Raymond Bellour
INTERVIEW WITH GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI
1. Desire and lack
Raymond Bellour: First of all, I was wondering what is recovered by this notion of desire as the absolute real, and without lack.
Doesn’t the way you make this notion operate represent too high a level of abstraction with regard to the child’s mode of constitution? Visibly, from the first weeks of the child’s life, what one notices is that the child functions out of a certain ensemble of elements of lack.
Félix Guattari: That’s the worst abstraction. Lack of what–- of vitamins, of oxygen? Needful lack, instinctual lack? What?
RB: Take the example of the breast, or the bottle. From the moment you take it away, there is a demand. And what is this demand? Is it an expression of desire, and is it expressed in terms of a lack or not?
Gilles Deleuze: This question seems simple, if one replies with a yes: the little child needs the breast, he lacks something, from that moment we will be spun all the way back to castration, and the lack of the dear Lord, and...
FG: Your question is rotten. As in communication, there is already one entity constituted as the transmitter, and another entity constituted as the receiver– one subject and another and then a thing that passes between them. From the moment you start with three terms, pole A that transmits, pole B that receives and something transmitted from A to B, and you remove one, then it lacks one of the three– that’s unstoppable. But it is all a system of multiplicities, of intensities, like a system of flows and cuts, a system that starts back up, that codes and decodes desire, that is going to reconstitute these poles, represent them. Obviously it’s not that there’s a kid on one side, a mother on the other, and then a breast– there’s none of that, at this level.
GD: When we wrote that desire is not a lack, but production, we obviously didn’t mean that it produces its own object: we don’t mean that the hunger of the little baby suffices to produce milk. We know very well like everybody else that desire doesn’t produce its object. What we’re saying is that the division, the space of segregation, with the object of desire as a person distinct from the desiring subject, already implies a cutting, a cutting which can come from the social field, which can come also from nature. And this is a cutting on a bed of flows that is itself flowing; desire is fundamentally this flowing of flows, in which nothing lacks. The flow of hunger from the little calf and the flow of milk from the cow do not meet up if the little calf has lost its cow– this we know, like everybody else– but we say that desire is, in its essence, these meetings or not-meetings of flows. There are flows that can meet up and that produce the effects of repulsion, or else that don’t meet up again and produce the effects of lack. We know quite well that there are lacks, society is organized to distribute lack in certain places and to distribute excess in certain other places. We are not saying at all that there is no lack, we are saying: phenomena of lack are not desire.
RB: O.K. From there, the same question can have a sort of second level: what the fuck do we care about this desire if it is so fluid, transpersonal, an ungraspable absolute real, that it lacks even more than classic psychoanalytic lack?
GD: You’re talking as though flows are imperceptible...Not at all. Flows are flowing, in any case. I’m thinking of an example even more pathetic than the cow: conditions of drought, in which animals cannot find any more water, and start to flee. There is a flow of dryness, there is a flow of animals fleeing, there is a flow of water at some distance, there is a search. A flow of dryness is something absolutely full, just like a flow of animals; it does not lack anything. That is what exists: this is what we call the real. Anyway, we are inside the flows. We are not people confronted objects. The idea of the flow is not even a concept; one only has to look at something that flows, no matter what–- milk, pee, sperm, money: that is reality. This is precisely what life is, and this is exactly what people live with. It’s not at all that the history of flows changes anything; it’s that people live so little in the experience of flows that they do not understand any of this at all: they look for objects, they take themselves to be persons, etc. A flow in search of other flows, that’s not about lack.
FG: The passage from one flow to another is a kind of theory of attachment [étayage], which means that there is a passage, a mechanical transfer from one flow to another. In all of these flows, connected, disjointed, added on, there are certain flows which are deterritorialized, which means that, among themselves, the flows create not phenomena of lack but a sort of shift [décalage] which will carry desire from one flow to another. This is precisely what will constitute the coding of flows.
GD: When we speak of flows, it’s not to replace one concept by another; it is to imply that this is not the same way of living, and of living desire. It is not at all about an art of flows: it is about living in a form where it's not people, it is not objects, but flows that pass–-this is what one lives. Here, Félix is completely correct: one lives in the form of, and out of, yet another flow, the flow of one’s own flight to the self [fuite à soi], the flow of one’s own search for the self, which is not a lack. An animal senses water ten kilometers away, but one cannot say that it lacks water: it is held in a kind of flow which pushes it or from which it guides itself towards the water.
FG: It’s the water that lacks the animal. It’s not the same thing.
GD: A subject is not someone who is facing the flows; a subject is itself an ensemble of flows. So if that’s really desire, then desire really means to make flow [faire fluer], it really means to produce flows. In this sense the ground which is drying up, or the ground which is moistened, is flowing. The very fact of learning to live in this way changes everything about the consciousness and the unconscious of the desire that one has.
FG: I was saying that it is the water that lacks the animal. This has the appearance of a paradox. One must understand with deterritorialized flows– and they are all deterritorialized, each in relation to others– that with certain flows, flows of abstract quantities, like flows of capital, indeed one sees that they lack something. The moment you have a flow of dollars– somewhere, it lacks a territory, it lacks a labor power [force de travail]. It is the most deterritorialized flow that attracts the constitution of productive entities, which want to reterritorialize themselves somewhere. Therefore it is finally always in a differential system of flows that there is a constitution of the desiring vector.
RB: Isn’t this idea of a sort of capacity for taking things in as one goes along, while creating a series of flows oneself, a utopia in comparison to what is in people’s heads?
GD: In a room where people are taking drugs, and even more so in drug societies (respectable societies, as in India), there is a flow that passes and then there are places where the flow is blocked, and we can thus assign the subject secondarily– that is, the bad element which prevents the flows from passing. Marginal Americans live spontaneously like that.
FG: It is all the same an incredible illusion to think that people have an identity, that they are stuck to their professional function, father, mother and all that. They are completely wandering and wild; they appear to be fixed, caught in a constellation, but they are completely adjacent in relation to the many systems of intensity that run through them. It is necessary to have a completely rationalist intellectual vision to believe that there are well-constituted people who move along in a field while preserving their identity. People are all wanderers. It’s a matter of knowing whether this wandering revolves around a stake, like a goat, or whether it is a desiring wandering which comes precisely to find its bearings in relation to desiring, deterritorialized points of escape.
GD: We’re not saying that there is no lack. We are saying: phenomena of lack do not have anything to do with phenomena of desire.
This is what makes us different from the whole world up to now, from Plato to Lacan [laughter]. They said: ‘Ah, you see, desire is very complicated; it is a problem of lack, and then a problem of satisfaction.’ And from Plato to Lacan they all find themselves back at the church. [laughter]
RB: I would like to know why you call this desire.
FG: Have you seen a person in a situation– familial, conjugal, or otherwise– who is thereby in the field of desire? It is organized in precisely the opposite way, you see. We do not say that it flows all the time; we know that when it does not flow, you aren’t in the field of desire. When it cracks, when there is a door that slams, when there is a draught, pay attention: something happens, just then desire passes– the concierge notices something, she hears something. Without that, with the concierge all alone in her room, there’s no desire.
There is one politics–-fascist, paranoid, capitalist, bourgeois, reterritorializing, let’s say–- and then there is another which, as soon as there is something that cracks, something that escapes, invests itself there.
RB: What strikes me in that is the decisional aspect of the thing– an aspect which is borne out by your use of the word politics. There are two politics, there are two options.
GD: It’s not one individual’s choice in relation to two politics: it is the fact, in one case, of running up against the person, the role, the function, and in the other case, of putting oneself adjacent to a mechanical process. The options are those of the unconscious itself, not the options of decision.
RB: I would like to know how the whole problem of sexuality, in the traditional sense of the term, can be articulated within your problematic. Is sexuality– more specifically the sexual– a more important flow than others?
FG: There is no more important flow with respect to sexuality, resulting as it does from the division of the sexes, precisely because this is already a deduction [prélèvement], a mutilation of a generalized transsexuality. Wherever it is a matter of dividing the sexes, this already means that there has been a forcing back [rabat] of desiring energy into persons, into poles; in one sense the word sexuality itself is an entry, an avenue towards the Oedipalization of desiring energy. It is moreover for this reason that we have spoken more of desiring energy than of pan-sexualism, or of generalized sexuality. So, there's no specifically sexual sexuality, no sexual biological energy resulting from the division of the sexes that would constitute a particular zone of desiring energy. This is because sexual machines, in the sense in which you're taking them, are already nothing but mutilated sequences, cut out from desiring energy. Desiring energy knows no sex, knows no people; it even knows no object. It produces its objects and finds itself forced back onto its origins, forced to attribute social and sexual coordinates–- exclusive coordinates that are in the end restrictive and mutilating. So, insofar as there is an escape of privileged biological energy that would irrigate the social field––by extension, by sublimation––desiring energy is the complete opposite. There is a sexual, transsexual, a-personal energy which accompanies all flows, and which then finds itself recodified in personal relations, in familial relations, in ego relations.
GD: Sexuality in the hypertrophied state, as one can see with the work of Miller, with Lawrence– with the authors that were called pornographic, erotic– is a sexuality which appears to us already as a system of codification linked to all phenomena of Oedipalization, of castration. The whole analytical or schizo-analytical process, the experimentation of these authors, consists in being able to disengage themselves from this system, and find lines of escape, faultlines in this social encoding.
We don’t mark off one narrow sexuality for persons, whether this would mean women, men, chickens or anything else, and then one broad sexuality, which would be the equivalent of a sublimation and which would flood the social field. On the contrary, that's the last thing we would say; it simply doesn’t work like that. We're saying: whatever you may like sexually, whatever you invest in through sexuality, whether it be a woman, a man, a piece of clothing, a shoe, a chicken, it is a political and social field. Sexed objects are not at all coincident with the difference between the sexes. This is already our first disagreement with psychoanalysis: we do not attach any importance to sexual difference, we do not attach any privilege to it. It can happen this way, or it can happen in other ways, but regardless of what you espouse sexually, through the sexual object, the sexuated object [sexué]––and regardless of how this object may be sexuated, whether homosexuated, heterosexuated, or bestiosexuated––in any case it is a social and political field. Thus for us there is not one narrow sexuality and one broad sexuality; there is never anything but one single sexuality which is the same everywhere and which floods everything. And this sexuality does not sublimate itself in the social field: it invests the social field directly. If you love the daughter of an army captain, then in a certain way you make love to the army, or to the counter-army–-anything is possible. But there aren't two distinct sexualities. Insofar as sexuality is narrow, it is socio-political; it simply passes through certain objects that arouse it, that erect it, that provoke erection. These subjects are channels for relations of flows. The more that this is contrasted with sex itself, the more it in fact broadens out into the world, into the social and political world, in the same way that in Burroughs’s work, the more that it focuses on drugs, the more it brings about a social delirium, a complete social delirium, with the police, etc. This is evident in Miller too: the more it retracts onto scenes of pure sexuality, the more it opens up...
FG: A little kid who begins to jerk off in a taxing and painful and catastrophic way, one could conceive of this as some sort of contraction of sexuality into meaning, the partial zone which takes it on. But I believe that even in this case it is in the final analysis a certain way of finding an experimentation outside of the social field; the proof is that masturbation is condemned precisely insofar as it marks the appearance of a sexuality outside the norm. What counts is not whether the sexuality takes place in the street, or hidden beneath the sheets, it's that it breaks with the way society wants to channel every sexual practice within the limits of a familialism or within the limits of a series of chains of integration.
RB: Yes, but even so I see a difference there. If sexuality has been given an extraordinary privilege in the last century, for example, it is precisely because there is a kind of perpetually secret, hidden activity, which does not become more and more apparent in the form of transgressions and provocations.
FG: It’s always the same mistaken reasoning. If you start by posing the object, and from the object want to deduce the conduct, you’re going to get it all wrong. Desire has no object, and it is not a vector which departs from a personal totality that fixes itself onto an object. Desire receives its personological repression and counter-determines its object, but it manufactures, it produces its object. It’s not because you jerk off or because you have some preoccupation with a partial object that you experience guilt; it’s because you have a guilty sexual practice that you adopt some object or some social practice. So it’s just the opposite. It is thus that the individual, in order to be placed in conjunction with deterritorialized flows, takes on territoralities that are more and more partial, guilty, painful, masochistic; it is thus that the individual appropriates [prélève] a certain number of body parts, or voyeuristic practices, or things like that. Guilt is first of all a practice of sexuality that is privatized, that is made guilty, that is capitalized, and that goes on to select its objects in the social field.
RB: But then do you conceive of sexual life as something equivalent to gastronomy– that is, an art which is carried out on an extremely varied register of dishes, and which moreover completely evades all that is secret?
GD: Whether there’s something secret or not, nothing changes. Nothing prevents the libido from branching out on an open social field, and not at all on a closed familial field .
RB: From the moment one says secret, there is already a tendency towards a restriction onto the person...
GD: No, because the secret is a very coded social form which itself implies its whole social field. The secret is not at all the private. It doesn’t mean the reduction of sexuality to the private; it means that the forms into which sexuality invests the social field pass through the secret. But the secret, far from being a removal from the social field, is a certain structuring of the social field itself.
I want to come back to the first point, what you were saying about Miller and Lawrence. It seems to me that the more they fall back [se rebattent] onto non-sublimated sexual forms, the more there is at the same time an opening into the political and social world, and it matters little whether that opening is good or bad, whether it is in fascist form or in mystical form, or in real political form . These are not two distinct things in Miller’s oeuvre– Tropic of Capricorn with its sexual scenes and The Colossus of Maroussi with Greece, and its delirium over Greece. It’s the same thing: that is, he fucks Greece by way of the scenes of Capricorn. For Lawrence, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Etruscan Places, there really is a wrong side and a right side. And again, it is due to a non-sublimated sexuality that it opens into the historical, social, political world.
FG: I can take as an example that of Kafka: it's the crossing over to animal sexuality, or from a nearly schizo-sexuality, from a schizo-incest, in a certain way. Far from resulting in a contraction of sexuality, it's through that crossing-over that he carries out his analysis of the involution of the forms of bureaucracy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the forms of modernist capitalist bureaucratism that begin to appear in the sectors he is confronted with–– insurance companies, etc.
GD: When Miller writes The Colossus of Maroussi, it’s not sublimated sexuality in relation to Tropic of Capricorn. It is simply the historical and social field which is developing itself on its own, which had already been invested by the moment when he got a hard-on for that woman. This is not sublimation, it is the exploration of the social, historical, and bureaucratic field, which corresponds to the way he fucks or doesn’t fuck his ol' lady.
FG: In his Letter to His Father, Kafka says of his father: when you were in the shop, when you were doing business, then you were admirable. . . and at the same time he hated him. But what he saw there was not a relationship of jealousy, of possession, not a miraculous relationhip between mother and father, but a certain social field of tyranny that his father established.
RB: Foucault has said: “The secret is perhaps more difficult to raise than the unconscious.” Capitalism has a certain way of literally making all sexual objects impotent, of cutting them off from their real connections.
FG: Yes, you offer all the more genitals, breasts, etc. . . since that way you can be sure that nobody will talk about money, about micro-political force relations, which are components of the essence of desire.
GD: And I would stress that the secret is not at all a move outside the social field. With societies other than our own, with, for example, secret societies. Secret societies are structured within the society itself. A secret society is a certain way of inducting [investir] society into a particular mode, even if this is only the mode of anarchist societies. Secret societies for blowing society up, these are completely hooked up to society. The secret itself is never a distancing from society, but a structural element of any society, so much so, that the idea of a sexuality forced back onto [rebattue sur] a certain secret is fully part of the way in which sexuality continues to invest the social field.
RB: So you don’t think that it is exactly the breaking of this secret that constitutes the sexual as the privileged place of a superior, hidden pleasure [jouissance]?
GD: No. We know too well that a public sexuality, a community sexuality, can produce familialism as much as private sexuality. It doesn’t happen that way, it won’t happen that way: the problem is not there.
FG: I would like to add that there's all that naturalism, all that good conscience in sexuality, through psychoanalysis, through medicine, through pedagogy, through sex education, which consists in the crushing of desire, in the cutting off of a certain number of objects of sexual difference precisely in order to cut them off from desire. Personally, I don’t like the term “secret” very much, and Gilles likes it, but we can agree in saying that what is secret in desire is that there is something absolutely unforeseeable in it. When desire exists somewhere, you never know at all where it’s going to be released. [déboucher]. You never know the object of desire, for the good reason that desire has a certain goal, and then it is a process that is going to release onto something else. It's the exact opposite of the way sexuality is represented–-as a satisfaction, in a discharge with a known object, with a known drop in tension, with a known protocol, one which is totally coded. The opening of desire onto the social field is a certain kind of innovation, a certain kind of production, with particular objects, and it is precisely this that people do not want to hear about: people want everything to be predictable– at such-and-such a stage of infancy you have such-and-such a type of object, at such-and-such other stage you have such-and-such other one, and if you lack such-and-such a type of object, then something isn’t working, you have to rectify something there. You have such-and-such an erogenous zone which is normally developed at one period, and abnormally developed at another, etc., everything is completely programmed. . .
GD: When you think you love a woman, or anything else, in fact what you love through that object is an entirely different thing. The question is to know up to what point you are conscious of this, in a vital manner. This is not to say that you really love someone else, like your mother–-that's a load of shit, it’s a disgrace to say things like that–- but rather that what you love through someone is of a non-personal order, of an order of flows which passes or does not pass. So there may be a secret or there may not, but in any case it emerges onto a social field, an historical field, an insane field.
FG: One can say that desire proceeds in its production through what could be called an a-signifying semiotics; that is, in order to produce itself, it makes use of flows, it makes use of substances, and does not make use, in a privileged way, of formal relations, of relations made discrete or bi-univocal--to be precise, of all signifying semiotics. Such that each time one wants to cause desire to pass outside intensive substances and into the limits of formal relations--that is to say localized, coordinated and personalized relations, depending on the principle of contradiction, etc. So at the same time one falls back on the whole dichotomy of partial sexuality. . .
GD: I have just the image we need. There are words like "to be delirious." To be delirious means precisely “to slip out of the furrow” . There is in Sade the strange word déconner, “to defuck,” and then, in all pornographic literature there's the word déculer -- “to debugger." To “debugger” means to pull out of someone you’ve just been fucking in the ass; to “defuck” means to pull out of someone you're presently inside of; and to be delirious, that’s the farmer who misses the furrow with his plow. All sexuality is right there. The difference, it’s not whether there is a secret or not, it’s the fact that delirium, defucking, debuggering, that's the fundamental state of sexuality. One addresses oneself to a person, one aims at a person, an object or whatever, and it slips through that, inevitably it slips through, in happiness or sadness (but in happiness too, there's something else that one feels), all at once and through that person or object. Maybe, in certain cases, it it had to be that person, it had to be that thing, that event. In Kafka’s case, it had to be Felice-– so that all at once it defucks, so that all at once it raves deliriously onto some social formation. But it’s not the social formation that maintains a given sublimation; instead, it is the social formation that maintains the lines which we have been calling lines of deterritorialization– -that is, of defucking, of delirium, etc. This implies that it won’t work if there isn’t love or desire for a particular person; but it works through this person, the person is completely undone. It is thus that psychoanalysis seems so weak to us in this regard.
RB: How do you situate yourselves in regard to what one could call the biological problem of sexuality, the sexual instinct?
FG: I am going to take up the terms Gilles has given us: what causes defucking, debuggering, delirious raving? It is the fact that from one substance to another, one passes from a certain coefficient of deterritorialization to another, whatever formal structures one encounters. A system of intensities does not allow for the representation of another system of intensities, but allows for a connection of systems of intensities. There is a particular flow of signs which needs to come back into conjunction with a particular flow of caresses, of sperm, of milk. Outside of this connection, each of the flows is sent back to its own formal structure. An event is produced from these conjunctions of intensive flows: something else, another desiring-machine appears outside of the formal correlations. This, I believe, is the biological aspect, in the restricted sense in which you’re speaking. At a certain moment the deterritorialization can only be carried out when it comes back into this particular conjunction, which causes something in the human machine to blow a fuse.
RB: You have often placed in opposition the phenomena of production and of anti-production, and in particular in all that has to do with dreams, fantasies– with images, let’s say. I'd like you to try to specify the status that you give to what one could call the different representations of psychological life, in order to determine what of it is production, and what is anti-production.
FG: In my opinion the significance of the dream, of the fantasy, of the phantasm, is that it is a machine for detecting Oedipal garbage, a machine for detecting the areas where reterritorializations take hold. The dream is an activity that tends by definition to be cut off from all connection to the real.
RB: From all connection with the social field.
FG: At the same time it is as if the dream were an X-ray of all the points of blockage. It is extremely interesting to locate all these points of blockage. I think that the dream– I’m taking up Freud’s expression– is the royal view, not of the unconscious, but of the Oedipalization of the unconscious. It is still very interesting to know in what way we have a tendency to become fascist, to become our own cop; and it’s a way of locating another possible politics. The dream, at the same time that it has these fascist impacts, there is at precisely the same place the umbilicus of the dream, which is the mechanical index of something else, of another possible politics. It is in the very place where it is the most fascist, where it is the most blocked, that something can open onto another chain. It is all the more fascist at that place because there is a mechanical threat behind it.
So it all depends on what you want to do with the dream. If you want to interpret the dream, to reify it, to objectify it, in a grid of interpretations, then at the same time the dream serves to reinforce a fascist politics. If you want conversely to put it in a system of production, a system of breaking the habitual schemas, the real schemas, if you want to proceed for example by a technique of experimentation, then it is possible to use the particular semiotics of the dream to reinforce an a-signifying semiotics, more than to feed an Oedipal semiotics.
RB: But at that moment, it seems to me a problem arises: how can one establish both a locating and a dividing up? How does one pose the problem of this division: isn’t it again an operation of knowledge which risks another reification?
GD: No, it is an operation of critique, not of knowledge. We have tried to contrast a domain of experimentation and a domain of interpretation, which is that of psychoanalysis in general. The interpretation machine is really a paranoiac machine that functions at all kinds of levels–-at the social level, at the familial or conjugal level. It is obvious that psychoanalysis did not invent the interpretation machine, but psychoanalysis has profited from it, and has given it a new face. And the interpretation machine means first of all:
1) I know or will know the meaning of what you are saying, or someone– be it only the good Lord or the psychoanalyst– can know what it means.
2) What you are or what you say is something comprehensible, even if I don’t know it myself, as it follows from what you have been, your past.
FG: It’s not by chance that...
GD: The first aspect of the interpretation machine is the signifier: it means something. The second aspect is the anamnesis, that is: what you are, you were in the past.
3) The third aspect, it seems to me, is representation. That is, what you do or what you say represents something, and I will corner you in this domain of representation– it is the relationship of force. The interpretation machine and the relationship of force, they are one.
Psychoanalysis lives by these three aspects. It gives an original face to three aspects which are the old faces of the couple. It’s not even necessary to say, as we wrote in Anti-Oedipus, that the place of psychoanalysis is the family; one should just say that the place of psychoanalysis is conjugality.
Schizo-analysis would consist of, among other things, the undoing of all interpretation machines: it is understood that what you say does not go back to anything else, it does not signify anything; you say it because you desire to say it, what is important is which relationship, with which desire. In the interpretation it always means something else: in experimentation. . .
FG: It’s always in the present. It’s not recursive, it’s not prospective–
GD: It’s a raw given. What is the position of desire in the present situation?
FG: What are you putting together, what politics are you leading, where do you want to get to, what are your coordinates?
GD: Yes, experimentation equals politics. What is it that you want?
The second point is that there is no reference to the past–-this is not at all to suppress the past. In this I feel again quite Bergsonian: it’s the idea that the constitution of the past and the present of which this past is the past are strictly contemporaneous. The memory of childhood and the present moment when childhood was childhood arrive at the same time; there is simply a radical distortion between the two.
The memory of childhood is contemporaneous to childhood itself–- only no, that’s garbage. The child manufactures its Oedipal memories of childhood, and at the same time, there are what Félix calls “childhood blocks” [blocs d’enfance], which are of a completely different nature, and which have nothing to do with Oedipus, and with the family. In the novels of Tony Duvert, there are childhood blocks, in the sense that one sees an infantile sexuality that has absolutely no Oedipal elements, and it is at the same time that the Oedipal memories of childhood are being constructed. So our rejection of the anamnesis does not consist at all of saying that there’s no reference to the past. That is what the people who broke with Freud said; that’s the trap they fell into. Jung and Adler said: let’s consider the present- that is, non-infantile– factors. O.K., Freud was right about everything that is childhood, but there are problems specific to the adult, or to the young man. We aren’t saying that at all: we’re saying that even if you just take the child, it’s not right, it’s not what Freud says it is.
Childhood memories are constructed during childhood, at the same time that one is a child, and so one is already betraying one’s childhood. Even at the level of childhood, you already find mystification– that is, the cleavage between Oedipal structures and pure childhood blocks. In infantile factors there are factors of the present, eternally present, and then there are virtual factors. Virtual factors are the fabrication of Oedipus; they are the object, they are the product of repression. But the true life of the child has nothing to do with that.
Childhood is already political. A kid thinks about bombs, he thinks about fucking his sister, and this is not about the family: it’s about sexuality and the social field. Thus there is no operation of anamnesis to perform. The theme of experimentation is that by nature you do not know what you are. The child didn’t know what he was, and doesn’t know it any more now. One can know what one is only by the outcome of experimentation, as something of the future, the exploration of a future childhood. For once, memory and forgetting are set in opposition. Psychoanalysis proceeds by memory, and we proceed by forgetting–- and not by awakening through forgetting. We say that the more you forget the better, because the more you forget the more you live, and the less you know what you are, the better: the more you’re already finding. It is for this reason that we like American sadomasochists, who don’t read Freud. A psychoanalyst says: I am going to tell you if you are sadistic or masochistic, or one more than the other. It seems to me that American sado-masochists say instead: you don’t know anything about what I am, no one knows anything about it, so you’d better experiment. That seems like good schizo-analysis to us. Indeed, it is even delightful to see faggots who say I am a faggot: any formula that says “I am” is impossible. Maybe the faggot who says to you, See, I’m a faggot, maybe he is something totally different. And that’s the object of a schizo-analysis, to know what he is.
And the third and final point, in which we completely set ourselves in opposition to psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis has always consisted of negotiating--in the proper sense of the word–- that is, merchandise for money, and you live your purchases. So there I come back to the question regarding fantasy: the fantasy has never been a lived state. The fantasy is a completely fabricated state, and is trafficked illicitly. It is a coin, and the psychoanalyst is someone who proposes to translate lived states into fantasy for you. I'm going to make you spit out cash.
RB: For meaning and for money.
GD: For money. We say: the lived is intensive by nature. It is intensities that pass, and with these intensities, it’s not representative: it runs through the beautiful woman, it addresses itself to the people one loves, etc., but it’s not representative.
RB: Even so, it produces images.
FG: No. When the analyst gives you images, you are caught in a system of coordinates. You have a subject position which represents something. From the perspective of desire, as soon as there is an image, one can say that already there is cessation, short-circuiting of desire, since there is the subjective cut [coupure] which has instituted the representation of the image on one side, and the intensity which has been partialized, cut in a field of representation and in a field of production, and moreover in a field of useful labor and a field of harmful labor.
GD: It’s like when you read a book: there is an erotic relationship with what you’re reading, an amorous relationship with what you’re reading.
RB: But you have images when you stop reading.
GD: Yes, when you’ve had enough, when you want to think. So then come the images, that’s the fantasy going on strike. At that moment the intensities stop, they are blocked off. When the intensities pass, there are no images.
FG: It’s quite simple: when you’ve just been fucking, when you’ve just come–
GD: There are no images.
FG: It’s cut off.
RB: But it seems extremely curious to me that all “imaginary” life is entirely subordinate because it contains productions of images...
GD: It is Oedipal.
FG: Let’s be clear. You are up to your neck in images, in any case; we’re not going to say that images are not necessary. The question is knowing what to do with the images.
GD: The image is by definition a stop in the intensities, the image is an extension. It is when the intensities, all at once, overflow into an extension, put themselves into an extension, in order to form a scene. Then that is what one calls a phantasm.
RB: But then, with drugs, for example...
FG: There are flows.
RB: It is well known that with drugs you have accelerations of images, a multiplication of images. . .
FG: Yes, there are flows of images. The intensities drain the images. . .
GD: Nothing can be separated out completely. In the dream there is a system of images, and then something else passes through that–-what must be found is what other thing passes through, and how it passes through. Psychoanalysis, far from finding what passes under the dream, locks itself up in the dream. It locks itself up in a system of images and signifiers, but for us it’s all the same thing: image, signifier, symbolic imagination. In any case there is always an image-intensity complex. What seem to us to be the key are the non-representative intensities, because they are deterritorializing, they swallow territories, you don’t know where you are anymore.
RB: And every image is inevitably territorializing.
FG: Inevitably, an image is a territory, it is an operation of subjectivization, of interpretation, and of territorialization. It’s the difference between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, if you like.
GD: Images rush forward to such a point that they rediscover pure intensities. For example, it’s not as if we’re saying that film is shit, because it consists of images...
FG: On the contrary.
GD: On the contrary, film is great because it can bring in such a flow of images (for example in Godard) that it unblocks images, even using a fixed camera shot. It’s not the speed, it’s not the acceleration of images that does this; we are not making any kind of dualism. At the same time the image is the extension which takes on an intensity when it dies, like a stream running into a pond. This is the fantasy, but it is also a rush of images, or else a fixed image where things are happening all over; this completely restores the intensity through the image. The Lacanians believed that it sufficed to find the signifier in order to get past the representational. We're just saying that the signifier is still pure representation. What interests us is discovering the intensities.
RB: There are some texts written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of sixteen or seventeen that offer much evidence of sexual lack, that crystallize upon purely phantasmatic things, with massive representations of derived satisfaction, and at the same time there are on the contrary images that slip by, that are sorts of states of ecstasy that she is creating in a systematic fashion, alone in the blackness. She creates images: sometimes they slip by completely and sometimes they are blocked. And it seems to me that the two phenomena are very important, and that neither is exclusive from the other.
GD: Yes, but there, that’s a little bit the difference between Félix and me. Félix says: be Oedipal all the way. The more you are Oedipal, the better it will be. If you don’t dream, your lines of pure intensity, your non-oedipal lines, will not be found.
FG: Yes, I believe that one characteristic of Oedipus is that it is always a happy medium. It’s the difference between psychoanalytic technique in the office, and psychoanalytic technique in for example the attempts of Laing at Kingley Hall. In the latter, they lose the happy medium: they do Oedipus on the scale of an entire community. So being Oedipal means staying inside the happy medium of the triangular normalization. If you ever make yourself Oedipal all the way to abolition, all the way to narcissism, all the way to the death drive, then at that moment something changes. The characteristic of the whole Romantic movement is that they start from a triangulated position with partial objects, and then at certain moments they take the tangent. Werther is so Oedipal, he ends up not being Oedipal at all.
GD: When one compares Werther's suicide with that of Kleist, or when one says that, given a dream, you can separate out by abstraction (but not at all by real separation) the representative directions and the intensive directions, and that a dream is never something pure, but has an oedipal direction and a non-figurative direction--an intensive direction--and one must find what is intensive in the phenomena of the dream's expanse; that seems to me to be true of dreams.
RB[?]: Yes, what seems important to me is what you call non-figurative, it makes me think back to Anti-Oedipus, at the base of which there are two movements with respect to the problem of the non-figurative. And you are well aware, when you speak of art in the end as art classified historically as non-figurative, that this can also be an excellent booby-trap.
FG: With respect to the figural, and here Lyotard's notion seems important, where the figural would surpass [depasser] the opposition of figurative and non-figurative, and perhaps [even] that of image-phantasm.
GD: Except that "figural" is a bad word for us, not for Lyotard, but for us it's a bad word.
FG: It's not that I'm particularly fond of it myself, but it indicates a direction of surpassing [dépassement].
GD: The direction of surpassing is not abstract in the sense of abstract art, because abstract art seems also to be completely representative.
FG: If there is anything that is often in its structure full of snares, it's surely [abstract art].
GD: Completely spread out [étendu], the real difference is the intensive [thing] itself and the entire domain of extension, whether it be abstract extension, abstract space, or representative space.
FG[?]: As for intension [intension] there is something that has puzzled me, ever since Difference and Repetition where you've already taken it up; namely, how, if there has been a science of extension--which is classical psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.--is the very scientific term "intensity" even thinkable. [In other words, how] can the structure be pin-pointed, measured, quantified, articulated, etc.? Can intensity determine itself simply by opposition to the fact that it is not structure, that it cannot be reduced to structure, or to some other thing that might quantify it, think it. . . How is it that this can be spoken of in terms of science, or is this excluded?
GD: There have always been efforts [essais] toward a science of intensity, and hence the question must be looked at historically. It's an endeavor which has been perpetually quelled but which reemerges all the time: there was an effort toward a science of real intensity, a real science of intensity in scholastics--one of great importance to me. Intensive magnitudes play an essential role in both physics and metaphysics. Also in the work of Dun Scott there are efforts towards a science of intensive magnitudes; both on the level of the modes of physics and on the level of God, of theology. There was also an effort for a science of intensive magnitudes in 19th Century energetics, in pure physics, in distinguishing the nature of intensive magnitudes from extensive magnitudes.
RB: Intensity can only be placed in opposition to structure or image. Is the very term "science of intensities" itself thinkable, and if so, what would that mean?
GD: A science of intensities is very possible. For me, the question would be more why––since there have been so many attempts on the part of the sciences, throughout history, for a science of intensities––why have these attempts been suppressed and quelled in favor of a science of extensive magnitudes? It's not that this science of extensive magnitudes is the last avatar of [science's] success, that was the human sciences. In physics, there have been all sorts of chances for [developing] a science of intensities, on many occasions. And why did they fail? Why were they defeated again and again? This already poses many problems. A science of intensive magnitudes would imply, along with its own history, a completely different relation. I mean that epistemology is not reconcilable with a science of intensive magnitudes. Epistemology is made up entirely as a function of a science of extensive magnitudes. Everything that has been attempted in the way of intensive magnitudes has remained marginal. Whether it be things like acupuncture, which I consider to be in the domain of intensive magnitudes, [or] all the attempts of intensive physics, of intensive linguistics, or in the human sciences. As for the Hjelslevian school, there are those who have made efforts toward an intensive interpretation of language. One must look at the role of intensities in the music of John Cage. The first question is: Why is all this marginal by [its very] nature? The second question is: Can there be a science for all this? Not even this has been done. There's a marginal literature on the subject. Why hasn't it taken hold? Personally, I see all sorts of differences between intensive and extensive magnitudes. Once again, I feel Bergsonian, attacking extensive magnitudes. I'll take one characteristic of intensive magnitudes that seems to me to pose exactly the problem you brought up: Is such a science possible? I'm saying an extensive magnitude is easy to recognize. It's when what you grasp simultaneously, what you grasp in an instant is, by definition, a unity[. And multiplicity, you can only take it successively, There you have an extensive magnitude.] If you say that the length of this table is an extensive magnitude, you mean some division that I grasp of this length, which I apprehend in an instant. From the moment that I apprehend it in an instant, I constitute it as a unity, whether it be half the table, or a fourth, or a tenth, whatever I grasp in an instant will be a unity. And whatever I grasp as multiple will be grasped successively. From that very moment there is extensive magnitude and there is representative space. Intensive magnitude is the opposite. I mean: It's a multiplicity that you grasp in an instant as multiplicity. When you say about heat that it's 20 degrees, that doesn't mean it's 10 degrees plus 10 degrees, it means that it's the multiplicity 20 degrees that I apprehend in an instant. [In other words] it's either hot or it's cold, or it's not too hot. A multiplicity apprehended intensely as multiplicity, that's an intensive magnitude.
RB: But when you make use of the "degree" you make use of a whole system of codification, that is the problem with science.
GD: This brings us back to the problem raised by Felix. In any case, it's related. Intensity is related to its translation in extension. A science of intensive magnitude would be a science that would begin to be able to do away with numerical principles, [it would be] a non-extensive numerical system, and I'm saying that this has been done a thousand times and each time thwarted. Take, for example, ordinal systems, the attempts to interpret ordinal numbers, Russell's essays [essais], Meinhorf's essays [essais], the considerations of intensive magnitudes in scholastics; such attempts have been made continually. We cannot ask the question: Is such a science possible? We should rather ask: Who or what is it that has thwarted the development of such a science?
FG: Basically, I don't think the question is worth asking. A science of intensive magnitudes is absurd since at the core of the problem lies the connection of all science with a political field, with the field of desire. Hence that cannot be a science, it could be one type of politics at the heart of science, at the heart of art, at the heart of experimentation on daily life, at the heart of the revolutionary field. And whoever would propose a science of intensive magnitudes would place himself in the same position as the epistemologue, and would propose a sort of metalanguage of intensive magnitudes with respect to the sciences or with respect to politics. And one can easily imagine an Althusserism of intensive magnitudes, with the same disastrous result. Intensive magnitudes means, for me, the process of deterritorialization, i.e., the conjunction of processes. One cannot have a conjunction of processes since. . .
RB: It's the very character of a politics of realization which is contrary to scientific shift [décalage ].
FG: Exactly.
RB: Deleuze philosophizes the whole thing to an extreme. This is what struck me especially in the article in Minuit, because there you clearly posed the problem [about] no longer [being] able to associate, it's the no longer able to which is important. It's not a positive formula of disassociating, it's a negative formula of not associating. From the moment when one doesn't associate, in a certain way one knows that one has a good chance of being in connection with a desiring machine.
FG: There's no guarantee, in the same way that there is no guarantee for a revolutionary protocol, no guarantee for intensive magnitudes in the order of the sciences or in that of art, or in anything, for that matter. . .The problem of desiring magnitudes is not one of science; it's just as much a political field as a desiring field as a field of revolutionary ecstasy. One cannot imagine a science of desiring magnitudes that would be in some way an epistemology of intensive magnitudes and at the same time [hypercoding]. . .
GD: You who are always talking about the science-machine, in that sense, yes. Even the science-machine is made up of intensities. The relationship sign-particle is an intensive one.
FG: Yes, it's a thing. But the constitution of a science, the scientific discourse involved, will never offer any guarantee of any sort of consistency, of whatever nature it might be.
GD: No, but it's the madness of science. Intensity is the madness of science.
FG: Or rather the politics of science.
GD: Whatever.
FG: Of a desiring politics.
GD: Of a politics of particles. It's intense, the holes and all that. We haven't spoken about holes, you've got to ask Felix: BLACK holes, BLACK HOLES, does that work? BLACK HOLES are holes of intensity. It's when holes, for example hyperphysical, or fantastic [holes], are considered as particles. Not [just] things for which particles pass, but as particles that move faster than. . .
FG: Than full particles. . .
GD: [Than] all particles, than light, all that. Holes are particles. This destroys the phenomenon of castration, this demonstrates that. . .[Guattari laughs]. . .there's no difference between the sexes.
FG: In the hole, in the hole. . .
ACT III: SCHIZO-ANALYSIS
RB: Schizo-analysis, what is its reality: by whom, for whom, when or how, until when?
FG: If schizo-analysis ever must exist, it exists already; it would never appear in the frame-work of a school, of an established association, or of a flow of pressure [courant de pression], because an analysis can be nothing but the conjunction of different local experiences, instances of taking charge, of taking desire into consideration, nothing if it's not about a teacher in his classroom, about a community, a psychotherapist in his practice, a group of [attendants] [soignants] who want to change bureaucratic relations[.] If there is, at one time or another, a connection [between] different practices concerning desire that [themselves] bring about a connection of a criticism of, for example , the bureaucratization of organizations, criticism of oppressive pedagogical relations, criticism of the subjective and alienating relations of psycho-therapeutic agreements; then at that point an analytical activity will be established, that will be at the crossroads of a whole series of political struggles. At the same time, schizo-analysis would be the result of groups, or of individuals who would be at once militants and analysts, that is to say, quite the opposite of those [people] who profit [tirer dans] from the legitimacy of co-optation by a pyschoanalytical association. Quite the opposite of people who would cut off the field of their private practice, or of their therapeutic practice, of signifying reading, from the field of revolutionary struggle. Schizo-analysis is everywhere that this question is asked, if it is ever asked.
GD: Having said that it's not at all about something that would be the basis for a group, in the sense of a school, In schizo-analysis, there are very general principles. In fact, it's a matter of very few principles. These principles are, for example, research on non-figurative intensities, non-oedipal unconscious, experimentation versus interpretation, oblivion versus anamnesis, suppression of the Id and of subjectivization. So the psychoanalyst would more likely say, "Come back to your ego", but we're saying: your ego, you haven't dissolved it enough. No neutrality. . .
FG: Politicization, enlistment [engagement ] of the patterns [types] that are in the very structure of analysis, where people are imprisoned, not some scientific status that is isolated, protected. . .
GD: Nobody competent.
RB: Which means that just anybody could be. . .
FG: Exactly.
GD: No, not just anybody. But everybody.
FG: Group-subjects
GD: In other words, to set up places. I think there's an essential point between schizo-analysis and psychoanalysis--in fact it's Freud's stroke of genius--namely, to discover the unconscious and to be the enemy of the unconscious; insofar as the unconscious is what one must reduce by means of analysis. Very well. For us, the problem is something entirely different. It's rather, under what condition can one produce unconscious? And there we see clearly the theoretical and practical difference between psychoanalysis and us. It's that, for us, the unconscious isn't there. Psychoanalysis is someone, is something that says that the unconscious is there, you're stuck with it, and I'm going to interpret it for you. We say: the unconscious isn't there, and I'm going to try and make it for you. The problem is: under what conditions someone whose unconscious is stifled by nature, curbed (not repressed, since that's just the hypothesis of that old fool), whose unconscious doesn't exist, under what conditions can this be a product of the unconscious [itself].
And one sees that all social instances, including psychoanalysis, are set up to deter the production of the unconscious. When Felix analyses precisely the said therapeutic instances of sectorization [sectorization], or of some other thing, one can see, on a concrete level, that practically everything is set up so that a guy who goes in to see a psychoanalyst, by the very nature of the set-up, won't have any chance to speak.
That is, he can speak, but he has no chance of making the slightest statement in what he says. Because it's immediately taken up into a machine where no matter what he says is stifled in advance. It's chattering [mouline] in such a system that he is screwed in advance. You can speak, my boy, in any case that won't change anything. We're waiting for you, we've got the grid, what you say means this, and you cry out in vain, you howl in vain--and that's why when Andre Green reproaches us for not considering the sufferings of the neurotic, I say: it's odd, because as for the sufferings of the neurotic, he cries out in vain on the couch, nothing happens.
FG: The system of schizo-analysis, this would consist of-- given a multiplicity, given a complex situation--a guy who comes to see you. Rather than of making this reduction which consists in throwing everything back onto a system of pre-established grids where the height of interpretation becomes that everything the guy says collides with the silence of the analyst[.] That's where you find the strongest interpretation, that's even where you find an intensity of high seduction since the silence of the analyst becomes, so to speak, the celestial music; it's the response to everything that can present itself, and it is this extremely seductive music, a kind of music of death. . .
RB: Of Nirvana. . .
FG: The death instinct, that's the silence of the analyst. Rather than that, given a multiplicity, a situation, a guy who comes, one could very well draw a connection such that his relation to desire would be of another nature; in other words, rather than introduce the problem: How do we get rid of the situation, relieve it, what have we got to reduce--with us it's: What have we got to complexify. Rather than reduce complexes, how might we render them more complex, by way of the real connection of real machines in order make sure that there be other workings [rouages] other branchings off.
I mean, what is the role of an analytic group or an analyst? It's to decode, it's to help put into words, to put into action, [au pied de l'acte, et non pas au pied de la lettre], what are the potentialities, the possibilities for connection. To register, to log down[reperer] that
certain things could be further experienced, that perhaps the analyst himself could plant the seed, can find workings, can intervene.
It's because it's a group that this will be better. A group can have the worst politics, familialist, suburban familial therapy. It has to conduct itself on certain, very broad grounds, of the like: no translation into phantasm, no interpretation.
RB: Concerning the permissiveness, do you imagine it to be total, in the sense that just anybody can produce himself in schizo-analysis?
GD: Total, since, as Felix has said so well, the difference is not dual versus group analysis; the difference lies entirely elsewhere. For example, the MLF [Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes] engages in heavy interpretation, crushing, abominable. What you have done means this--with respect to the phallus, to the mother-child--which is appalling. In response, one can conceive of a dual relation that would not be interpretative.
RB: Even a husband and wife or brother-sister relation.
GD: Much more than that, we think that brother-sister incest is a schizo-analytic escape completely different than all oedipal relations, one that is formidable [terrific?]–--that this [escape] can be turned into [versé dans] the Oedipus if the sister is the substitute for the mommy, and that this can open up phantastic things when there aren't any rules. The rule, it's on the level of an individual [d'un]: do I interpret or do I not interpret. Now, to not interpret--that's why these are not abstract systems--to begin to not interpret, this would imply a veritable ascesis, a phantastic discipline, a kind of yoga. . .
FG: A micro-politics of [a] permanent class.
GD: As soon as there is interpretation, there is death. Ah, you did this, why did you do this. I would say it's the complete opposite of liberty. The old opposition determinism/liberty, we're trying to transpose it as interpretation/ experimentation. And experimentation, this doesn't mean: I'm playing with [your head], that means I'm trying something out on you. Which is not at all a renewal with respect to my childhood; again, our duality does not run through childhood/adult, it's something else altogether. Who, then, is a schizo-analyst? Whoever with respect to whomever else.
On the condition that this doesn't happen by way of contract, as with the case of teaching. To make as many things as possible pass through an existing structure, while calling on what people are doing elsewhere; they weren't expecting us. In a corner, there's a bunch of guys who are making stuff up about schizo-analysis, that's obvious. We're the first to announce something that's going on-–-and who has not expected us––to know that things will no longer happen by reading Freud, by reading psychoanalysis, but will happen through experimentation. It's what the Americans have been doing for a long time through not-culture, and not through culture.
Bellour: Can children escape the Oedipus?
GD: It's at the same time that kids make their oedipal childhood memories and lead their non-oedipal childhood. There is no fatality to the system in which they're caught. What do they do, kids? They dream of bombs, they dream of firecrackers, and they dream of explosion, and that's not oedipal.
RB: They've got problems with their daddy , and that's oedipal.
GD: No, because they also fabricate their childhood memories at the same time. One must distinguish childhood blocks [blocs]–--in Felix's formulation-–-and childhood memories. Freud and the Freudians, and even dissidents of Freud, have always asked the question: Let's see, aren't there childhood memories that come after childhood and that are rejected. . .
FG: Memory-screens.
GD: It's completely about that.
FG: There's nothing but memory-screens!
GD: There's nothing but memory-screens that are fabricated in the very moment. So, when my son says to me: I want to make you blow up, daddy; or when my daughter sleeps in my bed, it's oedipal. The psychoanalysts are right. There is already some childhood memory in there. [My daughter] fabricates it at the same time. She is already in memory.
FG: She militates in Freudianism.
GD: It's for when she's 30, or 20. Ah, I slept in daddy's bed.
FG: She's preparing her future!
GD: But you shouldn't battle yourself in order to change that, you should do something else. Because in a community, this would be even worse. That's not what counts. [What counts] is to liberate childhood blocks as much as possible in opposition to childhood memories. And these childhood blocks, it's not that. It's like when my son says: I'm going to blow up Chaptal high school. He's talking about blowing up daddy too, since it's both at the same time; there too, there is still this mixture, this branching off into the social field, which the psychoanalysts completely ignore. When he says: I want to blow up Chaptal high school, he doesn't mean: I want to blow up daddy. And when Emilie sleeps in my bed, she doesn't mean: I want to make love with daddy. She means that too, she means other things as well. She means, I want something that belongs to me, I want to make my own life, etc.
RB: One shouldn't struggle against the one, but from there liberate the other. And to struggle completely against the one makes it resurge all the more.
GD: Actually, the problem isn't there. One shouldn't struggle against the one, the problem is that [if] it be in the family, in the community, in boarding school, in society, these same aspects will present themselves. The problem is that for each case--if it were possible to find the outlet--in this distinction childhood block/ childhood memory (I want to sleep with daddy). It's already part of childhood memory. I masturbate my dolly, that's childhood block. I want to blow up Chantal high school, that's childhood block. I want to put a bomb where daddy's sitting, that's a childhood memory. The family favors this, and does nothing thereby but to fill its social function, which is to divert all the child's political aggression. Since the child is [caught up] in the political from birth, politicized, as poor child or rich child, it is completely political-–-it is politico-sexed. While Freud said: The child is sexed but not political, we're saying: The child is politico-sexed, there is no sexuality without politics. And to be sexed is to live as rich and poor. That's the daughter of the boss, etc. The sexuality of a kid is not within the familial frame-work, it's the maid, the rich woman, the poor woman, etc., Whether the kid prefers the rich or the poor, that's it's affair, it's own thing, but schizo-analysis is done no matter where, no matter when, without agreement, that's what's important, without transfer.
That's all for today: down with interpretation, long live experimentation. Experimentation means: Let the flows through. Down with interpretation means: death to persons, to the whole personologic system, familialism, etc.
translated by: Brent Hayes Edwards
Robert Hardwick Weston
