The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 59
This movement called for the use of the institution in its dynamic aspect
which promotes exchanges and allows patients to situate or resituate
themselves in historic and symbolic dimensions. It privileges a high level
of transversality, maximum communication, favouring speaking out loud
and responsibility. It requires a permanent analysis of the institutional
counter transference (emotional reactions of the caregivers involved,
their interrelations and the social and material organization of the insti-
tution) which determines the therapeutic action itself … Institutional
psychotherapy responds to the need for justice by considering the patient
as a whole and by conceiving each patient as being like oneself despite
the differences (associated with the mode of hospitalization, the social or diagnostic category). (Cano 2006: 45)
Preferring the term ‘institutional analysis’ over ‘institutional psychotherapy’, Guattari sought to push the movement in a more political direction.
In Anti-Oedipus, a footnote by the translators explains that:
Institutional analysis is the more political tendency of institutional
psychotherapy begun in the late 1950s as an attempt to collectively deal
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with what psychoanalysis so hypocritically avoided, namely psychosis. La
Borde clinic established in 1955 by Jean Oury of Ecole Freudienne de
Paris, served as a locus for discussions on institutional psychotherapy,
and Jacques Lacan’s seminars as the intellectual basis for these discussion
‘in the beginning’. Félix Guattari joined the clinic in 1956, as a militant interested in the notions of desire under discussion – a topic rarely dealt with by militants at that time. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 32)
David Reggio and Mauricio Novello (2007), in an interview with Jean Oury,
indicate that ‘the term “institutional psychotherapy” was introduced in
1952, by the psychiatrist Georges Daumézon (1912–79), but the practice
to which it refers dates back a decade earlier, to the wartime clinic of Saint-Alban’. They go on to explain:
At the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban, faced with the eugenic ideol-
ogy of the then Vichy minister of health, Alexis Carrel, a group formed
around the figures of Lucien Bonnafé (1912–2003) and François Tosquelles
(1912–1994), comprising patients, neurologists, phenomenologists, sur-
realists, resistance fighters, refugee psychiatrists and scientists. Bonnafé baptised the group the ‘Société du Gévaudan’. Its aim was to ‘resist and
create’: to resist the policy of natural selection that was killing the mentally ill, to resist the Vichy regime that was propagating it, and to resist the broader tendencies of homogenization and segregation that characterize
the treatment of the mentally ill; to create a therapeutic conviviality in the face of segregation, and with it, to create a new direction in psychiatry – a psychiatry that would be a living ‘art of sympathy’, not an alienation but
an ‘accompaniment’ of the victim. (Reggio and Novello 2007: 32)
Institutional psychotherapy had been a ‘pragmatic, non-utopian program of
Freudian-Marxist institutional experimentation’ (Bourg 2007: 126). Guattari the student left his studies in pharmacy, broke with the Trotskyists, turned to philosophy, attended Lacan’s lectures in 1953 and was eventually hired at La Borde to organise events for patients, taking up a full-time appointment in 1955. From the beginning Guattari was interested in the development of
experimental techniques: first, during 1953–9, the grille or grid which was a work structure based on a rotation of tasks and blurring of identities; la parole vide or ‘empty speech’ was an attempt to take into account specific desires of individuals against the needs of the greater collectivity during the period 1959–64; experiments to develop mixed patient-counselor groups to
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experimented with esprit autogestionnaire or a kind of self-management (see Bourg 2007, especially chapter 10). Anti-Oedipus connects to many of the insights and techniques developed at La Borde, representing a departure
from both institutional and Lacanian analysis towards a radical notion of
desire and an interest in the ‘politics of desire’.
Transversality and the Politics of Desire
The essays written in the period 1955–70, taken from two books,
Psychanalyse at transversalité (Maspero 1972) and La Révolution moleculaire (Éditions Recherches, Séries ‘Encre’) and published in the English translation Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (Guattari 1984) address a set of early themes on institutional psychotherapy beginning with the
important essay ‘Transversality’ (orig. 1964) and ending the section with the path-breaking ‘Towards a micro-politics of desire’ (orig. 1975). He suggests
‘Institutional therapeutics is a delicate infant. Its development needs close watching, and it tends to keep very bad company’ (Guattari 1984: 11) and
goes on to propose a new concept which he calls the transversality of the
group to replace the ambiguous idea of the institutional transference.
The idea of transversality is opposed to: (a) verticality, as described in
the organogramme of a pyramidal structure (leaders, assistants, etc.); (b)
horizontality, as it exists in the disturbed wards of a hospital, or even
more, in the senile wards; in other words a state of affairs in which things and people fit in as best they can with the situation in which they find
themselves. (Guattari 1984: 17)
A decade later, when Guattari comes to write about the micro-physics of
desire, he wants to go beyond a form of structuralist analysis which, in his view, remains too formal and not materialist enough:
To try to explain complex socio-historical structures in terms of a mecha-
nism of exchange or language in terms of a system of logical transforma-
tion, or desire in terms of the operation of a signifying system and the
phantasies it generates, is to try to avoid questioning the operations of
property that control the social sphere at every level. It is not a matter of producing a universal formalism as such but of the way a system of power
comes to use the means of a signifying formalism to unify all the vari-
ous modes of expression and centre them around its own ‘fundamental’
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age hierarchies for the ‘right’ of the ruling class to seize the means of
production from the workers and so on. (Guattari 1984: 82–3)
In this essay he makes the transition to a ‘politics of desire’ that he explores in relation to signification through the mechanism of psychoanalysis and
semiotics, bringing together questions of representation and production in
a conception of ‘sign machine’ and ‘ machinic sense’ – abstract machines that de-territorialise and connect various fluxes and flows of signs, time and labour; indeed, any assemblage that makes connections among elements and produces
regular effects. Drawing on both Gregory Bateson and the Danish linguist
Louis Hjelmslev, Guattari articulates both a system of signification based on the duality of signifier and signified and a system of representation based on the duality of substance and form as a mode of subjectification. Transversality is an attempt to develop a group analysis sensitive to institutional dynamics that understands desire and phantasy as collective phenomena linked to power relations and to the politics of psychiatric practices. To this extent Guattari develops a highly original form of antipsychiatry that compares to the work of R. D. Laing and David Cooper in the UK, Thomas Szasz and Ernest Becker in
the US, Franco Basaglia and Mario Tomasini in Italy and similar movements
based on patients collectives and rights in Spain and Germany. Laing and
Cooper, who argued that schizophrenia was inflicted by family and societal
structures, were highly persuaded by Michel Foucault’s (1961) early work in Madness and Civilization. Guattari’s great innovation was to use Hjelmslev’s glossematics to move beyond Lacan’s linguistic formulations to develop a
semiology of the unconscious that recognised but was not limited to linguistics, and to understand traditional Freudian definitions of the main concepts of the Oedipal story such as castration, sublimation and lack as deriving from social relations and group dynamics. Hjelmslev’s semiotics proved more useful than Saussure’s because it enabled a theoretical consideration ‘of flows of many different kinds – of money, of energy, of gestures, of melodies – which were either radically polysemous or altogether without signification’ (Holland 2006: 542). In Guattari’s hands this conception becomes a fully materialist semiology that enables him to explore, analyse and decode subjectivity, sociality and institutions in relation to wider questions of political economy.
Eventually, in his later works such as The Three Ecologies Guattari embraces the notion of ecology to expand his analysis of interconnected flows into the realms of politics, ethics, aesthetics, the environment and globalisation of capitalist production.
Guattari founded the Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and
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issues in philosophy, mathematics, psychoanalysis, education, architec-
ture and ethnology. The FGERI represented aspects of multiple political
and cultural engagements including the Group for Young Hispanics, the
Franco-Chinese Friendships and the opposition to the wars in Algeria and
Vietnam. He subsequently was active as a member of various others groups
including students and the Movement of March 22. It was at the University
of Vincennes that Guattari met with Gilles Deleuze in the wake of 1968 to
soon begin drafting ideas for Anti-Oedipus.
Rhizomic Collaborations with Gilles Deleuze
Anti-Oedipus can be read as an extended polemical attack on the foundations of Marxist and psychoanalytic thought in France. It focuses on the critique of the concept of desire in Freud (and in Jacques Lacan) in a way that recorded a certain ambivalence about the events of May 1968, and at one and the
same time established the theoretical framing of ‘desiring-production’ and
clarified the role of psychoanalytical politics to understanding new social movements. To a very large degree, the conceptual apparatus employed by
Guattari and Deleuze in relation to desire came from a set of interrelated concepts tested in the clinical situation a decade earlier by Guattari. The beauty of the concept of ‘desiring-production’ is that it locates desire in the realm of social production that is simultaneously ‘autonomous, self-constituting, and creative’, lying beyond the agency of any individual. Desiring-production
is a ‘universal primary process’ that underlies otherwise seemingly separate natural, social and psychological realms. As Daniel Smith and John Protevi
(2008) argue:
Anti-Oedipus is, along with its conceptual and terminological innovation, a work of grand ambitions: among them, (1) an eco-social theory
of production, encompassing both sides of the nature/culture split,
which functions as an ontology of change, transformation, or ‘becom-
ing’; (2) a ‘universal history’ of social formations – the ‘savage’ or tribal, the ‘barbarian’ or imperial, and the capitalist – which functions as a
synthetic social science; (3) and to clear the ground for these functions,
a critique of the received versions of Marx and Freud – and the attempts
to synthesize them by analogizing their realms of application. In pursu-
ing its ambitions, Anti-Oedipus has the virtues and the faults of the tour de force: unimagined connections between disparate elements are made possible, but at the cost of a somewhat strained conceptual scheme.
(Smith and Protevi 2008:)
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To call these works collaborations is to underestimate the extent to which
Guattari and Deleuze destabilised the prevailing categories concerning
authorship, philosopher, book and writing, a view that reaches its most
explicit statement in A Thousand Plateaus. In the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write about the concept of the book – an anti-book for it is really an assemblage, a multiplicity that is unattributable, a body without organs. It is not a ‘root-book’ based on binary logic or linear unity that constitutes a radicle-fascicular. By reference to William Burroughs,
James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche they edge towards the concept of the
rhizome where, unlike tree or root, any point can be connected to any other and establishes a semiotic chain, collective assemblages of enunciation, and connects it to a whole micropolitics of the social field.
Against the classical or romantic book there is no interiority of a subject.
In this sense, citing Kleist, they suggest: ‘The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 9). As Deleuze and
Guattari write, ‘the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome
with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world’
(11). They want to banish every trace of Hegel in the object of the book:
There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the
world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectiv-
ity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between
certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book
has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 23)
Formalising the principles of the rhizome, they state:
1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhi-
zome can be connected to anything other, and must be.
3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, “multiplicity,” that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.
4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks
separating structures or cutting across a single structure.
5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not
amenable to any structural or generative model; it is a ‘map and not a
tracing’. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 7–9)
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Against the arborescent conception of knowledge based on totalising, binary and dualistic principles, Deleuze and Guattari opposed the rhizome which
works with horizontal, non-hierarchical and trans-species connections and
resists the organisational structure of the root-tree system that mistakenly charts a chronological causality and looks for value in the origin of things. In asserting this mobile organic structure they make use of biological mutual-ism and horizontal gene transfer as opposed to evolutionary theory, suggesting ‘evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent
descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already
differentiated line to another’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 10).
A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up
again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of
ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and
again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines
of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 9)
In botany the rhizome is a horizontal, underground plant stem capable of
producing the shoot and root system of a new plant allowing the parent plant to propagate asexually and to perennate (i.e. survive an annual unfavourable season) underground. The rhizomic approach to culture and history is to
resist its narrativising tendencies and to present them as a map, assemblages with no specific origin or genesis: a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (25). Deleuze and Guattari calls the rhizome ‘an image of thought’ which can be used
as a mode of knowledge and a model for society that does not rely on any
structural or generative model of linguistics or psychoanalysis.
The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it
constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the
removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of
