Saturday 18 January 2014

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo written by Abida younas

, DeLillo’s Cosmopolis deals with rampant consumerism, power, money and depressing effect of technology on postmodern world. It tells a tale of twenty eight years old packer, a billionaire, who makes up his mind to cross through Manhattan street to get cut of hair. He drives in his stretch limo, which is highly spacious, technical and seem as luxurious office. His limo has computer and television screens through which he observed the outer world.
Packer’s voyage is disturbed by various events of the day. He is obstructed by traffic jam which is caused by the visit of president in the town, anti-capitalist revolution, and a funereal of Sufi star. On the way, he also has several sexual encounters with his wife and with other women. As the day passed, the protagonist, packer loses large amount of money by betting against the rise of yen.

Cosmopolis set in the near future. Therefore it narrates the story of our time, the time of global media which is run by corporation. Packer relieves his wealth by gambling against the yen just to reduce his own economy. 

Friday 17 January 2014

Consumer society: Myths and Structures by Jean Baudrillard written by Saima Yasin


Introduction:
Translator introduces the reader with the key thinkers as influence for Baudrillard to write the book. First influence is Marx and Marxism which goes parallel with the Jean Baudrillard’s consumer society; myths and structures. The important role accorded to Marx and his ideas, especially commodities and their use-value and exchange-value, is interesting in light The Mirror of Production (1973/1975) and move progressively away from a Marxian perspective. For Marx, the primary place of capitalism is in the structure of the means of production and the relations of the
production. (Mirror of Production. 10). M arx shifted the center toward the "real" act of the production and the/ consumption of products, But for Baudrillard, in both cases the real logic is the same : it is the investment of things with value ; it is the placing of a sign
on a thing and the logic of this process of signification is the true essence of capital.

Émile Durkheim is a second classical theorist whose ideas had a profound influence on the book. From Durkheimian perspective consumption is not seen as from of an enjoyment or pleasure, but rather as something which is institutionalized, forced upon us, a duty. Baudrillard focuses his attention on collective phenomena, on Durkheimian social facts. Indeed, he describes consumption in very Durkheimian terms as `collective behaviour', `something enforced, a morality, an institution', and `a whole system of values'. According to Durkheim and Baudrillard production, like consumption, is viewed as a collective phenomenon. Thus, the pressure towards individualization in modern consumption is seen as being at odds with the nature of both production and consumption.
Another major modern theorist of influence in The Consumer Society is Thorstein Veblen,  his pioneering work on consumption, his famous concept of conspicuous consumption. Baudrillard not only usefully employs the notion of conspicuous consumption, but also spins off some interesting ideas of his own from it. For example, while the middle classes continue to engage in conspicuous consumption, the elites may engage in new forms of inconspicuous consumption in order to create new and more subtle differences between themselves and the rest of society. Baudrillard examines the `benevolence' of things like advertisements where a `free' television programme is offered in exchange for a few minutes of commercials. He sees this and things like it as conspicuous displays of disinterestedness.
 In heart of The Consumer Society Baudrillard argues for the study of signs, structural relations, the code and, more generally, unconscious social logic.
Consumption:
To Baudrillard, consumption is not merely a frenzy of buying a profusion of commodities, a function of enjoyment, an individual function, liberating of needs, fulfilling of the self, affluence, or the consumption of objects. Consumption is an order of significations in a `panoply' of objects; a system, or code, of signs; `an order of the manipulation of signs'; the manipulation of objects as signs; a communication system (like a language); a system of exchange (like primitive kinship); a morality, that is a system of ideological values; a social function; a structural organization; a collective phenomenon; the production of differences; `a generalization of the combinatorial processes of fashion`; isolating and individualizing; an unconscious constraint on people, both from the sign system and from the socio-economico-political system; and a social logic.

Baudrillard tries to relate the two theoretical perspectives in the book, there are two entangled social orders -- the order of production and the order of consumption.

For Baudrillrad consumption is structure that is external to and coercive over individuals.  Consumption is a system of codification and leads people to false idea of happiness and libration. In postmodern era every object has become a consumption and we are involved in consumption of a consumption. There is a insatiable need of consumption of consumption. from a structural perspective, what we consume is signs (messages, images) rather than commodities. This means that consumers need to be able to `read' the system of consumption in order to know what to consume. Commodities are no longer defined by their use, but rather by what they signify. And what they signify is defined not by what they do, but by their relationship to the entire system of commodities and signs. There is an infinite range of difference available in this system and people therefore are never able to satisfy their need for commodities, for difference. There is a sense that there is a series of structures that, in playing out their nature and relationship to one another, produce the consumer society.

The world of consumption is treated like a mode of discourse, a language  As a language, consumption is a way in which we converse and communicate with one another. Once we think of consumption as a language, we are free to deploy the whole panoply of tools derived from structural linguistics including sign, signifier, signified and code. As a result, instead of Marxian use-values and exchange-values, consumables become sign-values.


The Formal Liturgy of the Object
1: Profusion
humans of the postmodern age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather-- on a rising statistical curve -- with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages. This runs from the very complex organization of the household, with its dozens of technical slaves, to street furniture and the whole material machinery of communication; from professional activities to the permanent spectacle of the celebration of the object in advertising and the hundreds of daily messages from the mass media.

In this age we are becoming functional. We live by object time: We have to describe these objects as we see and experience them, never forgetting, in their splendour and profusion, that they are the product of a human activity and are dominated not by natural ecological laws, but by the law of exchange-value.

Profusion, piling high, stacking are clearly the most striking descriptive features of this consumer society. Markets, shops showcase bundle of things filling with neon lights unable to fill the insatiable need to own these objects. Consumers are tempted by various tactics on bonus, % off, buy one get one free, every object if available in cluster, nothing alone. And this changes the consumer's relation to the object: he no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. The shop-window, the advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name, which here plays a crucial role, impose a coherent, collective vision, as though they were an almost indissociable totality, a series. This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations.

The Miraculous Status of Consumption
`Affluence' is, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness. The satisfactions which the objects themselves confer are the equivalent of the fake aircraft. In everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle. Consumer goods thus present themselves as a harnessing of power, the profusion of goods is felt as a blessing of nature, as a manna, a gift from heaven, manipulated by the order of consumption.

The usage of signs is always ambivalent. Its function is always a conjuring -- both a conjuring up and a conjuring away: causing something to emerge in order to capture it in signs (forces, reality, happiness, etc.) and evoking something in order to deny and repress it. consumption of images, of facts, of information aims also to conjure away the real with the signs of the real, to conjure away history with the signs of change.

Talking about world of communication, mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality. we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, we can’t distinguish ourself from the fake world. The image, the sign, the message all these things we `consume’ represent our tranquility consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real.

the praxis of consumption. The consumer's relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility -- nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity. On the same pattern, we can say that the dimension of consumption as we have defined it here is not one of knowledge of the world, nor is it one of total ignorance: it is the dimension of misrecognition.

The Vicious Circle of Growth
Consumer society is not characterized merely by the rapid growth of individual expenditure. It is also accompanied by the growth of expenditure met by third parties for the benefit of private individuals, the purpose of some of this being to reduce the inequality of the distribution of resources. But this `redistribution' has little effect on social discrimination at all levels. As for inequality of standards of living, comparison of the two studies on family budgets made in 1956 and 1965 shows no reduction in the discrepancies.

Environmental Nuisance
The advances of production, of the possession of ever more goods and individual and collective amenities have been accompanied by increasingly serious `environmental nuisances' which are obviously a consequence of industrial development and technical progress, and of the very structures of consumption.


Part II: The Theory of Consumption
4: The Social Logic of Consumption

The Egalitarian Ideology of Weil-Being
Happiness is made measurable in order to perform a distinctive function, to register in a consumer society. It becomes measured in accordance to the egalitarian ideal that equal amounts will be distributed, but this is just an alibi. This measuring of happiness rules out immeasurable inner happiness, and only accepts as happiness that which can be displayed, signified. We accept this change because it promises a means to legislated equality.

The "right" to happiness signifies the disappearance of actual enjoyment of happiness. Just as the right to clean air indicates clean air’s manufactured scarcity. Capitalism systematically turns natural values into rights, or commodities, which enable economic profit and mark social privilege.

Affluence is creating new examples of shortage: shortages of space and time, fresh air, greenery, water, silence. Certain goods, which were once free and abundantly available, are becoming luxuries accessible only to the privileged, while manufactured goods or services are offered on a mass scale.

Consumption, like the education system, is a class institution: not only is there inequality before objects in the economic sense (the purchase, choice and use of objects are governed by purchasing power and by educational level, which is itself dependent upon class background, etc.) --in short, not everyone has the same objects, just as not everyone has the same educational chances--but, more deeply, there is radical discrimination in the sense that only some people achieve mastery of an autonomous, rational logic of the elements of the environment (functional use, aesthetic organization, cultural accomplishment). Such people do not really deal with objects and do not, strictly speaking, `consume', whilst the others are condemned to a magical economy, to the valorization of objects as such, and of all other things as objects (ideas, leisure, knowledge, culture): this fetishistic logic is, strictly, the ideology of consumption.




5: Towards a Theory of Consumption
 Man `endowed' with wants or needs which `lead' him towards objects which `give' him satisfaction. Since man is, nonetheless, never satisfied, the story of Affluent society begins over and over again, with the sterile self-evidence of old fables.

The system of needs is the product of the system of production. By system of needs, we mean that needs are not produced one by one, in relation to the respective objects, but are produced as consumption power, as an overall propensity within the more general framework of the productive forces. following genealogy of consumption is traced:

1 The order of production produces the machine/productive force, a technical system radically different from the traditional tool.
2 It produces capital/rationalized productive force, a rational system of investment and circulation, radically different from `wealth' and from earlier modes of exchange.
3 It produces waged labour power, an abstract, systematized productive force, radically different from concrete labour and the traditional `workmanship'.
4 And so it produces needs, the system of needs, demand/productive force as a rationalized, integrated, controlled whole, complementary to the three others in a process of total control of the productive forces and production processes. Needs as a system are also radically different from enjoyment and satisfaction. They are produced as system elements, not as a relationship of an individual to an object (just as labour power no longer has anything to do with--and even denies--the worker's relation to the product of his labour, and just as exchange-value no longer has anything to do with concrete, personal exchange, or the commodity form with real goods, etc.).

According to Baudrillard, consumers are not passive victims, but actors within a social system that is perpetuated by the use of it, no matter for what end. Consumption, and its attendant social system, survive as a language, which consumers choose to speak through, perpetuating it. Consumption “is directly and totally collective.” “When we consume, we never do it on our own (the isolated consumer is the carefully maintained illusion of the ideological discourse on consumption). Consumers are mutually implicated, despite themselves, in a general system of exchange and in the production of coded values.” Consumption “assures a certain type of communication” in society; failure to communicate would be regarded by others in this context as anti-social. Needs are like symptoms in a hypochondriac, a hysteric. There is no necessary connection between need/symptom and object/body; just an arbitrary one. The “need” is an unfulfillable desire for distinction; it has nothing to do with pleasure, except for maybe the denial of pleasure. Pleasure is the rational end, not the objective, it is a constraint, a compulsion, a social imperative without which one becomes anti-social, inexplicable, alien and scary. This is “fun morality,” which mandates a universal curiosity and a complete exploitation of things according to the rules for extracting pleasure.

Credit is one means of socializing groups to the fun morality; it prevents their having an excuse for not participating. Finally, consumption helps atomize the individual, enhancing social control and legitimizing an increase of bureaucracy which circumscribes the freedom simultaneously offered within the system. So one is urged to consume, and then urged to accept the social responsibility inherent in the consumption. The world of goods treats consumers as a group in order to classify them into different statuses, but the individuals within the group feel no collective impulse; have no sense of being a part of a group – so the process is impervious to collective resistance. The individual feels his voice as a consumer is strong and powerful as long as he is consuming; if he refused to consume, he would be stripped of the power/pleasure afforded him – this is even more true of women, who are constituted as subjects primarily by consuming in the early days of commodity capitalism. This explains why consumerism is embraced and accepted early on, it shows what task culture performs; illustrating the “power” of the “freedom” of consumer choice; illustrating the “autonomy” one has over her own experience of pleasure (when in fact such pleasure is less autonomous, more dependent, or at least as dependent on the social system that classifies and neutralizes the individual).

The Logistical Function of the Individual
The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products. The system needs people as workers (wage labour), as savers (taxes, loans, etc.), but increasingly it needs them as consumers. Where the individual as such is required and is practically irreplaceable today is as a consumer.

6: Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference
Advertising: the industrial production of differences, the production of the system of consumption. This creates the individual’s goal of “personalization” through seeking out smallest marginal differences. “All men are equal before objects as use-value, but they are by no means equal before objects as signs and differences, which are profoundly hierarchical” – that sums up conspicuous consumption’s logic, and why that logic is rigorously reproduced – it allows not only for individuals to compete for distinction, but also products for market-share and profit margin. Advertising helps produce conformity, not in the naïve, particular sense, but in the sense that all share the code of differentiation through objects. Thus revolutionary tensions are diffused not through luxury but the code itself, which channels such energy into fashion revolutions. People become invested in the rules they are playing by, don’t want to discard them even though they subjugate.

The Masculine and the Feminine Models
Functional femininity has its counterpart in functional masculinity or virility. The models are, quite naturally, arranged in twos. They are the product not of the differentiated nature of the sexes, but of the differential logic of the system. The relation of the Masculine and the Feminine to real men and women is relatively arbitrary. Increasingly today, men and women play equally on the two registers in creating their significations, but, for their part, the terms of the signifying opposition only derive validity from their distinction. These two models are not descriptive: they govern consumption.

Part III: Mass Media, Sex and Leisure
7: Mass-Media Culture
everyone who does not wish to fall behind, be left on the shelf or lose their professional standing must `update' their knowledge, their expertise, their practical range of skills on the labor market. This is the logic of Re-cycling in this age which undercover means consumption of more goods.

The logic of consumption, as we have seen, can be defined as a manipulation of signs. The symbolic values of creation and the symbolic relation of inwardness are absent from it: it is all in externals. The object loses its objective finality and its function; it becomes a term in a much greater combinatory, in sets of objects in which it has a merely relational value.

In TV, radio, press and advertising, are sequences of the periods of neutrality and impersonality the discourse about the world does not seek to generate concern. This tonal `blankness' contrasts with the highly charged nature of the discourse on objects, with its cheery, elated note, its vibrato.

he truth about advertising is that it is beyond true and false in the same way objects are beyond use value and fashion is beyond beauty – such things, he might say, are the alibis of those discourses. Advertising is “prophetic language, insofar as it promotes not learning or understanding, but hope”.

Advertising has a strategic position in this process. It is the reign of the pseudo-event par excellence. It turns the object into an event. In fact, it constructs it as such by eliminating its objective characteristics. It constructs it as a model, as a spectacular news item. `Modern advertising began when the advertisement was no longer a spontaneous announcement and had become "made news"'

8: The Finest Consumer Object: The Body
Also included is a chapter discussing the body as “the finest consumer object,” as both capital and fetish. “one manages one’s body; one handles it as one might handle an inheritance; one manipulates it as one of the many signifiers of social status”. The body is alienated in the process of its social “liberation” and is exploited – it displays, lives the structures of the consumer society, embodies them without choosing them or profiting by them. For Example: woman’s sensible, expressive body in the culture of sensibility – it demonstrates the cultural prerogative without really gaining through it – conforming to that ethic is disciplinary rather that pleasurable.  developing this further: “the ethics of beauty, which is the very ethics of fashion, may be defined as the reduction of all concrete values – the use values of the body – to a single functional exchange value, which itself alone, in its abstraction, encapsulates the idea of the glorious, fulfilled body, the idea of desire and jouissance, and of course thereby also denies and forgets them in their reality and in the end simply peters out into an exchange of signs.” The alienation of labor power, individual freedom, and the body itself finally are all enlisted in order to support the “productivist option.” All is turned to account by the productivist system, but apparently, not individual producers.

“Medical cult” develops from the notion of body as prestige object. This creates “a virtually unlimited demand for medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical services .health today is not so much a biological imperative linked to survival as a social imperative linked to status”.

There is in no sense, of course, any natural affinity between beauty and slimness. Beauty cannot be fat or slim, heavy-limbed or slender as it could in a traditional definition based on the harmony of forms. It can only be slim and slender, according to its current definition as a combinatorial logic of signs, governed by the same algebraic economy as the functionality of objects or the elegance of a diagram.

9: The Drama of Leisure or the Impossibility of Wasting One's Time
Time is commodity, occupying major place in consumption society. “we are in an age where men will never manage to waste enough time to be rid of the inevitablility of spending their lives earning it”. Leisure means time away from rational scheduling, from productivity, but holidays themselves become rationalized pursuits of pleasure, which can only be found through producing distinctions. Leisure is itself consumption, showing how much extra time, wealth and capital one have.

10: The Mystique of Solicitude
Nothing is purely and simply consumed today -- that is to say, bought, possessed and used for particular ends. Objects no longer serve a purpose; first and foremost they serve you. Without this direct object, the personalized `you', without this total ideology of personal service, consumption would not be what it is. It is the warmth of gratification, of personal allegiance which gives it its whole meaning -- not satisfaction pure and simple. It is in the sun of this solicitude that modern consumers bask.

Alongside the economic and political institutions, there are non-institutional systems of social relations. This is that entire network of `personalized' communication which is invading everyday consumption. For we are indeed talking of consumption, the consumption of human relations, of solidarity, reciprocity, warmth and social participation standardized in the form of services a continual consumption of solicitude, sincerity and warmth, but consumption in fact only of the signs of that solicitude, which is even more vital for the individual than biological nourishment in a system where social distance and the atrociousness of social relations are the objective rule.

In this network of anxious relations, in which there is no longer any absolute value, but only functional compatibility, it is no longer a question of `asserting oneself', of `proving oneself', but of relating to and gaining the approval of others, soliciting their judgement and their positive affinity. This mystique of gaining approval is everywhere gradually supplanting the mystique of proving oneself. The traditional individual's objective of transcendent accomplishment is giving way to processes of reciprocal solicitation. Everyone `solicits' and manipulates, everyone is solicited and manipulated.

11: Anomie in the Affluent Society
The consumer society is at one and the same time a society of solicitude and a society of repression, a pacified society and a society of violence. We have seen that `pacified' daily life thrives on a daily diet of consumed violence, `allusive' violence: news reports of accidents, murders, revolutions, the atomic or bacteriological threat -- the whole apocalyptic stock-in-trade of the mass media.

Our economic attitudes are rooted in the poverty, inequality, and economic peril of the past' This difficulty of living in affluence should itself show us, that the alleged `naturalness' of the desire for well-being is not so natural as all that. Otherwise, individuals would not have so much trouble getting used to it; they would embrace plenty with open arms. This should indicate to us that there is in consumption something quite different, and perhaps even something opposite: something for which people have to be educated, trained, even tamed. It should tell us that there is here, in fact, a new system of moral and psychological constraints which has nothing to do with the realm of freedom.

On Contemporary Alienation or the End of the Pact with the Devil
The Student of Prague is a remarkable illustration of the processes of alienation, that is to say, of the generalized pattern of individual and social life governed by commodity logic.

the age of consumption, being the historical culmination of the whole process of accelerated productivity under the sign of capital, is also the age of radical alienation. Commodity logic has become generalized and today governs not only labour processes and material products, but the whole of culture, sexuality, and human relations, including even fantasies and individual drives. Everything is taken over by that logic, not only in the sense that all functions and needs are objectivized and manipulated in terms of profit, but in the deeper sense in which everything is spectacularized or, in other words, evoked, provoked and orchestrated into images, signs, consumable models.

Review of Feed by M. T. Anderson written by Abida Younas

M.T. Anderson tells a tale of Corporate America and present day society. He creates a futuristic account of society that seems painful and credible at a time. His book is a sheer satire on excessive consumerism and our dependence on technology that creates dark and at the same time believable, frightening and terrifying vision of future corporate world.
He presents a futuristic apocalyptic society in which human brains will be replaced by a device called feed. He shows that feed is implanted in the brains of being, which connect them with internet every time. The users of feed continuously barrage by advertisement, entertainment and other kind of consumer media. Consequently literacy rate are sharply declining due to the conquest of corporation. It is because, as Anderson shows that schools are run by corporation and they are merely concerned with consumerism. Therefore in Anderson’s dystopian society, schools are concerned with teaching of shopping.
The invasion of corporation though at one hand makes us the inhabitant of ultra modern society but at the same time it brings the deterioration of environment and speed up the activity of consumerism. The inhabitants of this corporate society are rapidly losing their cognitive abilities of thinking because of feed. It is ultimately feed, which is in the possession of corporate industry, controls its users rather than beings’ own brain.
In the middle of this apocalyptic society, Anderson throws a love story of titus and violet. There is a group of teens in Feed, and all of these teens have implantation of feed in their brains. Readers are shown that these teens performed well their activity of life in the presence of feed, but at the moment their feeds are get hacked by hacker, they lose their ability even to move. This shows that technology even take possession and control our limbic system as well.
Furthermore Anderson shows the two opposing attitude in a corporate society. At one hand he shows titus and his friend, who are comfortable with feed, whereas at other side there are people like violet and his father who resists the use of feed. When titus falls in love with violet, so he and his friend begin to spend more time with violet, and at the end he learns to observe the world the way violet sees. Soon he also starts questioning about feed = tech and no longer believe on feednet. This book provides an apathetic and lethargic picture of plausible future – a future where technology will be everything and corporation will own everything even school.  

Saturday 11 January 2014

The Field of Cultural Production by Jabeen Hassan

The Field of Cultural Production with the sub-title Essays on Art and Literature, published in 1993 brings together Pierre Bourdieu's most important writings on art, literature, and aesthetics. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary, art, and cultural criticism in the late twentieth century: aesthetic value and judgement, the social contexts of cultural practice, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the structures of literary and artistic authority.
The Field of Cultural Production comprises of three significant parts .Bourdieu method of analysis is based on ‘radical contextualization, examination of the set of social conditions and cultural practices of the production, circulation and consumption of symbolic goods’. He develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works on three levels of analysis i.e. socio-historic, discursive and interpretive analyses. One of Baurdieu’s central concerns is the role of social structures when unequal power relations are accepted as legitimate, embedded in cultural practices, and taken for granted in the society at large. Bourdieu’s theory of the field reveals the material and symbolic production of cultural goods and takes into account the mediators who contribute to the work’s meaning and legitimization as their ultimate function to maintain ‘the universe of belief’ within cultural field. The degree of autonomy of the field is measured by the direct connection between the work of art and the immediate social structure and its symbolic meaning. However the external determinants are also moulded into the cultural field, depending upon its level of autonomy.
First part of the book also elaborates how philosophy, the expansion of corporate capital and the emergence of information technologies were translated into and applied to the field of cultural production. It also addresses how the internet is currently being translated into the field and, in particular, how the distribution of symbolic capital is affected by the internet’s possibilities.
 The essays in this volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert’s point of view, Manet’s aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. Flaubert in 'Sentimental Education' was a proto-social scientist, and saw the 'field' in a particularly enlightened way, due to a bunch of ways the field shaped the idea of 'artist' in Gustave's time, as well as Gustave's attempts to win some independence for the field.
Typical Bourdieuian graphs, maps, fields, habituses, and strategies - as applied to art and literature when art and literature became their own special fields in the 19th c, Paris, capital of the world and modernity. Looking at art and learning to look at art is highly political, and implicates the reproduction of the ruling class. Manet was like a Flaubert in how he revolutionized what the idea of painting was in his refusal of the game of professionalization inherent to the contemporaneous Academy of Painting.

The book emphatically describes cultural production as a dynamic and fluid field that brings diverse disciplines and modes of creative practice that interests a student, often with particular strengths in visual and performing arts, curatorial practice, community advocacy and activism, new media technologies, and literary and cultural theory.


summarizing fredrick jameson’s “The culture logic of late capitalism” written by: SAYYEDA FARIHATULAEN RIZVI

The “Culture Logic Of Late Capitalism” is a book by Fredric Jameson which got published in 1984. Keeping in view the contemporary context Jameson has brought forward this book having a critical discussion about Modernism and Post-Modernism and that from a Marxist perspective. Jameson attempts to characterize the nature of cultural production in the second half of the 20th century, the era of late capitalism, and to distinguish it from other forms of cultural production of preceding capitalist eras. He analyzes the works of art and architecture categorically from what he terms "high modernism" and postmodern works. The major stress is placed on art and architecture. It is essential to grasp postmodernism as discussed in his book not as a style, but as a dominant cultural form indicative of late capitalism.
He begins his discussion by pointing out the concept of Periodisation in relation to modernism and postmodernism. Jameson believes that it is possible to speak of cultural modes with in a defined timeline. Nevertheless, he restricts his periodization of postmodernism to the unbinding notion of cultural dominant which has a degree of flexibility which still allows for other forms of cultural production to coexist alongside it. In the book he says:
“…even if all the constitutive features of Postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism -- a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel -- the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of Postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.”

Fredric extended the work of Ernest Mandel who categorised capitalism into three distinct periods which coincide with three stages of technological development: industrialized manufacturing of steam engines starting from the mid 19th century, the production of electricity and internal combustion engines since the late 90's of the 19th century and the production of electronic and nuclear devices since the 1940's. These three technological developments match three stages in the evolution of capitalism: the market economy stage which was limited to the boarders of the nation state, the monopoly or imperialism stage in which courtiers expanded their markets to other regions and the current phase of late capitalism in which borders are no longer relevant.
Jameson proceeds to match these stages of capitalism with three stages of cultural production, the first stage with realism, the second with modernism and the current third one with our present day postmodernism.
Fredric points out a few of the theoretical issues through this book, which he considers to be very essential part of post modernism. In order to bring forward the difference of post modernism with modernism and for doing so effectively he takes help from the aesthetic world including photography.
The first point that he brings forward relates to depthlessness. According to Jameson Postmodernist works are often characterized by a lack of depth, a flatness. Individuals are no longer anomic, because there is nothing from which one can sever ties. The liberation from the anxiety which characterized anomie may also mean a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings are now free-floating and impersonal. Also distinctive of the late capitalist age is its focus on commodification and the recycling of old images and commodities.
A modern painting, Jameson suggests, invites interpretation, a hermeneutic development and completion of the world which is beyond what is represented. In a postmodern work, to put in simply, what one sees is what one gets, and no hermeneutic. relations will be developed with the representation. This depthlessness is seen by Jameson as a new kind of superficiality. Jameson strengthens his point of depthlessness by two thematically related works: Van Gogh's "A Pair of Shoes" which represents high modernism and Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes" which are obviously postmodern.

tumblr_mawz7oCKKT1rvt47eo1_1280.jpg                                a-pair-of-shoes-1886(1).jpg
(ANDY WARHOL’S “DIAMOND DUST SHOES)                (VAN GOGH’S “A PAIR OF SHOES”)

Jameson quotes Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh's works as one which invites the reconstruction of a whole peasant world and dire life and offers another possible interpretation of his own which follows the basic notion of addressing something which is beyond the actual shoes in the painting.
In contrast, "Diamond dust shoes" do not "speak to us", as Jameson puts it. Different associations are possible when looking at a Warhol's work, but they are not compelled by it nor are they necessarily required by it. Nothing in the postmodern work allows a lead into a hermeneutic step.  
Warhol's work is therefore an example of postmodern depthlessness because we cannot find anything which stands behind the actual image. Warhol is of course famous for stressing the commercialization of culture and the fetishism of commodities of late capitalism, but the stress in not positive or negative or anything at all, it just is. The depthlessness of cultural products raises the question of the possibility of critical or political art in late capitalism, especially when Jameson argues that aesthetic production today has turned into a part of the general production of commodities.
Another important factor related to post modern culture relates to “the wanning of affect”. For the explanation of this factor jamesom argues that human figure is the best example. As Jameson in the book describes:
“The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol's human subjects: stars -- like Marilyn Monroe -- who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images. And here too a certain brutal return to the older period of high modernism offers a dramatic shorthand parable of the transformation in question. Edward Munch's painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away -- for both practical and theoretical
reasons -- in the world of the postmodern.”  
Marilyndiptych.jpg(WARHOL’S “MARILYN MONROE”)
The-only-privately-owned--001.jpg (EDWARD MUNCH’ S “THE SCREAM”)
When we look at modern painting with human figures we will most often find in them a human expression which reflects and inner experience, such as in Edvard Munch's "The Scream" which epitomizes the modern experience of alienation and anxiety. In contrast, Jameson holds to that in postmodern art feelings wane (therefore "the waning of affect").
The concept of expression, Jameson notes, presupposes a model of inside and outside, a distinction between ones inner and outside world and the individual person as a single monad. But when we look at postmodern portrait such as Warhol's Marilyn we can hardly speak of any expression, and that is because, Jameson holds, postmodernism rejects traditional models of the depth such as the Freudian model of conscious and unconscious or the existential model of authentic and unauthentic.
Another contemporary capitalistic bourgeois notion for Jameson is the idea of the subject as a monad, individual. Jameson notes how the crisis of alienation and anxiety gave way to the fragmentation of subject or "death of the subject. Jameson proceeds to describe the waning of affect through the process in which the subject has lost his active ability to create a sense of continuity between past and future and to organize his temporal existence into one coherent experience. This reduces his cultural production abilities to nothing but random and eclectic "piles of fragments"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=theculturalst-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B001G3XGEM
Jameson brought forward the idea of Pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism according to Fredric Jameson. The existence of an autonomous subject was an essential part of artistic as cultural production in the modern times, Jameson argues. It allowed for the artist as subject to the address his consumer as subject and thus to affect him. But with the waning of affect the artist's unique individuality, one a founding principle, has been reduced in the postmodern age to a neutral and objectifying form of communication. With the fragmentation of subjectivity and subjectivity in a sense coming to a gloomy end, it is no longer clear what postmodern artists and authors are supposed to do beside appealing to the past, to the imitation of dead styles, an "empty parody" without any deep or hidden meanings, a parody that Jameson calls pastiche.
Pastiche, like parody, is the imitation of some unique style, but it is an empty neutral practice which lacks the intension and "say" of parody, not satirical impulse and no "yin" to be exposed by the "yang". The postmodern artist is reduced to pastiche because he cannot create new aesthetic forms, he can only copy old ones without creating any new meanings.
Pastiche leads to what is referred to in architectural history as "historicism" which is according to Jameson a random cannibalism of past styles. This cannibalism, pastiche, in now apparent in all spheres of cultural production but reaches its epitome in the global, American centered, television and Hollywood culture.
When the past is being represent through pastiche the result is a "loss of historicalness". The past is being represented as a glimmering mirage. Jameson calls this type of postmodern history "pop history" – a history founded on the pop images produces by commercial culture. One of the manifestations of this pastiche pop history are nostalgic or retro films and books which present the appearance of an historical account when in fact these are only our own superficial stereotypes applied to times which are no longer accessible to us. Jameson famously analyzes the postmodern features of the L.A. Westin Bonaventure hotel. His main argument concerning the Bonaventure hotel is that this building, as other postmodern architecture, does not attempt to blend into its surroundings but to replace them. The Bonaventure hotel attempts to be a total space, a whole world which introduces a new form of collective behavior. Jameson sees the total space of the Bonaventure hotel as an allegory of the new hyper-space of global market which is dominated by the corporations of late capitalism.westinbona.jpg

 Depthlessness, pastiche, the fragmentation of the subject and other characteristics of postmodern culture introduced by Fredric Jameson (see previous parts of the summary) strongly question the notion of "high culture" as opposed to popular culture. Jameson notes how boundaries between high and low culture have been transgressed in postmodern times with kitsch and popular culture integrating with forms of high culture to produce one big varied consumer culture.

Postmodernism according to Jameson is an historical situation, and therefore it will be wrong to assess it in terms of moral judgments. Jameson proposes to treat postmodernism in line with Marx's thought which asks us to "do the impossible" of seeing something as negative and positive at the same time, accepting something without surrendering judgment and allowing ourselves to grasp this new historical form. 

Summary of Dialectics of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno written by: Sonia Farooq

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno are of the view that thoughts of the individuals have become a commodity and discourses are been which carry this task of Commodification. Language, according to them, is being formulated to celebrate this Commodification (Preface to 1944 & 1947 xvi). The literary text is subject to the producers and readers and publishers which for thir own benefit let it go uncensored and as a result superfluous thing appears in the market which is destructive for cognition and prepares a ground for the “greedy acceptance of charlatanism” (xv, xvi). Horkheimer and Adorno focused on “self-destruction of enlightenment”. For them freedom cannot be separated from enlightened thinking but the concept of thinking is promoting demand for money everywhere as they say such thinking process already contains in it “germ of the regression”. For them the “mysterious willingness” of the “technologically educated masses” makes them “fall under the spell of despotism” which is self-destructive for the human cognition and weakens the criticality (xvi). According to them it “holds mind captive in ever deeper blindness”. For them an individual is “entirely nullified in face of the economic power”. Individual does not exist in front of money. For them the rational thinking or criticality; “intellect” should negate the process of reification. According to them “brand-new amusements” make people weak to resist economic powers and deprives them of their autonomy and individuality. Individual vanishes before money and the ideological apparatuses they serve (xviii).
They are of the view that “bourgeoisie economy” is always generated by “entrepreneurs” and technology produces ways and methods of exploitation of masses (p-2, ch-1) because human beings want to purchase power. For them enlightenment and especially in the form of technological and intellectual power is like a dictator who knows how to manipulate human beings (6). They maintain that repetition of particular image or symbol manifests the permanence of certain social meanings (16). Industrialization has resulted in “objectification of mind” and transformed human soul into “thing”. The industries produce commodities with desired behavior in people. The fetish character of the commodity has dominated all aspects of life in a society. Mass production agencies have propagated such characteristics of commodities and made it a rationalized and naturalized standard of living for people. The success or failure of individual is dependent on commodities. Such commodities are individuals’ identities (21). That is why the find themselves powerless in front of commodities. Reification of the reason is one of the most destructive and calamitous feature of consumerism through culture industry. The technological advancement in the form of entertainment industry furthers the process of Commodification and degeneration (28). They are of the opinion that powerlessness of the masses is not just a method or plan of the ruler but the “logical consequence of industrial society” (29). For them “instruments of power – languages, weapons, and finally machines – which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone” (29). The world is transformed into industry (29). Humanity is losing itself in the illusion of individualist society (31).
They maintain that capitalism inflicts destruction. Human beings are misused as things, it “radiates perverted love” and sick psyche (89). Feelings like love which are supposed to humanize have become dehumanized in culture of Commodification.
Technological advancement and social differentiation have given rise to “cultural chaos” (94). Film, radio and magazines – each as a branch of culture constitute a system (94). All mass culture is identical under money and instills false identity (95). Mass entertainment does not project itself as art but they are forms of business used as an “ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce” (95). The culture industry in the form of technology produces products for consumer needs as they demand it and that is why they accept it with little resistance but for them “a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the system”.  This form of cultural production is gaining power because of those who rule the society and those who possess economic control. Technology has become a compulsory feature of alienated society (95). Mentality and consciousness of masses support the system of culture industry by being part of it (96). The unity of culture industry is actually the unity of politics propagated by the industry which does not demarcate any difference in its use. They say “something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated” (97).
Consumers are divided into statistical form and hence individuals are quantified and arranged according to their income (97). Culture industry through technical media as TV and films etc. achieves a concurrence between word, image and tune to produce sensuous elements and this for Horkheimer and Adorno is the success of capitalism (97). Inspired by the Kantian studies about the mechanism of psyche they analyze the “ready-made clichés” of entertainment industry which are produced to be used by public to get desired response (98). The world of film creates illusion of the outside world. They show real world as an extension for the world of films (99). Consumer culture destroys their imagination. Products of culture industry like films and advertisements etc. “cripple” individuals’ faculties to think of exploitation through reifying their minds and “objective make-up” (100). They hold the opinion that “the products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction”. Its power for them is “imprinted on people once and for all” (100). Agents of the culture industry are advanced form of modern social control (100). Culture industry operates to present naturalness in everyday existence through trends and behavior screened on TV (101).
For Horkheimer and Adorno concept of genuine style has disappeared or it is equated with power. For them contemporary art is “hypocritical” as it confirms the capitalistic way of life. In this way art is also an ideology. Present art for them is “obedience to the social hierarchy” (103, 104). The culture industry contains process of “identifying, cataloging and classifying” to administer the public. It imposes a desired behavior pattern and routine of individuals in the name of “unified culture” (104) which is a form of globalization. It imprints certain images on the minds. It makes them one dimensional and compliant subjects and participants who cannot resist and can only survive if she/he incorporates herself/himself into consumer culture (104).
Any individual who does not confirm to such practices of Commodification is taken to be a stranger and is “condemned to an economic impotence”. He is convicted as inadequate in society (106). All classes of society are hemmed into capitalism “in body and soul” and they without any resistance “succumb” to all the offerings “proffered” to them (106). In the form of “idea, novelty and surprise” they attract the masses. Everything is set in endless motion to keep us busy in wants of new (106). According to them “the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its control of consumers is mediated by entertainment” (108). The ideology of the entertainment is business (109). They say “Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism”. Even in leisure masses are indulged in the process of capitalism as they save images in the mind provided by entertainment industry. They can only escape from mechanized work routines by adapting themselves into capitalistic entertainment in leisure time which is “the incurable sickness of all entertainment” (109). The spectators are not required to think on their own. The presented product prescribes the reaction through signals (109). Mental activity is strongly avoided in entertainment. The culture industry “endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises” (111). The desire according to them is “inflamed by the glossy names and images” and “debasement of the drive” has become the purpose of art. It constantly exhibits “the object of desire” (111). For them “works of art are ascetic and shameless”. The culture industry is “pornographic”, “prudish” and “reduces love to romance” (111). It becomes marketable by promoting sexual symbols.
Culture industry’s main purpose is to create desire and leave it unsatisfied for the consumers so that they keep on desiring for it by being engaged in the offerings provided by entertainment (112). Culture industry does not leave any place for resistance (113). The culture industry promises flight from everyday life. The same everyday world is presented as paradise (113). “Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display” (116).
“The element of blindness in the routine decision….., is celebrated by ideology” (117). Culture industry takes human beings as its customers and reduces humanity to statistics (118). Through electronic media and print media they are demonstrated freedom of choice and free from system but they remain objects in both the cases (118). Capitalist or consumer society is strengthened on the weakness of subjects; the public (124).
For Horkheimer and Adorno “Art now dutifully admits to being a commodity”. The consumer becomes the “ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape” (128). Everything achieves a value only if it can be exchanged. Everything has a character of being fetish (128). The “Art becomes species of commodity, worked up and adapted to industrial productions, saleable and exchangeable” (130). Art also has been reified and performs the function of reification (130). The contemporary society has an industrialized culture which is a fraud in the form of commodified culture. The culture also becomes a commodity. It works on exchange value and has merged commercialism and advertisements into itself (131). In a competitive culture of society, advertisements perform the social service to create the consumer. Advertising is an art for the “pure representation of social power” (132). The merging of advertising and culture industry is influencing public as technique used is now a “psychotechnique” which is a method to manipulate individuals (133). The blindness and muteness to the ideology of consumer culture is the target of consumer ideology.
The rapidly spreading repetition of brand names in advertsing are not used according to the behavioural function it possesses (135). The culture industry has “taken over the civilizing inheritance” (135). The culture industry promotes “categories of vulgarized depth psychology” which attracts and drives individuals to become an apparatus to meet the requirement of the ruling ideology. The impulses of the individual unconsciously make the prevailing system of culture industry a success (136). All reactions including the most intimate ones have been reified. Personality is confined to being possessing a brand logo and product used (136).

So the culture industry establishes a society in which advertising helps and motivates individuals as consumers to have commodified identity which they recognize as false at the same time (136).

Summary: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari writen by: Aiman Aslam

Anti-oedipus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia is written by the postmodern critics named Deleuze and Guattari. The book has a preface written by Michael Foucault and an introduction by Mark Seem. Furthermore, the book is divided into four major parts (namely, The Desiring Machines, Psychoanalysis and Familialism; The Holy Family, Savages, Barbarians and Civilized Men, and Introduction to Schizoanalysis), each part further comprising of certain sections, each section dealing with a separate (but linked to the previous) issue. The first part of the book is an account of Deleuze and Guattari’s materialist psychiatry, the second is a critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex, the third is a rewriting of Marx’s philosophy of history using the new language of materialist psychiatry and the fourth section is about Deleuze and Guattari’s new analytic endeavor, Schizoanalysis.
Michael Foucault, right in the preface to the book, pinpoints certain important features that are discussed by the writers throughout the book. According to him, the time period of 1945 to 1965 witnessed great reliance of the people on Marxism, Freudianism, and then Fascism. However, the later ages saw resistance against the narrow doctrines presented by these theories and their propounders. Deleuze and Guattari are among those who resisted. Their thought is hostile against totalizing theories that bind desire to fixed alibis, and also to the poor technicians of this desire—psychoanalysts and semiologists. Fascism (in all spheres of life) is considered to be an exploitation of peoples’ desire and just another way of repressing them. So the book, according to Foucault, could be renamed as An Introduction to the Nonfascist way of Life.
The preface is followed by Introduction written by Mark Seem. He starts off with the way a psychiatrist will check one up as one goes to him/her. It’s just another way of economic as well as psychological exploitation. What Deleuze and Guattari have actually protested against is the wrong desire ingrained among common people by those in power—the desire to be led by others. In sharp contrast to psychoanalysis, they present schizoanalysis to the people. The approach is diagnostic which will gradually lead to healing as it cures people from the cure itself. They have tried to probe into and deconstruct the seemingly natural attachment of the economy of our libido (flows of desire) to the political economy (flows of interest and capital). To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political analyses that remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in order to free the multiplicity of desire from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal yoke. People are sick, sick of their own selves from which now healing is required. But Guattari and Deleuze’s Anti-oedipus is not the superman of Nietzsche rather it calls for actions and passions of a collective nature. Desire, according to them, becomes destructive only because it is always in a state of repression.
In the book, the writers draw the analogy between human life and machines. Human organs are just like machines which constantly give output in return for some input. Similarly, everything around us and inside us is machines altogether. In this context, every process around us is equivalent to production in one way or the other. For instance, man and nature are not separate parts of a process rather they are one and essential identity. Desiring machines are ruled by binary set of laws—one machine coupled with another for complete functioning, fuelled by desire and always in a state of free flux or flow.
Deleuze and Guattari have developed their notion of ‘Schizoanalysis’ in this book. This approach articulated a new mode of postmodern self organized around concepts of plural and multiple identities and decentred or displaced consciousness. They start from the basis that desire is itself revolutionary and radically subversive. Hence, society has needed to repress and control desire, to ‘territorialize’ it within demarcated areas and delimited structures: ‘To code desire is the business of the socius’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 139). In this view, the socius or the communal structure within which we live is a repressive system or regime: it organizes social harmony not through enabling collective action to result from rational debate, but by preventing individual and collective desires from being allowed their full potential.
The book gives a historical analysis of the ways in which desire is channeled and controlled by different social regimes. Deleuze and Guattari theorize desire as a dynamic machine which constantly produces new connections and productions. Perceiving the libido as a still fluid and as a flow prior to representation and production, ‘schizoanalysis’ opposes all those discourses and mechanisms which block the flow of the unconscious. For example, the family structure is one place where individual desires are controlled or ‘dammed up’, as certain social structures are produced and reproduced through parental roles, sibling rivalries and the imposition of gendered identities. Contrary to conventional psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari understand desire to be essential, and argue that it does not signify a lack, a subject in search of a lost object. Bodies are constructed as ‘desiring machines’ because machines arrange and connect flows. This ‘deterritorialized’ body is called ‘the-body-without-organs’—a body without organization, a body that casts off its socially articulated, regularized and subjectified circumstances. In this respect, schizoanalysis has various tasks that can be considered postmodern:
  1. It attempts a decentered and fragmented analysis of the unconscious, aiming to recapture pre-linguistic experiences, unconscious investments of sounds and sights which liberate desire.
  2. It seeks to release the libidinal flow and to create ‘new’ desiring subjects.
  3. Contrary to the processes of psychoanalysis, which neuroticises the subject, it‘re-eroticizes’ the body by freeing it for libidinal pursuits.
Now if the book is looked at with reference to its separate parts, it could be explained this way. The western tradition of philosophy conceives of desire as something that has a negative aspect.  From Plato to Freud, and most recently Lacan, desire is thought to be something that is reaching toward the acquisition of something.  At the discussion of desire and lack, Deleuze and Guattari import some of Nietzsche’s philosophy.  For Deleuze and Guattari, desire does not lack anything; rather desire is a machine and the object of desire (what Lacan would call Objet a) is yet another machine.  The circuits these desiring machines create are what Deleuze and Guattari call Desiring-Production.  Desiring-Production takes the place of Freud’s unconscious.  Desiring-production is responsible for the production of reality and in turn social forces and relations: “…the truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.” (38)
The second part of Anti-Oedipus is a critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex.  This portion of Anti-Oedipus makes the case that the Oedipal complex is a colonizing force.  The Oedipal framework colonizes and represses the desires of the members of society.  Even more, Capitalism has an integral role in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory.  Schizophrenia exists alongside capitalism and resists the neuroses that capitalism uses to maintain a repressive society.
The third piece of Anti-Oedipus is the reframing of Marx’s historical materialism in the language of materialist psychiatry.  Deleuze and Guattari trace history using through the discussion of territorialization and deterritorialization.  Since the production of reality and society takes place through desiring-production, history cannot be understood as a dialectics of class struggle, but rather through the flows and blockages of desire.  Deleuze and Guattari trace these flows from the beginning of the socius, which is also the beginning of desiring-production, to the barbarian machines, the despotic machine, the urstaat, and the civilized capitalist machine.
The concluding piece of Anti-Oedipus is an introduction to Schizoanalysis.  Schizoanalysis is uncovering the ways “the subject who desires can be made to desire its own repression” (105). The schizoanalytic process is discovering the subject in nature, rather than a psychiatrist’s office, discovering the formation and functions of the subjects as desiring machines.  “The Schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional” (322). Schizoanalysis deals with libidinal energies in a way that is outside of the Oedipal matrix.
The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused”. (293)
More concretely, the schizoanalytic practice is “…(1) undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2) liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify as a particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the flows of labor and desire, of production, and knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency” (321).  Deterritorialization is a process with no end, schizoanalysis is deterritorialization toward “An active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, and the scientific machine, and the (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another” (322).

In a nutshell, one can view Deleuze and Guattari engaged with dogmas that make their approach postmodern in the first place. These dogmas or beliefs could be framed under the following statements. First for all, we can infer an institutional appropriation, taming and neutralizing of desire. Secondly, there is a defense or support for the liberation of the body and desire. Thirdly, there is also a pursuit of a ‘schizoanalytic’ destruction of the ego and the superego in the favor of a dynamic unconscious. Lastly, there is a rejection of the modernist notion of the unified, rational and expressive subject and the substitution of a postmodern subject which is decentred, liberated from fixed identities, and free to become dispersed and multiple.