Deleuze and Guattari

I'll confess up front that I haven't read the whole of Anti-Oedipus, but I don't think Deleuze and Guattari would be upset. After all, my desiring-energy pursued its own schizo course in a series of conjunctive and disjunctive flows through the pages. I found much of interest, but I found much with which to disagree, as well. I was struck by comments like this: "desire produces reality [....] It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production" (30). This gives important reality to desire as a force in the world, rather than relegating it to a realm of psychological phantoms.

I also find myself agreeing with their conception of capitalism as a social form that "deterritorializes" desire. Unlike the social forms that precede it, capitalism requires flows of desire. But Deleuze and Guattari critique capitalism as a reterritorialization, as well. Psychoanalysis participates in this reterritorialization through the construction of individual egos (and superegos) that internalize prior forms of territorialization: "The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations" (308). Psychoanalysis, through the Oedipus complex, produces subjects based on the concept of lack. It's prohibitions create the desires it prohibits.

But in other ways, I sense a problem with this theorizing. I appreciate that Deleuze and Guattari insist that we must not get caught up in the historical garbage heap of mythical territorialities, but then what do we get caught up in? How do we come to value things? If "we are all handymen: each with his little machines" of desiring-energy, where do we point these machines? These may seem like quaint questions to those who like the idea of a schizo's walk, but too many important ideas get thrown out with the bathwater -- such as the idea of importance itself.

The biggest conceptual problem I have with the text is that Deleuze and Guattari posit a "free" desire when they talk about decoded flows, but what makes it suddenly free? How are its directions and obsessions determined? They write that "the schiz came into existence only by means of a desire without aim or cause" (378), but it's not clear how desire can be without aim or cause. They suggest that desire just is. Perversely, this is the same type of thinking used to argue that whatever is is right.