Group phantasy superimposes the different levels, changes them round, substitutes one for another. It can only turn round and round upon itself this circular movement leads it to mark out certain areas as dead ends, as banned as impassable vacuoles, a whole no-man’s land of meaning. Caught up within the group, one phantasy reflects another like interchangeable currency, but a currency with no recognizable standard, no ground of consistency whereby it can be related, even partially, to anything other than a topology of the most purely general kind. The group – as a structure – phantasizes events by means of a perpetual and not-responsible coming and going between the general and the particular. A leader, a scapegoat, a schism, a threatening phantasy from another group – any of these is equated with the group subjectivity. Each event or crisis can be replaced by another event or crisis, inaugurating a further sequence that bears, in turn the imprint of equivalence of identity. Today’s truth can be related to yesterday’s, for it is always possible to re-write history. The experience of psychoanalysis, the starting up of the psychoanalytic machine, makes it clear that it is impossible for the desiring subject to preserve such a system of homology and re-writing: the only function of the transference in this case is to reveal the repetition that is taking place, to operate like a machine – that is in a way that is the precise opposite of a group effect. The group’s instinctual system, because it is unable to be linked up to the desiring machine – objets petit ‘a’ returning to the surface of the phantasy body – is doomed to multiply its phantasy identifications. Each of these is structured in itself, but is still equivocal in its relationship to the others. The fact that they lack the differentiating factor Gilles Deleuze talks of dooms them to a perpetual process of merging into one another. Any change is precluded, and can be seen only between structural levels. Essentially, no break is any longer accepted. That the structures have no specific identifying marks means that they become ‘translatable’ into one another, thus developing a kind of indefinite logical continuum that is peculiarly satisfying to obsessionals. The identification of the similar and the discovery of difference at group level function according to a second-degree phantasy logic. It is, for example, the phanstasy representation of the other group that will act as the locating machine. In a sense, it is an excess of logic that leads it to an impasse. This relationship of the structures sets going a mad machine, madder that the maddest of lunatics, the tangential representation of a sado-masochistic logic in which everything is equivalent to everything else, in which truth is always something apart. Political responsibility is king, and the order of the general is radically cut off from the order of the ethical. The ultimate end of group phantasy is death – ultimate death, destruction in its own right, the radical abolition of any real identifying marks, a state of things in which not merely has the problem of truth disappeared forever but [it] has never existed even as a problem.
Félix Guattari, “Machine and Structure” (1969)
Written as a review of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, before Deleuze and Guattari had met and began their collaboration with Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
