SchizoCapital and the Branding of American Psychosis

Author: Wilson S.

Source: Cultural Values, Volume 4, Number 4, 1 October 2000 , pp. 474-496(23)

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Abstract:

This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth-century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty-first-century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth-century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption-production of commodities, brands and identities.

Language: English

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: Lancaster University

Publication date: 2000-10-01