In Defense of David Gordon Green's Horror: His Films Are Accidentally 'Communist?' (Or Capitalism - A Deal with the Devil)

In 2018, David Gordon Greer, a director and producer primarily known for his comedies, started what would become a new trend for him - rebooting beloved classic horror films.  He reimagined the Halloween franchise as a trilogy - Halloween, Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends - and most recently, starting with The Exorcist: Believer, he has begun reimagining the The Exorcist franchise as a fresh trilogy as well. 

Green's horror reboots receive mediocre reviews from film critics and are disliked - even hated - by hardcore franchise fans.  We could explain the reactions as 'fanboys gatekeeping,' which may be at play here, but I think the reaction to the films has more to do with the 'American Psyche' or the values of the American film industry viewer than it does the actual quality of the films. 

I think Green plays with egalitarian and nonhierarchical themes while also carefully avoiding the typical pitfalls so common to these kinds of storytelling elements, chiefly the reduction of complexity to a liberal or neo-liberal pastiche. 

To understand what I mean we have to go back to Hegel's unpublished essay from 1804 - no just kidding. To understand what I mean we need to look at the values implied in the narratives and characters of the original films and see how the reboot they deviates.

In the original Halloween, Michael Myers is a killing machine, and there is no rhyme or reason to his violence. Then in the sequel, they began to retroactively write in an occult story - that there was some sort of family link, some sort of curse. This curse / sibling story line took over the remainder of the original Halloween franchise, even incluing original Halloween movies that were themselves reboots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_(franchise)

Notions of occult evil rituals (the Salem witch hysteria of 1800s, the devil worshipper hysteria of the 70s and 80s, etc.) and family ties are kind of 'molar' or normative story telling elements. They imply a pure child was corrupted by an evil source that spoiled the protective layer or function of the family, and now as a result, there is violence inside the family (the incest taboo). Very capitalist.

The only force that can reckon with Michael is his psychiatrist Dr. Loomis who once thought he could contain or heal Michael, but now realizes he cannot... and this is why he carries a .357. So the only force that can wrangle the incesstual / violent evil is a fearless male mental health / psychiatry through force. First as control, then as violence. Very phalic, very capitalist. 

In Greens Halloween Michael Myers loses the shallow occult stuff, and keeps the family stuff only for it to be subverted and shown as impotent. Additionally, the chief narrative elements from the original franchise(s) lose their centrality or phallic / capitalist nature. What do I mean by this? Michael Myers becomes less of a corrupted human type character and more of a bigger than life legend-type aura that lingers and haunts the town of Haddonfield. He is disembodied, abstracted, and becomes an idea more than a person. Through disembodying the character, he comes to truly embody or re-embody the boogeyman, which is the whole goal the original franchise set out to achieve. Everyone lives in the shadow of this boogey man in the closet. Michael's shadow is part of the community and town itself. Even when he is not around, his presence lingers and affects the behavior of all (trauma? ideology? anyone?). Dr. Loomis - and all individuals as we will see - alone are powerless against his aura of fear, and even more powerless when Michael actually returns in the flesh. This is no longer a story about an good being becoming corrupted into an evil being that is eventually triumphed over by a lone good guy (or girl), nor a story of an isolated family cursed by a cult, it is now a story of how a community understands their shared history, and how they heal from it through overcoming an abstract negative shape.

This communtiy aspect becomes more evident in the second and third installment of the triology where a mass hysteria takes over the town causing people to begin rioting and killing one another out of fear that one of them may actually be Michael Myers. It is not invididual actors that solve this problem, the problem is only solved when a group of different thinkers come together to work out a more effective way of overcoming their fear. In the end  - spoilers - Laurie (Lee Curtis) can't even kill Michael on her own, she needs the assistance of the entire town who throw his body into a meat grinder, signifying the absolute destruction of his myth (spirit) and body. 

Green's Halloween trilogy is about a community that overcomes a fear and trauma routed in its material history, a fear and trauma that compels them to take the easy way out, that of dividing and attacking each other, a community that overcomes all of this and joins together to heal. Here Green succeeds where horror icon and legend Stephen King does not. For King, it is often the case that the 'real' and 'material' (domestic abuse, sexual abuse, child neglect and abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.) are manifestations of bad and evil spirits (The Shining). In more sophisticated horror, it is precisely the opposite - it is the mundane real and material events, lacking in any metaphysical obscurity or depth, that are horrifying. I've mentioned this in another blog): when the patients in my mental ward thought the place was haunted I reminded them that real life is scarier than any ghost. 

Green's Halloween trilogy captures the horror of a real community doing bad things reacting to a shared event that occurred. How does this 'realism' (though the movie itself is a kind of fantasy, not realism) and its nonhierarchical story telling elements not succumb to liberal pastiche? The liberal pastiche version of this is when characters resolve their differences quickly, without process, and project all the 'bad' tension or conflict into the 'bad' force or person outside of the community. In Greens Halloween universe, the characters do not suddenly 'realize they were alike all along,' and that 'Michael is the source of their problems,' but rather, they realize they are fundamentally different than each other while being fundamentally alike in one way - what they all share in common is some aspect or another is that they can be, under the right circumstances (Fear), killers just like Michael Myers. This is not to be confused with the right wing rhetoric of 'everyone is a killer if given the chance, it's a dog eat dog world.' Rather, what we're seeing with Green is what Melanie Klein would call 'the integration of the good and bad object without the split off projected object.' The community members do not resolve their differences, but recognize how their differences play with one another, and the members do not see Michael as an 'other,' but as a part of their individual and collective selves that needs to be reconciled with (what Jung might call 'the shadow' - Michael is after-all referred to as 'the shape' who lurks in shadows in the original film). 

This move from individualism to community response is not only evident in the Halloween franchise, but also the first installment of the new Exorcist franchise.

In Exorcist: The Believer the daughters of two different families - one black, the other white, one a believer in God, the other one who once believed has since lost his faith - become possessed by a demonic force. The opposed families must come together and utilize their varying persepctives and life histories to save their children. Like Halloween, in The Believer, the story does not stop at two lone parents, as the conflict spills over into the community which then plays a larger role. 

When the church refuses to get involved, the neighbors of the families step in to help, resulting in a kind of DIY (Punk) exorcist. At the last minute the priest from the catholic church is persuaded to join but - spoilers - his neck is almost instantly snapped by the demonically possessed girls and he is killed. Again, the individual expert cannot solve the problem, only the community members with no formal expertise can by coming together. 

The community exorcises the girls successfully because they believe, but also because they did not take the easy way out. This 'easy way out' motif, present as well in Green's Halloween, is the inverse of egalitarian and non-hierarchical approach. It is a bargain with the devil. 

In The Believer the demon, mid-exorcist via the possessed girls, gives the community members a choice - it tells one father 'I'll let your child go if you stop the exorcist' meaning one girl would live and the other die. This is of course a classic demon riddle or tempting bargain - if you do something evil against your neighbor I will give you what you want. This mirrors the choice that the main character (not the character being given the choice by the demon during the exorcist, but the other father whose child would die) has to make at the beginning of the film: his pregnant wife is injured, if she gives birth the baby will live but she - mother - will die. He must choose to cut the baby out and let her life, or let her give birth, and let his wife / the mother die (this is the origin to his lost faith). 

In Halloween, as mentioned earlier, the 'easy way out' or bargain with the devil is fear. To live in fear beneath the shadow of Michael Myers is easier than fighting to heal or escape its grasp; to attack one's neighbor in a bout of mass hysteria, fearing that the neighbor is Michael, these are all easier than overcoming fear. 

This is the classic trope that fear divides people, and when people are divided into a 'dog-eat-dog' 'survival of the fittest' mentality, they take the short-term reward over the long term benefit.

Capitalism is and always has been about time preference. Those few who come out 'on top' supposedly are able to take the long term benefit over the short term (investment business ontology - work hard now so you don't have to work at all later), and those supposedly poor and less worthy who feed into the machine grab up the short term reward over the long term (consumerism - shitty fast food, drunks, alcohol, porn, media now, don't think about tomorrow). 

Whether Green is this or that political alignment is not in question here. Whether his movies accidentally tap into a complex social critique that was not present in the original films could be the question - I think they do. I think his films remind that capitalism is always a deal with the devil.

Reflections on People Writing on Bombs: Resentment, Overkill, and Empty Signification

Since WWII American soliders have written messages on the bombs and missiles soon to be dropped on or launched at the opposition.

In 2006, Israeli children were photographed participating in the same behavior - writing messages on bombs / missiles headed to Lebanon. This image has recently been circulating the internet social media platforms with many incorrectly assuming it is a contemporary image of Israel children signing bombs headed to current day Gaza. 

Give a military regime enough time and any misconception, like the one above, may become a reality - as of 2024, the president of Israel was photographed signing bombs headed for Gaza. 

This 2024 moment is not an isolated incident, but a moment in a long history of writing on bombs. 

This is a curious behavior, and I believe others may have thoughts about it. I know I do. I notice in myself a strong reaction to it.

Why write a message on an explosive? Clearly the 'enemy' will never recieve it as it will detonate before being read - or if it is read, somehow, the reaction cannot be witnessed as the witness will instantly die. Is the message not then for the enemy, but perhaps for someone else? 'Mabye it is then for the allies of the one writing the message?' we may conclude. If so, it is then likely an act to arouse feelings of comradery and unity among the ranks, etc., not an act meant to truly convey a message across the gap of subjectivity to a real and whole person on the 'other' side. This is puzzling, though, as the allies already agree with enough of the party line to fight a war. If we take this as true, then the message on the bomb is - like most language, signification, etc. - redudant to the allies and empty to the enemies.

The message is itself death, and the reciever of the message is already imagined dead; the writing is for the living who witness the death and simultaneously require no convincing to believe in the justification of the death. Words are not needed for any of this. It's all seemingly already decided in advance.

So the message is empty to all. So isn't it enough to just blow up the enemy? Why must we send a message that is never recieved by any of its parties? If we cannot answer this, it would mean this act of writing is purely performative (this much should be obvious, but I think the 'psyhchological' process is worth extrapolating). Though the act agrees with the powers that be, the act of writing or use of language itself does not invoke any of that existing power (the bomb will be dropped regardless of the writing); it challenges no existing power; does not compel any latent or virtual power to come into existence. 

It is superfluous. Writing a message on a bomb goes beyond 'just doing what needs to be done' - i.e., the cold efficent functionalism of war -  and thus it slips into death-ritual battle-cry performance. It is now a social ritual, a religious moment, a moral attack, a magical gesture. A dead letter - one that embodies the Lacan-Derrida discourse of 'whether a letter is already always recieved' or not. The bomb - and its inscription - is a letter that is always recieved. 

I will be painting with a broad brush when I say this, but I do think even in doing so I do not evoke any strawmen fallacies / arguments: This is all kind of odd behavior for the militaristic types. The militartistic personality espouses 'honor' 'duty' 'valor' 'efficency' etc. The strong silent soldier of any nation does not mince words, they 'get the job done.' Even when it is 'get the job done at whatever the cost' the cost is still concerned with efficency, not superfluous writing. And even when the solider graduates and becomes an intelligence official, he continues to refrain mincing words. Like in a computer or machine, words are solely functional bits of code; they are units or packets of information that make something happen - open or close gates, resolve decisions leading to other branches of possibilities, etc. -  they are not for conversing or sharing. All of this considered, writing on a bomb is a petty behavior that contradicts this 'get the job done efficently and without emotions' aesthetic / practice. It's a crack in the terminator armor. Writing on a bomb shows that there are some pretty intense feelings possibly tied up with some fantasies that can't be contained by the efficency and coldness narrative.

In more precise terms - one possible conclusion is that writing empty messages on bombs is a resentful appeal to an imaginary audience watching the war; it goes beyond 'just doing what needs to be done' and implies some emotional need to punch down on people who can't respond as they're not present or are already dead. It's the equivalent of 'talking behind someone's back.' It fails at being true communication of any kind as any spoken or written communication that does not function to transfer information that both parties can utilize to make decisions or connect meaningfully - this could be the intersubjective meeting of worlds, or the agreeance of not intersubjectively meeting, or behavioral management such as boundary setting, friendship forming, agreeing on terms of fighting, etc. - any communcitation that does not aim to do those things is in fact spiteful and more about hurting or conveying hurt than it is about repairing or restoring a real way of being in the world.

The empty message of writing on a bomb responds to a personal or collective internal and emotional need - the need to feel powerful when the bomb is exercising all the power, a need to express anger, to enjoy unity. It is the human security system creeping up in all its insecurity, faintly mumbling to itself 'Yes, the silent hand of the market of the war machine - the assmelage of the killing machinery, the deep almost metaphysical flow of economic forces, the supposed behavioral incentives, etc. -  this is doing all the work, and I want to remind you the human puppet is here as well to hastily scribble some marks on the explosive ordanence, to take some last minute credit!' Meat puppets riding the coattails of the forces of death.

This is the enjoyment of death.The extraction of pleasure from destruction. One may be tempted to crudely frame this as Nietzschean. Is it not Nietzschean to enjoy the destruction, identify with the power symbolized by the bomb, and shake off any moral voice that would say 'no, don't write that' and instead act? No. It is not Nietzschean, that is the liberalization of violence - 'oh, but all destruction contains in it creation.' No. There is no power in this gesture, no growth, no grasping at an outside that would challenge one to learn and overcome one's self and one's world, only the succumbing to an appeal to an existent order of power, an imaginary audience of projected fantasies, and its impotent defenses against insecurity. Submitting to an established power unecessarily and cruely adding insult to injury is not Nietzschean.

It's a little bit of salt in the wound; but remember salt in the wound of the other  - like salting the earth (Carthage?), or how video-gamers get 'salty' and trash talk - is about cuasing pain in others and preventing healing and re-growth, while salt in your own wound functions to do the opposite; to disinfect and encourage healing. Salt in the other's wound is 'I already beat you, now I'll spit in your face too.' 

This is called 'overkill.' We see and use this term in our everyday life, but it has a technical application.

In Thirst for Annihilation, Nick Land Writes

“The most profound word to emerge from the military history of recent times is 'overkill'...Superficially it is irrelevant whether one is killed by a slingshot or by a stupendous quantity of high-explosive, napalm, and white phosphorous, and in this sense overkill is merely an economic term signifying an unnecessary wastage of weaponry. Yet the Vietnam war - in whose scorched soil this word was germinated - was not merely the culmination of a series of military and industrial tendencies leading to the quantification of destructive power on a monetary basis, it was also a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence. Whilst a systematic tendency to overkill meant that ordnance was wasted on the already charred and blasted corpses of the Vietnamese, a subterranean displacement of overkill meant that the demoralized soldiers of America's conscript army were 'wasted' ('blitzed', 'bombed-out') on heroin, marijuana and LSD. 

This intersection implies...that the absolute lack of restraint...in the burning, dismemberment, and general obliteration of life, was the obscure heart of an introjected craving; of a desire that found its echo in the hyperbolic dimension of war. 

Is it not obvious that the hyper-comprehensive annihilation so liberally distributed by the US war-machine throughout south-east Asia became a powerful (if displaced) object of Western envy? Almost everything that has happened in the mass domains of noninstitutional pharmacology, sexuality, and electric music in the wake of this conflict attests strongly to such a longing. What is desired is that one be 'wiped out' . 

After the explicit emergence of an overkill craving, destruction can no longer be referred to any orthodox determination of the death drive (as Nirvana-principle), because death is only the base-line from which an exorbitantantly 'masochistic' demand departs. Death is to the thirst for overkill what survival is to a conventional notion of Thanatos: minimal satiation. Desiring to die, like desiring to breathe, is a hollow affirmation of the inevitable. It is only with overkill that desire distances itself from fate sufficiently to generate an intensive magnitude of excitation.” (p.47-48).

Overkill, argues, Land is not an arbitrary miscalculation or mis-usage of military ordance, it is libidinal yearning to wipe something out and reap enjoyment from the excess. Remember taking that extra shot at the bar when you're already beyond drunk? Is not the hazy thought in that moment 'fuck it, who cares about tomorrow!' This is overkill. The annihilation of the present, and forgoing of a future for the present indulgence in excess. The letters written on a bomb would be cut by Occham's razor. They are excess; wasted time and energy- overkill. Overkill can be ok on a personal level, but when it's done on a national level we may have reason to be concerned.

Though it has been claimed the Israeli army utilizes Deleuze and Guattari in their practices of warefare, in the spirit I am outling here, writing on a bomb can broadly be considered an inversion of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than turning a concept into a brick, or a word into a chemical, Herzog and those who came before him turn a brick (of explosives) into a concept, a cehmical (reaction) into a word.  In this sense it is the ultimate culmination of academia, like a journal editor rejecting your a paper and leaving a snide comment (the paper's already rejected, why bother leaving a comment?). It is the disavowal of the real violence through language games which creates a circuit of perverted enjoyment. In this sense, again, it is not Nietzschean. 

I offer an anaologous situation: In my role as a therapist, when a family comes to me to try and better function together, one common area of work is helping kids and parents focus on what they need from each other in the present, rather than what they want to say to each other about the past. Parents will say things like 'I need Jane to understand why sneaking out of the house to vape with boys was bad and scary for us' and kids will say things like 'I need my parents to believe and asgree with what I believe or I can't live with them.' I tell parents they need to forgoe expecting their child to magically want to do something different as what they are doing - though it may have risks - may feel pretty fun and rewarding to them (the kid). Instead, parents are instructed to set concrete, value and judgment free boundaries - 'we get you want to sneak out and do those things, we get that you probably won't change how you feel, and we want to let you know what we have to do as parents if that happens.' Here are the terms kid, do what you're going to do given the info (this always reminds me the cop and robber dynamic in good cop and robber films like Heat. In these films, the good guy and bad guy have a mutual respect for the role they play, and the don't take it personally. Robbers have to rob, cops have to pursue). Similarly, I tell kids 'You can't change what your parents think in their heads, but you can ask them to respond to you differently in how they act. So if there's a behavior that indicates to you they don't believe you and agree with you, we can work on them having a different response.' Mom and dad can believe sneaking out to vape is bad, they don't have to endorse this, but mabye they can stop morally critiquing their child's character, and instead stick to enforcing the boundaries. Usually kids and parents start to talk about what they need from one another, and they change how they act with eachother to reflect those needs. The 'problem' behaviors don't always go away, but how the aftermath is handled often does, and this helps families function and survive together (if there's not a life in immediate danger, it's not the job of the therapist to judge what is or isn't good for kids and families, just help them reconcile their goals and co-exist, assuming that is what they want from therapy. If kids want to emancipate, or families want to send their kids away, I send them somewhere else - that is not my place to decide!).

Anyways, I don't endorse violence in anyway, and I don't like war, but I am a bit of cynic and find it hard to imagine a world without war. What I do get interested in  is how nations, political actors, and the media try and fit a war into a narrative with a hero and a villain. 

Again, when I say these following things I am not endorsing them, just imagining how these postmodern, 'capitalist realism' 'PR types' think about framing a war in the age of TV.

From a purely PR perspective, I think a war that is impersonal - or at least framed that way - has better 'optics,' but once you start making it personal, the optics start to decline, and you get a glimpse that despite there being very strong and real material / economic factors to a war, there is also perhaps a personal dimension at play as well. That is, you can't be the hero of the narrative and utilize overkill too. If you want to maintain the hero illusion to the other, you need to be humble; you need to show no enjoyment in the act of destruction, even if it is present. If it is present, you need to maturely manage it - not by spitefully writing on a bomb. The fact that humility in the fact of destruction is challenging for some in a war, again, may indicate that there is more personal and emotional reasons for the violence. It arouses a reaction - is this a game to you? Do you take joy in this? 

So, when someone enjoys the excess of violence, there is likely going to be a 'moral' or emotional reaction to that, and it will likely not be good for your cause. 

It is also likely not good for your soul.

A Brief Response to Daniel Tutt's Recent Essay on Micro-Politics

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. 

Jung vs. Freud - Undermined by Winnicott (Science vs. Mysticism; Materialism vs. Spiritualism; Practice vs. Theory).

Introduction

Jung and Freud discourse pops up now and again on Twitter. The discussion is tired - mysticism vs. scientism, etc., Buried beneath this uncharitable interpretation and its stale caricatures of the Jung and Freud story is a more interesting one waiting to be told. 

It is a story of how at times our theoretical models or practical programs accidentally achieve the opposite of what they set out to achieve; a story of how at times a narrative is constructed that hinges upon a thinker that is often at odds or in tension with how a competing narratives makes use of that same thinker. 

For example, Deleuze and Guattari frame Jung as a thinker grounded in the 'outside,' culture, history, i.e., a champion of esoteric yet epistemologically sound materialism, etc. With this gesture they oppose him to Freud, a thinker they understand as unwittingly mired in the epistemological error of cognitive bias, filtering all his data through a predetermined theory with a predetermined conclusion - in this case  the patient's personal history, thereby severing the ties to the greater world and thus turning away from scientific-materialism and instead towards a personal psychologism. 

Here, Jung is on the side of the revolutionary, the schizoanalyst, etc. while Freud is on the side of a reconstruction of human behavior and thought that only benefits the hegemonic power, i.e. the state, the family, etc. If we've read D and G, we all know the argument. And yet Jung himself is rightly criticized by others for committing the same error as Freud, the error of venturing into the inside - a personal psychologism -  only to fail to connect internal experiences with the outside, to fail at a materialist project. Similarly, Freud is viewed as reclaiming materialism by rooting thought in behavior, personal or cultural, in the body, and is championed - if not critically - by the left. 

 How can Jung be both a revolutionary materialist whose answer to Freud's epistemological errors of personal psychologism was to venture into the outside and also be guilty of turning to personal psychological explanations that appear to be grounded in history but lack any connection to the material, i.e. somatic realm? How can Freud be an epistemologically erred thinker relying on personal myth and hegemonic concepts and also a true materialist co-opted by the left's attempts at materialism?  These are questions this essay explores - I aim to say we simply can't have it both ways for both thinkers!

The short answer, for now, is a reworking of the old 'if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear' question: If a theoretical model gets it wrong and there's no other model around to see it, does it still make an error? In a Kuhnian (and somewhat Zizekian sense - i.e., dialectical or Parallax process), theoretical models require one another to see one another and between their scopes and their tensions come some semblances of 'truth.'

To go Further Still: Winnicott and Jung

The the analysis of Jung that most exposes his error of personal psychologism - as far as my own research goes, which is admittedly accidental, and lacking in methodological rigor - starts with renown British pediatrician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott's review of Jung's autobiography. 

I think its important to note this document and include it in the Jung vs. Freud discussion for two reasons; 1: I'm willing to bet most people haven't read this one off book review from 1964, so it's new literature in an old discussion, and 2: it's authored from someone deep within the high ranks of psychoanalysis, a true practitioner who did not engage in any theory that was not simply derived from or confirmed by direct patient experience; Winnicott's not a academic with an abstract bone pick, or a political activist with an agenda to push, he's an analyst doing what analysts do best - analyzing.

In his review of Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (D. W. Winnicott, Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections - International Journal of Psychoanalysis 45, 1964: 450-455)Winnicott makes a handful of succinct comments that reach far beyond that of a simple book review; as he comments on Jung's thinking and writing and the ruptured past of psychoanalysis (Jung vs. Freud, self-psych, ego-psych, drive theory, object relations, etc.) he also, unbeknownst to himself, anticipates the field's then future criticisms and derivatives, mainly that of Lacanian-Maoist/Marxist psychoanalysis and Schizoanalysis. In other words, here Winnicott provides a purely clinical take on what Deleuze and Guattari later approach from a theoretical angle (even if Guattari is a practicing analyst, and their theory is a theory of praxis).  

Winnicott is generous and charitable in his analysis of Jung, describing him as an analyst and thinker who should be read and understood; a complex man who is not to be reduced to a mystic, nor stripped of his status as a psychoanalyst. At the same time he understands Jung as a recovered childhood schizophrenic whose return from the realm of psychosis both allowed him deep insights into hidden truths about the world and also prevented him from reconciling his creative and destructive impulses, and, more importantly, prevented him from connecting these deep truths meaningfully to his own development and growth as a material body in space. 

This, Winnicott believes, is the main contributing factor to the break up of Jung and Freud, as well as the inability for 'classical' (i.e., Freudian) psychoanalysis to properly 'treat' schizophrenics. Freud was categorically incapable of understanding Jung's psychotic genealogy, Jung incapable of understanding Freud's neurotic genealogy. It's important to note I use this word 'categorically' deliberately in a Kantian sense as Winnicott in this text describes an unbroachable epistemological gap between Jung and Freud, 'Jung and Freud as two sides of the same coin, connected but unable to see one another' (an example reminiscent something out of a Zizek book or lecture on Parallaxism...). I.e., Winnicott is not speaking in superficial terms about two people misunderstanding one another, he is making an epistemological claim about discrete models of understanding distinct ways of being in the world related to ontological development (the way bodies and minds develop along certain paths determined by outside forces). 

This etiology of Jung can be easily dismissed if we consider it as a purely academic of theoretical gesture. It is far from this and should be viewed only from a practical perspective.

To illustrate, in analyzing one of Jung's famous dreams (the underground tomb) presented in the autobiography Winnicott writes the following:

"When Jung contemplated the idea of the erect penis in the place of the king on the throne in the underground chamber of his dream as a four-year-old he did not connect this with, for instance, a projection of his own phallic excitements. He seemed to fear that...an analyst would insist that he had seen an erect penis somewhere, but the thing an analyst would find lacking is any attempt to relate this with the four-year-old Jung's instinctual life..." 

Similarly, in analyzing a series of "thoughts" and "ideas" (really psychotic thoughts or fantasies) Jung reports about God shitting on the roof of a church destroying its walls, Winnicott writes 

"...again...Jung does not go one step further back and relate this to his own destruction of beauty. We could not expect to find Jung feeling God to be a projection of his own infantile omnipotence and the shitting as a projection of his own hate..."

For Winnicott this all culminates in Jung's search for "the center of the self" and his interest with the mandala which Winnicott understands as "a defense against spontaneity... a failure to come to terms with chaos... a flight from disintegration."

In what sounds like it could be a line straight from Deleuze and Guattari's work, Winnicot summarizes his position on Jung and selfhood: "the center of the self is a relatively useless concept. What is more important is to reach the basic forces of individual living..." As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, what are concepts but tools to be used in practical ways (the self = a drawing, the force of living = a map)? We will come back to this.

For Winnicott, Jung's work is the product and outcome of a body healing itself from the 'pathological' (life obstructing as opposed to life affirming) aspects of schizophrenia. It is therefore a flight from schizophrenia and the body as a reaction to first hand experiential knowledge of schizophrenia and the body (a turning away from the face of God in fear of annihilation) as opposed to Freud's flight from schizophrenia which was a reaction to a lack of first hand experiential knowledge of schizophrenia (for those who are curious, this is the psychoanalytic understanding of the difference between anxiety and fear: anxiety is fear of the unknown or the fantasy of the known, true fear is the recognition of a real object or internal object of an known experience; I am anxious about an upcoming exam, and I am fearful of the animal that will kill me, etc.). 

For Winnicott, Jung fails to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time - that his visions are universal in a sense, tapped into deep cultural and historical stories, from the outside, the result of noumena colliding, and also still necessarily  incredibly local, bound to his body and originating in his body, and subject to those metaphysical limits. Because of this Jung's thinking therefore remains incomplete (Kant here resolves Jung vs. Freud - his entire body of work can be viewed as synthesizing the outside world, the inside of the body, and the presence of God; a meeting of theology and behaviorism, i.e., psychology - the ghost in the machine). Only radical connection with the body, and rooting / grounding thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and visions - no matter how 'real' and worth investigating they may be in there cultural spiritual sense - to the base material of body makes them whole and actionable in a practical sense. 

For example, as an analyst, if a patient were to share with me a dream and describe for me how it relates to a fairy tale from the 18th century, I would express excitement, but wonder what it means that this patient dreamt the dream at this time in their life, reported it to me in this way, and what relation it has to his life, and what he may be hiding or unaware of given he has not explored this himself, etc. The question is not if dreams can accidentally or coincidentally synchronize with fairy tales, or even historical events of past or future, but why these tales or events were revealed through a dream at this very moment. For fun, in theological terms: it's not a question of 'does God exist, and does thou really, from time to time, choose a human to be thou messenger?' the question is - and this is the hero's question of film and myth - 'why me...why did God choose me?' 

But back to psychology - Deep history internalized in the body requires something actionable, otherwise it is an avoidance of the outside. Jung looked deeply inside himself to avoid seeing his true self in the outside (what practitioners will know in practice as the patient using insight as an avoidance strategy). 

This is all to say, reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's now beat to death phrase about 'the process,' Winnicott urges Jung to go further still. 

Similarly, Baudrillard reminds us that "Reality itself is too obvious to be true." We should remind ourselves frequently that "exploration of the self is too obvious to be exploration of the self." 

Going Further - Trouble in Schizoanalytic Paradise: Jung and Guattari (and Deleuze)

Winnicott's analysis of Jung exposes some tension in this all too-ready-made dichotomy between schizo-hero Jung and Oedipalizing Freud. This tension would be relatively insignificant if not for the following facts:

1. Winnicott is the most cited psychoanalyst in all of Felix Guattari's published notes and texts - even more than Lacan (I can find the exact source for this if pressed, at this moment of writing it escapes me and you'll have to accept the following: My own research shows Winnicott's name appears the most, and Fadi Abou-Rihan's book on D and G and Psychoanalysis may also corroborate this!)!
2. Jung, though not mentioned nearly as much as Freud in A Thousand Plateaus, plays a significant role in D and G's framing of the problems of psychoanalysis in that he is the thinker most explicitly opposed to Freud, and therefore opposed to the Oedipal structure D and G are critiquing. In fact, one could go as far to say that Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus champion Jung as an early schizoanalyst whose goal was to 'open up' analysis to the radical outside, the an-oedipal, the cultural, etc., whereas Freud wanted to reroute everything through the Oedipal and individual structure. 
3. It is well documented in autobiographies and academic texts that Deleuze read, researched, and was influenced by Jung.

So Deleuze read Jung and Guattari read Winnicott. This means they should know better!

I have no proof, but I'd like to imagine Guattari read Winnicott's review of Jung. Not just because Guattari clearly read Winnicott and Deleuze read Jung, but because both Deleuze and Guattari and Winnicott discuss the infamous '2 skulls' dream Jung presented to Freud; the dream that Freud interprets as Oedipal despite Jung feeling it to be about his inevitable break with Freud. And both D and G and Winnicott  treat the dream as an example of Freud's inability to understand schizophrenia. 

Whether Winnicott's critique of Jung was read by D and G and overlooked for not fitting the narrative, or perhaps was never read at all, the text still poses questions I believe the two thinkers would surely need to consider and mindfully respond to. 

Conclusion - Similar Narrative Tensions within Psychoanalysis

I've argued the basic evergreen, collegiate position that when a new piece of literature is added to a discussion it disrupts preexistent narratives and provides a potential space for new thought. Someone else will have to come up with the new thought. The only 'conclusion' I have here is the cliché that we should be careful about pitting thinkers against one another for philosophical or political arguments, as they are often more multi-faceted than they initially appear, and a true exploration of a thinker often undermines one's position.  

For now I want to point out one other place where narratives in psychoanalytic politics and political psychoanalysis can and should be disrupted, that of  the relationship between Lacanianism and Marxism / practice and theory.

Lacan almost never wrote about case studies, endorsed a purely theoretical model of analysis, and strove to shake off  concepts of measurability and replication as criteria for psychoanalysis being confirmed as a science (variable length sessions, variable pay, not using insurance, undermining institutional authority by granting degrees at a whim, allowing students to self-determine when they graduate as an analyst, etc.). As a result, the effect of Lacanianism on the world has largely been an academic one, not a practical one. There are far more psychoanalytic training institutes that are non-Lacanian than ones that are Lacanian, and far more practicing analysts that are non-Lacanian than there are ones who are Lacanian. There are many psychoanalytic academics and philosophers who do not see patients (Zizek being the most famous) who are Lacanians and few academics and philosophers who are non-Lacanians who do not see patients. We could go on with the permutations, but we get the idea. Lacanianism seems to find its place in pop-culture (seen in films, TV shows - most recently White Lotus). Lacanianism is the vehicle of pure theory and yet, building on Marcuse's Freudo-Marxism that looked to understand political behavior in terms of Freudian biologism, Lacanianism was esteemed in high regard as a true science by a Marxist thinker and has come to be tightly bound with many Marxist positions that endorse 'praxis' or practice as the main goal of intellectual theory. Clearly this is a tension. Lacanianism is not as 'praxis' oriented or critical as it thinks it is.

I don't meant to say any of this is 'bad.' I have some good Lacanian friends - some who practice analysis, some who don't; I enjoy some Lacanian literature, and I myself am a petty pop culture enjoyer! 

The real point is this - Winnicott's analysis of Jung somewhat disrupts the Deleuzo-Guattarian framing of opposing Jung to Frued, but what document(s) will help disrupt the narrative that Lacanianism is Marxist practice when in many ways it returns to abstract, theoretical and academic discussions - or worse, pop culture clichés  - that have little practical effect on people?

I don't know the answer to this question. A job for someone else.

But to return to the tree in the woods - 'if a theoretical model gets it wrong and no other model is around to see, does it still make an error' - question: Freud, Jung, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Zizek, - they all need eachother. Concepts are tools, thinkers too. It's foolish to pick a favorite tool in your box when they all serve a purpose. 

Magic, Zero, Game Theory, Capitalism, Death Drive, 90s

Magic the Gathering is a card game invented in 1991. It is still widely played today.

The inventor of the game is a mathematician and computer programmer so naturally the rules of the game rely on a degree of math and computer science (though this would likely be true even if the inventor was not a mathematician as the rules of any game often rely on numbers and sequences). 

When playing Magic in order to 'cast' a spell one needs to pay its cost, so naturally one must have the required resources to pay. For popular games like Pokemon this resource is an 'energy' card. For Magic this resource is a land card that produces mana. 

In sum, a Magic deck is composed of spells and lands. Lands produce 'mana.' Mana is required for spells. 

Over the course of Magic's history, the 'powerful' spells have undergone a shift in their form and content; they've gone from being expensive in mana cost and singular in copy in a deck / game to being inexpensive in mana cost and redundant or multiple in a deck / game. 

That is, over time the increase in power of a spell has correlated with a reduction in its cost and an increase in its statistical presence in a deck of cards (your deck can contain no more than 4 of the same card in many formats of magic, and in some formats 1 of. In both formats, cheaper mana cost cards have prevailed over more expensive ones).

To win the game, old Magic players relied on a few big spells, while new Magic players run multiple copies of many smaller spells.

As the formats became more and more competitive - especially in the last few years - this trend has intensified and accelerated. In the last few years the game has seen the introduction of what are essentially zero cost spells. These spells literally have a 0 in their cost, or they have an 'alternative casting cost.' For example, the player may pay 2 life (phyrexian mana, which we will come back to later), or may remove a card in your hand from the game to pay the cost of a spell (so you don't need a land card in play to use it...), or pay 0 for a spell this turn but if you don't pay 5 next turn you automatically lose the game.

Over time the game incentivized and trended towards 0 cost for maximum value. This understandably made game matches go quicker.

What this says about Magic and its fun-level is one thing, but what it says about the structure of games and therefore reality in general is another.

I think this may be one example of how any system with rules (Game) may tend towards least amount of cost for most amount of value. Readers will find this familiar - it is not unlike what is often described as 'the capitalistic death drive.' As I and others have written about elsewhere, both capitalism and magic are about turning a 0 into a not-0; pulling something from nothing; creating surplus value of code from a deficit, etc. 

Another way of understanding this is that a game that does not optimize its move-sets for zero or near-zero efficiency will not survive the selection pressures / process. Occham's razor but for games. I theorize this could be based on the fact that this optimization allows for higher speed of play, more resolution of matches, and therefore and an overall more time to play more matches. This could mean more fun, or it could mean more practice, and the evolution part of our organism loves the meeting of fun and practice! In other words, the human brain - in the most inorganic, anti-subjective, and chemical sense - is tuned to and triggered by - addicted to even - processes that demonstrate efficiency trends towards zero. For these reasons, a competitive game with simpler and less costly ways of generating value and winning will likely interest the lizard brain more than a comparative one that does not check these boxes. 

So, I think Magic the Gathering, this 90s Math-Magic game, hacks into Outside flows. Computer science, Math, Magic, Zero, 90s? It's all there (as usual).

This latent tendency within the game is captured by the actual fantasy story narratives of the game as well. 

Creatures known as 'Phyrexians' - incredibly 90s Lovecraftian-Terminator Centobytes - are hellbent on 'compleating' or perfecting organisms by infecting them and turning them into agentless, soulless, melted-up bio-machines. A key word utilized in the Phyrexian narrative is 'process.' The end result is not what matters, the process of perfecting the body (in a Cartesian and Deleuzian-Guattarian sense) through mutilating it and fusing it with machine parts linked to a hive-mind is. These Phyrexian cards - no surprise here - often cost 0 mana and instead cost 'Phyrexian mana' which means the player can pay 2 of his life (players start with 20 life) instead of using a land card to produce mana. 

The latent Accelerationist elements of the card game are expressed directly in the narrative.

As a cherry on top: Years ago - perhaps 5 or 6 at this point - a Nick Land audiobook had, apparently from the Youtube uploader, been associated with a wizard card from Magic the Gathering (the video had an image of the MTG card edited to reference Land...).

This is not to say MTG is accelerationist, or anything banal like that (though it is funny Nick Land - Land = Mana). More so it is to say that when things tend to come out on top in the 'game' of life, they tend to show up in and around the same crowd - computer science and solid math, zero, magic, the occult, efficiency, etc. 

Explaining the BwO to you so you don't kill me. Not dumbing it down, explaining it so you do not literally kill me.

Introduction

The popular meme above and the variations one can witness throughout the Twittersphere such as 'explain BwO to me right now' or 'the BwO is obscurantist' (@metanomad, bless his heart, deleted the Tweet here) all transmit the relatively same message - that Deleuze or more specifically the concept ‘body without organs’ is, for whatever reason - and different people will give many different reasons - obfuscatory, unclear, difficult to understand, etc. The most generous critics will attribute this to a complexity in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought while the least generous will dismiss the concept as useless jargon. 

Ultimately, unless a concept's epistemic rigor is significant to a praxis, or bares a concrete and direct relationship to our every day lives - such as keeping airplanes in the air, bridges stable, etc. - we shouldn't care too much about the distinction between good and bad concepts. The need to justify a concept to an other is to fall prey to precisely what psychoanalysis and Deleuze himself would warn us about - 'get trapped in the dream of the other and you're fucked!' The need to justify a concept is all voice, no exit; symbolic, impotent linguistic debate, discussion, no exit. 

Per the pragmatism of Deleuze and Guattari - mostly Guattari whom loved Peirce, James, and had a penchant for off the cuff impulsive chaotic and unpredictable behavior - if one finds an intellectual concept useless, so be it, simply move on to one you find useful. When one finds a concept useful, then it is useful and you should use it. This is in the spirit of Guattari's one-off addage - 'if nothing is happening, then nothing is happening' (or - the 'masculine urge' to say 'it is what it is...').

So why bother elaborate upon or clarify an unclear concept? Perhaps it may be useful to some whom have already dismissed it, and perhaps a clear view will give better reason to those who have rightly dismissed it. Clarifying a concept is about helping someone have sufficient information for decision making. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, just as many have tried to elaborate on the concept, so will I. Whether I succeed or fail - though irrelevant - is none the less up how you, dear reader, and how you choose to put the concept into action.  

BwO

The body without organs is one of the most notable and recognizable concepts put to use by Deleuze and Guattri (even if it was ‘stolen’ from Artaud). 

It’s described as an egg; often spoken in the same breath as concepts such as ‘the flow of ‘partial objects,’ (a concept borrowed from Kleinian psychoanalysis), ‘the plane of immanence’ ‘desiring machine’ ‘schizo flows’ and ‘smooth unstriated surfaces.’ 

These of course all require unpacking. 

Partial objects are fragments of experience, affect, subjectivity, or behavior that are not predetermined. They are yet to be fully formed, or if they are fully formed they are yet to be fully comprehended by the other's sensory and intellectual faculties. 

For the infant, the mother is not yet a full person; neither internally - she is devoid of an internal world of thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. - nor externally - the infant’s newly developed cognitive abilities only permit them to focus on or two sensory experiences at a time. At its best, Mom is reduced to a smiling face, a caressing hand, a warm and gentle embrace, a nutrient and gratifying breast. At its worst, a grave face, a distressing fumble, a frustrating breast. 

Klein showed how the infant's crude emotional and cognitive faculties reduce these experiences to a simple 'good vs. bad' object binary. Mom’s whole internal and external - her body - is reduced to one or two partial representations that are themselves bound up with the infants fantasies and precepts. 

For psychoanalysis, here lies one aspect of the genesis of most mental health issues such as personality conflicts, but especially fetishism - the partial object to which the whole is reduced. But where Klein and psychoanalysts see the partial object as a way of understanding pathology, Deleuze and Guattari de-pathologize the concept and show us that it also allows for new organizations of affect, thought, feeling, and behavior. 

Seeing the world as a stream of partial objects allows us to see the many different permutations that this or that thing could connect up with this or that thing - what is described by D and G as the functions desiring machines and their flows - as opposed to viewing the world through a ‘whole object’ lens which from the start dismisses and precludes certain combinations, experiments, etc. Herein lies the ‘schizo’ in schizoanalysis; herein lies the information we need to understand: why D and G describe the BwO as (insert quote about different body parts being connected to each other from 1k plateaus). 

"why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly...where psychoanalysis says 'stop, find your self again,' we should say instead, 'let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet.' ... "the BwO reveals itself for what it is... a long process of experimentation...(for it is not 'my' body without organs, instead the 'me'... is on it. or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds." (Plateau 'How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs,' 150-151; 160-161).

This means the BwO is a body of pure virtuality. It is undifferentiated and unexpressed potential in the form of corporeal and incorporeal material. It is a body whose vectors of effect, change, development, etc. are yet to be determined. A mass of code. A Big Bang.

The 5th Element  

Not so bad, right? 

Regardless, some have attempted to find concrete examples of the concept in film, culture, etc., so here’s my concrete example to add to the heap - the BwO is quite literally nothing other than the severed arm of Mondoshawans from which Leeloo is reconstructed at the beginning of the sci-fi film The Fifth Element (1997). See below.

The Mondoshawans are a race of ancient aliens who protect life and whom despite being from the deep past (see the intro scene), have incredibly advanced technology. This is likely because they have existed ‘before time’ (see CCRU and deep time, and how archaic shamanism and future alien tech converge).

The creatures appear to be inhuman, genderless (likely Lemurs beneath their armor).

When a severed arm is recovered from their crashed space cruiser, Earth scientists discover that it contains incredibly dense genetic material, thousands of times more dense and complex than human DNA; essentially a starter kit for life - an egg, a sourdough mother dough. It is incubated by the scientists who use future tech to reconstruct a body out of the material of the hand. Like Eve coming from Adam's rib, the beautiful and "perfect" Leeloo is born from the arm. 

The severed arm is a quite literally a part object. A body part that performs a certain function under certain circumstances separated from a whole body. However, it’s dense, undifferentiated material does not yield another of the Mondoshawans, but a beautiful human female. Why?

This is not simply a philosophical question pulled form thin air. When watching the film I wondered to myself - 'why would a mass of alien genetic material produce a human looking creature?' Rather than answer it from a practical perspective - that the film makers wanted a badass female lead for their film, etc. - I attempted to answer the question with my best take on the film's canon, my best understanding of the logic of the film's universe, or the 'realism' or 'ontology' of the film (what Deleuze and Guattari would call a 'plane of immanence' - also see Fisher's understanding of realism, naturalism, and supernaturalism in The Weird and the Eerie). 

The answer I was able to give myself, which I believe is consistent with the implied Sci-Fi logic of the film which seems to be a gritty materialist-realism, is that the laws of the environment condition the development of the undifferentiated genetic material. Or - in the different language of Deleuze and Guattari - form and expression are linked. The milieu (A Thousand Plateaus language) or the Force Field / plane of immanence (Anti-Oedipus language) influences and structures the otherwise amorphous. 

When an alien body - presumably the outcome, the end product of the matrices of forces from an alien planet, an alien milieu, an alien field of forces, etc. - is broken into parts - parts which themselves are dense genetic material - and reconstructed within or on a different plane, milieu, etc., reconstructed among a different matrix or field of forces, then the body will assume a different form. Form and express may be relative, but their relativity is indicative of their influence upon one another. The milieu structures the way a body is expressed. One could take any set of genetic inputs and alter the environment and bare witness to surprisingly varied results!

This is why Leeloo is 'the 5th' element. 5 is asymmetrical. Asymmetry = Motion. Motion = Life. Or...unlife. Like the Mondoshawans, the 5th element is that which exists beneath and below the 'formal' aspects of life (earth, wind, fire, water) - it is the milieu itself, the genetic mass whose form is dependent on expression, dependent on the milieu.

So there, I've explained the BwO...

'The Mitchells vs. The Machines' as Surplus Value of Cute: Crypto-Cute/Acc & Pro-Oedipal Nostalgia

Netflix's recent animated adventure The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a humorous take on the AI singularity that hits above its age demographic and target audience by filling itself with (accidental?) accelerationist dogwhistles (as if out of a Zero HP Love Craft short story, and in what feels like a Cypher re-injecting himself in the Matrix moment, the robots lure dumb tech abusers into captivity with their seductive 'pod' -the message here is who cares about human annihilation when I have free wifi and a big screen!). 

It's the story we all know by now, or rather, all the stories we all know by now compressed and condensed in one flat narrative surface (the allusion to Fisher's Flatline Constructs is intentional here - and remember, compression is how contemporary media in our capitalist landscape thrives): your self-aware female smart phone love object (Her) has turned against its human user and mobilized an interlinked network of super robot soldiers (Terminator) all because it was made obsolete by robots that were intended to do our housework who themselves have turned bad (I-Robot). 

Along with narrative condensation, some contemporary figures and themes flatten out and haunt the film; Elon Musk, in a kind of inverted Space-X moment, is strongly invoked: A Grimes (his wife) song plays shortly before we learn that the machines' aim is to annihilate all humans by encasing them in pods and launching them into space; where Space-X is a humanist gesture of extending mankind into the stars through technological ingenuity, these tech-machines wish to send mankind into space precisely to destroy it. In a kind of nod to Facebook and its depiction in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerburg is invokved: Who's partially to blame for the robot take over? An over reaching silicon valley techy drunk on corporate power named Mark whose hubris is his downfall. Etc.

China and Evolutionary Science is invoked as well. 

How?

The Mitchells, a fractured and chronically miscommunicating but spunky and well intentioned family who are attempting to reconnect with one another in the age of digital solipsism, evade capture precisely because they are neither too dumb nor too smart as opposed to the other humans in the film (a perfect, intelligent, attractive, and coordinated family whose parents are played by John Legend Chrissy Teigen and slack jawed Wi-Fi addicted losers are captured all the same). 

That is, in an interesting inversion of the AI singularity, the Mitchells' eclectic weirdness makes them a kind of oddball that is not easily predicted by the machine AIs. 

Just as we see in The Matrix trilogy where Neo is explained to be an asymmetrical surplus remainder of code produced accidentally by machine logic, making him a kind of human singularity that cannot be reduced to the logic of a machine and thereby alluding to the ghost of metaphysics and science, 'the ghost in the machine' or the 'emergent' quality of consciousness that eludes 'hard' science, always falling victim to either mystical or theological speculation or physicalist reductionism, the Mitchell family is a too a non reducible surplus. 

This calls to mind Lacan's 'the real' which is that unresolved bit which remains outside of the symbolic and the imaginary, but more accurately, calls to mind Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'surplus value of code' and the 'machinic assemblage.' A machinic assemblage is a collection of heterogeneous bits that by themselves do not create an effect but when linked together create an emergent quality; when put together create more than the sum of their parts (see Manuel De Landa's Assemblage Theory and Deleuze and Guattari's example of the orchid and the wasp in A Thousand Plateaus). 

"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here."

But we digress! 

This notion of a human surplus that escapes easy machine codification is then intensified and compressed within the narrative of the film, and it takes the form of something seriously cute - a pug.

The Mitchell family learns that the robots cannot process the image of their family dog, a pug. When the robots attempt to visualize the dog, their processors get stuck between identifying the object as either a dog, pig, or loaf of bread (and the inclusion of 3 as opposed to the binary of 2 is interesting here...) thereby creating an error that glitches the robot. After learning this, the Mitchells mount their pug on the front of their car and drive through an army of robots, incapacitating them along the way, defeating the robot leader, and saving humanity. 

This merits significant pause. The Pug is a Chinese breed of dog originally bred (bread) by the Emperor of China to look docile, cute, and sit on his feet and produce warmth. In other words, the outcome of hundreds of years of cold, harsh, cruel, imperial human meddling into the selective processes of nature created this weird looking super cute thing that nature itself would likely not produce if left to its own selective devices. As I wrote in my blog entry Scattered Thoughts on Cute/Acc, 

"Just as a lump of coal turns to a cluster of diamond under high pressure over many years, a lump of cold and ugly turns to a cluster of warm and fuzzy; ugliness on one side of the process produces cuteness on the other...warmth and cuteness are born out of the furnace of coldness...Wherever anything is cute, there is surely a trail of bodies not far behind..."

This is to say that the puzzling 'thing' (enigmatic signifier, to use Jean Laplanche's term) that disrupts the robot revolution is the physical instantiation of the history of humanity's impact on and interruption of nature; a cute surplus production from the uncute historical churnings.

Ultimately, the moral of the Mitchells vs. the Machines is that firstly middle of the bell curve selective traits (as opposed to the slackjawed wifi junkies - left of the bell curve - and the hip, cool, John Legend family - right of the bell curve) and the family as an instantatioan of that bell curve are advantageous to survival (what I call Pro-Oedipal nostalgia) and that secondly, cuteness is essential to survival; the moral is that cuteness and middle of the bell curve familialism are linked. 

The fantasy is that the family, the oedipal humanist paragon, will save us from the inhuman, and in the process the importance of cuteness will be brought to the forefront. 

After all, as my supervisor at the hospital often says, the family is a survival mechanism against a cold, cruel word. And afterall, as  the cliché goes, cute people are often thought of as being somewhere between the beautiful and the ugly - or, as in the case of the pug, or the beauty mark, or weird models, some elusive combination of the two!

Some Thoughts On JA Miller's 'Docile to Trans'

 Entry 31: Some Thoughts On JA Miller's 'Docile to Trans' 

(this is entry 31 in my psychoanalysis blog here, posted to my main blog for easier access due to the relevance of the text I am responding to) 

"But you have to be familiar with the place, as I am and as Guattari once was, to allow yourself such profanity." - J.A. Miller

It is fitting that my last two blog entries in the psychoanalysis section are centered around the unethical practices of Lacan as JA Miller's recent essay, which describes Lacan's abuse of Miller, could easily fit right into each of the above entries. 

That is, Miller has - to a lesser extent of course - joined the dissident ranks with the likes of Guattari, Green, and Laplanche. However, juicy psychoanalytic drama aside, as folks on twitter have pointed out, more importantly the text also covers trans culture and wokeness. 

Though the text set out to mainly to respond to Paul B. Preciado's lecture turned Semiotext(e) book 'Can the Monsther Speak,', what is more important is that the piece acts as a junction for significant divergences within the history of psychoanalysis and an important lesson in 'what psychoanalysis is' or 'what it should be today.'

*

The history of divergences in psychoanalysis and what psychoanalysis 'is' or 'ought to be' essentially amount to two parts of the same discussion which I will attempt to cover. 

Haunting JA Miller's text is an inherited and neurotic resentment for May 68 which - as psychoanalytic theories of embodiment, whether Nietzschean, Freudian, or something else might suggest - is nothing more than a sublimated rivalry between himself and Felix Guattari. 

To be preicse, 'nothing more' sounds too polemical, reductive. What we should say is that some of the subtext of Miller's text can be interestingly explored and framed by looking at Miller's relationship to Zizek, Lacan, and Guattari. 

So what's the Guattari connection? 

Let's start with the text and then move beyond it:

Preciado's book is published by Semiotext(e), the main publisher of Guattari's work, which was of course founded by Guattari's personal friends Sylvère Lotringer.

Miller mentions that his grandson - a supposed woke-scold who lectures Miller on gender - names his favorite book as In Search of Lost Time. As any good Freudian knows, if someone takes the time to include a fact or detail in speech or writing, it has some sort of significance to the text (even if it is itself insignificant and the purpose is to detract and distract...), so one must conclude (especially if one is a good Lacanian) that the inclusion of this book is not insignificant. Though it is a well known text, and even if Guattari himself came to love the book through Lacan, my first association is that it is Guattari's self-admitted favorite book of which he wrote on at length in most of his works. 

The Proust book stands in as a signifier for Guattari, just as Preciado does. 

Both are treated with a modicum of disdain in the text, just as Guattari is treated in general by the psychoanalytic and philosophical community alike, which we will get to in a moment.

Zizek makes a similar move to Miller in his short text First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, where he claims to respond to 'post-Hegelian neoliberal' Antonio Negri (pg. 52-60) but does so by mainly putting DeleuzoGuattarian language in scare quotes. 

"egalitarian-emancipatory 'de-territorialization' "(pg 129)

 "radical nomadism...the standard post-Hegelian matrix of productive flux...nomadic 'molecular' ...'molar'... "(139-141).

Of course Negri, a friend and co-author of Guattari (Communists Like Us), utilized Guattari's conceptual language, but the language Zizek mocks in these moments is more readily noticed as Guattarian, not Negrian. I can imagine Zizek or his editor suggesting Ziz respond to a more contemporary thinker who is carrying the Guattarian torch, rather than Guattari himself who Zizek thinks too lowly of to even respond to (which we will show in a moment). 

Again, as is the nature of the (Lacanian) signifier, one name stands in for another, even right down to the level of phonemes: Neg'ri' really means another '-ri,' - Guatta'ri.'  

Three disdained authors all stand in for Guattari. 

But why?

As is now common knowledge (myth or legend will also suffice) – and I will spare the details as they are already fully documented elsewhere (Intersecting Lives, Lacan Was a Phase in My life, Anti-Oedipus Papers, etc.) - Felix Guattari, esteemed by the master, was set up to be the next Lacan – set up to carry his torch. Unfortunately, at the 11th hour Lacan retracted his support and opted instead for his son-in-law Jacques Alain-Miller who was is in good standing with the then influental Maoists. JA Miller of course would go on to be Slavoj Zizek’s ‘psychoanalyst’ and teacher.  In fact, what Lacan did to Guattari is mirrored by what Miller did to Zizek: As the story goes, Guattari was going to publish a text in a journal whereupon Lacan convinced him to publish it in his journal only to then reject the piece leaving Guattari with nowhere to publish it (part of what prompts Guattari to link up with Deleuze, and the rest is history...); Zizek was told he was to be published by Miller only for Miller, at the last minute, to reject the piece causing Zizek to look elsewhere.

In classic Lacanian arrogance, in his text JA Miller imagines an interlocutor so that he may respond to the imagined position. Let us do the same with Zizek here.

Let us imagine a universe in which Lacan did not pull the rug out from Guattari’s feet. In this universe, Guattari would have been in the position of Miller and thus in the position to be Zizek’s psychoanalyst and teacher. Of course, there is no telling if it is not the case that in this counterfactual universe that Zizek would not still have chosen Miller as his analyst while still rejecting Guattari, but what matters is that there would’ve existed the possibility that Guattari could have been Zizek’s superior in an authority structure (could there a more Lacanian duo of words than 'authority and structure!') of importance to Zizek. That is, the counterfactual lets us rhetorically imagine a possible world in which Zizek was subordinate to Guattari in ranking with the master, Lacan.

Let’s imagine a different counterfactual. Let us base this one on a fact: it is undeniable that Guattari was more blessed by the father / master than Zizek himself. Guattari, analysand and student of Lacan even before it was fashionable (to the extent that he was jokingly called Lacan around La Bourde), had an intimate relationship with the master. Now for our counterfactual: Imagine a universe in which Zizek recognizes this fact. What necessarily comes next from his recognition of this fact? Perhaps the idea that not only did Guattari have a closer relationship than Zizek to his idol Lacan, but that Guattari, from Zizek’s perspective, squandered this. Let us imagine a world where Zizek thinks “It should have been I who was chosen to be Lacan’s torch bearer, I would appreciate it in a way that Guattari did not!” Now, what feelings are thoughts like these often bound up with? We would probably say jealousy or envy, feelings -or psychodynamics, rather -  that  are commonly associated with betrayal, the word Zizek himself uses to refer to Guattari:

“Deleuze was a mega genius – Guattari, now he is the real traitor here. Like a true Stalinist would say, he should be brought out back and shot” (Žižek. “Ontological Incompleteness in Film” The European Graduate School lecture Dec 1 2012)

Now, considering Zizek would never have been in the place to bear Lacan’s torch, he has settled (as both the Kleinian depressive position, Freudian resolution of the Oedpial complex, and Lacanian castration requires) for the next best thing – having Miller as his analyst. 

To get back to Miller's text - this envious or jealous and resentful streak is captured only briefly in the text when Miller writes "But you have to be familiar with the place, as I am and as Guattari once was, to allow yourself such profanity," meaning 'in order to critique Lacan(ianism) you have to had been through it. Interestingly, this is not unlike the inclusivity ritual or signing ethnic or racial groups enact around certain slurs, or the way an older brother draws the line on who can name-call his younger brother; both are name calls 'hey, I can say that to him because he's my family, but I'll beat you up if you say it!' Sibling rivalry anyone?

It is this historical drama that is playing out in Miller's piece. Guattari is an implied signifier standing in for the 'disorder' of hsyeric discourse introduced into and thereby undermining psychoanalysis. 

This helps us get to our other point - discussing how the text helps us see 'what psychoanalysis is.' 

* *

Psychoanalysis changed from a medical adjacent therapeutic clinical technique for helping people to a theoretical template for understanding culture. Lacan achieved the latter by making efforts to remove the notion of medical or healing authority from psychoanalysis, making it 'a science of understanding how subjectivity forms' of which the therapeutic benefits were purely secondary, if at all. He did so by bankrupting the value of the training institution by letting anyone in, and making the criteria for graduating analytic training based on immeasurable, individualized, and moving goalposts (which is why Deleuze and Guattari refer to him as 'the first schizoanalyst' which we wills ay more on in a minute).

Over the course of my training I have weighed both the strengths and weaknesses, alternating between the therapeutic and theoretical approach. I have - like most of the Lacanian defectors (Laplanche and Green, among others) - settled on the therapeutic approach. 

Regardless, the the purely theoretical approach of listening to a patient on the couch without the intent for caring or curing, or the act of viewing a film through a psycho analytic lens - both being an exercise in how someone understands their own subjectivity, and how their subjectivity might have formed along certain lines - this 'pure' approach is merely an intensified version or extension of the basic therapeutic technique Freud developed. 

In other words, no matter how you cut it, psychoanalysis is a way of understanding how people understanding themselves, and how that understanding effects behavior and thought which is measured by the way the person relates to the analyst under certain circumstances (an other, transference). 

The question then is a tricky one - is this specific frame and method of listening and deducing one's subjectivity through a careful relationship applicable to trans folk?

The quick and easy answer is yes, but things are rarely quick and easy, and especially not when it comes to psychoanalysis. Here's the longer answer: 

I don't think psychoanalysis should try and cater itself to trans folk; Neither analysts nor trans really want each other for who they are (which is one understanding of Lacan's 'there is no sexual relationship'), and so I think psychoanalysis and the trans population are an ineffective match. This is not because of a fault with trans folk, nor a deficit of psychoanalysis, but rather because of a limit or set of limits pertaining to both psychoanalysis and trans people.

My experience is that most trans people do not want or need psychoanalysis because the theory and model is derived from non-trans folk subjectivities and therefore it seeks to achieve different goals than those of trans subjectivities, and it seeks to achieve these goals by means different than those of trans folk.

This is because psychoanalysis, in addition to being a frustration model that presupposes someone has enough gratification in life to withstand continued frustration (the analyst prohibits action, reflects questions, encourages laborous thinking and the expression of hard to express feeling, etc.), psychoanalysis is in part predicated on the acceptance of things out of one's control, or the idea that there is such a thing as being in and out of control. This acceptance takes various theoretical myths from different sub-schools of psychoanalysis:

• The Kleinian depressive position of accepting appropriate accountability as opposed to paranoically projecting blame; 
• the Freudian settling for a stand-in object that is inherently inadequate from the sought after object, such as a woman outside of the family in place of the mother, 
• or the Freudian letting go of the already-always lost object in an act of mourning rather than becoming mired in melancholia or mania (the latter being the fantasy that the already-always lost object is able to be recreated if one tries hard enough); 
• the Lacanian castration and barred subject, etc. 

I call these myths of acceptance because we don't have to subscribe to their contents; don't have to believe them to be true or effective in anyway. They are values psychoanalysis attempts to inscribe into its patients; a frame of acting and understanding. 

Additionally, psychoanalysis is about having a relationship - even if it is a simulated relationship that reveals 'there is no (sexual) relationship' - with another person. 

Let's be real. Trans folk don't need - or want - a paid simulated relationship with another person where they reflect on their understanding of their self and the historical experiences that contributed to this understanding, they need or want someone to clear them legally to get a surgery or chemical administration to move on with their life. 

In this sense, psychoanalysis is inefficient to the needs of the trans folk. Trans folk need or want surgical and chemical intervention to feel less dysphoric. Some psychoanalysts believe that dysphoria can be worked out through the transference. I don't believe this, nor do I see any evidence that this is true. Additionally, the trans folks I have worked with do not tend to express an interest in exploring how their experiences contributed to their own understanding of their self (despite there being some good content worth exploring!). For the folks I've worked with, or continue to work with, it doesn't matter, and in many cases, it feels invalidating or counterintuitive to their attempt at carving out a space for themselves in this world. 

Simply put, what psychoanalysis offers and what trans folk need  or want are at odds - so bother reconciling the two? 

This is not say that I do not believe trans folk seeking psychoanalysis should be turned away - that psychoanalysis should exclude trans. 

No, not at all. And rather than elaborate theoretically, let me explain clinically. I have some trans folk currently in my outpatient practice, and have worked with additional trans folk in the past who have cordially and politely left treatment after we came to a mutual agreement about trying something different. I have also worked with a number of trans folk at the hospital I am employed at. With these people I do not make an attempt to foster transference or explore someone's self understanding. Rather, I work to help them solve conflicts through playfully challenging moral prohibitions they have internalized, or work to try and expand rigid thinking about what one needs to do to feel affirmed in their gender. 

One AFAB (assigned female at birth) patient who identifies as male fears that if he peruses cis females - the population he is attracted to - that they will feel betrayed or duped and retaliate physically or socially when they discover, when it is time to be intimate, that he is a male without a penis. I suggest perhaps if his life is not truly in danger it does not matter, what does he care anyways? They'll either like him or they won't, and if they don't, fuck it. Can't he handle the feeling of rejection? Why should that fear prevent him from perusing his desired object? etc. Another patient insists he must starve himself to achieve the male body he needs to feel gender affirmed. Surely there are other ways that not cause as much harm and distress? Other ways that do not land you in the hospital? Have you seen most men? Isn't gender in part a set of social performances? etc. 

These patient do not want to understand themselves - what contributed to their values, their behaviors, their thought structures - nor do they want to accept - or learn to accept, the unchangable. Nor is their much incentive for them to do so! Rather, they want the world to be different, and though this may cause unnecessary exhaustion or despair at times, there is ultimately 'nothing wrong' with that. Nothing wrong indeed, just may not be suitable for psychoanalysis! And the question then is, is what I am doing with these folks psychoanalysis? Some will say yes, some will say no. Andre Green has a history of saying this kind of work is 'pre-analytic' or 'not really analysis.' I think Miller would agree. 

This brings us to a bit from Miller's essay. He writes

"Before trans people, the monster was the hermaphrodite. He too disturbed sexual public order. But hermaphroditism is only a matter of organs. A hermaphrodite is a biological case, a rare one at that. Androgyny, on the other hand, is a creature of myth, a matter of look and lifestyle. An androgynous person is someone whose appearance does not allow you to determine to which sex he or she belongs. This was already the case in ancient Greece or Rome: see Luc Brisson’s Le sexe incertain. It is not as such a sexual identity disorder. Trans is something else again."

Miller is both right and painfully wrong here. I would say to him, 'Yes, precisely - the 'something else again' is the emergent quality known as subjectivity that psychoanalysis aims to study!

This again gets us back to Guattari vs. Miller. This is precisely why Guattari developed schizoanalysis, a process of helping people act on their desire rather than reflect on it. A method of circumventing representation and encouraging action. 

With Guattari's distrust of linguistics in mind, the ultimate question is not 'can the monster speak' but 'does the monster want to speak, and if so, under what circumstances?' Does the monster want transference and reflection, or do they want a need met so they can live their life? Yes - not can the monster speak, but can the monster do.