Volume 047 min read
Deleuze and Guattari I
Module I · The Foundation
Objective
By the end of this volume you understand the concept of the desiring-machine and the upheaval Deleuze and Guattari carried out with Anti-Oedipus. You know why they conceived desire not as lack but as production, and what it means to think the unconscious as a factory rather than a stage. With that you hold the CCRU's second great source, because this is where the language comes from in which the group thought desire, production, and flow together.
Exposition
Two names, one work. Gilles Deleuze was a philosopher, Félix Guattari a psychoanalyst and political activist. In 1972 they jointly published Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of a work subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The book appeared a few years after the uprisings of May 1968 in France and breathes their spirit. It attacks two authorities at once, the psychoanalysis of Freudian stamp and the orders that pen desire in. The tone is wild, overflowing, deliberately difficult. What counts for you at this point is only the conceptual core, which I extract from that thicket.
Start with the opponent, because the book's provocation only sharpens against it. Classical psychoanalysis thinks desire from lack. You desire what you don't have. Wanting is a hole crying to be filled, an emptiness pointing at a missing object. In this picture desire is always determined negatively, always as the absence of something. Freud further tied that wanting to a fixed stage, to the family and its primal drama, the Oedipus complex. The child desires one parent, fears the other, and from that triangle of father, mother, child psychoanalysis derives the structure of the unconscious. All desire gets traced back to that familial pattern and interpreted within it.
Against both, Deleuze and Guattari set their reversal. Desire is not lack but production. Nothing is missing from it, it makes things. Wanting does not point at an absent object, it generates connections, flows, reality. That sentence is the hinge of the whole book. Where Freud saw an emptiness, they see a factory. The unconscious is not a stage on which an old family drama gets performed over and over. It's a workshop that produces without pause. Deleuze and Guattari say explicitly that the unconscious is not a theatre but a factory. Note that image, because it carries everything else.
Out of that factory comes the central concept, the desiring-machine. The term joins two spheres that Western thought usually keeps apart, desire and machine, the living and the mechanical, the inner and the technical. That separation is exactly what the authors want to abolish. For them desire is machinic in constitution, and machines are not the cold antagonists of life but its own construction. A desiring-machine is anything that taps a flow and passes it on. The mouth is a machine that interrupts and takes up the flow of food. The breast is a machine that produces a flow of milk. Eye, hand, organ, but also tool, institution, city, all of it can be read as such a machine. A desiring-machine always couples to another, taking up its output and passing on its own. What emerges is an endless net of connections in which flows run and machines cut them.
Two features of this conception are decisive for the CCRU. The first is the anti-humanist feature. If desire is machinic, then the individual human with their interiority no longer stands at the centre. The human appears as a compound of machines, a crossing point for flows that run through them and reach beyond them. The subject is no longer an origin but an effect. The CCRU will take up that dethronement and drive it further. The second feature is the proximity of desire and production as such. By conceiving wanting as a productive force, Deleuze and Guattari move it close to economic production. Desire and economy are not separate realms. The same principle of producing, of flowing and coupling, runs through both. Out of that adjacency the connection to capitalism grows in the next volume.
A third concept belongs here, because it complements the desiring-machine and you will meet it again, the body without organs. The expression sounds cryptic and is partly meant to. What is meant is no anatomical body but a plane across which the machines distribute themselves. Picture it as the unstructured surface on which no fixed organs, no fixed functions have yet been assigned. Where the desiring-machines couple and cut without cease, the body without organs forms the counter-pole, a surface of pure possibility across which intensities spread before they harden into fixed orders. For now it's enough that the authors think, alongside the productive machine, a plane of the not-yet-determined, a reservoir of the unformed. The concept will reappear in transformed shape in the number cosmology of the Numogram.
Sum up the movement of this volume. Deleuze and Guattari release desire from the prison of lack and family. They make wanting a productive, machinic force that generates flows and ties connections. The unconscious becomes a factory, the human a crossing point of machines, desire a neighbour to economic production. Those three shifts are the inheritance the CCRU took up. It adopted the language of flows and machines, the dethronement of the subject, and the close adjacency of wanting and economy. What in Deleuze and Guattari was still a critique of Freud and a celebration of productive desire, the group will turn into a theory of capital running as a vast desiring-machine of its own.
Core Claim
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari conceive desire not as lack but as production. Their desiring-machine joins wanting and machine, turns the unconscious into a factory and the human into a crossing point of flows. This gave the CCRU the language in which desire and economy appear as a single productive process.
The Critic
This account takes from a very large book what the CCRU took from it, and leaves lying what the CCRU left. Anti-Oedipus was read in its own time above all as an intervention in psychiatry and in the politics after 1968. Guattari worked for decades in a psychiatric clinic, and the desiring-machine was for him no cosmic principle but a tool in the treatment of people. The book issues in a procedure, schizoanalysis, which is entirely missing here. Take the machine and leave the practice and you hold an ornament.
The price of that selection shows in the concept itself. Deleuze and Guattari insist the desiring-machine is not a metaphor, that they mean the machinic literally. The claim is hard to test and easy to make. It's a stipulation that shields the text from the objection that it mistakes an image for a thing.
A third point concerns the fit with the CCRU. Deleuze and Guattari never understood their thinking as an affirmation of capital. Both stood on the political left, both worked on concrete struggles. That Land develops from their desiring-machine a theory of capital as an autonomous force is an appropriation against the authors' stated intent. Whether such an appropriation is legitimate depends on whether you follow the work or the will of the author. The CCRU never posed the question.
Bridge to the Next Volume
The desiring-machine produces flows, but something happens to those flows the moment capitalism seizes them. Deleuze and Guattari describe how capital dissolves fixed orders and releases flows, and they coin the term deterritorialisation for it. Volume 5 follows that movement and shows why capitalism is a double-edged, unleashing force in their thinking. There the transition opens from the philosophy of desire to the theory of capital, and it's where the CCRU will pick up.