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Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis by Eugene W. Holland Review by: William Scott MLN, Vol.

116, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 2001), pp. 1102-1105 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251801 . Accessed: 26/01/2014 23:36
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Eugene W. Holland, Deleuzeand Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introductionto Schizoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, xii +123 pages. Eugene Holland's second book is an eloquent and rigorously argued complement to his first, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis:The Sociopoeticsof Modernism(Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Holland describes it, the second book is intended to be "an introduction to reading Deleuze and not... a substitute for it" (vii). It is one of three such Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, books to appear in the last decade, including Michael Hardt's GillesDeleuze: in Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and An Apprenticeship Deviationsfrom Brian Massumi's A User'sGuide to Capitalismand Schizophrenia: Deleuzeand Guattari (MIT Press, 1992). Whereas Hardt's book explores the relation of Deleuze's early work to Bergson and Spinoza, while Massumi's emphasizes the perspectives of the second volume of Capitalismand Schizophrenia,A ThousandPlateaus,Holland's book distinguishes itself from these by "materialist psychiatry"as the combined inheritattending to Anti-Oedipus's ance of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. If Holland instead chooses to focus this is because, exclusively on the materialist critique offered by Anti-Oedipus, as he insists, its "revolutionary enthusiasm ... appears to be dampened if not silenced in A ThousandPlateaus" (ix). The book is organized into four chapters. The first is an introduction that, is a sort of machine, describes "whatit can do and assuming that Anti-Oedipus how it works" (3). The second is an analysis of the notion of "desiringproduction" which situates this within an "internal"critique of Oedipus. This is followed by a third chapter which describes the "external" critique of Oedipus and its corresponding notion of "social-production."A fourth chapter concludes the book by examining potentially fruitful applications of schizoanalysiswithin areas of theoretical and political activism such as marxism, feminism and environmentalism. Throughout, Holland carefully details the relations between Deleuze and Guattari's book and its various theoretical predecessors, including (among others) Marcuse, Reich, Weber, Adorno, Lukacs, Klein, Levi-Strauss and Lacan. The first chapter in particular is in a tradition of "transcendental" critique concerned to position Anti-Oedipus stemming originally from Kant, yet undergoing a materialist inflection by way of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche to become finally a critique of "psychoanalytic metaphysics."As Marx's critique revolutionized Smith's and Ricardo's classical political economy by hitting upon abstract labor as an analytic category which would allow him to speak of capitalism's "autocritique" within a universal history, so, Holland argues, Deleuze and Guattari manage to abstract a notion of the Oedipus that allows them to explain psychoanalysis'sautocritique within a universal history. According to Holland, this is made possible because they "translate desire and labor from their respective 'determinate systems of representation' (psychoanalysis and political economy) into the concepts of

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'desiring-production' and 'social-production,' precisely in order to stress their common derivation from 'production in general and without distinction' as it appears under capitalism" (18). Thus, translation comes to occupy a crucial role within Holland's book, expressed most schematically in his various interpretations of the operations of "decoding" and "recoding" that result from capitalism's incessant work of "axiomatization." The second and third chapters comprise the bulk Holland's analyses, explaining-in true Kantian fashion-the three "syntheses" of the unconscious, the "paralogisms"of psychoanalysis (the illegitimate uses of these three syntheses), and the social formations which roughly correspond to the historical development of Oedipus (savagery,despotism, and capitalism). The central themes explored here include notions of production and antias a template for desiring-production, production, the "body-without-organs" and of linguistic) representation and inscription, and the (political systems historically changing character of the "socius," together with the various investments of desire (social and psychic) that constitute it. While these chapters are strictly explicatory, the fourth and final chapter, entitled "Beyond Critique: Schizoanalysis and universal history,"attempts to synthesize Deleuze and Guattari's insights and apply them to the fields of contemporary political and theoretical debate. It is here that Holland's book, in spite of its otherwise alert and penetrating exegeses, leaves a number of questions unexamined. At the heart of these questions is the issue of capitalist axiomatization: the quasi-dialectic of deterritorializing and reterritorializing (or decoding and recoding) forces that make for capitalist expansion and accumulation. Because Holland does not further specify this notion-and perhaps it does not permit of specification in any more concrete detail-its precise effects in the register of socio-political theory appear difficult, if not impossible, to gauge. For one thing, Holland does not consider whether axiomatization can itself be understood as a limit inherent to the dynamics of capitalist economies. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari, he concludes that "the capitalist system of commodity-production has no intrinsic economic limits. It continually displacesany apparent limits in the process of expanding and intensifying capitalist production all over the globe" (114). However, because absolutizing displacement as such is no substitute for radicalizing it to the point of its own autocritique, the structures of possibility for political agency it opens up are all destined to be ambivalent at their very core, producing as well as potentially subverting the forces of capitalist accumulation in equal (and ultimately indistinguishable) measure. This problem surfaces in several local contexts. For instance, in the fourth "socius"of schizophrenic permanent revolution, where forces of anti-production continually enable "social connections to be made, un-made, and remade in accordance with the movements of molecular desiring-production itself' (96-97), it remains unclear what becomes of the concept of death, whose "mobility"within the market society of post-capitalism has presumably

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been restored. Similarly, if the operation of "undoing recoding to the point of subordinating molar to molecular forms of investment" (99) holds sway in this socius, it is not clear how such a society could seriously be termed "post"capitalist, when, in fact, it more accurately describes the (no less capitalistic) condition of postmodernity: namely, post-Fordist flexible accumulation. In this regard, for example, Holland might have considered the role played by Kant's aesthetics, the famous "purposiveness without purpose," as a critical precursor to schizoanalysis's "unconscious investments of desire" where "interest always comes after" (102). By situating Deleuze and Guattari in this tradition-from Kant through Hannah Arendt-one might better explore the political ramifications of capitalist axiomatization. The question of politics is perhaps most evident in Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between subjugated (politically oppressed) groups and subjectgroups, or groups that can "produce an unconscious revolutionary break [from forces of subjugation] and then be able to sustain it" (105). Because definition, "molar" structures, Holgroups in general are, by Anti-Oedipus's land could have anticipated and responded to the question of how a subjectgroupat the molecular level is possible in the first place. Holland signals his awareness of this as a problem, however, when he observes that "Rare, indeed, is the group in contemporary society that is not a subjugated oneand lasts long enough to be noticed" (105). These questions come to a head in Holland's analysis of the politics of gender and feminist theory towards the end of the book (pp. 116-123). In demonstrating how schizoanalysis undermines gender roles and sexual orientations, Holland infers the subversion of identity politics tout court,including that which pertains to "ethnic, religious, or racial groups" (119). Yet, due to the relative absence of questions of race and ethnicity in Holland's analyses, it is far from obvious where or how a connection can be drawn from subversions of gender identity to subversions of various processes of racialized identity formation such that an affirmation of the former would already imply, as Holland seems to claim, the achievement of the latter. In support of Judith Butler's gender theory, Holland suggests that "schizoanalysis may adduce historical and materialist contexts" (120) for her work. Here again, the question is: to what extent does capitalist decoding absolve itself from the category of race as a constitutive basis for its modes of accumulation? Does capitalism ever manage, or even attempt, to fully decode "race"?Indeed, could it afford to? At the root of these problems is what Holland (and Deleuze and Guattari) would characterize as the paralogism of the "afterward,"where "Real social
relations are . . . construed merely as so many 'sublimations' of Oedipal

relations, which are supposed to be primary (as well as universal)" (55). That is to say, the problem for Anti-Oedipus (and Holland and Butler) is that desiring-production, in strategic moments, is clandestinely separated from social-production in order to be theorized as a determinant over it. This implies a utopian idealization of decoding in general, or a fetishizing of

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decoding processes in isolation from their economic and political functions in a context of social production. Thus, it also commits what Holland had earlier described as an illegitimate use of the "connective" synthesis by extrapolating decoding as an isolatable (and unqualifiedly liberating) phenomenon rather than seeing it as a potential instrument in the operations of socio-economic containment. Further, Holland reinforces the very distinction between public and private that he wants to question by assuming that capitalism is always to be understood as merely "market" capitalism, thus failing to account for the historical changes in capitalist production that have led to managerial forms of hierarchy, or vertically integrated corporate "asceticism": "[I]t is the nuclear family that produces Oedipally recoded ascetic subjects in the private or domestic sphere, while decoding sponsored by market exchange prevails nearly everywhere else" (122). Although Holland notes that the relation between desiring-production (the body-withoutorgans) and social-production (the socius) is a homology that is "crucially not a relation of equivalence, expression, or reflection" (122), insisting that production on the socius ultimately determines production on the bodywithout-organs, up to this point his analyses have in fact tended to reverse the direction of determination, appearing to suggest that the homology is indeed one of equivalence such that desiring-production can come to be equated with-or seamlessly translated into-"production in general." As a consequence, Butler's position (as Holland describes it) is only viable because it presupposes the functional equivalence of this homology. Thus Holland concludes that "So it is that schizophrenia on the bodywithout-organs emerges at/as the end of universal history as the principle freedom in permanent revolution" (123). Still, a question remains: what becomes of schizophrenia on the capitalistsocius in the form of axiomatization? Would it not continually work to undermine precisely those subjectgroups Holland considers "whose very existence and form of operation subvert the dominant mode of organization in power, that of subjugated groups" (123)? If Holland's lucid and philosophically demanding book cannot answer this question, perhaps it is not so much his fault as that of the theory he is concerned to explicate. This book, at any rate, is a most useful tool for accessing the formidable (and seemingly cryptic) project of schizoanalysis that Anti-Oedipus proposes.
TheJohnsHopkins University WILLIAMSCOTT

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