Deleuze and Guattari

I particularly enjoyed the Deleuze and Guattari readings, I'll be finishing A Thousand Plateaus at some point, so though I imagine anything I can come up with has been considered to some extent by the authors, there are a few things I think can be noted without having read more than the first few chapters.

More and more it seems that all the best theorists are talking about the same thing. Of the readings I've done, A Thousand Plateaus is I believe the clearest and the most dedicated to creating that united subject, especially because it refuses to be restricted by academic language. The structuralism of Barthes is supposed to have been torn apart by Derrida, but even in what I've read of Barthes' early work the goal is the same as Derrida's--the difference being that Barthes is more concerned with outlining the structure than its impossibility (the infinite center being circumscribed by the structure, which is after all the inevitable outcome of a philosophy), while Derrida explores an outcome which I think is already implied in Barthes; the structure surrounding the absent center is or can always be composed entirely of absent centers, so that an individual structure is always subordinate to the notion of structurality, which renders the presence/absence dialectic unfit, because there is nothing present (there is presence, but in order for something to be present it must already be absent, so that absence is not essential to the discourse), there is only an orientation (towards disorientation). The approaches are only different in that one is the reversal of the other--in Barthes, looking in towards infinity from the entire structure, in Derrida looking out towards the structure with the infinity at our back. I think for Deleuze and Guattari Barthes works with arborescent multiplicity and Derrida with the rhizomatic, but as they are quick to emphasize, "There is no question, however, of establishing a dualist opposition between the two types ... There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage" (34).

My concern is that by setting out to write as much as possible from the perspective of the multiple rather than the singular (each of us was several, etc), the failure of the singular (the sort of thing Derrida would go after) is denied or depersonalized. For example, the discussion of psychoanalysis and the Wolf-Man. Certainly they are correct to indicate Freud's failure to understand the situation, but what about the wolves? To Deleuze and Guattari, Freud's initial mistake was supposing that the wolves were not wolves, but just a stand-in for goats, and ultimately a spot to label with the Oedipal complex (which, they suppose, probably correctly, is Freud's ultimate motive force or fallback). But what about psychoanalyzing A Thousand Plateaus? If the writers have avoided the Oedipal fallacy by indicating it, what is it replaced by? Certainly there is the idea of multiplicity, which appears to be a fine one by all accounts. But when they actually discuss the case of the Wolf-Man, they don't seem to say anything new, in fact, they appear to fall into the same trap themselves: "Even Brunswick can't go wrong ... she does see that this time the wolves are Bolsheviks" (35). This is a different wolf dream, and I imagine this is the best supported interpretation available, but how is their offhanded equation of the wolves with Bolsheviks substantially different from Freud's substitution of goats? In Deleuze and Guattari's critique, the objection to the latter case is that the wolves are not a part of the analysis, when they should be integral to it. Where are the wolves in A Thousand Plateaus, then? The frequent use, throughout the chapter, of the word dogs ("Castration! Castration! cries the psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father or a dog where wolves are" (38)) is certainly meant to be contrasted with the idea of the wolf, a dog is like a domesticated wolf. But a dog is not a wolf, nor is the contrary true. The use of the term scarecrow in the above quotes probably indicates some awareness of this, but isn't the idea of psychoanalysis (here inseparable from failure) the same kind of falling back to Oedipal castration that the writers are criticizing, containing discernable essentialism (a hole, a father or a dog)? We are meant to see the failure of psychoanalysis in the treatment of the Wolf-Man, which is clearly discernible. But the idea of wolves, rather than signifying ultimately castration or the father, represents here only the idea of singularity within the pack (as opposed to the packness within the singularity that the understanding of a proper name is supposed to entail). Where is the wolf? Wolves are not dogs, and while a pack implies wolf more than it does bee, a pack is really the same as a herd, almost a swarm (though the last implies molecularity to a significantly lesser degree). Left unsaid is that wolves are scary things, they are wild, and they have been known to injure people. I think it's clear that Deleuze and Guattari would rather be the wolf than the dog (though they would no doubt hedge around a statement like this in the interest of modesty or something less obvious), but what about the sheep? A Thousand Plateaus is practically gibberish to most people, only those trained sufficiently in certain academic disciplines can interpret it to any extent. I'm certainly in favor of individual freedom, non-exclusionary integration, et cetera, but I'm wondering whether it's later in the book that Deleuze and Guattari tell us what we're supposed to do with this viewpoint once it has been acquired. Wolves represent a pack, sure, and the contrast of pack/mass with molar/molecular (or is it the other way around?) is fruitful, but a wolf is not present. The wolves are fascists, aren't they?

Wolf brings to mind singularity, individualism (lone wolf, etc), all those things as well as the idea of a pack. While Freud was certainly mistaken in many particulars, he did at least ask what the wolves were before he substituted his own ideas for the unanswered question. In A Thousand Plateaus the refusal to make a distinction between the concurrent existence of arborescent and rhizomatic multiplicities seems to encourage everything except what is represented as a failure of psychoanalysis by the authors--it's an uneasy truce, and seems to be the kind of thinking Marx set out to avoid. Not that I'm a big fan of Marx, but when have Deleuze and Guattari ever hung out with wolves? Marxism and psychoanalysis are of course very distinct doctrines, of which I don't know as much as I should, but Deleuze and Guattari seem to create their position only in opposition to the two, without really answering any of the questions whose unanswered presence makes Freudian psychoanalysis (for example) stop working. Sometimes it seems as though the dense quality of the prose is only there to mask the possibility of interpretations that edge frighteningly close to a fascist position (there is no individual, the concept of individuality is predetermined by the mass, we live in packs whose members we identify as singular unities, but in reality the limits of the self are defined largely in relation to a mass whose existence is only ever inferred, and we're wolves too, so where is the position of the altruist or the one who goes without?). Or to put it differently, in the end does this approach differ from objectivism to a meaningful extent?