“Such delegation explains why the family can appear to be a microcosm when really it is not; why familially constructed subjects often seem, on the one hand, so ill-suited to the specific content-requirements of social-production at any given moment of its development; why, on the other hand, the family’s degree of abstraction as an apparently separate reproductive institution produces subjects perfectly suited formally to a system of social-production in constant flux. For what they learn in the nuclear family is simply to submit, as good docile subjects, to prohibitive authority - the father, the boss, capital in general - and relinquish until later, as good ascetic subjects, their access to the objects of desire and their objective being - the mother, the goods they produce, the natural environment as a whole. But that is all they need to learn: the content-requirements of social-production, as capitalism “continually revolutionizes the means of production,” change too fast for the family to play much of a role in job training, for example, just as fashion and life-style fads change too fast for parents to play an adequate role in consumer training. What the Oedipal family-machine produces is just enough: obedient ascetic subjects programmed to accept the mediation of capital between their productive life-activity and their own enjoyment of it, who will work for an internalized prohibitive authority and defer gratification until the day they die, the day after retiring. Far from being autonomous, much less originary, fundamental, or universal, the Oedipus complex of the nuclear family appears as though it had been “fabricated to meet the requirements of…[the capitalist] social formation” (101/120), from which it in fact derives by delegation.47 And to challenge or rebel against such Oedipally constituted authority would amount to committing incest! The Oedipal machine, to the extent that it works, effectively straight-jackets desire.” -Holland, Eugene W… Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (pp. 55-56). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
And to go straight to the source itself:
“From the very beginning of this study, we have maintained both that social-production and desiring-production are one and the same, and that they have differing regimes, with the result that a social form of production exercises an essential repression of desiring-production, and also that desiring-production - “real” desire - is potentially capable of demolishing the social form. (116/138)” –Ibid: quote from the Anti-Oedipus
I know this is a lot. And if it is any consolation: the bulk of it is Holland’s writing and not mine. But it gets at the heart of what the Anti-Oedipus is about; all else is just elaboration and articulation. At the same time, I should admit that there is a little (maybe a lot of (confirmation bias at work here in that it confirms some of my initial instincts about the book and overlaps with one of my main concerns about Capitalism: what I refer to as the tyranny of the functional. And much of what follows will be framed in terms of that tyranny.
I would first note a point made elsewhere in Holland’s book: that, under the Oedipus, the nuclear family provides a kind of elementary preparation for functioning in a Capitalist society (very much like the 3 R’s in American primary education: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic): a prohibited in the form of the incest taboo (the mother (and a prohibitor: the paternal father figure –that is against a desire that probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the prohibition in the first place.
What this creates is a situation that (at a more nominal/blue collar level (Capitalism engages on a regular basis: of creating a situation that serves its purposes at the expense of others while wiping its hands clean of it. And the way it does this (via psychoanalysis (is by separating desiring production from social production via the nuclear family; by making it seem as if what we are and do is purely the result of our individual circumstance within the family; our individual psyches. It is as if Capitalism is saying (via, once again, psychoanalyses: that if there is a problem, it is not Capitalism that needs to be reformed, it is you.
And nowhere is this clearer than in Ego Psychology in which the assumption is that if you are having problems, it is due to a fractured ego that can be put back together if you submit to a paternal guru type. And that is when we are, by nature, fractured selves. Think Dr. Phil here: the epitome of Ego Psychology and the tyranny of the functional. And is not Dr. Phil not the very kind of psychologist that Guatarri was seeking to undermine when he allied himself w/ Deleuze?