I am presenting a workshop on assemblages today primarily for the PhD students in one of our research centres. I have set two readings, one of which is Ian Buchanan’s chapter “The ‘Clutter’ Assemblage” (here is another version of the essay) in The Schizoanalysis of Art.
A brief passage in the essay reminded me of my Forget OOO post from almost 5 years ago encouraging graduate students to not get caught up in the internet hype of OOO. The 2006 post was triggered by Levi Bryant’s reading of ‘desiring machines’ in terms of OOO’s ‘objects’. Buchanan’s chapter addresses the use of schizoanalysis to understand how desire is productive in the context of artistic work. The passage extracted below explains better than I did why reading ‘desiring machines’ in terms of ‘objects’ as a move to some how escape from Kantianism is profoundly ill-advised. (Of course, there is another dimension to the below that Buchanan does not emphasise, which I indicate in my Forget OOO post pertaining to the ‘machinic’ or what I think is best described as the ‘milieu of singularities’):
Desiring-production is the process and means the psyche deploys in producing connections and links between thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensa- tions, memories and so on that we call desiring-machines (assemblages). It only becomes visible to us in and through the machines it forms. While both these terms were abandoned by Deleuze and Guattari in subsequent writing on schizoanalysis, the thinking behind them remains germane throughout. This is by no means straightforward because Deleuze and Guattari cast their discussion of desiring-production in language drawn from Marx, which has the effect of making it seem as though they are talking about the production of physical things, which simply is not and cannot be the case. The truth of this can be seen by asking the very simple question: if desire produces, then what does it produce?
The answer isn’t physical things. The correct answer is ‘objects’ – but ‘objects’ in the form of intuitions, to use Kant’s term for the mind’s initial attempts to grasp the world (both internal and external to the psyche). That is what desire produces, objects, not physical things. Kant, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was one of the first to conceive of desire as production, but he botched things by failing to recognize that the object produced by desire is fully real. Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that superstitions, hallucinations and fantasies belong to the alternate realm of ‘psychic reality’ as Kant would have it (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25). The schizophrenic has no awareness that the reality they are experiencing is not reality itself. They may be aware that they do not share the same reality as everyone else, but they see this as a failing in others rather than a flaw in themselves. If they see their long dead mother in the room with them they do not question whether this is possible or not; they aren’t troubled by any such doubts. That is the essential difference between a delusion and a halluci- nation. What delusionals see is what is, quite literally. If this Kantian turn by Deleuze and Guattari seems surprising, it is never- theless confirmed by their critique of Lacan, who in their view makes essentially the same mistake as Kant in that he conceives desire as lacking a real object (for which fantasy acts as both compensation and substitute). Deleuze and Guattari describe Lacan’s work as ‘complex’, which seems to be their code word for useful but flawed (they say the same thing about Badiou). On the one hand, they credit him with discovering desiring-machines in the form of the objet petit a, but on the other hand they accuse him of smothering them under the weight of the Big O (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 310). As Zizek is fond of saying, in the Lacanian universe fantasy supports reality. This is because reality, as Lacan conceives it, is fundamentally deficient; it perpetually lacks a real object. If desire is conceived this way, as a support for reality, then, they argue, ‘its very nature as a real entity depends upon an “essence of lack” that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 25). But that is not how desire works. If it was, it would mean that all desire does is produce imaginary doubles of reality, creating dreamed-of objects to complement real objects. This subordinates desire to the objects it supposedly lacks, or needs, thus reducing it to an essentially secondary role. This is precisely what Deleuze was arguing against when he said that the task of philosophy is to overturn Platonism. Nothing is changed by correlating desire with need as psychoanalysis tends to do. ‘Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces. Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized within a real that is natural and social’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 27).