This is a period of schizophrenia--I refer to the psychopathology of the times. Not so much "schizophrenics in any clinical sense," as Jameson puts it (1991, 26), but schizophrenia considered as a process; a mapping of the topography of the social, cultural, or aesthetic rendered in terms of the topography of the mind, such that the fragmentation and increasing alienation of advanced capitalism is understood in terms of a collective psychosis. Jameson's model of schizophrenia is derived from Lacan, and in the course of his exposition he equates the Lacanian understanding of psychosis with that expressed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus (1972). However, perhaps this equation is erroneous, since their notion of schizophrenia differs somewhat from "this classical view" (Jameson 1991, 420 n.12). Freud claims that "neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relations between the ego and the external world" (1924, 563). Deleuze and Guattari wonder: "Could it be that the loss of reality is not the effect of the schizophrenic process, but the effect of its forced oedipalization, that is to say, its interruption?" (1972, 123). I wonder: Might this change the way we view schizophrenia as "a suggestive aesthetic model" (Jameson 1991, 26)?

Lyotard defines the postmodern work of art as that which attempts to put forward "the unpresentable in presentation itself" (1982, 124). Following our reading of the cultural through a psychoanalytic topography, we may define the presentable as that which constitutes, according to Lacanian terminology, the Symbolic of our society. It is important for our purposes to note that this symbolisation is constructed in relation to the name-of-the-father, with the phallus acting as transcendent signifier. It is important to note also that, according to this scheme, psychosis is the result of the rejection (or foreclosure) of this Law (as in Lacan's analysis of Judge Schreber). Lacan claims that whatever is excluded from the Symbolic appears in the order of the Real--that realm which exists outside symbolisation. By extension then, this is the realm of the unpresentable; the realm of psychotic phenomena which resist an Oedipalised interpretation; the realm, that is, of the postmodern, or to put it another way, the anti-Oedipal, work of art.
 
 

II. Anti-Oedipal Schizophrenia
 
 

This refusal, or breakdown of phallocentric meaning, Deleuze and Guattari term "deterritorialization." They define this process as the schizophrenic tendency of the capitalist mode of production--that tendency that Marx characterised by the ubiquitous phrase "[a]ll that is solid melts into air" (Marx and Engels 1848, 476). Deterritorialization is thus the sweeping away of all fixed, fast-frozen relations and meanings, the stripping of halos, and a constant revolutionising of production in a truly psychotic fashion, such that, as Lyotard describes it: "[P]roperly speaking, there are no more signs since there is no more code, no reference to an origin, to a norm. . . . [T]here is nothing left but a little price tag, the index of exchangeability" (1972, 20). In counteraction to this breakdown of meanings then, capitalism is forced to recode its materials into that little price tag--exchange value as the only sensible quality recognised. This counter-tendency Deleuze and Guattari term "reterritorialization"--the moment in which capitalism, in order to retain its relations of production and private property, is forced to artificially resurrect all the old meanings; "States, nations, families" (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 34). Schizophrenia is thus both in and against capitalism; it is that which forms what Marx calls "the powers of the nether world" which the capitalist "sorcerer" is unable to control yet must desperately try to contain (Marx and Engels 1848, 478). Deleuze and Guattari describe the situation thus:

Far from lamenting this situation--as Jameson appears to--Deleuze and Guattari identify it as one that has great revolutionary potential. The schizophrenic tendency is the revolutionary tendency of capitalism, and in an age of real subsumption, where all society has become a great social factory "in which production tends to be so thoroughly socialized that surplus is extracted not exclusively from the industrial proletariat, but throughout society as a whole," (Holland 1985, 305), then this revolutionary tendency is latent in all of society's producers: "In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes . . . [but] between the class and those who are outside the class . . . whence the resemblance in the nineteenth-century socialists' portrait of the proletariat, between the latter and a perfect schizo" (1972, 255). They are keen to stress however that it is not a case of identifying the revolutionary with the schizo, even if, in the course of their exposition, this is what they appear to be doing. (They say "This would be a bad reading, and we don't know which is better, a bad reading or no reading at all" [379].)

The figure of the schizo may be said to operate in their discourse as a kind of metaphor; so while, as the following extract from early on in the book demonstrates, such an equation appears to be their point:

Rather than rejecting the importance of class struggle then, their identification of the revolutionary potential of the schizophrenic process is a means through which to reconfigure revolutionary politics, through an understanding of the nature of its investments of desire (that is, once desire is freed from the neurotic, familial interpretation that psychoanalysis insists on, with its alienating division of the realms of production). The thesis of a single realm, coupled with their earlier identification of the two moments of capitalist production (the deterritorialization / reterritorialization that we may equate with Marx's scheme of forces / relations of production), leads Deleuze and Guattari to declare therefore that: "Class struggle goes to the heart of desire" (355). If, as they insist, every investment of desire is social, that it "bears upon a sociohistorical field" (342), then there are two ways of understanding this social libidinal investment, corresponding to the two poles that capitalism ocillates between (again, the deterritorialization / reterritorialization and forces / relations distinction).

The anti-Oedipal analysis of desire is thus, despite its complex terminology, another way of asking the question "‘How will the revolution be betrayed?'" (379). The deterritorializing potential of the schizorevolutionary pole is always in danger of capture by the axiomatic reterritorializations of the paranoiac pole of capitalism: