“Dreaming is work, you know – there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.” – Mitch Hedberg

What is probably the most fascinating thing about Deleuze and Guattari’s way of writing is the spatial vividity with which they literally build their concepts like organic sculptures. They place them in relationship to each other as suspended in a 3D space, taking form as they evolve from primitive solids into more sophisticated and combined abstract figures. In their last book What is philosophy?, almost a tutorial for designing philosophical interfaces, we can see this process clearly. The two French philosophers see what they do as creation rather than communication, and for this reason reading the first pages of the Anti-Oedipus can be at once confusing and liberating. But being the book a manifesto for schizoanalysis, this only makes it more consistent.
Schizoanalysis is meant as a materialist revolution of psychiatry, most notably negating the Oedipical triangulations (Father, Mother, Me) which, according to Sigmund Freud, structure the subconscious. The word “materialist” is not the first Marxian echo coming across the pages of the Anti-Oedipus, which together with its later and also very influential companion A Thousand Plateus forms a project entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”. The way these two terms intersect will be made more clear later.

First of all, unlike Freud, Deleuze and Guattari argue the subconscious is in perpetual creation, by means of desire, and that the schizo is the perfect point of view from which to understand the real process of production of man and nature, which are not opposed as in a dichotomy, but part of the same process of production. Such process incorporates the production of production (actions, passions), the production of recording processes (distributions, coordinates, points of reference), and the production of consumption (sensual pleasures, anxiety, pain). Man – the schizo in particular, through his desiring-production – is not opposed to nature and is both producer and product at the same time. Schizophrenia is “the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and nature’”. In other words, there are only flows and machines producing them.
Desiring-machines make us organisms, but at the same time they make us suffer for being organized in such a way, or at all. To Deleuze and Guattari the full body without organs is the total embracement of schizophrenia, the unproductive and unconsumable body belonging to the realm of antiproduction.

So, we have a production and an antiproduction. The former happens by way of the desiring-machines, while the latter is a sort of surface (Socius) on which all production is projected, “miraculated”, that is provided with a quasi-cause. This happens during the recording process, which we could call a process of abstraction when also a reason is given for all things to happen. Such reason can be God or capital, but in both cases it is equally divine (from here the use of the word “miraculated”). All production is then “legitimated” by means of such disjunction, and moved on what we could imagine as a sort of hovering and parcelled out plane.
There is still another process that I mentioned before, and that is consumption. Such process is only possible because of the emergence of somewhat of a subject from the recording process (as you might have guessed, it is just another abstract surcodification the schizo is lucky enough not to be a total victim of). Once we have the subject, sitting next to the desiring-machines, we can have consumption. The subject has some kind of a reward from this process, and the recording process makes it trace it back to the quasi-cause we mentioned before.

Being the subject the result of the friction between the desiring-machines attached to the body without organs, it can turn out to be very conflictual. The machines that affect it the most are the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, the former making it suffer as an organism and the latter tricking it into staying anchored on the recording surface, with all its delusional constructions (like Oedipus, for example). This type of subject shifts from state to state in a linear way, letting each state define it.
In some cases, another type of machine kicks in. It’s the celibate machine, which is some sort of compromise of good living, a “new alliance” between the desiring machines and the body without organs. Such machine allows the subject to be reborn with each and every state, experiencing delirium and intensities in a perpetual satisfaction. For this case Deleuze and Guattari make the examples of Judge Schreber, one of Freud’s mental patients, and of Friedrich Nietzsche as schizos and homini historia (because they are able to identify with all characters of history).

The schizo desires as a production of subconscious. Deleuze and Guattari consider desire as a lack to be an Idealistic and outdated conception, and instead argue desiring-production is also the only social production. But why is then the schizo, according to the French philosophers, a product of capitalism?
Capitalism, by decoding the recorded flows of symbols and constructions projected on the Socius, can set the desiring flows free even on such deterritorialized plane, making it closer to a body without organs. By disrupting the abstract structure of society (a few examples could be nation states, historical heritage, local laws) capitalism generates a flow of intensities. This happens while the capital is still doing the opposite, that is “miraculating” such recorded production as a quasi-cause, which makes this even more schizophrenic.
The modern day schizo is still convinced capital makes the world go round, and thus relates to it as an actual factor in the determination of his or her life, but at the same time is carried by it as in a stream whose speed and direction you can’t predict.

More than three decades after the Anti-Oedipus was published, schizophrenia has become a mandatory condition for the globalized urban citizen. We are more and more conscious of the ways we produce ourselves and our identity, but at the same time we are victims of the interfaces we use to create it.
From European bloggers to Central American gang members, we all give in to desire and imagination (which, according to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, has become a social practice). We shape an image of what we want to be, and proceed to adhere to it as much as possible. We do so not only by filling up detailed profiles on online social networks, but by choosing our clothes, interests, friends, colors, signals, slang. They no longer represent a vertical social hierarchy, but an horizontal cartography of imagined lives and shared customs. In the globalized world people flow like information, and those choices are metadata.

For some, choice is both the biggest liberty and the most pressing duty. The creative class praised by Third Wave theorists like Alvin Toffler and urban advisors like Richard Florida fractalises in niche markets and sub-subcultures, making a living (often barely) off ultra-targeted information. On the other hand, immigrants balkanize in gang-ridden slums, physically deterritorialized and also deterritorializing their imagined identity on a globalized recording surface. The Salvadorian gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 were born in American prisons, later to spread in Central America after the Salvadorians who founded them were deported and brought all the American gang signs, symbols and imagery to their home country. And at least according to YouTube, gangs with the same signals and language have been sprouting in the Philippines as well.
Even if for some imagining an identity is a professional choice and for others a mean to survive in extreme conditions, we’re all grasping towards that disrupted Socius while being carried away by a furious flow, which in both the body without organs and the globalized world is more important than us. We’re projecting ethnic, social, professional identities on a shared surface (movie and internet imagery, mostly American) miraculated by globalization, which gives us a quasi-cause to move and work, but ultimately leaves us more schizo than ever given the eventual limitedness of our choices.

To conclude by referring back to the Mitch Hedberg quote at the beginning: dreaming our identities is a full-time job, and not everybody gets much of a wage.