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[–]shartofwar 4 points5 points  (1 child)


I am new to AO and D+G as well. I just finished reading Eugene Holland's Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. Holland's book has been enormously helpful.

From what I understand, the disjunctive synthesis of recording is D+G's version of Freud's "death instinct." It's function is "anti-production." That is, recording on the body-without-organs neutralizes the connections made during the connective synthesis of production, allowing new connections to be made. Here are a couple excerpts from Holland's book that may help:

"The formation of the body-without-organs opens or subjects animal instinct to the distinctively human form of time: to memory and repetition. What registers on the body-without-organs are essentially signs of organ-machine connections that enable or oblige us to repeat previous modes of desiring-satisfaction, albeit with greater or lesser degrees of freedom of variation within repetition. Forming a system of relations, these signs bind or synthesize time, enabling us to relate or compare one satisfaction to another, and to take pleasure not necessarily in experiencing one thing in relation to something else, instead. For inasmuch as the signs comprise a "system of possible permutations among differences" on the body-without-organs, they bind time synchronically, as Lacan (following Saussure) might put it, rather than linearly."


"For now what is important is that the body-without-organs represents for schizoanalysis not just the locus of repression but the potential for freedom. It can be compared to a kind of tabula rasa, freeing the organism from the purely mechanical repetition of instinctual determination as well as the fixations of neurosis--provided we understand that such a tabula rasa does not exist from the start, but rather gets produced in the course of psychic development by the transformation of energies of connection into energies of recording.

The body-without-organs is constituted as a recording surface in the first place, as I said, when the energy of anti-production de-sexualizes or neutralizes the active connections made by productive desire. In fact, the interplay of desiring-production and anti-production generates alternating rhythms of attraction and repulsion between the organ-machines and the body-without-organs. When anti-production predominates, 'the body-without-organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a order to resist organ-machines.' When productive desire prevails, machines 'attach themselves to the body-without-organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates, like a grid.' What is essential is that even while anti-production interrupts or suspends existing productive connections on the body-without-organs, it at the same time registers their diverse possibilities, and ends up multiplying the relations among them to infinity. Hence the importance of the syntax of the disjunctive synthesis of recording, which selects and networks signs of organ-machines produced by connective syntheses in a strictly open-ended series: 'either...or...or...'"

Maybe that will help, or at least get a conversation started. Good luck!



You have to remember that it's not production, it's desiring-production. Synthesis of Marx and Freud.

I'm much better with ATP than AO, so that's all I have for you for now.