Félix Guattari has not been well-served by the academic machine. He was marginalised almost from the start of his joint work with Gilles Deleuze, who was generally seen as the brains behind Anti-Oedipus, the book that procured for them a certain amount of renown (if not notoriety). And the extraordinary growth in critical scholarly commentary on their joint writings has tended to revolve around an appreciation of Deleuze’s work, whose claim to the production of a metaphysics has all too often been addressed with scant regard for the important role that Guattari played in their construction of a philosophy in the years between May 1968 and Guattari’s death.1 Of course, seeing Deleuze as a quirky metaphysician presents some interesting and fascinating problems for professional philosophers and there is no doubting the immense subtlety and nuance of his thinking and the scope of his engagement with the history of philosophy. Yet there was always an institutional – and experiential – challenge embodied in their double-headed writing machine that all too easily falls by the wayside when Guattari’s role is downplayed, especially when what is preferred is an inscription of their thinking within canonised scholarly problematics (that Deleuze for one was always quick to repudiate).
As thinkers together of an unconscious that invested directly in the movements of history – schizophrenic delirium, with its ‘world historical, political, and racial’2 content serving for them as something of a starting point for understanding both the ‘diabolic powers’ knocking on the door, as well as the compromises established with those powers by psychoanalysis – it would be all too easy to find in their work the traces of a rather romantic lionisation of madness that was common currency in the tumultuous France of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, there is more to Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation of the importance of the experience of psychosis than the judgement that they romanticise (or aestheticise) schizophrenia would allow – and it is Guattari’s work that makes this point blindingly obvious.
From a rather early stage in his work, Guattari evinced a desire to escape from what he saw as the ‘methodological individualism’ of psychoanalysis, its reliance on one-on-one dialogue and its lack of engagement in the difficult, ongoing task of treating psychosis in the institution. There was an absence of sustained direct involvement with psychosis on the part of Freud (Schreber, through his writings, Little Hans through his father) and only a minimal involvement on the part of Lacan (the Papin sisters, for diagnostic purposes), and this, for Guattari, was a problem.3 It limited the value of the idea of the ‘foreclosure of the name of the father’ and, on the basis of a much closer – indeed daily – involvement with psychotics led to far greater emphasis being placed by Guattari not just on institutional facts, on collectives, and the non-autonomy of language, but also on the transindividual processes that are put into play in and by an unconscious that is somewhat refractory to apprehension within the enunciative space-time of ‘ordinary’ analysis.4 The phony ‘contractualism’ of the analytic relationship, with its ostensible exclusion of third parties and focus on the individual, was not something that found a very positive response amongst institutional psychotherapists, by virtue of the broader institutional qualities of the delegation of the treatment of madness to particular groups of people in society (to say nothing of the concrete realities of institutional situation). And the historical experiences of progenitors of institutional psychiatry such as Tosquelles during the Second World War (the need to work with non-professional staff, the use of the Saint-Alban hospital to shelter members of the Resistance, and so on) would mean that La Borde was a propitious domain for Guattari’s own background of militancy in the student movement.
In his early writings, Guattari’s conceptual displacement/relativisation of analytic ‘transference’ by institutional ‘transversality’ is one particularly fruitful outcome of the complex encounter between politics, therapy, psychoanalysis and the psychiatric hospital, and it sustained a rethinking of the unconscious in a social direction, breaking down the tacit hierarchy – inside and outside the institution – on which the ‘contract’ rested, and re-instating – first with the idea of the institutional object, then with the idea of the desiring machine – the third party putatively excluded in one-on-one dialogue. In addition to generating a perception of the importance of the group, of relations between groups (as in the division of labour) and of concrete institutional arrangements themselves (the institution as a ‘modelling clay’ for the treatment of psychosis), it also, more broadly, leads to what might be called a ‘de-professionalising’ of access to the unconscious, accomplished through the generation of conceptual tools that reframed the analysis of desire in directly political terms. Guattari repeatedly returns to the view that the conceptualisation of the unconscious he was engaged in would be an unconscious within reach of anyone!
Guattari’s endeavours to tackle the role of the group in relation both to analysis and to politics was clearly something that interested Deleuze, who saw in the theoretical contributions of Guattari to ‘institutional psychotherapy’ a set of notions that had a precise practical orientation – that of ‘introducing into the institution a militant political function, constituting a sort of “monster” that is neither psychoanalysis nor hospital practice, even less group dynamics, and which aims to be applicable everywhere, in the hospital, the school, in militancy – a machine to produce and to enunciate desire’.5 That one of the first fruits of Guattari’s collaboration with Deleuze was Anti-Oedipus, a sort of Rabelaisian high-point in the theorising that took place in the aftermath of 1968, should not obscure the institutional experience to which Guattari’s work always sought a certain kind of fidelity. Nor, of course should it obscure the links between the approach to writing taken by Deleuze and Guattari and his co-author’s understanding of the instititution of philosophy. After all, Deleuze’s ‘conversation’ with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, involves a quite explicit appraisal of the institution of philosophy and the function that the image of thought played in codifying thinking – an appraisal that in many respects continues the discussion of ‘Intellectuals and Power’ between Foucault and Deleuze from earlier in the 1970s. And it is worth noting here, as if in passing, that Deleuze’s otherwise rather improbable reference in this latter text to Proust for his understanding of the new role of the intellectual is itself heavily dependent for its understanding of the function of the writer’s ‘oeuvre’ on Guattari’s conceptualisation of transversality.6
That Guattari’s writings were not only heavily marked by but also aimed to remain faithful to his own experiences – of working at La Borde, continuing an analytic practice, as well as working tirelessly in the field of politics – is a point that has been made succinctly by one of Guattari’s colleagues at La Borde, Jean-Claude Polack, who points out that he ‘always stayed as close as possible to his everyday experience’,7 an observation that holds true even – perhaps especially – where his writings seem most avowedly experimental. Consistent with his work’s contestation of the sufficiency of language and its perpetual re-commencement from the unassignability of the expression/content distinction, it is difficult to separate out Guattari’s theory from its ‘objects’. So, when Guattari returns, in a short text written in the wake of a visit he made to a hospital on the Greek island of Leros in 1989, to the four ‘imperatives’ that guide his approach to ‘enunciative hyper-complexity’, we would do well to see this as a statement of what it is that shapes Guattari’s approach to his own activity of ‘doing theory’ as such: irreversibility – there’s no going back after the ‘evental’ encounter, singularisation – the need for a permanent readiness for the advent of any rupture of sense, heterogenesis – the searching for the specificity of the ‘ontological’ terrain on which subjectivation occurs, necessitation – the way that affects, percepts, or concepts must be incarnated in an ‘existential territory’.8 In fact, this text – in which Guattari reflects on his lifetime of work at La Borde – points us towards a kind of ‘de-institutionalising’ of theory accomplished, oddly, through an acknowledgement of its much closer connection with institutions. ‘Theoretical modelling, as he puts it, has an existential function. In this respect, it cannot be the privilege of theorists. A right to theory and to metamodelling will one day be inscribed at the entrance to every institution that has something to do with subjectivity.’9 In some respects, this is a view that directly continues both his strictures against Althusserian theory (in the late 1960s), and, in the present text, against the Gramscian theorisation of the organic intellectual. ‘We do not think that there is any place, in effect to set up a specific group and praxis the function of which would be to synthesise Theory and Action. The very form of the division of labour between militancy, the analysis of the unconscious and intellectual activity should wither away, to the extent that the practice of theory gives up basing itself on systems of universals – even if they are dialectical and materialist – and action establishes itself in the extension of a liberatory economy of desire.’10 The reader can follow the train of thought leading Guattari to this argument for him- or herself. But there is a more general point here, which is that contrary to a fairly widespread view, which would hold that ‘theory’ and ‘experience’ are opposing, even antinomic terms, for Guattari they are in fact indissociable: like his friend Deleuze, albeit in a slightly different way, Guattari maintains the connection between theory and singularity, an ‘irreversible adventure’.
Guattari’s ‘discovery’ of the dimension of transversality had for him entailed an ongoing theoretical and practical critique of the undue ‘privileges’ that might accrue to the analyst in the institution, a critique given broader scope in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari are keen to contest the ‘underhand powers’ founded on the transference – a point noted by Foucault in his Preface to the English translation of that book. But more important perhaps than the obvious critical scope that the concept permits is the way in which it helps to prepare for the development of the later concept of the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ as the constructive element that institutional analysis brought to light. Whilst in their own presentation of this latter concept, Deleuze and Guattari use Kafka as their reference point for what they are trying to address – his novels serve as a privileged point of articulation for the concept, both in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature as well as A Thousand Plateaus – we would do well to note that Guattari was already talking of ‘collective agents of enunciation’ as early as 1964. Conceptualising the subject as a ‘collective agent of enunciation’ was, in Guattari’s view then, indispensable to avoid reifying the institution as a structure. Substituting a variable distinction between subject- and subjugated groups for the problematic notion of structure would, he argued enable the total (and totalising) character of the institution to be shattered, giving way to the possibility of a praxis necessary to the generation of analytic ‘effects’ (i.e. enunciating desire), through the ‘subjective consistency’ of groups able to address their own transitory, finite existence.11
There is much that might be said in turn at this point about the connections between Guattari’s consistent emphasis on the importance of (group) practice and the concomitant critique that Deleuze and Guattari have proposed of ‘the’ signifier in their writings. But contrary to the view that sees these thinkers as apologists for the simple spontaneity of ‘flows’, Guattari himself retained two key ideas throughout his work: that a determined praxis was always necessary to open up the possibilities that the homogeneous registers of meaning production occluded, and that linguistic, or linguisticised conceptions of structure blocked any real analysis of the kind required to effectively open up the possibilities ‘encysted’ in any situation.
However rather than pursuing this line of argument it is perhaps more interesting in the present context to connect the experimental approach to practice that these explorations of transversality gave rise to with another dimension of his work – his activities with the FGERI (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Research, founded in 1965) and slightly later CERFI (the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Development, in 1967). The notoriety acquired by some of the publications issuing from these initiatives has been commented on elsewhere, both from more or less negative12 and more obviously positive13 points of view, and Guattari’s defence in court following the publication of the ‘Three Billion Perverts’ issue of the journal is particularly interesting not least for the way it shows him trying to problematise the links between research, desire, and the State. In any case, the numerous issues of the journal provide a written trace of the ways in which Guattari’s collective, transversal analysis of desire was, in the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s, extending beyond the immediate scope of the La Borde clinic and into what might now be called ‘interdisciplinary’ research. Interdisciplinarity is an idea that is rather familiar in academic circles these days14 – sufficiently so, perhaps that, as is the way with familiarity, it tends, not always rightly, to breed contempt. That such contempt is typically expressed by the well-territorialised professionals of traditional disciplines, with their institutional apparatus of key journals, special conferences, accepted ways of asking questions, and so on, is not especially surprising, and it serves here as a reminder of the difficulty of separating out knowledge production, institutional power, and subjectivity, a knotty set of ties which Guattari’s approach to the possible ‘creativity’ of the institution sought to counter. The collective research projects in which Guattari was involved were thus in some respects rather different from what is now held to be interdisciplinary research, not least because the kind of interdisciplinarity at which CERFI aimed had an intensely libidinal component, for better or for worse (Dosse, not entirely fairly, thinks the latter), traces of which can sometimes be found in the presentation of material in the issues of Recherches to which these projects gave rise. But Guattari’s ‘interdisciplinary’ research practice with CERFI is also of interest here because of its more or less direct bearing on the present text.
Originally titled ‘Collective equipment and semiotic subjugation’ and not discovered until after Guattari’s death, Lines of Flight seems to have been written at much the same time that Guattari was working on A Thousand Plateaus with Gilles Deleuze, a connection that the reader will be able to confirm by dint of the numerous passages here that are also to be found in that text. But the text was also written as a report for the Ministère de l’équipement, a relatively new ministry that was first created under the government of Pompidou in 1960, out of a series of separate ministries – for transport, for public works, and for construction. And it was with regard to the heterogeneous matter of ‘collective equipment’ that the French State provided funding for a CERFI research project that in addition to involving Guattari and his other CERFIsts – François Fourquet, Lion Murard, Anne Querrien and Liane Mozère, amongst others – also involved Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.15 Several issues of Recherches were devoted to presenting the findings of this project, including two issues in 1973, grouped together under the heading the ‘genealogy of capital’, a title that captures both the influence of Foucault as well as the (sometimes overlooked) genealogical elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Engaging specifically in the study of issues that might now be considered the province of urbanism, town planning or urban geography, the first of the issues of Recherches exploring this loosely conceived genealogy included two interviews with Foucault, and whilst the discussions had are not entirely conclusive they do point towards some of the ways in which Guattari was extending his understanding of the social unconscious (the latter is flatly identified, in the first of two discussions with Foucault, with ‘collective equipment as such’).16 But the project on collective equipment is also interesting here because of the way that it feeds quite directly into what will become A Thousand Plateaus. Whilst references to ‘collective equipment’ are almost entirely absent from that text, it is evident from Lines of Flight just how much that research mattered. Here, Guattari not only picks up on aspects of the work carried out in relation to the ‘genealogy of capital’ but he also draws on Anne Querrien’s research into schooling – first published as ‘L’Ensaignement’ and since republished as L’école mutuelle: une pédagogie trop efficace? – and on Judith Belladonna’s research into prostitution, which also appeared in Recherches, and in so doing points to the close proximity between a Foucauldian approach to subjugated knowledges and what A Thousand Plateaus would no doubt refer to in terms of ‘minoritarian becoming’.
All of this, of course, is history and would probably be of little more than passing interest, except for what it says, once again, about some of the collective dimensions of the research practice in which Guattari was engaged and what this tells us about the philosophy he was constructing with Deleuze. Lines of Flight should, in many respects, be considered a group project, an incipient collective assemblage of enunciation in its own right, even if few of Guattari’s collaborators in CERFI here are mentioned by name. It is thus advisable not to separate the theoretical challenge presented by the concept of the collective assemblage of enunciation when thought through the work of Kafka – rethinking the virtual presence of the collective within the solitary writing practice of the intellectual – from the practical experimentation of which it is a part. And so one might in turn say of Lines of Flight what Guattari says, with Deleuze, of the ‘K-function’ in Kafka’s novels. ‘It is pointless to ask if “K” is a subject – “he” is more a general function that proliferates by itself, or rather “K” is less a general function assumed by an individual than the functioning of a polyvocal assemblage of which the solitary individual is a part.’
Next to nothing has been said here about the substantive content of Lines of Flight. That’s quite deliberate, but maybe one or two words on where this book leads are called for, just to finish. Despite the term’s absence from A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari himself repeatedly returns to the idea of ‘collective equipment’ in his later writings. This may in part be a function of the pliability of the term ‘équipement’ itself, which allows it to operate as a sort of shorthand (and not incidentally renders it difficult to translate accurately).17 However, in a different context, the anthropologist Paul Rabinow has helpfully indicated the historical connections between the idea of ‘équipement’ and the French State, and points in passing to the rather all-encompassing reference of the term, which ‘included everything that was not a don gratuit of the soil, subsoil, or climate’, at least in the 1942 ‘Plan d’Équipement National’,18 a breadth that Guattari certainly, if not explicitly, picks up on. This discursive link with a broadly conceived notion of an environment makes it unsurprising to find that it is in the context of his grappling with the problems posed by the ‘three ecologies’ that Guattari should call once again on the idea of ‘collective equipment’. In a text on ‘Ecosophic practices and the restoration of the subjective city’, for example, Guattari considers the role of urban mentalities in relation to the collective refinalising of human activities. The possibility of this refinalisation taking place is, he suggests, largely dependent on the possibility of a shift in urban mentalities. Referring to the work of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean world and the proliferation of city states in the sixteenth century, Guattari argues that within the context of a nascent capitalism, this proliferation could only be considered to hold itself together when understood as ‘so many components of a single network of collective equipment’.19 And he goes on to note, anticipating by some years arguments made by geographers, political theorists, sociologists, etc., that the situation today is one in which that same network of ‘material and immaterial equipment’ has woven itself together at a much greater scale. The more this network is planetarised, the more it is ‘digitalised, standardised, homogenised, uniformised’, the more it constitutes a ‘hegemony of major cities or, more exactly, of subsets of major cities connected by telematic and informatics means.’ Much has been written, invoking assemblages, spaces of flows, networks and so on since Guattari’s death that is consonant with this kind of analysis, but some of his lessons, particularly concerning the connections between rhizomes, assemblages and subjectivity seem to have been filtered out along the way. It is as much in his life-long engagement with the micropolitics of institutions and his collaborative research practices as in the better known work with Deleuze that we can find the seeds of Guattari’s prescient conceptualisation of an integrated world capitalism. Integrated world capitalism is at work today in the pipes, cables and circuits of global data networks, the algae-like proliferation of property developers and global rentiers, as well as our dreams and nightmares, but it finds many of the tools Guattari elaborated for thinking practically against it, ‘in favour, I hope, of a time to come’ here, in this book.
Andrew Goffey