| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Some blame Freud for our obsession with various forms of therapy and false memory, but orthodox analysts see the analysand’s comments about child sexual abuse as part of a narrative, something to take seriously but not necessarily always literally true. Marx was concerned with the flows of capital and interest, Freud with the economy of the libido. For Deleuze and Guattari, these are not separate but the same: The flows and productions of desire are the unconscious of social productions. Desire has been transferred entirely from the body to the image. Child sexual abuse and celebrity culture epitomize the zenith of the free market and the worship of the image, with absolute consumption equaling total commodification. Deleuze wanted us to forget beginnings and ends, but that is impossible, for without such a framework we ignore the economic (i.e., our physical) and philosophical (i.e., our mental) reality. Displacement and exile summarize key components of the twentieth century’s predicament. Some today are more mobile by choice, yet there is greater homeostasis. In dominant media culture, the homogeneous takes precedence over the heterogeneous. How can we think in any way at all, given that, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, thought is heterogenesis?14 Ironically, with homogenization and further advances in hegemony, any difference is more striking, more real. Meaning only comes through difference, but meaning, value, and truth are invalid concepts in our homogenous, media-saturated world. Many, perhaps unable to cope with the anxiety brought about by the uncertainties of our age, blame postmodernism for society’s ills, and we have witnessed a return to fundamentalism and belief in grand narratives. But let us stick with modernism for a second. According to Susan Friedman,