Towards a Radical Anti-​Capitalist Schizophrenia?

Inter­net shop­ping has entered main­stream cul­ture. Every major cor­por­a­tion in the world has a web site offer­ing product inform­a­tion, inter­act­ive advert­ise­ments, and, increas­ingly, the abil­ity to buy products on-​line. Dis­count books, pizza deliv­ery, stocks, and just about any­thing else you can ima­gine are avail­able for pur­chase in cyber­space. Inter­net based com­merce exem­pli­fies and extends the trends in cap­it­al­ism that this paper attempts to elu­cid­ate. In par­tic­u­lar, World Wide Web shop­ping accel­er­ates the rate at which a shop­per can acquire products. The only thing that sep­ar­ates an advert­ise­ment from a pur­chase is a couple of mouse clicks. My cent­ral con­ten­tion is that late cap­it­al­ism not only accel­er­ates the flow of cap­ital, but also accel­er­ates the rate at which sub­jects assume iden­tit­ies. Iden­tity form­a­tion is inex­tric­ably linked to the urge to con­sume, and there­fore the accel­er­a­tion of cap­it­al­ism neces­sit­ates an increase in the rate at which indi­vidu­als assume and shed iden­tit­ies. The inter­net is one of many late cap­it­al­ist phe­nom­ena that allow for more flex­ible, rapid, and prof­it­able mech­an­isms of iden­tity formation.

… What is meant by iden­ti­fic­a­tion? This pre­lim­in­ary ques­tion informs my dis­cus­sion of how iden­ti­fic­a­tion func­tions in the media sat­ur­ated world of late cap­it­al­ism and, more import­antly, the issue of how iden­tit­ies can be fostered that res­ist the logic of commodification.

1. Cap­it­al­ism and Schizophrenia

I focus my dis­cus­sion of iden­ti­fic­a­tion by com­par­ing two con­tra­dict­ory texts. The first is the ground­break­ing essay by Fre­dric Jameson, entitled, “Post­mod­ern­ism and Con­sumer Soci­ety” (1983). The second is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s con­tro­ver­sial book Anti-​Oedipus (1983). Jameson’s essay and Anti-​Oedipus present two dis­tinct per­spect­ives on how sub­jects form iden­tit­ies within late cap­it­al­ism. Although very dif­fer­ent, both texts approach iden­ti­fic­a­tion through an ana­lysis of schizo­phrenia and cap­it­al­ism. To fur­ther explore these two themes, I place these texts in con­ver­sa­tion with each other and with other texts that focus more nar­rowly on psy­cho­ana­lytic stud­ies of con­tem­por­ary visual culture.

Jameson asso­ci­ates post­mod­ern aes­thetic and cul­tural move­ments with the psy­cho­ana­lytic cat­egory of schizo­phrenia. Bor­row­ing from Lacan, Jameson defines schizo­phrenia as “the fail­ure of the infant to accede fully into the realm of speech and lan­guage” (Jameson 118). The schiz­oid neonate fails to fully acquire lan­guage, and as a res­ult can­not indi­vidu­ate, because the infant must enter into a social/​linguistic field to develop an ego. Jameson writes that:

schizo­phrenic exper­i­ence is an exper­i­ence of isol­ated, dis­con­nec­ted, dis­con­tinu­ous mater­ial sig­ni­fi­ers which fail to link up into a coher­ent sequence. The schizo­phrenic thus does not know per­sonal iden­tity in our sense, since our feel­ing of iden­tity depends on our sense of the per­sist­ence of the “I” and the “me” over time (119).

Accord­ing to Jameson, the schizo­phrenic lacks a per­sonal iden­tity, is unable to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between self and world, and is incap­able of exper­i­en­cing con­tinu­ity through time.

There are sev­eral reas­ons why Jameson asso­ci­ates these attrib­utes of schizo­phrenia with post­mod­ern­ism and late cap­it­al­ism. In many respects the media cul­ture of the late twen­ti­eth cen­tury sim­u­lates schiz­oid exper­i­ence. The rapid fire suc­ces­sion of sig­ni­fi­ers in MTV style media erodes the view­ers sense of tem­poral con­tinu­ity. To use the same words that Jameson uses to describe schizo­phrenic exper­i­ences, the images that flash across the MTV view­ers’ ret­ina are “isol­ated, dis­con­nec­ted, dis­con­tinu­ous mater­ial sig­ni­fi­ers which fail to link up into a coher­ent sequence.” This post­mod­ern mont­age can have the effect of dis­or­i­ent­ing the sub­ject, and may con­trib­ute to the ego­less­ness that is char­ac­ter­istic of schizophrenia..

Jameson is con­cerned that the emer­ging post­mod­ern art forms will lack the sub­vers­ive, crit­ical func­tion that mod­ern­ist art served. “[M]odernism was oppos­i­tional art,” asserts Jameson. It “did not go well with over­stuffed Vic­torian fur­niture, with Vic­torian moral taboos, or with the con­ven­tions of polite soci­ety” (123 – 124). As mod­ern­ism lost its sub­vers­ive nature and became can­on­ized (i.e. Picasso, Elliot, Sartre, etc.) it is unclear weather post­mod­ern­ism filled in as a rad­ical social/​political move­ment. By des­troy­ing the dis­tinc­tion between high and low art, post­mod­ern cul­ture was able to integ­rate itself into the cap­it­al­ist mass cul­ture. MTV can serve as our example once again. For all its sexual expli­cit­ness, MTV fails to shock, and con­trib­utes to cap­it­al­ist cul­ture more than it threatens it. Thus, Jameson con­cludes that “post­mod­ern­ism is closely related to… late cap­it­al­ism” (125). Where mod­ern­ism often attacked the bour­geois soci­ety from which it emerged, post­mod­ern­ism “rep­lic­ates… repro­duces… [and] rein­forces… the logic of con­sumer cap­it­al­ism” (125). Jameson leaves open the pos­sib­il­ity that “there is also a way in which [post­mod­ern­ism]… res­ists” the logic of cap­it­al­ism (125). Nev­er­the­less, he reveals his Marx­ist back­ground and mod­ern­ist lean­ings through his skep­ti­cism toward the polit­ical poten­tial of postmodernism.

Jameson links schizo­phrenia to post­mod­ern­ism, and post­mod­ern­ism to con­sumer cap­it­al­ism. He is say­ing, in effect, that con­tem­por­ary cap­it­al­ism has exten­ded the symp­toms of schizo­phrenia to the masses in the form of post­mod­ern cul­ture. His for­mu­la­tion sees both post­mod­ern­ism and schizo­phrenia as cul­tural forces that scramble and con­fuse. The schizo­phrenic con­fu­sion des­troys the pos­sib­il­ity of crit­ical per­spect­ives, such as those found in mod­ern­ist tra­di­tions. In a frag­men­ted cul­tural milieu, cap­it­al­ist, con­sumer cul­ture can thrive unop­posed. When Jameson dia­gnoses our cul­ture as schizo­phrenic, he is telling us that our cul­ture is not fully human. A schizo­phrenic cul­ture fails “to accede fully into the realm of speech and lan­guage.” (118) Like the schizo­phrenic, such a cul­ture is root­less, sep­ar­ated from his­tory, and out­side of “human time” (119).

Like Jameson, Deleuze and Guat­tari see cor­res­pond­ences between cap­it­al­ism and schizo­phrenia, although they con­cep­tu­al­ize the rela­tion­ship quite dif­fer­ently. This dif­fer­ence stems in part from the philo­sophies of the authors. Where Jameson is a Marx­ist with mod­ern­ist sym­path­ies, Deleuze and Guat­tari could be clas­si­fied as post­mod­ern­ist, or post­struc­tur­al­ist. Jameson would cer­tainly con­sider these author’s work to be part of (schizo­phrenic) post­mod­ern¹ cul­tural pro­duc­tion. Fur­ther­more, Jameson is a mod­ern­ist intel­lec­tual who stud­ies post­mod­ern­ism while Deleuze and Guat­tari can be described as post­mod­ern­ist the­or­ists. Thus, when Deleuze and Guat­tari dis­cuss the rela­tion­ship between schizo­phrenia and cap­it­al­ism, a post­mod­ern sens­ib­il­ity is always lurk­ing in the background.

Deleuze and Guat­tari react strongly against the Freu­dian and Lacanian treat­ment of schizo­phrenia. In char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally play­ful and com­bat­ive lan­guage they warn us of Freud’s dis­taste for the schizophrenic:

For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn’t like schizo­phren­ics. He doesn’t like their res­ist­ance to being oed­ip­al­ized, and tends to treat them more or less as anim­als. They mis­take words for things, he says. They are apathetic, nar­ciss­istic, cut off from real­ity, incap­able of achiev­ing trans­fer­ence; they resemble philo­soph­ers –“an undesir­able resemb­lance” (23).

Accord­ing to Deleuze and Guat­tari, Freud does not like the schizo­phrenic because s/​he is a dir­ect affront to Freud’s psy­cho­ana­lytic sys­tem. The schizo­phrenic has not developed an ego, or gone through the Oed­ipal pro­cess of indi­vidu­ation. Thus, the schiz­oid is “some­where else, bey­ond or behind or below” the Oed­ipal triad that is so cent­ral to Freu­dian ana­lysis (23). The schiz­oid has no “me” and hence does not have an uncon­scious that is pre­oc­cu­pied with the Oed­ipal drama of daddy, mommy, and me.

In attempts to cure schizo­phren­ics, Freu­dian psy­cho­ana­lysts have often tried to lead the schizo­phrenic down the road to ego form­a­tion, and nor­mal­ity. This has often meant for­cibly impos­ing the Oed­ipal cycle, which is sup­posedly char­ac­ter­istic of nor­mal psychic devel­op­ment. Melanie Klein is per­haps “the ana­lyst least prone to see everything in terms of Oed­ipus” (Deleuze and Guat­tari 45). Nev­er­the­less, even she was unre­mit­ting in her attempts to oed­ip­al­ize her psychotic patients. When a psychotic child named Dick came to see her for ther­apy she encour­aged him to play with toy trains. Deleuze and Guat­tari quote Kline’s first per­son account of the session:

I took the big train and put it beside a smal­ler one and called them ‘Daddy-​train’ and ‘Dick-​train.’ Thereupon he picked up the train I called ‘Dick’ and made it roll [toward the sta­tion].… I explained: ‘The sta­tion is mummy; Dick is going into mummy’ (qtd. in Deleuze and Guat­tari 45).

Kline’s state­ments ter­ri­fied the kid, caus­ing him to run into a closet to hide. Klein respon­ded to this by say­ing that “[i]t is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy” (45). No mat­ter what beha­vior the child exhib­ited, Klein imposed an Oed­ipal inter­pret­a­tion. The pur­pose of this treat­ment was to make the dis­join­ted and inco­her­ent beha­vior of the patient coalesce into a nor­mal (i.e. Oed­ipal) iden­tity formation.

Deleuze and Guat­tari see this kind of treat­ment as a form of ter­ror­ism. In the course of such treat­ment “[a]ll the chains of the uncon­scious are…linearized, sus­pen­ded from a des­potic sig­ni­fier (i.e. Oed­ipus)” (54). Indeed, they assert that schizo­phren­ics who are treated this way often digress into aut­ism, which has unfor­tu­nately been asso­ci­ated with schizo­phrenia. For Deleuze and Guat­tari, it is the ana­lyst and the psy­chi­at­ric ward that make the schiz­oid sick, and turn him/​her into a silent and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally unpro­duct­ive aut­ist. The healthy schiz­oid has an essen­tially pro­duct­ive (un)consciousness. S/​he does not fan­tas­ize. Instead, Deleuze and Guat­tari assert, s/​he pro­duces and makes the real.

This pro­duc­tion of the real is fun­da­ment­ally incon­gru­ent with Freu­dian and Lacanian mod­els of the uncon­scious. Freud and Lacan see the uncon­scious as sym­bolic, fantasy laden, and dra­matic ­­ filled with semi­otic puzzles and ancient Greek theater. Hence, for both authors desire is asso­ci­ated with lack. That is to say, desire desires that which is fan­tas­ized, repressed, wished for, or absent. Desire is engaged entirely with that which is lack­ing and needs to be rep­res­en­ted. Hence, “desire gives way to a rep­res­ent­a­tion” of that which is lack­ing ­­ the phal­lus, the Oed­ipal escapade, the ideal “I”, etc. (54). The schiz­oid, on the other hand, is incap­able of exper­i­en­cing lack. For him or her the uncon­scious is always pro­duct­ive and never fant­ast­ical. Desire itself pro­duces the real and cre­ates new worlds.

The Freu­dian uncon­scious is too unpro­duct­ive and oth­er­worldly to entice the schiz­oid into nor­mal­ity. It has noth­ing to offer the schiz­oid. Hence, the schiz­oid scrambles, decodes, and recon­fig­ures the psy­cho­ana­lytic dia­logue ­­ trans­fig­ur­ing sig­ni­fi­ers into the real, and refus­ing to be Oed­ip­al­ized. Schizo­phren­ics “escape cod­ing, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions…[they are]: orphans (no daddy-​mommy-​me), athe­ists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no ter­rit­or­ies)” (Seem xxi). Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo­phrenic will not be trapped by the power-​laden and des­potic webs of sig­ni­fi­ers that sat­ur­ate soci­ety and psy­cho­ana­lytic practice.

It is the schizoid’s abil­ity to scramble and decode that Deleuze and Guat­tari asso­ci­ate with con­tem­por­ary cap­it­al­ism. Like the schizo­phrenic, cap­it­al­ism can insert itself any­where and every­where as a decoder and scram­bler. Although,

[o]ur [cap­it­al­ist] soci­et­ies exhibit a marked taste for all codes, ­codes for­eign and exotic…this taste is destruct­ive and mor­bid. While decod­ing doubt­less means under­stand­ing and trans­lat­ing a code, it also means des­troy­ing the code as such, assign­ing it an archaic, folk­loric, or resid­ual func­tion (245).

Mobile, flex­ible cap­ital is cap­able of insert­ing itself into any cul­tural milieu. In coun­tries as dif­fer­ent as Japan, Brazil, France, and Kenya, cap­it­al­ism is able to take advant­age of the local sym­bolic order (Har­vey 1989). The forms that cap­it­al­ism takes in these vari­ous coun­tries reflect the sym­bolic order that the cap­it­al­ist machine has plugged into. Thus, Deleuze and Guat­tari do not char­ac­ter­ize the cap­it­al­ist machine as mono­lithic or unit­ary ­­ it does not have an “I”, an ego, or a uni­fied iden­tity. It works instead as a poly­morph­ous des­troyer of codes. It con­tinu­ally breaks down the cul­tural, sym­bolic, and lin­guistic bar­ri­ers that cre­ate ter­rit­or­ies and limit exchange. Thus, Deleuze and Guat­tari assert that “[c]ivilization is defined by the decod­ing and deter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion of flows in cap­it­al­ist pro­duc­tion” (244).

It would seem that Deleuze and Guat­tari are mak­ing a move sim­ilar to Jameson’s by assert­ing that schizo­phrenia resembles and is asso­ci­ated with the logic of late cap­it­al­ism. “Yet it would be a ser­i­ous error,” assert Deleuze and Guat­tari, “to con­sider the cap­it­al­ist flows and the schizo­phrenic flows as identical, under the gen­eral theme of… decod­ing” (244). Cap­it­al­ism “pro­duces schizos the same way it pro­duces Prell sham­poo or Ford cars” but the schizos are not sal­able. (245) Indeed, the schizo­phrenic is locked up in insti­tu­tions, and turned into a “con­fined clin­ical entity” (245). If the schizo­phrenic really exem­pli­fied the cul­ture of cap­it­al­ism, why aren’t schizos cel­eb­rated as her­oes and heroines in con­tem­por­ary cap­it­al­ist soci­ety? Deleuze and Guat­tari con­clude that:

schizo­phrenia is the exter­ior limit of cap­it­al­ism itself or the con­clu­sion of its deep­est tend­ency, but that cap­it­al­ism only func­tions on con­di­tion that it inhibit this tend­ency, or that it push back or dis­place this limit… Hence schizo­phrenia is not the iden­tity of cap­it­al­ism, but on the con­trary its dif­fer­ence, its diver­gence, and its death (246).

As cap­it­al­ism decodes and deter­rit­ori­al­izes it reaches a limit at which point it must arti­fi­cially reter­rit­ori­al­ize by aug­ment­ing the state appar­atus, and repress­ive bur­eau­cratic and sym­bolic regimes. The schizo­phrenic never reaches such a limit. S/​he res­ists such reter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion, just as s/​he res­ists the sym­bolic and des­potic ter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion of the oed­ip­al­iz­ing psychotherapist.

Thus, Deleuze and Guat­tari dis­agree with Jameson’s argu­ment that schizo­phrenia rein­forces and con­trib­utes to the hege­mony of cap­it­al­ism. Instead, Deleuze and Guat­tari see the schizo­phrenic as capitalism’s exterm­in­at­ing angel. For them the schizo is a rad­ical, revolu­tion­ary, nomadic wan­derer who res­ists all forms of oppress­ive power. They believe that rad­ical polit­ical move­ments should “learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oed­ipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to ini­ti­ate a rad­ical polit­ics of desire freed from all beliefs” (Seem xxi). Schizo­phrenic sens­ib­il­it­ies can replace ideo­lo­gical and dog­matic polit­ical goals with a rad­ical form of pro­duct­ive desire. This “desiring-​production” brings the uncon­scious into the real, and unleashes its rad­ical world-​making poten­tial. Pro­duct­ive desire need not be sol­ipsistic, and includes the “group psy­chosis” induced by rad­ical post­mod­ern artistic cre­ations and polit­ical move­ments. Neither is desiring-​production lim­ited to clin­ical schizo­phren­ics. Desiring-​production marks the schizo­phrenic poten­tial in every­one to res­ist the power of des­potic sig­ni­fi­ers and cap­it­al­ist reterritorialization.

Deleuze and Guat­tari see schizo­phrenia as a cent­ral part of a sub­vers­ive post­mod­ern polit­ics with the rad­ical poten­tial to bring down cap­it­al­ism. Jameson’s view could not be more dif­fer­ent. For him, post­mod­ern schizo­phrenic cul­ture “rep­lic­ates,” “repro­duces,” and “rein­forces” the logic of cap­it­al­ism (Jameson 125). How can we resolve this con­tra­dic­tion which trans­verses the divide between mod­ern­ism and post­mod­ern­ism and high­lights the fun­da­ment­ally dif­fer­ent polit­ical sens­ib­il­it­ies of these two groups? It is a con­tra­dic­tion which causes us to ques­tion how psy­cho­ana­lyt­ical con­cepts and cap­it­al­ism res­ist and rein­force each other. Most import­antly, it is a con­tra­dic­tion that informs our reac­tion and res­ist­ance to con­sumer cap­it­al­ist culture.

2. Iden­ti­fic­a­tion and Late Cap­it­al­ist Visual Culture

Hop­ing for some insight into a pos­sible res­ol­u­tion to this con­flict, I turn to Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Jean Laplanche. I use Lacan to show the import­ance that images play in the pro­cess of ego form­a­tion and iden­ti­fic­a­tion. Barthes’ work helps to extend this ana­lysis to cap­it­al­ist cul­ture. He explains how media images act as Lacanian mir­rors that cause iden­tity form­a­tions to be ideo­lo­gic­ally laden. Laplanche’s work adds a much needed tem­poral dimen­sion. Laplanche’s the­ory of time provides a tool for under­stand­ing the con­tem­por­ary accel­er­a­tion of visual cul­ture and its impact on identification.

Lacan’s concept of the mir­ror stage describes the pro­cess by which the schiz­oid, poly­per­verse infant first gains a sense of hav­ing a uni­fied iden­tity. Lacan asserts that this exper­i­ence of iden­tity form­a­tion “leads us to oppose any philo­sophy dir­ectly issu­ing from the Cogito” (1). The Cartesian concept of the self, groun­ded in the self-​evidence of the Cogito, assumes that the ego is pre­given, requires no form­a­tion pro­cess, exists before the world, and even goes so far as to posit the self as the ana­lytic pre­con­di­tion to the world’s exist­ence. Lacan’s work refutes this view by demon­strat­ing that the neonate is forced into a world of already exist­ing social and semi­otic struc­tures. The new­born must be inser­ted into this lin­guistic order and can only gain an ego in rela­tion to this order. As Jameson told us earlier, there is no “self”, “ego”, “I”, or “me” without language.

Per­haps the first semi­otic step­ping stone on the road to ego form­a­tion is the recog­ni­tion of one’s own reflec­tion: the “Ideal-​I”. Lacan describes the pro­cess whereby an infant first comes to recog­nize itself in a mir­ror. Before this point of iden­ti­fic­a­tion the child does not con­cep­tu­al­ize itself as a phys­ic­ally and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally bounded indi­vidual. If it is shown a mir­ror, it will not recog­nize itself, and will take little interest in the light boun­cing off the glass. This changes some­time after the infant’s sixth month when an iden­ti­fic­a­tion occurs. Iden­ti­fic­a­tion is “the trans­form­a­tion that takes place in the sub­ject when he assumes an image,” or imago (2). When the child recog­nizes its own image “the I is pre­cip­it­ated in a prim­or­dial form” which Lacan refers to as the “Ideal-​I” (2). In this way, ego form­a­tion begins with a mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion ­­ the neonate mis­takes itself for its reflection.

The reflec­tion is a “mirage” which rep­res­ents an “exter­i­or­ity in which…[the child’s] form is cer­tainly more con­stitu­ent than con­sti­tuted” (2). That is to say, the child’s image is merely a single com­pon­ent of the child’s being that met­onym­ic­ally rep­res­ents the child as a total­ity. The ideal­ity of the image “contrast[s] with the tur­bu­lent move­ments that the sub­ject feels to be anim­at­ing him” (2). The bounded and coher­ent sym­metry of the visual image, an image which serves as a (mis)representation of the child, is utterly incon­gru­ent with the poly­per­verse, schiz­oid nature of the little “hommelette.” Nev­er­the­less, the force of this mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion is undeni­able, and marks the estab­lish­ment of “a rela­tion between the organ­ism and its real­ity” (4). Thus, it is at the mir­ror stage that the neonate first real­izes that it is one object among many. At this point, it is able to com­pare the way the imago of it’s own body relates to other images in the exter­ior world.

The child is nor­mally exceed­ingly happy with its new imago ­­ often laugh­ing and smil­ing at the reflec­tion. The situ­ation changes how­ever, when the fic­tional nature of the imago becomes appar­ent to the child. The child begins to real­ize that the “Ideal-​I”, with which it was so jubil­ant to identify, is in fact incon­gru­ent with the child’s more com­plex con­sti­tu­tion. This res­ults in “the iden­ti­fic­a­tion with the imago of the coun­ter­part and the drama of prim­or­dial jeal­ousy” (5). That is to say, the child becomes ali­en­ated from the “Ideal-​I” and begins to see it as another, com­pet­ing sub­jectiv­ity. The love for the “Ideal-​I” gives way to jeal­ously and fear of com­pet­i­tion. This is the point at which humans first learn to desire the other, which in this case is the ideal­ized imago of ones own body. By link­ing desire with alter­ity, the child moves bey­ond the mir­ror stage into the world of “socially elab­or­ated situ­ations” that force the child to recon­cile its own ego with the desire of the other (i.e. that which is lack­ing), and social, lin­guistic, and sym­bolic constraint.

This is how Lacan explains ego form­a­tion and the sub­sequent iden­ti­fic­a­tion and ali­en­a­tion with ideal­ized (mis)representations. The story is use­ful in the present con­text for two reas­ons. First of all, it details how the schiz­oid comes to identify with an imago and devel­ops an ego. Secondly, the con­cep­tion of the mir­ror stage has been used extens­ively by media crit­ics to explain the force images have in the régime of con­sumer cap­it­al­ism. The mir­ror­ing that Lacan describes hap­pens when a woman looks at ideal­ized images in a fash­ion magazine, when a teen­ager stares at a poster of a rock star, or when the man on the street gazes up at the Marl­boro man on the bill­board. Such examples are omni­present in this media sat­ur­ated society.

Roland Barthes exper­i­ences the pleas­ure of the Lacanian mir­ror when he vis­its the cinema: “In the movie theater, how­ever far away I am sit­ting, I press my nose against the screen’s mir­ror, against that “other” image-​repertoire with which I nar­ciss­ist­ic­ally identify myself” (Barthes 348). Barthes’ short essay, “Leav­ing the Movie Theater,” illus­trates how visual cul­ture lures view­ers, pro­du­cing pleas­ure, but also com­mu­nic­at­ing and trans­mit­ting ideology.

I am glued to the rep­res­ent­a­tion [in the film]. The his­tor­ical sub­ject, like the cinema spec­tator I am ima­gin­ing, is also glued to ideo­lo­gical dis­course… the Ideo­lo­gical would actu­ally be the image-​repertoire of a period of his­tory, the Cinema of a soci­ety (348).

The viewer “nar­ciss­ist­ic­ally iden­ti­fies” with an image-​repertoire that defines the ideo­lo­gical con­tent of a period in his­tory. Barthes con­nects the pleas­ure of a Lacanian iden­ti­fic­a­tion with ideo­lo­gical indoc­trin­a­tion. Like all Lacanian iden­ti­fic­a­tions, this filmic exper­i­ence pro­duces a mis­recog­ni­tion. The view­ing sub­ject, “glued” to the screen, mis­takes him­self or her­self for an ideo­lo­gic­ally laden “image-​repertoire.” In this sense, the very pro­cess of ego form­a­tion rein­forces the logic of a cap­it­al­ist society.

Barthes implies that under­stand­ing the image-​repertoire of a soci­ety will elu­cid­ate the types of (ideo­lo­gic­ally laden) sub­ject form­a­tions pos­sible within that soci­ety. What, then, is the image-​repertoire of late cap­it­al­ist soci­ety? Paging through a fash­ion magazine such as Vogue or Elle, we encounter a vari­ety of rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent images: some mod­els are child-​like, some are butch, some are waifs, some are tat­tooed, some wear eleg­ant party dresses, some lounge in torn jeans. Clos­ing the magazine and tak­ing the TV remote in hand, we encounter a sim­ilar visual caco­phony. The viewer is encour­aged to identify with cops, thieves, surfers, busi­ness­men, princes, pau­pers, house wives, and ath­letes, to name but a few. Indeed, on MTV all of these char­ac­ters may make an appear­ance in the course of a two minute video. News­pa­pers, movies, bill­boards, and video games also offer a stun­ning array of images. Not only does each of these medi­ums con­tain a sur­pris­ingly var­ied image-​repertoire, but a late cap­it­al­ist sub­ject may encounter all of these medi­ums in a single day.

Thus, it is dif­fi­cult to isol­ate a par­tic­u­lar ideo­logy from the image-​repertoire of late cap­it­al­ism. What is notice­able is not the con­tent of the images but the effi­ciency and rapid­ity with which they are cir­cu­lated and con­sumed. Nev­er­the­less, to pro­mote con­sumer cap­it­al­ism the images must have some con­tent to cre­ate the pos­sib­il­ity for a mir­ror stage iden­ti­fic­a­tion. It is this iden­ti­fic­a­tion ­­with a model, ath­lete, or actor­­ that encour­ages the pur­chase of the product being pitched. In order for an advert­ise­ment in GQ to be suc­cess­ful, it must pro­voke an ego form­a­tion that makes the product integ­ral to the viewer’s iden­tity. This fra­gile ego form­a­tion must per­sist long enough for the GQ reader to pur­chase the product.

It is this com­mit­ment through time, depend­ent on a Lacanian ego form­a­tion, that is required for advert­ise­ments to suc­cess­fully entice people into buy­ing products. The schizo­phrenic would make a ter­rible shop­per, because s/​he “does noth­ing, since to have a pro­ject means to be able to com­mit one­self to a cer­tain con­tinu­ity over time” (Jameson 119 – 20). But, if the schizo­phrenic is a ter­rible shop­per, why is schizo­phrenic con­scious­ness asso­ci­ated with con­sumer cap­it­al­ism? This ques­tion forces us to con­sider the rela­tion­ship between tem­por­al­ity and iden­tity. Jean Laplanche’s recent work explores this theme, provid­ing us with a psy­cho­ana­lytic the­ory of temporality.

Fol­low­ing Freud, Laplanche asso­ci­ates the exper­i­ence of time with rhythm. It is through changes in excit­a­tion and the move­ment between pleas­ure and unpleas­ure that we develop our exper­i­ence of time. Laplanche quotes Freud: “Per­haps it [ the exper­i­ence of time] is the rhythm, the tem­poral sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quant­ity of stim­u­lus” (165). In my view, the “rhythm” of con­sumer cap­it­al­ism is defined by the “flick­er­ing” (Bur­gin 10 – 11) images of the mass media. As the word “flick­er­ing” sug­gests, in late cap­it­al­ist soci­et­ies the rhythm that con­sti­tutes tem­por­al­ity is extremely rapid. How does this his­tor­ic­ally spe­cific rhythm influ­ence the form­a­tion and dis­sol­u­tion of identities?

Laplanche links tem­por­al­ity and iden­ti­fic­a­tion with the concept of “de-​translation” and “re-​translation.” The pro­cess of de-​translation is char­ac­ter­ized by “the split­ting up of sig­ni­fy­ing sequences,” that causes an indi­vidual to ques­tion his or her cur­rent iden­tity (171). The psy­cho­ana­lyst stim­u­lates de-​translation in the ana­lysand, so that s/​he can develop an altern­at­ive, and, they hope, less repress­ive, iden­tity. This pro­cess works because “the indi­vidual has only too great a tend­ency to recom­pose a unity, to re-​translate, to recast a syn­thetic vis­ion of him­self and his future” (171). It is this pro­cliv­ity to “recom­pose a unity” that allows the indi­vidual to pro­ject an iden­tity into the future.

Hence the exper­i­ence of time, defined by Laplanche as rhythm, is cre­ated through the con­tinual pulse of de-​translation and re-​translation. De-​translation requires a tem­poral dis­con­tinu­ity which pro­duces a re-​translation. Thus, in Laplanche’s terms, time’s rhythm is marked by the cease­less pulse of de-​translation and re-​translation. Re-​translation pro­duces a tem­poral com­mit­ment, and de-​translations allow that same com­mit­ment to be revised or replaced. This dual rela­tion proves essen­tial to the work­ings of con­sumer cap­it­al­ism. It allows an indi­vidual to identify with an advert­ise­ment (re-​translation), and pro­ject an iden­tity into the future that requires the pur­chase of a product. Sim­ul­tan­eously, other advert­ise­ments will bom­bard the viewer, “split­ting up sig­ni­fy­ing sequences (de-​translation),” and cre­at­ing the pos­sib­il­ity for fresh iden­tity form­a­tions (re-​translation).

In Lacanian terms, con­sumer cap­it­al­ism needs sub­jects who con­tinu­ally reen­act the infant­ile drama of mir­ror stage iden­ti­fic­a­tions. These sub­jects must oscil­late quickly between schizo­phrenic con­scious­ness and ideal­ized ego form­a­tions. Laplanche’s concept of trans­la­tion adds a tem­poral dimen­sion to this ana­lysis, show­ing how the rhythm defined by the cap­it­al­ist media con­tinu­ally renews the pro­cess of iden­tity form­a­tion and dis­sol­u­tion. Laplanche’s work leads me to a con­clu­sion that Laplanche never drew him­self. I assert that the increas­ingly rapid rate at which images are dis­trib­uted and con­sumed in late cap­it­al­ism neces­sit­ates a cor­res­pond­ing increase in the rate that indi­vidu­als assume and shed iden­tit­ies. Because advert­ise­ments link iden­tity with the need to pur­chase products, the accel­er­a­tion of visual cul­ture pro­motes the hyper-​consumption asso­ci­ated with late capitalism.

Put dif­fer­ently, cap­it­al­ism needs schizo­phrenia, but it also needs egos. The con­tra­dic­tion is resolved through the accel­er­a­tion of the tem­poral rhythm of late cap­it­al­ist visual cul­ture. This type of accel­er­a­tion encour­ages weak egos that are eas­ily formed, and fade away just as eas­ily. An essen­tially schizo per­son can have a quick ego form­a­tion, and buy a new ward­robe to com­pli­ment his or her new iden­tity. This iden­tity must be quickly for­saken as styles change, and con­tra­dict­ory media images bar­rage the individual’s psyche. The per­son becomes schizo again, pre­pared for another round of Lacanian iden­ti­fic­a­tion and cata­logue shop­ping. The “Ideal-I“s that the cap­it­al­ist media offer are per­haps even less com­plex than the infant­ile imago of the child’s own reflec­tion. Need­less to say, such an ego wears out fast, inspir­ing the con­sumer to shop around for another one.

The accel­er­a­tion of the pro­cess of de-​translation and re-​translation has neces­sit­ated new modes of shop­ping. The con­sumer must be able to make a pur­chase before one fra­gile iden­tity is replaced by another. Late cap­it­al­ist soci­ety has seen the emer­gence of numer­ous tech­niques to make pur­chases more instant­an­eous: the global accept­ance of the credit card, cata­logue shop­ping, infomer­cials, the home shop­ping net­work, and the emer­ging Internet-​based com­merce. As I men­tioned at the begin­ning of this essay, com­puter based shop­ping makes pur­chas­ing as easy as double click­ing on the image of the product you want. In this instance, an iden­tity form­a­tion would only need to last 10 seconds to suc­cess­fully engender a pur­chase. When the pro­cess of iden­ti­fic­a­tion becomes this rapid, it closely resembles the inab­il­ity to identify that char­ac­ter­izes schizophrenia.

The sim­il­ar­ity between rapid fire iden­ti­fic­a­tions and schizo­phrenia elu­cid­ates Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that schizo­phrenia is “the very limit of cap­it­al­ism” (35). If we under­stand the word “limit” in its math­em­at­ical sense, we see that the accel­er­a­tion of visual cul­ture aims to pro­duce a sub­ject that approaches, but does not reach, a truly schizo­phrenic state. In this respect, Jameson is cor­rect to be con­cerned that post­mod­ern­ism and schizo­phrenia rein­force, instead of res­ist, con­sumer cap­it­al­ism. Yet, Deleuze and Guat­tari are quick to point out that if the schizo­phrenic flow trans­gresses a cer­tain limit, ego iden­ti­fic­a­tion becomes impossible alto­gether. In this scen­ario, the urge to buy would be utterly defused, and cap­it­al­ism would become impossible.

Des­pite the allure of Deleuze and Guattari’s revolu­tion­ary schizo­phrenic, it is ques­tion­able how such a fig­ure could oppose cap­it­al­ism. The clin­ic­ally schizo­phrenic live miser­able and sol­ipsistic lives. Although they do not con­trib­ute to the hyper-​consumption of late cap­it­al­ism, they can hardly be called revolu­tion­ary. Of course, Deleuze and Guat­tari do not pro­pose that we should actu­ally strive to become schizo­phrenic. Rather, they feel that we can learn from the schizophrenic’s abil­ity to escape the fas­cism of des­potic sig­ni­fi­ers. But how can we learn from the schizophrenic’s abil­ity to de-​translate oppress­ive tech­no­lo­gies of iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and still retain our sanity?

Deleuze and Guat­tari think that the schizo­phrenic can teach us to res­ist the psy­cho­ana­lytic asso­ci­ation of desire and lack. It is this asso­ci­ation, Deleuze and Guat­tari con­tend, that pre­vents desire from becom­ing an essen­tially pro­duct­ive fac­ulty. For these authors, “[d]esire does not lack any­thing; it does not lack its object” (26). Indeed, “[t]he object­ive being of desire is the Real in and of itself” (27). These asser­tions are para­dox­ical because they cri­ti­cize psy­cho­ana­lytic the­ory using its own tech­nical lan­guage. Within the con­text of psy­cho­ana­lytic lan­guage, the idea that desire pro­duces the Real is com­pletely ridicu­lous. If the clin­ical schizo­phrenic acts as if desire pro­duces the Real for psy­cho­ana­lysts it is only because s/​he is delu­sional and com­pletely isol­ated from the Real. ²

Nev­er­the­less, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a pro­duct­ive uncon­scious has value if one moves out­side the stric­tures of psy­cho­ana­lytic the­ory. In con­tem­por­ary soci­ety, there are polit­ical act­ors who embody Deleuze and Guattari’s vis­ion of the rad­ical schizo­phrenic. Who are these schizos? Or as Deleuze asks else­where, “Who are our nomads today, our real Niet­zcheans?” (Deleuze 20). Three groups, I believe, prac­tice a desire that is divorced from the concept of acquis­i­tion and lack: con­tem­por­ary queer act­iv­ists and the­or­ists, Slack­ers, and post­mod­ern artists. I con­clude by eval­u­at­ing these move­ments in par­tic­u­lar, and schizo­phrenic polit­ics in general.

3. A Rad­ical Anti-​Capitalist Schizophrenia?

Among queer the­or­ists, Judith Butler’s concept of per­form­at­ive polit­ics is com­pat­ible with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desiring-​production. She iden­ti­fies “queer” polit­ics as a milieu that uses desire as an essen­tially pro­duct­ive force. But­ler refers to,

tra­di­tions of cross-​dressing, drag balls, street walk­ing, butch-​femme spec­tacles… die-​ins by ACT UP, kiss-​ins by Queer Nation; drag per­form­ance bene­fits for AIDS… the con­ver­gence of the­at­rical work with the­at­rical act­iv­ism; per­form­ing excess­ive les­bian sexu­al­ity and icon­o­graphy that effect­ively coun­ters the desexu­al­iz­a­tion of the les­bian; tac­tical inter­rup­tions of pub­lic for­ums by les­bian and gay act­iv­ists in favor of draw­ing pub­lic atten­tion and out­rage to the fail­ure of gov­ern­ment fund­ing of AIDS research and out­reach. (233)

In these examples the bor­der between per­form­ance and polit­ics is blurred or erased. As this bor­der erodes, so does the sep­ar­a­tion of desire and the Real. Kiss-​ins and excess­ive dis­plays of les­bian sexu­al­ity cel­eb­rate pre­cisely that which is not lack­ing: homo-​erotic affec­tion and desire. In these instances, desire is not defined by lack. Instead, we encounter a pos­it­ive con­cep­tion of desire that is cap­able of pro­du­cing sub­vers­ive polit­ics. It is desiring-​production, and not “iden­tity polit­ics,” that is essen­tial to the sub­vers­ive polit­ics that But­ler describes.

Queer polit­ical prac­tice is prob­ably the most fruit­ful use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rad­ical schizo­phrenic. Fur­ther­more, other late cap­it­al­ist sub­jects have also man­aged to sep­ar­ate desire and lack. One example is the “Slacker” phe­nom­ena. These media-​savvy youth con­sume the accel­er­ated visual cul­ture of late cap­it­al­ism, yet do not develop ego form­a­tions that res­ult in con­sumer shop­ping. It is as if the light and sound from the tele­vi­sion is suf­fi­cient to sati­ate their desire. Actual products become super­flu­ous ­­ the media itself is the final object of con­sump­tion. This refusal to con­sume defuses the cap­it­al­ist media’s efforts to accel­er­ate the pro­cess of iden­tity formation/​dis­sol­u­tion and cap­ital accu­mu­la­tion. Although hardly revolu­tion­ary, the Slacker’s refusal to identify may facil­it­ate “forms of com­munity that are played out over and above the logic of com­mod­ity exchange” (Dur­kee 1995).

The final schizo­phrenic sub­ject I will address is the post­mod­ern artist. Accord­ing to Martha Rosler, these artists pro­duce “quo­ta­tional work” that appro­pri­ates mater­ial from diverse sources often based on advert­ising images from the dom­in­ate pop­u­lar cul­ture (Rosler 73). Warhol’s soup cans, Liechtenstein’s “car­toons,” Duchamp’s ready-​mades, and Koons’ Michael Jack­son statue are all examples of this form of appro­pri­ational or quo­ta­tional work. Such work can poten­tially pro­duce a schizo­phrenic con­scious­ness for art view­ers by dis­so­ci­at­ing advert­ising images from con­sumer products. By trans­form­ing media images into “isol­ated, dis­con­nec­ted, dis­con­tinu­ous mater­ial sig­ni­fi­ers,” these artists make iden­ti­fic­a­tion more dif­fi­cult (Jameson 119). Such work mag­ni­fies the schizo­phrenic tend­en­cies inher­ent in cap­it­al­ism, threat­en­ing to trans­gress what Deleuze and Guat­tari call the schizo­phrenic “limit of cap­it­al­ism” (246). If this limit is trans­gressed, an advert­ise­ment can no longer func­tion as a Lacanian mir­ror. Instead, it will be con­sumed as art, and the con­sumer product will be for­got­ten altogether.

Finally, Jameson’s ques­tion remains: Can schizo­phrenic social move­ments be effect­ive at res­ist­ing the logic of late cap­it­al­ism? The three polit­ical and cul­tural move­ments of queer act­iv­ists, slack­ers, and post­mod­ern artists, sug­gest that a schizo­phrenic atti­tude can effect some level of res­ist­ance. Yet, these same examples also high­light the lim­its of a schizo­phrenic polit­ical prac­tice. Queer polit­ical move­ments have been quite suc­cess­ful at sub­vert­ing and chal­len­ging het­ero­sex­ist norms. More work needs to be done, how­ever, to make this move­ment more than just oppos­i­tional, sub­vers­ive, and shock­ing. What pos­it­ive polit­ical vis­ion do we have for a world where two men kiss­ing in pub­lic is no longer shock­ing? This lack of a pos­it­ive polit­ical vis­ion is more evid­ent in Slacker cul­ture. Although, “slack­ing off may pro­duce end­less local instances of non­com­mod­i­fied social rela­tions, it can­not envi­sion modes of asso­ci­ation that truly challenge…economic struc­tures” (Dur­kee 1995). These youth may not con­trib­ute to cap­it­al­ism, but they do not mount a chal­lenge to it, either. Post­mod­ern artistic pro­duc­tion encoun­ters sim­ilar prob­lems. Rosler is skep­tical about the “altern­at­ive vis­ion [that] is sug­ges­ted by such work…We are not provided the space within the work to under­stand how things might be dif­fer­ent” (Rosler 72). The idea of a dif­fer­ent, bet­ter soci­ety is absent or under­developed in these examples of schizo­phrenic cul­tural and polit­ical movements.

Return­ing to Laplanche’s ana­lysis, we can say that Deleuze and Guattari’s revolu­tion­ary schizo­phrenic is skilled at effect­ing “de-​translations.” This is neces­sary in a soci­ety dom­in­ated by het­ero­sex­ist, racist, colo­ni­al­ist, and sex­ist norms. As I have argued, schizo­phrenic acts of de-​translation may also be some­what effect­ive for res­ist­ing increas­ingly flex­ible and accel­er­ated modes of cap­ital accu­mu­la­tion. Yet, for Laplanche, de-​translation is fol­lowed by “a tend­ency to recom­pose a unity”(179). This is impossible a pri­ori for schizo­phrenic move­ments. Nev­er­the­less, new unit­ies can prove to be polit­ic­ally stra­tegic and socially bene­fi­cial. Laplanche ima­gines “a new syn­thesis of trans­la­tion… that is less par­tial, less repress­ive, less symp­to­matic” (171). In polit­ical terms, this new trans­la­tion evokes a vis­ion of a soci­ety that is more inclus­ive. It also replaces a schizo­phrenic refusal to identify, with a dir­ect­ive to form iden­tit­ies that oppose those offered by the cap­it­al­ist media.

I am not pro­pos­ing that the unity pro­duced by re-​translations is polit­ic­ally super­ior to schiz­oid de-​translations. Instead, I encour­age rad­ical people to explore the polit­ical pos­sib­il­it­ies of both de-​transitional and re-​transitional stances. Advert­ising has suc­cess­fully used both these strategies to accel­er­ate iden­tity formation/​dissolution and, by exten­sion, con­sumer cap­it­al­ism. There is no reason that rad­ical groups could not use sim­ilar meth­ods to chal­lenge cap­it­al­ism and develop altern­at­ive col­lect­ive iden­tit­ies. The con­tem­por­ary focus on crit­ical and decon­struct­ive social the­ory offers fer­tile ground for pos­it­ive and col­lect­ive re-​translations. The fear of unity, although under­stand­able, can be lim­it­ing to rad­ical polit­ical move­ments. The unity pro­duced by re-​translations are not neces­sar­ily oppress­ive, espe­cially if these moments of unity are peri­od­ic­ally dis­rup­ted and re-​configured by schizo­phrenic out­breaks. A suc­cess­ful con­tem­por­ary polit­ics has stakes in defin­ing the rhythmic flow between schizo­phrenic and iden­ti­fic­at­ory impulses. Hope­fully, altern­at­ive rhythms can chal­lenge, or at least syn­co­pate, the accel­er­at­ing rhythm of late capitalism.

Spe­cial thanks to Vic­tor Bur­gin, Gabe Brahm, and Lor­raine Kahn.

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This work is licensed under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-​Noncommercial-​Share Alike 3.0 License. Ori­gin­ally pub­lished as: ‘Cap­it­al­ism and Schizo­phrenia: Con­tem­por­ary Visual Cul­ture and the Accel­er­a­tion of Iden­tity Formation/​Dissolution’ Neg­a­tions vol 1 no 1 (1996).

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