Throughout his life, Félix Guattari worked to eradicate the identification of subjectivity with personal identity and to replace the classical subject, conceived of as a closed, personal monad, with collective and political modes of subjectivation. He thus proposed to rethink the productions of subjectivity from a clinical angle and to evaluate them as a function of their capacity to promote spaces of freedom. In doing so, he embarked upon a singular, philosophical enterprise, indissociable from the critical practice that he called schizoanalysis.
Of course, he was not the only thinker of the post-war generation to posit a subject that was the result of a social production, of an interpellation: Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze and Foucault all pursued their theoretical work under these auspices. But Guattari worked for the dissolution of any individual conception of the subject in accordance with a political and analytical axis that was not reducible to the principles of Lacan, from whom he clearly took a distance, or even to those of Deleuze, with whom he created a stunning collective work. In reality, Guattari opened up a problematic field with entirely new and singular conceptual operators, which brought into conjunction the contributions of Marx, Sartre and Lacan.
ECOLOGY AND TRANSVERSALITY
The problem Guattari addresses in Schizoanalytic Cartographies is how to describe such productions of subjectivity, especially in the case of contemporary capitalistic productions and as a component of the sociopolitical analysis of the present.1 It is a question of developing the capacity to counter the toxic effects of the dominant system or to ecologically stimulate its beneficial effects. In all cases, we must define subjectivity, an unconscious production for which Guattari reserved the term ‘collective assemblage’, as plural, heterogeneous and machinic.
The later phase of his work hones in on the problem of the re-singularisation of the productions of subjectivity that we experience without always being able to decode or inflect them correctly. The most urgent task concerns the analysis of active machines of production of subjectivity in our societies. Since the end of the 1970s, we have endured Integrated Global Capitalism (CMI),2 the last avatar of post-industrial, global capitalism, which increasingly decentres the seats of power of structures productive of goods and services, shifting them to structures that are productive of signs, of control over information (media, advertising, polls), and of subjective codings that Guattari terms ‘semiotics’ (TE 32).
This ambitious programme entails an entirely new political history of social assemblages, conducted from the point of view of their semiotic codings, which applies as well to previous formations, whether capitalist or not, as to contemporary formations, with their economic, juridical and technico-scientific semiotics that produce specific subjective effects with their own collective equipment (TE 32).3 Through analysis of the current phase of capitalism, Guattari theorised the cognitive and subjective capital of societies in relation to the Earth, in its factual and singular existence. Human history concerns not an epic of spirit, but rather the adventure of the planet. Following Bateson, Guattari opens thought to ecology, freeing the latter term of its nostalgic connotation of preserving nature to instead initiate, with The Three Ecologies (1989), a veritable clinic of culture, an ethics of the Earth capable of reconciling the ecology of social bodies with that of mental states and environmental apparatuses (TE 28).
Guattari’s theoretical operations, characterised by this diagnostic function, are veritable coups de force that leap and shift from one theoretical domain to another, in the manner a knight on a chessboard. These operations entail a new description of theory as well as new scientific practices that support Guattari’s concept of transversality. Guattari developed this concept as early as 1964 as the discursive complement of his therapeutic procedure and to constitute the forefront of his theoretical offensive. Concepts and practices must renounce the discourse of the Master and the universalist ambition embedded in stable, immutable, static doctrines. There are no universal concepts, only theoretical takeovers (coups de force) that are a response to practical necessities and that are produced in the interstices of fields of knowledge, on their borderlines and at sites of fracture and renewal.
For Guattari, transversality first and foremost designates a practice, that of a kind of organisation (or group figure) that individuates and becomes organised by avoiding structuring, hierarchical and traditional connections of vertical submission and horizontal conjunction. Guattari opposes transversal, acephalous organisation, which proliferates diagonal connections with the strategic aim of undoing formations of power that so easily betray ‘groups and groupuscules’, both to the terracing of vertical levels structured along the lines of the command-obey relation, and to the horizontal conjunction of relays of the same order, which also assume the existence of hierarchical levels. Practically, this amounts to undoing formations of power; theoretically, it amounts to invalidating two master concepts: that of sovereign centralisation, justifying the exercise of power in the form of domination, and that of totalisation, a belief that determines the exercise of domination because it presides over the figure of a central, unique, unifying and centralising power. In other words, groups that resist oppression, especially groups on the Left, are not exempt from reintroducing, at the core of their modes of functioning, the very elements of domination they allegedly oppose. From this, Guattari extracts an operative distinction between subjected groups – groups functioning hierarchically – and subject groups – groupuscules experimenting with transversal operations, capable of auto-production in a singular mode by avoiding the mortifying effects of rigid hierarchies (PT 42–5).
Through the analysis of phenomena of power that work through subjected groups, Guattari, in synch with Foucault’s analyses in Discipline and Punish, refuses the scheme of an auto-centred power exercising its mastery from a centre of domination. For Guattari the concept of transversality, formed through the practice of institutional analysis, is inherently political but practically concerns the political critique of the psychiatric institution, whose ostensible therapeutic vocation is inevitably thwarted by phenomena of practical domination (the institutionalisation of madness), and traversed by theoretical domination (the domination of the universal signifier). That Guattari, taught by Freud, but especially by Lacan, contests the representation of a power-individual, given as a constituted entity, is not at all surprising. We can see how his analytic formation led him to contest the unitary representation of the ego and thus that of the personal subject. But he extracts from this critique of the subject an immediate political consequence: if the critique of individuation is applicable to physical, psychical or collective individuals, it is also applicable to social, biological and material bodies. It contests, therefore, the very principle of centred organisation, and brings the critique of the unity of the ego to a political field in which power is at stake, at the core of theory. The polemic against the personal representation of the subject immediately branches out in the form of a political critique of centred organisations and an epistemological critique combating authoritarian conceptions of theory.
The concept of transversality, a practical concept elaborated to serve as a psychotherapeutic solution, turns out to be a war machine against rational and centred epistemologies. In applying a political critique to the epistemology of rational systems, Guattari contests the unitary, homogeneous and authoritarian model of organisation, and privileges instead a type of system with multiple, acentred connections. The behaviour of these systems – the tendency to privilege margins and hybridisations – bears witness to a new alliance between practice and theory. This is not surprising since the concept of transversality itself is the result of a hybridisation of discourses, of a pragmatic conception of theory as toolbox or bricolage. It favours the conjunction between a critique of the theory of the ego (psychoanalysis) and the practices of groups (sociology of power) from a militant perspective whose aim is precisely to deploy concepts at the forefront of an operational offensive. ‘It is in this way that we can transmute concepts of different origins: psychoanalytic, philosophical, etc.’, not out of a phoney humanist concern to create a panorama of culture, but in support of a guerrilla operation, to figure out how ‘to escape when you’ve been cornered’ (PT 42). This is how Guattari posits philosophy, in terms that are simultaneously analytical, political and ethical.
SCHIZOANALYSIS
The ‘encounter between the psychoanalyst and the militant’ (PT i) in a single person, Guattari, led him to place a direct analysis of the relations between power and desire at the core of a theory of the social.4 Thought is practical and is provoked by real struggles. Guattari’s immersion in a historical milieu is signalled by his use of a political lexicon, including in his research on psychotherapy. His interest in a critique of psychiatry and of asylums was a response to the militant and oppositional demand that fed the explosion of May ‘68 in which he was an active participant, and which, like a detonator, precipitated his thought from speculation toward real movements, political tensions and the concrete reality of madness in its institutional universe.
Guattari described himself as divided up among ‘different places’, a Marxist militant of Trotskyist inspiration, a Freudo-Lacanian at work, and a Sartrean in the evening when he theorised. His disparate references bring together the militant praxis of groups on the Left, institutional psychotherapy with Jean Oury at the La Borde clinic,5 and analysis in the orbit of Lacan, who was his analyst and whose seminars constituted for him, as for a whole generation, a decisive laboratory for theoretical experimentation. At the same time, this heterogeneity cemented the need for the transversality of his procedures.
Engaged with Oury in applying analysis to the treatment of psychotics at the La Borde clinic, within the framework of institutional psychotherapy derived from the work of Tosquelles, Guattari conceived of the unconscious as a desiring machine, in direct contact with the political and historical dimension of the social.6 This grafting together of psychoanalysis and politics, in accordance with Tosquelles’ position – which prescribed walking on one Freudian leg and one Marxist leg – inscribed Guattari within concurrent attempts to bring together Marx and Freud. But in restoring a historical perspective to the unconscious, Guattari was quickly drawn into a radical critique of psychoanalysis characterised by a double movement of a transformation of analytic practice and an interest in schizophrenia, which opened the way to the invention of schizoanalysis, also developed in the work conducted with Deleuze, from Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus.
Guattari absorbed this dual direction from institutional psychotherapy, which linked the care of patients to the reform of institutions – starting in the first place in asylums – in which they are subjects. Reducing the gap between the private dimension of the Freudian unconscious and the sociopolitical constitution of subjects, institutional psychotherapy acts upon actual institutions by reforming therapeutic structures. Its political dimension opposed it to psychiatry as practised in hospitals – administrative, juridical and medical management of the abnormal within the social body – but also to psychoanalysis, the analytic theory of the processes of the constitution of consciousness through unconscious flows.
We are faced with a Marxist-inspired analysis of the psyché. It posits consciousness within the material dimension of social production and historicises the Freudian unconscious, whose economy of the drives must be directly plugged into social assemblages instead of being maintained in a separate sphere as an ‘empire within an empire’. It assigns to madness, maladaptation and psychosis a value of experimentation that has political stakes and cultural value: in accordance with Foucault and his analysis of madness as being situated at the border of Reason, the schizophrenic becomes, for Guattari, the operator of a transformation of the socius that reflects back on modes of social subjectivation.
Not only does schizophrenia in its usual sense indicate a pathology of capitalism, it also designates a hyletic process in which any society engages (que toute société met en forme). It also becomes necessary to correlate the sociopolitical analysis to a psychoanalysis that has exchanged its reference to a unitary and personal psyché for a hyletic flow, which in turn requires a new name: schizo-analysis.
Schizophrenia thereby becomes the generic term for diverse processes of subjectivation. This explains why schizoanalysis first engages in a critique of psychoanalysis and of its overly restrictive conception of the unconscious, wrongly reduced to a psychic entity or to a linguistic signifier,7 even as it is concerned with a political analysis of mechanisms of production of subjectivity, particularly of those under capitalism.8
Nevertheless, schizophrenia also continues to designate the suffering schizophrenic Guattari sought to treat. It thus came to mean the maladaptation of a hyletic material to its assumption of form (mise en forme) in the social, and in this sense a failure or residual incapacity of another type, that of the catatonic insane person confined to a hospital. Schizophrenia thus functions at two levels: first, as a matrix of the process of subjectivation, it designates the hyletic flux present in any social formation; and second, as a blockage in the process of socialisation, it designates the individual despair of the schizophrenic, resistant to Oedipalisation. But it is necessary to see, and this complicates the analysis, that we cannot maintain the state of the schizophrenic as an individual, pathological given. It indicates the reaction between a state of desire and a state of social status that is conferred upon him by the type of ‘care’ imposed upon him.
The contemporary schizophrenic is not one by nature. He is rather an unhappy social actor, a defenceless patient who endures ‘the alienation which, not the schizophrenic, but the people for whom it’s a big deal simply to play cards in the presence of patients find themselves in [because the director of the asylum had instructed them not to do so]’ (DI 241), that is, the psychiatric institution as a whole. It is thus necessary to distinguish schizophrenia as a process of desire and as a generic term for hyletic flux, and the committed schizophrenic, the patient produced by the repression of the asylum, ‘therapy’ and social normalisation.
THE PRIMACY OF PSYCHOSIS: LACAN AND GUATTARI
To comprehend the status of desire in Guattari’s thought, to untangle the very particular connection he establishes between the clinic and social critique, and to understand how he manages to transform ‘schizophrenia’ into a name for a desiring machine irreducible to Oedipal social forms, we must return to the status of psychosis and the decisive influence of Lacan. It is because he was trained by Lacan that Guattari positioned desire on an impersonal plane that was collective from the very start, allowing him to avoid any synthesis between individual desire and social repression (or liberation), such as we find in Marcuse or Reich.
Guattari learned from Lacan that there is no individual desire, that the libido remains an undetermined flow as long as it does not become articulated in relation to a transindividual dimension, even if for Guattari this dimension does not consist of a symbolic signifier, but rather refers to real and variable relations of production for each society. Guattari’s thought may thus be characterised as a Lacanian Marxism, which distinguishes it from previous efforts to join psychoanalysis and Marxism, and although he retains the goal of contesting the social order, he categorically refuses the principle of an opposition between the individual and social coding. Desire is not independent of the relation between hyletic flux and desiring machines that are always social; it is always related to the social and does not refer to a private, personal, individual dimension that we can relegate to the realm of the superstructure of mentalities and unconscious representations. If there is desire, it belongs to the regime of production, that is, to the infrastructure, to the material plane of effective relations of social production.
In Guattari’s thought, desire is not hyletic flux itself, but, in conformity with Lacan, the assemblage of this flow. Simply put, it is in terms of this assemblage that their positions differ: both agree that desire involves a cutting of the flow, but for Lacan, this takes place in the form of symbolic structuration through inscription of the signifier, while for Guattari, it occurs by means of desiring machines and asignifying and material coding. To comprehend the divergence between the two, and further, to understand how desire does not operate at the level of individual spontaneity, but rather at the level of a machine that ‘cuts’, we must delve further into the Lacanian theory of psychosis and review its epistemological status and its articulation of desire to the Law, for which Guattari substitutes the social production of desiring machines.
Guattari retained from Lacan’s teaching the idea that psychosis is not a deficiency, but rather a process that is perfectly independent of neurotic repression, and even more suitable than the latter for providing information about the unconscious syntheses that constitute the subject. Psychosis functioned as the problematic field in which Lacan situated his ‘return to Freud’ as a ‘beyond Freud’ based on the two following points: the signifying assemblage as a symbolic order and the place of the father as a master signifier, the Other that founds the symbolic order. Guattari paid close attention to this theoretical position, but displaced and critiqued it in turn.
Without doubt, Lacan also contributed to disengaging modes of production of subjectivity from any reference to an act of individual consciousness. In articulating the Freudian unconscious to the findings of linguistics in order to accentuate the rhetorical character of the primary process, Lacan disentangled the symbolic plane from any subjective intentionality. The unconscious symptom, the entire unconscious, must be considered to be ‘structured like a language’,9 which does not mean that Lacan applied linguistic analyses to the rhetoric of the unconscious, but on the contrary, that the distinction between the signifier and the signified in Saussure, or the theory of shifters in Jesperson and Jakobson, can only become effective starting with the unconscious, which is constitutive of the differences of language as well as of the structuration of the subject.10
Lacan thus appropriated the Saussurean analysis of the signifier and the signified, as well as its adaptation by Lévi-Strauss:11 the signified is a continuous, amorphous flow that can only make sense from the moment it is cut by a signifier, which confers upon it its binary coupling term for term with related signifiers to which the chain of signifieds begins to correspond. The master signifier cuts the amorphous mass of floating signifieds, and constitutes them in their position as signified, becoming ‘the point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate’.12 Lacan calls this the quilting point (point de capiton) in reference to Plato’s comparison of discourse to cloth, but which is no longer produced through weaving (braiding of threads, continuous weaving) but through upholstering, an activity that gathers together a continuous fabric by means of an external pin or fastener, and violently and extrinsically imposes a topological structure upon it that twists it into a fold of a determinate subjectivation.
This signifier-quilting point exceeds the domain of linguistic reference: non-linguistic, extra-propositional and psychic, it is from the quilting point that the floating lines of signifieds and symbolic signifiers, among which figure other linguistic signs, can become articulated. Lacan names this the master signifier, the phallus, or the Name of the Father.
Guattari takes up the quilting point, but decisively transforms it by collapsing the ordered chain of signifiers and signifieds, refusing the authoritarian cut of the master signifier, for which he substitutes, with a dash of humour, the transversal minority of the desiring machine, which also cuts the flows, but which does not function in the signifying order of the symbolic or of discourse. Hence the opposition between structural, signifying semiologies and machinic, asignifying semiotics: term for term, Guattari opposes the machine, in the social order of production, for structure, in the symbolic order of significance. In short, Guattari operates with Lacan just as Marx did with Hegel: he puts Lacanian theory back on its feet by reversing it from logic to the Real.
The decisive point of Lacanian theory concerns this redoubling of the signifier, appearing once in the chain of relative signifiers, and once as the big O signifier. Here is the second point at which Lacan’s return to Freud constituted a transformation of Freudian theory. Lacan slanted Freud in favour of a preponderance of the paternal function, the guarantor of sexual difference, the bearer of the phallus. The phallus is not anatomical but signifying. In short, Lacan transposes the second Freudian topography (id, ego, superego) – too anatomical for his taste because it posits already-totalised objects – onto a structural grid that allows him to transform parental points of identification (the superego) into signifying tensors – logical and topological sites – that converge on the site of the phallus. This is the great Freudian heritage that his followers have covered up, according to Lacan, because they remained focused on the object relation when they weren’t busy transforming analysis into an exercise in the adaptation of the ego. For Lacan, what matters is avoiding the object relation that privileges the imaginary position of the fantasm and finds its axis in the mother-child relation. Only the phallic function permits this. These analyses of the paternal function, the redoubling of the signifier, accompanied by the absolute transcendence of the master signifier, are made possible by psychosis and imply at the same time the relativity of the Oedipus complex, now revealed to be applicable only to neurosis.
The analysis of psychosis reveals the quilting point. In other words, more neatly than neurosis, psychosis indicates the structuring power of a signifier irreducible to the order of discourse, but it does so negatively. Psychosis is the structure wherein there has been a failure to introduce a signifier. The remarkable feature of psychosis is that the structuration of the signifier has not played its role. What indicates psychotic foreclosure is that the quilting point has been eluded or missed. The Oedipus complex affects the imaginary, signifying structuration of the neurotic and does not concern the psychotic: Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ proves to go ‘beyond Freud’, and for this reason Guattari is the successor of Lacan, not Freud.
Guattari derives two major conclusions from this. First, the primacy of the signifier implies the relativity of the Oedipus complex because it is not functional except in the name of a signifying structure, for a subject who has already been articulated by triangulation and submitted to the symbolic order, but not for a subject foreclosed from it. Oedipus is not operative for the psychoses. This in turn indicates a historicity of the Oedipus complex that Guattari applies to the signifier itself. Guattari absorbed from Lacan’s teaching the need for a critique of the Oedipus complex, which he performed with Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus in 1972.
MARX AGAINST LACAN: THE PRIMACY OF THE SIGNIFIER AND THE PLACE OF THE FATHER AS FIGURES OF SOCIAL DOMINATION
But in pursuing the Lacanian path, Guattari establishes his distance from Lacan and turns to a critique of the signifier itself. The phallus imposes the Law that sustains and animates desire. Lacan only reduced the imaginary complex of individual desire in order to posit the symbolic signifier as the phallus in the order of sexual difference, the symbolic Law in the imaginary order of desire. Oedipus only has purchase in so far as it inscribes the place of the father, which is not that of the man, but that of the master signifier that binds the floating chains of signifiers and signifieds to its structuring lack, and organises desire in relation to the signifying lack of the Law, imposing the symbolic order that the psychotic lacks. Lacan proposed that Freud found the Oedipus complex everywhere because ‘the notion of the father, closely related to that of the fear of God, gives him the most palpable element in experience of what I’ve called the quilting point between the signifier and the signified’.13
Like Lacan, Guattari recognised the urgency of critiquing Oedipus, but he approached this critique in a radically different way. Lacan reduces Oedipus to a false step in the symbolic topology of the constitution of the subject, while Guattari understands its reduction as a liberation of desire, which would have been laughable to Lacan if Guattari hadn’t also proposed, like Lacan, that there is no such thing as a spontaneity of desire or a desire anterior to its social coding. But the two authors stake out different positions on this coding, as well on the transcendence of the Law, which targets this liberation. This is already indicated by the fact that Lacan oriented his clinic to the treatment of paranoia, while Guattari oriented his toward schizophrenic depersonalisation, characterised by a militant suspicion with regard to the power of the Law. Guattari felt the urgent need to escape the Lacanian position. But he did not limit himself to the Deleuzian critique of the Law as a transcendent invariant and of desire as lack; he understood the Law as a positive structure of social domination, a perspective lacking in Deleuze. It is through Marx and his critique of the law and of rights that Guattari recognised the need to take up the critique of the signifier. From this perspective, the literary analysis of Kafka implies not only a contestation of the Oedipal status of literature – Kafka, like Proust, considered one of the great Oedipalists, who falls back so easily upon the neurotic relation to the Law – but also a refusal of any Oedipalisation of literature or of art. It implies especially a direct confrontation with the transcendent position of the Lacanian Law, and the term ‘minor literature’ encompasses a critique of the master signifier.
Lacan thus plays an important role in the theory of the desiring machine: he made it possible to think of the object of desire as a ‘nonhuman “object,” heterogeneous to the person, below the minimum conditions of identity, escaping the intersubjective coordinates as well as the world of meanings’ (AO 360). The second pole, that of the Other signifier, contributes to the theory of the desiring machine, which directly takes up the function of cutting and coding flows as operations constituting desire. But the Other signifier must be subjected to the same critique as that applied to Oedipal structuration; its socio-cultural attraction is comparable to that which allowed Lacan to mock Oedipus.14 It must thus be subjected to the same materialist and political examination instead of being positioned as an expression of culture. Lacan seemed well disposed to an approach that put the unconscious in relation with history and politics, but he did not pursue it.15
Guattari’s critique of Lacan thus proceeds by way of a Marxist analysis. The signifier itself is also historical; it has not been given for all time to human constitution. Lacan is indeed correct to deal with the Oedipus complex as an Imaginary myth, and he does not hesitate to destroy the pretensions of fantasy in favour of (collective) symbolic structure. But in introducing the phallus as an ahistorical master signifier, he did not see that he was constructing an even more destructive myth, the efficacity of the phallus installing in every subject the existence of a complex analog, fabulated no longer upon parental figures (to marry Jocasta, to kill Laius – to read Sophocles) but upon castration, the anguish of being produced as a socially sexed being who inscribes desire within the Law: there is no transcendent phallus without the agony of castration. Guattari deals with the agony of castration as a complex comparable to that of the Oedipus complex. Once the reduction of the phallus to the castration complex has been accomplished, the critique that was applicable to the Oedipus complex as imaginary identifier must also apply to the castration complex, and Lacan did not follow his analysis through to its conclusion.
Second, the signifier now assumes, according to Guattari, a determinate historical inscription: it refers to despotic social formations, and its very historicity invalidates Freudian analysis, which is not applicable to a universal psyche, but only to the specific social formation of fin de siècle Austria. Once Guattari reduced Oedipus to the literate fantasy of the Viennese bourgeoisie, it was not difficult to pursue the analysis and invalidate the master signifier as an even more archaic structure of domination. It is henceforth its role as a marker of power – a consideration completely absent in Lacan – that will polarise all of the critiques. The Lacanian determination of psychosis as foreclosure not only functioned to reveal the insufficiencies of Oedipal psychoanalysis; it also condemned the primacy of the letter and the Law that theoretically define foreclosure, most notably its use in interpretation. It led Guattari to separate himself once and for all from psychoanalysis (AO 90–1).
DESIRING MACHINES AND THE REFUSAL OF FREUDO-MARXISM
Guattari thus operated a double displacement: he opposed the machine of real production to symbolic structure, and distinguished between social realities, productive realities (machines), and products (structures). Next, he defined oppressive structures and assigned an ‘anti-productive’ value to the results produced. The libidinal reality of desire permitted it to be classed among productive forces, while the family – as a social form historically linked to property – is not only an anti-productive residue, but is also a structure defined as oppressive: it is not content to give shape to desire, but subjugates it in a form of social domination. Guattari thus transforms psychoanalytic theory using Marx, since structures depend on anti-productive forces of subjugation, and the unconscious on real forces of production. But, at the same time, he opposed the Marxist gospel of a separation between material infrastructures and superstructural representations.
In separating subjectivity and individual existence, Guattari connects Marx to Lacan in a singular way. Subjectivity is not an ideational effect of a structural or signifying kind; it is manufactured, it is machinic. This is the polemical sense of the concept of the machine that Guattari proposed very early, and which he opposed to Lacanian structure, conferring upon it a pragmatic effectivity that is clearly politically engaged, in line with his militant activity. For Guattari, it was never a question of sequestering himself on the intellectual plane. Deleuze attaches ‘a particular importance’ to this text (Psychanalyse et transversalité), which signals the failure of the concept of structure due to its abstract formalism.16
In this way, Guattari dissociates the concepts of the individual and of subjectivity. Corporeal individuals undergo modes of social subjectivation such that the body of a material individual is always the site of different modes of subjectivations that are often concurrent, disparate and heterogeneous, but which converge with more or less harmony or inadequacy to produce social individuals. The individual is thus the result of social subjective modes of production. The example of language clearly demonstrates this: all human individuals-subjects socialised by language have submitted to the coding of a language that subsists exterior to individuals; even if it does not exist outside of speakers or outside the set of material apparatuses that code it, the written traces thanks to which it subsists are deprived of living speakers. The individual-subject thus finds himself positioned in relation to unconscious subjective formations as a result or product, but also as a terminal, to use the superb expression Guattari introduced in 1984: if it can justifiably be said that an individual corporeally exists, this individual only functions by means of transindividual programmes that inform it, educate it and govern it, and with which it interacts. It is necessary to conceive of the individual as a terminal. The individual terminal is thus a consumer of subjectivity. We must conceive of the relation between the individual and the unconscious social mode of subjectivity in the following way: the individual is modelled by modes of subjective production. These are not ideational, as the structuralists assume; they may not be reduced to effects of language, of significations, or even of signifiers. They are rather of the order of asignifying material production. ‘Subjectivity is manufactured just as energy, electricity, and aluminum are’ (MRB 47).
NOTES
1. Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies.
2. In French, Capitalisme Mondial Intégré. See Guattari and Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil.
3. Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, ‘Chapitre V: Le discours du plan’, in Recherches 13 (1973): 183–6.
4. Deleuze, ‘Trois Problèmes de groupe’, Preface, Psychanalyse et transversalité.
5. On La Borde, see ‘Sur les rapports infirmiers-médecins’ (1955) in Psychanalyse et transversalité, 7–17; Molecular Revolution in Brazil, 135–7; and Oury, Guattari and Tosquelles, Pratique de l’institutionnel et politique.
6. It was François Tosquelles who, in the 1940s, having withdrawn to Saint-Alban due to the war and participating in the Resistance, founded institutional psychotherapy. Ten years later, after the somewhat artificial tumult concocted by the experience of the Resistance and of Liberation, Jean Oury moved to La Borde and took up Tosquelles’ experiment with a small group of around forty people, including patients. On institutional psychoanalysis, see Oury, Guattari and Tosquelles, Pratique de l’institutionnel et politique. On La Borde, see Polack and Sivadon-Sabourin, La Borde ou la droit à la folie.
7. Guattari, Les Années d’hiver, 1980–1985, 274.
8. It is apt in this context to recall that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus have as their subtitle, ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’.
9. Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, Écrits, 223.
10. Lacan, ‘On a Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, Écrits, 479.
11. Lévi-Strauss, Preface to the Work of Marcel Mauss.
12. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 267.
13. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 268.
14. ‘Yet the Oedipal show cannot run indefinitely in forms of society that are losing the sense of tragedy to an ever greater extent.’ Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, Écrits, 688.
15. ‘I have only been able to briefly mention the cultural history of this signifier, but I have sufficiently indicated to you that it’s inseparable from a particular structuration.’ Lacan, Seminar III, The Psychoses, 267.
16. Deleuze, ‘Trois Problèmes de groupe’, Preface, Psychanalyse et transversalité, xi.