Part 2: The Connective Synthesis

(A-O close reading notes 2)

As we read we will be presented with what will be called the three syntheses of the unconscious: the connective synthesis (production of production), the disjunctive synthesis (production of recording), and the conjunctive synthesis (production of consumption). Though they will be presented sequentially, it is important to keep in mind that they do not exist independently of one another, or follow one another sequentially, they are simply presented sequentially so we can understand their distinct functions:

“For the real truth of the matter – the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium – is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: Production of productions, of actions and passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of referencee; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties and of pain” (4)

To start with, the first synthesis, the connective synthesis of production: “The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: ‘and…’ ‘and then…’” (5). Imagine a self-producing chain, with each link producing the next link, which in turn produces the link following. Each link is both a break and a continuation: it draws off part of the flow of the preceding link, but that flow continues through it and as it, and is partially drawn off by the link following it. This self producing chain is desiring-production, the physical reality of desire itself: “Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows” (5).

To define the elements of the productive, connective synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari will use the terms ‘partial object’, ‘flow’, and ‘partial object-flow’. Here all objects are partial because they do not and cannot exist independently of the flow that passes through them and which their existence presupposes. For example a tree is not a complete and independent object: included in its existence as an ‘object’ is the necessary ‘flow’ of sunlight, of water, of wind to carry its seeds, etc. 

Within the connective synthesis, nothing is produced in which the process of production is not carried forward : always, “the pure ‘thisness’ of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing” (7). This is the key to the connective synthesis, that what is produced is never a nonproductive product, a static complete object, but a partial object through which a flow of desiring-production carries forward: 

“The rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production” (7)

We are told that yet another characteristic of the connective synthesis is “the fact that it couples production with antiproduction, with an element of antiproduction” which is “perpetually reinserted into the process of production” (8)

This antiproduction, this death instinct, “the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable”, this is our introduction to the body without organs. And even though it is presented sequentially, the full body, the force of antiproduction, does not arrive at the scene of a beautiful and pure primary production and mess it up by inserting an element of antiproduction. The coupling of production and antiproduction is an inherent “characteristic of the connective synthesis”(8).

I am going to leave the second synthesis of recording and the introduction of the body without organs to the next post.