FG FG No.0 a Kitchen Debate
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FG FG A Kitchen Debate no.0 1 In this project we decided to bring Lillian Moller together two FGs—Frank Gilbreth Gilbreth, The Psychology and Félix Guattari. of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste, Sturgis & Walton Company, New York, 1914. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p.31. Frank Gilbreth and Félix Guattari have a great deal in common, but they also have many divergences. Firstly, their shared interest in organisa- tion: in Frank Gilbreth’s case ‘scientific organisation’ and in Guattari’s political and revolutionary organisation. This interest was reflected by their intensive use of diagrams. From the perspective that, precisely, the diagram according to Gilles Deleuze, ‘is the map of relations between forces’.² The former was an American engineer who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth (1868–1924), and the latter a psycho- therapist and philosopher in the sec- ond half of the twentieth century (1930–1992). Aside from their shared initials, both regularly worked as a duo. Although this is rare in the field of manage- ment—Frank Gilbreth worked with Lillian Gilbreth,¹ a doctor of psycholo- gy, industrial engineer, and mother of twelve children—, it is quite excep- tional in the field of philosophy, as Félix Guattari co-authored many of his major works with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. 1 3 And the authors continue: ‘This can be done best by showing graphi cally two plans of management: the first of these (see Fig.2) represents what is variously known as military or traditional mana gement […] and has also been used many times in religious organi sations and political organisa tions. […] Fig.3 represents the lines of autho rity in functional or scientific mana gement. Here the division is by functions, the first functional division being the sepa The first two diagrams that we are The preceding two diagrams ration of the plan- ning from the presenting here are contained in are extracts from Félix Guattari’s performing’, Frank Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s Applied Schizoanalytic Cartographies: they B. & Lillian M. Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study, published in 1917; represent the ‘Map of entities Motion Study: A Collection of they present respectively traditional and tensors’ and the ‘Intersection Papers on the management (fig.2) and scientific of the Given and the Giving’.⁴ Efficient Method to industrial or functional management (fig.3).³ Preparedness, Sturgis & Walton In addition to this diagrammatic Company, practice, Frank Gilbreth and Félix New York, 1917, pp.2223. Guattari were both interested in grids. 4 Félix Guattari, Frank Gilbreth (whom we shall Schizonanalytic Cartographies, henceforth refer to as FG1) did in fact Bloomsbury, design a system of writing in the 2013, p.60. space within an orthonormal grid. Here is the instrument for recording human movement, the cyclograph, a light ring placed on the participant’s finger. 2 And two applications of this can be Obviously, the aim was to organise the seen, in this instance with a typist, and production process, to increase pro- here with a workman. ductivity by eliminating unnecessary movements throughout—represented by the ‘knots’ on the diagram, which then have to be eliminated. Félix Guattari (henceforth FG2) used grids in an entirely different way. FG1, as we have seen, was more interested in objectivity and seriality; in contrast, FG2 wished to increase the potential for action of subjectivity. In the La Borde Clinic that he co-man- aged with the psychiatrist Jean Oury ‘to develop new forms of subjectivity’, FG2 invented ‘new organisational solutions’: ‘It was therefore necessary to introduce a system that one could describe as the disorder of the “nor- The curves of light produced via pho- mal” order of things; the system tography were then transcribed in 3D, represented with wire. 3 5 Félix Guattari, ‘The “grid”’, in the review Chimères, issue no. 34, 1998, pp.3, 12. 6 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp.69 71. known as “the grid”, which consists of creating a flexible chart on which everyone changes their place depend- ing on 1) regular tasks, 2) occasional tasks, and 3) “rotations”, that is to say collective tasks that are not the spe- cialisation of any particular personnel category.’ Further on, Guattari speci- fies: ‘The aim of the grid is to make the organisation of labour adjustable, with subjective dimensions which could not Félix Guattari devoted several pages exist in a rigid hierarchical system.’⁵ to La Borde’s kitchen in Chaosmosis, his last book⁶. In this work he Lastly, one place was particularly designed the kitchen as ‘a little opera significant for both the Gilbreths scene’. And, indeed, ‘while food is and Guattari—the kitchen. prepared in a kitchen, it is also a place for exchanging matter in flux, signage, Upon the death of Frank Gilbreth, for and all kinds of performances’. professional reasons relating to the division of work according to gender, Lillian Gilbreth recycled the expertise she had acquired in the industrial sphere and applied it to the domestic field of the kitchen. The idea of efficiency, standardisation, and normalisation is clearly evident in this diagram of The Kitchen Practical (1929), which was also illustrated in various photographs. 4 7 However, that depends on the ‘degree of Frank B. Gilbreth openness (coefficient of transversality) Jr. & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, of the institution’, which will, or will not, Cheaper By the Dozen, Grosset make it a place in which there are ‘col- and Dunlap, 1948. lective agents of unconscious enuncia- 8 tion’ (i.e. a ‘heterogeneous multiplicity’). Emanuelle Guattari, I, Little Asylum, The final similarity between the two Semiotext(e), 2014. authors is that some of their children 9 became writers. ‘Acting in common derives it strength from the practical Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine commitment that links all those Gilbreth Carey wrote one of the best- who have estab sellers in children’s literature, Cheaper lished the rules of their activity By the Dozen,⁷ one of whose illustra- collectively’, Pierre Dardot and tions can be seen here (the Gilbreth One of these stories is about her brother Christian Laval, family at the dinner table, with twelve who was made to regularly eat lem- Commun — la révolution du XXI e children, is somewhat reminiscent of on-flavoured yoghurts bought in packets siècle, Éditions de la Découverte, an industrial assembly line). of twelve by their father. Her younger 2014/2015, brother’s only means of overcoming this p.580. imposition was to gradually empty the carton’s contents into a chest, until, of course, he was caught doing so. Following this overview, which could be termed archeo-genealogical, let us now move on to the relevance and, above all, the future of these questions. Emanuelle Guattari wrote I, Little If we consider each of the various points Asylum,⁸ in which she describes her that have been raised, let us say that child hood in the La Borde Psychiatric with this project ‘FGFG—A Kitchen Clinic. Debate’, we would like to tackle the question of duos—and we form one with In this book she relates, in particular, the KVM—from the perspective of the several anecdotes relating to food and notion of ‘common’. According to Pierre Félix Guattari’s domestic management Dardot and Christian Laval, the organi- of food. sational rules that have been established collectively are deemed to be common.⁹ 5 10 To avoid the inflexibility of national What Hardt and identities (French fries, Italian pasta, Negri call the ‘organization of etc.), which represent any number the intellectual labor of the of ongoing ‘imagined communities’,¹¹ multitude’: ‘The we will focus on mixed and hybrid elements that determine the conceptions and practices (or even disequilibrium of capitalist ‘fusions’, to use the language of cooking). command are insubordination, sabotage, industri With regard to grids: avoiding the al jacquerie, demands for basic attribution of a status and a function, income, the libera we will organise, via the development tion and organi zation of the of a revolving grid, debates and intellectual labor of the multitude, dinners attesting to a non-gendered, and so forth’, racial-, or class-based division of in Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, labour. Commonwealth, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The centrality of the kitchen… The Belknap Press of Harvard This is clearly a case of ‘transversal University Press, That is what we are striving to achieve praxis’,¹² or, as we like to refer to it, 2009, p.319. with this theoretical and practical of ‘philoso-food’ (philosophy, cuisine, 11 Benedict project: to collectively define, together art-design, and politics). Anderson, with the participants in the various Imagined Communities: debates and dinners, the evolving Reflections on the Origin management rules that we abide by.¹⁰ and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 1983. The question of a diagram, chart, and 12 map… Again, the idea is to challenge To use the form an idea that is overly binary. ula employed by Dardot and Laval to define ‘institu tional psychother apy’, as practised initially by François Tosquelles, and subsequently by Jean Oury and Félix Guattari (op. cit., pp.445 449). Dardot and Laval refer more generally to ‘con ductive praxis’ (praxis instituante), pp.405–451. On the subject of transversality, read: Félix Guattari, ‘Transversality’, In place of the major, imperial cartog- in Psychoanalysis raphy—which is synonymous with and Transversali- ty: Texts and the historical Kitchen Debate, the Cold Interviews, 1955– 1971, Semiotex War, and the famous International Fair t(e), 2015, pp.102 in Moscow in 1956, during which 120. the superpowers of the time, the USA and the USSR, via their respective president, Nixon and Khrushchev, stood nose-to-nose in a ‘model’ American kitchen and compared the merits of their respective economic and political systems—, we will focus on other lessprominent, post-colonial cartographies.