Learning about/from Psychoanalysis (week 7)

“A great deal of the academic scholarship, however, has lifted Anti- Oedipus out of space and time entirely, treating it as principally a contribution to philosophy (whether wacky- elusive, spurious problematic, or canonical- impressive”-important to consider how it’s framed historically so one can then consider what constraints such framing presents to theory“Doing so reveals as well that the book needs to be understood as initiating a conceptual paradigm shift, particularly in its fresh take on the problem of ideology –and the puzzle of what attracts human beings to particular political stances.”“The most singular and personal factors have to do with social and collective dimensions. It is stupid to imagine a psychogenesis independent of contextual dimensions, but that’s what psychologists and psychoanalysts do.”“more accurately, human beings are conceived as composed of multiple, endlessly shifting, connecting and disconnecting desiring- machines, which are in turn continually connecting and disconnecting to all other life (both human and non- human), in fl ows interrupted and changed by stoppages, surges, and redirections.”“On the other hand, as Deleuze put it in his preface to Guattari’s 1972 essay collection: “What is at stake is the libido as such, as the very essence of desire and sexuality: it invests and disinvests the flows of all kinds that run through the social body.” 29 Deleuze and Guattari did literally mean that also economics was a sexual matter.” “The truth is that sexuality is everywhere:  the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.”-exactly, sexuality is linked to all forms of power and arousal and dedication, so it’s inherently included in all frameworks, yet often excluded in discussion; issue of psychoanalysis and how its evolved that we keep seeing in these readings“that an answer to the question of why human beings submitted to political arrangements that were not in their economic interest might lie not just in the intellectual content or even the emotional appeal of the ideological “befogging” to which they were subjected by the powers that be, but literally in the corporeal impact of ideology, especially an ideology that enforced sexual fear and self- restriction. 32 “What has to be explained,” Reich wrote, “is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don’t steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don’t strike.”-question has been posed time and time again; and is always relevant“A realistic appraisal would have had to point out that the average worker bears a contradiction in himself; that he, in other words, is neither a clear- cut revolutionary nor a clear- cut conservative, but stands divided. His psychic structure derives on the one hand from the social situation (which prepares the ground for revolutionary attitudes) and on the other hand from the entire atmosphere of authoritarian society –the two being at odds with one another.”-power of conformity and believing that what they are aligned with is “right”“We’re not contrasting desire, as some romantic luxury, with interests that are merely economic and political. We think, rather, that interests are always found and articulated at points predetermined by desire … Because however you look at it, desire is part of the infrastructure (we don’t have any time for concepts like ideology, which are really no help at all:  there are no such things as ideologies).”-of course it’s all interconnected, with each influencing one another“she insisted on the consequentialness of projective identification and in general on the extraordinary role of unconscious phantasy in determining human behaviors.”“Klein emphasized just how close to psychosis and self- disintegration almost all human beings often were, filled with persecutory- paranoid and benign or reparation intending impulses jostling with each other for supremacy  –a constant state of internal war.”“Deleuze and Guattari got essential ideas about the instability of all persons, the potency of the unconscious, the metonymic slipping and sliding and substitutions in chains of meaning, the constant splitting or doubling of selves and objects, and the foundational importance of misrecognition and miscommunication between selves and others”-the unknown and the flexibility of all constructs influence one another“The point was, fi rst, to see through the absurdity of much of what had been said over the decades about the presumed importance of the familial triangle, with its pretend- transgressive prescribed roles and its glum, restrictive outcome –but also to see both the personal and the political damages the presumption of the Oedipal complex’s importance caused. In short, and in notable contrast to Reich, Deleuze and Guattari were not hostile to families at all. Rather, they criticized what they perceived as a willful and appalling myopia in familialist thinking.”“Families are filled with gaps and transected by breaks that are not familial: the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, religion and atheism, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, Stalinism, the Vietnam war, May ’68–all these things form complexes of the un conscious, more effective than everlasting Oedipus.”“While there was no such thing as a delimited and coherent individual, there was absolutely idiosyncrasy –and it was much to be cherished. For Guattari, moreover, desire ever remained a potentially transformative force, one which for him included “ all forms of the will to live, the will to create, the will to love, the will to invent another society.” 77 Maintaining hope against hope, Guattari asked in 1985: “How does one go about producing, on a large scale, a desire to create a collective generosity with … tenacity … intelligence and … sensibility?” For, as he mused, “perhaps I am a naïve and incorrigible optimist, but I am convinced that one day there will be a return to collective judgment, and these last few years will be considered the most stupid and barbaric in a long time.”-the cognitive dissonance that allows humans to continue and not be paralyzed with existential dread“to say that “making love” did not need to be reduced to something inter- individual. “There are all sorts of ways of making love! One can do it with flowers, with science, with art, with machines, with social groups.” For, “as soon as one breaks the personalogical framework of Oedipal sexuality, … a transsexuality is established in connection with the social field, that is to say with a multiplicity of material flows and semiotic flows. The entire individual libidinal economy, closed in on itself, is put in question.”“This model, Horkheimer observed, had “disappeared long ago.” Not only were fathers being steadily replaced as orientation points by “collectives such as the children’s sport club, the fraternity, and the like,” but the constant “detached adjustability” that the ever more insecure economic situation demanded of young adults meant that “it is no longer the son’s fear of the father that is the typical psychological fact but the father’s secret fear of the son.”