Schizoanalysis

Schizoanalysis (''or'' ecosophy, pragmatics, micropolitics, rhizomatics, or nomadology) (french: schizoanalyse; ''schizo-'' from Greek σχίζειν ''skhizein'', meaning "to split") is a set of theories and techniques developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, first expounded in their book ''Anti-Oedipus'' (1972) and continued in their follow-up work, ''A Thousand Plateaus'' (1980).

Overview

The practice acquires many different definitions during the course of its development in their collaborative work and individually in the work of Guattari.

In his work ''Chaosmosis'', Guattari explains that "rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex", schizoanalysis "will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity".

Background

Schizoanalysis was developed by Guattari as a response to the shortcomings of French psychoanalytic practice and as the culmination of his work with institutional psychotherapy at the La Borde clinic. Guattari was directly confronted with the use of the Oedipus complex as a starting point for analysis, and the authority figure of the psychoanalyst in relationship to the patient. Guattari was interested in a practice that could derive, from given systems of enunciation and subjective structures, new " assemblages 'agencements''of enunciation" capable of forging new coordinates of analysis, and to create unforeseen propositions and representations from the standpoint of psychosis.

Deleuze later broke away from the framework, stating that "we no longer want to talk about schizoanalysis, because that would amount to protecting a particular type of escape, schizophrenic escape".

Concepts

Deleuze and Guattari write in the fourth chapter of ''Anti-Oedipus'', "Introduction to Schizoanalysis", that in effect, schizoanalysis asks "What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?".

Deleuze and Guattari develop four theses of schizoanalysis:

# Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field.
# Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.
# Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments.
# Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole.

Schizoanalyst

A schizoanalyst is not a deconstructionist; they churn logos through a partial-object text-machine-subject to express praxis-enslavement by ''puissance''. Schizoanalysis addresses ressentiment by leading the neurotic subject to a rhizomatic state of becoming. Schizoanalysis uses psychosis as a figurative-philosophical diagrammatic model, creating ''abstract machines'' that go beyond a semiotic simulacrum, generating a reality not already present. Contradistinct from the psychoanalytic axiom of lack generating the kernel at the core of the subject, schizoanalytic desiring-production of intensities decode "representational territories" by self-generating the subject-becoming-BwO as a multiplicity. Desiring-production is a virtuality of becoming-''intense'', a becoming-Other. Schizoanalysis deterritorializes- reterritorializes found assemblages through rhizomatic desiring-production.

Body without organs

The body without organs is a central concept in schizoanalysis; Deleuze and Guattari write in ''A Thousand Plateaus'' that it is "the only practical object of schizoanalysis". It is "the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable", a disorganized body of loose and erratic desires that they strongly identify with schizophrenia, as well as masochism and repressed forms of love, and that they compare in ''Anti-Oedipus'' to a desert of sorts. Bodies without organs are produced by the unconscious when desiring-production achieves its third nonproductive stage; a body without organs is "produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes." Deleuze writes in '' The Logic of Sense'' (1969) that "a body without organs, with neither mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being complete, at this price", is "closed on a full depth without limits and without exteriority."

Four functors

The four ontological dimensions are concepts within a clinical model of the unconscious, laid out in the following schema:

# Fluxes: material, energetic and semiotic transformations (qv., libido)
# Territories: finite existential subjectifications (qv., self and transference)
# Universes of reference (value): virtual incorporeal enunciative alterifications (qv., complexes and sublimation)
# Phylum (machinic): drive deterritorialization

The territory (first assemblage that appears by decoding) is the social field of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, while the flux and phylum are the components of abstract machines. With these functors, there are four circular components that bud and form rhizomes:

# The generative component: the study of concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures and variations, making a tracing of the mixed semiotics.
# The transformational component: the study of pure semiotics; their transformations-translations and the creation of new semiotics, making the transformational map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings.
# The diagrammatic component: The Real as an Absolute synchronic-parallel diagram of Reality (or Nature), surpassing all regimes of signs by the merging of content and expression.
# The machinic component: the study of the assemblages that effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously semiotizing matters of expression and physicalizing matters of content, outlining the program of the assemblages that distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps, and mutations.

Legacy

* Manuel DeLanda
* Michael Hardt
* Antonio Negri

Nick Land

British philosopher and theorist Nick Land, whose critical work and experimental texts in the 1990s frequently cited from Deleuze and Guattari, wrote that "schizoanalysis shares in the delicious irresponsibility of everything anarchic, inundating and harshly impersonal." In his 1992 essay "Circuitries", Land described the practice of schizoanalysis as a prescient theory, writing that it "was only possible because we are hurtling into the first globally integrated insanity: politics is obsolete. ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'' hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent inevitability of viral revolution, soft fusion." Land's later work in the 1990s, associated with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, also further reinterpreted and developed schizoanalysis alongside cybernetics, cyberpunk aesthetics and occultism, most prominently in his 1995 essay "Meltdown":

Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static. Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BwOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit.

Bard & Söderqvist

Swedish philosophers and futurologists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist build from Deleuze & Guattari's schizoanalysis in their book ''The Body Machines'' (2009), the third and final installment of ''The Futurica Trilogy'' (2000-2009) with Lacan's empty signifier re-added as an extra +1 to a properly implemented 12+1 structure – developed in collaboration with Stockholm's Royal Institute of Art

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