Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass.

"The Desiring-Machines" is an extraordinarily difficult text. That said, I found it helpful to use other theorists as points of reference for the various arguments Deleuze and Guattari make. Not to sound like a wine connoisseur, but: I detected definite notes of Derrida and Burroughs in the piece. For Derrida, there was a redolence of the "supplement," however much D and G resisted the notion of an originary lack. Discussing Marxist economics (which I do not profess to understand), there was the idea of moving around surplus, of residues (capital) turning around and preempting foundational principles (labor); of "anti-production [operating] retroactively" to "appropriate productive forms"(31); finally, of the "body without organs" appearing to "allow us to return to nothingness" though it is decisively "not an original primordial entity" and is "not the proof of an original nothingness"(8, 33). At the center, then, is the desiring-machine, the interminable chain of interrupting productions and productions of productions. The subject becomes a residue of production, a mutating waste product (a bricolage). And if a "whole" ever exists, it is simply another term in the fragmentation, unable to "totalize." The main difference between these ideas and that of the supplement is that, I think, Derrida more firmly believes in the paradox, the originality of the supplement, whereas D and G mark the retroactive residuum as more of a counter-pressure.

Burroughs helps in thinking about ideas of coding, recording, and the schizophrenic. The surface of the body without organs is an "enchanted surface," divine, miraculous. Within inscription lies the power of creation, a machine whose interruptions form the residue of a "writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real"(39). Think of Burroughs' claim that the virus has a tendency to make itself real, that hieroglyphic writing itself demonstrates and eventually realizes (produces?) a natural state (beyond or before the The, the IS, the EITHER/OR); the virus, for him, is literal. For D and G, the act of recording creates a "genuine consummation," something "autoerotic" and "automatic," perhaps autopoetic. The hallucinations and delusions of the schizophrenic are real in that they create felt realities, in that "delirium is in fact characteristic of the recording that is made of the process of production of the desiring-machines"(22). There is no "lack" of reality: desire produces its own object. Playback, tape recorder 3, the productive cut-up of mechanical processes, creates a residue within its setting that is very real.

The schizophrenic is he who "scrambles all the codes" and who "never [records] the same event in the same way"(15). He "deterritorializes" the event and thus holds influence over it. To look at the subject: taking his image out of context, scrambling it, the subject becomes a frenetic and fractured thing. Subjectivity in Burroughs' writing is at the mercy of recordings, inscriptions, cut-ups--the subject cannot fall back on the essentialism of bodies, of organs and organic processes; inside is, perhaps, a machine contiguous with the machines all around him. There is no inside or outside. Similarly, the scrambling and deterritorializing work of the schizophrenic provides a vital bridge between the machines of the body and the machines of society: "schizophrenia is desiring-production as the limit of social production." Moreover, "the neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society"(35). Thus, the crisis of subjectivity and identity is moved out of the insular realm of the family, out of the realm of biological determinism and the individual psyche. Disorders of the mind become social disorders, irreducibly connected to capitalistic/social production. In the same way, for Burroughs, identity (through the machine of recording, inscription, imagery) opens up to society. The body becomes bodies, the animal animals. The virus machine connects the subject to the tape machine, the projection-screen machine, the media production machine.