The Guattari Reader Pierre-Felix Guattari Edited by Gary Genosko Copyright e Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996 First published 1996 2468 109 753 1 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 UF UK Blackwell Publishers Inc 238 Main Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of shon passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no pan of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without, the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library CaUlloguing in Publication Datil A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British l.Jbrary. Library of Congress CaudDging-in-Publication Data Guattari, Felix. [Selections. English. 1996] A Guattari reader I Pierre-Felix Guattari; edited by Gary Genosko. p. em. - (Blackwell readers) ISBN 0-631-19707-9. - ISBN 0-631-19708-7 1. Criticism - History - 20 century. 2. Criticism - Psychological aspects. 3. Psychoanalysis and literature. I. Genosko, Gary. II. Title. m. Series. PN94.G83 1996 95-42828 194 - dc20 CIP Typeset in 10 on 12pt Plantin by Pure Tech India Limited, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain by HannoHs Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction Part I: The Vicissitudes of Therapy 1 The Divided Laing 37 2 Franco Basaglia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist 42 3 Mary Barnes's "Trip" 46 4 The Four Truths of Psychiatry" 55 5 The Transference 61 6 Psychoanalysis Should Get a Grip on Life 69 Part II: From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses 7 The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis (With Gilles Deleuze) 77 8 Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 95 9 The Postmodern Impasse 109 10 Postmodemism and Ethical Abdication 114 Part III: A Discursive Interlude 11 Institutional Practice and Politics 121 Part IV: Polysemiosis 12 Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement 141 13 The Place of the Signifier in the Institution 148 14 Ritornellos and Existential Affects 158 15 Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire 172 Part V: QueerlSubjectivities 16 Three Billion Perverts on the Stand 185 VI Contents 17 Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse 193 18 A Liberation of Desire 204 19 Toward a New Perspective on Identity 215 20 Genet Regained 218 Part VI: Red and Green Micropolidcal Ecologies 21 Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes (With Eric Alliez) 233 22 Communist Propositions (With Antonio Negri) 248 23 The Left as Processual Passion 259 24 Remaking Social Practices 262 A Select Bibliography of Works by Guattari 273 Index 277 Acknowledgments I am indebted to the advice and service so generously offered by the following people: Brian Massumi, Jean-Franc;ois C6te, Peter Van Wyck, John O'Neill, and Nicholas Zurbrugg. Paul Bouissac, Jacques Pain, Mike Gane, Michael Hardt, Judith Squires, Tim Murphy, and Charles Stivale pointed me in the right directions. Special notice needs to be given to the translators who worked with me on this project: Sophie Thomas, John Caruana, Lang Baker, Charles Dudas, Peter Trnka, Ben Freedman, Todd Dufresne, and Fadi Abou-Rihan. Samir Gandesha and Amresh Sinha provided moral support. In addition, many people facilitated the permissions process in the UK, France, and the US. Rachel Ariss pro­ vided warm support and incisive comments, and our daughter Hannah kept me on schedule. This project was conceived during a very convivial lunch with my editor Simon Prosser in a cafe in New Cross near Goldsmiths' College in London where I was a Visiting Research Fellow in Sociology in 1993-94. Special thanks to Chris Jenks for his invitation, and to Les Back for his encouragement. For-permission to reprint and/or translate material, the author and the publisher are grateful to the following: "The Divided Laing" ["Laing divise", QL 132 (1972)], "Franco Basa­ glia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist" ["La contestation psychiatrique", QL 94 (1970)], "The Postmodem Impasse" ["L'impasse post-modeme", QL 456 (1986)] and "The Left as Processual Passion" ["La Gauche comme passion processuelle", QL 422 (194)] are all used with the kind per­ mission of La Quinzaine litteraire. "Mary Barnes' 'Trip' " ["Le voyage de Mary Barnes", copyright © Le Nouvel Observateur (28 mai 1973)]. Used with the kind permission of the publisher. "The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis", reprinted from G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. by H. Lane, M. Seem, R. Hurley, translation copyright © 1977 by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Used with the kind permission of the publisher. Introduction En bref, toujours et plus que jamais: la revolution moleculaire. [In short, always and more than ever: the molecular revolution.] Felix Guattari, 'La revolution moleculaire', Le Monde (7 dec. 1990): 2. All Readers tell the story of their editors' reading and The Guattari Reader is no exception. The articles and interviews in this volume are assembled around five themes: "The Vicissitudes of Therapy", "From Schizo By­ passes to Postmodem Impasses"; "Discursive Interlude" [a long inter­ view on a variety of topics]; "Polysemiosis"; "QueerISubjectivities", and "Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies" In other words, this Reader addresses the issues of anti-psychiatry and anti-psychoanalysis; the schizo process and the promise of a post-media era set against the dead end of postmodem theory; a wild and woolly polysemiotics based on creative extrapolations from the glossematics of Louis Hjelmslev and the semi­ otics of C.S. Peirce; the queering - that is, the polyphonic potentializa­ tion - of subjectivity; a theory of capitalism and how, and why, to resist it. These do not by any means cover the entire field of Guattari's work, nor are the individual pieces meant to neatly tie up the five arrangements. None of the arrangements are solid blocks; they are all porous, internally diverse, and crossed by multiple thematics. We are on the verge of a long-delayed and for some, long-awaited, explosion of interest in and publishing - in English, at least - on Guattari as his work emerges from the shadow of Gilles Deleuze The Guattan° Reader will fmd itself in good company. Still, how many of you have been to a Deleuze and Guattari conference and not heard more than a few words on Guattari? Too many? Yet I have not attempted to separate Guattari from.> his co-authors. Such an attempt would be completely wrongheaded in Guattari's own terms. Still, I am sorely tempted merely as a provocation - to frame the problem sociologically in terms of a generational (perhaps even a departmental) divide among readers, but this, too, would distort the important lessons Deleuze and Guattari have taught about the conjunction - among others - between their names. I have included Guattari and Deleuze and Alliez and Negri ... because it 2 Introduction was not by accident that they all ended up writing together and between one another. I will not enter here into a detailed justification of my selections. There is too much to say about them, none of which could satisfy all of the possible objections to them. Which is not to say that I'm not inviting second guesses. I did, however, want to avoid an imbalance between material already available in English and previously untranslated material (the situation is always, in this regard, fluid; a few retranslations of material are included), as well as using both short and long pieces, and have included journalistic articles as punctuation for the longer technical bits. I also wanted to make use of as many statements of position as muddy explorations (although, personally, I enjoy wading through the latter). Instead, in this introduction I want to provide some background and critical material drawn from a variety of sources which support the themes that run through this Reader, without, I hope strangling any of the sections, and choking out the reader's own de-and reterritorializations. The first two introductory essays situate Guattari in terms of significant events, places, and debates in the European anti-psychiatry movement. The key concept under discussion is the 'sector', and the key site is La Borde clinic. The third section is organized around the concept of the therapeutic bestiary, and uses the 'animal' as a device for revealing tendencies in Freudian analysis against which Guattari theorized and also inherited and adapted to his own needs. Guattari, too, has a bestiary. The goal of the section on schizoanalysis is to explicate elements central to Guattari's "pragmatics of the unconscious" and provide an example of how a difficult concept such as the machine may be put to work on a text from pop culture. The final introductory section is devoted to Guattari's theory of Integrated World Capitalism and the emergence of his alterna­ tive brands of communistic and ecosophical thinking. The introduction ends by taking note of some of the particular political projects in which Guattari was involved before his death on August 29, 1992. Choose, then, as you like, and make connections as your reading progresses; treat this Reader like a rhizome. Or make a diagram. There is no need to match the following introductory sections to particular arrangements of mater­ ial. This is supposed to be a user-friendly collection rather than a stodgy manual! 1 And-Psychiatry and th~ Sector Throughout its various manifestations in literature, media, and even cinema, the anti-psychiatry movement of the early 1970s discovered the Introduction 3 close relationship between psychiatric and other forms of repression.