You weren’t born Oedipus, you caused it to grow in yourself; and you aim to get out of it through fantasy, through castration, but this in turn you have caused to grow in Oedipus—namely, in yourself; the horrible circle. Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater. What does schizoanalysis ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality. And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical incompetence—the right to enter the analyst’s office and say it smells bad there. It reeks of the great death and the little ego.
Deleuze & Guattari, “The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis,” Anti-Oedipus p. 334
Deleuze & Guattari, “The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis,” Anti-Oedipus p. 334
For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak). What Smail calls ‘magical voluntarism’ – the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV ‘experts’ and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it.
Mark Fisher for The Occupied Times, Good For Nothing / shorturl.at/aBDNW
Mark Fisher for The Occupied Times, Good For Nothing / shorturl.at/aBDNW