Schizoanalysis (or ecosophy, pragmatics, micropolitics, rhizomatics, or nomadology) (French: schizoanalyse; schizo- from Greek σχίζειν [skhizein], meaning 'to split') is a set of theories and techniques developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, first expounded in their book Anti-Oedipus (1972) and continued in their follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Overview [T]he goal of schizoanalysis: to analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression—whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere. [...] Schizoanalysis is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis. The practice acquired many different definitions, uses and articulations during the course of its development in collaborative work with Deleuze and individually in the work of Guattari; for instance, in Guattari's final work, Chaosmosis, he explained that "rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex", schizoanalysis "will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity" whereupon it could take on the same tasks expected of revolutionary ideologies and political projects.
Background
Schizoanalysis [...] has no other meaning: Make a rhizome. Schizoanalysis was developed by Guattari as an open-ended theoretical practice responding to the perceived shortcomings of French psychoanalytic practice and as the culmination of his work with institutional psychotherapy at the La Borde clinic. Guattari was regularly confronted with the use of the Oedipus complex as a starting point for analysis, and the uneven dynamic of the authority figure of the psychoanalyst in relationship to the patient. Guattari was interested in a practice that could derive, from given systems of enunciation and subjective structures, new "assemblages [agencements] of enunciation" capable of forging new coordinates of analysis, and to create unforeseen propositions and representations from the standpoint of psychosis that would yield positive conclusions to analysis.
The new materialism takes from Nietzsche the notion that each body or product is a synthesis of forces, a sign or symptom of a mode of existence. Desire is never something that is missing, forbidden, or signified: desire is a power of synthesis that constructs an assemblage in order to increase its power of acting. Deleuze would later begin to break away from the framework, stating that in 1973 that "we no longer want to talk about schizoanalysis, because that would amount to protecting a particular type of escape, schizophrenic escape".
Concepts
Schizoanalysis, then, is a form of social analysis according to abstract machines, lines of flight or deterritorialisation, regimes of signs, the stratification of molecular elements or their destratification, and planes of consistency. It maps the social unconscious according to its movements and intensities of desire. [...] so that lines of experimentation or becoming may be constructed through a reassembling of the abstract machines that lie between the strata and produce them. In the phrasing of David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan, schizoanalysis is a project of "experiments that dissemble and dissolve the self and other configurations and modes of organisation, but that also propose that an individual is composed of a diversity of different individuations, of other durations, both organic and inorganic [...] it is schizoanalysis that reveals that a sense of self can be made and unmade". Deleuze and Guattari themselves summarized schizoanalytic practice in the fourth chapter of Anti-Oedipus, "Introduction to Schizoanalysis", as prompting the questions "What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?". In this sense, they developed four theses of schizoanalysis:
Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field. Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest. Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments. Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac reactionary pole, and a schizoid revolutionary pole.
Schizoanalyst
The schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional. [...] Analysis should deal solely [...] with the machinic arrangements grasped in the context of their molecular dispersion. [...] every partial object emits a flow [in the field of multiplicity ] [...] Partial objects are direct powers of the body without organs, and the body without organs, the raw material of the partial objects. [...] The body without organs is an immanent substance [...connecting] Spinozist [...partial-object-like] attributes [that enunciate its haecceity ][.] A schizoanalyst cannot be considered a kind of deconstructionist; in Guattari's terms, they pass what is understood to be logos through a text-machine-subject having the status of a partial object to express praxis-enslavement by—in Deleuze and Guattari's French—puissance, and the experience of the process of machinic enslavement. Schizoanalysis addresses ressentiment by leading the neurotic subject to a rhizomatic state of becoming. Schizoanalysis uses psychosis as a figurative-philosophical diagrammatic model, creating abstract machines that go beyond a semiotic simulacrum, generating a reality not already present. Contradistinct from the psychoanalytic axiom of lack generating the kernel at the core of the subject, schizoanalytic desiring-production of intensities decode "representational territories" by self-generating the subject-becoming-BwO as a multiplicity. Desiring-production is a virtuality of becoming-intense, a becoming-Other. Schizoanalysis deterritorializes-reterritorializes found assemblages through rhizomatic desiring-production.
Body without organs
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