Félix Guattari

A Critical Introduction

Gary Genosko

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781783714506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This is an introduction to the thought of the radical French thinker Félix Guattari. Guattari's main works were published in the 1970s and 1980s. His background was in psychoanalysis -- he was trained by Lacan and he practised as a psychoanalyst for much of his life. He developed a distinctive psychoanalytic method informed always by his revolutionary politics. Guattari was actively involved in numerous political movements, from Trotskyism to Autonomism, tackling ecological and sexual politics along the way. A true believer in collectivity, much of his work was written in collaboration, most famously with Gilles Deleuze. This is also an introduction to key concepts such as schizoanalysis, transversality, a-signifying semiotics and various kinds of machine.

1

THE FORMATION OF A YOUNG MILITANT

While many of us were excitingly entering the workforce for the first time as part-time laborers in the tertiary sector, Guattari was already at 16 years of age politically precocious. He was a child of the Liberation, and all of its ‘extraordinary wild imaginings,’ above all those of the youth hostel movement.¹ Radical pedagogue Fernand Oury (1920–98) was instrumental in getting Guattari involved during the summer caravans from one hostel to the next that he organized in the Paris suburb of La Garenne-Colombes for youth like Guattari, who grew up in the same department, and already knew Oury as his science teacher.² Indeed, in his journal Guattari recalls a dream sequence in which there were ‘two different paths for going out of my house at La Garenne. One was towards Fernand Oury’s house.’³ This chapter follows the path upon which the elder Oury (there would be another younger brother) set Guattari.

Fernand Oury’s influence was decisive for Guattari in both practice and theory. Guattari once remarked that

my presumed competence in this domain [setting up intra-hospital patient clubs and workshops at Clinique de Borde in the mid 1950s] was due to the fact that since the age of sixteen I had always been a ‘militant’ in organizations like the Youth Hostels and a whole range of activities for the extreme left.⁴

The Guattari that we have received is best known for his collaborations: with Deleuze, Negri, Alliez, etc. Guattari’s career path led him to take up psychoanalysis after abandoning the study of pharmacy he began in the late 1940s, what he dubbed the ‘family business.’⁵ He was trained by Lacan, having entered the orbit of the master’s seminar in the early 1950s and with whom he had a stormy relationship, and spent his career at La Borde. In return for freedom to experiment with the institution’s organization, Guattari offered, in a confessional mode, ‘constant fidelity to the local superegoism.’⁶ He also maintained his own practice. Jean Oury – another Lacanian superego – helped Guattari escape from an internship in pharmacy, a path he abandoned;⁷ Fernand initiated Guattari into a militant’s life that prepared him for what his brother had in store.

The picture of Guattari I want to draw in this first chapter owes more to a little-known schoolteacher in suburban Paris than to the big names of post-’68 French thought. Fernand Oury was best known as a key figure in the movement that updated the ideas of Célestin Freinet (1896–1966) for a new era of barracks schools under the name of ‘institutional pedagogy.’⁸ The new large urban (primary and secondary) schools of the 1960s were far removed from the one- or two-room rural schoolhouses with small numbers of mixed ages in the primary grades that defined the Freinet movement. Fernand’s name is closely linked with the birth of the institutional pedagogy movement (IP) in the early 1960s. This was a sub-movement – a ‘recognizable strand’⁹ – of Freinet teaching, located in Paris, although Freinet himself was not comfortable with IP’s heavily theoretical discourse grounded in psychoanalysis, the ‘case study’ method of writing about children, and the creeping professionalization and desire for a pathway of accreditation (ideas alien to Freinet) of the teachers involved. In fact, the IP introduced an entirely new element into Freinet culture: academic research in education studies now had a role to play in Freinet activity.¹⁰ Freinet’s failed attempt to influence activities in the Paris group’s journal (L’Éducateur de l’Ille-de-France) from his location outside of Cannes in the south of France led to the IP’s expulsion from the Parisian Freinet group, the Institut Parisien de l’École Moderne.

Oury was not the only educator who influenced Guattari and assisted in his political education. Fernand Deligny (1913–96) worked with psycho-socially marginal children, offering them an alternative to hospitalization. He also created, circa 1948, a ‘therapeutic caravan’ known as La Grande Cordée, ‘a network of lodgings for delinquents, pre-delinquents, and emotionally challenged children with the assistance of the Youth Hostel network. Children impermeable to psychiatric treatment were welcomed by “normal” adults.’¹¹ By means of sponsorships, funds from support groups, donations, and numerous moves in and out of Paris to encampments and communes, Deligny managed to sustain his peripatetic cure against the demands of professional teachers and those specialists who voted for the institutionalization of the children with whom he lived and worked, creating a ‘suitable place to live.’¹² Eventually, in 1965, he landed on the doorstep of La Borde. Jean Oury and Guattari assisted Deligny’s team by providing accommodation at La Borde, where part of Deligny’s film Le Moindre Geste (1962–71) was shot by Josée Manenti and Jean-Pierre Daniel in 1965–66. Later in the decade Deligny would work on his film and short-lived journal Cahiers de l’Aire (1968–73) at Guattari’s property in Gourgas, close to the commune where he lived in Monoblet. Despite Deligny and Manenti’s differences with Guattari,¹³ both were briefly involved in the production of publications for the Fédération des groupes d’études et de recherches institutionnelles (FGERI – founded in 1965). Indeed, Deligny is credited by some with the artisanal production of the Cahiers de la FGERI, including the early issues of the journal Recherches, directed (perhaps even dominated) by Guattari.¹⁴

Before Guattari coined the term ‘schizoanalysis’ to describe his brand of psychotherapy, he worked under the rubric of what was known as ‘institutional psychotherapy,’ that is, analysis undertaken by foregrounding the institutional context itself as a mediating object in collective life. This approach actively deconstructed the dyad of analyst–analysand and the familialism that perfused even the most avant-garde practices of psychoanalysis; indeed, access to the unconscious could not be made exclusively via language and the symbolic order by means of the transference, the psychoanalytic cornerstone. Guattari focused on how an institution contributed to the creation of certain kinds of subjectivity; likewise, for educators working within the Freinet-inspired IP, the focus was on how the school itself created certain kinds of learning disabilities in its pupils. The organization, artifacts, fields of reference, and group life of an institution emerging through its collective selfinvention was not empirical sociology or organization studies, because the model was the psychoanalytic part-object that was irreducible to its objective description. The ‘institutional object’ (based neither on lack nor on a whole from which a part is cut, but understood in positive and productive terms irreducible to any totality, especially the kinds of identities that institutions bestow) could be known only through an analysis of a group’s desire as it participated in and negotiated its creation with reference to proliferating reference points. This gave to groups the ability to occupy the creative spaces of an institution and contribute to its ongoing elaboration in a kind of sculptural process. This would have been extremely difficult in a ‘barracks’ school with large numbers of children managed only through quasi-military routine. Institutional pedagogy and psychotherapy were grappling with very similar problems around how institutional objects were received, that is, introjected, by their denizens.

Guattari was learning the ropes of institutional experimentation in the course of his training as a young militant, first visiting Jean Oury at the small psychiatric clinic at Saumery in the early 1950s. It was not until he joined La Borde a few years later and developed the ‘grid’ – literally the tabular representation upon which the evolving schedule of work rotation in which everyone participated was inscribed – that he developed a portfolio of practices for gaining access to the ways in which complex institutional interrelations affected the psychical economies of actual groups and their members. Guattari set about experimenting with ways to heighten and maximize an institution’s ‘therapeutic coefficient’ by unfixing rigid roles, thawing frozen hierarchies, opening hitherto closed blinkers, and modifying the introjection of the local superegoisms and objects. This role redefinition and displacement of fixed, hierarchical power relations and identities was scrambled micropolitically in ways that interrupted fantasies that would have otherwise bewitched the institution’s denizens by trapping them in inflexible strata of authority and routines without any justification but their own continuation. As I shall explain in Chapter 2, the grid wasn’t perfect and was a little centralist in bureaucratic inspiration at first.

Jean and Fernand had been active in the IP and had therefore a working knowledge of the battery of Freinet techniques. Fernand had been a member of the Freinet movement since the late 1940s. Jean borrowed Freinet techniques and adapted them to new forms of group work at Saumery and then La Borde.¹⁵ In a sense, then, Guattari was absorbing from the Oury brothers lessons in modified Freinet practices.

The notion that youth hostels could be lumped together with other far left experiments is hard to reconcile with the broad internationalist strokes of the hostelling movement. France was one of the original signatories to the establishment of the International Youth Hostel Association (IYHA) in 1932. Hostelling is a German creation, dating from the early twentieth century and catering to the country wanderer burdened only by a rucksack, with a foundation in educational experimentation – the elementary school hostel set up in Altena by Richard Schirrmann, widely considered as the founder of the youth hostel movement, in 1909. While the politics of the IYHA may be appreciated through its actions over a number of decades – its successful resistance to National Socialist attempts to dominate the organization in the 1930s and, later, its steadfast refusal to permit South Africa membership and its outright rejection of South Africa’s proposed ‘white’ and ‘black’ hostel networks – the movement is centrist in its internationalism and valorization of youth travel, preferably in the country and on foot, and exposure to folk cultures in general. All the values of self-reliance and the benefits of fresh air and physical activity are found there, together with any number of restrictions (age limits for hostel use, division of the sexes in the dormitories, house parents, etc.). Organizationally, youth hostels are by-and-large voluntary bodies in the non-profit, NGO sector, organized around national councils with main executive bodies that conform to the basic standards set by the IYHA. Many national youth hostel organizations have direct connections with ministries of education and serve, in the manner of Schirrmann, as accommodation for traveling school classes, a kind of ‘roaming school’ or ‘school country house.’¹⁶ This is what Guattari suggests by the ‘caravans’ organized by Oury out of La Garenne, which used both schools and hostels as accommodation for roaming groups of schoolchildren during vacation periods; likewise, it is the same network that assisted Deligny in conceptualizing passages, circuits, and trajectories followed by children within much more strictly circumscribed areas, which he would map both on paper and on film (not so much as lines of flight, but lines of repetition and wandering) towards grasping the inscriptions of unique existential territories. But what is the relationship between hostelling, far left militancy, and popular pedagogy? What is the link between the youth hostels and Oury’s institutional pedagogy and how did they contribute to Guattari’s training as a young militant and influence his subsequent experiments with transdisciplinary groups?

The French Anomaly in Youth Hostelling

In the history of the youth hostel movement, France is an anomaly. Although it was not uncommon for national associations to be divided and subdivided along regional–territorial lines, in France competing associations emerged that were fractured along political and religious lines. This was a unique challenge for the IYHA. The original signatory for France was the Catholic wing of the movement, the Ligue Française pour les Auberges de la Jeunesse, long associated with the name of Marc Sangnier (1873–1950) and known for its pacifist politics, not to mention its conservative attitudes toward sexuality.¹⁷ The first French youth hostel was established in Sangnier’s country home in Bierville, south of Paris, and opened its doors in 1930.

In 1934 another French hostelling organization appeared, the Centre Laïque des Auberges de la Jeunesse (CLAJ). According to one historian:

[I]t drew on the latent anti-clericalism in French educational circles and gave political allegiance to the Popular Front Government; it emphasized the need for the young hostel-users to take a part in constructing and controlling their youth hostels, and large numbers of hostels sprang up all over the country like mushrooms … Every group of hostel-users established its own journal which discussed in serious terms the mystique of youth-hostelling – the liberation of youth from the ‘stuffy’ tradition of the older generation. The movement could boast its own poet (the Provençal writer, Jean Giono) and its own collection of songs (Marie-Rose Clouzot’s La clé des chants).¹⁸

There are several important points here that allow us to situate Guattari and Oury in this lay hostelling tradition. The first is the emphasis placed on the socialist politics of Léon Blum’s Popular Front (Front Populaire), which had come into power in 1936 behind a left unified in the face of the threat of fascism. The Front’s emphasis on cultural enrichment through leisure, and the secularization of education, gave impetus to the formation of many new organizations, but most importantly provided funding for many existing organizations, including the Centre Laïque and the Ligue. Leo Lagrange was the minister in charge of the Ministry of Leisure at the time and he later assumed the presidency of the CLAJ.¹⁹ The lay hostels multiplied faster than those of the Ligue largely because of government policies that saw in them places where workers, who for the first time enjoyed paid holidays, could vacation. A mythic status has accrued to the ‘communist’ summer camps for children, the colonies de vacances, and the body that was charged with training its leaders (Centres d’Éntrainement aux Méthodes d’Éducation Active). Followers of Freinet were members of this body and Freinet’s own school, which had room for boarders, participated in this scheme. At the time the government supported a wide range of programs geared toward youth organizations. Under the Popular Front, hostels, schools, and other facilities became points of intersection for popular education, new opportunities for leisure and the valorization of youth travel, and consensual political ideology machines within civil society. This enthusiasm was rekindled in the postwar years. Just as significant was the character of self-organization attributed to the hostels within the Centre Laïque, which underlined selfreliance through workers’ control. This extended to the actual construction of the facilities, thus regaining the original mandate of cooperative labor that animated the hostelling spirit and which accelerated in the postwar years in the face of the considerable task of rebuilding and repair. It may be added that some of the remote hostels in unoccupied France during the Second World War had been ‘centers of resistance,’²⁰ just as psychiatric hospitals like St. Alban had provided refuge for progressive doctors, artists, and resistance fighters.

However, it is the central role given to a self-produced collective publication that cements the relationship between Guattari, Oury, the youth hostels, and institutional analysis. A key feature of Oury’s Freinet-inspired pedagogy was the self-produced school journal and the collective responsibility assumed for its editing and distribution. While many national youth hostel associations had their own periodicals, including in France the Ligue’s Information et documentation, these were not constitutive of the institution and stood apart from the project of its permanent reinvention. While many of these journals had ‘romantic names such as Au devant de la vie, Route joyeuse, Viens avec nous and l’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Formation of a Young Militant
• 2. Transversality and Politics
• 3. Subjectivity, Art, and Ecosophy
• 4. A-signifying Semiotics
• 5. Informatic Striation
• 6. Minor Cinema
• 7. Affect and Epilepsy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• List of References
• List of Media
• Index