Deleuze and Guattari on Desire and Movement

For Deleuze and Guattari, everything in the world is made of movements of energy that all want to go somewhere. These movements are made up of smaller movements, which also have directions they want to go somewhere, and so on. There are flows of energy everywhere, constantly in movement.

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Desire as Movement

Deleuze and Guattari, in line with Spinoza, call this fundamental movement desire.

You might wonder, "I thought desire was wanting something! Why is it the movement and connection of energy?"

If you suppose that consciousness—the site of all your feelings and experiences—is also a particular formation of this constant interplay of movements, then notions like "desire," "revulsion," or "willing" are not, in reality, the same kinds of things as how they appear in speech.

• Speech designates specific, definite objects.

• However, if everything is flux and movement, then to be strictly accurate, definite objects don't actually exist. There are only temporal formations that seem to hold their shape a little longer than the movements surrounding them.

When D&G call the flux and the connections of certain movements desire, they account for how these things appear in human experience while simultaneously dismissing the notion that there is a transcendent self separate from the endless flux of the world.

By placing the word desire in a part of the model where it stands for connection itself, it is unable to be used to refer to how we often talk about desire colloquially: as that mysterious want that emanates from a person and tries to reach for something we lack.

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Paranoia and Schizophrenia as Investment Types

Schizophrenia and paranoia for D&G are names for two ways in which desire (the flow of energy/movement) can be invested within a given community of movements. They represent two ways that the flows of energy that make up the world can be directed.

1. Paranoia-Fascizing Investment

• This channeling is towards established formations and coherent structures.

• Examples include: the idea of a coherent self or soul identity to be protected, the walls of a city, the culture or traditions of a people, etc.

• Anything named and treated as an object is, to some degree, a paranoic investment. Indeed, so are all the concepts used to explain this idea.

2. Schizto-Revolutionary Investment

• This refers to all those energies that go between, around, and through the formations of paranoic investment because they are not organized in that way.

• They're like molecules flowing past and through large organic structures.

• Everything treated as a single thing with an inside and an outside (from a political state to a company to a human person) is filled with smaller movements that constantly cause friction with the other movements they're living next to. If these movements aren't repressed (e.g., the wearing down of a wheel, the rebelliousness of a child, the lawbreaking of a criminal), they threaten to break down the coherence of the entire system.

This is why D&G discuss how capitalism itself schizophrenizes by making every institution dependent on exchange to maintain existence, making the very terms of their identities exchangeable.

• The castle, its walls, its men—all become dollar values that can be more or less liquidly transformed into other commodities.

• Schizophrenia in terms of social investments means the kind of fluidity of identity that molecules have: free and ready to combine to form any new combination with no prejudice to any currently existing formations.

It is important to note that this makes "schizophrenia" the kind of thing that isn't done as an action by a thinking and plotting individual. We do not choose to be more schizo. Schizophrenia in this context merely reflects a tendency of a given material situation.

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The Pendulum and the Body Without Organs (BwO)

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe paranoia and schizophrenia as the two extreme oscillations of a pendulum around the position of the Socius (the full body).

The pendulum oscillates around the position of the Body Without Organs (BwO).

Note on the BwO: This is D&G's term referring to the image that things have of themselves, or act as if they have, as coherent individuals that stand above and possess as objects all of the other little movements that actually make them up. For example, you refer to yourself as one person, one self, one idea, and that idea is above all the countless movements that actually make up your body, blur the line between inside and outside, etc. It is the image of your body as a single thing without organs.

D&G continue:

"One of whose sides is occupied by the molar aggregates [paranoia] and the other populated by molecular elements [schizophrenia]... The major line ends at the body without organs. And there it either passes through the wall opening onto the molecular elements where it becomes in actual fact what it was from the start: the schizophrenic process, the pure schizophrenic process of deterritorialization; or it strikes the wall, rebounds off it, and falls back into the most miserably arranged territorialities of the modern world..."

This illustrates the absurdity of arguing that D&G were urging people to become more "schizo" for the sake of political effectiveness:

1. Choosing to be more "schizo" isn't even possible because D&G are describing movements at a pre-level to consciousness, which is also made up of those same movements.

2. The attempt to be more schizo for the sake of some specific political cause (which is already an investment in a given society) is to engage in a paranoia-fascizing investment of desire, which is the exact opposite of the schizophrenic process.

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