22/11/2025
"There is an emergent disconnection between the focuses of activism and the current structure of oppression in everyday life. What revolutionary politics lacks is a new psychology, an anti-psychiatry that will help us to undertake the task of gradually releasing our repressed emotional, visceral, and affective concerns from the grips of our current society continuous of control.
The primary aim of schizoanalysis is to fulfill this lack — to take the affirmative possibilities of contemporary groundlessness to its limits in order to rupture the anxious realities of neoliberal capitalism (realities such as the NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the unemployment office, the privileges system in the prisons, Trump’s presidential victory, the constant examination and classification of young schoolchildren).
Indeed, to push through the limits imposed by the psychological alienation of capitalism, to replace our position as Oedipualized, defenseless, guilt-ridden puppets in internal straight-jackets, with free, empowered, de-securitized, uncoded subjects that have the tools to overcome anxiety by transforming fear into anger, and acting on this anger through affective projectiles of attack.
According to the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who coined the term, schizoanalysis is not a political ideology; it is an active, creative force that works micro-politically from the bottom up to raise radical political consciousnesses by uprooting people from the reactive social causes and traditions that have placed them in a state of perpetual anxiety.
Deleuze and Guattari contrast this active force of schizoanalysis with the reactive force of capital-induced anxiety — a process of alienation and decomposition that disempowers and segments populations by turning them against each other and themselves by making social spaces “neat and orderly,” creating governable subjects conducive to top-down quantification and control, and providing the work-discipline and speed which capitalism demands. In other words, the reactive forces of capitalism create anxiety through bodily, emotional and sexual repression that operates through a restriction, a blockage, and a redirection of affect.
Anxiety within capitalism is reactive and personalized: from New Right discourses blaming the poor for poverty, to contemporary therapies which treat anxiety as a neurological imbalance or a dysfunctional thinking style, a hundred varieties of management discourse — time management, anger management, parental management, self-branding, and gamification — all offer anxious subjects an illusion of control in return for ever-greater conformity to the capitalist model of subjectivity.
By complicating these doctrines of individual responsibility which reinforce vulnerability and disposability, schizoanalysis offers us a creative way to confront these anxieties plaguing contemporary politics in the Global North.
From the 2011 dismantling of the Occupy encampments in Zuccotti Park to the dispersion of Black Lives Matter protests in Dallas, the inability of contemporary social movements to develop viable, long-term alternatives to the destabilizing processes of capitalism is directly related to their failure to respond to the reactive problem of anxiety. In actively confronting the condition of collective anxieties, schizoanalysis offers an alternative basis for a political project which provokes a new way of resisting the rhetoric, fear, control, and perpetual uncertainty that characterizes the groundlessness of our post-fact era.
By rejecting the internal attribution of blame and the individual orientation of therapy, schizoanalysis emphases social oppression and collective responses. This perspective can transform the anger and alienation resulting from the oppressive experiences of capitalism into a more positive, focused kind of discontent. In situating the problem of anxiety socially (as opposed to individually), schizoanalysis affords us the creativity to feel anger, both as subjects and a collectivity, which can overcome earlier prohibitions by making anger an energizing force for change, increasing confidence, and enhancing activist relations.
By analyzing the ways in which the 'personal is political,' activists can overcome the reactive personalization of oppression and begin to see the ways in which each phase of capitalism is qualified by a particular affect — emotion, way of relating, bodily disposition — that holds it together.
This is not a static situation. As capitalism is always redefining its own limits, it constantly comes into crisis and recomposes and reterritorializes around new affects. As its power comes largely from its alienating force, the pervasiveness of a particular form of affect management only lasts until strategies of resistance break down its social source. As long as the dominant affect of anxiety is a public secret, it remains effective, and strategies directed against its sources cannot emerge.
Thinking of capitalism as a mode of managing our dominant affects presents an alternative to theories that celebrate the rise of immaterial labor — labor that produces informational and cultural content as commodities — as a path to eventual liberation through the unleashing of human creative power.
Theories of immaterial labor wrongly assume that capitalism releases human creative potential and that the main problem is merely the privatization of its product. In other words, they locate the problem not in the processes of capitalism itself, but rather in the ways in which it commodifies outputs.
In the modern era (until post-war settlement), the dominant affect was misery—the public secret of this narrative was the misery of the working class and the exposure of this misery was carried out by revolutionaries. When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s—a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery.
Of course, anxiety is not new under capitalism. As early as the 1930s, psychoanalyst William Reich theorized anxiety as the result of a conflict between the libido — unconscious desire — and the outer world. What is new about capital’s management of affect in a post-fact era is that anxiety now subsumes the whole of the social and emotional field, rather than being concentrated in specific spaces such as sexuality.
By extracting the emancipatory potential of the schiz — the ability to constantly break free from the dominant forms of emotional control — a schizoanalytical perspective offers a contingent grounding for an anxious, groundless world — a way of deepening our understanding of the post-fact society by pointing to the ways in which the transformation of reactive affects into movement-focused anger and courage is only viable through the reconfigurations of horizontal connections that stave off both meaninglessness and isolation.
By reconnecting with our experiences now — rather than theories from past forms of affect management — recognizing the shared, systemic nature of our experiences, and working to transform emotions and construct dis-alienating spaces by unifying through patterns in our shared experiences, a politics of schizoanalysis is an anti-psychiatric form of collective care that has the potential to mutate into affinity groups within a wide network of autonomous organizations that have the critical and tactical capacities to move beyond reactive critique and towards active social transformation." - CounterPunch
This is an edited version of 'High Anxiety: Capitalism and Schizoanalysis' by A.T.Kingsmith. To read the full article please click here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/23/high-anxiety-capitalism-and-schizoanalysis/
