This article will be the more coherent of two articles this quarter on Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project Capitalism & Schizophrenia, specifically the first book: Anti-Oedipus. For those unfamiliar with D&G it is strongly recommended to begin here. The intention of this article is to relate the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (D&G) to the Land Back movement. On the surface this is very easy: D&G call for us to find a way to leave the capitalist socius and establish a new earth socius which frees desiring-production from capitalist repression and returns it to being directly organized around relation with the Earth. But now I've gone and used a bunch of concepts completely detached from their meaning and we're not much closer to understanding each other. We will need to establish working definitions for several of D&G's concepts, namely desiring-production, social production, and the socius. Hopefully we can leave explaining whatever the fuck a body without organs is to the other article.
Ian Buchanan’s Guide to Anti-Oedipus provides a rough description of the psychoanalytic understanding of desire that Deleuze and Guattari were responding to: "Id is psychic energy in its raw state. Id is a force inside us which is by nature compulsive, driving, impersonal, hungry, insatiable, sexual, aggressive, creative and destructive - it lives in us, but we experience it as 'other'." Deleuze and Guattari turn this understanding on its head, asserting that desire is not just a force inside of us but a force which fundamentally shapes and drives our every interaction with the world: "It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id." D&G further assert (contrary to Freud’s understanding of the unconscious as a theater) that the unconscious is a veritable factory. Judge Daniel Paul Schreber - whose memoir became a case study for Freud - could feel sunbeams coming out of his ass. Freud decided (among many other insane and harmful assumptions) that Schreber must be suppressing some latent homosexual desires. D&G assert instead their theory of a productive unconscious: “Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors."
Desiring-production is so named because it is with these understandings of desire and of unconscious thought as production that D&G will attempt to lay a new foundation for the material psychiatry that Wilhelm Reich first set out to create (see other article). In one of Eugene Holland’s entries in the Deleuze Dictionary (edited by Adrian Parr), he writes that “Schizoanalysis uses the pivotal term 'desiring-production 'in tandem with 'Social-production’ to link Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx: the term conjoins libido and labour-power as distinct instances of production-in-general."
From Marx's Grundrisse, literally "foundation" for a critique of political economy, Deleuze and Guattari drew a lot of inspiration. Marx spends some time in the introduction of his Grundrisse having it out with the individualist fantasies of bourgeois historians and other academics. A particular target here is the theory - drawn up by Rousseau and others - of the Social Contract: "which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract." As he does with Hegel elsewhere, Marx turns these bourgeois ideas on their head, rejecting the theory of “free competition” and the individual, which “appears detached from the natural bonds, etc which make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate.” His criticism is interested not in the bourgeois ideas themselves but in the history of human development which allowed them to come into existence: “The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.” This is the crux of Marx’s entire life of work: material conditions and the material production that shaped human development. To the extent that Marx is interested in talking about individuals at all, it is only "individuals producing in society - hence socially determined individual production."
Deleuze and Guattari are less concerned with prioritizing our collective or social existence over the individual as they are with abolishing most of the distinction between individual and society entirely. To D&G every “individual” is always already a microcosm of their social world, and microcosm here must be understood not as a “representative” of the greater whole but a real, living piece of it, a whole array of inextricably linked forces. This is a heresy of sorts from so-called Orthodox Marxism: rather than Ideas simply being the reflection of the material world, the process of production of ideas is itself a fundamental social force. This is not a distinction between the material world and its ideal fantasy, between that which is “real” and that which is not. To assert that the unconscious is itself productive requires D&G’s distinction between the Virtual and Actual - between the material world as it actually, currently exists, and the virtual which shapes what it can become. Desiring-production and Social-production, then, are responsible for the production of reality, all of it that we as humans are capable of affecting at least. Social-production is the goods that we harvest, modify, and produce to sustain ourselves, but it is also our infrastructure, as well as the production of new people, physically and mentally. It is everything that humans can be said to create.
Social-production is simply desiring-production under determinate conditions. But what are those “determinate conditions”? They are determined primarily by the Actual, material world that all of us share, but each individual is also an entire Virtual world of social forces, shaped by the specific material conditions that each of us face. The Virtual here is again not to be understood as simply a reflection of the material world but as the potential to act on and change the Actual as well. The two are mutually co-determining.
As for what the “determinate conditions” actually look like at any given time, there are a few different places to look. Marx’s historical materialism asserts that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marx further describes 5 stages of economic development, also referred to as the modes of production: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and communism.
The Socius is D&G’s response to this universal theory of the stages of history. Not a rejection of it but certainly a noticeable change - a new universal history that Deleuze and Guattari assert would not be possible to trace if not for Capitalism’s growth into a global economic system and the changes which preceded this. A Socius denotes how social production is determined, or more specifically what it is organized around. What remains of the stages of economic development/modes of production are now each a different socius, from the socius of the Earth, to the despot, to Capitalism, and finally to a New Earth socius.
In pre-capitalist and pre-feudal times, D&G argue (alongside a handful of anthropologists which they cite) that social production was organized in direct relation to the earth. When we speak of an "earth socius," it may be much more helpful to understand this as human social production organized around the LAND, not as merely the soil itself but as that rich network of relations between all forms of life that depend on any particular plot of "land." What could be called the human dimension of this network of relations between life and everything which sustains it is further described by D&G as the "sporadic and reciprocal" circulation of debt or obligation along lines of lineage & alliance. Indigenous theorists have more simply referred to the entire system (not just the human dimension) as Grounded Normativity. Regardless of what exactly we call it, it’s important to better understand how it works.
Under the Earth or Land Socius, what you take, process, and produce cannot be more than the land and life around you can provide or withstand, or you risk death for yourself and others. But contrary to what Marx wrote, these “primitive communist” societies did actually experience and even produce surpluses of goods, but had their own methods of dealing with those surpluses. The Potlatch attributed to several Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples is one such method, but at the core of any of these is that excessive accumulation is prevented by destroying, dispersing, or consuming the excess or surplus of goods. Instead of permitting any individual or class to exploit the labor of others by denying access to this surplus from others (and in so doing accumulate even more), the surplus of goods and therefore of energy is redirected into sustaining the existing mode and means of social production. In so doing, “primitive communism” was constantly warding off the formation of capitalism and the state.
But as we know, resources were eventually allowed to accumulate further and state formations did eventually develop. Wherever in particular this occurred at any particular time, it marked the change between a socius of the Earth to that of the despot. In the time of the despot, all of the debt and obligation which previously circulated between all life is reorganized in service of that despot. The old reciprocal codes of values which sustained the Earth socius are “over-coded,” creating an infinite and unidirectional system of debts between the despot and his subjects. As systems of codes, the native languages of the Earth Socius societies are also appropriated by the despot - where language previously may have been largely to communicate knowledge its use is now overwhelmingly to give orders. Even the actual meaning of words can be threatened as “value is evacuated from meaningful objects and accrues instead to gold or money as universal equivalent."
Feudal societies were likewise overthrown in time with the development of capitalism. Socii (plural of socius) everywhere which were devoted to different particular despots are instead traded for an entire system of despots that now live in service of Capital itself. The old social codes of societies which previously were over-coded by the despot are now destroyed outright, and “axiomatized” as D&G put it, or replaced with axioms. An axiom here is best understood as a pair of terms connecting a particular quantity of a particular kind of labor to a particular quantity of money. When we say that social production under capitalism is organized in the form of axioms we mean that whether they are paid a wage or a salary, each worker under capitalism is reduced to one axiom, one relation (per job) between their labor and money, in the seemingly endless reproductive process of capital.
These relations between people’s labor and Capital are the foundation of the determinate conditions of the Capitalist socius, just as the relations between people and all other life or between subjects and their despot did before. Direct oppressive social control is no longer nearly as widespread as it was under the despot. Oppression still exists, to be sure, generally in the form of state violence - but the predominant form of social control has shifted to repression, simultaneously social and psychic in nature. Where money was used to signify tribute to the sovereign in the past, money (Capital) itself has become the sovereign which demands our participation in order to be awarded the privilege of remaining alive. It is left "up to you" to value and valorize this system as you see fit or allow yourself to be left to die. This economic pressure and the other social changes which arrived with it have left such an unprecedented mark on human development that describing them further is actually outside the scope of this article.
Let it be said that regardless of whatever else destroying capitalism and establishing a new earth socius entails, here on Ojibwe homelands it can mean nothing less than ensuring that everyone can find and practice Mino Bimaadiziwin: The Good Life.