Guattari and transversality Institutions, analysis and experimentation Andrew Goffey How, on the basis of what problems and concerns, in typically as a contextualizing point of reference to reference to what concepts, and in the light of what frame discussions of concepts. How the institu- practices, can and should we understand the work of tion and its possibilities were crucial to Guattari’s Félix Guattari? It is now fairly widely accepted that concerns can thus easily fall by the wayside. Philo- Guattari was not simply a junior partner in the two- sophical readings that do not engage with this ques- headed exploration of capitalism and schizophrenia tion of the institution, or which consider Guattari’s signed ‘Deleuze and Guattari’ and that there is a early writings from the telos of the collaboration with Guattari ‘effect’ that consists in more than the provi- Deleuze, risk missing the ways in which Guattari’s sion of clinical material and political experience, a work links theory and practice. Given the complexity heady rhetoric and a speculative interest in semiotic of the developments around psychiatry in postwar theory, for Deleuze to develop into well-formed philo- France, ignoring the matter of how Guattari under- sophical concepts.1 However, developing an explora- stood institutions and what is entailed by his notion tion of what might be called the ‘plane’ of thought of institutional analysis further risks missing the proper to Guattari is a task that remains for the most specific interest of his work in relation to the broader part still to be accomplished. historical current of movements calling into question With the recent publication in English of a com- institutions more generally. plete version of Psychoanalysis and Transversality,2 It is worth pointing out, in this respect, that the anglophone readers are in a better position to appre- French term institution does not cover the same ciate some of the complexities of Guattari’s thinking semantic field as the English term ‘institution’. As and, in particular, the depth of its engagement with Jean Ayme has pointed out in his essay on the history a set of practices organized as much in relation to of institutional psychotherapy, the institutional realities of working with psychosis contrary to Anglo-Saxon use, for which the institu- as with the psychotic institutions of leftist politics tion is the hospital, from which ‘deinstitutionali- in post-World War II France. Not only did Guattari zation’, designating the taking in hand of the ill work in one of the numerous hospitals in the French outside of the hospital, follows, in French, institu- psychiatric sector, but he wrote for a newspaper, La tion designates first of all the action of instituting, Voie Communiste, which was at the forefront of a and then ‘everything that is invented by humans in 4 shift away from the Stalinism of the PCF. In these opposition to the facts of nature’. respects, the questions of the institution and, more What anglophones might think of as institutions, specifically, of ‘institutionalization’ form an interest- in French is captured by the term établissement. Jean ing starting point for addressing some key themes in Oury, following Tosquelles in his insistence on dis- Guattari’s work, his relationship with Deleuze, and tinguishing ‘institution’ and établissement, remarks in the nature of his lifelong engagement with clinical a manner that is largely consistent with the spirit, if issues relating to psychosis, as well as his vindication not the letter, of Guattari’s thinking: of micropolitics, which is incomprehensible without some appreciation of the importance of the institu- the establishment is a structure that is plunged tion in his thinking. into global society, and which relates to state cri- teria: it must answer to a large quantity of neces- Thus far, the institution and institutionalization sary administrative conditions; whereas institutions do not figure that much in the few commentaries are something that can develop inside the estab- that exist on Guattari’s work.3 The La Borde clinic lishment: they are quasi-infinite in number and is generally present, of course – unavoidably so – but variety.5 38 RadicaL PhiLosoPhy 195 (jaN/feb 2016) In these respects, exploring the issue of the in the ‘air du temps’ in France (and not just France) institution has broader resonances. It not only helps in the 1960s, both in the myriad agitations shaking elucidate the well-known theme of micropolitics, but the psychiatric sector and in intellectual debate, and it can help in the development of a more detailed Foucault was very much part of these agitations. A consideration of questions of power, and in particular number of commentators have noted the way that some of the differences between Deleuze, Guattari Foucault’s The History of Madness became something and Foucault. It also offers the possibility of a reading of a rallying point for the burgeoning criticism of of Deleuze that starts from Guattari (rather than the asylum. Robert Castel has gone so far as to talk the more conventional reverse move). For, whilst the of ‘two’ versions of Foucault’s The History of Madness theme of the institution may have only a muted pres- when making the link between the latter and a bur- ence in Deleuze’s work, it is there. Deleuze acknowl- geoning ‘anti-repressive sensibility’.8 And it was in edged this in an interview with Antonio Negri, in relation, precisely, to the ‘anti-psychiatric’ current the journal Futur antérieur in 1990. Responding to that Foucault would develop a critical analysis of a question about the problem of politics and the the notion of the institution in his 1973–4 lectures at problematic relationship of movements to institu- the Collège de France on ‘Psychiatric Power’. These tions that he (Negri) detects in his work, Deleuze lectures, where it is a matter of reframing questions acknowledged the importance of a movement within of psychiatric expertise in terms of a problem of institutions that is distinct from laws and contracts. power, rather than a primarily representational one And it is precisely in relationship to Guattari, in of the ‘perception’ of madness, serve as an interesting ‘Three Group-Related Problems’, the essay that he counterpoint to Guattari’s thinking. For Foucault wrote as a preface to Psychoanalysis and Transversality, argues that the institution (along with violence and that we find an explicit invocation of the theme of the the family) is a notion that will not get us ‘very far’ institution in relationship to politics, as a counter to in the analysis of the links between a discursive the ‘contractual’ form of relationship to which anti- practice and the apparatus of power. More pointedly psychiatry found itself having recourse.6 We can also for Foucault, the difficulty with taking the notion of find a more direct indication of Deleuze’s interest in the institution as an implicit framing device is that institutions and the movement of ‘collective creation’ ‘as soon as we talk about institutions we are basically in his writing practice: first with Guattari and then talking about both individuals and the group, we in a reworking of the entretien, the ‘conversation’ take the individual, the group, and the rules which format of the intellectual discussion, with Claire govern them as given.’ For Foucault, the key point is Parnet. For the entretien and the situation it creates that power is constitutive of individuals and groups: in which an author ‘explains’ him- or herself is pre- ‘What is important therefore is … the practical cisely an element of the institutions of philosophy dispositions of power, the characteristic networks, that Deleuze was concerned with at that moment in currents, relays, points of support, and differences of French intellectual history: the emergence of media potential that characterize a form of power, which ‘intellectuals’, such as the nouveaux philosophes, the are, I think, constitutive of, precisely, both the indi- links between publishing and journalism, and the vidual and the group.’9 Thus it is the informal tactical usurping of philosophy by marketing, in relation to reality of power that takes analytic precedence over which Deleuze situates key elements of his approach the more formalized, rational operations of the insti- to ‘doing’ philosophy, subsequent to his encounter tution, which can, in Foucault’s view, have nothing to with Guattari. do with anything like the production of subjectivity in which Guattari was evidently interested. Why institutions? The underlying criticisms of ‘anti-psychiatry’ (in a But it is perhaps in relationship to Foucault and to the broad, not the UK-specific, sense) are amplified in a shifts in his thinking that Guattari’s approach to the series of rather generic characterizations of a whole institution is of the most immediate interest. At one series of developments – of which Guattari’s work point in the early 1970s Foucault and Guattari had a was a part – by Jacques Lagrange in the contextual- particularly close connection, through a collabora- izing presentation of Foucault’s course, and these are tive project funded by the French government that indicative of a willingness to simplify what were ulti- eventuated in the publication of several issues of the mately a complex, not to say chaotic, set of historical journal Recherches on the ‘genealogy of capital’.7 The processes in the postwar period. Whilst Lagrange institution and its critique were, of course, very much is doubtless correct to point to the limitations of 39 the terms on which the institutional psychotherapy and existential psychiatry prove very little in and of current in postwar French psychiatry may have themselves: Guattari was not a phenomenologist and sought to reform the ‘psychiatrie de secteur’, and to nor was he any great respecter of the unity of philo- the broader connections between anti-psychiatry à la sophical systems.