Schizoanalysis And City
By Helena Mattsson
In the introduction to issue nr. 13 of the journal Recherches, CERFI describes its work as a machine made up of parts stolen from “the bicephalous savant Deleuze-Guattari and his building site.” The building site was L’Anti-Oedipe, published in 1972. The description of this critique of psychoanalysis as a building site is telling, since two disciplines - psychoanalysis and urbanism - are taken apart, in order to form new constellations. New machines connecting subjective desires to things, the city, the universe… to a productive machine. For Deleuze and Guattari, things, buildings, the city, nature, are all part of our desiring structure, and even though L’Anti-Oedipe primarily starts from and is directed against psychoanalysis, it makes possible a new perspective on urbanism as well.
Theories of urbanity were developed in parallel to industrialism and capitalism, and to the growth of metropolises. The architectural theorist Manfredo Tafuri claims, in his Progetto e utopia (published in 1973, one year after L’Anti-Oedipe, that these theories of urbanity (which to a great extent are still with us today) erase the difference between two separate categories - city and nature. In this way, the process of modern capitalism is portrayed as if it were governed, like nature, by natural selection, and these theories came to obscure the conflicts and complexities of the modern metropolis. We can still see today how urban theory often addresses the “whole” of the city, in order to “heal” it, so as to create an organic unity. Using a term from L’Anti-Oedipe, we might say that these theories often function as a reterritorialization of the urban dynamic rather than as a mapping of the productive forces at work. Deleuze and Guattari view capitalism as a pure deterritorialization driven by desires that create new rhizomes, new desires, and new territories. However, within capitalism, there are also forces of reterritorialization that organize, create structures and order - as the State, Law, the family, etc. For Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis is a reterritorialization that leads desire back to the family, breaks the growth of the rhizome, and against this they develop a schizo-analysis that follows the forces of deterritorialization rather than blocking them.
The schizo-analytic element is simple, according to Deleuze and Guattari. They claim: “Desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement - desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production.” Psychoanalysis has repressed this order of production, they say, and instead we have an unconscious that does not produce, but represents. An unconscious that believes - believes in Oedipus, believes in the Law and castration. Deleuze and Guattari pose the question: “Who or what reduced the unconscious to this state of representation, if not first of all a system of beliefs put in place of productions?” But Oedipus is not only a psychoanalytical construction, it is also the main figure of colonization, an internal colonization, and they speak of an Oedipalization that internalizes man and gives rise to a new suffering - an internal suffering. Oedipus does not suddenly arrive on the scene one day and just stays there, but is an instance of the State, of paranoia, of power. We have all been made oedipal and neurotic in the home, in school, at work, robbed of our forces and power. We have to learn from psychotics how to free ourselves from the oedipal power, since it is they who cannot be oedipalized. Oedipus halts the individual’s desiring-production - but why would this be in the interest of power? It is hardly the desire for mommy which endangers power, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, but what is threatening is that all desire, no matter how low the scale, might call the established order in a society into question: “It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors.”
L’Anti-Oedipe seeks the answer to the question of why Oedipus and neurosis got hold of our bodies and shut down the productive machines of desire, and how a body might regain its power and desiring-production. In this way, we can also understand schizo-analysis as a political action opposing all forms of power and aiming for a radical politics of desire liberated from all beliefs. When we forget our egos, a non- neurotic politics may arise, where the individual and the collective are no longer opposed, and where collective expressions of desire are possible. The theory of schizo-analysis in many ways comes across as a child of its time, a kind of utopian 68, and the same tone pervades CERFI’s work. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of this, many of their CERFI’s ideas seem especially relevant today when the political resistance to the power of capital once more has grown. In the light of the conflictual forces of capitalism and globalization – both decentralizing and centralizing (de- and reterritorializing) – the descriptions of the rhizome and of desiring-production still appear relevant. Even when it comes to understanding modern urbanity, schizo-analysis provides an alternative to the urban theories that seek to heal the city, thereby hiding the productive desiring machines that generate today’s capitalist megalopolises, suburbs, small towns, infrastructures, and buildings in general.
In “Analysis of a Phobia in a five-year-old Boy” (1909) Sigmund Freud describes little Hans’ desires and phobias concerning the street and the surrounding world with the aid of two maps. This is the only case study that Freud presents by way of a map, which is presumably why this particular story has come to exemplify the connection between psychoanalysis and city. The case of little Hans is often seen as an instance of agoraphobia, for instance in Esther Da Costa Meyer’s “La Donna è Mobile: Agoraphobia, Women, and Urban Space,” even if Freud himself does not use this term in his study. Let us once more follow little Hans’ attempts to get out of both the family and the building, his relation to the outside world and Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of what will develop into a phobia - although this time we will illuminate Freud’s theories with schizo-analysis.
Herbert Graf, aka “Little Hans”.
Little Hans’ father joins “The Psychoanalytical Wednesday Society” in Vienna the year of Hans’ birth, and becomes a committed follower of Professor Sigmund Freud. When Hans reached the age of three, his father began to observe his actions and words; he began to see his son as a patient. He wrote down what his son said, and sent the notes to Freud. A year later Hans had developed a phobia that prevented him from leaving his home: the fear of horses. And then the father, guided by Freud, begins the first psychoanalysis conducted on a child.
At the age of three, little Hans discovers a function in his body that became the beginning of an investigation of the nature of the world: peeing. The problem of peeing soon turned out to be much larger than he could ever have expected. It separates the sexes, the living from the dead, it reproduces and affects, it produces taboos and morals. Like a scientist who finds a question providing a new perspective on the world, and which makes the ordinary into the extraordinary, Hans understood the function “peeing” as the problem that would guide him out into the world. The will to knowledge about the mechanics of peeing was Hans’ desire, and like all desires it was productive (if we see it in terms of L’Anti-Oedipe), creating lines of flight from the family and leading toward animals, machines, and things. Among the cows, Hans saw the widdler encountering the milk-machine. “Oh, look! There’s milk coming out of its widdler!” When visiting a zoo, he shouted excitedly: “I saw the lion’s widdler!”
Freud points out that Hans’ interest in widdlers was not purely theoretical, as one could imagine, but also implied touching. When Hans’ mother saw him having his hand on his penis, she effectively broke his line of flight for the first time: “If you do that again, I’ll send you to the doctor to have your widdler cut off. And then what’ll you widdle with?” Hans, who as yet had no consciousness of guilt, quickly found a solution that allowed him to move on in spite of castration, and he replied: “With my bottom.” And Hans’ journey of exploration of the world went on. When he was at the railway station, he saw a locomotive releasing water from an engine. “Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?” And he sums up what he has learned so far: “A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair do not.”
The secret of the widdler seems to be reserved for the parents, and it is never divulged to the inquisitive son. When Hans asks if his father has a widdler, the reply is “Yes, of course” and then Hans proceeds: “but I’ve never seen it when you were undressing.” Of course one might, just as much as little Hans, wonder what the father has done with it. The mother also blocks Hans’ knowledge and its lines of flight when she refuses to explain the differences between the sexes.
That which for Hans was an investigation into the world’s functioning, into how things were put together and how they worked, became for the parents merely questions that actualized their taboos. Through the mystification of the family’s widdlers Hans was prevented from solving those questions that would have lead him onward to the next ones. The mechanics of peeing for Hans began as a deterritorialization, but ended as a pure reterritorialization, after the parents and Professor Freud had “injected neurosis” into his unconscious.
Hans’ sister was born that same year, which further was to complicate his investigations. Five o’clock that morning Hans’ bed was moved out of the bedroom and he awoke around seven because of his mother’s moaning. He wondered why his mother was coughing, but then responded immediately himself: “The stork’s coming today for certain.” When the child was born, he was called into the mother’s room and saw bowls filled with blood and water. He pointed at them and said surprised: “But blood doesn’t come out of my widdler.” Hans, who saw the world like a mechanic does, knew there was an orifice in the body that would let the body fluids out, and that this hole was in the widdler, but he didn’t know that blood could come out the through it as well. Presumably he had already seen through his parent’s lies (especially when they talked about genitals), and he doubted that the child would have been brought around by the stork, since he connected the blood to the mother and not to the stork.
Seven days later Hans was present as his sister was bathing, and he checked her body in the manner of a technician: “But her widdler’s still quite small. When she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.” Hans was trying more and more to understand the widdler, which had become even more complex. Still no one had informed him about the difference between the sexes, and it seemed as if the problem was getting on his nerves. He pretended that he went to toilet to pee, in order to perhaps find some solution by playing a game. All of this was observed and was reported to Professor Freud, as Hans understood when he asked his father: “Why are you writing down everything I say?”
When little Hans talks about the widdler he is not referring to an organ but, if we follow schizo-analysis, to an aggregate whose elements vary depending on their connections. Does the girl have a widdler? Hans answers in the affirmative, not because of castration anxiety, but because girls pee too. Chairs have no widdlers, since they are not prone to integrate the release of liquid in their relations.
Just a little more than one year after Freud had received the first report on Hans, the latter began to develop the phobia against horses that came to limit his mobility. If we study the analysis in light of the idea of re- and deterritorialization, we can see how these two forces form a common complex. The desire to understand “peeing,” which was what brought him out in the world in the first place, was a deterritorializing force, but came to a halt in that it triggered the outside world’s desire to produce a neurosis in little Hans, to induce a consciousness of guilt by never answering his questions, but instead mystifying them. The expanding force of desire and the line of flight were broken. Deleuze and Guattari claim: “Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always via a rhizome that desire moves and produces.”
While taking a walk with his mother, Hans says: “I was afraid that a horse was going to bite me.” He also said that he had seen a horse fall down in the street, rattling its legs (it had presumably died), and that it frightened him. During the night he had a nightmare about having to go on another walk the day after, and that a horse came into his room. In the morning, his mother asked him: “Do you often put your hand on your widdler?” He answers that he does this every night when lying in bed. Before taking a nap the same day, Hans was warned not to have his hand on his widdler again. The horse, the street, the widdler, indecency, the mother, the father; everything was being interwoven into one big blockage. Freud suggests that Hans’ fear of horses had to do with the mother and a repressed sexual wish, a wish that, from the beginning, had no specific object. When the fear didn’t go away, despite the mother’s presence during the walks, it sought another object: horses. Freud instructed the father to tell Hans that the fear of horses was nonsense, and that the real cause was his exaggerated interest in his widdler.
To conquer territories, to become part of the outside world, is a recurrent theme in the story of Little Hans. He describes a dream to his father: “I was with you at Schönbrunn where the sheep are; and then we crawled through under the ropes, and then we informed the policeman at the end of the garden, and he grabbed hold of us.” Hans had visited the sheep earlier with his father, and discovered that part of the garden where the sheep can be seen was cordoned off by a rope, and Hans was astonished that the space could be blocked with a rope which is so easy to slip under. This spatial observation relates to a basic architectonic question of delimitations - concrete and representational - in an urban or cultivated environment. This is a type of understanding that each individual has to acquire in order to navigate in a city, and we may understand the scene as a deterritorialization of little Hans’ world. When Freud says that the dream or fantasy only symbolizes a scene of sexual intercourse, and the wish to posses his mother, he directs the expansive energy back to the family: Freud reterritorializes little Hans’ world. By replacing the assemblage Hans-park-sheep-rope (which connects Hans to the outside world) with Hans-mommy-dad-dy-sex (which connects his to the home, to Oedipus, and neurosis) Hans’ attempts to form an assemblage with the world is transformed into a symbolic, interior assemblage within himself. In a similar way, Hans’ descriptions of the horse’s halters and eye-shields will be reinterpreted into the family as daddy’s glasses and his mustache.
As we previously mentioned, Freud indeed noticed little Hans’ cartography but, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “only in order to project it back onto the family photo.” In schizo-analysis, there is an essential difference between a map and a trace: unlike the trace, a map is oriented toward experimentation in contact with reality. The map is open and has manifold entrances, whereas the trace “traces” a “destiny,” and unlike psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari claim, schizo- analysis rejects the idea of a predetermined trace. For schizo-analysis, this is seen as something dangerous, since it only reproduces impasses and blockages. “Look at what happened to Little Hans,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “they kept on breaking his rhizome and staining his map, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt.”
The map that Freud presents shows the immediate environment of the family house. Just opposite to their house is the warehouse of the Office for Taxation of Food-Stuffs, with a loading dock where carriages arrive all day long to pick up boxes and the like. Railings close off this yard toward the street. Hans was particularly afraid when carriages drove onto the yard and had to make a sharp turn. “I’m afraid the horses will fall down when the cart turns.” He was equally afraid when carriages standing by the loading dock suddenly were set in motion and drove away. He was more afraid of large dray-horses than small horses, more afraid of rough farm-horses than elegant ones. He was more afraid of a carriage driving by fast than horses trotting by slowly.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the only way for little Hans to get out of the family complex, after the fixation performed by Freud and the father, was to enter in a becoming-animal. But Hans did not imitate an animal, he did not pretend to be a horse or identify with a horse, but rather sought those affects that would transform him into a horse. Could he find those elements, that relation between rest and move- ment, those affects that turn a body into a horse? Is there an unknown assemblage that is neither little Hans nor the horse, but Hans’ becoming-horse, which would give him qualities allowing him to expand his territory? A body, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, are defined by its affects, and they give the tick as an example. The tick is defined by three affects only: it is attracted by light and seeks out the tip of the branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and it lets go of the branch when a mammal passes beneath; it digs into the mammal’s skin at the least hairy place where it sucks blood. The rest of the time it is asleep, undisturbed by what happens, sometimes even for years. For children, Deleuze and Guattari say, bodies are affective and not representative, as in psycho-analysis. A horse has eyes covered by cloth, it pulls heavy loads, trips over, rattles its legs, gets whipped, has a big widdler, etc. The affects are transformed within the assemblage “what a horse can do.”
By entering into a machinic assemblage we connect to the outside world, for instance the driver-car-shoe-pedal, or the man-lance-horse- stirrups. These assemblages come together and break up in a constant process of de- and reterritorialization, forming new rhizomes with the world while old ones are broken. That the assemblage would break and transform into a new assemblage is what scares little Hans - the moment when the carriages leave the loading dock: “I’m afraid of standing by the cart and the dart driving off quick, and of my standing on it and wanting to get on to the board (the loading dock) and my driving off in the cart.” What happens to the parts of an assemblage when it breaks up and deterritorializes? Little Hans’ body could be split up in two parts - one left on the loading board and the other in the carriage - which would mean that his body had reached the lowest limit of existence and had to die, just as the horse reached its limit when it tripped over and rattled its legs.
The father: “And if the cart stands still? Aren’t you afraid then? Why not?”
Hans: “If the cart stands still, then I can get on to the cart fast and get on to the board.”
The father: “Perhaps you’re afraid you won’t come home any more if you drive away in the cart?” Hans: “Oh no! I can always come back to Mommy, in the cart or in a cab. I can tell him the number of the house too.”
The father: “Then why are you afraid?”
Hans: “Because I’ve never been up there, and I would so much like to be there; and d’you know why I would like to be there; and d’you know why I would like to go there? Because I would like to load and unload the boxes, and I should like to climb about on the boxes there. I would so much like to climb about there. D’you know who I learnt climbing from? Some boys climbed on the boxes, and I saw them, and I want to do it too.”
Little Hans describes the loading board on the basis of a wish to inter into a new assemblage with the cart – the luggage – the board – and a function of this new body is “climbing.” Already when he saw the boys on the luggage he formed a rhizome with the carriages, the boys, and the luggage on the other side of the street. “There exist no other drives than the assemblages themselves.” Freud sees nothing but the father and the family in Hans’ becoming-animal. When he shows disgust for feces –“lumf” (his name for it) – the father and Freud figured out that the horse falling down and making noises with his legs was lumf falling down and producing a sound. The fear of heavy loaded carriages was the fear of a heavy loaded stomach and the fear of evacuating one’s bowels. Freud discovered an analogy between the carriage driving out through the gate and the way feces is let out of the body. Lumf in its turn is according to Freud only a symbol for the birth of Hans’ sister Hannah, all the carriages were in fact symbolic representations of pregnancy, and the fall of the horse was the delivery. So the horse was not only the dying father, but also the delivering mother. The circle was closed.
“A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.” In L'Anti-Oedipe two situations in a person’s life are pitted against each other - being out for a stroll, and being tied to one’s priest. The priest forces him to be situated in relation to the god of an established religion, to his mother and father. When he takes a stroll outside he is in the mountains, amidst snow flakes, with other gods or no gods at all, without family, without mother and father – with nature. He does not experience nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no difference between man and nature, the one is created in the other, and machines are connected. “The self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.”
Félix Guattari talks of singularities in a person’s life that may have unexpected consequences and enlarge his territory. He gives the example of a patient that had got stuck in a repetitive movement, walking round in circles. Suddenly one day, in a moment’s inspiration, he decided to take up driving again. Immediately a new territory of possibilities opened up, he resumed contact with old friends, drove to familiar places and regained his self-confidence.
Literature
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). Trans. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. X: Two Case Histories, trans. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955).
Felix Guattari, Les trois écologies (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989). The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar, P. Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).
Esther Da Costa Meyer “La Donna è Mobile: Agoraphobia, Women, and Urban Space,” in Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds.), The Sex of Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1996 ).
Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. Recent publications include Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State (2010), co-ed with Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and Neoliberalism: An Architectural History (2020). Forthcoming in 2023 is Architecture and Retrenchment: Aesthetics, Spatial Politics, and the Neoliberalization of the 1980s Welfare State.
