Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art

Ian Buchanan, Lorna Collins, Ian Buchanan, Lorna Collins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472524621
• eBook ISBN: 9781472531131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

The concept of schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's fusion of psychoanalytic-inspired theories of the self, the libido and desire with Marx-inspired theories of the economy, history and society. Schizoanalysis holds that art's function is both political and aesthetic – it changes perception. If one cannot change perception, then, one cannot change anything politically. This is why Deleuze and Guattari always insist that artists operate at the level of the real (not the imaginary or the symbolic). Ultimately, they argue, there is no necessary distinction to be made between aesthetics and politics. They are simply two sides of the same coin, both concerned with the formation and transformation of social and cultural norms. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art explores how every artist, good or bad, contributes to the structure and nature of society because their work either reinforces social norms, or challenges them. From this point of view we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called a 'aesthetico-political function' and change the world around us; or, conversely, we can not only let the status quo endure, but fight to preserve it as though it were freedom itself.

Edited by one of the world's leading scholars in Deleuze Studies and an accomplished artist, curator and critic, this impressive collection of writings by both academics and practicing artists is an exciting imaginative tool for a upper level students and academics researching and studying visual arts, critical theory, continental philosophy, and media.

Part One

Genealogy of Art and Schizoanalysis

1

The ‘Clutter’ Assemblage1

Ian Buchanan

Of the various definitions of schizoanalysis Deleuze and Guattari give, the most useful in my view is the one found in The Machinic Unconscious. Guattari defines schizoanalysis as a ‘pragmatics of the unconscious’, by which he means a mode of analysis whose purpose is to understand how the unconscious works (Guattari 2011: 27).

‘Works’ is meant in the most literal sense here – ultimately Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious is a factory and not a theatre, which they claim is how Freud conceives it. They draw heavily on Marx’s work on labour in the elaboration of their newly minted discourse of the machinic unconscious. But this discourse can be misleading because although Deleuze and Guattari frequently use the language of machines to describe the operations of the unconscious, their model isn’t mechanics but pragmatics. The only time they make a direct comparison between the unconscious and actual machines is when they compare it to the absurd machines of the Dadaists, surrealists, and the infernal machines imagined by Buster Keaton and Rube Goldberg (Guattari 1995a: 135).2 And on these occasions what is crucial is that these machines don’t work.

It is the nature of this not-working that will interest me here. As Guattari observes in a post-face he wrote for the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, Man Ray’s collage ‘dancer/danger’ doesn’t work inasmuch as its working parts, its cogs and wheels and so on, do not turn or intermesh with one another in a mechanical fashion, and it is precisely for that reason that it works as a piece of art (Guattari 1995a: 119–50). It works by creating a connection, but not an association – the distinction is important, indeed one could say the whole of schizoanalysis depends on it. Deleuze and Guattari stipulate that ‘you will not have reached the ultimate and irreducible terms of the unconscious so long as you find or restore links between two elements’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 314). Man Ray’s juxtaposition of the human dancer and the inhuman machine obeys this rule: it brings the two into a new kind of productive relation which Deleuze and Guattari would later call the assemblage, though in their first works they called it the desiring-machine, inasmuch as the relation it spawns is external to both of the original terms. It works precisely because it doesn’t project a cyborg figure of a machinic dancer.

What complicates everything is that there is indeed a necessity for desiring-production to be induced from representation, to be discovered through its lines of escape. But this is true in a way altogether different from what psycho-analysis believes it to be. The decoded flows of desire form the free energy (libido) of the desiring-machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 314–15).

Desiring-machines are the working parts of the machinic unconscious – but they work by joining together elements that do not have pre-existing associations; it is their operation that the pragmatics of the unconscious is tasked to understand. If dreams are Freud’s ‘royal road’ to the unconscious, then it is desiring-machines that provide Deleuze and Guattari with their sovereign superhighway to the machinic unconscious. If schizoanalysis is the discourse of the desiring-machine, then to understand schizoanalysis we must first of all understand the desiring-machine. To understand the desiring-machine we must go further back, as it were, because the desiring-machine is a product of a still more primary process, namely desiring-production.

Desiring-production is the process and means the psyche deploys in producing connections and links between thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations, memories and so on that we call desiring-machines (assemblages). It only becomes visible to us in and through the machines it forms. While both these terms were abandoned by Deleuze and Guattari in subsequent writing on schizoanalysis, the thinking behind them remains germane throughout. This is by no means straightforward because Deleuze and Guattari cast their discussion of desiring-production in language drawn from Marx, which has the effect of making it seem as though they are talking about the production of physical things, which simply is not and cannot be the case. The truth of this can be seen by asking the very simple question: if desire produces, then what does it produce?

The answer isn’t physical things. The correct answer is ‘objects’ – but ‘objects’ in the form of intuitions, to use Kant’s term for the mind’s initial attempts to grasp the world (both internal and external to the psyche). That is what desire produces, objects, not physical things. Kant, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was one of the first to conceive of desire as production, but he botched things by failing to recognize that the object produced by desire is fully real. Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that superstitions, hallucinations and fantasies belong to the alternate realm of ‘psychic reality’ as Kant would have it (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25). The schizophrenic has no awareness that the reality they are experiencing is not reality itself. They may be aware that they do not share the same reality as everyone else, but they see this as a failing in others rather than a flaw in themselves. If they see their long dead mother in the room with them they do not question whether this is possible or not; they aren’t troubled by any such doubts. That is the essential difference between a delusion and a hallucination. What delusionals see is what is, quite literally.

If this Kantian turn by Deleuze and Guattari seems surprising, it is nevertheless confirmed by their critique of Lacan, who in their view makes essentially the same mistake as Kant in that he conceives desire as lacking a real object (for which fantasy acts as both compensation and substitute). Deleuze and Guattari describe Lacan’s work as ‘complex’, which seems to be their code word for useful but flawed (they say the same thing about Badiou). On the one hand, they credit him with discovering desiring-machines in the form of the objet petit a, but on the other hand they accuse him of smothering them under the weight of the Big O (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 310). As Žižek is fond of saying, in the Lacanian universe fantasy supports reality. This is because reality, as Lacan conceives it, is fundamentally deficient; it perpetually lacks a real object. If desire is conceived this way, as a support for reality, then, they argue, ‘its very nature as a real entity depends upon an “essence of lack” that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25).

But that is not how desire works. If it was, it would mean that all desire does is produce imaginary doubles of reality, creating dreamed-of objects to complement real objects. This subordinates desire to the objects it supposedly lacks, or needs, thus reducing it to an essentially secondary role. This is precisely what Deleuze was arguing against when he said that the task of philosophy is to overturn Platonism. Nothing is changed by correlating desire with need as psychoanalysis tends to do. ‘Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 27). This rejection of Lacan confirms what might be termed the neo-Kantian reading of desire because it means that we cannot define desire in a transitive fashion: any attempt to define desire as the desire for something immediately puts us back into the realm of lack. Productive desire cannot be the desire for something, it must produce something.

This brings us to the most important twist in Deleuze and Guattari’s rethinking of desire: if desire is productive and what it produces is real, then desire must be actual and not virtual. Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit on this point. Referring to the formation of symptoms, such as hallucinations, Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘The actual factor is desiring-production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129). To which they add the following important clarification: ‘The term “actual” is not used because it designates what is most recent [which is its usual meaning in both French and German], and because it would be opposed to “former” or “infantile” [which is how it is used in Freud’s texts]; it is used in terms of its difference with respect to “virtual” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129). I doubt there is a more important or consequential statement in the whole of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Its importance becomes clear in the next sentence:

And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129, emphasis in original).

This is a major reversal of how we are usually taught to think about the relationship between the actual and the virtual. To actualize the virtual, then, does not mean that something that was previously only notional or imaginary is thereby made concrete and real (an idea turned into a thing, for example); rather, it means that something that was sensual is made present to the mind in an active sense (it becomes an object). The actual is that which concerns the mind right now, where concern would mean an active form of attention which could be either conscious or unconscious (what we commonly refer to as ‘preoccupation’ would be an example of unconscious active attention). Freud’s biggest mistake, Deleuze and Guattari claim, which demonstrates his failure to understand this point, was to think that the unconscious is constructed on the model of the Oedipus story, which would mean that the unconscious is merely a shadow theatre for the conscious and not a productive system in its own right. Freud thus mistook the virtual for the actual and vice versa. The problem of the actual and the virtual is central to the entire schizoanalytic project, but, as is obvious from the foregoing discussion, Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of this problematic does not follow any of the expected paths – it is not used in either an ontological or metaphysical sense, but wholly in what must be called a psychological sense. And that must be borne in mind at all times if one is not to be led astray by Deleuze and Guattari’s often perplexing rhetoric. Assembling, or synthesizing, which is the other word Deleuze and Guattari sometimes use, is then the basic operation performed by the unconscious, or indeed the mind as a whole. There are a number of sub-operations of assembling that Deleuze and Guattari consider (chief among these is the process of forming and unforming or deforming territories), but for present purposes it suffices it to say that assembling is what the mind does.

It is only when we turn to a consideration of actions – and not just the elaboration of thoughts and ideas – that we can see the full complexity of this claim because now it becomes clear that the usual distinction between actual and virtual must be reversed. The physical elements in a given assemblage are not necessarily ‘actual’ from the point of view of the construction of the assemblage, they are merely the props, and as we’ll see in the case of Little Joey (Bettelheim’s patient), they aren’t even necessary. In this precise sense they should be considered virtual. The actual is rather the productive set of ideas – the complex as Freud called it – that holds the props together and gives the overall arrangement (a perhaps better translation of agencement than assemblage) its coherence and purpose; I use the term ‘complex’ here quite deliberately, too. In the glossary Guattari appended to Molecular Revolution in Brazil, he writes, ‘In the schizoanalytic theory of the unconscious, assemblage is conceived as replacing the Freudian “complex” ’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 463). This is an important clue to understanding the concept of the assemblage, which is all too often simply equated with the composition of a set of physical props. The actual is the beating heart of the assemblage, that which makes a particular arrangement of things necessary. As the ‘Little Joey’ case demonstrates it remains in place even when the things themselves are removed.

In the context of artistic production, this raises some very interesting questions about the relationship between the physical conditions in which the art is produced – e.g., the studio – and the final arrangement of the artistic object itself.

The well-known British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips engages this question directly, albeit using a very different critical language, in a short but intriguing essay entitled ‘Clutter: A Case History’. He asks what clutter – e.g., a messy bedroom, an untidy studio, a disorganized desk, and so on – might mean, or rather ‘do’, for the person doing the cluttering. For Phillips, the questions ‘what does clutter mean?’ and ‘what does clutter do?’ are related, obviously, but also distinct, and one senses that he shares Deleuze and Guattari’s view, or at least intuits the substance of their argument, that one can only properly engage the second question by first of all renouncing the first, something he finds hard to do because psychoanalysis constantly pushes his thinking in that direction (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 109).

Psychoanalysis, especially but not exclusively its British, empirical strain, is, Phillips observes, curiously ambivalent about disorder, or what he prefers to call clutter so as not automatically to pathologize it. Virtually all its ‘categories of pathology’ are, as Phillips puts it, ‘fantasies of disorder’, yet its critical language ‘repudiates chaos’ as its basic duty (Phillips 2000: 60). On the one hand, psychoanalysis is professionally fascinated by instances of disorder, it is constantly on the alert for slips of the tongue, tics, compulsions, anything that might be construed as betraying a second order of psychical activity; yet, on the other hand, it cannot accept that disorder really is what it appears to be, it must uncover the hidden pattern, the secret order that renders the slips of the tongue, the tics, the compulsions, and so on, legible. The irony of this, from a schizoanalytic point of view, is that these ‘slips’ are the only forms of desiring-production that psychoanalysis recognizes and it negates them (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 77). What psychoanalysis cannot countenance is the idea that clutter might be meaningless and still purposive. The tension here between ‘what does it mean?’ and ‘what does it do?’ pushes contemporary psychoanalysts like Phillips in a similar direction to Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

Phillips offers as his paradigmatic example of what might be termed purposive clutter (i.e. an assemblage), the case of a painter in his mid-30s who came to see him because he felt he was becoming ‘mildly agoraphobic’. The artist couldn’t be completely sure of his self-diagnosis because his vocation kept him indoors at an easel most of the time anyway; but, he was sufficiently anxious about venturing anywhere near parks or the countryside to compel him to seek treatment. However, it was not the thought of being able to go outside again in relative comfort that drove him to the analyst’s door. His agoraphobia did not imprison him, or if it did it was not the confining nature of it that worried him. Not unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, he was more concerned with what his symptoms might mean. He wondered if his anxiety concealed an unconscious or perhaps preconscious desire not to see someone or something. Was it, in other words, a defence or perhaps a screen? Was he afraid of going outside in case he encountered someone or something that was in fact the real cause of his discomfort? Doubtless, as an artist he was also troubled by the potential impairment of his visual apparatus such a will to blindness entails. How could he have confidence in the ‘truth’ of his art with that gnawing worm of self-doubt eating away at his sense of aesthetic integrity? Paradoxically, the prospect of treatment also caused him not a little anxiety too because he sensed there was an intimate and productive connection (i.e. the assemblage manifesting itself as a complex) between his symptoms and his art, as though his not-seeing one thing was the price he paid for acuity in other areas. Phillips also sensed a connection between art and symptoms, although not in quite the direct fashion the patient feared.

So worried was the patient about the connection between his symptoms and his art that he tells his analyst ‘I will be in a mess if I come here with agoraphobia and you cure me of painting!’ (Phillips 2000: 62) Phillips treats his patient’s presenting symptoms as a potential entrée onto a new ‘field of virtuality’ (Guattari 1995b: 52). He doesn’t immediately seize on agoraphobia as the problem, but waits for the patient to explain why he thinks it is a problem. This is of course standard procedure for psychoanalysis, which effects its ‘cure’ not by interpreting symptoms for the patient, but by teaching the patient how to interpret them. Its ‘talking cure’ label is well-deserved because it is precisely by talking, by self-analysing, that the patient attains their cure, albeit at the price of a perpetual auto-critique. For Deleuze and Guattari this is one of the more egregious aspects of psychoanalytic practice; in their view,...

Table of contents

• Schizoanalytic Applications
• Title
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Inventing Schizoanalysis, Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins
• Part 1 Genealogy of Art and Schizoanalysis
• 1 The ‘Clutter’ Assemblage, Ian Buchanan
• 2 Schizo-Revolutionary Art: Deleuze, Guattari and Communization Theory, Stephen Zepke
• Part 2 Raw Data for Schizoanalysis: Outsider Art
• 3 Pragmatics of Raw Art (For the Post-Autonomy Paradigm), Alexander Wilson
• 4 Passional Bodies: The Interstitial Force of Artaud’s Drawings, Anna Powell
• 5 Art, Therapy and the Schizophrenic, Lorna Collins
• Part 3 Art as an Abstract Machine
• 6 The Audience and the Art Machine: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Opera for a Small Room, Susan Ballard
• 7 1780 and 1945: An Avant-Garde Without Authority, Addressing the Anthropocene, jan jagodzinski
• 8 Strategies of Camouflage: Depersonalization, Schizoanalysis and Contemporary Photography, Ayelet Zohar
• Part 4 Mobilizing Schizoanalysis: Collaborative Art Practice
• 9 The Event of Painting, Andrea Eckersley
• 10 In Response to the ‘Indiscreet Questioner’, Jac Saorsa
• 11 The Sinthome/Z-Point Relation or Art as Non-Schizoanalysis, David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan (Plastique Fantastique)
• 12 Art as Schizoanalysis: Creative Place-Making in South Asia, Leon Tan
• Index
• Copyright