Abstract
In this chapter the author contends that what makes the contemporary world a dystopian one is the capture of desire by late capitalist interests. Desire is innately highly productive and functions as the vessel of life and yet it is very repressed and regulated under false premises. The author sets out to interrogate why and how desire is targeted and encaptured within and by the late capitalist system, and to show how different treatments of desire culminate in the emergence of different types of subjectivity in today’s societies. The author sees these types of subjectivity as important for exploring the invention of a new people in contemporary dystopia, a people who could create a transformative action within the present dystopian reality. She sees the treatment of desire as a significant way of stigmatising or activating life and as a significant way of evaluating the dystopian and distopian poles of contemporary dystopia. Thus, she proposes that schizoanalysis could become an alternative method of reading which would recognise both the capitalist and revolutionary treatments of desire in contemporary dystopia.
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Notes
- 1.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire is linked as a lack to the Real. The Real is one of the three registers that Lacan proposes to delineate the phases in the formation of human subjectivity in his Seminars. Among them, the Imaginary corresponds to the phase in which the infant considers itself as a fragmented entity and associates its ego with the imago of its mother that it sees in the mirror. Thus, this register is indeed a state of illusions and images since the formation of the infant’s ego is based upon a false identification. As for the Symbolic, it is the phase in which the infant begins to speak. The moment the infant enters into the realm of language, which is for Lacan equal to the Symbolic register, it is castrated by language and becomes a submissive subject of the dominant ideology. While these two registers stand for concrete and observable phases of human subjectivity, the Real is impossible to reach and revitalise in concrete terms. This is primarily because it corresponds to anything beyond language. The dismissal of the Real from the Symbolic stems from the idea of castration. Once the infant is castrated by the name-of-the-father, namely the phallus/language, it represses the feelings, experiences and drives that belong to the pre-Oedipal phase into its unconscious. The Real is, in this regard, the sum of all the repressed desires beyond the reach of the subject and language (Lacan 2007, p. 191–207). Relating the notion of desire with the Real can thus be understood as an attempt to relate the notion of desire with fantasy. Deleuze and Guattari find this perception problematic in the sense that desire, despite its overflow of productive and creative energy, is reduced to an impossible fantasy. They oppose the assumption of desire as mere fantasy but nonetheless they do not entirely abandon the Lacanian notion of the Real. Instead, they bring new insights into the Real by releasing it from the repression of language and disclosing the flows of desire it embodies. They attempt to “renew, on the level of the Real, the tie between the analytic machine, desire, and production” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 53). To be more precise, unlike Lacan, they associate desire with the Real in positive terms, foregrounding its affirmative potential. As opposed to the Lacanian assumption that the Real is impossible to reach and bear, it is the realm in which production takes place: “desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real. The Real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible. Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organisation deprives desire of its objective being” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 27). Thus, it is not because of the very nature of the Real that desire is negated and forced to be unproductive, but because of the trammels of the Symbolic.
- 2.
The Oedipus complex lies at the heart of Freud’s theory on the development of human psychology and sexuality. Human sexual development undergoes several specific phases before the human subject acquires his heterosexual identity. Drawing attention to the polymorphous nature of the infant, Freud argues that the infant abandons his instinctual and perverse drives and his biological sex conforms with his social gender only after he experiences the Oedipal complex, which occurs in the phallic stage in which the infant who enters into a mother–father–child triangle begins to see the parent of the same sex as his rival since he bears sexual tendencies towards the parent of the opposite sex. What makes the infant abandon his feelings towards his parent is the Oedipal fear: the fear of being castrated by the father who represents the phallus. Freud interprets the Oedipal resolution with regard to the male infant’s sexual development (2001, p. 142–145). While the male infant severs his sexual ties with his mother upon the fear of castration, the female infant undergoes a reverse process: she assumes the absence of a penis in her mother as a failure and turns away from her. Since she conceives her father as a figure of authority, she wishes to identify herself with the father’s law and sees her mother as a rival. In either case, the Oedipus complex makes the infant assume phallic authority and succumb to its laws. Through the Oedipal law, according to Deleuze and Guattari, desire is identified with prohibition because what is assumed to be lacking is what is supposed to be prohibited. In Freudian psychoanalysis, what is prohibited and desired is the unity with the mother: “The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to our-selves: so that’s what I wanted” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 114). However, both this notion of desire for something prohibited and the notion of the law that imposes the prohibition are equally fictitious and aiming at injecting repression into the unconscious of people. Both aim at repressing desire and keeping its liberative potential under control: the infant should go through the Oedipus resolution to be a functioning member of society; otherwise, he or she will be a pervert or a psychotic. The Oedipus complex can thus be considered as a disciplinary means of the state rather than a discovery of psychoanalysis. It helps to turn individuals into obedient, healthy and normal subjects in the social terrain. Thus, no matter how ferociously late capitalism defends the opposite, social repression indeed goes hand in hand with psychic repression. Oedipalisation is indeed the modern version of social repression: it kills the productivity of desire by reducing it merely to familial sexual desires. Once the human subject is Oedipalised, he begins to perceive his desires merely in negative terms as unhealthy drives that should be driven into his unconscious. Despite the flow of powerful productive desires he inherits, he now becomes the subject in lack.
- 3.
Unlike the sedentary/paranoiac subject that restrains his or her movement from A to B by assuming a transcendent point of arrival, the nomadic subject is always in-between, and the in-between is, for Deleuze and Guattari, the one that “[takes on] all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo” (1987, p. 380). The nomadic subject is, then, a joyous and free subject since the abandonment of a telos provides one with a liberatory space. This space could also be called a nomadic space which is, by its very nature, a space of affirmative difference and polyvocality. This space born out of the nomadic subject’s line of flight from the taken-for-granted sedentary lines is indeed a configuration of nomos. Nomos essentially corresponds to “the law”, “distribution” or “a mode of distribution” where there is no closure, no measure and no boundaries (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 380). The nomos then stands for a non-structured space that does not hold on to a centre. This makes it a direct opposite of logos which implies the existence of an organising principle which not merely creates a structure but also reinforces its maintenance through its construction of false binaries. While the logos ends up drawing sedentary spaces surrounded by boundaries, walls and territorialities, the nomos is the revolutionary distribution of smooth spaces that resist any enclosure and instead allow for new configurations of subjectivity, new modes of existence and new ways of thinking. This is why the schizo subject is not logocentric but nomadic: he has “no points, paths, or land, even though [he does] by all appearances” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 381). Having no determined point to arrive at, no determined paths to follow and no determined land to stay in, the nomadic subject is always on the move and in the act of deterritorialisation.
- 4.
Chaos, in Deleuzian philosophy, stands for a kind of formless multiplicity, heterogeneity, potentiality and infinite flows of difference prior to any organisation. Yet this multiplicity or difference may not always necessarily be affirmative. Chaos becomes affirmative only when art, literature or science gives a consistency to its disorder through the creation of concepts and people. In other words, chaos becomes chaosmos through new creations. As Deleuze and Guattari underline in the last chapter of What Is Philosophy?, art, literature and science “transfor[m] chaotic variability into chaoid variety” (1994, p. 204), which makes chaos affirmative. In this regard, when we make references to affirmative chaos, we do not imply simply a chaotic existence of flows of difference but take this degree of consistency in chaos into account without endangering its productivity.
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Çokay Nebioğlu, R. (2020). Schizoanalysis of Contemporary Dystopia. In: Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_5
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