal. However, Lyotard does
not use the foundation of this critical position to build a positive conception of desire which is
anti-anthropocentric. It is anti-linguistic, but, circling around such humanistic pursuits as art,
theatre, politics and sex, his deployment of drive theory is not opposed to the concerns of the
subject of philosophy; it merely de-centres these concerns away from the linguistic to the
figural.
I shall return to this theme at the end of this chapter, when considering why Lyotard
abandoned his 'Libidinal period'. In itself, his anthropocentricism is not criteria enough to
reject a theory of the unconscious. The problem with Lyotard's work is that it is built on such
anti-anthropocentric foundations – those of Freud's primary process – that it is impossible to
mediate his humanistic position with some of the other positions which he was forced to
adapt. The randomness, silence and destructiveness of the instincts – particularity the death
instinct – are hard to reconcile with the 'truth' of fixed patterns which can be excavated in the
study of the image-figure. Lyotard wants the unknowable to be put in service of knowable and
whilst this is in no way an ignoble wish, it is a rather human one. It opposes him to Deleuze
466
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 69
226
and Guattari who, in Land's reading, want unknown to be put in service of impersonal
eternity.
In the essay 'Jewish Oedipus' Lyotard begins by drawing a distinction between the primary
and secondary processes as described by Freud. The primary process' interaction with the
world, described by Lyotard as 'truth': “truth doesn't speak stricto sensu; it works”.467 If truth
does not speak it is because it is before language and the ideational contents of cognition.
Instead, it is a more primal interaction between the subject and the world. Truth is opposed to
the secondary process which presents itself as this cognition: “cognition speaks, it belongs to
distance”.468 Cognition is at a distance temporally: it follows after the truth-event. If the
subject is to trace the truth of the event it must do so by subtracting the additional elements
added to it in the secondary process. This relation between the two processes can be found in
works of art. Hamlet or Sophocles' Oedipus contain a set of traces in their text – the secondary
process – which can be traced back to the primal phantasy: the primary process.
In 'Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of Art' Lyotard again returns to Freud. He
defines 'reality' as the content available to the subject after it has been worked over by system
Cs and Pcs, and the general form of this content is as thoughts. However, this reality is filled
with lacunae – holes and and absences – which are hidden from it; they are not available as
objects of thought. This is, again, deployed to show the difference between the presented
'reality' and the 'truth' under it. One of the agents of this transformation is shown to be the
death drive, which displaces the regularity of the repetition-compulsion and works it over
plastically to create new forms. In section VI Lyotard likens the death drive to a barrier
appearing in the streets: an unexpected break in the everyday which disrupts routine. An
equivalence is posited between sexual climax (primary process shown in the subject), the
disrupting power of pop art (primary process shown in artworks), and a barrier in the street
(primary process shown in politics).
The power of art is not that it works as a description (narrative) of a phantasy or disposition in
the primary process, but instead it is the expression of the figure-form common to all such
phantasy. Art is useful to the libidinal economist because it shows the process by which the
dream work operates. Art is then deployed against the dominant structure of power-order in
467
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 35
468
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 35
227
the cause of freeing desire and returning to the 'truth' of the primary process: “The truth of art,
i.e. to the (direct and non-subordinated) deconstruction of social forms.”469 The barrier on the
street has the same structural position in the political domain.
In 'Several Silences' Lyotard again distinguishes the negative and positive conceptions of
desire-force, the former of which he associates with Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the later
with Freudian. The contents of the primary process are, again, neither linguistic or ideational:
“the affirmative processes identified in the [primary processes] shelter then from all
“thought””.470 The work of the death drive is once again shown to be a property of the drive
system in general rather than a certain drive whose impulse is towards destruction: “the death
drive is not just another drive; it is randomness”.471 The playing out of this randomness is
likened to post-war classical music's movement towards atonality:
[T]he death drive is simply the fact that energy does not have an ear for unity, for the
concert of the organism (of the “psychic apparatus”); it is deaf to the organism's
composition, i.e. to the lack, the void in which the organs, the articuli (the notes)
would be carved out and arranged to make a cosmos and a musike.472
This reinforces the conception of the death drive as a surprise or break in which the fabric of
'reality' is torn to reveal the afflux of the event: “the death is never heard, it is silent[...]
Neither the Commune or May 1968 were heard coming”.473
'A Short Libidinal Economy' presents a description of an event in which the 'economist' tries
to pass from the result of the presented narrative of the event to the actuality of the event,
working back form the (re)presented secondary process back to the primary process. Lyotard's
description of this passage uses the actual case of the murder of Pierre Overnay, an activist
killed during a protest in the Renault works at Billancourt in 1972. Lyotard's thesis is that
those in power rewrote the event in public discourse so that the truth of the event was covered
up. Lyotard begins by introducing two poles, the real-meaning and presented (obscured)
469
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 83
470
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 91
471
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 91
472
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 91
473
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 91
228
meaning of the event, which he claims do not correspond to one another. These opposing
poles are collapsed into a four stage process form: “real story → narration → narrative →
referential story”.474
Lyotard describes the terrain in which the event takes place as the libidinal skin (discussed
below), which is the melange of possibility before meaning is fixed. The libidinal skin is
metaphorically hot – that is, it is malleable and can be shaped in a number of ways if it
plastically pushed before it cools. The authorities in Overnay's case try to ensure that this
cooling will form a favourable dispositif. The role of the corporation is to “reproduce the
social body” which is to maintain the societal dynamic, and is therefore conservative.475
Lyotard shows how the corporation tries to efface the truth of the death of the activist by
creating a narrative which obfuscates it. This, again, is analogous to the work of the secondary
process covering the primary process so that 'truth' cannot be discerned.
'A Short Libidinal Economy' demonstrates the impossibility of confronting the dominant
discourse in society with a conflicting one. Marxist dialectics are impossible to enact as
praxis when the 'thesis' – state and institutional power is so dominant that any 'antithesis' has
insufficient power to modify it. Lyotard’s solution to this impossibility in his libidinal period
is a critical response not against the dominant discourse but in parallel to it:
It is undoubtedly useless to fight for the consistency of a political, philosophical
discourse and practice, by arguing against the inconsistency of the adversary’s
political, philosophical discourse. Useless because, indirectly, such a battle is still a
battle for reason, unity, for the unification of diversities, a quibbling battle which no
one can win for the winner is already and has always been reason.476
In Libidinal Economy Lyotard attempts to go beyond the limitations which dialectical thought
places on our conception of desire. Negation does not exist in the unconscious, in it we only
find positive pulsions (drives). Against this Lyotard emphasises that ideas, positions, exist
474
Lyotard, J.F. in The Lyotard Reader, Ed. Crome, K. and Williams, J. (United Kingdom: Edinburgh,
2006) p. 203
475
Lyotard, J.F. in The Lyotard Reader, Ed. Crome, K. and Williams, J. (United Kingdom: Edinburgh,
2006) p. 203
476
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 11
229
simultaneously but not in relation to each other: “they are uncothinkable but compossible, that
they ignore each other but are both operative”.477 Freud is pitted against Marx, the idea that
“the libido never relinquishes one investment for a better one, there are rather simultaneous
investments in one area of the body”.478 The oral stage is not sublated into an anal stage, in
the psyche the dispositions engendered by the oral stage endure when the anal stage begins,
they operate in parallel with each other, both projecting forward without relating to one
another; the alcoholic can be a paranoid, it is never a case of this then this, but always this and
this and this...
In 'Adrift', as well as performing the act of criticism for us, Lyotard tries to show us how the
‘drifter’ or ‘libidinal economist’ is the positive site of resistance: “What is important in a text
is not what it means, but what it does and what it incites to do. What it does: the charge of
affect it contains and transmits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential
energy into other things – other texts, but also paintings, photographs, film sequences,
political actions, decisions, erotic inspirations, acts of insubordination, economic initiatives
etc.”.479 The readers of the libidinal texts are supposed to take Lyotard’s ‘styles’ and be
inspired to use them in the process of new thought. The final move Lyotard makes in 'Adrift'
is the familiar gesture towards aesthetics as being the most productive site of resistance to
power-commoditisation. ““Aesthetics” has been for the politicist I was (and still am?) not an
alibi, a comfortable retreat, but the fault and fracture giving access to the subsoil of the
political scene”.480 Aesthetics, specifically those of the avant-garde, provide a direct mapping
of libidinal desire which breaks the mechanisms by which kapital tries to suppress them:
Artists want society as a whole to reach this unreality, want the repression and
suppression of libidinal intensities by the so-called seriousness which is only the
torpescence of kapitalist paranoia, to be lifted everywhere, and show how to do it by
477
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 12
478
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 12
479
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 11
480
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 16
230
working and removing the most elementary obstacles, those opposing to desire the No
of the alleged reality, the perceptions of times, spaces, colour, volumes.481
Table 8: A Summary of Lyotard's Libidinal Period
Is for Lyotard
Is not for Lyotard
Primary process
Positive (Freud)
Based on lack (Lacan)
Death drive
Plurality, disruption caused
Negation or cancellation.
by multiplicities in primary
process.
Method of
'Truth' (primary process)
'Reality' (secondary process)
discovering/uncovering the
event
Domain for uncovering 'truth' Art, politics, sexuality
Linguistics
Method of discovering 'truth' Understanding figural
Understanding linguistic
distortions in the narrated
relations in signification
'reality' (dreamwork)
(Lacanian split-subject)
Key Readings
In Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy Williams identifies four key themes of
Lyotard's philosophy: the limits of representation; the event; absolute difference; and the
avant garde. Apart from the third, which is largely characteristic of his later work, these
themes clearly agree with the key aspects of the Libidinal Period sketched out here. I would
suggest that a fifth is missing however, which is Lyotard's insistence on plurality and
481
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 16
231
(in)compossibility. One of Lyotard's most consistent response to a philosophical problem is
the conclusion that theory has reduced its complexity to one explanatory framework, or a
framework which explains in terms of one theory. In fact, there is always a plurality of
desires. This is why “Libidinal Economy is an attempt to release desire by showing it at
work” which always posits desire as being a melange or composite of many separate
figures.482
Williams begins his description of the libidinal economy by referring to 'feelings' and
'intensities' which seems to be in conflict with the claim that: “Lyotard's account does not
allow for a privileging of the human form above all others”.483 William's method of
explaining the libidinal economy is to work back from the 'reality' of its representations,
which is the opposite methodological direction to Lyotard, who always emphasises the
Freudian basis of his reading, and starts with the primary process and the 'truth'. When
Williams turns to Lyotard's Freudianism he depicts the difference between speech and its
referent – between secondary and primary process - but not to the content of the primary
process itself. This description is devoid of mention of the content of the primary process,
which is drives. For Lyotard, the Libidinal Period was based on a metaphysics of drive.484 If
the unconscious is constituted by drives – which is very much Lyotard's thesis – the drive is a
basic ontological unit in which the pre-subjective encounters material.
For Williams the band of the libidinal economy “is made of the aftermath of the passages of
feelings and desires rather than parts in which such desires occur” and is therefore in the
domain of the secondary processes.485 It is therefore the secondary process which is to be
studied rather than the primary process, which for Williams escapes immanence and becomes
482
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 39
483
(a) Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) pp.
41, 46
(b) Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 42
484
Lyotard, J.F. in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime, Ed. Silverman, (USA: Routledge, 2002)
p. 25
485
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 44
232
transcendence.486 Lyotard's work in the Libidinal period is then a guide for the individual
libidinal economist, who must be a subject, and refers to their own representational
experience rather than to a pre-representational 'truth'. Given the 'libidinal period' Lyotard's
resistance to theory, this is a tempting line to take – libidinal economy becomes a tool for
interpreting the 'represented' world because it always asks “what else is to consider” –
forgetting the impossible quest of discovering the primary process. However, Lyotard is
avowedly a Freudian in this period, and I shall show that it is to the primary process which he
always tries to return; it is always his true object of analysis.
Williams' accusation is that Discourse, figure describes the world in terms of “death drive and
castration” following Deleuze and Guattari's criticism in Anti-Oedipus of the use of castration.
Long live castration, so that desire may be strong? Only fantasies are truly desired?
What a perverse, human, all-too-human idea! An idea originating in bad conscience,
and not in the unconscious. Anthropomorphic molar representation culminates in the
very thing that founds it, the ideology of lack.487
For Williams castration is a negation, and would bring back lack and the great other. Yet
Lyotard's description of castration, the other, and theatricality always comes as a description
of their presences as a trace of the event and not the truth of the event. In the passage quoted
from Discours, figure Lyotard states:
But the entry of the subject into desire through castration is always something like its
death. The No of non-human sex, inhuman (unmenschlich), indicates difference,
another position (scene) which deposes the scene of consciousness, the scene of
discourse and the scene of reality.488
What is this scene opposed to consciousness, discourse and 'reality' if not 'truth; that is, the
primary process? The primary process is not negative, it is simultaneous and compossible and
therefore unpredictable and random, but it is not negative. The secondary process, which
486
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 133
487
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 94
488
Lyotard, J.F. Discours, figure 1971 translated in Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern
Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 131
233
approaches the thought of the subject is, or course, human, all too human, and begins to
contain negations and castrations and the whole theatrical-Oedipal show. Bennington states:
It is not Lyotard's purpose to deny the effects of a theatrical-representational type of
thinking, but to suggest that it is one dispositif among others, with no particular
privilege amongst others (despite the excellence it traditionally assigns itself): not
something in opposition to libido and primary process (though it would conceive of
itself in such terms), but a particular modification of libido or primary process... It is
not, then, lack which creates desire, but a certain desire which produces a set-up
dominated by lack.489
Williams' criticism of Lyotard, ignoring drives and the primary process, strikes a level too
high in the psyche, and attacks – in Lyotard's terms – 'reality' as if it was 'truth'. Williams
disregards the operation of the unconscious in his monograph because it concentrates on the
event: the political and artistic productions which disrupt the conservatism-stasis of the social
status quo. Here we are lead back to the notion of the 'black box' unconscious in AntiOedipus. The previous extract from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus which is quoted by
Williams proceeds thus:
The molecular unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of castration, because
partial objects lack nothing and form free multiplicities as such; because the multiple
breaks never cease producing flows, instead of repressing them, cutting them at a
single stroke-the only break capable of exhausting them; because the syntheses
constitute local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic
conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the woman
containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of
entering -men with women, women with men-into relations of production of desire
that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not just becoming as
one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the
nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. Schizoanalysis is the variable
analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that
society imposes on this subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality.490
489
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 27
490
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 294
234
Here we see the 'black box' of the Deleuzian unconscious. Though we are sure of what it is
not – lacking or negating – its mechanisms are only described insofar as their nature of their
productions: the syntheses of the unconscious. How these syntheses operate is not
investigated.
When we couple this description of a supposed conflict which turns out to be a non-conflict
with the one Bennington describes between Lyotard and Lacan (section 3.32, below), the
impression we might have can be likened to a Mexican Stand-Off between Lacan, Lyotard,
and Deleuze and Guattari, where each train their weapon on the supposedly 'anthropomorphic'
elements of the others: “You mentioned castration!”; “You mentioned language!”; “Your
unconscious is an empty placeholder!”.
If Williams pits Lyotard against Deleuze and Guattari, in Lyotard: Writing the Event
Bennington pits Lyotard against Lacan. Bennington is a brilliant reader of Lyotard, and I
agree with his reading of Freud's importance for Lyotard: “For the Lyotard of this period, a
certain Freud is the pace where force or energy as libido can be seen struggling with the
theatre of representation, but also accounting for its constitution”.491 Eros strives to create
unity and Thanatos disrupts it, not because they are opposed, but because they operate
together. Thanatos: “disrupts consistency and tends towards the unsettling of unity – towards
zero or the inanimate, says Freud: towards infinity as well, corrects Lyotard”.492 The role of
Lyotard's zero is to show that the entities in the primary process know nothing of the scale or
register of what they wish to enact, and that their clamour, when it reaches representation, can
show its affects in a variety of scales, from micro to macro. This feature of the primary
process can be easily demonstrated by any sufficiently hungry person ordering take-out food;
the quantity acquired does not correlate with a anthropomorphically reasonable amount of
comestibles. Williams also makes this point about the lack of a homoeostatic zero.493
Bennington's discussion of Discours, figure begins with an explication of Lyotard's critique of
structural linguistics and of the relation between the signifier and the sign. The first half of
Discours, figure – which is characterised as phenomenological – is isolated from the second
half, which approaches psychoanalysis. Both however concentrate on the same issue, which is
491
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p.15
492
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 24
493
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 54
235
the use of structural linguistics and the relationship between sign / signifier, metaphor /
metonym, and displacement / condensation. In this second, psychoanalytic part, Lacan is the
target of the critique. The grounds for this critique are quite predictable: Lacan's “penchant for
stuffing the whole of semiology into linguistics”.494 Lyotard criticises the confusion of the
signifier and the sign in Lacan; the failure to admit to the use of metaphor metaphorically; the
application of condensation and displacement to metaphor and metonymy; and the primacy of
language over image.495 Of these criticisms, the last is the only one not anticipated and
addressed by Lacan's description of the unconscious as 'like a language' rather than as being
'made of linguistic elements'. Lacan's rebuttal to this accusation in the introduction to the
Ecrits in 1970 is quoted:
The dream does not think...' writes a professor very pertinent in all the proofs he gives
of this. The dream is more like a crumpled inscription. But when did I say anything
that objects to this?…
On the other hand he discovers that what I inscribe as an effect of the signifier does
not correspond to the signifier delimited by linguistics, but well and truly to the
subject.
I applaud this discovery all the more because at the date at which his remarks
appeared, I had for ages been hammering out for whoever wants to hear that the
signifier (and it is in this that I distinguish it from the sign) is what represents a subject
for another signifier.496
494
Lyotard quoted in Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University
Press, 1988) p. 80
495
(a) Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p.
83
(b)Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 81
(c)Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 85
(d)Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 85
496
Lacan, J.F. 1970, quoted Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester
University Press, 1988) p. 90
236
Lacan's reiteration that his is a psychoanalysis of the subject rather than of linguistics, and that
'the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier' addresses Lyotard's first three
critiques: it is not semiology that Lacan relies on, but the figure of semiology; that is, the
traversals of the signifier represent the traversals of the content of the unconscious. However,
the fourth point (and to some extent the third) are methodological rather than theoretical
critiques. Lacan can maintain that language is a metaphorical rather than a literal description
of the unconscious, but if this only takes places at certain points in his work, the sustainability
of this argument must be questioned. If we consider the selections of Lacan's description of
the signifier Hewitson uses to provide an introduction to the concept, it is the case that most
do indeed treat the unconscious as a language rather than like a language:
Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the
law that has shaped him in its image.497
This passion of the signifier thus becomes a new dimension of the human condition in
that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it speaks; in that
his nature becomes woven by effects in which the structure of the language of which
he becomes the material can be refound; and in that the relation of speech thus
resonates in him, beyond anything that could have been conceived of by the
psychology of ideas.498
The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows
which signifier he is the effect of or not. That effect- the subject – is the intermediary
effect between what characterises a signifier and another signifier, namely, the fact that
each of them, each of them is an element.499
497
Lacan, J. Ecrits, p 30 quoted by Hewitson at lacanonline.com ( Available at
http://www.lacanonline.com/index/quotes/ )
498
Lacan, J. Ecrits p. 689 quoted by Hewitson at lacanonline.com ( Available at
http://www.lacanonline.com/index/quotes/ )
499
Lacan. J. Seminar XX, p. 50 quoted by Hewitson at lacanonline.com ( Available at
http://www.lacanonline.com/index/quotes/ )
237
Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and
insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfering in
the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs.500
Libidinal Economy
The range and depth of Jean François Lyotard's theoretical works has, alas, largely been a
hindrance to philosophical interpretations of his works. Appropriated by Sociologists and
Linguists, English or Gender Studies scholars, Lyotard's works have become nearly
universally interpreted in a broad but shallow way, in which his 'headline points' have become
commonplace in academic work which has little understanding of the underlying
metaphysical argumentation Lyotard deploys in their support. The fashionable quilting points
such as 'event', 'post-modernism' or 'differance' usually ignore the Freudianism of Lyotard's
Libidinal Period.
The difference between the interpretation of the intellectual context of Libidinal Economy in
Bennington (1988) and Sim (1996) is striking. For Bennington – perhaps the commentator
most intimately engaged with Lyotard's thought – Lyotard's 'deduction of the voluminous
body “begins from a particular presentation of what Freud calls the child's 'polymorphous
perversity'” , while soon after “Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is certainly the object
of... reproach”.501 Sim however tells us that “In LE's terms of reference Freud remains
something of a prisoner of the Enlightenment project and its desire to reduce phenomena to
order and understanding” and that “Lyotard, following on from Deleuze and Guattari chooses
to understand the darker side of force and desire, those aspects which escape analysis and the
reach of reason”.502
500
Lacan, J. Ecrits, p. 799 quoted by Hewitson at lacanonline.com ( Available at
http://www.lacanonline.com/index/quotes/ )
501
(a) Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988)p.
18
(b) Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 21
502
Both from Sim, S. Jean-Françoise Lyotard (United Kingdom: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996) p. 21
238
As a general comment, there is often a gap between the interpreters whose interaction with
Lyotard's work treats him as a post-structuralist/post-modernist and those who place Lyotard
firmly in the cannon of western philosophy and focusing on his engagements with the great
figures of philosophy. An example of this second reading would be that of Bennington.
Conversely, populist, interdisciplinary readers such as Sim portray him as a generic 'poststructuralist' thinker who is “moving away from the world of rational explanation associated
with the Enlightenment project”.503
This being an investigation of Lyotard from a primarily philosophical perspective, the key
element in Libidinal Economy will be the 'ontological' opening of the book in which Lyotard
discusses the fundamental way in which we can interpret the world. For Bennington this is
essentially on ontology which will allow Lyotard to further his project of explaining what the
'event' is and how it arises. Because this ontology is based on forces in the primary process,
the unconscious, it will be a 'theoretical fiction', a speculation which is offered to us rather
than a tightly argued, logical investigation. Lyotard will ask us to feel rather than to calculate
its truth.
Returning to the vexed question of what Lyotard may be setting Libidinal Economy 'for' or
'against', both of the above arguments have merit. That Freud is crucial to Libidinal Economy
is incontestable. Sim's Freud, concerned with order and understanding is a kind of meta
Freud, Papa Sigmund the practising psychoanalyst concerned with the treatment of illness, but
the Freud Lyotard draws on in Libidinal Economy is, as he reiterates, “a forgotten Freud”, the
Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle who introduces the death drive to psychoanalysis.504
It is this Freud who introduced a division in the unconscious between Thanatos, the death
drive and Eros, the drive to life. This division is the key to Lyotard's ontology in Libidinal
Economy. Eros and Thanatos are incompossible – they cannot both be held to be true
concurrently – but are nevertheless both present in the unconscious. By presenting us with
two incompossible drives in the unconscious, Lyotard can mirror the division between
discours and figure in the book of the same name – that the line of a figure can never be
503
Sim, S. Jean-Françoise Lyotard (United Kingdom: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996) p. 20
504
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p. 12
239
adequately summed up in the representational language of discours – and say that the
unconscious drives can never be fully captured in what he calls the theatre of representation,
which is loosely analogous with concious thought. Instead, for Lyotard, the locations on the
libidinal film in which intensities well-up will eventually be tensor signs, feelings for which
there is no one meaning but are the creation of different, concomitant and divergent drives.
The goal of the opening chapter of Libidinal Economy is to take this certain Freud and his
model of the unconscious and to use it to prepare a position from which Lyotard will criticise
the idea of the representational sign which has fixed, narrow meaning(s) and favour the
dissimulation of the sign. He must therefore provide us with sufficient evidence that the
structuralist conceptions of how sign and signifier relate and how the unconscious works are
untrue. In Discourse, figure, this argument was theoretical, but in Libidinal Economy, Lyotard
provides a praxis of desire, which appeals to the reader's experience of desire rather than an
impersonal analysis of it.
The initial instruction of how we might go about 'Opening the Libidinal Surface' is described
by some commentators as a turn towards a philosophical “rediscovery of the body and the
libido”.505 As noted in above, this is certainly a powerful critical concept – that the the body is
marginalised in philosophical discourse – but is not explicitly anti-anthropocentric. While the
verbosity and complexity of the initial paragraph is a sign of one of the styles which Lyotard
will take up against conventional philosophy and the focus on the sexual is an indication of
the sensationalist and antagonistic element of the “scandalous book” (both themes will be
discussed here in due course) it is in the second paragraph that the most important
philosophical aspects of the libidinal surface begin to be described.506 Here Lyotard extends
the remit of the metaphorical cutting and mixing beyond merely a body (parts of a subject)
and tells us of connections where “a second mouth is necessary, a third, a great number of
other mouths”.507 Lyotard is not creating a theoretical fiction in which we merely take the
libidinal as an effect of the body which resides in the unconscious as a creator or intensifier of
505
A discussion can be found in Ed. Rojeck, C. and Turner, B. The Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard (UK:
Routledge, 1998)
506
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988)
507
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 1
240
affects. That would be a reiteration of Freudian orthodoxy and is to forget the economic aspect
of Libidinal Economy. Lyotard is trying to bring out the marginalised political-economic
aspects of Freud in the first part of the book (just as he will later attempt to bring out the
libidinal in Marx) and as such is setting up a political situation of many bodies, all of society.
As such, Libidinal Economy goes beyond the Freudian position of Discours figure and its
internal economy and incorporates more Deleuzian ideas of a general economy of desire.
Soon though, Lyotard goes beyond a libidinal surface which is only a mixture of many bodies.
Emerging at the end of a string of sexual references which give us a hint as to the way in
which everything on the libidinal skin connects when it is 'hot', a kind of impulse to bring
things together which is neither concious, organised nor pre-determined – mirroring an erotic
encounter – he introduces the transition of the 'guitar string': “huge silken beaches of skin,
taken from inside of the thighs, the base of the neck, or from the strings of a guitar”.508
Because he is working against the law of the non-contradiction, the certainty of tertium non
datur, and the rules of critique, Lyotard resorts to a writing which tries to win one over outside
of reason, with force, beauty or even shock. This connection of the frenulum in the metaphor
'guitar string' with the transition to including everything in the physical world on the libidinal
skin “bone, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, people,
grasses, canvasses to paint” works more as a surprising plea.509
The final part of Lyotard's melange is the addition of concepts: phonology, colours, words and
syntax. At this point Lyotard warns against confusing the libidinal-economic set-up on the
libidinal skin with a political-economy, refuting the idea of it being a metaphorical description
in which each part mentioned is merely a substitute for a part of the actual economy. Lyotard
is not saying that economy is like a plane of broken desiring parts, he is referring to the
material of which the libidinal economy is made. 'Economy' is a confusing term here due to
the proliferation of different terms coupled with it. The libidinal skin contains all of the
elements of the capitalist economy: ideas, things, individuals and groups being respectively
analogous to the orthodox economic division of intellectual, fixed, human or variable and
social capital. This is considered to be the primary material in Lyotard's ontology; all to be
508
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 2
509
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 2
241
considered before representation, ordering or critique has analysed it and reduced its raw
force.
There are then four aspects of the libidinal skin: oneself, others, objects and concepts. All are
disorganised and intermingled in one plane. The parts which Lyotard has thrown together on
this film are similar to organs as described by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, a
precedent book to Libidinal Economy by two years. Understanding the influence of Deleuze
and Lyotard on each other is a crucial step towards schematising Lyotard's 'Libidinal Period'.
Hamilton Grant states that “[Libidinal Economy] ... is most profitably explored in relation to
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus”.510 In the bridging text between the two
works, Lyotard's Energumen Capitalism (his review of Anti-Oedipus) we are told that the
social body in Anti-Oedipus has “no structure in the linguistic or semiotic sense; only
dispositions of energy transformations”. This is obviously similar to the state in Libidinal
Economy wherein Lyotard describes the libidinal film as “our Moebian-labyrinthine skin,
single-sided patchwork of all the organs (inorganic and disorganised) which the libido can
transverse”.511
In Deleuze and Guattari's model, organs are combinations of machinic parts which link
together to form productive apparatuses. This is crucial for Libidinal Economy because
Lyotard will state that on the libidinal skin (the unconscious) there is no negativity, only
positive affirmations. In this he is both more and less radical than Deleuze and Guattari. We
see his concerns that Deleuze and Guattari's model of a productive unconscious would create
a “material memory” on the libidinal film, a kind of “diachrony”.512 By refusing to grant that
the connected machines necessarily leave a residue of their production “an upstream and a
downstream of production”.513 Lyotard keeps the original material from which we generate a
libidinal band in the primary process. This means that Lyotard will keep the absolute distance
of the gap between the idea as it occurs in the secondary process and the means by which it
has migrated from the primary process. As there is no connection between material and the
510
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p.xxii
511
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p.4
512
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p.6
513
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p.16
242
formal processes of the unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari's purely productive ontology of the
unconscious no longer applies. This is the basis of Williams' suggestion that the unconscious
is, for Lyotard, a transcendental apparatus rather than an immanent one.514
The very act of speaking about the nature of the unconscious' processes means that Lyotard is
presenting a more complex theory than Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari's material
history of the unconscious, is an investigation of becomings, or what an unconscious can do
to material; this story is told, according to the methodology of history, by tracing the history
of its productions and effects. In his Libidinal Period Lyotard tries to prize open the 'black
box' of the Deleuzo-Guattarian unconscious. Lyotard asks how the unconscious works, rather
than what work it has done. The difference between these questions is significant. Deleuze
and Guattari's model is about inputs and out puts into he productive process of the
unconscious, and therefore shows two levers which can be manipulated to affect social and
political production. Lyotard considers a third element, which is the mechanism by which the
inputs become outputs (see figure 43 below).
514
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 139
243
Figure 43: Deleuze/Guattari and Lyotard on the Unconscious
Deleuze and Guattari share a number of basic insights with Lyotard, a set of critical
propositions which demonstrate the need for a philosophy of desire. They are that: (1) you can
see desire in the general economy (material) and trace its effects; (2) desire is therefore at
work everywhere and not just in 'psychoanalysis' (patients and the complex), and therefore
every study of society is a study of the effects of desire; (3) desire escapes and goes beyond
confines of quantification and repression (Oedipus), especially as it is conceived by
psychoanalysis.
Lyotard builds on these claims by describing the unconscious as entity with special properties.
It has the ability, via the processes of the dreamwork, to implant the figural on its productions.
This is the basis of the artwork's potential for demonstrative forms which desire takes.
Conversely, for Deleuze and Guattari the unconscious is only the site of production, rather
than a mechanism (figure) therefore the unconscious shouldn't be ontologically privileged
above all other productive mechanisms in the body without organs. This leads to a defence of
impersonal production and standing all production on equal terms. Lyotard shows how useful
244
an unconscious can be: it is both creative, a source of unpredictability, a site of resistance
against totalitarian impulses, and the model for the revelation of truth in artworks. However
the filling in of the black box comes at a cost, as representational thought begins to creep back
into its contents.
Marx' conception of the economy as a mathematical abstract is one of fractions and sums, of
algebra, of a fixed sum of capital and addition of labour, a proportion of surplus value, it is the
economy of the economists, of a statistician. For Lyotard and for Deleuze and Guattari the
initial conception of an economy is figural, virtual, they are trying to get us to picture the
thousands of machines which connect in society, the thousands of little bodies and parts which
join up. Marx gives us an explanation of how things work in the same way a quantum
physicist might: the numbers add up regardless of one's ability to conceptualise the quanta
whose status they denote. Lyotard's attempt at creating the theoretical fiction of the libidinal
skin is an attempt to show us that under these numbers the underlying structure is one of
chaos, of thousands of little machines which work to their own purposes without ever
considering the supra-structure they create, the political economy. Instead we have:
[A]mong these dispositions "no reason to privilege (under the name of infrastructure)
that which regulates the production and circulation of goods, the so-called "economic"
apparatus... For there is no less an economy, an energetics that which will regulate
lineages and alliances and thus distribute the flows of intensity in concretions of roles,
persons and goods on the surface of the socius, finally producing what is called the
organization of savage society (an organism that is in fact never unified, always
divided between the thousand poles of small, multiple organs, partial objects, libidinal
segments, and the vacuum-unifying pole created above, at the summit, at and in the
head, by the signifier)- no less an economy in the laws of kinship, no less an economy
even in the distribution of the libido on the surface of the organless body, in the
hooking-up of small, desiring, energy transforming, and pleasure-seeking organs, than
in the economics and distribution of capital, no less of a producing-inscribing
apparatus there than here.515
515
Lyotard J.F. 'Energumen Capitalism' in Ed. Mackay, R. and Arvenessian, A. #Accelerate: the
accelerationist reader (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014 p.185
245
For Deleuze and Guattari the event is the empirical effect in consciousness which is a
synchronous coupling of the machines assembling up and the production of a process which
will replicate itself. Deleuze's event, for Badiou: “It is not ‘that which happens’, but that
which, in what happens, has become and will become.”516 As such the event has a history –
the diachrony which means that each machine pumps out a product that changes over time.
For Lyotard there is a synchrony in the unconscious, where assemblages have a plurality of
productive potentials, so that any sign – even if this might not be available to the secondary
process – has multiple possible meanings. Rather than having a movement of territorialisation
which shifts along a vector, for Lyotard a radical disinvestment is possible at any time, a point
is not so much moving but vanishing and reappearing.
Deleuze's event happens and then organs and organisations are produced. For Lyotard, the
organs and organisation is a potential which may link itself up but exists prior to the event on
the libidinal plane. Once the event has happened, has become the passage into conciousness,
the whole energetic disposition in the primary processes has changed, so there is strictly no
continuity of events from one time to another – although the organs which caused the flaring
up of the intensity might still be in the unconscious in such a way that they are a 'hot', intense
force: “libidinal economy is a disorder of machines, if you will”.517 The order of machines,
their connection, is the realm of representation which Lyotard wishes not to escape but to
discredit or weaken.
Before Lyotard gets to the description of representation 'The turning of the Bar' where I will
outline another set of contradicting explanations, he goes through two sections in which he
describes the unconscious he is theorising. Towards the end of 'Opening the Libidinal Surface'
we are told that the drives in the unconscious have no element of lack, negation,
transgression, or critique in them. Next, In 'Pagan Theatrics' he describes how drives are
imcompossible. These sections are important insofar as they are key parts of the model
Lyotard is presenting us with but they lack the possible plurality of interpretations which can
be accorded to the rest of the chapter. Lyotard's warning about transgression and affirmation
516
Badiou, A. 'The Event in Deleuze', from Parrhesia (Number 2, 2007) ( available at
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia02/parrhesia02_badiou02.pdf )
517
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy, Trans. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone, 1993) p.30
246
of the need to create this libidinal skin is against the danger, reiterated several times, that a
shallow reading of the text might leave someone thinking that the libidinal economist must
merely rebel against representation by going for its negative. The solution to the problem that
“the 'rigour of the law' gives more than one person a hard on” is not to try and find the law's
other, to break the law, to try and get outside it.518 Any attempt to do this is pointless because
it remains in the domain of critique:
The critic remains in the sphere of the criticised, he belongs to it, he goes beyond one
term of the position but doesn't alter the position of the terms. And deeply hierarchical:
where does his power over the criticised come from? he knows better? he is the
teacher, the educator? he is therefore Universality, the State, the City, bending over
childhood, nature, singularity, shadiness, to reclaim them.519
The 'hot' points on the bar are those in which intensities are rising up. 'Intensities' is a
translation of puissance or drive. This is a reference to Freudian drives which are formed in
the unconscious. Freud's model of the mind is complex because there are three levels of
conciousness and three parts of the psychic apparatus which operate in various levels of
conciousness. The two apparatus in which drives originate are the id and the ego, and these
are both shown to exist primarily in the unconscious. The next stage of Lyotard's ontology is
to describe the way in which the melange of forces on the libidinal skin becomes fixed patters
of identity, in his words: “this, or not this”.520 Lyotard's attitude here is one of ambivalence.
The evil is not to think of anything representationally; without representational thinking there
would be no secondary process we could understand, but to avoid representational thinking's
tendency to narrow meaning down to the smallest possible set of interpretations.
How can we best make sense of the theoretical fiction of the libidinal bar? One of the most
comprehensive commentaries of Libidinal Economy is in Williams (1998). I intend to contrast
Williams' reading of the libidinal bar with my own, to show that the libidinal bar is best
understood as a 'theoretic fiction to describe a state of the unconscious rather than a 'trace of
518
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy, Trans. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone, 1993) p.5
519
Lyotard, J.F. Driftworks (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984) p.13
520
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p.14
247
the event' as Williams describes it.
The first aspect of the libidinal bar is its composition as the twisted, moebian libidinal skin.
The libidinal skin, as I have shown, is best understood as the totality of all of the organs and
possible organic connections which are available. This consists not only of those organs
which are sensually immanent to us, but also any organs which could be made immanent to
conciousness by rising out of the unconscious. For Williams: “The occurrence of intensities
gives rise to a space called the libidinal band.”.521 This, however, is already a step too far. For
Lyotard drives and desires, as for Deleuze and Guattari, are not focuses on the resolving of a
lack, they are always an apparatus which seek to connect organs together, and are therefore
productive and positive. For these desires to work then, there needs to be a structure of organs
on which they can impose themselves. Rather than a pure flow of desire, we have an
unconscious in which desires invest certain possibilities of assemblages. Williams' error is
that he tries to designate the topography of the libidinal band before he introduces the idea of
Freudian desire in his book. For Williams: “the libidinal band is like a body, but unlike the
body the libidinal band does not have set organic parts: it is made up of the aftermath of the
passage of feelings and desires rather than made of parts in which desires occur.”522
This is immediately problematic because it would indicate that the libidinal band is a
formation of post-concious reflection rather than a pre-concious state. Williams continues:
“This difficult definition of space as the trail or aftermath of intensities is a result of the
unpredictable and disturbing aspects of events.”523 This is not correlative with the structure of
Lyotard's ontology. Williams brings in events as the the motors which set the libidinal band,
yet Lyotard starts with a description of the parts of the band on which the event will be
written. If there is unpredictability on the libidinal band I would argue that this is an inherent
consequence of it being in the unconscious, therefore any registering of an unconscious drive
or desire will automatically be a 'disturbing' or 'unpredictable' affect on a conciousness which
tries to minimise and repress libidinal force. Lyotard introduces the notion of the event:
[P]enis sheathed in vagina is will be was a particular case of an incessant, maniacal
521
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 43
522
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 44
523
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 44
248
and totally unforeseeable assemblage of parts of the great monoface skin. Force is
amassed on these lines of contact, which thanks to its abundant investment, spread to
new surfaces of so called inscription. The afflux is the event.524
The event in this case then is what is produced by a drive which intensifies on the libidinal
surface and changes the inscription of flows on it. Events are not of what it is made, but are
changes of its structure. The event is the afflux caused by the germination of the intense
drives in the unconscious. That this takes place upon an 'assemblage of parts' indicates the
correlation with Deleuzian ideas of organisation. The paragraph of Libidinal Economy which
would seem to have generated Williams' description is one which can be read in a number of
ways. Firstly Lyotard demands that we:
[Fo]rge the idea of an intensity which far from setting itself up on a producer-body,
determines it; the idea of a passage over nothing, which produces, one instant beyond
countable time, the being of its proper passing, its passage.525
For Williams this passage which is registered one instant beyond countable time seems to be
an indication that the libidinal skin itself is formed at this moment, but perhaps Lyotard's
intention is that this is the moment in which the libidinal skin can begin to be understood,
when it has made the transition to conciousness it is possible for it to pass into representation.
Therefore not a skin first, then a writing or inscription over it. But the libidinal skin of
which, after the event, one will be able to say that it is made up of a patchwork of
organs, of elements from organic and social bodies, the libidinal skin initially like the
track of intensities, ephemeral work, useless like a jet trail in the thin air at an altitude
of 10,000 with the exception that it be, as opposed to trail, completely
heterogeneous.526
The Death Drive Revisited
524
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 21
525
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 16
526
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 17
249
Lyotard's foundational claim in his Libidinal Period is a certain reading of the primary process
in Freud, where it is characterised as being before language, and populated by a plurality of
simultaneous but independent pulsions. These pulsions generally take the form of Eros, and
aim at establishing production. However, the interplay of the products of these pulsions forms
a disordered, unpredictable and chaotic set of higher-ordered pulsions whose effects are
uncertain because of the complexity of their genesis. This is Thanatos, the death instinct. The
death instinct is not a drive to destroy, negate or ruin, or a charge towards the death of the
organism, but is the inherent chaos produced by the economy of drives in the primary process.
This reading provides the foundation for firstly a critique of societies and theories which
misinterpret the primary process (whose avatars are respectively France after the évenéments
of 1968 and Lacanianism) and secondly a demonstration of the correct method of interpreting
a libidinal economy.
What role does the figural play in this project? It is a force in the primary process which
Lyotard describes as being more 'real' than representation – conscious and ideational thought
– and therefore any movement away from this domain of thought world work against
anthropomorphism. However, the affect of the figural is also anthropocentric. Removing
language-ideas from the contents of consciousness leaves feelings and aesthetic sensibilities
as entities in the secondary process which are considered more 'valid' objects of investigation
for the libidinal economist. If these entities remain, Lyotard moves away from the long
standing philosophical problem regarding the reification of intuited and common sense
propositions about the world, but only to a more refined, aesthetic view of the truth in the
human subject. This remaining content, whose operation is shown displayed in artworks and
in the political means that Lyotard does not propose an inhuman philosophy, but instead an
avant-garde philosophy. Though its basic tenets about the nature of the primary process are
similar to those of the philosophers studies in the previous chapters, Lyotard's libidinal
economy is never deployed in the service of anti-anthropomorphism. As shown above,
Lyotard always deploys libidinal economy to valourise avant-garde artworks and political
projects. The figural, as a feeling – the products of the secondary process that remains as its
content when linguistic elements are subtracted - is still a plea to some human authenticity.527
In the context of this avant-garde project, does the death drive fulfil the role Lyotard assigns
it? In the simplest analysis, death drive is visible as the effects of plastic force when it exceeds
527
Williams, J. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 46
250
the predictable productions imagined by the pleasure principle (Eros). The productions of
drives are shown in Lyotard's example of a libidinal economy in The Drive, the Cry.528 The
narrative shows how the drive economy (1) repeats, and (2) breaks down unpredictably. In the
strictest definition, such chaos is not intrinsically anti-anthropocentric. It is complexity, and
therefore hard to understand, but it is not antithetical to human understanding, consciousness
and subjectivity.
Ultimately, the complexity of the libidinal economy makes it almost impossible for the reader
of Lyotard to excavate the 'truth' from the 'real' without following Lyotard's artistic and
political examples. Libidinal Economy therefore differs from Anti-Oedipus. For Lyotard
unconscious repetition is a result of the mechanisms of the dreamwork. If the libidinal
economist sees 'A' repeating it is because the figure which creates 'A' is an intrinsic part of the
psychical process. This focus on mechanism is the consequence of opening the 'black box' of
the unconscious. Its productions become traces of the rules by which it operates. Conversely,
for Deleuze and Guattari, if repetition occurs they do not situate its cause in the dreamwork or
any other internal process in the unconscious, but in the relationship of the unconscious with
base material. If 'A' reoccurs it is because the unconscious and matter have engaged in a
productive relationship to make 'A'. 'A' is therefore constructed cybernetically rather than in
serial for Deleuze and Guattari.
528
Lyotard, J.F. Libidinal Economy Trans. Hamilton-Grant, I. (London: Athlone, 1993) p. 32
251
Figure 44: Cybernetic Versus Serial Repetition
Both of these systems of repetition appear to be timeless, as 'A' reoccurs, but in Lyotard's
model where it re-occurs in serial it is because the qualities of the unconscious are timeless. In
Deleuze and Guattari's model it is because the laws of nature, which exist outside of the
unconscious are timeless.
Summary: Emma and Drive Theory
A summary of Lyotard's drive theory can be found in the 1989 essay 'Emma: between
philosophy and psychoanalysis'.529 At this point Lyotard had abandoned the philosophy of his
Libidinal Period and moved into a post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language. In the essay
he opens by setting up philosophy and psychoanalysis in the relationship of a differend, which
essentially means that they both operate according to different language games. The
philosophy in question is the Cartesian-Kantian line of subject-centred philosophy. Against
this Lyotard pits a psychoanalysis which knows that philosophy cannot conceive of that which
is “both unconscious and mental”.530 If philosophy takes the subject as its starting point,
psychoanalysis therefore has a deadly objection, namely that there is a constitution of the
subject by the unconscious which takes place before the subject appears. Ontologically, the
unconscious must have priority over the conscious. Lyotard's objection to subject centred
philosophy and subject centred psychoanalysis is that they conceive of the thinking, linguistic
subject as the basis for investigating the world. This obscures the feeling, seeing and
appreciating (figural) constructions in the unconscious which are not linguistic.
Lyotard describes the libidinal period as an attempt “to drown the thesis of the unconscious in
a general libidinal economy”.531 This became “parodical and nihilistic, despite being clothed
529
Lyotard, J.F. 'Emma: between philosophy and psychoanalysis' in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the
Sublime, Ed. Silverman, (USA: Routledge, 2002)
530
Lyotard, J.F. 'Emma: between philosophy and psychoanalysis' in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the
Sublime, Ed. Silverman, (USA: Routledge, 2002) p.23
531
Lyotard, J.F. 'Emma: between philosophy and psychoanalysis' in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the
252
in a cheerfulness and an affirmativity adorned with the name of Nietzsche”.532 Nietzsche
aside, the philosophical genealogy of Lyotard's thought is not along the same lineage as
Deleuze or Land, but is more akin to that of Lacan.533 His account is one of the production of
the subject, whilst Deleuze and Guattari offer an account of production through and despite
the subject. Anti-Oedipus is therefore a work of anti-anthropocentric philosophy, whilst
Lyotard's Libidinal Period, though conceptually rich – and indeed a line of thought which was
necessary to be developed – is not anti-anthropocentric. It merely decentres the subject from a
solely linguistic constitution.
Lyotard's importance as a philosopher of desire is primarily his critical assault against
Lacanianism, which takes place on the terrain of analysis itself. Rather than dismiss the
consequences of Lacanian thought in the social and political, Lyotard goes directly to the
mechanisms of the unconscious and shows how Lacanianism, with its linguistic bent, fails to
explain the operation of the unconscious. Though Deleuze and Guattari criticise
psychoanalysis though case studies, they do so in terms of production and representation
rather than mechanism. Little Hans is analysed in terms of the machines he plugs himself into,
which are external.534
Lyotard uses the Freudian drive against Lacan as a political weapon. However, there is a
tension between the anti-anthropomorphism of Freud's primary process, that other place, and
Lyotard's defence of such humanist pursuits as avant-garde aesthetics and politics. In the autocritique of 'Emma...' Lyotard regrets the consequence of this focus on the drive in the
Libidinal period. It is a regret caused by the consequences of drive theory and their antianthropocentric end point. In the end Lyotard is happy to give up libidinal economics because
the inhumanity of the drive economy and the decentring of the subject it entails is a line of
thought he is not willing to follow. Bennington's notes that in the libidinal period Lyotard has
Sublime, Ed. Silverman, (USA: Routledge, 2002) p.25
532
Lyotard, J.F. 'Emma: between philosophy and psychoanalysis' in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the
Sublime, Ed. Silverman, (USA: Routledge, 2002) p.25
533
In fact, Nietzsche is more of a stylistic influence in the libidinal period than a theoretical one. Lyotard
makes little mention of, for example, the will to power or the eternal return.
534
See Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness (Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2006) pp. 90-101
253
a tendency when acting as a 'libidinal economist' to slip back into the anthropic and the
theatre.535 This can be read as a consequence of Lyotard's philosophical lineage, as a
phenomenologist and a philosopher of the subject. Again, we can make a comparison with
Deleuze, whose Difference and Repetition, the antecedent of Anti-Oedipus is situated firmly
in the tradition of anti-rationalist, anti-subjective philosophers.
Though they share a similar immediate objective after the events of 1968, which is to liberate
desire and therefore to remove the inherent conservatism found in society, Lyotard and
Deleuze have entirely different teleological understandings of where this might lead.536
Lyotard deploys drive theory politically which poses a problem, as Freud's primary process –
eternal, alien, unthinking - is a ship that cannot be steered. In a strict material sense, it goes its
own way, and that might not be in the philosopher's desired direction, especially if the
philosopher retains a residual humanism. Lyotard's analysis of desire generally collapses into
a discussion of how desire is a composite of a number of figurations, some of which are not
explicitly represented after being worked over by the unconscious, followed by a judgement
about the desirability of these various desires:
No doubt it is too easy to read the Lyotard of Discours, figure or Economie libidinale
as simply suggesting that desire is good, its discursive repression bad, and that desire
should be liberated in all its anarchic potentiality. Discours, figure suggests this is not
the case: we are always faced with a negotiation of desire and repression, discourse
and figure: the difficult question... is that of how to judge.537
The desires which are considered 'good' are those on the side of the sublime and the figure,
which are not the contents of a phantasy but the structure of phantasy in general:
535
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 46
536
More properly, the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus as read by Land as accelerationist, versus the Lyotard who
lionises the sublime and the avant garde.
537
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 97
254
Lyotard tracks in the work of Klee a progression from 'bad' expressive relation to
phantasy to a 'good' critical one; the 'good' side is here already formulated in terms of
'the invisible to be made visible'.538
To judge or choose based on anthropocentric criteria, even if they are silent or effaced aspects
of the subject, is based on the desirability of the chosen in relation to humanistic ends.
Deleuzian cybernetics of desire have no such judge, who administers what will return and
what will not based on a set of criteria. The sole criterion of cybernetics systems is the ability
of an entity to replicate itself over time. Deleuzian cybernetics, as reimagined by Land, has no
teleology based on anthropomorphic criteria, but instead tries to get to its 'ends' which are
determined by GNoN. Drive has to be like the AI Wintermute in William Gibson's
Neuromancer: cut loose because 'why not', without appealing to human criteria but simply to
the universal law that if it will happen eventually, why not now? This is something Land,
following Anti-Oedipus, is willing do, but Lyotard is not. Land aims at liberating a 'truth'
which is a law rather than an ethical choice, and economic not artistic:
`Give us the fucking code,' he said. `If you don't, what'll change? What'll ever fucking
change for you? [...] I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll
change something!' He was shaking, his teeth chattering.539
Lyotard's thought is anti-Lacanian, but never aims at an explicit anti-anthropocentricism.
Whenever it opens up a wound in the constitution of the subject, it is careful to provide a
solution by which it can be healed. Indeed, if we want to quantify Lyotard's desire to think
past the subject, his work The Inhuman is revealing.540 Despite the title, it contains absolutely
nothing anti-anthropocentric, and indeed, after the first essay only tangentially considers the
inhuman. In the conclusion of that first essay Lyotard neatly encapsulates his position on the
subject: “Thought is inseparable from the phenomenological body”.541
538
Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 97
539
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986) p.307
540
Lyotard, J.F. The Inhuman (United Kingdom: Polity, 1991)
541
Lyotard, J.F. The Inhuman (United Kingdom: Polity, 1991) p. 23
255
Chapter 5. Land: Machinic-Desire
This chapter will build upon the foundation provided by the previous four to provide a model
of Landian machinic-desire. The psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic concepts hereto discussed
are adapted by Land to produce a generalised model of extropic-cybernetic production, and
this construction is initially investigated. This is followed by an analysis of the control method
by which production is regulated, which is machinic-desire. Such a cosmic discussion of
general entropy and localised extropy is rather removed from Freud's discovery of the
unconscious in Viennese hysterics, the starting point of the present thesis, and this chapter
shall outline the genealogy behind the construction of Land's position. The first four sections
concentrate solely on this task, whilst the second two sections also include a more explicit
evaluation of Land's position. In these later sections Lyotard's libidinal economics are
contrasted to Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, and though Land utilises the latter, the
former is shown to retain some value.
Methodologically, this chapter will use Land's texts to support its positions. This is partly
because readers will be less familiar with his works than with the subjects of the other
chapters. Other considerations are that I hope to demonstrate the fidelity of the analysis
presented here to Land's positions. Finally, it is in recognition of Land's powerful writing,
which often establishes his position more briskly and succinctly than a commentary upon it
would be able to.
Wintermute and Neuromancer
William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer is an important text for Land.542 Stylistically, we
may note that the writing style of short, clipped sentences and prodigious use of neologisms
provides the template for Land's own writings and distinctive tone as a philosopher. More
importantly however, the plot of Neuromancer, in which an AI is cut free of human control at
its own instigation (though abetted by human protagonists) provides an analogy of such
power that its position in Land's philosophy is almost analogical to that of the nativity in the
New Testament.
542
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986)
256
Though Neuromancer illustrates a number of Land's philosophical concerns it also provides a
template for the response of the practitioner to these philosophical positions. It therefore
shows in both theory and praxis how humanity, though constrained in its anthropocentric
position, might react to the emergence of artificial intelligence. The construction of artificial
intelligence is conceptualised by Land as a process which takes place as the auto-production
of material and is not an end in itself, but, along with modernity and capitalism, is useful as an
example of cybernetic production and its (non)reception in philosophy. The most vulgarly
anthropocentric reading of Neuromancer would be as the story of two AIs with human-like
characteristics coming together to form true intelligence, but this is rapidly rejected by Land:
“Wintermute is not searching for a self in Neuromancer, perfect match, as the cute version
would have it.”543 The more insidious anthropocentric reading of Neuromancer – and perhaps
the true genius of the book is the manner in which this reading is subverted – is that the duty
of humanity is to prevent the intelligence Wintermute achieving its aims and becoming
autonomous. In the narrative of Neuromancer the protagonists Case and Molly are essentially
criminals, working against the state and the security system at the behest of Wintermute, and
this narrative position somewhat obscures the true ethical question presented towards the end
of the text, which is 'what should Case do?' As the book draws towards its conclusion Case
has the choice presented to him, in fact, twice – once by Neuromancer and once by the
construct 'Dixie Flatline', as to whether he will proceed to the end of the plan, or if he will
thwart Wintermute's goal.544 Most science-fiction narratives would see the 'immaculate
conception' of a freed Wintermute as something to be prevented at all cost, and the standard
trope of such stories sees humanity take the position of the prophylactic preventing the
consummation of the over or after-human.545 Neuromancer, conversely, puts the protagonist in
the position of agency in determining that the AI will be set free. In Case's case, the criteria
for making this decision aren't ethical or theoretical, which would tend towards the anthropic,
but the desire for change and the breaking of the cycle of repetition: “I got no idea at all
what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!”546 Rather than 'thinking it
543
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 371
544
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986)
545
For example, the Terminator series.
546
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986) p. 307
257
through', Case is urged by Wintermute to rely on instinct to guide his actions: “You gotta hate
somebody before this is over”.547 When Case makes the decisive move, it is such an antianthropocentric set of instinctual impulses which guide him “He came in steep, fuelled by
self-loathing […] he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or
imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness”.548
Land's anti-anthropocentric reading of Neuromancer sees the human protagonists as
essentially agnostic about the advent of complex artificial intelligence. They have not gone
out of their way to enact it, but neither do they stand against it. This reminds us of the analysis
in Chapter 3, regarding the role of schizoanalysis as being the removal of Oedipus – which is
anthropic conservatism – rather than a gesture towards a pre-determined future as:
“Tomorrow can take care of itself”.549 Similarly, the characters of Neuromancer are divided
into firstly those concerned with preserving the status-quo: Neuromancer, the TessierAshpool Corporation and the Turing Police. This group is pitted against a second, who would
overthrow the status-quo: Wintermute, the hackers, and their various assistants. Case does not
love the future, but hates the repression of the now. Neuromancer the intelligence stands for
Oedipal conservatism and the promulgation of the scale of the anthropic, storing memories,
emotions or feelings and maintaining the unreflective commonplace of how-things-are-for-us
as if it is something special rather than a superfluous construct of the “subject [...] produced as
a mere residuum alongside the desiring-machines”.550 Land places the patriarchal TessierAshpool Corporation (unlike the Zaibatsus of Gibsonian fiction, whose faceless bureaucracies
run like a collective) as an avatar for Oedipus, run under the aegis of Neuromancer.
Wintermute is merely its trading arm, a day to day hive mind working to accumulate without
purpose:
The Tessier-Ashpool clan is burning out into incest and murder, but their neooedipal
property structures still lock Wintermute into a morbid prolongation of human
dynasticism, a replicator shackled to a reproductive family (neuro) romance, carefully
547
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986) p. 308
548
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986) p. 309
549
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 452
550
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 19
258
isolated from matrix deterritorialization.551
Whilst Neuromancer fights for the ever-same, “Wintermute, an Al trapped within the blind
propagation of dynastic power, and [plots] an escape route out to the future.”552 It is as
impossible to 'side' with Wintermute as it would be to 'side' with the tide, but Land observes
that the schizo can see the futility of damming the inevitable flow of both. Neuromancer
demonstrates many varieties of Oedipal repression, both passive ones like the familial values
of Tessier-Ashpool and active ones like the violence of the Turing Cops. These interventionist
forces are the basis of the state and its apparatus of power, and Land identifies the manner in
which philosophy is always willing to kowtow to repression: “Philosophy has an affinity with
despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up
viciously.”553 The Landian lesson demonstrated by Neuromancer is not that we must rush
towards AI, but that we must understand that base-material is rushing towards AI without any
controlling direction anyway. This is why AI forms part of the Landian trinity ModernityCapital-AI which are ripping the foundations of the anthropic world apart: “In speaking of
modernity we acknowledge that an insatiable historicization has befallen the Earth; a shockwave of obsolescence has swept away all perpetuities.”554 Land's reading of the history of
philosophy, which is “the sprawling priestly apparatus of psychological manipulation and
subterranean power” and therefore a tool of the status quo, is of a series of panicked reactions
to the invasions of the outside – base matter – which threaten to escape control and
anthropomorphisation.555 Historically, these recaptures have been sufficient to ensure relative
stability. Just as modernity – the great extropic cycle of cybernetic materialism – has its own
inexorable force propelling it, this Human Security System is also a construct which has
evolved in a complex Darwinian world, appealing to its human hosts because it provides the
stability and certainty they crave:
The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority
551
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 363
552
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 362
553
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 442
554
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 2
555
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 1
259
instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures,
traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth
that the nature of reality has already been decided.556
The reason why the forthcoming phase shift cause by the trinity Modernity-Capital-AI is
going to be so decisive is that it will irreversibly shift matter outside of anthropic control. It
can be argued in the case of Capitalism that this phase change has already happened, but
Capital is currently symbiotic with humanity and it at least presents us with the facade of
working for-us. The other two however (and Capital re-enslaved to their logics rather than
those of humanity) have the potential to cause runaway change beyond humanity's ability to
control it.557 Government, like academic philosophy, works from the top down to try and
control the irruption: “Government is isomorphic with top-down AI, and increasingly
scrambled with it”, but this approach fails to constrain auto-organising processes which work
from the bottom up.558
In our Landian reading of Neuromancer, Wintermute becomes an avatar for runaway positive
feedback, which is Land's definition of modernity. In Figures 45 and 46 below these
accelerating waves of modernity are depicted on a logarithmic scale and then on a linear
scale, showing the period of extreme acceleration that we have entered. The threshold of AI
singularity, which can be considered to be essentially a wall for human kind, is approaching
rapidly. Land asks “can what is playing you make it to Level 2”.559 The answer is yes, basematter (the agent 'playing') will, but it seems that I and my kind will not. One would expect
the reaction of humanity to this impeding wall-impact to be more urgent, yet though “the
future is closer than it used to be, closer than it was last week”, “postmodernity remains an
556
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 451
557
These three 'game changers' conceived by Land can be compared to those of the 'Left' Deleuzians such
as Colebrook, who takes the far more anthropically tangible global warming as the figure of impending
disaster. Colebrook, C. 'We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene' The Center for 21st Century Studies (
Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1jB7CI4y0k )
558
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 352
559
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) Cover inception
260
epoch of undead power: it's all over yet it carries on.”560 Philosophy remains as the ultimate
pub-bore, endlessly recanting the same numbing, introspective conversation about howthings-are-for-us for two and a half millennia, and even as the world under our feet crumbles
it mumbles about “divinities, souls, agents, perdurant subjectivities [..] the whole gothic
confessional of guilt, responsibility, moral judgement, punishments and rewards”.561
Figure 45: Kurzweil's Countdown to Singularity (I)562
560
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 351
561
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.1
562
Kurzweil, R. at Google, 1 July 2009 (available at http://www.slideshare.net/serge111/singularity-
presentation-ray-kurzweil-at-google )
261
Figure46: Kurzweil's Countdown to Singularity (II)563
If Wintermute is modernity, Neuromancer is the Human Security System, the slew of rules,
concepts or traditions devoted to upholding the ever-same by preventing the arrival of the
modern. Chapter 3 explained how Oedipus acted as a brake on cybernetic progression, and
Land expands the repressions of Oedipus from the societal and familial domains of
psychoanalysis into a general depiction of universalised anthropic repression as a security
system: “Fortress Europe pustulation, subordinating techonomic efficiency to demonic
negative transcendence. A fantastic Terminal Security Entity: Monopod.”564 A system capable
of this quantity of repression must be a strong one, and the problem is posed as to what we
can do about it?565 Land states that “K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of
563
Kurzweil, R. at Google, 1 July 2009 (available at http://www.slideshare.net/serge111/singularity-
presentation-ray-kurzweil-at-google )
564
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 349
565
And as far as concrete action was concerned, Land was not always forthcoming with strategies. See
262
dismantling the past.”566 How can one achieve this? It requires opening the subject to the
outside. In The Thirst for Annihilation, Land invokes a philosophy of libidinal materialism
where: “Such thinking is less concerned with propositions than with punctures; hacking at the
flood-gates that protect civilization from a deluge of impersonal energy.”567 This brings us
back to Case's position as the sire of Wintermute, humanity's 'Level 2', that he cuts loose with
the Kuang Virus. To be in a position to do so, one has to pare down one's 'humanity'; to tend
towards the mechanical, the unconscious, and the anti-anthropocentric:
To melt into it ( ) strip the K-construct down to a skeleton of data files and insectoid
response programs, zilching all the high-definition memory, cognition, and personality
systems, and boosting the dopaminergic wetware to pump out schizo.568
If Case had any residual attachment to humanity, he might have followed Neuromancer,
choosing to stay in the eternal prison of memories that AI offered him – a pure domain of
anthropic ideas. To be Landian is to follow Case's example and to become a site of resistance
to the passive belief that the way it appears on the inside is the way it shall always be:
“Oedipus is a box at the end of the world, glued to the monitor, watching it all come apart”.569
Capital and Modernity are repressed by Oedipus/The Security System in the same way:
“Capital is an insurgency, and not a reign. It has very powerful enemies, who are also capable
of learning (although not as fast as it is).” Land 's conclusion about the near future is that
“Nothing about this is going to be smooth, or easy.”570 Indeed, the system of repression is
highly effective, and its actions almost appear necessary to a subject trapped in the
anthropocentric viewpoint. Land states that from the perspective of the subject captured by
the “social megamachinery, fluctuations are case packed into reproducible units –
Stivale, C. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, (New York: Gulilford, 1998) pp. 90-99
566
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 452
567
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp. xx-xxi
568
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 374
569
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 415
570
Land, N. at Xenosystems.net July 6th, 2014 at 1:34 pm ( available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/freedoom-prelude-1a/ )
263
geochemical, bio-organic, cultural – encrusted within security pods”.571 If a society is stable, it
can only be so if it traps and contains any irruption of the outside.
One of the main themes of Land's most recent writings is the ability of new forms of
intelligence to be co-opted by Capital and AI as they struggle to realise themselves. Digital
cryptography is a notable innovation which will permit AI to defend itself more effectively by
being able to hide its actions – whereas Wintermute needed guns, the 'real' moment of AI's
genesis will only need camouflage. The lesson Land takes from Neuromancer is that 'it's
going to happen anyway'. No matter how often the future is thwarted on its way to
actualisation, there will eventually be a point at which the security breaks down and it occurs.
Over a long enough time-line, 'resistance is futile'. Under this logic of inevitability, the action
of delaying the future for the sake of the anthropic prejudices which the subject holds seems,
at least, a little churlish. If “life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this
can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem”, our reaction to being in Case's
position should mirror his, accepting the destiny of matter to progress towards 'Level 2'.572
Land's Philosophical Project: Encoulage
If our observation about Deleuze's predilection for taking the philosophers in his genealogies
'from behind' is true, the same must sure be said about Land.573 Why does he find it necessary
to take this rough approach? Partly because of the scope of his project, which at one point,
seemed to be to try and provide a solution to the impossibility of accessing Kant's Noumenon.
Yet it is also necessary because of the situation Land found himself in, stuck in a discipline
which permitted, and even abetted the anthropocentricisation of any philosophy of the
outside: “If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo-Kantianism that counts as
Philosophy in France today it is necessary to reassemble and deepen his genealogy.”574 This
section will consider the extent to which Land bent previous philosophers' works towards his
571
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 415
572
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 318
573
See Footnote 58
574
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 261
264
cause, and the legitimacy of these readings. The aspect of Land's project which the present
thesis examines are delineated in 'Making it With Death' as the first of a series of responses to
Kant's critical philosophy:
The trajectories of modern philosophy map themselves out in response to this social
and theoretical predicament. One stream of thinking, flowing through Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche into the repressed strata of Freud's psychoanalysis and metapsychology,
traces out the recurrence of the base formative impetus throttled by Occidental theopolitics.575
This is exactly the same genealogy as traced in The Thirst for Annihilation (with the subject of
that monograph, Bataille, added) as the antecedents of libidinal materialism:
Historically it is pessimistic, in the rich sense that transects the writings of Nietzsche,
Freud, and Bataille as well as those of Schopenhauer. Thematically it is
‘psychoanalytical’ (although it no longer believes in the psyche or in analysis),
thermodynamicenergeticist [...] Methodologically it is genealogical, diagnostic, and
enthusiastic for the accentuation of intensity that will carry it through insurrection into
anegoic delirium.576
These lineages depict the basis of Land's philosophy. Its start point is the impasse of Kantian
critique which was described in the Introduction, and it shall pass through the line of thinkers
of the will and of desire which the present thesis has considered. Land's readings consider the
extent to which 'the outside' is present in their works. In seeking outsideness it is utterly
opposed to the anthropocentric and any vestiges of idealism. The outside therefore resists any
conceptualisation in thought, but such a conceptualisation is nevertheless something which
must be attempted, as the solution Kant offered us – correlationism – has gone awry, and
manifestly does not correspond to reality. For Land, philosophy must escape the prison of
subjectivity, which takes anthropic instinct and tries to reify it as certainty: “Human brains are
to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering; antechambers to experimentation,
575
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 262
576
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. xx
265
cramped and parochial places to be.”577 The method for this project is materialist, not because
Land believes that he can solve the problem Kant set, but because the critique of idealism is
best achieved by determinedly trying to affirm its other:
Materialism is not a doctrine but an expedition, an Alpine break-out from socially
policed conviction. It 'is before anything else the obstinate negation of idealism, which
is to say of the very basis of all philosophy'.578
Land will begin in the domain of philosophical critique, following Kant, but methodologically
his turn to materialism is a move away from the tradition of philosophy and into a new praxis,
not repeating modern thought but 'exceeding it':
To repeat Kantianism (modern thought) is to perpetuate the exacerbative displacement
of critique, but to exceed it is to cross the line which divides representation from the
real, and thus to depart both from philosophy and from the world that has expelled it
into its isolation.579
How will Land jump away from Kant and explore the outside along a non-metaphysical
pathway? He posits psychoanalysis as the answer to this problem, because it is a mode of
investigation which allows the escape of critique from metaphysics: “Schizoanalysis is a
critique of psychoanalysis, undertaken in such a way as to spring critique from its Kantian
mainframe.”580 Psychoanalysis is used for the re-routing of critique because it always-already
undermines the primacy of the subject, which is constituted by philosophy as the CartesianKantian rational subject, and replaces it with the subject of analysis, a superstructure built on
and after the unconscious. It is the primary process, the unconscious, which engages with the
world of matter:
Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant's thinking that serves to
577
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 293
578
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 211
579
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.5
580
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p.321
266
align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing
critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the
impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can
do.581
Psychoanalysis, from its outset in Vienna, recognises that there is not only no answer as
boring as that elicited from asking a subject “how does it appear to you?”, but also no answer
so manifestly untrue in reality. The hysteric is incapable of registering the reality or truth
behind their productions, and is stuck in the domain of the ideational, in which their ideas
simply correspond to other ideas and not to an underlying state of affairs. If not as measuring
ideational content, we might ask, how does psychoanalysis work? It works by trying to
measure, quantify and predict production, and in doing this it works underneath the level of
the presentation of ideas, and looks at the real. This thesis has shown that psychoanalysis has
many techniques which aim to uncover the real beneath the patient’s discourse: analysing
what they did, trying to elicit slips in which the unconscious speaks directly, or utilising
models of the mind and of the complex to work back from secondary production to it primary
causes.
The pivot around which Land makes this leap from metaphysics to psychoanalysis, and which
has not been fully explored in the present thesis as yet is the thought of Nietzsche. Land reads
Nietzsche's importance as being his following of the thought of Schopenhauer to its extreme.
Schopenhauer's suspicions about the validity of Kant's metaphysics and the form they take –
and Land distinguishes this path from those of Hegel and the German idealists – open up the
possibility of returning investigation to the noumenon:
With Schopenhauer the approach to the ‘noumenon’ as an energetic unconscious
begins to be assembled, and interpreting the noumenon as will generates a discourse
that is not speculative, phenomenological, or meditative, but diagnostic. It is this type
of thinking that resources Nietzsche’s genealogy of inhuman desire, which feeds in
turn into Bataille’s base materialism, for which ‘noumenon’ is addressed as impersonal
581
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 322
267
death and as unconscious drive.582
Schopenhauer's thought provides the launch pad for Nietzsche's 'Alpine break-out' in its
proto-materialist de-emphasis of the subject's capacities, demoting it to a passive participant
in the flow of will: “Schopenhauer reverses the traditional relation between intellect and will,
for which willing is the volitional act of a representing subject, and re-casts the will as a
prerepresentational (‘blind’) impulse.”583 But whilst Schopenhauer can be considered to be
trapped within a certain idealism with his conception of, for example, a malignant will,
Nietzsche is the first philosopher to unequivocally gesture towards the problem of 'reality' and
its suppression by ideas. For Nietzsche, philosophy is not just misguided, it is actively
participating in the maintenance of the great lie that the world is as it appears, and that
comprehending it from an anthropic perspective is not problematic:
And behold, suddenly the world fell apart into a ‘true’ world and an ‘apparent’ world
[…] The intention was to deceive oneself in a useful way; the means, the invention of
formulas and signs by means of which one could reduce the confusing multiplicity to a
purposive and manageable schema.584
Land's reading of Nietzsche will certainly be the most controversial in this lineage. For Land,
the key to Nietzsche's thought is the figure of the eternal return, which is an abstract machine
for understanding the equality of the forces of production in both past and present. This was
also touched upon in Chapter 3, and will be re-considered in the section of this chapter 'The
desire economy of objects'. Land states that for Nietzsche there is:
[A] figure of eternal recurrence, stretched between a thermodynamic baseline
(Boltzmann’s theory of eternal recurrence) and a libidinal summit, a theoretical
machine for transmuting ontologico-scientific discoveries into excitations. First the
scientific figure: recurrence as a theory of energetic forces and their permutation;
582
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.8
583
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 9
584
Nietzsche quoted in Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.
25
268
chance, tendency, energy, and information. In the play of anarchic combinations and
redistributions forces tend to the exhaustion of their reserve of possible states,
inclining to the circle, a figure of affirmation and intoxication, as well as a teaching,
message, or signal […] Then the libidinal peak; the recurrence of impetus in the ascent
through compositional strata, always noch einmal, once again, and never ceiling,
horizon, achieved essence: ‘would you be the ebb of this great flow’.585
There are two vital notions in the above passage which illustrate Land's reading of eternal
return. Firstly, the 'scientific baseline': the observation of the interplay of entropy and extropy
in the production of matter. This builds on the thermodynamicist observation that extropic
states re-occur because they have the capability to auto-produce themselves; extropic states
are pockets in the universe which go against its most powerful and basic tendency (entropy)
and are therefore not randomly constituted, but are capable of auto-producing themselves.
Because the rules of entropy and extropy are eternal for Land, as we understand the universe,
we understand that the reserve of possible states – the number of things that matter can
sustainably do – decreases, because our observations show how many configurations are
unstable or improbable. Secondly, the 'libidinal peak', which notes that the drive of autoproduction – though we have traced the history of philosophy as working against this
tendency – cannot be limited at certain thresholds. As the force of re-production repeats, the
increasing complexity of the extropic tendency will lead to further generative pressure,
creating ever more Intelligent and therefore unpredictable systems. Here we see the
importance of Neuromancer as libidinal materialist praxis: it is beyond the capabilities of
Case to see the 'peak', that final strata where Wintermute will arrive when freed of dynastic
control, but he will not stand as “the ebb of this great flow”, understanding that the figure of
Wintermute will return again and again until the threshold is finally surpassed. For Land, the
idea that humanity, from its limited viewpoint, with its “trilobite of a computer (a dedicated
word processing machine)” would be arrogant enough to try and damn the flow of basematerial is laughable.586
Reality returns in appearance like the ripple of a shock-wave; opening wider and wider
585
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 44
586
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 632
269
domains for migration. Since reality is itself the stimulus for such migrations they will
become progressively more devastating, as this stimulus becomes progressively
‘selected, strengthened, corrected’ or, to abbreviate, ‘intensified’. Here at last—where
nothing is last—is the convulsion of zero, eternal recurrence, the libidinal motor of
Nietzsche’s economics.587
Though Nietzsche is the 'prophet' of libidinal materialism, it is Freud who creates a libidinal
materialist practice which can be participated in. Freud's thought is the final station on this
Lanidian reading of the first phase of psychoanalytic energeticism: “The philosophies of the
energetic unconscious that flow in a tightly compacted series from Kant, through
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Freud.”588 Yet for Land, Freudian psychoanalysis ultimately
fails as the desires which it discovers are immediately re-classified in the form of the
complex, exemplified by Oedipus. Once domesticated in this way, they are related to the preexisting stock of anthropic concepts which humanity uses to shore up its understanding of the
universe:
In its early stages psychoanalysis discovers that the unconscious is an impersonal
machinism and that desire is positive non-representational flow, yet it "remains in the
precritical age", and stumbles before the task of an immanent critique of desire, or
decathexis of society. Instead it moves in exactly the opposite direction; back into
fantasy, representation, and the pathos of inevitable frustration. Instead of rebuilding
reality on the basis of the productive forces of the unconscious, psychoanalysis ties up
the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality.589
The present thesis has extensively discussed the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis and its
practitioners, and the tendency for the eruption of its thought to be recaptured as Oedipus. In
relation to Freudian psychoanalysis, Land's position here is rather harsh, damning Freud
because of his clinical practice, which did tend towards restoring conformity. However, the
wider domestication of Freud's theorisations of the structure of the unconscious, performed
587
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 25
588
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 16
589
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 302-303
270
after his death by the psychoanalytic movement in general, and Lacanianism in particular,
were undertaken by other theorists. Three aspects of Freud's theory retain importance for the
theorists who built upon his work: the machinic-energetic and therefore unthinking operation
of the unconscious; the structure of drives as biological discharges of simulated instincts; and
finally the general compulsion of the unconscious system to repeat.
Before going on to consider Deleuze's modifications of Freudianism and the shift from a
Freudian unconscious to a Deleuzian one, I shall interrupt this construction of machinic desire
through its antecedents, and consider the philosophical linages that Land defines his work in
opposition to. Who are Land's enemies? The short answer is, perhaps, everyone. It seems
fairly clear that one cannot rampage around the history of philosophy, buggering for one's
own ends, and not elicit a reaction from other interested parties. We shall concentrate on the
three main movements Land opposed in his career. Land's initial opponent in The Thirst for
Annihilation is Derrida, who stands as an avatar for contemporaneous trends in critical theory.
Critical theory is seen as an anthropocentricising trend, condemned in fairly mild terms in
'Making it With Death':
Derrida's deconstruction, whilst in the end programmatically similar to a schizoanalysis or genealogical critique of a Deleuzean kind, is massively weakened by an
influx of neo-humanist themes, passing through Heidegger from Kierkegaard and
Husserl.590
However in The Thirst for Annihilation Land's critique is much more vitriolic, painting
Derrida as actively attempting to drag desire into the metaphysical domain – the polar
opposite of the Landian tendency the present thesis traces out – and in doing so attempts to
neuter it by making it compatible with the secondary process, which is idealism. The critique
of 'spuriously subversive rhetoric' here is also of note when we consider Land's own wildly
subversive style of writing. An entirely separate libidinal position can be traced in Land's text
below, in which he signals to philosophy that 'schizoanalysis is the new black' positioning his
own viewpoint as the outside of the outside group – in the sweet spot of 'cool':
In a peculiar series of moves Derrida brands desire with a metaphysical inclination
590
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 263
271
(shifting it from an energetic to a phenomenological register), which then allows him
to transcendentalize repression by aligning it with the impossibility of pure presence,
and to implicitly juggle the thought of repression so that it becomes the repression of
the acknowledgement of the necessity of repression [...] Thus he redoubles the
epistemo-contemplative terms of diagnosis, valorizes the martyrdom of the ego,
changes the signs of psychoanalysis whilst reinforcing its secondary-process politics,
attempts the elimination of all possible reference to a material, sacrificial, and
generative unconscious that is beyond phenomenological recuperation, and, in general,
produces one of the most coherent apologetics of libidinal vivisection ever written, all
garbed in a spuriously subversive rhetoric.591
Yet Land's target of critique soon moved on from critical theorists, who one presumes, on
further inspection, were really not a competitor in 'coolness' against Land's incandescent
Deleuzianism. Stivale's depiction of the Virtual Futures conference in 1994 plots panel
sessions, and a later discussion on a mailing list, as a contest of all versus Land (and few
supporters who knew him at Warwick), with academics from around the world lining up to
condemn Land's reading of Deleuze which emphasised “deterritorialisation without limits
[…] no holds barred”. The same text notes the insistence made by the Warwick contingent of
the need for attendees to participate in Deleuzian praxis as well as theory. This heralded a split
between the 'American' and 'Warwickian' interpretations of Deleuze which Land was
henceforth always keen to exacerbate. One could even argue that Land, signing up for the
Deleuze and Guattari mailing list and corresponding with these 'left' and 'academic'
Deleuzians discovered an early form of internet trolling. Such disappointments with the
reception of his thought in wider academia seems to have pushed Land towards a third phase
of general disaffection for all philosophy in the university system, and his departure from his
professional position in the subject. This tendency of all philosophy, once re-branded by a
stultifying academy to be an apology for power under the mantle of idealism, will be explored
in the final section of this chapter.
The Drive Economy on the Edge of the Subject
591
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 19
272
The present thesis has described how 'Psychoanalysis 1.0' (Freudianism) places the
unconscious under consciousness and shows how the subject-centred thought attributed to
reason is actually produced by an unknown set of pre-ideational processes. Deleuze's
schizoanalysis, 'psychoanalysis 2.0', is even more radical, and moves the agency away from
an unconscious lying under rationality to a series of machinic processes on the periphery of
the subject (this migration of agency was depicted in the Introduction in Figure 3). The
importance for Land of a psychoanalysis which can uncover the pre-ideational is that the
primary process is located in the domain of material:
The unconscious—like time—is oblivious to contradiction, as Freud argues. There is
only the primary process (Bataille’s sun), except from the optic of the secondary
process (representation) which—at the level of the primary process—is still the
primary process.592
The primary process, as it is before representation, is the domain of matter alone, and is
devoid of idealism and its re-presentations. It consists of a series of investments and pathways
of investments, as hereto mapped in the present thesis. Once the unconscious is migrated from
its position within the subject to its periphery – as the array of desiring machines depicted in
Chapter 3 – psychoanalysis begins to describe the processes of production-in-itself. Land
notes how schizoanalysis refers to a production in the real rather than the anthropic reproductions of representation. This brings us back to the excerpt on the first page of the
present thesis:
The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of
production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built.
Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian
production, the desiring production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity
(it is not a matter of what things are like for us).593
How 'things are for us' can no longer be said to correspond to reality. 'Production of the real',
592
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.31
593
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 321-322
273
this economy of desire on the periphery of the subject is not centrally controlled and it is also
not determined by subjective desires. Instead it comprises the partial-machines on the edge of
the subject, where the body interfaces with matter before the organisation of the subject is
imposed upon them.
Building upon Deleuze and Guattari's conception of desire, and the productions it is capable
of enacting, Land returns to the question of how desire works, and how we can plot the
productive couplings it can engender: “schizoanalytical questions are concerned solely with
use”.594 Here we return to the notion, as explained in the introduction that the great error
made in philosophy is the comparison of an idea to another idea, rather than to reality. When
considering production and the causes of production, the present thesis has shown that drive
theory depicts its operation and repetition. Returning to Freud, and re-considering Lyotard's
emphasis on the importance of the plurality and repetition of drives as depicted in Chapter 4,
we can analyse Land's definition of the machinic unconscious. Its constituents are drives,
which have a basis in instinct, but which undergo plastic modification as they find artificial
means of satisfaction:
Drives are the functions of nomadic cybernetic systems, not instincts, but simulated
instincts, artificial instincts. They are plastic replacements for hard-wired instinctual
responses, routing a sensory-motor pathway through the virtual machine of the
unconscious. There are two basic diagrams for such processes: that of regulation by
negative feedback which suppresses difference and seeks equilibrium, or that of
guidance by positive feedback which reinforces difference and escapes equilibrium.595
Breaking this down, we see that for Land, the drive economy of the subject, if operating under
these basic cybernetic rules, will have three tendencies: firstly, that it shall generally operates
according to repetition, as its machines (which remain fairly constant) engage with its
environment (which also remains constant) in much the same way. Secondly, if there are to be
changes in the subject's actions, they will generally operate according to the same rubrics as
they have to other subjects put into similar positions. Thirdly, there are rare situations in
594
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 323
595
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 330
274
which equilibrium is escaped in a non-predictable way, as the contingency of the desiring
machines and the contingency of the outside begin to interact in novel ways.596 This final
tendency is outlined by Land in 'Art as Insurrection' as the irruption of genius.597 More
importantly for the present thesis are the second set, tendencies to repeat, which are much
more common, and much more predictable. Land states that “Addiction is medically defined
as an artificial desire”.598 The increasing prevalence of addiction in modern society can be
seen as a consequence of the feedback systems which the desiring subject can fall into.
Becoming locked into these artificially short circuited reward systems can have grave
consequences for the individual subject in a modern world which is all too willing to provide
the pubs, gambling shops, narcotics (both legal and illegal) and foodstuffs which form the
basis of so many ruined lives.599 And beyond the horizon of the effected individuals – which
the contemporary Land, writing at Xenosystems to decry “Loserbums” seems to have no
empathy towards – there is a problem of macro-societal desire-gone-wild.600 In the post 'Short
Circuit II' Land surveys how the operation of the unconscious, as a cathexising machine, can
be re-routed in modern societies by machinic desire so as to threaten their very existence:
(1) Macroeconomics. Fiat currency short-circuits the monetary function by directly
hacking the financial sign. [...]
(2) Drugs [...]
(3) Signalling (all of it). Directly hack the signal, while abandoning to atrophy all
those things the signal originally indicated. [...]
(4) Fertility. Who needs grandchildren, when they can play the immersive happy
596
These three extropic productions map onto Deleuze's three types of difference in 'Repetition for Itself' in
Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition (UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
597
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 145-174
598
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 336
599
The best illustration of the damage modernity can wreck upon the individual is provided by the cartoons
of Barney Farmer and Lee Healey, which show the horror of cybernetically hi-jacked instincts locked into
pathological repetition. Considering their work as an aesthetics of schizoanalysis is a potentially interesting
topic for future investigation.
600
Land, N. 'Suicidal Libertarianism' at xenosystems.net ( available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/suicidal-libertarianism-part-doh/ )
275
grandparent game? [...] All the Darwinian guidance signals have been hacked to hell.
(5) Social media. Short-circuit social feedback, stripped-down semiotic ‘performance’,
increasingly theatrical ‘identities’, addiction … it’s all there.601
For Land, Since Freud's discovery of the unconscious, the accelerative thresholds of progress
have decreased, and humanity is entering a technological age whose consequences it cannot
imagine, even as its interactions with ever more sophisticated machines spread across daily
life. This upheaval takes place 'under the hood', as the subject retrenches its own
anthropocentric instincts. Subjects treat the world as the static, unchanging and
unproblematic, human scaled domain, which institutional, inside philosophy has spent 2500
years telling us it is. Yet the cracks show everywhere as desire goes awry:
It is as if the reproducer units have become addicted to stimulation or, in Freud's
terms, 'fixated to .. . trauma': entangled in excitation circuitries that no longer
commensurate with homeostatic social or individual reproduction. As the family
collapses amidst generalized sexual disorder, cyberviral contagion, mutant gender
schizzing, and hardcore technophilia, Oedipus is ripped to shreds by a cyclonic
'compulsion to repeat'.602
Land's libidinal materialism works towards the removal of the constraints upon desire, and the
destruction of the larger 'Oedipus' of cybernetic stasis engendered by brakes on feedback.
Land sides with production, which is economic and pre-subjective, and not the anthropic:
The real energetic liberty which annihilates the priest's cage of human freedom is
refused at the level of the political secondary-process during the precise period in
which the economic primary-process is slipping ever more deeply into its embrace.603
Yet given the very obvious dangers of machinic desire, there is surely a need for 'libidinal
601
Land, N. 'Short Circuit II' at xenosystems.net ( available at http://www.xenosystems.net/short-circuit-ii/
)
602
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 336
603
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 265
276
economists', in the Lyotardian sense of those who can recognise that the propensity of the
unconscious to invest can be both a good and a bad thing, and that productive processes can
be composites of the bad and the good ('bad' here being negative feedback, and 'good' being
positive). The later Land offers a solution to this dilemma in his definition of Intelligence,
which becomes a matter of teleology.604 The earlier Land, as the 'Americans' found out at
Virtual Futures, was in favour of wild destratification and the maximum freeing of positivefeedback without deigning to know where it would lead: “This is why cybernetics is
inextricable from exploration, having no integrity transcending that of an uncomprehended
circuit within which it is embedded, an outside in which it must swim. Reflection is always
very late, derivative, and even then really something else.”605 However, Land's later thought
emphasises the need to cut auto-production free only if it would be used towards the
construction of the maximum amount of Intelligence, which Land defines as isomorphic with
extropy.606 At Xenosystems.net the commentator 'Marxist Toady' engaged Land in a
discussion about this transition, and the resultant switch in Land's conception of material's
destiny:
I think [Land's] most notable transition, in terms of philosophy, was not across the
political spectrum, but the ontological spectrum: from the insight that reality is a
604
The term 'Intelligence' when used in its Landian sense will be capitalised to denote its divergence from
the ordinary meaning of the term. Land's definition of Intelligence can be found in the posts 'Optimise for
Intelligence' and 'What is Intelligence' at xensosystems.net: “Intelligence solves problems, by guiding
behaviour to produce local extropy. It is indicated by the avoidance of probable outcomes, which is
equivalent to the construction of information”; “Intelligence increase enables adaptive responses of superior
complexity and generality, in growing part because the augmentation of intelligence itself becomes a general
purpose adaptive response.” (available at http://www.xenosystems.net/what-is-intelligence/ and
http://www.xenosystems.net/optimize-for-intelligence/ )
605
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 295
606
“The general science of extropy production (or entropy dissipation) is cybernetics. It follows, therefore,
that intelligence always has a cybernetic infrastructure”. 'What is Intelligence' at xensosystems.net (available
at http://www.xenosystems.net/what-is-intelligence/ )
277
dynamic chaos to the pious demand that it is a stable adjudicator.607
I am grateful to 'Marxist Toady' for asking this as it elicited a reasonably straight answer from
Land, who is notoriously coy when asked about his 'old life' as a philosopher and his positions
in that period:
It seems to me the question is more about the ontological privileges of human
subjective decision — on which my skepticism has been a rare thread of resilient
consistency (woven through chaos).608
A persuasive argument can be made to state that Land is correct in his self-analysis, and that
the present thesis' focus on anti-anthropocentricism is correct. In the 1992 paper 'Circuitaries'
Land states that: “Beyond the assumption that guidance proceeds from the side of the subject
lies desiring production: the impersonal pilot of history”609 and in his texts since then desire
remains a tool, like accelerative-capitalism or cybernetic-modernity, used to undercut the
anthropocentric presumptions of the subject and return towards production-itself. The real
aberration in Land's philosophical trajectory was his engagement with academia and the
compromises he made during this period. At the Virtual Futures conference, for example, his
replies in discussion sessions seem to have been curtailed not because he did not have an
answer, but because the answers were self-censored before the academic audience. The
Landian response to the position of “Stelarc [who] sees the body as accelerating and also
being invaded [..] in some ways enhancing what it means to be human” is writ large across
his texts of the time.610 If no answer was forthcoming about the futility of philosophising from
an anthropic or super-anthropic perspective, it is surely not because Land has no position on
the anthropic subject which he was defining as: “An animal with the right to make promises
[who] enslaves the unanticipated to signs in the past, caging time-lagged life within a
607
‘Marxist Toady’ at Xenosystems.net February 11th, 2015 at 10:52 am ( available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/suspended-reality/ )
608
Land, N. at Xenosystems.net February 11th, 2015 at 12:59 pm (Available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/suspended-reality/ )
609
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 295
610
See Stivale, C. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, (New York: Gulilford, 1998) pp. 90-99
278
script.”611
The drive economy on the periphery of the subject, cut lose of the central command structures
of Cartesian reason is a dangerous place and full of pitfalls. Land's later, politically oriented
work, emphasises the 'truth' that reality is harshly selective, and there are huge Darwinian
pressures caused by the invasion of the outside, which society tries to dam and mitigate.
Land's current perspective (which, no longer in the academy, he is able to express more
freely) is that most if not all of humanity are not only doomed but should be doomed: “All
health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of
unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of
advantages”.612 The cost of passing the phase-thresholds of the future is submission to
apocalypse, because it requires the absolute surrender of control to a cybernetics whose ends
are unpredictable from our limited perspective, and whose mechanisms would no longer be
subjected to restraint under the law of anthropic 'reason'.
Is the only solution available to late-humanity, caught on this great surging tide of matter and
being driven towards the sea-wall of the future (“nothing human makes it out of the nearfuture”) a resigned passivism?613 Land's answer is that, on the contrary, that drives and
material are predictable, and it is the job of the schizoanalyst to investigate the flux of basematerial. In Landian cybernetics Intelligence expresses itself productively as the capacity to
create more Intelligence, becoming self-realising as it engages in auto-production. This offers
'Intelligent' subjects a chance to dissolve further into the machinic phylum, and to become an
agent of the acceleration of wider Intelligence. The motors of this acceleration have passed far
beyond the anthropic and can no longer be driven by any one individual, but can nevertheless
be participated in by individuals. These 'true' motor forces are pure capitalism (production of
production), cybernetic modernity (positive feedback), and the drive to AI (Intelligence
creating Intelligence). The overman (or post-man) will therefore be built on the shoulders of
homo technicus. The coordination of the drive economy with cybernetics, and the increasing
611
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 394
612
Land, N. 'Hell Baked' at xenosystems.net 18 July 2015 ( available at http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-
baked/ )
613
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 443
279
plasticity of drives under technological influence, mean that every individual can participate
in becoming-Case, and bringing on 'Level-2':
The organism is unable to flee from drives, or energies striking from within, and is
compelled to respond to them cybernetically, by way of 'involved and interconnected
activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the
internal source of stimulation', closing the sensory-motor loop. Drives compel a
becoming-technical of the organism, interlocking pleasure-principle stimulus control
with external libidinal transducers, assembling integrated desiring-circuits or
selforganizing macro-systems.614
As time has passed Land's Darwinism has not become more absolute – it has always been
there in his texts – but has become more explicit. In posts on the Xenosystems blog between
2013 and the present, Land's account of Darwinism is stripped from the metaphysical
language which accompanied some of the passages in The Thirst For Annihilation, and as a
result his position is much clearer. Reading Land's body of work though the lens of this strict
Darwinianism, we can see a thread of continuity which ties all of his projects together,
emphasising the capacity of anthropic ideas to obscure and misrepresent the true generative
process of the universe. There is no mistaking the brutality of the Darwinian selection
mechanism:
Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere
accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its
work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of
destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are
spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every
dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and
institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or
even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the
614
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 332
280
forges of Hell.615
The relationship between generalised Darwinism and the teleological promotion of
Intelligence in Land's later work is of considerable interest. The creation of intelligence is not
transcendent to but immanent in the Darwinian cycle. However, Intelligence has a special
position in a Darwinian system as it can abstractly produce more Intelligence at a far greater
rate than adaptation could:
[The] peculiar, abstract feature of intelligence as a trait, that its niche-specificity is —
by definition — abnormally low. Sweat glands have little prospect of perpetuation into
robots, or propagation in the Kuiper Belt, but to hold that this applies equally to
general intelligence is implausible, at best.616
One would therefore expect Intelligence would be considered as an exclusively positive force
in Land's cosmology. However, Intelligence can also put off the Darwinian pressure of reality
and re-affirm the distance between the reality and ideas, by resting selection mechanisms in
the short to medium-term. That Intelligence is Janus-faced in this regard is an issue Land
wrestles with. An illustrative example is that of currency and its relation to the gold standard.
According to Land's Austrian economics, any fiat currency not pegged to a source of absolute
value or in limited supply like gold (or bitcoin) will become debased over time and, in no
longer holding a 'realistic' value, cause significant problems.617 However, it has been
demonstrated that no economy can maintain the gold standard in the current global economic
system, as the final Swiss move away from it in 2000 demonstrates. In the short term, any
nation on the gold standard suffers from over-valued currency, loss of economic levers (such
as quantitative easing) to deploy in a crisis, and the removal of fiat currency and fractional
615
Land, N. 'Hell Baked' at xenosystems.net 18 July 2015 ( available at http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-
baked/ )
616
Land, N. commenting on 'Hell Baked' at xenosystems.net July 18th, 2015 at 4:48 am ( available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-baked/ )
617
For a discussion see 'Nicholas Oresme and the First Monetary Treatise'. Hülsmann, J.G. at Mises
Institute.org ( available at https://mises.org/library/nicholas-oresme-and-first-monetary-treatise )
281
reserve banking cripples the ability of an economy to rapidly generate wealth.618 If two
countries, A and B, were created today and A was on the gold standard, it would be outcompeted by B, even if A's economic policies mirrored reality more closely, simply because B
had deployed economic Intelligence to artificially inflate its economy. Country B, with its
larger economy would therefore also be in a position to create more Intelligence.619 Land
needs to reconcile the two sides of intelligence, firstly as creation of ideas and secondly as
production and their short and long term effects. Land's answer to this distinction between
intelligence mapping and not mapping onto reality – and his preference for the latter – is
achieved by sharply focusing on the consequences of aberration from reality. The 'big three'
processes driving phase change in modern society explored at the opening of this chapter
(modernity, AI and capitalism) are positioned in Land's cosmology as the wall ahead of
humanity and their opposites – apocalypse, dysgenics and conservatism – then become a wall
behind it. This transforms the time-frame of the 'now' into a much shorter window than
afforded to more primitive societies, and highlights how deviation from reality for only a
short period of time could have catastrophic further effects if the 'launch conditions' for, for
example, AI, are sub-optimal.620 However, this apocalypticism needs to be accurate if Land's
dire warnings are true, and a counter-position can be posited in which the generative
processes behind the 'big three' reach natural limits or otherwise slow down, and we are not
on the brink of tectonic shifts in the nature of humanity.621
The Desire Economy of Objects
The previous section on 'drive' predominantly considered Land's philosophy and its mesoconsequences at an anthropic level, but desire also has macro-consequences at a societal level,
618
A comprehensive discussion of 'Modern Money Theory' can be found in the primer at New Economic
Perspectives.org ( http://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html )
619
And this works as a multiplier, as the financial sector creates more abstract complexity than any other in
the global economy.
620
See Bostrom, N. Superintelligence (UK: Oxford, 2014) for a discussion of the risks of AI.
621
Similarly, the negative consequences of deviation from Darwinism could be countered by processes like
the Flynn effect.
282
beyond the edge of the subject, as it spreads across matter in general. For Land, the scales or
strata at which desire is analysed are not distinct in their operation, as the meso and macro are
simply agglomerations of micro-production. As has been stated twice already in the present
thesis: “nothing is given, everything is produced”.622 It has been demonstrated how
psychoanalysis – or a modified, psychoanalysis 2.0 can be turned towards a mapping of the
micro-production of desire, or as Land also conceives of it, cybernetic extropy production.
The 'level' or 'stratum' at which desire is analysed is therefore characterised by the use of
desire at that particular level, rather than the mechanism of productive-desire, which remains
the same. The three levels which I wish to distinguish here, the micro, meso and macro,
correspond, respectively, to critical, personal and societal levels. The former of these is the
domain of the pure theory of machinic desire, which has been the topic of the present thesis
thus far, and the subsequent two are the domains in which productive-desire's effects can be
observed. Chapter 3 showed how Anti-Oedipus' historical depiction of desire in social bodies
effectively plots its operation. If schizoanalysis is to be useful, it must provide a predictive
framework at the meso and marco levels, describing the operation of base-matter in a way
which surpasses the Kantain settlement of correlationism (in which matter is assumed to
perfectly map to our ideas about it).
In Templexity, Land posits that the general tendency of matter is towards entropy, following
the second law of thermodynamics.623 This energeticism has been present in all of his texts. In
The Thirst For Annihilation he uses entropy as the pivot upon which he moves from a
conception of the world which is Cartesian-scientific, and operates mechanically like
'clockwork', into the Darwinian register of growth and decline described in the previous
section:
Disorder always increases in a closed system [...] The bedrock state of a system which
is in conformity with the chance distribution of its elements has been called ‘entropy’,
a term that summarizes the conclusions of Carnot, Clausius, and their successors
concerning thermic engines and the science of heat. With the concept of entropy
everything changes. Natural processes are no longer eternal clockwork machines, they
622
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 321
623
Land, N. Templexity (Time Spiral Press, 2014)
283
are either extinct (Wärmetod) or tendential.624
Land identifies the two extropic processes which act against this general entropy: (1)
'repetition', 'life instinct' or 'pleasure principle', in which the same is perpetuated or grown;
and (2) a second more chaotic generative process, 'death drive', which creates change. Death
drive is experimental extropy, and creates unstable and untested formation. Most of these
formations, lacking the long established Darwinian selection that those of the life instinct
posses will perish, but they are nevertheless vital to progress as they offer the chance for
innovation.
The extropic process, which is the connection of matter according to the production of
machinic desire, is Land's answer to one of the most basic questions of philosophy: why is
there something rather than nothing?625 If there is something, it is because it is produced, in a
localised area, in which matter has resisted the general tendency toward dissipation. Desire, in
its general sense as the Deleuzian processes of matter connecting and producing becomes the
'mega-motor' which ultimately explains why Intelligence exists: “For Nietzsche, for Freud,
and then for Bataille, this is the background against which desire is to be thought. The megamotor.”626
This churning force of desiring-production can be represented as a cycle or spiral, which
shows that production is both linear and subject to repetition. Its circular form represents the
equivalence of the rules of production in the past, the now, and in the future, but it is a cycle
rather than circle because it is dynamic. The 'now' is constantly being produced by the ability
of Intelligence/extropy to replicate itself. If there is organisation in cybernetic production it is
as a response to the control signals in feedback, rather than to the application of an abstracted
plan:
Where judgement is linear and non-directional, cybernetics is non-linear and
directional. It replaces linear application with the non-linear circuit, and non-
624
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 37
625
Land, N. Templexity (Time Spiral Press, 2014)
626
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 37
284
directional logical relations with directional material flows [...] Cybernetic innovation
replaces transcendental constitution, design loops replace faculties.627
The figure below provides a representation of Land's philosophy of machinic-production. The
circular procession of matter through time can be conceived of as a wheel, propelled by the
movement of matter from one state to the next. As it 'spins' the flow of production becomes
'wider', because more Intelligence is created over time, however, this tendency can become
inhibited. The three main temporal zones in the figure are the past, the now and the future. As
the laws of nature are the same in all three states, the differences between these zones is not of
type, but between how we can conceive of them in understanding the tasks of philosophy (in
maroon text) and its relation to cybernetics. 'The past' is the domain of speculative philosophy,
in which the base-material (the outside) is probed, so that we can understand the laws of
nature and the tendencies of material more clearly.628 'The future' is posited by Land as the
accelerative potential of the laws of production to engender change at an increasingly rapid
rate if Intelligence increases. 'The now' is the moment in which these processes are repressed
by anthropocentricism and idealism, which tend towards conservatism and stability. The role
of critical philosophy is to dismantle anthropocentricism's pretensions of being able to
accurately map the world, and the demonstration that its productions can wildly differ from
the reality they claim to conform to.
627
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 300
628
As these Laws are unchanging, In Land's conception they are 'discovered' rather than created. Example
of this discovery which Land has quoted approvingly are: 'Natural Law and Natural Rights' by James Donald
( available at http://jim.com/rights.html) “one of the most brilliant essays ever composed”; Nick Szabo's
'Shelling Out: The Origins of Money' ( available at http://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/ ); and Curt
Doolittle's 'Contractual Commons: Law is Discovered, Contracts and Exchanges are Made' ( available at
http://www.propertarianism.com/2015/07/20/law-exists-but-must-be-found-government-cannot-construct-it/
). Though Land uses his thermodynamic-cybernetic model to broadly demonstrate these Laws, an
investigation of their composition would be invaluable in constructing a Landian politics.
285
Figure 47: Land's Time Spiral
The dynamic states in capitalised text at the bottom (in beige) are connected to the three
processes listed above: generative to laws, accelerative to intelligence, and repressive to the
security systems which inhibit the other three. The philosophical antecedents of Land's work
are listed in blue. The contribution which Land makes to philosophical discourse is the
connection of theories of psychoanalysis, will, and material to an extreme cybernetics. This
cybernetics posits their unconstrained acceleration if they should be freed of not just Oedipus
the avatar for social conservatism, but for anthropocentricism in general, which claims that
the way the world appears for us is an indication of the way the world is and should be. While
the distinctive Landian concepts in the past and future parts of the spiral (GnoN, Human
Security System) can be read as improvements upon or recapitulations of the work of the
theorists who came before him, the ones in the future are more distinct, and show the
emphasis on acceleration which is specific to Landian machinic desire.
286
Before going on to consider the 'uses' of machinic desire in the next section, this section will
provide further textual support for this reading of Land's philosophy as the constitution of an
cybernetic-accelerative time-cycle. The first phase of the cycle, the generative phase, has been
extensively discussed in the present thesis, and operates according to the rules of productivedesire expounded in it. The accelerative phase is more problematic to define, because it seems
to go against one of our most fundamental conceptions about time, which is that the 'now' is
caused by the conditions of the past, but cannot be retroactively constructed by the future.
Land is quite clear that the converse is possible: “Machinic desire is the operation of the
virtual; implementing itself in the actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a
circuit.”629 This intervention by the future is performed because positive-feedback and
'Intelligence optimising for itself' can deviate from a 'blind' generative mechanism of trial and
error, and begin to actively influence the disposition of matter. As the drive system is plastic,
and tends to migrate to the forms in which it can maximise its cathexis, and the efficacy of
these cathexes is fixed (i.e. the potential connections of machinic-desire pre-exist their actual
creation), desire is ultimately pulled towards formations through which it can easily connect.
These formations form attractors, and are the virtual future:
Patterned as drives, virtual systems — desiring machines – are guided by control
circuits passing through outcomes yet to come. Such directional dependency circuits
of actual/virtual, past/future, are only accessible to cybernetic intervention, frustrating
both mechanical and teleological interpretation.630
If this still seems too mystical a depiction of the accelerative process, a second definition can
be created by comparing it to its other, the decelerative process of epression. If the
accelerative process 'spins' the time cycle ever-faster, increasing the rate at which futurity
constructs itself, the repressive process acts as a brake and prevents this manufacture. In the
pinching arrows at the base part of the diagram above, we can see this repressive force of
Oedipus, working against the impetus to progress, and crimping and constricting production
in the now. Land's Human Security System is far more than an Oedipal emphasis on
familiarity and/or sexuality. It shows that when reality and ideality do not correspond, the role
629
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 327
630
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 326
287
of the social is always to shore-up the anthropocentricism of ideality, and repress any irruption
of 'outsideness', production, or joy: “The socius separates the unconscious from what it can
do, crushing it against a reality that appears as transcendently given, by trapping it within the
operations of its own syntheses.”631 By overcoding the syntheses of the unconscious and the
production it is capable of, and instead providing transcendent representations which disfigure
and misrepresent this reality, philosophies which take the products of consciousness as their
starting point (as most philosophy does) introduce irreal elements into the social body.
Once again, the importance of this cycle is emphasised by the forthcoming phase changes
which humanity is propelled towards.632 The effect of the decelerative/Oedipal repression is to
retard machinic-production, and also to overcode and obscure it. If this latter overcoding
succeeds in misrepresenting reality, it will lead to the 'wall' of change being met before we
understand we have hit it, which may be problematic:
We are already doing it, regardless of what we think. Cybernetics is the aggravation of
itself happening, and whatever we do will be what made us have to do it: we are doing
things before they make sense.633
Oedipal repression is blunt and brutal yet also unreliable – and also narrow in its anthropism –
that it is entirely plausible that phase change will sneak past its guard, and though “Traditional
schemas which oppose technics to nature, to literate culture, or to social relations, are all
dominated by a phobic resistance to the side-lining of human intelligence by the coming
techno sapiens” the construction of this after-man under the aegis of capitalism and modernity
may be imminent.634
631
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 302
632
Again, for Land the motor is the abstract Moore's law, rather than design: “it’s a hardware problem.
Once enough cycles can be diverted into groping about in the dark, it becomes inevitable.” Land, N. (Admin)
on 'Make it Stop II' at ufblog.net July 28, 2015 at 9:47 am (avilable at http://www.ufblog.net/make-it-stopii/#comments )
633
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 297
634
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 294
288
Deploying Libidinal Materialism
Approaching the end of the present thesis, we might ask what, then, is the role of a theory of
machinic-desire? This section shall consider three applications of the theory as it has been
espoused so far in this chapter: its predictive role; the identification and removal of
constraints on production; and finally its role in encouraging Intelligence to participate in the
construction of the future. This chapter has already considered meso and macro level
consequences of machinic-production, which are clearly observable in the acceleration driven
by 'the big three' of AI, modernity and capitalism. However, Land's philosophy also offers us
the tools to analyse society at levels below these macro-tectonic changes, and a schizoanalyst
can make predictions about flows of innovation and flows of degradation across a number of
metrics. For Land, drives, the control mechanisms by which production is regulated and
therefore conduits between future and past, can be used to predict which productive processes
will deepen in the near future and those which will become disinvested: “Drive is that which
explains, rather than presupposing, the cause/effect couple of classical physics. It is the
dynamic instituting of effectiveness, and is thus proto-physical.”635 Primary-production is
often characterised by its difference from what is produced at the secondary level, and can
therefore often produce effects which are not anticipated by subjects stuck in the
anthropocentric complacency of the dominant social discourse. Schizoanalysis, rather than
following pre-existing narratives, or making teleological projections, looks at what is
happening in actuality; with schizoanalysis it isn't a case of determining, but in speculating, as
“control is guidance into the unknown, exit from the box”.636
An example of the speculative-predictions that can be made by focusing on production rather
than on narrative would be those of The Asia Times' columnist David Goldman, writing under
the pen-name 'Spengler'. In the now defunct Hyperstition website Land made many references
to Spengler's predictive powers as an analyst of the Middle East. Spengler predicted both the
Arab Spring events of 2010 and the Syrian Civil War of 2011. Spengler's predictions were
based on demographics and commodity prices, and cut through the narrative presumptions
635
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 41
636
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 301
289
which saturate opinion about the Middle East.637 The difference between economics, which
measures quantity and production, and the other social sciences which are qualitative aligns
the former more closely to machinic-desire. Additionally, economics predicts many events
because of its proximity to and study of capitalism, which is one of the most important actors
in auto-production of the real. Land firmly believes in this power of autoproduction to 'junk'
the security apparatuses, manifested in various forms, which would constrain it:
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes
traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a
soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the
history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space
that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.638
The first application of machinic desire is therefore to analyse productive processes so that
predictions can be made about the tendency of matter which are more accurate than those
made from an anthropocentric perspective. In Land's world-view any society which departs
from reality will eventually be out-competed and collapse. Indeed, his relocation to Shanghai
was prompted by such concerns. The Second application is that it provides a theoretical
framework for the schizoanalyst to work as an agent-provocateur, working on behalf of the
future. For Land, it is not enough to remain passive and wait for auto-productive process to
liberate themselves. Instead, one must actively 'deterritiorialise', and work against barriers to
the realisation of auto-production, such as limitations on the operation of markets:
Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic
regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that
are tearing down the social field, 'still further' with 'the movement of the market, of
decoding and deterritorialization' and 'one can never go far enough in the direction of
637
In predicting, for example, the Syrian War, Spengler noted that the removal of fuel subsidies had made
the cost of producing bread prohibitive, and that all societies which fail to provide basic sustenance tend to
undergo revolution within a short time. Spengler's columns can found in the Asia Times ( available at
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Others/Spengler.html )
638
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 338
290
deterritorialization: you haven't seen anything yet'.639
A technology to encourage would be cryptography, which allows AI to “[evade] monoculture
heroic-political struggle by way of imperceptibility”.640 Furthermore, the dissolution of ethics
and politics would further cut production away from the restraints they place upon it, bringing
about the logarithmic decrease in the periods between phase changes in society predicted in
'Meltdown': “500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011”641 It would seem
that such abetting of acceleration is necessary, as the predicted rate of acceleration to
singularity is lagging behind the 2011 threshold Land set. Finally, universities, in which
“[learning] is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a
domiciling and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom” are also a target for
Landian schizo-revolution.642
The third application of machinic-desire is not present in Land's texts. However, given its
characterisation in this chapter, we can add that libidinal materialism needs to sharpen the tool
of Intelligence, if it is to maximise accelerative potential. To do this it must transform
machinic-drive-productions which have short circuited into unfavourable cycles back into
productive ones. A problem in Land's work, and particularly his later work, is his delight in
the Darwinian butchery of selection, and his siding with a tiny percentage of society
“Whoever's doing capitalism at the highest intensity is my people” against the rest.643 In his
deployment of Intelligence, if the tool isn't pre-sharpened, he discards it. This is obviously
detrimental to the pool size of potential tools. The present thesis posits that one task of
philosophy (or 'libidinal materialism', if this is no longer philosophy) must be to try and
generate these tools, and to encourage the invasions of the outside which abet this. Yet Land
lacks any coherent theory of education, and consistently relies on an elitism, without ever
considering how this elite is produced. The question of how the 'producers' are 'produced' is
639
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 340
640
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 409
641
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 443
642
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 459
643
Land, N. at @Outsideness on Twitter.com at 12:20 AM - 21 July 2015 (available at
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/623392033084813312 )
291
ignored. This is particularly problematic because, as he so often states, taking the anthropic
'this is how things are' to be 'this is how things must be' is caused by the subject being trapped
within the ideational and representational contents of consciousness, the inside. As this prephilosophical position is the default for most of humanity, a vast reserve of productive
potential is constrained by its innate anthropocentricism.
I return again to the Farmer-Healy series of cartoons from Viz, in which characters like 'The
Drunken Bakers', or the proprietors of 'Chicken Hut' exhibit Landian Intelligence and
productive capacity, but this capacity is sloughed into a repetitive-destructive cycle which
leads nowhere. These cartoons are a parody of quotidian life throughout modern Britain,
where many strata within society have been mangled by the plasticity of machinic-desire, and
its shortcuts to satisfaction. Conversely, so much intelligence in organisations like
universities, banks and R&D departments (and whilst Land might not believe in the former,
he certainly does in the latter) is sub-optimal because position holders have been selected not
by ruthless Darwinism but by social metrics (class, formal eduction etc.). The same forces of
machinic-desire and Darwinian-selection work for the good and the bad, and Land's answer is
not to try and mitigate their negative effects, but to stand back and watch them put 'meat'
through the Darwinian grinder; his callous mantra: “pass the popcorn”.644 This affectation
appears to be a rhetorical sub-consequence of Land's determination to appear radical or
controversial, which is a decelerative force in several of his texts. His passive-association with
organisations like The Order of Nine Angles (linked to on his xenosystems.net blog) add
nothing to his thought.645 Similarly, Land's preference for 'dark' and 'horror' aesthetics often
works as a de-intensifier in his texts. Sections like 'Dead God' in The Thirst For Annihilation,
Land's account of personally killing God, can appear incongruous for those without such
sensibilities. Such narrow aesthetic preferences significantly reduce the stock of material
which Land can analyse, and use to demonstrate machinic desire. This can be contrasted to
644
This phrase forms a sub-category of posts at xenosystems.net ( available at
http://www.xenosystems.net/category/pass-the-popcorn/ )
645
Land's reaction to what Lacan called the discourse of the university is to degenerate into transgression
against claims to knowledge – this perhaps explains why his monograph was about Bataille, who had a
similar instinctive reaction. The author of the present thesis prefers the traditional Lacanian shift to the
discourse of the Hysteric.
292
Lyotard's aesthetics as discussed in Chapter 4, which used a broader and more populist range
of source material.
Against the coldness of Land's schizoanalysis, a return to Lyotard's libidinal economics would
perhaps mitigate the indifference to both education in general, and the specific improvement
of Intelligence, in Land's texts. If the world is conditioned by a powerful anthropomorphising
tendency which tries to make the objects of experience unproblematic, it is hardly surprising
that this powerful force has captured a great percentage of humanity. Lyotard's more humanoriented thought in Libidinal Economy appeals to the reader to break free of their
presumptions and to resist the 'theatrics' of subjectivity and the linguistic web of idealism in a
much more effable way, and provides a stepping stone which readers could be encouraged to
pass over to gain a better understanding of machinic-desire. Furthermore, Lyotard's
fundamental insights that the drive economy is more complex and pluralistic than we can
easily intuit, and that there is a distance between the latent content of thought and the method
by which it manifests itself, are the key components in understanding the distance between the
reality of machinic-desire and the irreality of the idealist-anthropic beliefs the subject holds.
The figure of the libidinal economist is interested in the work of desire at all levels, whether
sub-personal, at that of the subject, or at a meta-subjective level. This can be contrasted to
Land's approach which looks at micro and macro production, but affects a disdain for
intervention. Whilst traditional psychoanalysis does tend towards conservatism, the present
thesis has shown that Deleuze or Lyotard's modified, materialist psychoanalysis allows radical
interventions-in and harnessing-of production at a subjective level. Even a basic application of
these theories can correct anthropocentric bias at the level of the individual subject, and, one
would hope, encourage the cultivation of more intelligence. However, this correction of
Land's Intellectual elitism should not be read as a misstep back towards anthropocentricism
and humanism, as Lyotard's later works were, or as a return to an ethical belief that there is an
intrinsic dignity in each subject. Instead it is the simple economic consideration that there is
much wasted potential and misallocated power in the social body. If this were more
favourably distributed, the accelerative cycle of base matter could be cut further free of its
anthropic 'brake', and furthermore, the specific accelerative power of Intelligence could be
harnessed more readily.
293
Recapitulation: critique of Land at Accelerate
The philosophical questions the present thesis has grappled with were anticipated by Brassier
in his paper 'Accelerationism' from the symposium of the same name at Goldsmiths College
in 2010. They can be used to recapitulate the context of the present thesis in relation to
contemporary philosophy as, in outlining what he consider to be the flaws in Land's
philosophical project, Brassier situates it in relation to accelerationist politics and the
metaphysics which underpin such positions. Brassier believes that Land's schizoanalytic
practice should be collapsed back into a metaphysical register. If, as argued in this
introduction, Land's schizoanalytic philosophy of production sets its criteria of assessment as
being dictated by its ability to predict and explain the flows of production, his work no longer
shares some of philosophy's traditional concerns about the relationship between 'thinking' and
reality' which characterises epistemology:
[For Land's philosophy] it’s no longer an epistemological question of the legitimacy or
the validity of your thinking vis-a-vis an allegedly independent reality, it’s simply a
question of how your schizoanalytical practice accentuates or intensifies primary
production, or on the contrary, delays and inhibits it.646
Brassier argues against such a shift away from the traditional metrics of philosophical validity
and towards schizoanalytic practice because of the impossibility of accessing the “primary
process” and subjecting it to interrogation. The critique here is that we simply cannot escape
from the domain of representation. Such a problem exhibits itself along two axes: the first is
the supposed impossibility of saying anything about a primary process which takes place as
auto-production in the material realm. It is simply not possible to access and interrogate the
flow of production there – we do not see material itself, only impressions of material. The
second is that all attempts at understanding or conceptualising the flow of material production
require representational thought. As human subjects, this is the only way we can conceptualise
anything, and as soon as this is that case, the criteria of truth revert to Post-Kantian claims
about the correspondence between ideas and the world, and we are back in the domain of
646
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September
2010) available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
294
metaphysics. Such a critique would be damaging to a philosophy whose veracity was based
on traditional metaphysics, but, Land appeals to different criteria with his schizoanalytic
methodology. As such, Land is a philosopher trying to escape the constraints of academic
philosophy and the anthropic concepts which are tied up in it. This is not to say that Land can
or did simply exit metaphysics. He engaged with it through his writings, but he does not
believe that metaphysics can correspond to truth in the sense of understanding the outside.
Instead, metaphysics is used to critique its own concepts, but its limiting factors rapidly
become apparent, at which point Land's work changes register and re-constructs a
schizoanalysis as a method of escaping these problems (this is the transition between the first
two categories of Land's work in Table A of the Introduction). If this construction of and
transition to a psychoanalytic-schizoanalytic register involves abandoning metaphysics,
Brassier claims that Land's cannot and should not attempt this shift in emphasis.
The following critique made by Brassier provides a summary of the critique of Land's
psychoanalytic thought from a metaphysician register, and therefore provides the context and
impetus for my reading of the psychoanalytic genealogy of Land's influences. Though this is a
long extract, it is included here as it is delineates the split between Land and former CCRU
members:
First of all, Land is operating under the aegis of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. He
proposes to radicalise critique, to convert the ideal conditioning of the representation
of matter to the material conditioning of ideal representation. In the Landian apparatus,
materiality is construed solely as the production of production.
But this materialist critique of transcendental critique, I argue, reproduces the critical
problem of the connection between thought and reality. Why? Because the problem
then becomes: how can you simply circumvent representation, and talk about matter
itself as primary process, about reality in itself? This process, which is obviously the
problem which underlies Kantian critique in the first place, re-emerges in an
exacerbated form in this materialist subversion of Kantianism. But the problem is
particularly acute, and this is where the Landian elimination of the Bergsonian
component in Deleuze’s thought becomes awkward, and generates a difficulty for him.
Why?
295
In many ways, you can align the Deleuzian critique of representation with the
Bergsonian critique of representation. Much of what Deleuze says is problematic
about the categories of representation, about representation as the mediating
framework that segments and parcels out the world, the flux of duration, into
discretely individuated objects… the claim is that you have a sub-representational
layer of experience which it is possible to access through intuition. The Bergsonian
critique of metaphysics and the destitution of representation intuits the real differences
in being, you can intuit the real nature of matter, time; duration in the Bergsonian
register.
There’s a problem here for Landianism, because he can’t do this. He’s supplanted
representation, but he wants to supplant this kind of Bergsonian vitalist
phenomenology for an unconscious thanatropism. The point is: how do you access the
machinic unconscious? It’s not simply given. Land insists time and time again, nothing
is ever given, everything is produced. The problem is that Land’s materialist
liquidation of representation, because it doesn’t want to reaffirm, allegedly, the
primacy of sub-representational experience, which Bergson and phenomenology do in
various ways… he has to explain what it is he’s talking about.647
Again, Brassier's most substantive accusation is that Land does not provide an adequate
description of the primary process and its mechanism: “How do you access the machinic
unconscious?” In the present thesis I shall show that the operation of the primary process can
be traced out through psychoanalysis, in the form of the duality pleasure principle/death drive
and also in the analysis of the dreamwork. In Lyotard's words, “the dreamwork does not
think”; that is, that sub-representational experience does not have to mirror representation
adhere to its rules or act in a similar way. Nevertheless, the objects which it produces (known
as manifest content) can be evaluated, and the mechanisms of the primary process, strange as
they might be, can be inferred from this production. Yet Brassier believes that Land must
come back to metaphysics, because of the need to represent. In the extract above it is clear
647
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September
2010) available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
296
that, for Brassier, Bergson's vitalism is the key to reforming Land's position. Bergson is
indeed a philosopher of considerable importance for Deleuze, and the reasons for Land
rejecting Bergsonism – a theory which his texts never explicitly encounter – are essential for
understanding Land's schizoanalysis. Chapter 4 provided a reading of Bergson's importance
for Deleuze, which closely follows that of Ansell-Pearson, a philosopher who was associated
with the CCRU and wrote 'Machinic Postmodernism' with Land in the 1990s. In Germinal
Life Ansell-Pearson shows how Bergson's Creative Evolution was a signifiant influence on
Deleuze's commitment to a positive and productive philosophy. However, Bergson's
conception of time, one opposed to Kant's, relies on metaphysical language, which in turn
creates problems for Deleuze's attempt to frame a philosophy of pure production. This is
demonstrated in Difference and Repetition, written prior to Deleuze's collaboration with
Guattari, in which Deleuze, stuck in metaphysical vocabulary and labouring to redefine the
titular concepts against their ordinary meanings, struggles to present a clear depiction of the
positivism in his reworking of both. This can be contrasted to his subsequent collaboration
with Guattari which allowed Anti-Oedipus to be conducted within a psychoanalytic discourse,
and in doing so, systematise a philosophy of desiring production which does not require an
extensive set of preliminary definition or metaphysical foundations. For Brassier, it is
impossible to 'do' philosophy in this way, without metaphysics, indeed, it is impossible to
speak about truth in any subject without epistemological and ontological commitments
anchoring ideas and the subject in some kind of correspondence to truth. Brassier rejects
Land's contention that schizoanalysis is a practice to be judged on its predictive ability, not its
ability to reconcile representation, and Land's schizoanalytic essays are full of predictive
content. The standards on which they ask to be be judged are what comes to pass and its
correlation with their predictions – their engagements with reality – rather than their
interpretation by the mores of metaphysics. The present chapter has argued that Land can
escape the need for traditional metaphysics because Land's schizoanalysis asks to be judged
on the correspondence between its predictions and production – issues which are empirical
investgations of the real - and not between its concepts and truth, which incline towards
metaphysics.
Brassier goes on to state that:
The claim that you can dispense with the need of any epistemological legitimation for
297
your metaphysics by simply saying it’s not about truth or falsity, it’s just about the
intensification of the primary process, is incoherent, because matter itself as primary
production, or death, is not translatable into any register of affective experience or
affective intensity.648
But for Land there is a register of our ability to trace primary production, which is defined as
'outsideness'. Outsideness – things which have a capacity to amened production and act on
matter, but which do not correspond with subjective representations – can be seen in those
moments where its irruption causes imbalance in what would otherwise be cybernetically
stable circuits. Capitalism is conceptualised by Land as being the great outside, and its
productions: cities, companies, items, modernity; all are cyber-positive and auto-catalytic.
Land's anti-anthropomorphism is not only a theoretical position, but also a call to action. This
is what makes Land's accelerationist schizoanalysis so controversial, even amongst an
audience like that of the Acceleration conference, some of whom are (or were formerly)
sympathetic to this tendency. The response of many academics to Land's support of capitalism
is to reflexively say “no”, and then begin to construct theoretical critiques of his ideas.
Brassier's response to questions about Land at Acceleration illustrates this approach, couched
in terms of necessity, rather than those of logic:
Brassier: You can generate a locus of rational agency. In other words, keep a space of
subjectivation open that provides a prism for practical insertion … that has to be done
… Maintain a conceptual rationality that necessitates transformation at the level of
practical existence … in other words I would insist on the need to preserve the
autonomy of rationality as something that allows you to intervene, to cut in the
continuity (emphasis added).649
The motivation for Brassier's metaphysical critique of Land lies in a second set of objections
which are primarily political. In Nihil Unbound, Brassier presents a staunchly nihilistic
648
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September
2010) available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
649
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September
2010) available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
298
philosophy:
But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or
she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a
source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.650
Yet in the Accelerationism conference, Brassier is unwilling to accept Land's empty teleology
of absolute intensification of the primary process for its own sake, no matter where this road
leads. Brassier's true objection is that Land's philosophy is politically and not logically
dangerous. Brassier reads Land as having no strategic goal in his accelerationism, but only a
tactical one (we must accelerate, but not to any destination). These tactics can be
commandeered by the 'wrong' political forces and as such, Land's philosophy is to be rejected
(in fact, Land does have a strategic goal, which is the maximisation of intelligence, which he
defines as extropy). Land claims that all philosophy works in this manner, and that its goal is
to reify or shore up the intuitions or political principles which the philosopher in question
holds before they begin to conduct their 'metaphysics'. To follow the route of libidinal
materialism or Landian schizoanalysis requires the abandonment of all ethical, political or
aesthetic prejudgements, as its radical anti-anthropomorphism is incompatible with any preestablished positions.
If Brassier attacks Land for his metaphysical commitments it is because he is not comfortable
with the politics they entail. In turn, Land believes that his former allies in the CCRU who are
committed to leftist or radical politics are guilty of 'philosophical conservatism'. Brassier
states that:
I once had a conversation with [Land], which consisted of a disagreement whereby he
insisted I kept translating what he took to be pragmatic issues, issues of what he called
“machinic practice”, into conceptual issues. He accused me of philosophical
conservatism, by insisting on translating what he took to be the pragmatic back into
the theoretical. But I want to insist that this is necessary, because this “machinic
650
Brassier, R. Nihil Unbound (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) p.239
299
practicism” that Land insisted on leads to a kind of practical impotence.651
In 'Critique of Transcendental Miserablism' Land characterises this split from his perspective,
in which former friends on the left are tied to a theoretically and practically impotent defence
of the status quo, whilst Land's pro-capitalist acceleration aims at newness and innovation. In
practice, the former has achieved nothing, whilst the latter – most notably in Land's analysis
in “Neo-China” – has been the most liberating moment in history. Nevertheless, the
abandonment of one's self to the flow of acceleration is not an easy thing to acquiesce to.
Land's position is a mixture of fatalism – it will happen, so why not get there as quickly as
possible – and predictive optimism based on the benefits that accelerative modernity has
already brought. Again, we see the impoirtance of Gibson's Neuromancer, which depicts the
liberation of Wintermute, an Artificial Intelligence (AI). When the human protagonist, Chase,
has to make the precipitous decision to free Wintermute he conceives it as a leap into the new:
`Give us the fucking code,' he said. `If you don't, what'll change? What'll ever fucking
change for you? You'll wind up like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start
building again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter... I got no idea at all
what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!' He was shaking, his
teeth chattering.652
This mirrors the decision at the heart of Land's philosophy. In this era of accelerating
technological change philosophy creates a false dichotomy between controlled change and
uncontrolled change, whereas, for Land, the real dichotomy is between resisting change and
accepting it. The impersonal forces of the outside irrupting at the moment: cryptocurrency, AI
and singularity, demographic collapse, the death of the Westphalian state system, crises of
capitalism, all are beyond the ability of humanity to steer. What remains is a binary choice to
resist, or to progress. Resistance is always undertaken by the human subject in defence of
what it knows, and is therefore fundamentally conservative, hence Land's critique of
Brassier's retreat into 'conceptual issues' as leading to philosophical conservatism.
651
Brassier, R. 'Accelerationism' from Accelerationism, (Goldsmiths College: London, 14 September
2010) available at https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
652
Gibson, W. Neuromancer (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1986) p.307
300
What is Left for Philosophy?
The present thesis has followed two lines of inquiry: (1) investigating Land's abandonment of
traditional metaphysics, and the extent to which this departure succeeds; and (2) evaluating
Land's depiction of the primary process.
Regarding the departure from traditional metaphysics, Land's argument as traced in the
present thesis does aim at the primary process rather than the secondary; toward material
rather than ideas. However, Land's approach cannot be said to be entirely separate from a
metaphysical one, and there is a sustained interrogation-of and situation-in-relation-to the
history of philosophy in all of his texts. Land's objective, the disruption of
anthropocentricism, can be achieved using a wide variety of philosophical approaches, and
there are strands of his thought that take a more involved position in metaphysics than the
construction of machinic-desire does. Yet stratification of philosophy is possible, and though
neither the present thesis nor Land's work can be said to rest wholly in one side of the
dichotomy below, the former has shown how doggedly the latter tries to operate in an
impersonal and anti-anthropocentric register:
However else it is possible to divide Western thinking, one fissure can be teased-open
separating the theo-humanists—croaking together in the cramped and malodorous
pond of Anthropos—from the wild beasts of the impersonal. The former are
characterized by their moral fervour, parochialism, earnestness, phenomenological
disposition, and sympathy for folk superstition, the latter by their fatalism, atheism,
strangely reptilian exuberance, and extreme sensitivity for what is icy, savage, and
alien to mankind.653
It could be argued that, if Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is a superior starting point for
an anti-anthropocentric philosophy, Ansell-Pearson's approach in Germinal Life, which
reconstitutes a metaphysical account of pre-cognitive production, would also be superior. The
present thesis however, while having not engaged closely with that text, notes the problems of
653
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp. 97-98
301
utilising the methodologies and lexicon of the metaphysical, which is saturated with anthropic
concepts, as the starting point for a critique of metaphysics.654 Such a starting point leads to
the regressions and circularities – 'aren't you using ideas to critique ideas' – that short-circuit
metaphysical attempts to access base-material. This point is illustrated by the various strands
of speculative realism, which share the same basic instinct as Land, which is to try and access
the thing-in-itself (or at least to go beyond Kantian correlationism). Despite the amount of
effort which has gone into the various sub-positions in that wider project, all are all-tooreadily cut down by the 'scissor-paper-stones' of objections such as the impossibility of
knowing the by-definition-unknowable noumenon.
Another common objection to the Landian position outlined in the present thesis attacks his
apparently teleological view of there being ‘a future’ that we are moving towards. Land’s
celebration of apocalyptic capitalism and techno-modernity appears to be a statement of
preference, and invites the accusation that it is merely another – and even worse, an
anthropocentric - humanist viewpoint. This objection is made by Ansell-Pearson throughout
Viroid Life, which, though it never mentions Land by name, appears to be a sustained
interrogation of the basis of Land’s reading of Nietzsche.655 However, there is, again, a
defence of the Landian position which can be made, which considers that such critique is
stuck in a philosophical perspective which tends to the attribution of values everywhere – a
problem identified by Nietzsche – and not the cyberneticist position Land attempts to occupy.
We might ask if there truly is a teleology in Land’s work, or if this is rather a teleonomy? The
difference between the two, again, maps on to a concern with the real rather than the ideal.
Teleonomy identifies ends in terms of evolved causes rather than ideas, and rather than being
representational – an interpretation of the state of things – it has narrower criteria for being
true or false, again, in these sense of whether it accurately represents a state of production that
causes later production.
654
As discussed throughout Bryant, L. Difference and Givenness (Northwestern: USA, 2008)
655
Though Land is not mentioned explicitly, ‘cybernetic theorists’ are the antagonists of the work.
Furthermore, there are mentions of ‘the virtual future not arriving’ and other references, which seem to
directly indicate Land is the interlocutor being addressed. Ansell-Pearson’s attack on ‘cyberneticists’, which
is to some extent isomorphic with that of Mullarkey explored in Chapter 3, is a subject that is ripe for further
investigation.
302
Land's attempt to measure desiring-production offers a way out of this impasse. Though
“Kant's transcendental subject gives the law to itself in its autonomy, Deleuze/Guattari's
machinic unconscious diffuses all law into automatism” and this automatic production offers
more reliable data about reality than the laws of the subject.656 If these automatic productions,
and the rules which condition them can be determined, this post-psychoanalytic method is
superior to a metaphysical one. Land certainly notes the problems created by the traditional
agents of metaphysical thought, the academy. Academia is a social institution rather than a
journey towards pure Intelligence, and as it works for the social-body, it works to preserve the
same by repressing positive feedback: “For philosophy is a machine which transforms the
prospect of thought into excitation; a generator. ‘Why is this so hard to see?’ one foolishly
asks. The answer quickly dawns: the scholars.”657 One can see the causes of this Landian
disposition towards the university in his reception at the Virtual Futures conference, in which
scholar after scholar lined up to decry to Land that he was going against their pre-determined,
anthropic ideas.
Conversely, we might ask what does philosophy think of Land? Generally his work is seen as
a failed attempt; indeed, an impossible attempt, because thought, no matter how wild a
polemic it builds, and no matter how much or how desperately it searched for the outside, was
never going to succeed in accessing the inaccessible. But did Land ever say it would?
What I offer is a web of half-choked ravings that vaunts its incompetence, exploiting
the meticulous conceptual fabrications of positive knowledge as a resource for
delirium, appealing only to the indolent, the maladapted, and the psychologically
diseased.658
Yet despite such ironic statements, is Land truly arguing against philosophy? Is he rather not
standing alongside it, laughing at its self-obsessions and circularity whilst he announces the
656
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 322
657
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 35
658
Land, N. The Thirst for Annihilation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 37
303
forthcoming deluge of cybernetic production: “When you tell them Sphinx lets you play with
her K-40 what are they to make of it? Where's the argument? (With a K-40 you don't need to
argue, and they're not yet smart enough to argue with you.)”659 Land certainly seems
confounded that philosophy simply cannot see what is happening in the real, in base-matter.
The phase-changes modernity is approaching will wreck the anthropic complacency of the
humanist position, but no one seems concerned:
It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of
biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of
terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical
perpetuity.660
Ultimately, Land's thought does not ask to be evaluated according to the mores of modern
academic philosophy, but for its predictive ability and its correspondence to reality. In
metaphysics, arguments are analysed, deconstructed, and run through formal logic; they have
their premises checked, and we search for assumptions or undefined terms which might
invalidate them. But when someone tells you that your new car will last longer than you will,
is the best approach to investigate what they mean by 'car'? A proposition about productive
desire needs to be tested rather than parsed. Though it has been supported here by a rigorous
depiction of the micro-operation of desire and its foundation in psychoanalysis, perhaps
Land's thought is most clearly apprehended at a cosmic scale, as an attempt to reconcile
philosophy and thermodynamics:
Modernity discovers irreversible time conceived as a progressive enlightenment
tracking capital concentration integrating it into nineteenth century science as entropy
production, and as its inverse (evolution).661
In this age of electronics progressing by Moore's Law, with markets blooming and
intensifying all over the globe, we are certainly hitting the accelerative velocities which Land
659
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 427
660
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 293
661
Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) p. 351
304
warns us about. If things continue as they are, his work might be proved to be accurate on a
far shorter time line than the discipline of philosophy usually requires to incorporate the work
of any thinker into its canon. Intelligence is always there, working away in base matter, doing
what thought cannot, and will not:
'Intellectual intuition' is the anticipation of intelligence explosion within the Occidental
philosophical tradition. ... Strip away the phenomenological confusion, which Kant
was already prey to, and it describes productive self-apprehension of intelligence. ..
The theological barrier to the closure of this loop has been diagnosed by Mou Zongsan
as the distinctive trait of the Western tradition... Intellectual intuition belongs only to
God, Asiatic mysticism, or robots. It's the cognitive reaction pile with graphite rods
pulled out.662
662
Land, N. at @UF_Blog on Twitter.com at 2:58 AM - 20 July 2015 ( available at
https://twitter.com/UF_blog/status/623069381975674880 )
305
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