Reading Group Workshop 5 on Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’

Chapter 3. Savages, Barbarians and Civilised Men

This weeks reading group workshop continued to look at chapter three of ‘Anti-Oedipus.’ The presentation this week was given by Bruce McClure and began by highlighting the role of Louis Hjemslev in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and indeed in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. They draw from him a linguistics appropriate to the capitalist axiomatic, one that escapes all transcendence. It becomes a mobile apparatus of content and expression that can be applied to any situation. Marshall McLuhan’s role was also developed as something taken further in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Expression becomes the content for another expression using McLuhan’s linguistic theory. They make use of his concern with communication media independently of its context and his slogan: ‘The medium is the message.’
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Bruce also considered the change from a surplus value of code to a surplus value of flux in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the move from savage and despotic societies to capitalist ones. The surplus value of flux incorporates both unquantifiable aspects of labour and unquantifiable aspects of knowledge. Everything is flattened out and includes the accumulations of both goods and knowledge. The knowledge producers are rendered impotent because capitalism always creates a new axiom that makes knowledge productive for capital. It is the military-industrial complex and the state that act as the element of anti-production. This animates a double movement of deterritoralisation and reterritorialisation.

The presentation considered production as an abstract universality, an accumulation that goes beyond the human. Here a drive is immediately recuperated or objectified. In section 9, at page 254 in the new edition and 234 in the old edition, Deleuze and Guattari see science and technics as liberating flows of code. It was pointed out that knowledge capital is something that takes us to the work of thinkers like, Negri, Hardt, Balibar and Laclau. Knowledge capital has come to be seen as highly important in capitalism and as freer than previous forms of labour capital.

The discussion considered the negative and positive connotations of capitalism as it is presented in Anti-Oedipus. Is capitalism innovative by nature or is profitability key to whether innovation is interesting? Capitalism doubles desiring-production in the sense that it creates quantifiable flows that can meet just as desiring-production flows and breaks. One reading of Anti-Oedipus is to presents capital as a liberatory dynamic. We discussed why this reading looks viable. It was related to the notion among late 19th century Marxists that capitalism will do the revolution itself. This was the cause of Marx saying that he was not a Marxist. He was against the economic determinism that had come to characterise Marxism.

The next subject of discussion was the surplus value of flux. This is divided between human surplus value and machinic surplus value, with their relation operating as in the equation dy/dx. Machinic surplus value concerns technical machines and what can be said using science. Human surplus value concerns wages and is expended through consumer goods. These are two forms of money and are incommensurable. The selection criterion for technical machine is profitability and a technical machine only works by being profitable. The role of war was introduced as an instance of expenditure, burning off the energy of a society. This is something that can be achieved through advertising, militarism or imperialism.

At page 236 in the old edition, and page 257 in the new, we find Deleuze and Guattari using the example of Gregory Bateson. He leaves the human behind but this process is captured and used by the American military.

At page 235-236 flows of stupidity mirror knowledge as its anti-production, taking forward stupidity as the immanent limit of knowledge is ‘Difference and Repetition’.

At page 264 in the old edition (section 11 of chapter 3) Deleuze and Guattari discuss the notion that the family is outside the social field. This is a simulacra, an image of images that are in fact social. The privatization of the family moves away from immanence as ‘capitalism fills its field of immanence with images.’ Everyone is equal because everyone has a family, in other words, everyone is equally triangulated, equally lacking.

At page 265 in the old edition the notions of an ‘aggregate of departure’ and of an ‘aggregate of arrival’ are developed. The aggregate of arrival means that you always go home to a family but this private realm is only an image of social images. There is no freedom inside or outside and the private simply extends social repression. It was suggested that the Oedipal version of the family is less monstrous than the notion of family we find with mafia and gangster groups. This notion of the family is not contained, just as in savage societies Deleuze and Guattari see alliance as spreading filiation outwards. With Oedipus the family is contained or triangulated.

Turning to the savage society, we see that here surplus value is what allows alliance to occur. Deleuze and Guattari understand the process as beginning with an intensive filiation, something embryonic and unliveable, while this continues to unfold as extensive filiation and extensive alliance. It was suggested that ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ differs from ‘Anti-Oedipus’ in that it presents intensive alliance in the notion of becoming-other. This was related to the problem of a group subject, something that we found to come from Guattari’s work in previous sessions of this workshop. It is the problem of a group subject that can learn and respond in a differential way. Can there be an alliance that can develop and learn? It must not become a family again.

Reference was made to Guattari’s later notion of an auto-poetic group. We find something similar in Negri’s multitude, a unified body of the people. It is modelled upon a swarm. One response to this was that it is anthropocentric. Another was that it neglects the role of organisers in any political group. Anti-capitalist movements involve important people who direct things. Global movements have core networks of people who organise. There is a closed interior that manipulates an exterior, something involved, for example, in Trotsky’s democratic centralism. Retrenchment in a closed cell can provide the closed group behind public social centres. Knowledge is held in this closed group that is not held by those outside, making decisions issuing from this group seem incomprehensible.

We returned to the notion of an intensive alliance and asked what it would like, how would it work? Intensive filiation is described as a germinal influx. Incest must become a taboo so that filiation can spread outwards, become extended. Could intensive alliance have an interior? Becoming-animal involves returning to an intensive alliance, from extensive alliance or difference in extension to difference in intensity. The human-animal relation returns to intensity, refolds itself, in order to unfold itself differently in extension or in what the human and the animal can be or do. In the machine formed by the human and animal, in a case of becoming-other, new resources are drawn upon to realise humanity and animality in extension. These are the resources of the intensive alliance of humanity and animality. Reference was also made to ventilators and nebulisers. This involves a machine-human relationship where a new machine emerges that redefines that the human is or can do.

In the last paragraph of chapter three (p. 270-271 in the old edition) Deleuze and Guattari talk about autocritique. This seems to be the realisation that universal history is contingent or formed through accidents: ‘Universal history is nothing more than a theology if it does not seize control of its contingent, singular existence its irony, and its own critique.’ Is this to realise that things are only accidental? Or is it realising that accident is productive of laws that are necessary in psychoanalysis? Is it just that contingency should be recognised or should this produce something new? On the one hand it concerns the illegitimate use of the syntheses developed in chapters 1 and 2. Yet it also refers us to Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with Reich and the notion that desire desires its own repression. Are accidents instantiations of this repressive moment that sets off illegitimate uses of the syntheses?

Reference was also made to the distinction between unconscious desires and preconscious interests. This seemed relevant to concerns with what collectivity can be if it is not based on class, something that Alain Badiou has been writing about. Rather than class interest, collectivity would be based on something prior to interests but which still marks out a collective group. For psychoanalysis preconscious interests seem to be what we haven’t noticed but can be brought into consciousness. The unconscious is unrecognisable but you can recognise its traces in the preconscious.

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beware desyr

just wanted to say, I've posted up some notes on my blog and rather than simply copy them here I'll link to them instead - you can find them on notebookeleven here

Technorati Tags: deleuze , guattari , anti-oedipus

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The Mass Psychology of Fascism

an interesting page from the 'Surveillance Camera Players'

The Mass Psychology of Fascism

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Reading Group Workshop 2 on Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus'

Chapter 2. Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family, Sections 1-5
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The notes below are complicated by the fact that members of the group are using different editions of 'Anti-Oedipus'. The page numbers referred to as 'old edition' are found in the edition published in 1984 by the Athlone Press and then Continuum. Those labelled 'new edition' are from Continuum's new compact edition of 2004. What follows is taken from my notes and is in many ways incomplete. Those who were present are very welcome to add to the notes by commenting on this post or e-mailing additional points to volcaniclines[at]hotmail.com Please also feel free, whether or not you attended this workshop, to question or discuss the points raised by posting a comment.
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This weeks session began with a presentation on the themes of this weeks text by Edward Willatt. The presentation began with the notion that Oedipus is dogma (page 51, old edition). Deleuze and Guattari describe the 'Oedipus structure as [a] system of positions and functions' (page 52, old edition). It has the role of 'distributing in a given domain desire, its object, and the law.' It thus marks out a space of action but for Deleuze and Guattari this is hopeless. The object of desire is inadequate, dogmatic activity is frantic and then runs out of energy. The psychoanalytic cure is endless and becomes banal. The 'frantic Oedipalisation' practiced turns into a loss of energy because the object or limit is not the 'body without organs' but the complete objects and global persons projected by psychoanalysis.

At page 53 Deleuze and Guattari argue for a desire that is not reduced to its products in order to think the marking out of spaces of activity that are not at all hopeless. These spaces must not be marked by a dogmatic subject and object. The structures and persons of psychoanalysis are products while machines are 'the Real in itself.'

At page 54 we see Deleuze and Guattari argue that Freud had discovered a liberated understanding of desire, making it the domain of three syntheses. However, they argue that Freud did not maintain the immanence of syntheses to desire. The terms of desire, the marking out of the field of its activity, were not immanent to desiring-production. It is important to note that the thinker to whom they turn for the criteria of immanent synthesis is Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant sought to formulate three syntheses to deal with appearances that we are modelled on the 'thing in itself.' His critique of dogmatism was a prelude to his elaboration of three syntheses. For Kant dogmatic metaphysics is a theatre as it is for Deleuze and Guattari, it produces hopeless characters. For Kant we find dogmatists and sceptics, for Deleuze and Guattari neurotics and paranoiacs, to name just two. Just as Oedipus is set up above the flows and break-flows of desiring-production, so the 'thing in itself' is set up above appearances and their immanent syntheses. Kant's concern with appearances rather than the 'thing in itself' seems to connect productively with Deleuze and Guattari's concern with partial objects rather than complete objects.

In the second section of chapter two (entitled 'Three Texts of Freud') Deleuze and Guattari write that psychoanalysis '...measures the unconscious against myth...' (page 57, old edition) Time finds its model and measure in a myth space. This means that the roles and functions time is able to mark out in space become monotonous. Everything is decided in advance by myth and this limits the energy of activity, ensuring that it is always exhausted and never continuous. Deleuze and Guattari again move from Freud to Kant when they seek a non-mythical conception of time. We see this in Deleuze's 'On Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy' (to be found in 'Essays Critical and Clinical'). Here Deleuze writes of how Oedipus was '...urged on by his wandering as a derived movement.' In contrast 'Hamlet is the first hero who needed time in order to act, ...' He adds that 'The Critique of Pure Reason is the book of Hamlet, the prince of the north.' Now time is not defined by succession. Things are successive in different times but 'simultaneous in the same time, they subsist in an indeterminate time.' (p. 28-29) This means that in time we find the scope of the first synthesis of desiring-production in a 'time out of joint' or time without a mythical space as its model. The whole of time can be drawn upon.

At page 59 Deleuze and Guattari sketch an illegitimate use of the second synthesis (the synthesis of disjunction). Here the marking out of a space of activity is recorded but this use of synthesis can be legitimate or illegitimate. Psychoanalysis is said to make castration the 'common lot' of the two sexes. It is something lacking in both that distributes lack in both series. It means that 'you are girl or boy!' This is an exclusive use of disjunction, any attempt to mark out roles once and for all so that people can only seek to come to terms with these roles.

On page 65 we see Deleuze and Guattari subjecting Freud himself to analysis, diagnosing him as a dogmatist as we see Kant doing to his contemporaries. They see Freud at the end of his life realising that something is wrong with psychoanalysis. 'The cure tends to be more and more interminable!' All energy has gone out of the practice because it is dogmatic, it does not have the object that is the real source of all energy (the body without organs). In seeking to account for the energetics of machinic thought and practice, a continuous energy, Deleuze and Guattari point to '...a type of resistance that is nonlocalizable. It would seem that certain subjects have such a viscous libido, or on the contrary a liquid one, that nothing succeeds in “taking hold.”'

The third section of chapter two ('The Connective Synthesis of Production') puts forward the notion that '...the sole problem is always one of allocation on a scale of intensities that assigns the positions and use of each thing, each being, or each scene...' (p. 68). This is a concern with a matter full of intensities that mark out things, beings and scenes. It is not a theatre modelled in advance by myth but rather a factory of production.

At page 72 the 'body without organs' is presented as a third term that '...reinjects producing into the product, extends the connections of machines, and serves as a surface of recording.' Deleuze and Guattari's concern that there is nothing behind production is developed here. It is this lack of organs that provokes production to be productive. We can see Kant's influence here if we consider his concern with zero degree intensity in the 'Anticipations of Perception' in the 'Critique of Pure Reason'. This mechanism seems to be put to work here in order to think desiring-production, to find in the movement between intensities the continuous production of things, beings and scenes. For Kant it is zero degree intensity that is behind the continuity of different degrees of intensity. It prevents appearances from expressing a 'thing in itself.' Whatever Deleuze and Guattari's distaste for Kant's ends may be their concern with his mechanisms is clear. We see them not asking what Kant's system means but how it works.

The fourth section of chapter two is entitled 'The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording.' Here Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with how the connections that mark of a space of activity are lived. At page 75-76 (old edition) they write that 'This time it is a matter of the maximum conditions under which persons are differentiated. Hence the importance of the Kantian definition that posits God as the a priori principle of the disjunctive syllogism, so that all things derive from it because of restriction of larger reality...' What is important for Kant is that the Idea of God is not a cognition, a unity of the understanding, but a unity of reason that operates in the advance of cognition. Like the 'body without organs' it does not resemble what is organised but has an ongoing role in how things become organised and disorganised. This 'larger reality', this Idea of what the synthesis of disjunction can do, does not do the work of synthesis. It is an Idea of the widest and continuous use of inclusive disjunction rather than of exclusive disjunctions marked out in advance and waiting to be discovered. The latter conception would for Kant be the 'thing in itself' and for Deleuze and Guattari complete objects and global persons. What things, being and scenes become through disjunctions is left open because this totality is not already synthesised and because the energy contained in this Idea is a divine energy.

At page 78 Deleuze and Guattari explore the exclamation 'I am' – the series of intensive states that makes up the passive self who is subject to the activity of synthesis.

Section five of chapter two, 'The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation', seeks to account for a residual subject of machines. Deleuze and Guattari develop the nature of the passive self: 'It is a matter of relationships of intensities through which the subject passes on the body without organs, a process that engages him in becomings, rises and falls, migrations and displacements.' (p. 84, old edition) This third synthesis of desiring-production differs from Kant's third synthesis in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the latter the active subject, the transcendental unity of apperception, corresponds to the object=x. For Deleuze and Guattari the active subject and object=x is the 'body without organs'. It is compared to R. D. Laing's voyage of initiation, something described as a transcendental experience. It is an experience of being subject to productive syntheses, being passive in the face of synthesis. Deleuze and Guattari elaborate this as '...a series of emotions and feelings as a consummation and consumption of intensive quantities, that form the material for subsequent hallucinations and deliriums.' (page 84, old edition)

At age 97 Deleuze and Guattari write that 'Structures exist in the immediate impossible real.' This reflects their concern to find the desiring-machines at work in any thing, being or scene. The 'I am...' is the residue or surplus value of the machine.

At page 104 Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between preconscious investment, made according to the interests of opposing classes, and unconscious investments, made according to positions of desire and uses of synthesis. Interests are defined as being those of the subject, the individual or collective who desires. For the unconscious these things that 'I am' are not marked out in advance and so interests are not given in advance. This connects with the contemporary debates over the collectivity that is possible given the apparent decline of class identity. What is collectivity after class? Perhaps Guattari's analysis of the group, discussed later in the session and reported below, can respond to this pressing question.

At page 105 we find desire elaborated as what which 'flows and runs', this is how we know that it is present in immediate reality. It carries us along 'toward lethal destinations.' This raises the question of the value of the activity that desire produces or accounts for. Peter Hallward's reading of Deleuze ('Out of This World', Verso, 2006) questions the value of the activity that he accounts for – it is contemplative (in)activity. Deleuze himself, in the 'Dialogues' chapter 3, cautions that desire must not account only for festival-like activity. This reflects the un-livable nature of desiring-production but also how it is a regulative ideal, in a Kantian sense, that makes constructive activity possible. Deleuze and Guattari seem to focus upon affective encounters so as to keep in play an account of the activity of subjects in relation to objects.

At the end of section five, on page 106 (old edition), Deleuze and Guattari provide a method for reading a text. Searching for what is signified or for a signifier is to be avoided. To read a text is to make productive use of a literary machine which is '...a montage of desiring-machines...' They envisage '...a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.' We see here that Derrida is inverted. Rather the world as text we have the world as a continuum of machines and the text as another machine. It does not talk about the world and is not representative of the world. However, its own production must be singular enough to exemplify the world's productive activity or the way the world works (desiring-production as such).

The discussion began by questioning the Kantian reading of Anti-Oedipus that the presentation had put forward. The arguments had been that 'Kant works!' and as a result Deleuze and Guattari hold their noses and overcome all the 'northern fog' so as to make use of Kant's mechanisms. Their reading of Kant is about use rather than meaning. Thus Kant's 'object=x' and zero degree intensity are mechanisms for Deleuze and Guattari's use. To consider what they meant for Kant is to fail to extract the 'revolutionary potential' from his work.

Reference was made to something that separates Kant from Deleuze and Guattari. The compulsion to construct an understanding, a signifier, and the mechanics of signification are important for Kant. Deleuze and Guattari consider how we can avoid trying to understand in order to be able to encounter affects. It was suggested that Kant's concern is to control the metaphysical urge, this desire, rather than to realise it productively. It was argued that this is quite a different approach to Deleuze and Guattari's concern to account for how desire desires its own repression.

Deleuze and Guattari's argument against splitting reality between ideal and material, between signifying and Real levels, was discussed.

The concern with group fantasy at page 62 (new edition) was discussed. It was argued that this shows Guattari's input. For him all subjectivity is collective. He analysed differences within group activity. The critical question was then put: what is the agency behind this group activity? The passive subject and its continuation runs through Guattari's work. Who enunciates in collective assemblages of enunciation? Should we look for agency or an agent? Why does the group ever get out of bed? Is there a collective machine? Who acts? Who selects? Who does? These critical questions are often put to Deleuze. It was noted that group fantasy only has drives as its subject (p. 63 new edition). Agency or selection, it was argued, is here a post-representational image of thought. Choices occur to the passive subject. The group is a zone of clearance protected from symbolic attachments so that choices can occur to this passive subject – the exclamation 'it is' or 'I am' is the occurrence of choice through encounters in a field that is not marked out in advance by the symbolic.

It was also pointed out that Sartre is used by Guattari in his analysis of group fantasy. Reference was made to Deleuze's preface to Guattari's 'Psychoanalysis and Transversality' (translated as 'Three Group-Related Problems' in 'Desert Islands and Other Texts', Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 193-203). It shows Deleuze's engagement with the re-formed subjectivity that runs throughout 'Anti-Oedipus'. It was explained that for Guattari a 'subject-group' folds out into the world while a 'subjugated-group' infolds by internalising resentment. It is always caught in the dynamics of internalisation and externalisation.

Reference was made to Deleuze's earlier notion of larval subjectivity, suggesting that it was a space of clearance while Ideas were a grouping, as we see in the notion of revolutionary Ideas developed in 'Difference and Repetition.' An unconditioned or undetermined zone is created and this is what Ideas are. They are dark precursors.

It was also noted that in 'Difference and Repetition' the term machine is used and we have here contemplative machines and contracting machines. However, Deleuze did not previously have notion of a group that he came to embrace from Guattari's work. Perhaps the shift from machine to assemblage and from simulacra to rhizome also show Guattari's influence.

It was suggested that Deleuze and Guattari are trying to break open a space where things can work differently. They present a strategic polemic, heavily engaged with the intellectual forces in France at the time in which they are writing.

Critical concerns were raised over the value of rejecting Oedipus, a specific concept, unless it is clear that we can avoid all concepts. If a lack of all concepts (schizophrenia as process) is un-livable then why give up the stability of Oedipus?
Is Oedipus not better than the fascism that for Deleuze and Guattari is a normative and natural state? Do Deleuze and Guattari argue in favour of a specific social organisation or of the endless re-organisation of society that nevertheless is stable enough to sustain organised life (a social body with organs drawing upon the 'body without organs')? The value and potential of their critique was called into question.

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Reading Group Workshop 1 on Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus'

Chapter 1. Desiring-Production

This week a group of scholars from across London met for the first of a series of six workshops on this text. The session began with a presentation by Matt Lee that set out the themes and problems of this chapter.

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Pages references below are to the Continuum 2004 edition.

Matt argued that we find Anti-Oedipus beginning with an affect, something that declares itself. This is a literary technique, used by Deleuze and Guattari to start thinking about desire. He drew attention to the repeated use of ‘it is…’ This is a surging forth. Matt also argued that Deleuze and Guattari here ‘state and then explain’, as Deleuze very often does in his writings. He pointed to the proliferation of different names for this surging forth – desire, machines, schizophrenia, flows, production … .

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At page 47 desiring-machines are defined. Matt argued that here we find a critique that identifies bad theory and ideology, disputing its understanding of machines. The critique targets idealism, finding it oppressive because it psychologises the mental. At page 48 Naomi Klein is discussed and subject to severe critique over her psychoanalysis of children. Desire is said to operate on the basis of lack in psychoanalysis, psychological projection through fantasy that establishes an ‘inability to be’ in the subject of psychoanalysis. They lack the completeness of the object of desire.

At page 24 Matt drew attention to the equivalence of false materialism with typical forms of idealism in Deleuze and Guattari’s account. He argued that this is a very Marxist moment. Psychoanalysis is also made use of because it discovers drives even if it then buries them beneath the idealism of Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari affirm Marx’s move beyond Hegel in arguing that ideas are materially produced. They then move beyond Freud in affirming that desire is materially produced.

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Matt also argued that readings of Deleuze and Guattari which present their philosophy as the liberation of consumption and the consumer are quite wrong. For them the consumer is produced as an idealist category and as such is subject to critique. There is in reality just a produced consumption situation. At page 29 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the objective being of man must be restored, echoing Marx and opposing idealism.

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The presentation then considered the three moments that Deleuze’s work often formulates whether writing with or without Guattari. This is despite their hatred for the three moments of the Oedipal triangulation.

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At page 26-27 we find Deleuze and Guattari being critical of Kant. Matt took from their contention that Kant’s critical revolution changed ‘nothing essential’ that for them the debate between idealism and materialism is what is essential. This shows their allegiance to Marx.

The discussion considered the term ‘transversality’ and this was related to the ongoing debate over Deleuze and Guattari’s individual roles in Anti-Oedipus. It was argued that Guattari’s role is down played in the secondary literature because the texts are read in Deleuzian terms alone. For Guattari transversality is about moving in a different way, breaking up normal ways of operating. It is a methodology, the self transportation beyond a territory in group practice. A territory is grasped in order to go beyond it.

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The 'body without organs' was discussed at length. It was suggested that it is the unfolding of the subject to an unprecedented degree. It was related to the need to ‘be merely objective’, to build on the level of desiring-production. The body without organs as disorganised matter was compared to the role of larvae in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. There is a primary production of affects – something without organisation - and then there is regulation. In psychology, it was argued, regulation is the problem because it implies idealism.

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Attention was given to Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of Kant’s theory of matter, how me makes matter ‘profoundly schizophrenic.’ Could it be that this relies upon Deleuze’s understand of time in Kant as being ‘time out of joint’ (see ‘On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy’ in Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical). If time is an a priori form of matter in Kant then matter is made ‘schizophrenic’ by the liberation of time from space, from its ‘joints.’ This is what Deleuze and Guattari develop when they make the three temporal syntheses of desiring-production into the way in which matter into schizophrenia as a process.

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Returning to the perplexing ‘body without organs’ we considered Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that it is an egg. This was referred back to Difference and Repetition where the egg is also talked about. It was related to the unliveable life of matter that is schizophrenic as a process. No one can undergo the forces and process that occur in the egg and yet the egg produces the different ways in which matter is organised in liveable forms. Calling the body without organs an egg affirms that it more than makes up for the organisation it lacks (the forms of liveable matter) with its own dynamisms. The egg is the limit of a process of production but does not resemble its products in any way, any more than the egg or embryo resembles the adult which it produces.

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The discussion also tackled Deleuze and Guattari’s concern with desire. Is force or drive a better term than desire given that desire is so attached to its subjects and objects? Does not desire become something else thanks to Deleuze and Guattari’s re-thinking of it. It was noted that Deleuze and Guattari give up the term machine after Anti-Oedipus. It was pointed out that Deleuze was concerned that the term machines was too masculine. However, Deleuze did later define his use of desire as equivalent to Foucault’s use of the term pleasure and Foucault characterised pleasure as force. Force then is made the condition of real experience, escaping the attachment of desire to objects and subjects, as well as to interests. Does not force carry less baggage then desire?

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It was suggested that the term drive implies a singularity while desire implies a multiplicity. A further idea put forward was that Deleuze and Guattari seek to criticise the term desire by turning it into something else. The strangeness of desire without an object or subject, as desiring-production, is what they seek to present.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on Lacan in the first chapter were also discussed. For Lacan the subject is split and then tries to put itself back together without ever achieving this. Lack is fundamental. It was noted that in the recently published Guattari Papers Guattari writes of dreams of Lacan that he has had and then interprets them using psychoanalytic methods.

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Lacan’s split subject and mirror stage were set against the residual subject of the machines that emerges in Anti-Oedipus. In Difference and Repetition we get a fractured self and distorting mirror of the groundless ground of individuation. The fracture of the self is not a lack but full of a swarm of Ideas.

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A final point was that Guattari’s development of group analysis suggests a ‘group subject’ rather than a ‘subject group’.

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