In the second chapter of ATP, the critique of Freud stems from the reductive character of the psychoanalytic theories he put forth: "Freud himself recognizes the multiplicity of libidinal 'currents' that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him" (31).
Plant's Zeros and Ones intersects frequently with A Thousand Plateaus, especially where both texts engage in respective critiques of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis. I won't pretend to grasp the implications or reasons for Deleuze and Guattari's interest in schizophrenia (or maybe the effects or behaviors characteristic of schizophrenia?), but I'm interested in how Plant, having clearly read this text ("Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration") chose to defend dissociative identity disorder or multiple identity disorder instead of schizophrenia. The "disorder" Plant appears to be out to vindicate, that of having multiple identities in one body (or the "feminine" characteristic of not identifying as easily with a single metier for one's entire life), is similar to but not totally compatible with Deleuze and Guattari's interest in schizophrenia, the experience of hearing multiple voices. Are these choices even important? Is this a mass/pack distinction? Are there distinctions in Deleuze and Guattari's text that can be delineated?
Both D&G and Plant explore how the possibilities of and already established presence of multiplicities are reified by inherited philosophical conventions that privilege unity and totality. I keep coming back to Plant's inclusion in Zeros and Ones of a certain critique of women: that they couldn't add, that they would see one and one and one and one. This notion of inability to or aversion to synthezing is interesting where it applies to Deleuze and Guattari, especially where there is a clear interest in Bergson's philosophy. If the intensive is only rendered extensive, distinct, as a succession of units by an act of the mind, what are the implications for multiplicity as they conceive of it?
Can there be a proper name that remains faithful to this multiplicity? Is psychoanalysis what prevents this, or is there something else?
- "He knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and misspelled, retranscribed as a patronymic." (26-27)
- "Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs" (ATP, 35)
-"There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take ‘collective agents’ to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity." (ATP, 37)
The proper name is a social designation that reinforces the notion that the self is self-identical, singular, unified. The "true and proper" name of the Wolf-Man was a recognition of multiplicity-- my question is, is this multiplicity embodied/ contained by the body? I kept returning to passages about pores and orifices (both in this text and in The Desiring-Machines) to see if I could better understand how pores relate to a body without organs. It is hard to grasp what the body without organs entails, especially with regard to interiority/exteriority, boundaries, limitations, interpenetration. What is the relationship between the body without organs and the idea of a surface? I assume that positing the body without organs is meant to reinforce multiplicity, but at the moment I can't really separate this idea from notions of stability, delineated borders.
What is important about indiscernibility?
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