Schizoanalysis

For over a decade, I have been sifting through the remnants of psychoanalysis in search of what can be submitted to new theoretical elaborations which avoid, as much as possible, the reductiveness of Freudian and Lacanian formulations.

It is worth noting at the outset that my project, loosely termed schizoanalysis, was never conceived as a self-enclosed field. Far from being another “psy,” what I have to offer is something humbler in its aims and broader in its scope. The schizoanalytical project is more modest because it does not necessarily require an institutional foundation; it is already present here and there, in an embryonic form and in various modalities. It is also broader in that it has the potential for becoming a discipline for reading other systems of modelization—not as a general model, but as an instrument for deciphering systems of modelization in various other fields or, to put it somewhat differently, as a meta-model.

One may object to this proposition on the grounds that there is a fine line between model and meta-model. And indeed, in a sense it is true that subjectivity always emerges from meta-modelization activity (in this case, from the transfer of modelization, transversal passages between different sorts of problems). But what interests me here is the shift of the analytical problematic away from systems of enunciation and of preformed subjective structures, and towards assemblages of enunciation that are capable of fashioning new coordinates for reading and for “bringing to life” hitherto unknown representations and propositions.

Schizoanalysis, then, perforce will be ex-centric to other professionalized “psy” practices with their corporations, societies, schools, didactic initiations, etc. Its provisional definition would thus be: the analysis of the incidence of assemblages of enunciation among semiotic and subjective productions within a given, problematic context.

In the context of this presentation, I cannot dwell at length on such notions as “problematic context,” “scene,” and “bringing to life.” Suffice it to say that they refer to such diverse things as clinical board, unconscious phantasm, diurnal fantasy, aesthetic production, and micro-political acts. What matters here is the idea of an existential circumscription which involves the deployment of intrinsic references—one may also say the deployment of a process of auto-organization or singularization.

But why the persistent leitmotif of assemblages of enunciation? In order to avoid—insofar as it is possible—getting embroiled in the concept of the “unconscious”; so as not to reduce the facts of subjectivity to pulses, affects, intra-subjective instances, and inter-subjective relations. Obviously, these kind of things do preoccupy schizoanalysis, but only as discrete components and always with specific types of figure. It is worth noting, for instance, that there are assemblages of enunciation which are void of signifying semiological components, assemblages that do not have subjective components, and others that do not have the components of consciousness. The assemblage of enunciation then “exceeds” the problematic of the individualized subject, the consciously delimited thinking monad, and the faculties of the soul (apprehension, will . . .) in their classical sense. It seems necessary to emphasize that we have always initially to deal with ensembles which are either material and/or semiotic, individual and/or collective, actively machinic and/or passively fluctuating.

The question becomes that of the status of the assemblage’s components, which both bridge and oscillate between radically heterogeneous fields. I have said somewhere that we wished to construct a science where dishcloths and napkins would mix with things even more disparate, where dishcloths and napkins would not be subsumed under the category of “laundry,” but where we would gracefully submit to the notion that dishcloths can be differentiated in singularized becomings linked to a host of contextual references, ranging from a barman drying glasses with a dish-cloth to a soldier in a trench throwing in the towel. In a classical analytical perspective, this type of contextualization is usually not taken into account, except when it comes to significant incidents, and is never considered a referent capable of generating pragmatic effects in specific institutional or material social fields. It is this micro-politics of meaning which, in...