Brief Overview of Tutt's Essay
A quick response to Daniel Tutt's recent essay on Micro-politics:
People should read the essay, it's good, but it has its limits and makes a few small factual errors about the history of psychoanalysis. I think these occur not because of any ignorance on the part of Tutt, but likely because of the limits of the academic journal paper format. All the same, these moments require elaboration which I will include later in this blog entry.
But back to Tutt's essay: The first few pages demonstrate a generous and good faith understanding of the Anti-Oedipus (AO) text.
There is present in these first few pages a subtext that is important to note - that AO is an attempt at rigorously critiquing the epistemology of Psychoanalytic concepts, claims, and practice as opposed to a complete delegitimization or discrediting of psychoanalysis. That is, other critiques prior to AO - i.e., Popper, Kuhn, American cognitive scientists, etc. - don't critique as much as they claim psychoanalysis is charlatanry or pseudoscience. In other words, AO sets out to salvage what makes sense of psychoanalysis and reconstruct a new leftist positive project that liberates, not enslaves.
This is important to Tutt's argument as Tutt will show that D and G's understanding of psychoanalysis is flawed, therefore so are their conclusions, and therefore the leftwing project drawn from those conclusions is ultimately ineffective. This critical thrust doesn't come until around page 4 when Tutt claims the main points grounding D and G's critique are uncharitable, overstated, or outdated; these are errors that contribute towards the authors' polemical ultra-left romanticized conception of human behavior, one that has not only not had the effect of leveraging the fragmentation and decoding of capitalism towards leftist goals and ends, but has in fact succeeded in the opposite - it has contributed to right wing thought and behavior while capitalism progresses unphased by any of the Deleuzoguattarian lexicon.
Tutt's Argument
The argument can be broken into three points, two of which are better responded to in an academic lens, one of which better responded to in a clinical lens.
First the points better responded to in an academic lens;
1: The analyst as it appears in AO is a boogeyman - as a practitioner or intellectual figure they are not as influential or powerful in society as the authors imagine, not then and even less so now;
2: Later in life Deleuze walked back on his politics with Guattari;
Now for the point that is better discussed in a clinical lens.
3: D and G respond to an understanding of the Oedipus Complex that most Lacanians would not themselves endorse as being fair or accurate, and additionally, there are specific left wing Lacanians who do not endorse the Oedipal complex as understood by D and G.
I think Tutt's thinking is very sound, and over all these are fair points here that Deleuzioguattarians do not often properly contend with, but I do think some of the psychoanalytic specific facts are wrong here.
'Academic' Response to Argument
The academic - and somewhat boring - response to the first two points;
1: The analyst a boogeyman, not as influential or powerful as they are made to seem? It is true D and G - mainly G - are hyperbolic in the AO text, but we should give them credit where credit is due, and their critique of the bourgeoise position of the analyst deserves credit. In other words, this point of Tutt's is simply not supported by the facts.
At the time of the writing and publishing of AO, Psychoanalysis had indeed declined since its peak in the 50s, but still remained highly influential and widespread, and the popular analysts of the near past and current times where by today's standards filthy rich and living lavish bourgeoise lifestyles.
Regarding the widespread influence - from the 60s-80s the government and people of America had been thoroughly captivated by analysis; the CIA had taken an interest in promoting what it liked about analysis - i.e., its potential for understanding and controlling behavior - by involving analysts or analyst adjacent psychiatrists in their MK Ultra plans (don't forget Marcuse was on the payroll for the proto-CIA org that would soon become the CIA...) while simultaneously demoting what it didn't like -i.e., its revolutionary aspects - by squashing any psychoanalysts that dissented (Reich, communist who pre-dated Marcuse in his Freudomarxism was silenced by the US gov't). This is indisputable. meanwhile in entertainment, psychoanalysis thoroughly penetrated all aspects of Hollywood: psychoanalytic themes and imagery, as well as direct depictions of analysts or analyst-like figures appear on the screens in 70s and 80s films, while behind the scenes, popular Hollywood directors (Woody Allen anyone?) either became analysands themselves or had psychoanalysts on set to aid in method acting. Psychoanalysis was both a threat to be harnessed and defeated by the government, and an exciting method to be utilized in the making of popular media.
Regarding wealth and lavish lifestyles - two brief examples: in the 30s, Freud was a friend of the Bonaparte family, wealthy enough to travel the world and evade the Nazis. The less wealthy and connected were not as privileged. He saw mostly wealthy, well to do patients, though he did occasionally see less wealthy patients for free. Lacan was rich. An analysand of Lacan came to my institute years ago and shared that Lacan was, by today's standards (factoring in inflation and exchange rates) making millions of dollars mainly by cramming several patients - many wealthy, some not - into an hour via his 'variable length session' technique. We should be suspect of a new theoretical concept that challenges the established ethical checks and balances of the practice of analysis by introducing the reduction of the amount of work on a whim that in doing so -whether intentional or not - enables a practitioner to make more money by fitting 5-10 clients into an hour, instead of 1. Bankrolled by this variable length money, he flew all around the world, including my home city in America, and would visit fashionable restaurants where he almost always picked up the tab.
Nearly all analysts at the time charged for a session a fee that would require patients to sacrifice other expenses such as food and rent, and payment was considered part of the transference relationship meaning it was non-negotiable and had clinical implications. Even Guattari made money off his status as analyst - he ran a hospital, charged patients high fees at times, and was given hundreds of thousands of dollars by the French government to research other country's intellectual activity. With this money he funded a playboy-like lifestyle: he had a family and a lover on the side, a drug addiction, a fast car, a house, a and a separate apartment for his lover, etc., and none of that was cheap.
To make my point - name a group of intellectuals at the time that can say they lived this lavishly and made this much money without being in crime, the government, Hollywood, or doing hard labor. Name a population who lived like this simply by talking, listening, thinking, and publishing papers. Communists, existentialists, deconstructionists, Heideggerians, feminists, etc., can make no such claim. At the time, psychoanalysis was the intellectual or academic-adjacent profession to make the most amount of money by doing the least amount of work. If we step out of the academic world and into the medical one, if you were a psychoanalyst you may make as much as someone with an MD (Medical degree), if you weren't already an MD who studied and practiced psychoanalysis that is.
One might argue that a few choice members of a group making good money does not equate to the depiction of the analyst in AO as the 'new priest.' That this is more a question of the widespread influence of psychoanalysis on the culture at large. Well, research on the amount of analysts and analysands in training, and the wealth of institutes (based on student tuition prices and student numbers) indicates that since the 80s and 90s, the amount of people training and in training in Psychoanalysis has significantly declined. However, what this really means is that according to the numbers, psychoanalysis does not significantly decline in popularity until the 80s, not the 60s and 70s, so well after D and G have finished AO and gone on to soften their blows and focus more on evolutionary biology and literature in A Thousand Plateaus.
(Interestingly, the prevalence of psychoanalytic citations in multiple disciplines declines in the 50s but actually surges between 68 and 72, the time of AO - other less rigorous sources here - here - indicate the decline around the 80s, not 60s and 70s).
In short, it would seem that psychoanalysis, though having declined from its peak influence in the 40s and 50s, actually begins to peak again the 60s and 70s, and only truly declines in the big picture trend in the 80s. Individual analysts themselves make a lot of money leveraging little work while finding ways to economize time. This is just capitalism. The analyst was not as revolutionary as we thought.
Moving on.
2:Tutt cites Steigler as endorsing Deleuze as walking back on his earlier work with Guattari. This becomes a sub-narrative in Tutt's text. The implication is that this could undermine the critique from the inside - even Deleuze didn't believe this shit! Here Tutt subtly plays into a longstanding narrative of splitting Deleuze and Guattari, painting Deleuze as a mature academician and Guattari as a undisciplined nut (Zizek says Deleuze was a genius, but Guattari a traitor who should be shot; Justin Murphy similarly paints D as a fatherly academic and Guattari as a wayward nut, etc., many academics remove Guattari from the title when discussing the texts, etc.). This is a digression, however.
Back to Steigler: One wonders, however, if this is Steigler's interpretation or if there are primary texts where Deleuze explicitly states this, or at least implies it? Even better - does Deleuze begin to behave in a way that measurably indicates a shift away from his politics with Guattari? I've seen no such texts or accounts. If they are out there, send them over! On contrary, Deleuze seems to endorse Guattari as a brilliant thinker and close friend right up until his death. Of course someone as smart as Deleuze could endorse this and also believe, secretly or otherwise, that Guattari is politically wrong, but that is not clear.
Tutt mentions later in his text that Deleuze's later essay on the control society seem to imply a change in politics, but again this seems to be a judgment, not a direct endorsement from Deleuze himself. To say this round about judgment supports the idea that Deleuze questioned the AO project seems a stretch. An alternative explanation is that Deleuze is a true academic writing from a place of his own training, and education, while Guattari was a psychoanalyst, activist, and not a true academician by trade. Their authorial voices - i.e., writing styles, concept use, approach, etc., - will differ when they are writing by themselves and not together. Additionally, later in his life Guattari himself strays from his own earlier work as well as his work with Deleuze. In in '89 and '92, around the same time as Deleuze's essay, Guattari writes The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis, arguably his clearest, least theoretical texts that show a similar maturity to that of Deleuze's. The former looks at concrete ways of understanding political behavior through three points of reference and in some ways departs from the AO project, and the latter focuses on the concrete ways psychotherapy or psychoanalysis can leverage aesthetics to craft a new ethics that can change behavior to better focus on reachable political goals rather than abstract moralism. In fact, even prior to this A Thousand Plateaus looks to correct many of the oversteps of AO. The shift in politics is not evidence for a weakness or lack in the original political project, but more evidence to one of Tutt's own points - that you have to change your ideas as time goes on. More on this later.
Psychoanalytic or Para-academic Response to Argument - Anti-Oedipus is a Pharmaceutical or Therapeutic Intervention, not a Book
Why depart an academic lens for the clinical one?
The less abstract answer: the form and content of the text is clinical in nature, not academic.
First the content:
Throughout AO Deleuze and Guattari explicitly respond to Freud's case studies - the Ratman, the Wolfman, little Hans, Jung's dream to Freud - and point how Freud's bias - the ideas he has decided on as being right in advance based on his own thinking and experience - distort the clinical material and lead to a therapeutic intervention and conclusion that would not otherwise be drawn. The implicit argument is that if these patients and their thoughts / behaviors were viewed from a less biased perspective, clinical material may lead to different outcomes. From this perspective comes the idea that if we are going to use Psychoanalytic or Freudian concepts to understand behavior and ultimately politics, we may want to critique some of the epistemological biases that are present in the base texts.
Let's ask again - why depart an academic lens for a clinical one?
The more abstract answer, and one that regards form not content: the former (academic) threatens to treat AO as a static text that aims to capture, represent, and reproduce an image of the world - i.e., an accurate account of the history of behavior and ideas, how reality works, how people think, etc. -while the latter (clinical) looks at the text in the way D and G would encourage us to look at it - as a finite, time-sensitive, non-representational tool meant to temporarily capture subjectivities in a moment in time and activate a target group towards behaving differently.
The AO project sets out to make people do things in the world, not to make an accurate statement about the world itself. Afterall, it is Guattari who is quoted as encouraging us to 'fuck around and make shit up.' In this sense, in the big picture of left wing politics the text is closer to a clinical intervention a therapist may use in a lengthy treatment with a stuck, depressed patient than it is a collection of facts and prescriptions for political action.
In contemporary psychoanalysis when an analyst (from some schools of thought) has a patient (only a certain kind) who is depressed, stuck in a rut, etc., the analyst, working from within the transference relationship, may act or speak in controlled yet provocative manner in order to illicit a reaction from the patient, 'shake up' or break the status quo pattern. Lacan was infamous for this, we need only imagine his variable length session and 'punctuation' technique if we want an example. Guattari took after the master by providing provocative responses to his patients - 'you say you want to kill yourself, what keeps you from doing it, what keeps you coming here and telling me about it?' 'you're so depressed, why haven't you given up, what makes you come here and torture me with your complaints?' etc.
In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which overlaps with psychodynamic theory in many ways, this is called 'being irreverent.' In other forms of contemporary cognitive therapy it may take the form of 'paradoxical suggestion' or 'paradoxical intervention' where the practitioner playfully but without abandoning technique suggests doing more of the obstructive or dystonic behavior the patient has been trying to change without progress, or been stuck complaining about.
These things work. I've used them (It's important to note that this only works with some patients whom the practitioner has developed a strong working relationship with, or if the patient is in hospitalized care where they are supervised for safety following a session. There are patients who will not take to this, and there are therapist who cannot pull it off).
The left was in a moment of crisis, defeat, it was not clear that more of the same would get the left out of the rut, so an exciting, crass, provocative, irreverent, aesthetic, Nietzschean text that makes the case for scrapping everything and starting over from scratch was invented. Makes sense.
Clinical problems require clinical solutions. This gets us back to our 3rd point.
3: D and G's critique is outdated because of the left Lacanians? At the time of '68-72 was the critique outdated, or does it appear outdated now, in hindsight? And are these left Lacanians in the room with us now? Who are they, and did they exist then, and if so, what percentage of the psychoanalytic community at large did they compose? These would be helpful things to know for this to be more believable.
From the clinical angle it's not so important that a sect of left Lacanians endorse a different understanding of the oedipus complex than the one D and G critique. What theorists endorse in their texts, lectures, etc., what academic leaning analysts theorize about, etc., and what actually happens in the therapy room between the therapist and patient are two very different things.
Guattari is an analysand of Lacan who is an analyst with analysands himself, and he's in analytic and activist circles, so the critique of Oedipus is very real for him. He's lived it.
I'll tell you from my own experience, what the analysts in my institution endorsed in their papers, books, lectures, and classes, and what they actually did in the analysis room often amounted to two different things. There is a certain degree of social pressure that psychoanalysts as heads of bureaucratic institutions must contend with, and these pressures shape their social facing selves, but not always their practicing selves.
One may argue that all of this doesn't change the fact that the political project failed. It did, yes. But this would be a more damning point if it wasn't the case that Anti-Oedipus failed where Marxism also failed; more damning if the main line Marxist tradition had clearer victories under its belt. This somewhat polemical comparison of mine cuts to the heart of issue for Marxism: What even counts as evidence of a Marxist victory these days? The right will tell you America is already a communist state, with Marxists seeping into every educational institute, etc. The left will tell you that the world has been shifting right for decades and that we're on the brink of fascism. It gets harder to critique an alternative to Marxism when it is hard to identify evidence based criteria for your project working, moving the dial in the right direction, etc.
The bottom line is AO created a reaction within the left during its time, and for decades after. Perhaps that was it's goal. Fisher said that 'Nick Land was the opposition the left needed' to strengthen itself. AO fulfills the same function. It may not be completely correct, it may not succeed where it claims it predecessor failed, but it does make fair points of criticism about the Marxist and Freudian positions. A good critique does not need to have the answer, just show that the current answer is not doing the trick, and maybe that helps the predecessor improve in epistemic rigor.
