In their 1972 opus, Anti-Oedipus, French intellectuals Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari took a sledgehammer to the most cherished principle of classic psychology, accusing its founder, Sigmund Freud, of gross anthropocentrism and of oedipalising his notion of an unconscious mind.
(I don’t think that they mentioned Carl Jung. But to my mind the level of obsessive anthropomorphising that he indulged in places his literary output more appropriately alongside that of Hans Christian Anderson. Just don’t read Jung, unless you have a pathological need to not get real.) Anyway…
Freud had correctly identified the existence of an unconscious mind - a heap of inner protocols, driven by libido - that will run our lives unless we become aware of them. Yet, having made this excellent proposal - having taken five steps forward - he then proceeds to take four back again by claiming that this unconscious mind is essentially archetypal in nature, and revolving around an oedipus complex. In so doing, he unlocks the cell door, but then places humanity back in the prison of patriarchal control where it had been languishing, at least since the agricultural revolution.
Deleuze and Guattari instead proposed a machinic unconsious - the notion that the substructure of human psychology is not archetypal but rather a series of assemblages - small machines which have both function and desire. The legs both have the function of walking and enjoy doing so. The mouth has the desire to consume and the capacity to do the same. And so on.
From this series of component assemblies, the sense of individual selfhood - the I - emerges as a means to hold everything together psychologically.
I think that this way of modelling the unconscious mind is excellent. Whilst radically non-anthropocentric, and thus a bit scary for someone who’s been brought up to believe faithfully in antropomorphism, it maps apparent reality very closely. It makes complete sense.
Having proposed this model, our two French intellectuals came to see the individual as a heap of machinic assemblies who’s capacity to follow their desires was limited by the social protocols of the culture in which they were immersed. And that, in order to set human nature free, we needed to dissolve those protocols in acts of deterritorialisation - reclaiming our world back from the archetypal forces unto which we had allowed ourselves to be subjugated, through our willingness to believe in anthropocentrism.
They further proposed that capitalism was a mechanism that was achieving this end because, in order to expand its power, capitalism needed to constantly create new products for people to buy. And to facilitate this, it needed to encourage humans to adopt new identities. Capitalism thus needs to engender humans to exist in a constantly-shifting sense of tribality. And, in so doing, it progressively undermines the capacity of the existing hierarchical, patriarchal power structure to exert control. They thus considered that, with the continued advancement of capitalism, humanity would, one way or the other, become progressively liberated.
In their follow-up to Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux 1980), Deleuze and Guattari seem to have somewhat walked back on a lot of the radicalism of the first volume. I think the sheer destructive potential of what they had proposed, along with general mounting concerns for where capitalism was going, rekindled a last spirit of anthropocentrism within them. And they allowed themselves to find some middle ground between the insurgent radicalism of the machinic unconscious and the need to not wipe our species out.
I would like to propose a different way forward.
What Deleuze and Guattari were actually seeking to liberate, like all radicals and revolutionaries before them, was our libidinal drive - our sense of immanent potential. Traditional patriarchal culture binds our potential into simplistic familial and worker-boss relationships. We get to expend our energy working for “the man” and trying to give our families what they expect of us. In so doing, we maintain the same patriarchal structures. Not only does “the system” fuck us over, it also uses our energy to maintain itself.
Obviously, this is not great.
Revolutionaries tend to assume that the political arena is where change needs to happen. By seeking to mobilise “the proletariat,” they hope that a worker’s revolution will destroy the existing hierarchy and replace it with something better. Historically, when these types of revolution have happened, something better hasn’t rocked up. Things have ended up worse - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.
Yet, revolutionaries, at least those who haven’t actually experienced Marxism first hand, still cling to it as a way forwards. I suspect that they need an idea to hold onto, for fear that, should they let go, a total loss of agency will await them.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Our sense of libidinal potential - our feeling of personal energy - does not of its nature need to be freed up politically. That is not the only way forwards. It can also be liberated internally. Finally, it is locked up through constrictions in how much we can feel our body. If we can expand our sense of the body, we will begin to increase our energy. Simultaneously, we will experience a more liberated attitude because, as our personal energy rises, its binding to both unconscious and external protocols is broken. This happens in the same way that a blocked pipe will become clear if you increase the pressure of the liquid flowing through it, sufficiently and in not too sudden a fashion.
Seeking freedom from unnatural-feeling levels of control, we first tend to fight their external manifestation. Yet, the real arena where freedom can be actualised is internal. It is bound up in both how we are perceiving our own identity and its relationship to constraining external forces and in the physical manifestation of holding patterns and dead zones in our body fascia (interconnecting tissue) and musculature.
By utilising techniques to “open up” the fascia and muscles, we increase our sense of immanent libidinality and, by simultaneously opening our mind, we are progressively liberated internally. Whilst this doesn’t destroy “the system,” it does vastly reduce its binding upon us.
Learn more about Bioenergetics on my YouTube channel here or my website here.
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I had Deleuze-Guattari on my reading list for years but then I stopped being that fussed about capitalism as the reason everything was awful and they fell off the bottom.
However, that idea of machinic assemblages reminds me of Gurdjieff. One of his slogans was "man is a machine". You can't do anything - things happen to you and you react to them. He also put out this idea of man having numerous 'centres' - movement centre, emotional centre, intellectual centre, sexual centre etc - which operate independently of each other while drawing from the same energy source. Problems arise when one centre tries to do the work of another centre, e.g. when emotional centre tries to do the work of intellectual centre, or vice versa.
For Gurdjieff, the path to freedom (i.e. not being a machine) began with trying to "remember oneself". There is very little information to be found on what that meant practically. There are probably different optimal strategies for different people. But for me, it's come to mean trying to remain aware of my body as much as possible.
Context acts as a determining factor in these philosophies. Scientific reductionism and, the image of the machine, shall we say, as the Hegelian synthesis of capitalism and socialism, meant that they couldn’t see what you are describing. As science becomes more integrated with the whole body, and the marriage of capitalism and socialism fails at an accelerating rate, promising some new, not yet emergent organizing principle of society, the principle of freedom that you describe may be what will carry us through the epochal transition that we are in.