Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Jonah Peretti
In the time that it  has taken to write and  publish this paper, 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 (www.amazon.com),  pizza delivery (www.PizzaNet.net),  stocks (www.schwab.com),  and just about anything else  you can imagine (virtumall.com)  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.

Connecting capitalism and identity formation  requires extensive contextualization. A considerable  portion of this essay is  spent wading through the murky  waters of Lacanian and post-Lacanian  psychoanalytic theory. Evaluating competing theories  of identification is essential to  my project. 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 regime 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 unites  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.
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 1996, titled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", by artist "Jonah Peretti".