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Capitalism and Schizophrenia: An Ontological Critique
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*Capitalism and Schizophrenia* is a two-volume project comprising *Anti-Oedipus* (1972) and *A Thousand Plateaus* (1980), written by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The work functions as a "universal history" of desire, seeking to understand how human drives are organized, repressed, or liberated within social and economic systems.
## Desiring-Production and the Critique of Lack
The authors introduce the concept of **desiring-production**, arguing that desire is not a psychological "lack" or a search for a missing object (as posited by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis). Instead, desire is a primary, productive force that functions like a machine, constantly connecting to other machines to create reality. In this framework, the social field is directly invested by desire; there is no distinction between the "individual" psyche and the "collective" socio-economic structure.
## The Dual Movement of Capitalism
Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism occupies a unique historical position because of its relationship with **territorialization**.
1. **Deterritorialization**: Capitalism functions by breaking down traditional barriers, sacred rituals, and rigid social hierarchies (decoding flows). It seeks to make everything exchangeable and fluid to facilitate the movement of capital.
2. **Reterritorialization**: To prevent total collapse into chaos, capitalism simultaneously creates new, artificial boundaries. It recodes flows through the state, the nuclear family, and consumer identity.
The "Schizophrenic" in this context is not merely a clinical diagnosis but a process. The "schizo" represents the limit of capitalism—a movement that deterritorializes further than the system can manage, breaking away from the "molar" (rigid, centralized) structures of the state and the ego.
## Rhizomes and Assemblages
In the second volume, the authors move toward a non-hierarchical epistemology. They contrast the **arborescent** model of thought—which is linear, hierarchical, and rooted in a single "trunk" of truth—with the **rhizome**. A rhizome is a decentralized network where any point can connect to any other point. This concept underpins their theory of **assemblages**, which are temporary constellations of bodies, ideas, and technologies that produce specific effects without a central governing logic.
## Promising Directions for Exploration
1. **The Body without Organs (BwO)**: How does this concept of a "limit-surface" describe the potential for humans to resist being organized into functional, productive units by the state?
2. **State Apparatus vs. War Machine**: What is the distinction between the "State," which seeks to capture and internalize flows, and the "War Machine," which exists exterior to the state and operates through nomadic movement?
3. **Minor Literature and Politics**: How can marginalized groups utilize "minor" languages or practices to subvert the dominant, "major" cultural frameworks?
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Question · @TomBers
What is the unconscious of capitalism?
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The Capitalist Axiomatic and the Social Unconscious
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To understand the unconscious of capitalism, one must move beyond the Freudian "theater" of internal representation toward a "factory" of external production. In the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, the unconscious is not a repository of suppressed memories or familial dramas; it is the entire field of social, technical, and economic flows.
## The Axiomatic vs. Coding
While previous social formations—such as "primitive" or "despotic" societies—organized the unconscious through **coding** (ascribing qualitative meanings, taboos, and rigid inscriptions to bodies and desires), capitalism operates through an **axiomatic**.
An axiomatic is a purely quantitative logic. It does not care what a flow "means" (whether it is a flow of oil, data, or human labor); it only cares how these flows can be conjugated to produce surplus value. The unconscious of capitalism is therefore indifferent to belief or tradition. It replaces the "sacred" with the "calculable," allowing the system to integrate seemingly contradictory elements—such as radical art or religious fundamentalism—provided they can be translated into the language of capital exchange.
## Anti-production and the Death Drive
A central mechanism in the capitalist unconscious is **anti-production**. Because desiring-production is inherently chaotic and expansive, the capitalist system would perish from its own overabundance if left unchecked.
Anti-production refers to the internal "vacuums" created within the system—such as the state apparatus, military spending, and massive bureaucracies—that function to soak up excess energy and prevent the system from reaching a "schizophrenic" breaking point. In this sense, the "death drive" is not a biological urge but an economic necessity: capitalism must constantly produce "waste" and "lack" to maintain the scarcity required for market valuation.
## Machinic Enslavement and Social Subjection
The capitalist unconscious operates through two distinct but overlapping modes of control:
1. **Social Subjection**: This targets the "molar" individual. It produces the "subject" (the worker, the consumer, the citizen) who identifies with their role and feels a sense of personal agency or guilt. This is where the **Oedipal complex** functions as a tool of the state, trapping desire within the nuclear family.
2. **Machinic Enslavement**: This operates at a "molecular" level. It treats humans not as autonomous subjects, but as components or "dividuals" within a larger technical machine. When one uses a credit card or an algorithm, the system does not engage with their personality; it connects directly to their biological and digital impulses.
## The Privatization of the Unconscious
In capitalism, the unconscious is "privatized." By funneling all social desires into the narrow container of the nuclear family (the Oedipal triangle of Mommy-Daddy-Me), the system ensures that revolutionary energy is redirected into personal neurosis. The "unconscious of capitalism" is the process of taking a vast, social, and productive force and convincing the individual that their desires are merely private, sexual, and shameful secrets. This displacement prevents the recognition that desire is, in fact, a direct investment in the socio-economic field.
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Dimensions of Anti-production: Excess and Stasis
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In the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, **anti-production** is not the absence of activity, but a specific function within the social machine that buffers, absorbs, and redirects productive energy. It serves as the "death drive" of the economic organism, ensuring that the system does not consume itself through its own speed. The following topics provide adjacent pathways to understanding how systems manage their own excesses and limits.
## 1. Georges Bataille and the Accursed Share
Georges Bataille’s theory of the **General Economy** posits that every system produces an excess of energy (the "accursed share") that cannot be reinvested into further growth. If this excess is not deliberately wasted—through sacrifice, luxury, or war—it will eventually result in catastrophic, unmanaged destruction.
* **Connection:** Anti-production functions as the mechanism for managing this Bataillean excess. It is the "non-productive expenditure" necessary for social stability.
* **New Dimension:** This perspective adds a **theological and sovereign** dimension. It suggests that capitalism must "waste" resources (such as through military spending or planned obsolescence) not out of inefficiency, but as a structural necessity to prevent the system from overheating.
## 2. The Body without Organs (BwO)
The **Body without Organs** is the unproductive surface upon which the flows of production are recorded and distributed. It is the site where anti-production occurs, acting as a "quasicausal" agent that claims the fruits of labor as its own.
* **Connection:** If production is the movement of flows, the BwO is the "stasis" or the "ice" that allows those flows to be mapped and organized. Anti-production is the force that "arrests" the process to create a stable record.
* **New Dimension:** This explores the **ontological** ground of the concept. It shifts the focus from economic policy to the very nature of how matter and desire are organized into a recognizable "body" or social structure.
## 3. The State Apparatus as Capture Machine
In *A Thousand Plateaus*, the State is defined by its ability to perform **capture**. It does not create wealth so much as it "overcodes" existing flows of labor and land, extracting a rent or tax that contributes to the maintenance of the State itself.
* **Connection:** The State is the ultimate institutionalization of anti-production. Bureaucracy, taxation, and the legal system represent "frictions" that slow down raw economic flows to ensure they serve the sovereign power.
* **New Dimension:** This adds a **political and legal** dimension. It helps distinguish between "productive" labor (which creates value) and the "anti-productive" layers of management and surveillance that allow a hierarchy to persist.
## 4. Entropy and Thermodynamic Social Models
Drawing from the hard sciences, some theorists view anti-production through the lens of **entropy**. In any thermodynamic system, energy is lost to heat; anti-production is the social equivalent of this lost, unusable energy.
* **Connection:** It frames anti-production as an inevitable physical constraint rather than just a psychological or economic choice.
* **New Dimension:** This introduces a **materialist and ecological** perspective. It suggests that the "waste" of the capitalist axiomatic is a fundamental limit of any complex system, linking social theory to the physical laws of energy degradation.
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