Particularized subjectivities

I would like to follow the way particularised materials relate to contemporary subjectivities and to the desire of contemporary subjects. I refer to what the psychiatrist Félix Guattari calls the micropolitics of desire[1] as well as to the thesis he developed together with philosopher Gilles Deleuze concerning a shift in the construction of subjectivity from a segmentary mode towards molar[2] and molecular[3] compositions of subjectivity.

In their view, the subjectivities fostered by current capitalism rely on a decoding of the flux of capital rather than on the accumulation of its symbolic value. Current capitalism fosters subjectivities who abandon symbolic organisation and leave behind neurosis and its mechanisms of forming metaphor[4] in favour of opening up a form of subjectivity Guattari & Deleuze call schizophrenic[5]. Their schizo-analysis[6] focusses on particularized subjectivities who do not form metaphors but rely on metonymic processes of contagion, gliding, swarming instead, and who by doing so relate to particles rather than to objects[7]. Instead of a neurotically composed subject that is animated by their desire in relationship to master-subjects such as the father, a monotheistic god, a spiritual leader, or philosopher, Deleuze & Guattari focus on the schizo.

As we know from a long tradition of psychoanalysis that runs from Freud[8] via Melanie Klein[9] through Bionian[10] and Winnicottian[11] to Lacanian[12] aspirations – neurotic subjectivity generalized through the Oedipal complex represses the object of desire that is woman. The moment the object is consumed it falls apart and travels the body expressing itself in a range of symptoms accompanied by anxiety. I do not want to focus on the feminist rebellion against this dynamic of desire[13] that she had to bear in her individual, social, political and economic fate, but on the fact that feminist politics is nonetheless in solidarity with the overall shift in the ecologies of desire and subjectivities towards a schizo-logic of particularities[14].

Dust and particles are not to be read as metaphors but as metonymies. Contemporary subjects relate to contagious particles that are not just physical as dust and sand are but vegetative as cannabis and cocaine, sexual such as oestrogen and testosterone, neuroactive such as Prozac and Xanax, or chemical such as Speed (amphetamines) and MDMA (METHYLENEDIOXYMETHAMPHETAMINE). This list of animating particles or – as Negarestani would have it – “demonic dust”[15] is to be continued and gives way to subjectivities characterized by Paul Presciado as toxic and pornographic: “Contemporary society is inhabited by toxic-pornographic subjectivities: subjectivities defined by the substance (or substances) that supply their metabolism, by the cybernetic prostheses and various types of pharmacopornographic desires that feed the subject’s actions and through which they turn into agents. So, we will speak of Prozac subjects, cannabis subjects, cocaine subjects, alcohol subjects, Ritalin subjects, cortisone subjects, silicone subjects, heterovaginal subjects, double-penetration subjects, Viagra subjects, $ subjects . . .’[16]

So, if we talk of particles, we do not just encounter flattening ontologies[17] but a type of subjectivity still captured by a name stemming from early 20th century psychiatry as schizo[18]. If we look at contemporary psychoanalysis, we recognise that it is part of this shift towards schizo-subjectivities and in the process of revising its approach to subjectivity. Processes of signification or visual recognition are no longer decisive for the subject’s emergence, but its shortcut access to enjoyment and jouissance through substances is. Extreme metonymies such as those of addiction in which the subject extracts an alternative life from the substance[19] are accompanied by softer ones such as those of swarming enacted by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990s[20] or those of “string-figuring”[21] that Donna Haraway proposes in her ecology of Chtulucene. We also can think of Luciana Parisi’s thesis in her book “Abstract Sex”[22] that desire and enjoyment are a matter of particulars, not of whole bodies. We could add older propositions from feminist ethics such as Iris Marion Young’s that is founded on the rejection of universalist ethics[23] in favour of an ethics based on partiality. Since “infinity is intrinsic to parts”[24] particularization knows no end and calls for a new ethics of the endlessly particularised subject.

Anke Hennig

[1] Félix Guattari, “Microphysics of Power / Micropolitics of Desire (Milan, May 31, 1985)”, trans. John Caruana, in A Guattari Reader; edited by Gary Genosko. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell 1996, 172-181.

[2] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987.

[3] Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984.

[4] Jacques Lacan, “The Metaphor of the Subject”, trans. Bruce Fink, in Écrits, New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co 2002, 755-758.

[5] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

[6] Félix Guattari, “Psycho-Analysis and Schizo-Analysis”, trans. J. Forman, in Semiotext(e) 1977 II/3, 77-85.

[7] See the much-criticised development of object analysis on the back of Freudian remarks on the object of desire.

Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, Madison, CT: International Universities Press 1975.

Fairbairn and the object relations tradition, ed. Graham S Clarke and David Scharff, London: Karnac 2014.

[8] Freud, Sigmund. “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 11. London: Hogarth, 1964. 179-90.

[9] Klein, Mélanie (1946). “Notes on some schizoid mechanisms”. In Envy and gratitude and other works 1946-1963, London: Hogarth Press 1975, 1-24.

R.D. Hinshelwood, “Melanie Klein and Repression: an examination of some unpublished Notes of 1934”, Psychoanal Hist. 2006; 8(1), 5-42.

[10] When Bion shifts from relieving the subject from the alienation within a repressive Oedipal group toward analysing the stabilising effects of said group he also implies that the status of woman as repressed object is stabilised within the group. See for example: Wilfred Bion, (1943). “Intra-group tensions in therapy”, in Lancet 2: 678/781 – 27 Nov. 1943, in Experiences in Groups (1961).

Wilfred R. Bion, (1946). “Leaderless group project”, in Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 10: 77–81.

Wilfred R. Bion, (1948a). “Psychiatry in a time of crisis”, in British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. XXI.

Wilfred R. Bion, War Memoirs 1917 – 1919, ed. F.Bion. London: Karnac Books 1997.

[11] See especially how Winnicot describes the replacement of the “good enough mother” (Winnicott, 1971, pp. 13) by the “transitional object” in the development of the child.

Donald W. Winnicott,  “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession”, in Int J Psychoanal. 1953;34(2), 89–97.

Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications 1971.

[12] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, Encore, transl. Bruce Fink, New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co. 1998, 80.

[13] See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One,  trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, Ithaka: Cornell University Press 1985.

Hélène Cixous; Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Wang, Betsy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986.

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York, Columbia University Press, 1980.

[14] Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl. A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality”, in Human Studies 3 (1980), 137-156.

Joan Copjec, Read my Desire. Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1994.

Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London, New York: Verso 1986.

[15] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia. Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Melbourne: re.press 2008, 92.

[16] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, trans, Bruce Benderson, New York: The Feminist Press 2013, 33ff.

[17] Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, London: Open Humanities Press 2011.

[18] The term was first used by Eugen Bleuler in 1911.

Theocharis Chr. Kyziridis, Notes on the History of Schizophrenia, reprinted from the German Journal of Psychiatry, URL http://www.psychodyssey.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Notes-on-the-History-of-Schizophrenia.pdf

[19] Scott Wilson, The Order of Joy. Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment, Albany: State University of New York Press 2008, 40.

[20] See the swarms of essays by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. URL http://www.ccru.net/abcult.htm

[21] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, London: Duke University Press 2016, 9-29.

[22] Lucian Parisi, Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, London and others: Bloomsbury 2004.

[23] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1990.

[24] Lucian Parisi, Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics, and Space, Cambridge Mass.,

London: MIT Press 2013, XII.

verina gfader is an artist and researcher whose practice is orchestrated as organised fields of research aided by printed matter, drawing and animation, text performance and fabulations, and fictional institutions. The work is an interaction, a relation between thinking/ theory and making/performing/ practice, and often results in a book-object, piece of printed matter: a diagram encompassing worlds, materiality, study, spirit. On the professional and conceptual plane (and beyond the charters of Malmoe Art Academy/Lund University, the University of Hong Kong, Animate Assembly, and EP book series); verina concentrates on other, more peripheral territories: anonymous materials, Dust, DIY science and anime backgrounds in Japan and elsewhere.