Strategies, Vol. 15, No.

1, 2002

On Some Implications of Schizoanalysis

Eugene Holland

My aim here is to distill some of what I consider to be the more signiŽcant

implications of schizoanalysis from Deleuze and Guattari’s very complex analy-
sis of the psyche and its relations with modern society, politics, and history. Of
particular interest is their “anti-Oedipal” analysis of the nuclear family, and the
ways that speciŽc family formation produces a form of asceticism strongly
conducive to capitalist social relations. Beyond the family, schizoanalysis has
important implications for assessing modalities of political engagement, particu-
larly regarding so-called “identity” politics. Finally, schizoanalysis entails a
surprising endorsement of “universal history”—surprising for a perspective
based on a quintessentially poststructuralist philosophy of difference—and it is
worth understanding how such an endorsement derives from Deleuze and
Guattari’s incorporation of Marx and how it relates to their stance on politics.1
In exploring these issues, we will brush up against questions of modernism
and postmodernity as they might apply to schizoanalysis. Although these are
not categories central to the thought of Deleuze or Guattari, for present purposes
it will sufŽce to say that while schizoanalysis is probably not postmodernist, it
does challenge assumptions about the “modernity” of modern subjectivity. As
Bruno Latour put it, we have never really been modern: modern subjectivity has
not lived up to the Enlightenment ideals ascribed to it.2 Most notably, modern
subjects continue to will their own subjection instead of autonomy and freedom.
Through its analysis of the nuclear family, schizoanalysis explains why. At the
same time, through its analysis of the economic dynamics of capitalism sur-
rounding the nuclear family, schizoanalysis examines the conditions under
which difference overcomes identity, citing as often as not the art and literature
of high modernism. At issue in the schizoanalytic view of history is which of
these two broad tendencies will prevail.

I. The anti-Oedipal historical critique of the nuclear family

The point of departure for the schizoanalytic critique of the nuclear or Oedipal
family is the tendency of capitalism to segregate reproduction in the domestic or
private sphere from production in society at large. The an-Oedipal family, by
contrast, is not only “extended”—it includes more generations and more distant
relatives than the nuclear family—it is also more fully imbricated in social
relations. Even in early modern times before the rise of manufacturing, for
example, work took place mainly in the home. More generally, family ties were
thoroughly enmeshed in and often the cornerstone of social organization;
relations of reproduction coincided with relations of production, and relations of
production largely coincided with social relations themselves.3 Capitalism priva-
ISSN 1040-213 6 print/ISSN 1470-125 1 online/02/010027-14 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1040213022012783 4
28 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

tizes both production and reproduction. As production devolves to the factory

and privately owned enterprise, circulation to the market, politics to the state,
and other social relations to the various institutions of civil society, the nuclear
family is reduced to the role of reproduction, supported by privatized consump-
tion in the domestic sphere.
Drawing on a formulation by Marx, Deleuze and Guattari characterize the
prototypical nuclear family as being composed of “Daddy–Capital, Mommy–
Earth, and their kid the Worker–Consumer.”4 Yet the parallelism between
capitalist economics and the nuclear family is more than a structural homology.
Whereas psychoanalysis considers the family to be the model and nucleus for
social relations, schizoanalysis considers social relations to be determinant: the
nuclear family serves merely as a relay for the construction of subjectivity,
imprinting the Oedipal psyche with the structure and dynamics of the capitalist
economy.5 The title of their Žrst collaboration notwithstanding, Deleuze and
Guattari insist that psychoanalysis isn’t simply wrong about the Oedipal tri-
angle; rather it mistakes for a universal and determining structure what is in fact
a historically speciŽc result of capitalist privatization, whose primary effect is to
replicate capitalist social relations in and through the domestic sphere. What
could be a more propitious time to program subjectivity for capitalism than the
impressionable years of infancy and childhood?
In the schizoanalytic social-familial triangle, the Mommy–Earth pole
designates the “goods”: the source of life, nourishment, comfort, love, joy.
Access to these goods is jeopardized by the intervention-mediation of Daddy–
Capital and what we might call the threat of market-castration. Just as the threat
of losing parental love enforces obedience on the part of the Child, the threat
of losing your job and market access to commodities enforces obedience on
the part of Worker–Consumers. Moreover, this loss of immediate access to
mother-goods fuels a compensatory and anticipatory identiŽcation with the
castrating father-mediator, of all things. The very market forces that cut us off
from the mother-goods will henceforth be considered the primary means of
restoring access to the “good life”: we willingly submit to the boss as obedient
workers in order to deŽne our identities and life-goals in terms of commodities
as enthusiastic consumers. “Living well,” so the saying goes, “is the best
revenge.”
Whether characterized by separation anxiety or castration anxiety or some
combination of the two, the psychodynamics of the Oedipal family thus Žnd a
near-perfect echo in the psycho- and socio-dynamics of the capitalist market: we
get separated from sustenance and the enjoyment of life (the mother-goods), and
we are constantly threatened with being cut off from the means (jobs and wages)
of regaining access to those goods by the father–capital–boss. It appears as if the
nuclear family were designed to program subjectivity for capitalism. Yet schizo-
analysis insists that this appearance reverses the actual direction of determi-
nation: the child may be father to the man, as the psychoanalytic slogan has it,
but the social formation is father to the father. “Oedipus begins in the mind of
the father.”6 For it is the capitalist social formation that institutes the nuclear
family in the Žrst place, and the father who learns Oedipus from the boss before
taking it home to the heart of the nuclear family. From this broader and
historically-informed perspective, society in general doesn’t reproduce the uni-
versal Oedipal dynamic of “the” family: the nuclear family as a speciŽcally
 Holland 29

capitalist institution internalizes and then reproduces the Oedipal social dy-
namic of the capitalist market.
Anxiety, subservience, and identiŽcation with the oppressor are, however, not
the only psychodynamics programmed into capitalist subjectivity by the nuclear
family. For another of the deŽning features of this non-extended and socially-
disimbricated family form is that it constricts love and intimacy within the
narrow bounds of parents and siblings—“haven in a heartless world,” perhaps,
but also a hothouse for severely conicted desires. During the formative years
of childhood, desire is in fact limited to the very objects that the incest taboo
rules out of bounds! The Oedipal family is therefore, perhaps more essentially
than anything else, a training ground for self-denial and asceticism.7 The family
Oedipus trains us early on to accept castration, relinquish direct access to the
mother, and defer gratiŽcation until we form a new Oedipal family, just as the
social Oedipus trains us to knuckle under to the boss, relinquish unmediated
access to the good life, and defer gratiŽcation while working until after retire-
ment (at which time we promptly die). And to the extent that the Oedipus does
not program us for pure asceticism, it trains us to accept inferior substitutions.8
The prescribed wife is, of course, a substitute for the proscribed mother—but the
Oedipal mother is already a poor substitute for the much broader range of
extended familial and/or fully social relations characteristic of an-Oedipal
family forms. In much the same way, consumerism serves as the impoverished
substitute for self-realization.
At some degree of severity or generality, self-denial and persistent deferral of
gratiŽcation culminate in what we might loosely call perversion: a serious
imbalance between self-denial and self-realization. Georges Bataille had already
diagnosed a similar imbalance in historical and anthropological terms: compared
with other socioeconomic formations in his view, what was distinctive and
perverse about capitalism was the curtailment of festive social or public expen-
diture in favor of endless private accumulation and reinvestment for proŽt.9
Drawing on Bataille, schizoanalysis diagnoses the reection and reproduction of
this perverse socioeconomic dynamic in the ascetic psychodynamics of the
Oedipal family.
A Žnal consequence of the isolation of the nuclear family from social relations
at large concerns the psychodynamics of identiŽcation, both quantitatively and
qualitatively. Within the conŽnes of the nuclear family, children have two and
only two adult Žgures with which to identify, and on which to model them-
selves: Daddy or Mommy—that is, the oppressor or the oppressed.10 Depriving
children of any other adult role model prepares them to adopt one of these two
standpoints in their later life—either of which effectively mirrors and reinforces
a crucial stance in capitalist society: either become a boss, or submit to one.
Furthermore, the more completely ruthless market competition dominates the
extra-familial public sphere and deprives children of supportive role models
outside the nuclear family, the more strongly they tend to identify with one of
the two role models offered them within the nuclear family. Or to put it in key
schizoanalytic terms: the more thoroughly adult roles in society at large are
“decoded”—“stripped of their halo,” as Marx put it: stripped of any affective
value and determined instead solely by monetary calculation and market com-
petition—the more intensely the two adult positions within the family are
“recoded”—which in this context means endowed with compensatory affective
30 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

value, and taken for the purposes of identiŽcation as inexorable or absolute.

Oedipal subjects are thus programmed by the nuclear family not only for the
self-denial of asceticism, but also to identify more exclusively and absolutely
with the polar positions in any power structure: domination and subservience.
Schizoanalysis can thus help explain what empirical and comparative research
has already suggested: that contemporary fundamentalism of various kinds is
not so much a throwback to pre-modern attitudes and modes of organization,
but rather a quintessentially modern phenomenon that draws on the self-denial
and strong authoritarian identiŽcations fostered by the Oedipal family.11

II. Beyond the family: difference and politics

Having introduced the terms “decoding” and “recoding” in connection with
familial and extra-familial psychodynamics, we need now to provide a more
comprehensive account of their scope, for they have more work to do. I
suggested at the outset that Deleuze’s philosophy could be considered arch-
modernist because of its consistent advocacy of difference over and against the
claims of identity. This is not just a metaphysical predilection, but a historically-
grounded assessment of major tendencies and prospects for freedom in modern
capitalist society. In his philosophical magnum opus, Deleuze distinguished the
two major enemies of difference: qualitative resemblance and quantitative equiv-
alence.12 Difference succumbs to identity either when differences between things
are subordinated to their similarities (any two cats are different in their being,
but as cats their similarities prevail over their differences), or when things are
simply counted or measured (as when one cat is considered equal to one dog,
or when a [large] cat weighs the same as a [small] dog). In one case, identity is
established by a code that determines which features of a class of things are
invariant, which are variable, and which are excluded. (Cats invariably have fur
and four legs; they may vary in fur color; they do not lay eggs.) In the other case,
identity is established by number, in abstraction from qualitative features. The
genius of the Žrst Deleuze–Guattari collaboration was to have transformed this
philosophical insight into a powerful tool for analyzing capitalism.
By comparing capitalist market society with other modes of social organiza-
tion, Deleuze and Guattari were able to show that pre-capitalist social forms
were organized on the basis of codes and qualitative resemblance; capitalist
society, by contrast, is organized fundamentally by the quantitative calculus of
the market—that is to say, the allocation of resources and the organization of
activity in capitalist society are based primarily on the prospects for turning a
proŽt (with the crucial exception of the domestic sphere). Even more important
for the analysis of capitalism is that quantitative and qualitative identity are
incompatible, and that quantitative equivalence tends to undermine qualitative
resemblance. To say that one cat equals one dog does relatively little violence to
either; to say that one dollar spent on crack cocaine or military hardware equals
one dollar spent on infant health care or education is a different matter
altogether. Ethical and political considerations, to be blunt and somewhat
simplistic about it, get short shrift in a society where economic considerations
are paramount; arms manufacturing is far more likely to turn a proŽt than
preventive medicine; a weapons engineer is likely to earn more than a
schoolteacher. 13 This is part of what Marx meant when he observed that
 Holland 31

capitalism “strips the halo” from professions hitherto regarded with awe, and
turns everyone into wage slaves.14 On Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, the
process is even more widespread than that: all qualitative social codes—pro-
fessional, political, ethical, etc.—give way before the “cash nexus” of quantitat-
ive economic calculation under capitalism. They therefore consider one of the
main tendencies of capitalism to be “decoding”—by which they mean not the
translation of a given statement into one that is more readily understood, but
rather the subversion and stripping away by market forces of social codes
themselves.
Before proceeding further, it is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari
acknowledge and analyze important counter-tendencies within capitalism.
One is the process of “recoding,” discussed above in connection with the nuclear
family. But the family isn’t the only locus of recoding. To mention just a few
of the many others: in the sphere of consumption, fashion codes endow basically
interchangeable and meaningless commodities with a semblance of aesthetic
value and meaning—at least for the duration of the fashion season (after
which another cycle of decoding and recoding will commence anew). In
the sphere of production, too, certain procedures and objects need to be
endowed with technical value and meaning in order for manufacturing pro-
cesses to take place—at least until a new, improved technology is introduced
into production. What is crucial to understand about these and indeed all
instances of “recoding,” however, is that they remain strictly subordinate and
secondary to the other counter-tendency, which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as
“axiomatization.”
Axiomatization is the process by which capital brings together factors of
production in the pursuit of surplus value. Capital in abstract, monetary form
gets invested in means of production and labor power, and in the process pure
quantity (money) takes on qualitative attributes (a speciŽc technology embodied
in the means of production purchased; the corresponding speciŽc skills required
of the labor power hired). Two features of this fundamental process are crucial.
For one thing, axiomatization decisions are the bedrock of capitalist social
organization and development; this is the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari
insist that capitalism is an economic society unlike any other: its social organiza-
tion is based on a quantitative calculus rather than on codes. The second and for
present purposes even more important thing is that the qualitative attributes and
codes that arise locally and temporarily from axiomatization do so subsequent
to and as a result of investment calculations which are purely quantitative. This
is why Deleuze and Guattari consider axiomatization to be the fundamental
process of capitalism, and why ultimately decoding is a more signiŽcant
tendency within capitalism than recoding. “There is no code valid for all of
society” under capitalism, they insist.15 Quantitative axiomatization sponsors
decoding at the heart of the capitalist machine and throughout market society;
social recoding provides compensatory codes valid only for speciŽc social
locations or activities and for limited periods of time.16
We are now in a position to understand why, like Marx, Deleuze and Guattari
Žnd certain features of capitalism so laudable. For to the extent that axiomatiza-
tion undermines the codes of resemblance (to the extent it decodes), it thereby
subverts identity and frees difference from its subordination to codes. The
capitalist market thus functions as an enormous difference-engine, inciting
32 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

difference with every extension of its axiomatics into a new region of the globe
or a new zone of personal life.
Of course, difference freed by axiomatization in this way is not immune to
recapture and recodiŽcation; indeed, this happens all the time. In musical
fashion, for instance, a new sound may arise outside the normal channels of the
music industry, but as soon as it achieves a threshold level of popularity (i.e.
potential market share), it gets axiomatized by the major labels and recoded as
the “in” sound (at least until the next cycle of emergence–axiomatization–recod-
ing takes place). Similarly in the fashion industry, at a given moment a certain
movie star may set the new fashion style for the gender/age group that
identiŽes with him or her, only to have the aesthetic/economic value of that
style decoded in a subsequent moment and replaced with the next style for that
group. One of the basic mechanisms of recoding (reassigning value) is indeed
identiŽcation—whether within the family or in society at large—but the source
of the Žgures available for identiŽcation in capitalist society is always directly or
indirectly capital itself and the process of axiomatization. In the case of the
family, as we have seen, Daddy and Mommy are delegated roles by capital. The
familial poles of identiŽcation are thus best understood as secondary derivatives
of capital, or “images of images” as Deleuze and Guattari put it.17 A child may
identify with the castrating father, but the father-image itself derives from the
Žgure of the castrating boss. The images circulating in the mass media derive
from capital much more directly: our movie star acquires a certain look because
of investments made in hiring him or her, in a certain production team (director,
costumer, etc.), and in the clothing itself.18 The Želd of familial identiŽcations is,
as we have seen, exceptionally narrow, and the corresponding two abstract
identiŽcations (oppressor/oppressed) themselves exceptionally strong; these
strong identiŽcations provide the bass line, as it were, for subsequent extra-fa-
milial identiŽcations that are typically plural, eeting, and unstable. Capitalism
thus appears ambivalent, according to schizoanalysis: it undermines identity and
frees difference on one hand, yet reasserts identity based on axiomatization and
familial and/or social identiŽcations on the other.
What, then, are the implications of decoding and recoding for politics?
Although Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refuse any idea of a schizoanalytic
political program,19 what they do say resonates most signiŽcantly with more
recent developments in queer theory, and in particular the work of Judith
Butler.20 Like Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, Butler considers identity to be
an emergent property of repetition, rather than treating consistency in repetition
as a result of pre-established identity. For Deleuze, conceptual identity is
established by maximizing consistency and minimizing difference in repetition;
identity never exists apart from repetition, which always threatens to undermine
that consistency. Similarly, for Butler personal identity is established through
and only through the repeated performance of that identity, and in no way
pre-exists its performance. Gender norms arise from repeat performance; they
are not its source or cause: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions
of gender,” she insists; “that identity is performatively constituted by the very
‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”21
This is already a very compelling account of personal identity (gender and
otherwise), but Butler’s interests go beyond the issue of how stable (gender)
identities and norms are constituted: she is also interested in their instability,
 Holland 33

and in the prospects for their displacement or transformation. The great advan-
tage of “grounding” normalized identity in the degree of consistency of rep-
etition, for Butler as for Deleuze, is that repetition can always be subject to
variation. Repetition may actually produce not repetition of the same (reinforce-
ment of norms), Deleuze insists, but difference: divergence, deviation, even
subversion of norms. The strategic question for Butler thus becomes “not
whether to repeat [for that is unavoidable], but how to repeat, or, indeed, to
repeat and through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender
norms that enable the repetition itself.”22 And that raises the question of where
the variability of consistency/inconsistency in repetition come from, and how it
is to be explained.
One of the great virtues of Butler’s reconceptualization of gender identity is
that it clears a space for agency. Gender is not predetermined; it is neither a
purely biological given nor a purely social construct: it is enacted. But she avoids
pure voluntarism, as well: gender may well be enacted, but always through acts
of repetition bearing the weight of social norms. These norms are, to revert to
Deleuze’s terminology, codes of resemblance. (Real men invariably have two
legs and a penis; they may vary in hair color; they do not eat quiche.) As such,
they are subject to the decoding rampant in so much of capitalist society—with
the important exception of the nuclear family. We would thus expect more
viable alternatives to heteronormative identities to emerge where decoding is
most widespread and the nuclear family most isolated—that is, in advanced
capitalist societies. And indeed the historian John d’Emilio has argued precisely
this, at least as far as gay alternatives to heterosexuality are concerned, in an
empirical study of “capitalism and gay identity” in 20th-century North Amer-
ica.23 If freedom in Deleuze and Butler’s views is measured in degrees of
variation in repetition, then it seems clear that the capitalist tendency of
decoding affords great prospects for such freedom, and this is part of what
Deleuze and Guattari Žnd so admirable about capitalism.
But even if we agree that the destabilization of social codes and norms by
decoding makes greater variation in identity-performance possible under capi-
talism, we still need to explain the counter-pressure to reinforce rather than
subvert normative identities by repeating norms without variation. Here, a
debate that took place between Butler and Nancy Fraser in the pages of Social
Text may be instructive.24
The aim of Butler’s essay was to challenge the notion (purveyed by “Marxist
orthodoxy”) that the struggles of the “new social movements” or “identity
politics” can or should be relegated to secondary status vis-à-vis class struggle
because they are not truly economic but superstructural or “merely cultural” (as
the title of the essay puts it). To the contrary, Butler argues that heteronormativ-
ity must be considered part of the infrastructure, and that this requires “an
expansion of the ‘economic’ sphere itself to include both the reproduction (sic)
of goods as well as the social reproduction of persons.”25 Fraser argues, from
what she calls a Weberian perspective, that heteronormativity should be kept
distinct from economics. There exist in her view two different but equally
important sources of injustice: injustices of distribution (economic injustices) and
what she calls injustices of recognition—injustices that arise from the failure or
refusal to recognize alternative identities as deserving of respect and equal social
standing. It is generally counterproductive, she contends, to confuse these two
34 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

categories of injustice, and it is misguided to reclassify heteronormativity as part

of the infrastructure, as Butler had tried to do.
Fraser’s arguments against Butler on this point are good ones, as far as they
go. Expanding the deŽnition of the “economic sphere” to include the repro-
duction of persons as well as the production of surplus value certainly makes for
a more comprehensive understanding of the capitalist mode of production, but
it fails to distinguish the exploitation of wage slaves characteristic of capitalism
from other forms of injustice. On a somewhat more practical note, Fraser argues
that capitalism could function perfectly well without heterosexual norms, and
that the new social movements are not in fact the “fundamental threat to [the]
very workability [of the capitalist political economy]” that Butler claims they
are.26 (On this count, Fraser notes that the strongest resistance to alternative
identities comes from the religious right, not corporate capital.) Whatever the
ultimate merits of these arguments, however, Fraser’s analysis begs the question
of where the force of recognition—and of the refusal to recognize—comes from
in the Žrst place.
Here schizoanalysis can offer an explanation that is neither deŽnitionalist nor
functionalist (as Fraser argues Butler’s argument is), but nonetheless expands
our understanding of capitalism to include issues like heteronormativity. From
a schizoanalytic perspective, Fraser is right about one thing: heteronormative
pressures do not arise from axiomatization—a gay or lesbian rock star, for
example, could in some circumstances or for some markets turn a proŽt or set
fashion styles as effectively as a heterosexual star. But such pressures do arise
from within a quintessentially capitalist institution: they arise from Oedipal
recoding based in the nuclear family.
We have already discussed how the isolated nuclear family fosters anxiety,
subservience, bipolar identiŽcations, and asceticism in the subjects of capitalism.
But its isolation from other forms of social relation has yet another effect: the
only (or certainly the preponderant) models of adult love and intimacy it offers
Oedipal subjectivity are parental, and hence heteronormative. The nuclear
family thereby fosters heteronormativity along with anxiety, subservience, and
the rest. But there is more: the asceticism characteristic of Oedipal subjectivity
also fuels the heteronormative pressure to refuse recognition to alternative
gender identities, for these identities are not deŽned in terms of normative
reproductive roles, nor in terms of productive roles, but rather in terms of
pleasure, of all things. What could be more scandalous to ascetic, Oedipal–cap-
italist subjectivity than identities deŽned not by production or reproduction but
by a variety of different modes of sexual gratiŽcation and personal fulŽllment?!
Fraser is certainly right to insist that ending discrimination against alternative
identities will not per se put an end to economic exploitation, but she overlooks
the extent to which the refusal to recognize those alternative identities stems
from the Oedipal psychodynamics of the nuclear family as a distinctly capitalist
institution. For schizoanalysis, “desire is part of the infrastructure,” and putting
an end to capitalism will depend on transforming the psychodynamics stem-
ming from the privatized nuclear family as much as on transforming the process
of economic exploitation based on privatized capital-accumulation.
It is not yet clear, however, how schizoanalysis might envisage political
organization and action, although it is clear that decoding would be favored
over recoding, inasmuch as decoding frees difference while recoding subordi-
 Holland 35

nates it to identity. The prime locus of recoding, as we have seen, is the nuclear
family—but it is by no means the only one. Vanguard political parties (such as
the French Communist Party) are rejected by schizoanalysis on anti-Oedipal
grounds: the structure and psychodynamics of party membership mirror and
reproduce those of nuclear family life (and of wage labor).27 Party members
forgo direct access to political goods, accept instead the mediating authority of
the party leadership, and work for the party while deferring their own
fulŽllment.28 “Identity politics,” too, are rejected on the grounds that they
impose a factitious and invidious identity on a variety of differences.29 More-
over, given the nature of the fundamental Oedipal identiŽcations—father/
mother//oppressor/oppressed—any recoded group identity will involve either
an inated sense of superiority and the right to dominate or a masochistic
celebration of victimhood.30 Neither provides a sound basis for progressive
political mobilization.
In a somewhat broader context, since sharply-deŽned identity politics are by
deŽnition exclusive rather than inclusive, questions inevitably arise as to how
any one identity group could operate effectively with other groups.31 In one of
the best-known defenses of the new social movements, Laclau and Mouffe
suggested that a chain of equivalence would form among various identity
groups, enabling them to work together. But such an equivalence would
completely change the nature of the group, subordinating the original distinctive
basis of identity to the new basis in equivalence; the group would in effect have
abandoned its original identity. Schizoanalysis foresees, instead of an identity, a
convergence or intersection of interests arising from different loci, wherein
differences would not be submerged in any Žnal unity or equivalence.32 Butler
echoes this view in an elegant formulation:
The only possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conicts, but will be
a mode of sustaining conict in politically productive ways, a practice of contestation
that demands that [new social] movements articulate their goals under the
pressure of each other without therefore exactly becoming each other.33

A provisional and mobile alliance politics of this kind seems most likely to avoid
the traps of Oedipal recoding, which makes the organs of political contestation
into mirror-images of the very political structures they intend to contest. And if
this view seems to grant politics a considerably reduced role, it is because
Deleuze and Guattari place their emphasis on other modes of social organiza-
tion, among which must be included the post-Oedipal family and the post-cap-
italist market.

III. Difference and universal history

It may indeed seem strange that schizoanalysis, emerging as it does from
Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, would renew discussion of universal history,
which is usually associated with the synthesis of differences into identity in
teleological and totalizing systems such as the one attributed to Hegel. There are,
however, key differences between what Deleuze and Guattari call universal
history, drawing on Marx, and (what is usually taken to be) the original
Hegelian version of this notion.34
To begin with, according to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, difference is
36 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

fundamental: identity emerges only locally and transiently from the movement
of difference. Yet at the same time, it takes the advent of capitalism to put
difference on the historical agenda. This is because, as we have seen, all previous
social formations sought—for the most part successfully—to suppress difference
in codes of resemblance. History only becomes universal from the moment that
capitalism subverts the codes of previous social formations and replaces them
with the quantitative calculus of the market. Or more precisely: capitalism as
difference-engine inaugurates the process of history’s becoming-universal, by
decoding previous social formations that curtailed difference via codes; but it
fails to fully realize that process inasmuch as it too recaptures and re-contains
difference by means of recoding. Hence the essential ambivalence of capitalism,
according to Deleuze and Guattari. Given their deep-seated commitment to
difference, the strategic question thus becomes how to drive a wedge between
the positive and negative features of capitalism: how to maximize decoding and
minimize recoding.
One relatively straightforward strategic principle follows directly from the
foregoing analysis, at least as far as Oedipal recoding is concerned: eliminate the
nuclear family. To this end, one might envisage a return to extended-family
forms: they would mitigate the concentration of castrating authority in one
person, and multiply the number of adult positions available for identiŽcation.
But even extended-family members fall under the incest taboo, so this family
form would nonetheless inict a signiŽcant degree of asceticism on its members.
A more comprehensive program for alleviating Oedipal recoding would resitu-
ate the family triangle (Mommy–Daddy–kids) in a broader network of social
relations reaching well beyond kin, perhaps involving communes or collectives
of some kind. The extent to which eliminating Oedipal recoding would ulti-
mately require not just knitting the family back into the fabric of social relations
but actually abolishing the segregation of reproduction from production at large
is an important issue, but one which lies well beyond the scope of this essay.
But Oedipal recoding is not the only form of recoding under capitalism, even
if it is the most noxious; there is also the social recoding that stems from
axiomatization. Workers must be retrained, for example, to handle new pro-
duction technologies; similarly, consumer tastes must be trained to appreciate
the new commodities that get produced. Yet inasmuch as axiomatization lies at the
heart of the capitalist difference-engine and is largely responsible for decoding, axioma-
tization itself cannot be eliminated.35 If we grant that the schizoanalytic revolution
will want not to jeopardize but indeed to expand and accelerate the liberating
effects of axiomatization, how then can the stiing effects of social recoding be
mitigated? The key here, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is to be found in
Marx’s analysis of the uneven rhythm of capitalist development caused by the
private ownership of capital itself.
In the third volume of Capital, Marx outlines two moments of capital’s
ongoing self-expansion.36 In the Žrst, positive moment, a wave of new, more
productive capital-stock transforms the existing apparatuses of production and
consumption: this “continual revolution of the means of production” that for
Marx characterizes capitalism practically reinvents labor and capital in order to
devote them to new forms of production and consumption, and in the process
spawns decoding throughout society. But, in the second, negative moment, this
progressive movement is abruptly stopped, because the owners of existing
 Holland 37

capital are still making a proŽt on it: the evolving apparatuses of production and
consumption alike are tied down to what is now obsolete capital-stock, solely in
order to valorize it and realize proŽt on previous investment. So: a wave of
innovation liberates all kinds of creative energies (in consumption as well as in
production) at the same time that it revolutionizes and socializes productive
forces; but then the power of privately owned capital supervenes, yoking the
relations of production and consumption to the dead weight of private-surplus
appropriation. 37
From this analysis, Deleuze and Guattari deduce a familiar revolutionary
imperative, but with an unfamiliar twist: expropriate the expropriators; abolish
private ownership of the means of production; socialize private capital—but
leave the process of axiomatization intact, along with the operations of the
market on which it is based. A market freed from capital in this way—in other
words, a truly free “free market” economy—would foster decoding in two ways.
Both, it should be noted, produce differences of degree: capital is, after all, a
social relation rather than an accumulation of things or applied technologies,
and transforming that social relation—namely, socializing private capital—
leaves the things and technologies themselves more or less intact. So inasmuch
as private capital acts, as we have just seen, as a brake on decoding in
consumption and production, socializing capital will in a sense simply release
these brakes in both spheres. For one thing, the “continual revolution of the
means of production” responsible for generating decoding throughout society
will continue and indeed accelerate, for the barrier posed by private ownership
of capital—i.e. the insistence on extracting all possible proŽts from the existing
production apparatus instead of replacing it immediately with newer technol-
ogy—will have been eliminated. For another thing, without the intervention or
mediation of private capital, the apparatus of production (supply) will respond
more immediately to consumer demand, instead of programming it, through
advertising, to favor the goods private capital has already produced or is already
equipped to produce.
So in one sense, the result of the schizoanalytic revolution is a “free market”
with a vastly improved, relatively unmediated feedback loop between pro-
duction and consumption, inasmuch as the mediation of private capital that both
delays the implementation of new technologies and locks consumption onto
obsolete commodities has been eliminated. But in another, more important
sense, the capital-free market envisioned by schizoanalysis in fact overturns the
predominance of production over consumption that for Marx represented the
anachronistic reign of inhuman necessity over the prospective realm of human
freedom. In this sense, the schizoanalytic revolution represents the realization of
universal history inaugurated by capitalism. For while the difference-engine of
axiomatization maximizes decoding, the capital-free market minimizes recoding.
Through reversing the privatization of reproduction in the nuclear family and
abolishing the privatization of production by capital, the ultimate aim of
schizoanalysis is the free proliferation of difference: permanent revolution itself.

Notes
1. See Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1977) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, R.
Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press);
38 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

and Holland, Eugene W. (1999) Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus”: Introduction to

Schizoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge).
2. See Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, C. Porter (trans.) (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press).
3. Mark Poster distinguishes the bourgeois (nuclear) family form from other forms in
his Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press, 1978); for a more empirical
treatment, see Ariès, Philippe and Duby, Georges (eds) (1987) A History of Private Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press); Marcel Mauss examines patterns of pre-econ-
omic exchange imbricating entire clans in complex social organizatio n in The Gift: The
Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, W. D. Halls (trans.) (London and
New York: Routledge, 1990); see also Zaretsky, Eli (1986) Capitalism, the Family, and
Personal Life (New York: Perennial Library); and (1995) The Birth of Identity Politics
in the 1960s: Psychoanalysis and the Public/Private Division. In: M. Featherstone, S.
Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage),
pp. 244–259; and of course the classic work by Engels (1972) The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (New
York: International Publishers).
4. Deleuze and Guattari say that “Father, Mother, and child thus become the simu-
lacrum of the images of capital (‘Mister Capital, Madame Earth,’ and their child the
Worker)”–to which I have added “the Consumer”; see Anti-Oedipus, p. 264.
5. The quotation in note 4 above continues: “… these images [Mister Capital, Madame
Earth, and their child the Worker-Consumer] are no longer recognized at all in the
desire that is determined to invest only their simulacrum [Daddy-Mommy-me]. The
familial determinations become the application of the social axiomatic. The family
becomes the subaggregate to which the whole of the social Želd is applied” (Anti-
Oedipus, pp. 264–265).
6. Deleuze and Guattari go on to explain that this beginning itself “is not absolute: it is
only constituted starting from the father’s investments of the social historical Želd”
(Anti-Oedipus, p. 178, translation modiŽed).
7. The considerable extent to which this analysis of asceticism intersects with Niet-
zsche’s own lies well beyond the scope of this essay; but see Holland, Deleuze and
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Chapter 1 and passim.
8. This training in substitution, as Lacan reminds us, is also crucial for language, but it
is important not to lose sight of the social dynamics involved as well.
9. See Bataille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share: An Essay in General Economy, R.
Hurley (trans.) (New York: Zone Books).
10. I take it for granted that the nuclear family is a patriarchal institution as well as a
capitalist one, and that the mother is oppressed, whether “in the name of the father,”
by the non-remuneration of her reproductive labor, and/or by additional factors or
combinations thereof. “The oppressor” and “the oppressed” may be crude rubrics to
express this presupposition; domination and subservience or prohibitor and the
prohibited would be other ways of conveying the dynamics of this narrowly bipolar
structure. Making a case for the presupposition itself, of course, lies outside the scope
of this essay. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the nuclear family is
an ideal-type less and less in force in contemporary society–for better rather than for
worse, according to schizoanalysis.
11. See, for example, Lawrence, Bruce (1989) Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt
Against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper and Row).
12. See Deleuze, G. (1968) Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.) (New York: Colum-
bia University Press), p. 1.
13. Another useful way of thinking about decoding is in terms of the eclipse of
use-values of all kinds–affective, ethical, aesthetic, political–by exchange-value and
the predominance of the market.
 Holland 39

14. The famous quote is from the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”: “The bourgeoisie
has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with
reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man
of science, into its paid wage laborers.” See On Revolution, S. Padover (ed., trans.)
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 83.
15. Cf. Anti-Oedipus, p. 33: “… unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is
incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social Želd. By
substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of
abstract quantities …”
16. One aspect of the relation between axiomatization and recoding has been discussed
extensively by Baudrillard in terms of the relation within political economy between
exchange-value and use-value: recoding is the (often) factitious use-value assigned to
commodities–whether by capitalists in order to sell them, or by consumers to
appropriate them as their own–that were in fact produced for the sake of exchange-
value. Such “social recoding” can usefully be distinguished from Oedipal recoding,
but there is no doubt interaction between the two as well.
17. Deleuze and Guattari conclude that “Private persons are … images of the second
order, images of images” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 264).
18. Other Žgures of identiŽcation–teachers, priests, etc.–may be located closer to one of
two extremes: the father or the boss.
19. Deleuze and Guattari insist that “schizoanalysis as such has strictly no political
program to propose” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 380, original emphasis).
20. See especially her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990) and the essay “Merely Cultural” in Social Text 52–53 (1997), pp. 265–
277. Butler herself prefers to cite Foucault rather than Deleuze.
21. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 25.
22. Ibid., p. 148. Compare Butler’s notion of the proliferation of gender with what
Deleuze and Guattari say about “n sexes”: “Desiring-machine s of the nonhuman sex:
not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the
n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes
on this subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 295).
23. See especially: Capitalism and Gay Identity. In: Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History,
Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–n16.
24. See Nancy Fraser’s rejoinder to Butler’s Merely Cultural, Social Text 52–53 (1997),
pp. 279–289.
25. Butler, Merely Cultural, p. 272.
26. Butler, Merely Cultural, p. 274 and passim; Fraser p. 285 and passim.
27. For an important qualiŽcation, see Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus,
p. 107.
28. For further discussion, see ibid., especially pp. 107–108, 118; see also Michael Ryan on
the inadequacy of Leninist-style vanguard parties in Marxism and Deconstruction: A
Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
29. Deleuze and Guattari themselves make the case against identity politics via the
notion of an exclusively gay liberation movement, but the same principles would
apply to other identity groups: “For example, no ‘gay liberation movement’ is
possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction
with heterosexuality, a relation that ascribes them both to a common Oedipal and
castrated stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two non-commu-
nicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their
transverse communication in the decoded ows of desire …” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 350).
30. For a similar critique of the implications of identity politics (but without the reference
to masochism), see Brown, W. (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late
Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
40 Strategies · Vol. 15, No. 1

31. Of course, the same question would arise for any “non-identity politics”: how could
people who are constantly improvising their identities form a group, much less
operate effectively with other groups of people doing the same? The presumption is
that as groups proliferate, the kind of effective coordinated action required to make
deep-seated and long-lasting changes in society would be harder to accomplish.
32. See Holland, op. cit., pp. 106–121.
33. Butler, Merely Cultural, p. 269.
34. For a fuller treatment of these differences, see the last chapter of Holland, op. cit.,
entitled “Schizoanalysis and Universal History” (pp. 92–123).
35. The other major source of decoding is money; see the discussions of exchange-value
in notes 13 and 16 above.
36. See Marx, Karl (1967) Capital, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers), pp. 249–
250; see also Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York:
Vintage, 1973), pp. 618–623, especially the following: “In one period the process [of
capital-accumulation] appears as altogether uid–the period of maximum realization
of capital; in another, a reaction to the Žrst, the other moment asserts itself all the
more forcibly–the period of the maximum devaluation of capital and congestion of
the production process” (p. 623).
37. Of course, the distinction between these “Žrst” and “second” moments is strictly
analytic–the two are ongoing simultaneously in the economy as a whole; yet the
precedence of the “Žrst” moment expresses Deleuze and Guattari’s preference
(shared with Marx) for the “positive” moment of the process.