Deleuze & Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia," Chapter 1. The Desiring-Machines (Summary)

 The Machine in Everyday Life

• Everyday life is a machine, functioning smoothly and intermittently.
• Organs, energy sources, and other machines are interconnected, producing a flow that is interrupted by each other.
• The human body is a machine, with functions such as breathing, eating, talking, and breathing.
• Judge Schreber's solar anus is a model of a machine, capable of producing and explaining the process theoretically.
• A schizophrenic's walk outdoors is a better model than a neurotic lying on an analyst's couch.
• Everything is a machine, from celestial machines to alpine machines, all connected to the body.
• Lenz's walk is a reflection of this machine-like existence, contrasting with his relationship with his pastor and his relationship with nature.
• The self and non-self, both inside and outside, no longer hold any meaning.

The Desiring Machines in Samuel Beckett's Works

• The characters' self-locomotion and gaits in Beckett's works are compared to a finely tuned machine.
• The bicycle-horn machine in Beckett's works is compared to the mother-anus machine.
• The Oedipus complex in Beckett's works is examined, focusing on the repression of desiring-machines.
• The machine's function and function are also explored, such as the production of sexual pleasure.
• The schizophrenic's experiences are not merely aspects of nature but a process of production.
• The relationship between nature and industry is examined, with industry being the opposite of nature, extracting raw materials from nature, and returning refuse to nature.
• The concept of production, distribution, and consumption is discussed, implying that there are no relatively independent spheres or circuits.
• The real truth lies in delirium, where there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits.
• Everything is production, including production of productions, actions, passions, recording processes, distributions, and consumptions.
• The recording processes are immediately consumed, consumed, and reproduced, making them the productions of one and the same process.

Understanding the Concept of Man and Nature

The Human Essence and Nature
• The human essence of nature and man's essence become one within nature through production or industry.
• Industry is seen as a fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.

The Role of Man in Nature
• Man is in intimate contact with all forms of life, responsible for even the stars and animal life.
• He is the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe.

The Process of Production
• Man and nature are not bipolar opposites but are one essential reality, the producer-product.
• Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle.

The Concept of Schizophrenia
• Schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature."
• Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations.
• Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented.

The Concept of Desiring-Machines and Production

• Desiring-machines are partial objects that produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects.
• Each organ-machine interprets the world from its own flux, interpreting everything in terms of seeing.
• The coupling within the partial object-flow connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing.
• Producing is always something "grafted onto" the product, and desiring-production is production of production.
• The Cahiers de I'art brut deny the existence of a specific, identifiable schizophrenic entity.
• A schizophrenic table is described as a process of production which is that of desire.
• The pure "thisness" of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing.
• The surface of the table is eaten up by the supporting framework, a necessary consequence of its mode of production.
• 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.
• The satisfaction the handyman experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket or diverts a stream of water cannot be explained in terms of "playing mommy and daddy," or by the pleasure of violating a taboo.

The Concept of Producing and the Identity of a Product

• The identity of producing and the product is a third term in the linear series, creating an enormous, undifferentiated object.
• The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing diverse tasks but does not subordinate each task to the availability of raw materials and tools.
• The rules of the 'bricoleur' are to make do with 'whatever is at hand,' a set of tools and materials that are finite and heterogeneous.
• The machines run so badly that their component pieces fall apart, allowing them to return to nothingness.
• The full body without organs is the unproductive, sterile, unengendered, and unconsumable.
• Desire desires death and life, as the organs of life are the working machine.
• The body without organs is nonproductive but is produced at a certain place and time in the connective synthesis.
• The imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series.
• The full body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction, which is a characteristic of the connective or productive synthesis.