<nettime> Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus

[Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen@autonomedia.org>]

Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

From Subjectivity Volume 5 Issue 1 (April 2012)
Special Issue: Collective Becomings, Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis & 
Joanna Figiel
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v5/n1/index.html


1. Post-Oedipal
The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have 
dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze 
and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that 
book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, 
in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were 
fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from 
capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book 
the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to 
be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very 
different way.

The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, 
the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a 
sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know 
in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the 
unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily 
life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to 
reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.

My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is 
schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the 
tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari? Anti-Oedipus and A 
Thousand Plateaus described, or better yet, mapped in advance the waste 
and proliferating land of rhizomatic capitalism that we see now deployed 
in the forms of neoliberal deregulation and financial semiocapitalism. 
They also mapped the formation of the schizo-psychosphere, in which 
today the psychosis is taking the central place of neurosis as 
prevailing clinic condition.

Shortly after its publication Anti-Oedipus encountered and inspired a 
movement that was the expression of the first generation of precarious 
cognitive workers, a movement which, while continuing the legacy of May 
1968, was opening a post-ideological wave, based on the concepts of 
desire and autonomy. In the streets of Bologna in the year 1977 students 
yelled ‘anti-oedipal’ slogans rather than celebrating Che Guevara and 
Mao Zedong. Those students found in that book the joy of unleashing 
desire as energy of social solidarity and creation.

When we first read that book in the 1970s we understood it as a claim of 
liberating desire from the chains of industrial work, from sexual and 
social repression. This was a legitimate reading, but it was also too 
narrow, too simplistic. Now the chains of capitalism have become 
immaterial and semiotic, and psychic suffering does not come so much 
from repression but mainly from the hyper-expressive compulsion, from 
competition and acceleration of the infosphere.

In the 1970s we did read that book as a critique of the Freudian 
reduction of the unconscious to the theatrical dimension, and a critique 
to the Lacan’s reduction of the unconscious to language. This was a 
legitimate way to read the book, and a good political starting point.

“Quelque chose se produit: des effets de machine, et non des metaphores” 
– “Something is happening: machine effects, not metaphors.” We read in 
the first page of the book, and this was a good introduction to a 
critique of the logocentrism implied in Freudian and Lacanian cult of 
interpretation. But beyond that today we should understand what has 
changed in social imagination and in the collective psychosphere in the 
decades that come after the publication of this book, which has to be 
read today as a prefiguration of the new phenomenology of precarious 
work and the new pathologies of psychic suffering.

We identified desire as a force, and rhizomes as revolutionary models, 
as we tried to fully develop the liberation of collective life from the 
repressive tangles of industrial capitalism, and simultaneously from the 
centric and authoritarian model of the disciplinary state. In my opinion 
that interpretation was politically legitimate, particularly in the 
context of unemployment, the precariousness of young people, and 
persisting political power of the working class, but it was narrow and 
reductive from a philosophical point of view. Forty years later, in my 
opinion, we have to abandon the emphasis on the liberating potential of 
desire and of schizoid expressivity, and replace the assumption of 
infinite energy of desire with a new consciousness of exhaustion, a 
consciousness of the limits of living organisms.

Desiring expressivity and rhizomatic proliferation, the processes that 
the book conceptualized, have been strong factors of change, dismantling 
the repressive and neurotic form of capitalist domination in its 
industrial phase. But in the meanwhile, the features of a new model of 
economic power have emerged, and this new model is based on the 
topological structure of the rhizome, and is acting as a powerful 
attractor for the economic investment of desire.

In the 1970s we emphasized the liberating force of desire, and movements 
deconstructed the neurotic cage of alienated labor and sexual 
repression. In the 1990s, as language was captured in the process of 
semiotic production and desire invested in the creative economy and in 
the financial abstraction, we have to face the ambiguity of desire, 
which is not a unilaterally progressive force, liberating and joyous. 
Strictly speaking desire is not even a force, but a field, and the field 
where the most important action of social communication occur. The basic 
processes of disaggregation and re-aggregation for power and social 
movements are happening in the field of desire. This is the fundamental 
discovery of that book. But this discovery has turned into a 
misunderstanding.

We translated the words of Anti-Oedipus into the idea that desire is in 
itself a force of liberation, and thus we did not see the pathogenic 
effects of the acceleration and intensification of the info-stimuli, 
that are linked to the formation of the electronic infosphere and to 
precarization of work.

2. Limit
1972 was also the year of publication of a book titled Limits to the 
Growth produced by a group of scientists assembled by the Club of Rome. 
Asserting that physical resources of the planet are not boundless, the 
book contained an important conceptual intuition: economic growth cannot 
be infinite because basic physical resources are doomed to run out. The 
Arab-Israeli war of 1973 seemed to confirm this. It showed that the 
fundamental assumptions of capitalist ideology needed to be rethought 
and a new political culture developed based on the idea of un-growth.

Similarly, the psychic energies of cognitive work are not boundless, as 
the organic, psychic and cultural limits of the social body are limits 
to the potency of the general intellect, and a limit to desire itself. 
The core of clinic and political attention needs to shift: from the 
field of the expanding potency of the general intellect and desire to 
the field of psycho-pathologies of the first generation of precarious 
cognitive work. The acceleration of the infosphere, the unceasing 
intensification of mental work, that semiocapital is constantly 
stimulating, has to be seen as factors of the fragilization of the 
psychic fabric of social composition. This was foreseen by Deleuze and 
Guattari in the last part of their lives. In their last book What is 
philosophy?, particularly the last chapter, dedicated to Chaos and the 
brain Deleuze and Guattari write:

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more 
distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, 
that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or 
precipitated into others that we no longer master.

What is philosophy? is a book on aging, as the authors state in the 
introduction. Aging, suffering, physical and psychic decay – the 
continent of exhaustion – that were hidden in the triumphal emphasis of 
our political reading of Anti-Oedipus, emerge here as a new perspective 
for imagining and conceptualizing the process of subjectivation in the 
sphere of semiocapitalism.

The schizo-strategy outlined in the pages of Anti-Oedipus was a way to 
escape the Freudian phenomenology of neurosis. The psychotic explosion 
of the high-speed semiocapital is changing the landscape. Neoliberal 
deregulation and network proliferation have deterritorialized the 
process of subjectivation, and opened the door to the explosion of the 
repressive cage of industrial labor and of paternal power of 
interdiction. As the repressive borders of unconscious and labor 
explode, precariousness becomes the social form of indetermination and 
uncertainty in the psychogenesis.

In his recent book, Man without Unconscious, Massimo Recalcati (an 
Italian psychoanalyst and philosopher who is trying to redraw the 
conceptual relation between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari) lists the 
emerging diseases of our time: panic, food disorders, dependence on 
toxic substances, attention deficit disorders: pathologies that cannot 
be easily referred to the Freudian analysis, and demand a new context of 
interpretation, the context of post-Fordist, postindustrial 
deterritorialization, the context of labor precariousness. I call this 
context semiocapital because the general product is no more the physical 
good but the immaterial semiotic products: information, affection, and 
aesthetics. Countless users can consume these products without 
exhausting them, circulating in the market of attention, invading mental 
space, and producing effects in the cognitive, but also affective and 
psychic spheres.

In the sphere of semiocapital the production of semiotic goods provokes 
an expansion and acceleration of the infosphere, directly affecting the 
psychosphere, i.e. the affective, sexual and imaginary dimensions. 
Consequently the relation between the production process and unconscious 
comes to be much more immediate and complex than in the industrial age, 
where production and consumption involved the collective psychic sphere 
only in an indirect way. Freud’s psychoanalysis was intended to bring 
the plague into the disciplinary space of conformist bourgeois society, 
opening the door to the vision of unconscious abysses. The bourgeois 
society, which tried to deny and remove the disturbing features of 
sexuality was obliged to look at itself in the mirror of sexual 
psychogenesis.

Now we inhabit a totally different condition marked by the explosion of 
imagination, by the hyper-sexualization of media imagery, and the 
precarization of social connections. Psychosis is no longer confined to 
the separated sphere of institutionalized madness, but is exploding in 
the daily dimension as a factor of constant deterritorialization of the 
activity of imagination and desire.
We cannot face this new situation with the conceptual tools of the 
Freudian analysis, but at the same time also the categories of 
schizoanalysis need to be rethought.

Free from the neurogenic cage of the disciplinary society, the 
unconscious exploded and is proliferating in full daylight, naked and 
provocative in the dimensions of advertising, pornography and popular 
diffusion of psychopharmacology and cocaine, and the media 
hyper-stimulation of attention. Should we reclaim the restoration of the 
old moral order, of the slow family life, of the hierarchical 
territorialized system of the Protestant bourgeoisie in the old 
industrial cities? Obviously not, because this claim would be 
reactionary and ineffective. But we should not insist on the mere 
exhibition of the plague, on the mere emphasizing the infinite potencies 
of desire. Constantly mobilized by the economic machine, shifting from a 
simulation to the next under-promise of immediate pleasure, desire is 
turning to panic. The precarious generation is haunted by countless 
contradictory injunctions: enjoyment and acceleration, expression and 
competition, freedom and anxiety, creativity and exploitation. What is 
the way towards subjectivation in these new conditions?

3. Body
In order to imagine paths of social recomposition in the poet-oedipal 
condition that I have tried to sketch out in these pages we need to 
understand that the crucial problem, both at the political and at 
clinical levels, is the bodily dimension of the general intellect. This 
is why I speak of cognitarians, in order to define the cognitive workers 
in conditions of precariousness. Precarity is jeopardizing the sphere of 
affection and language, but we cannot cherish the idea of a comeback to 
the old times of the ‘standardized’ employment and social discipline. We 
should find a way to disentangle the potentialities of the new condition 
starting from an understanding of its alienation. This is why I use the 
word “cognitariat.” In this concept I want to underline the implication 
of the intellect and of the body, the denial of this implication, and 
the separation of mental activity from the social body.

Since 2001, Christian Marazzi has been warning of the dismantling of the 
general intellect, a process that started after the dotcom crash of the 
spring 2000. As he predicted, during the first decade of the new century 
cognitive labor has been disempowered and subjected to the form of 
precarization. The social and affective body of the cognitive workers 
has been separated from their daily activities. The alienation of the 
first generation of people who have learned more words from a machine 
than from their mother is based on this separation, on the 
virtualization of social relations. In the last two or three years, in 
the aftermath of the financial crisis, riots and huge demonstrations 
have exploded in many European cities, and seem destined to spread and 
gather strength in the coming years. But it is difficult to imagine what 
the forms of the struggle will be, as financial capitalism is 
deterritorialized and virtual, and therefore it is impossible to zero in 
on a social target, to attack a delimited enemy, as the enemy is nowhere 
and everywhere. So what is the issue of the mobilization against 
financial capitalism, if financial capital is impossible to locate and 
to contest?

At the same time, the possibility of a revolution seems to be out of 
reach, as social reality has become too complex, and replacing the 
ruling class seems useless, as a specific ruling class strictly speaking 
no longer exists. The financial class is not a territorialized class, as 
the industrial bourgeoisie used to be, it is rather a transversal 
function, recombining countless fragmentary actions of net-trading, 
exchanging stocks, producing simulations and so on. Economic power and 
political power are not the emanation of a rational decision, but a 
recombinant function, traversing the boundless sprawl of digital 
financial exchange. How can this ocean of fragments be subverted, how 
can a rational direction be imposed on this constellation of segments? 
It is not possible.

So why are people taking to the streets, and fighting against the 
police, and destroying the shops and the banks? Old rituals coming from 
the proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth century? 
Perhaps, in a certain way, yes: old rituals have become ineffective as 
the city is no more a place of social life, but a simulacrum, and the 
enemy is no more identifiable and targetable. But we should see another 
face in this kind of mobilization, one that is not aimed towards 
aggression and destruction, but towards self-recognition and recomposition.

The cognitarians of this generation are going to the streets to 
recompose their social and affective bodies. They are reactivating their 
bodily relations with the metropolitan territory. Riots are reshaping 
the perception of urban territory, and the perception of the complicity 
between bodies. From this point of view the students’ struggles that 
exploded in fall 2010 are not to be seen as a sudden outburst of rage, 
but as the beginning of a long-lasting process that will encompass the 
next decade, a cognitarian insurrection of sort. Insurrection means 
rising up, and also full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The 
actor who is coming out on the historical scene of our time is the 
general intellect in its process of subjectivation. The potencies of 
this actor are the potencies of the collective intelligence in the 
network, the potencies of knowledge, reduced to the narrow dogmatic 
utilization that capitalist economy is forcing on them.

The full deployment of the general intellect falls beyond the sphere of 
capitalism. When the general intellect will be able to reconstitute its 
social and erotic body, the capitalist rule will become obsolete. This 
is the new consciousness that comes out from the explosion of the last 
months of 2010 from reclaiming the autonomy of knowledge. The process of 
social recomposition is essentially the process of reactivation of the 
body of the general intellect, whose social existence is constrained in 
the precarious fragmentary form.


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