Brief and
selective notes on: Guattari, F and Rolnik,
S. (2008) Molecular Revolution in
Brazil, translated by Karel Clapshow and
Brian Holmes. Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series.
[Our two heroes under took a trip to Brazil, then
{1996} looking like a very exciting place
politically, with the apparent success of the
Workers Party {PT}, led by the charismatic
Lula. They seem to be building some sort of
platform by putting together an alliance of all
sorts of minorities—hence molecular
revolution. It all seemed to be driven by
desire and subjectivity, overthrowing the old
mechanisms of subjectivation. Guattari had
already been involved in various autonomist ground
roots activist movement in France and Italy.
{the movement in France was centred around the
development of various free radio stations
expressing minority viewpoints}. The
original book was a kind of travelogue, with some
records of what Guattari actually said to various
activists, some contributions by Rolnik, some
written pamphlets, and some subsequent
conversations.
Rolnik, S. Preface to the Seventh Brazilian
Edition
Guattari evidently believes that the Brazilians
are 'a multiple people, a people of mutants,
people of potentialities'(9), and that this
provides the basis of the molecular
revolution. Brazil was engaged in direct
elections after military dictatorship, and
Guattari liked the 'micro political vitality',
which he saw as the result of 'the politics of
desire' [this analysis is produced by
feelings and experience, apparently, and some
reflections]. The results were seen in
discourse and also in 'gestures and
attitudes'. It was a break with the
inscription in subjectivity of the history of
overlapping hierarchies.
Guattari saw parallels with events in Europe, also
offering 'the possibility to articulate macro and
micro politics both theoretically and
pragmatically' (10). There were challenges
to Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) and other
parts of Latin America as well. This book
records one month visiting Brazil and the
conversations that went on. They were 'all
interwoven, threads of a single fabric' (11), and
the discussions played a part in the social
movement that changed Brazil, in clinical
practice, in struggles against the state and its
policies, including higher education. It is
in Brazil, where French philosophical notions,
including those of Guattari, Deleuze, and
Foucault, 'have received the most explicit
incorporation in clinical practice'.
When Lula was elected, it was possible to analyze
the processes that had led to the success in terms
of more general changes in Brazilian society and
the processes of subjectivation. In
particular, the split between micro and macro
politics was overcome. Guattari played a
major part in analyzing the events. This
book is been revised quite a bit since, and a
conversation with Lula has been included in this
collection [sorry, but I have not separated it out
from my notes, so here it is below. What do you
think? Penetrating Deleuzian analysis or pretty
banal stuff?]. Rolnik thinks the dialogue
between Lula and Guattari shows their foresight
and their ability to identify 'knots being
loosened in Brazil and tightened in France',
including threats to the future.
This material looks different from the usual
Guattari style, but it is 'the invisible source of
all his texts'(13), showing his view that the
writing was an 'uncontrollable impulse' arising
from his involvement and engagement. He
proceeded at a 'dizzying pace', using words wildly
and inventing concepts in an overall 'schizo flow'
as Deleuze once called it [delirious rant I called
it] . This book works at a slower pace and
shows the movement of thought from encounters to
sensations, to elaborations and back again.
Lula and Guattari, A Conversation, 1982.
G: Brazil seems to offer an effervescence of ideas
and a will to change, but the movement is not that
well known in France. Until recently, there
was severe repression here. There is an
entirely new climate now, new 'desires for
transformation arising from the most diverse
social categories' (276), and they seem to be
embodied in the movement led by the Partido
dos Trabalhardores (PT) [Workers'
Party]. The movement seems to have
changed the agenda. Can the right still
block this process, though? For example they
have recently restricted access to voting.
Is a military coup still possible?
L: The right is still very strong, and still
controls most of the apparatuses of the
state. There are new expectations,
though. Some right wing elements are
penetrating liberal organizations, and there are
new alliances to block working class demands for
rights. The election will be difficult,
particularly for the PT, because its candidates
cannot go on television and there is a new kind of
election. However, the struggle continues
outside of the electoral process… There is
always the risk of military repression, and that's
why we must organize the working class to defend
itself [militarily?]
G: What of the right wing argument that the PT
lacks the experience and competence to manage the
country?
L: This might influence the electorate, because we
are still inexperienced in political
participation, and we have been treated as a
mass. The people believe they need to be
led. There is also strong class prejudice,
believing that capacity can be measured by
diplomas or revenue. The PT needs to
demystify this. The issue is where the State
stands. We need to see the struggle in terms
of conventional political parties [maybe] (278)
G: There was a banner in a demonstration saying
that people know how to work and to govern
[penetrating insight!]. Surely existing
politicians are incompetent and corrupt?
Would you compromise with the other parties in
coalition?
L: Our interests lie in the progress of a
class. The right wing are interested in
politicians all operating together to stop
disorder.
G: The PT came out of the movements [in Sao
Bernado], which united the industrial working
class and elements of the middle classes and
intellectuals. Can it also represent
peasants?
L: We are strong in the countryside, although it
is difficult to organise there, for example
because there is poor transportation. We
believe we have realised the dream of the union of
workers in the countryside and those in the city.
G: What of the relation with the catholic
church? Is it at all like Poland?
L: No. Some progressive bishops have talked
about repression and proposed grassroots organizations
which are like those of the PT. There are no
formal arrangements, but some Christians suggest
criteria for voting and choice of parties which
coincide with our political proposals—but any
other grassroots party could also benefit.
G: Your economic programme involves
reappropriation of banks and industries, to break
with multinationals. But what sort of
nationalisation or state regulation do you
actually suggest?
L: We want to convert to a state run system, but
we need to work out how to get there by
calculating political forces. We could
nationalize as a preliminary step, but we need to
make sure it remains within the 'framework of a
democratic state' (281), where banks and
industries are run for the benefit of the
collectivity. We can't be too
idealistic. We need to build union delegates
and factory commissions first, then to consider
comanagement. Then nationalization, and
finally a whole state run system. But we
have to be careful. We're not aiming at
models found in other countries.
G: The PT is also a centralist organisation,
though, like any traditional communist or
socialist parties?
L: We have to adopt the official statutes, but our
practice is different. For example, we want
delegates to participate much more widely before
selecting regional delegates, to maintain
grassroots groups to discuss matters and make
decisions and pass them up.
G: I noticed this on meeting militants of a local
committee of the PT. Diverse groups,
claiming to be autonomous, and representing
interests like ecology or sexual minorities were
'gathered around the committee'(282) and seem to
have some influence on it. However, in other
areas, the PT hierarchy has prohibited particular
candidates, although a subsequent convention
overturned them. The dogmatism of militants
has been overcome in France through the free radio
movement and its new forms of expressions.
How do you feel about free radio?
L: This would be too early for us but we will get
there, to break dependence on the official media.
G: What role do intellectuals play? Are they
as good as the ones in Solidarity?
L: We tried to demystify and break down the
distance between intellectuals, students, peasants
and workers, through new 'relations of
fraternity'(283), and this has been
successful. Working class groups are more
tolerant of intellectuals than others.
G: Some of your banners seem to openly support
Solidarity, and you met with Walesa?
L: Our official position is to support Solidarity,
although they have not responded to our letters.
G: What about the Falklands war?
L: [I have collapsed several replies to various
issues together here] We objected to the use of
force by England, but also the dictatorship of
Argentina. The policy of distraction did not
work, human life was lost. However, it is
clear that the developed countries will always
help each other against the underdeveloped
ones. Overall, I think the Falklands do
belong to Argentina, although they have long been
colonized and lots of English people live
there. I did not support some of the
Argentine left who demanded the islands be
returned. I did not want to support either
the war or General Galtieri. It is difficult
to align with the other parties in other Latin
American countries. We want to show
solidarity with all the oppressed people,
including the Salvadoreans. America should
solve its own problems rather than
intervene. We don't want to be dependent on
Soviet imperialism either. We are not in
relation with the Socialist International, partly
because we don't want to emphasize ideological
questions at the moment and it would be premature
to get involved at the international level.
We have to work with the grass roots.
[Now a new phase where Lula asks Guattari
questions]
L: Is the French socialist party putting into
practice what it promised?
G: Mitterrand opposed American interventions in
the third world, but also supported Thatcher and
Reagan over the Falklands. Socialists say
they are supporting Solidarity, but not at the
price of losing business in Russia. Their
stance towards Israel is 'cynical, ambiguous'
(287). They seem to find it easier to be
anti imperialist in Latin America than in Africa,
because they have their own neo colonial heritage
in Africa!. However, they have made some
useful criticisms of American practices including
the export of a culture [he means Jack Lang's
speeches]. Lang wants to develop Latin
culture. However, domestically, after a
honeymoon period, the crisis has stopped
developments, and the government cannot solve the
problems. It has adopted classic
conservative measures. It has no interest in
social transformation, and deals with day to day
problems like any political party. The Party
is sclerotic, there's nothing like the activities
of minorities that there are in Brazil. The
PT has not solved all the problems, but in France,
they have not even have appeared. France has
its marginalised minorities and subjective
minorities, and these are actually 'at the centre
of the crisis' (288), but in France, there is no
interest, only conformism and dreams of past
glories. The occasional terrorist
provocation produces a policy of security and
control. The international crisis dominates,
but there is no French response to change as
promised when the Party was elected. The
result will almost certainly be widespread
demoralisation and loss of confidence, possibly
with the return of reactionary groups. At
least movements in Poland or Brazil are addressing
social problems in an increasing traversal way,
and there are lessons for all of us at all
levels. Even language is important, and your
speeches and writings are impressive, showing
freedom, the absence of cliché, sometimes even
references to past leaders, even Mao, and this
seems to show 'an a priori confidence in the good
faith of your interlocutors' (289).
L: Our greatest strength is non dogmatism. I
noticed in Italy the influence of dogmatic manuals
which precede practice. We want to emphasize
practice rather than discussing theory, especially
if the people are not disposed to discuss
it. We have to awaken their interest first.
G: Are they not still a lot of militant
traditional elements inside the PT? Are you
changing them?
L: The PT offers a kind of dilution. We have
no ideology police. The more workers we
attract, the less the sectarians will prosper.
Rolnik: [Oh! She was there too? She
was quiet!]. But don't worker candidates
have less time and resources to run effective
campaigns?
L: This is a serious problem. We want lots
of such candidates, but it is hard to create the
conditions that permit them to be effective in
campaigning. There is also a requirement for
worker leaders to present their candidacies for
other posts. We do need a broad base.
[I have just picked out one or two little gems in
this massive book, which represent little nuggets
of my interests]
Chapter 1 Culture: a reactionary concept?
The concept isolates semiotic activity into
separate spheres which can then be standardized
and commercialized. Capitalistic modes of
production also operate through the control of
subjectivation, introducing 'a "culture of
equivalence"' (21), linking it to the way in which
capital operates. Capital increasingly has
to manage 'the seizure of the power of
subjectivity' (22).
Singularity is not the same as
individuality. Mass culture produces
isolated individuals organized in hierarchies and
other 'systems of submission'. Individuated
subjectivity is produced, and so is social
subjectivity, and it often operates at the
unconscious level. The impact of capitalism
is sufficient to effect even dreams or
fantasies—it 'seeks to occupy a hegemonic
function' (23). Processes of singularization
can resist. All the normal modes of
manipulation and control need to be
rejected. Instead, we develop 'an
existential singularization that coincides with a
desire, a taste for living, a will to construct
the world'. Terms like culture only prevent
us from understanding these processes.
The word culture means different things. It
can mean value judgements, or some '"collective
soul culture," synonymous with civilization',
which everyone has. The notion of soul is of
course ambiguous and has been connected to both
fascist notions of race and other freedom [anti
colonial] movements. The third meaning
refers to mass culture or commodity culture.
Everything is dominated by monetary circulation or
state activity.
The bourgeoisie have installed value culture [in
order to pursue social distinction—you need
Bourdieu here]. The term has also produced
different subdivisions such as classical culture,
scientific culture and so on. Soul culture
is 'a pseudo scientific notion' emerging with
anthropology and colonialism. It is often
connected with racism and the notion that there is
a primitive. Structuralist readings did
something to combat ethnocentrism, and sometimes
'what it really established was a polycentrism, a
multiplication of ethnocentrism' (25).
However, at least it separated itself from the
economy, even at the expense of operating with
things like myth or worship. At the same
time, this drew a boundary around certain
activities of semiotization. The culture of
non industrial societies has been commercialized,
and those who practice traditional cultures do so
with a sense of having 'lost their references'
(26). Industrial methods of classification
and categorization have also increasingly
penetrated these cultures. Commercial culture
concerns itself simply with production and
distribution of cultural goods, regardless of
qualitative or territorial barriers. That
has led to bodies like UNESCO even being able to
calculate cultural levels of different cities or
countries.
All of these three meanings still operate and have
become complementary—for example capitalist
communication generates a certain
universality. All are now implicated in
social control. Marginal subjectivities can
be tolerated. IWC increasingly decides what
is marginal. It also makes real
efforts to produce 'new [officially constituted]
subjective territories' (27), defining [proper]
families groups or minorities. We see
ministries of culture appearing, sometimes as a
sign of an intention to modernize.
The value judgement notion of culture has not been
totally abolished, although it remains as an
underlying background defining the social field
[definitely needs Bourdieu here—and blow me down
if he doesn't appear!]. Different groups
have different cultural capital (28) and this
supports the power of elites. Individuals
also use cultural goods to increase their status,
for example when politicians make cultural
references to gain support.
We can see some of these dimensions of work when
considering the arguments that Lula and the PT
will prove to be incompetent, lacking knowledge
and capability. The same points were made
against Walesa and Solidarity. It is not a
straightforward discussion of competence, of
course, because classical links are notoriously
incompetent, and capitalists are actually
appalling managers. It is also not the case
that only particular functions of knowledge are
required to manage economies, located in
particular people. There is no reason to
think that Lula could not manage to assemble a
competent team. This is really a discussion
about relations to culture. Lula is working
class and possesses a certain soul culture, but he
doesn't participate in bits of the dominant
culture. It might be just 'a question of
style and etiquette', or forms of speech.
Contempt for these matters can sometimes lead
people to see themselves as unable to manage
capitalist processes and to disqualify themselves.
What Lula's success implies is that this notion
can be disrupted and a new kind of subjectivation
process can appear, as a new form of 'subjective
singularization' (31), which is capable of
managing a modern economy without reproducing the
usual social categories and the dominant control
grid. The issue is how to produce new modes
of semiotic production like this to produce a new
society and a new social division of production
which is not oppressive. As a similar
problem, artistic specialization [producing
painters or musicians] is clearly productive, but
it needs to be stripped away from 'hegemonic
possession by capitalist elites' (31). To
put this another way, how can such singularity in
cultural production be properly shared, not
'confined to a new kind of ethnicity', for example
(32), not just becoming a speciality, but linking
with the whole social field then with all other
kinds of production including 'machinic
production—the revolution of computers,
telecommunications, robotics, and so on'.
The point is to produce a new 'aesthetic
sensibility', which breaks with the 'three
semantic nuclei'. This is what ministries of
culture should actually do rather than just
distributing culture for consumption. We
need to be aware that semiotic production always
includes micro and macro political
dimensions. This might be realized by any
attempt to democratize culture: at the moment, in
France, what this really means is not singular
subjectivation but relations with the existing
systems of cultural production. We need
instead a new 'mode of cultural production'that
radically breaks with the current system of
power. The problem is how to do this [!!]
Capitalist culture has permeated all fields.
The alternative is not to eulogize popular or
proletarian culture. The point is not the
ethnocentrism of culture either. The issue
is the way in which culture features relations of
equivalence and how this connects it to economic
production. 'The dominant classes always
seek this double surplus value: economic surplus
value, through money, and power surplus value,
through value culture'(34) [surely not just value
culture, but popular culture as well]
[Pretty banal talk up of the success of an
outsider politician here. New process of
singularization indeed! Hitler was an outsider
too. If you are curious about what happened to
Lula and the PT look him up --it's rather sad]
Chapter 2 Subjectivity and History
We need to discuss the 'production of
subjectivity' instead of 'ideology' [so much for
all the controversy over the bold claims in Thousand Plateaus
that there is no ideology. It wasn't support for
the 'end of ideology thesis', just an objection to
the term!]
The old mechanisms producing subjectivity have
dissolved, and no one wants them back [the example
is the ways in which adolescents were
initiated]. Now there are professionals who
produce subjectivity, in teaching, in social
sciences or in social work. These
professionals find themselves facing a choice,
either to reproduce the older models 'which do not
allow us to create outlets to process
singularization' or to encourage the new processes
wherever they can. In any event, there is no
recourse to scientific objectivity or
neutrality. Anyone choosing to pursue a
career to produce scientific knowledge has
'already made a reactionary choice': in France,
they are considered to be gendarmes, to acquire 'a
police nature'(41)
There are no subjects, merely 'a "collective
assemblage of enunciation", which does not
correspond to an individual or a social entity.
Subjectivity in capitalism often takes the form of
infantilization, where the state does everything
for us. Collective facilities like social
services also reinforce this position, integrating
human and infra- and extra- human factors, to
construct a whole reality including a psychic
reality, affecting even 'unconscious
representations'. The most apparently
personal or singular dimensions of life such as
'death, pain, loneliness, silence' are managed
(58), or institutional solutions are
accepted. Even desire is fitted into
'dominant references', and the professionals are
'very skilful of this kind of practice'
(59). Even time and temporality is affected.
[Rolnik adds a bit] Lots of authors have analyzed
subjectivation and capitalism, but Deleuze and
Guattari are original in seeing the production of
subjectivity as 'the basic industry of the
capitalist system itself (or of the bureaucratic
socialist system)' (61). They are also
unusually acute in pointing to 'points or rupture
within this complex device', where apparently lots
of current social movements are operating.
These points are 'focuses of major political
resistance: they attack the logic of the system,
not as an abstraction or representation, but as a
lived experience. There is an opening up of
new possibilities in this position that is quite
rare nowadays'
[Back to Guattari] The new social movements are
aiming at producing 'original, singular models of
subjectivation, processes of subjective
singularization'. This involves the
'autonomization' of a group, creating its own
semiotics and cartography, and undertaking its own
local politics. Singularization is a 'self
modeling', involving analyzing particular elements
to construct 'practical and theoretical
references', independently of global power.
Molecular revolution must go on at every level,
the infra-personal '(at work in dreaming,
creation, etc.), the personal (in relations of
self domination)', the interpersonal '(in the
invention of new forms of sociability and
domestic, romantic, and professional life, and in
relation with neighbours and school)'. Free
radio stations can help spread these new forms of
subjectivity. So singularization disrupts
capitalist mechanisms of value and affirms new
ones, such as 'a willingness to love'(63).
There is no need to see these as always operating
as social relations, for example individuals can
reconsider their relations with the arts.
The rejection of capitalist values might begin
with wage labour, but go on to develop some
challenge even to time, as the Italian autonomists
did. The process might be assisted by a
reappropriation of mutant bits of '"machinic
processes" (theoretical and literary machines,
machines of sensibility, etc. and not just
technical tools)' (64). Revolutions now need
to be molecular rather than large scale.
They might start as defensive and they risk
recuperation from IWC [integrated world
capitalism], but the system is in crisis, and
molecular revolutions are more likely to benefit
from things like new computers and new scientific
and aesthetic relations. Once we have helped
the new subjectivity to develop, it will find its
own forms of organization. We must assert
'becoming - singular' against every form of
capitalist subjectivity (67) and we must
constantly construct new assemblages.
Rebellious youth cultures like punk do not break
sufficiently with 'the dominant means of
expression' (72) and have therefore run the risk
of ' declining into microfascism'. Yet they
could lead to singularization because they do to
some extent, or perhaps even unconsciously,
display a potential '"vector of molecular
revolution"'(73). [Usual waffle and caution,
and speculation about possibilities rather than
any analysis] Even children are capable of
molecular resistance to the system of television,
family, and school that it finds. Other
educational methods can show how this mechanism
can be dismantled, preserving the 'whole wealth of
sensibility and expression natural to the child'
(73) [no details, unfortunately].
Larger social forms such as political parties or
trade unions can also be persuaded to aim at
autonomy, but so can smaller microscopic fields,
neighbourhoods communities, schools and so
on. The goal is to produce subjectivity, and
this can 'trigger off a mutation in the collective
systems of hearing and seeing', just as great
artists can have an impact. However 'I don't
mean that any maladjusted child or any person
classified as schizophrenic is automatically a
great artist or a great revolutionary'(74).
Current struggles are precarious, but there are
some encouraging examples—Italian Autonomy and
Polish Solidarity [oh dear, both flopped], and
maybe the Brazilian workers party.
[Anecdotes of Polish Solidarity and of resistance
in other countries ensue, 76-7]
[Guattari has a lot of optimistic stuff on Poland
and other European countries. For example he
sees Solidarity as a genuine grassroots movement,
which has awakened new kinds of desire, and even
'reinvented Catholicism… that is not a real
religion' (76). [In a Leninist turn] he says
'the fuse had been lit'. In Brazil
specifically he places great hopes in that portion
of the population who are not 'guaranteed', but
who are precarious—this also helps them escape
'the control grid'].
In Brazil, new 'modes of semiotic expression of
different natures' have emerged as a reserve of
resistance to bureaucratized language.
Brazilians need to avoid 'deadly expressions of
desire (such as throwing paving stones as a
weekend pastime)... microfascism' (90) and
should do this by articulating these modes of
expression in 'rhizomatic forms of
connection'. [Not specified of course.
All this is the old faith in 'rebellious
subjectivity' much discussed at the time of May
1968].
Minority groups can become politicized if they are
attempting to establish that their whole process
gains a place in society, as in, for example
'becoming - homosexual' (101). The same
dilemmas affect feminism, which also needs to be
'the vehicle of the becoming - feminism that
concerns are not only all men and children but,
deep down, all the mechanisms of society'.
This would challenge masculine subjectivity, for
example, 'a certain kind of demarcation'[stap
me! Not the binary again!]. The same
might be said about 'becoming-black' or 'becoming
- minoritarian', and these processes have already
appeared in the arts. 'Becoming' here means
a process of singularization, first breaking with
'dominant stratifications' (102). This is
required rather than asserting a [normal]
cultural identity, or a 'revival of the
archaic'. Establishing identities like this
involves 'transverse processes, subjective
becomings' at the level of individual and
group. However, such processes always
encounter a threat of blocking. What is
required is not a popular front, not unification,
but 'corridors of passage, corridors of
unconscious communication… Becomings that
literally permeate these different modes of
subjectivation'(103), and attack the usual
apparently natural categories. These
transversal elements are what he and Deleuze
called the '"molecular dimension" of the
unconscious'. Current societies already have
'countless processes of minoritization'[the only
example is the ecology movement, although he also
lists movements for rights among the psychiatrized
and drug addicts]. French feminism has
managed to intervene, but it is not just a matter
of political rights: it requires links with 'the
whole complex of feminist microrevolutions that
are at work throughout the fabric of society'
(104).
Italian Autonomism shows some problems [of
balancing individual minority groups with a
unified party]. For example, feminist
militants left one important element, Lotta
Continua (LC), on the grounds that
the party was patriarchal, but their own
organizations, which included publishing houses,
very soon 'became completely depoliticised'.
LC never recovered from its guilt, and
fragmented. Feminists might have operated
instead as an autonomous factor to reinforce the
effectiveness of LC, but instead
contributed to 'its collapse into a black
hole'(124). We must hope that feminists do
not do the same thing in the Brazilian workers
party, since the unity of the movement would be
lost [the feminist militant questioning Guattari
clearly disagrees].
[Rolnik describes a network that she had helped to
create among social psychologists and
psychiatrists, and it recruited lot of people in
Brazil. However, it lasted two years and and
then dissolved. She's no longer so sure that
it was a good way forward. Guattari
responds:] the European Network was differently
organized, without a unified secretariat, and the
local groups in France have now become linked to
various other community movements, including
jurists, and people who have been
psychiatrized. The European Network has not
acted as a party, but wants to create conditions
for conversations, 'a real dialectic' (130), and
then to support 'different rhizomes, at different
levels of construction', and this has happened in
Mexico and the USA.
[One of the things discussed by this network was
practice at La Borde]. We began by making a
series of small changes to transform the relation
between specialists and patients, but this did not
challenge the dominance of the state, and remained
local. La Borde became a kind of
museum. There were all sorts of
possibilities of what might have happened, but
'history decided' (137) to turn into the sort of
institution that manages to coexist with the power
of the state, although it was threatened once or
twice with closure. Other experiments are
interesting, for example where psychiatric patient
support groups contacted trades unions to ask for
support and membership, and the same is been done
with people suffering from Down's syndrome.
[On the free radio movement in France].
First the state tried to suppress it, and then to
regulate free stations, using criteria for support
such as quality and size of audience, and many
free radio stations 'succumbed to the temptation'
(162) others insisted on remaining free and
rejecting these criteria. Some of the
argument turned on whether or not free radio
should be professionalized and more
technologically sophisticated.
[A discussant talks about the mass media].
Lots of academics have argued that television is
'hegemonic' in creating subjectivity, but why is
there no support for progressive
alternatives? Even progressive political
parties do not offer one. At the moment, all
we have is a fight against censorship, but this is
too specific and should not be an end in itself:
indeed, liberals also want to oppose it.
Even when censorship was relaxed for a while,
'things didn't change very much' (165) as a result
of watching challenging films. The issue is
to become active producers. There is a more
theoretical issue about symbolic production, and
the role of media in the production of
singularities. Some militants did make their
own films, but these were still financed by
corporations, and were soon seized by the police,
without bothering even to cover their backs with a
discussion of censorship. Can radical films
perforate hegemony? Can free radio stations
do this? Some have already infringed
national laws, in the form of 'cultural
piracy'. Some 'Indians' in Brazil are
developing new uses of the mass media, involving
covert tape recordings of public speeches that
could be later denounced, or using radio to
establish communication networks. Video can
even serve to illustrate common experiences among
indigenous people who do not have the same
language.
[Rolnik's question] what is the relation between
terms like process of singularization, and
autonomization or minoritization, or molecular
revolution? Are they all the same, or are
they pointing to different aspects of a single
process? [Guattari replies]: molecular
revolution is more 'ethico-analytico-
political'(172); a process of singularization is
'the more objective event of a singularity
detaching itself from layers of resonance and
causing the process to proliferate and broaden,
which may or may not find an intrinsic structure
or system of reference'; autonomy 'refers more to
new territories, new social refrains';
alternatives can be macro or micro political;
minority involves more of a sense of becoming,
while marginality is 'more sociological, more
passive' [so the bullshit flies thick and fast as
usual. In subsequent discussion, it looks
like a marginality and minority is really the
difference between classes in themselves and for
themselves; people can choose to be in minorities,
they may or may not be treated as marginal, and
there is an important political difference in how
they are treated]
[More on free radio]. The French movement
came from 'heterogeneous milieus' (176), involving
all sorts of marginals and minorities, 'a kind of
molecular focus'. It became important during
elections, since it involved legal battles about
media monopoly, various struggles against new
forms of repression, and discussion of liberating
uses of technology. This is the sort of
articulation that we need. It might also be
used to discuss feminist movements which also
raised questions for 'society as a whole'.
The may not have been any palpable results, but
molecular forces were released, and conventional
parties had to respond [sad]. The
International Network of Alternatives to
Psychiatry had a similar result, raising
awareness. Such organizations need to be
both defensive and aggressive, and are 'living
devices, because they are embodied in the social
field itself, in relations of complementarity of
support—in other words, a rhizomatic relations'
(177). [Massive philosophical talk up of
what are essentially lobby or pressure groups].
May 1968 was perplexing, in that lots of plans and
discussions led nowhere. Some groups set
themselves up and produced plans. This is
not always helpful, but it does display 'a totally
different logic than that of the secretariats or a
politburo' (178). It is more a matter of 'if
it works, OK; if it doesn't work that's also
OK'. However, we do need 'a structure of
parameters where one can keep an eye on the
problematic so as they appear, where one can
express these kinds of collective investment of
desire, where one can evaluate the consistency of
these different projects altogether'
'It is far from my intention to create a theory of
minority movements in Brazil. In any case, I
would be quite incapable of doing so' (178) [so,
after all this discussion…]
[We already see the significance of the concept
that recurs again and again in this discussion –
singularization. Guattari does much to distinguish
the singular from the mere individual, no doubt
having in mind the Deleuzian notion of a
singularity as something which, when traced
effectively, will tell us about the multiplicity
or assemblage which constitutes it, and which also
offers new possible actualizations. It is
not actually defined in the collection of
definitions at the back of the book. I seem
to remember a Leninist association with this term
as well—when people realize they are a
singularity, an active minority, this can
tip the whole political system off its
balance. There is a great deal of support
for Italian Autonomy as well. Unfortunately,
most of the actual examples had not turned out as
well as Guattari hoped—don't we need to work out
why? As we will see below, Guattari seems to flirt
with fatalism, ending in the sad sort of claims of
a 'moral victory' characteristic of lefty
academics. Rancière suggests they are quietly
pleased with the outcome].
Chapter 3 Politics
[Guattari explains that he once trained to be a
pharmacist: 'That is certainly what left me with
this mania for using expressions such as "molar"
and "molecular"'(179).
The issue is whether democratic politics exists on
the subjective level of individuals and groups, in
terms of 'molecular levels' (190) like attitudes,
sensibilities and practices. Critics have
sometimes asserted that '"if politics is
everywhere, it is nowhere"'[Baudrillard].
However, politics and micropolitics are not seen
as being everywhere [by normal people --the old
split Rancière finds everywhere!] ], and we have
to place them everywhere, 'in stereotyped
relations of personal life, conjugal life,
romantic life, and professional life, in which
everything is guided by codes'. We need a
new pragmatics [at the level of analysis as well
as action]. If there is a first rule of
micro politics, it is 'be alert to all the factors
of culpabilization; be alert to everything that
blocks the processes of transformation in the
subjective field'. We need to overcome the
problems in escaping, since it is always
difficult. In particular we need 'the social
analysis of the attribution of guilt' (191).
We need to work not just with political economy
but subjective economy as well, and to depart from
Marxism. For Marxism, issues of desire, art
or religion are located in a superstructure.
However, subjectivity is produced precisely within
the infrastructure. To understand IWC, we
can no longer just read political economy.
Major social antagonisms based on power are still
present, as are those based on 'economic and
social contradictions' (197), but there are other
emergent issues and struggles as well—for example
the emergence of religious phenomena in Iran,
Afghanistan, or Poland. Here we need to
understand 'the problematics of the economy of
desire' in order to resist conservative
manipulations.
Marx still has lots of useful ideas, but much of
his work has been reterritorialized or coopted in
'an appalling academic hotchpotch' (198).
Much of it is now used to 'crush molecular
revolutions', although we can use Marx's thinking
for some problems, even Freud's thinking, although
we must not rely on how these people are 'made to
work in the universities'.
The modern state has much expanded and increased
'the relation of dependance that produces an
infantilized subjectivity' (208). The
welfare state has assisted in disciplining groups
and re-establishing systems of bureaucratic
control, producing a 'kind of rhizome of
institutions that we call "collective
facilities"'. Sometimes the programme
includes decentralization or self
management. The whole point is to maintain
the 'capitalistic flows'and capitalistic
progress. However, the fabric of society has
not been restored, and instead 'new bureaucratic
castes, the new elites' have benefited. The
welfare state even now regulates sex. It is
'extremely miniaturised' and affects 'unconscious
representations' (209), extending further than
Althusser's ideological state
apparatuses, and operating 'on an invisible
level of integration'. For example, it first
produces marginalization and then rescues people
from it, as long as they submit to a system of
control. The state now manages opportunities
for autonomy. The problem for places like
Brazil is whether to follow this kind of modernism
at the expense of developing 'utterly crushing
modes of subjectivation' (210).
This kind of politics extends to parties of both
left and right. The default solution is to
set up ministries to deal with things including
minorities. However, official recognition
incorporates them into collective facilities, and
can even assist in the production of 'capitalistic
subjectivity' (211). Minority groups,
including workers in insecure jobs, should not
wait for or seek state assistance: they risk
demoralization, or even future levels of worse
repression depending on who will run the state.
How to maintain singularization during electoral
campaigns? We have to take part in
mechanisms like voting, even though we know this
will compromise our singularity. However the
alternative is 'making poetry in our own little
milieus or setting up little homosexual spaces
where we can feel great, or inventing alternative
formulas for children's education'. Even if
we somehow combine these interests, we wouldn't
overthrow state power. If we just continued
to live our own lives we would risk radical
isolation. This will involve the joys of
normal living being radically separated from
'enormous, heavy, militarized, armed structures
that organise the social field' (212).
Instead we need to develop a new way of channeling
energy and 'processual transformation' to attempt
to undermine the current 'barbarity and
stupidity'. This is the real challenge.
[On meeting people setting up alternative
preschools]. [An activist notes that] there
is a risk that alternative preschools will simply
modernize the system. Instead, what we
should be doing is mobilizing the
population. However [Guattari assures
them] groups like this one need a viewpoint
so they can address emerging problems. They
should not adopt the sort of model that depends on
state powers, but even grassroots models need to
be consistent and palpable to be able to address
proper politicians. These 'experiments of
autonomization' (213) need to discuss with
supervisory staff, to take advantage of
contradictory and antagonistic relations between
bodies within the state. Links might also be
made with parties and trade unions, not on the
basis of mutual accusation or 'schematic
programmes', but through 'diagrams concretely
embodied by people and by experiences' (213) [the
diagram is a sketch of the multiplicity or the
abstract machine in Deleuzian philosophy, but it
might means something more to do with sketching
out interests here?].
[Rolnik introduces a discussion on dialectic and
flow. She's puzzled because she thought that
Deleuze and Guattari have broken with the concept
of dialectic, especially with the dialectical
conception of desire. She is surprised to
see Guattari using the term again. Maybe he
just meant dynamic relation? She now sees it
as a term relating to an important aspect of their
work, especially one 'realized at the level of
their writing itself' (224). It is to
reinforce their point that texts are never
coherent or closed, they never control
successfully. Deleuze and Guattari want to
break with the closed text, and argues that 'the
concept always has a meaning defined as a function
of the field of experimentation with which it is
articulated'. In other words the term
dialectic 'only acquires meaning in its
variations'.] Guattari replied to this
puzzlement: Deleuze condemned some words and
everyone else followed suit. There is no
intention to trample on words though.
Dialectic can mean not just Plato or Hegel, but
something involved in 'machinic phyla, in the
dimension of the irreversibility of
rhizomes'[clear as fucking mud—evasive bullshit,
surely].
[In another example, Rolnik, trying to translate
one of the plateaus, asks for clarification about
what was meant by 'Joyce's letter'].
Guattari replied by saying neither of them could
remember and the passage could be deleted.
[Rolnik is thrilled: writing is a vibration,
combining words, having words appear and then
separate or disappear according to 'the flows'
with which the text is connected' (225).
Deleuze later confirmed that that Guattari saw
writing 'like a schizo flow that carries all kinds
of things along with it'. Deleuze preferred
texts that both escape at the edge and yet are
closed in upon themselves 'like an egg': books
should also contain 'retentions, resonances,
precipitations and many larvae'. [They didn't want
to edit, evidently -- far too famous,no doubt]
1968 in France led to all sorts of molecular
revolutions at different levels such as the social
or artistic. The Prison Information Group,
including Foucault, Deleuze and others
emerged. These went along with various
groups for reflection or research or
intervention. There were neighbourhood
committees, struggles in immigrant worker sectors,
movements of sexual minorities. However,
none of these were able to escalate to another
level, or to link with existing forms of struggle,
which were still dominated by parties and
unions. Indeed, members of struggling
movements 'became intellectuals', and this
isolated them from their fellows, ending in
'processes of specialization and
degeneration'. In Italy, Autonomia
faced similar problems. Some factions wanted
each group to remain independent, some operated
with a notion of a new working class, to include
the unemployed and students. Some saw
unemployment positively as an 'accepted rejection
of work' (233) but there were also dogmatic and
sectarian groups affecting autonomous
groups. The apparent failure to escalate to
large scale movements encouraged 'reactionary
counteroffensives' and 'cooptation'[into commerce
and the collective facilities]. There was an
'implosion in the molecular revolutions', and many
revolutionaries killed themselves, ended up in
hospital, or joined various sectarian groups.
One response was to produce alternative parties
like Gauche Prolétarienne [Ranciere was
keen on this -- here]—'sectarian
groups with dogmatic conceptions, which introduced
a new kind of bureaucratic efficiency' (234) and
lost contact with the activists.
Autonomia similarly became sectarian, and
'left the door open' for the Red Brigades and
subsequent disaster. At the same time,, the French
intelligentsia announced a departure from politics
and militancy in favour of a new age, '"the post
political age"', or the 'age of social
implosion'. Any activism was seen as leading
to the Gulag, and capitalism appeared as the
lesser evil. These backsliders 'included
Baudrillard' (235). Brazil needs to draw a
suitable lesson and look out for the same pattern
of 'counterflow'(236).
The '"function of autonomy"'can be embodied in
large parties like the PT, or other parties or
unions. Such organizations can protect
militants and allow them a certain security,
overcome their guilt, although this can sometimes
lead to the reproduction of traditional
hierarchical models. The issue is always to
ask what the effects might be on subjectivation in
daily activities, and to preserve autonomy at the
micro level.
New kinds of representations or new cartographies
are necessary. Centralized apparatuses
cannot exist alongside processes of
singularization, as the Leninists showed us.
The two levels were connected by conventional
hierarchies or priorities which always left the
central apparatuses in a dominant position.
We need to construct new machines for struggle,
'war machines' (247), which cannot just follow
programmes expressed in conventional
organizations. There is a danger that
centralism will simply be sweetened by 'a pinch of
autonomy'. We should not be trying to make
everything 'converge on a single arborescent
central point', but place specific issues
and movements on 'a huge rhizome that will
traverse all social problematics… For
example [including] the level of how children who
have not read the great theorists feel, or people
who are victims of racism or sexism. Not
just in abstract proclamations, but on an
immediate, practical, concrete level' [I'm getting
really fed up these assertions, slogans,
philosophical corrections and proclamations].
Capitalistic flows have to function in two
ways—the appropriate machinic processes, so the
each mutation has to be compatible with 'the
structures of representation, social structures,
personological poles, hierarchies, territories,
and so on' (256), and they also have to help
structure reterritorialization. This means
they include a certain redundancy as well as
support for a system. Christianity is a good
example as 'the first great capitalist religion,
because it captured all the factors, all the flows
of deterritorialization that threatened to break
up the Roman empire.' At the same time, it offered
a possible subjectivity that would traverse the
different status levels, even including slaves and
barbarians. It was a deterritorialized
religion and promised further deterritorialization
as a religion of salvation. Nevertheless,
its effect was to reterritorialize [systematize as
an organized religion]. So it showed the
classic double movements of capture of
deterritorialized flows and the organisation of an
order. Christianity offered an even more
powerful 'overcoding' than the order it
replaced. The drive to reterritorialize is
also what unites Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky,
despite their other differences.
Italian Autonomism was one of the first movements
to points to a new kind of working class, a group
that did not fit into 'the processes of guaranteed
work' (262), sometimes also called precarious
workers. These people had developed a new
kind of relation with society and daily life, a
new way of producing personal and collective life
through different kind of relations to work—they
saw involuntary unemployment as 'the deliberate
rejection of work in the form in which it was
presented to them' [the militant ones did? Others
suffered -- see below] Apart from anything
else, this has rendered useless the classic
organization of social classes in the discussion
of molecular revolution. The 'structuration
of social subjectivities' does not follow these
categories, or rather, new forms of structuration
have appeared alongside classic ones.
Modern categories would include 'the capitalistic
elites, the guaranteed workers, and the non
guaranteed' (263). Each category still
contributes to the maintenance of social
discipline and order. Even the non
guaranteed have internalized a superego that sees
themselves as worthless [see above]. The
elites have a different subjectivity: that of the
academic elite, for example, is based on their
awareness of the risk that they might also soon be
non guaranteed, since they lack the resources of
finance or traditional aristocracy. The
guaranteed are constantly oscillating between
wanting to guarantee their place and aspiring to
be members of the elites. They are still
excluded, however, by various semiotic or cultural
barriers which mean they lack legitimacy and will
never gain full recognition. These 'very
strong unconscious barriers' (264) operate even
behind the iron curtain.
All of us define our position in relation to these
'unconscious categorizations of subjectivity',
[sounds like Bourdieu here] and all feature
an anxiety about being guaranteed. The
unguaranteed can occasionally contest this process
of subjectivation, and so can other groups, even
capitalistic elites. However, even the
guaranteed working class can no longer appeal as
the universal agent challenging all social
relations, since it is split by 'dependence and
counterdependence'. The non guaranteed are more
likely to reject the whole system, including the
system of guarantees, and are thus 'the vehicle
of... revolutionary aspirations'. This is
why we need alliances and 'systems of
transversality' (265) across these categories, and
all do possess 'desire in relation to the tendency
of IWC to take control of all modes of
subjectivation'[a kind of stamocap or Hardt and
Negri line?]. In Brazil, such alliances
might be emerging, as they are in Poland via
Solidarity [!]
The normal 'sociological divisions of class' have
been dealt with by capitalism. Their
capacity to survive and create is regulated by
capitalist subjectivity—even members of the
counterculture come to find their existence
intolerable. Overall, the welfare state and
its guarantees 'are, in a way, radically
alienating. But this brings potentials of
enormous contestation, which cut across
everything'.
| break.....break.....break.....break.....break.....break |
Chapter 3 Desire and History
[Addressing some Freudians]. Lacan insisted
on putting analysis at the centre of the formation
of various schools, but soon developed an
institutional form. Some analysts wanted the
teaching sector to be the focus of analysis, while
others wanted to analyze institutions, and these
two components of the school drifted apart.
Eventually three groups emerged—teaching analysts
who had been trained and worked only in the old
psychoanalytic institutions; a group for whom
analysis was only one element because they were
also working in institutions; a third academic
group, who became dominant. Freudian
analysis had always argued that only the analyst
could supply the authority for his work, but this
led to a new hierarchy between members,
practitioners, and then a bunch of
non-certificated, self- authorising
practitioners. In turn, this affected
institutions devoted to training, and their
relation to various schools universities and other
institutions. This had the effect of
sterilising analytic research. Lacan
established 'cartels' which were soon adopted by
various sectarian groups, jockeying for places in
a hierarchy, with everyone 'fending for
himself'and lots of variants. Lacan's
theoretical elaborations confined himself to
analysis in the original Freudian sense, and he
never attempted to understand what analysis might
look like in a more analytical way for
institutions or establishments, grassroots
movements and so on. Analysis is now in
trouble. The most urgent issue, however is
'basic questions such as the future of movements
for social transformation' (293 - 4).
'I know very well that people in favelas
couldn't care less about psychoanalysis, Freud, or
Lacan. But the abstract machines of
subjectivation produced by psychoanalysis through
the media, magazines, films, and so on are
certainly also present in what takes place in the
favelas' (299). Therefore we need to
develop new models to analyze the unconscious in
these settings. We need to see what is
happening to conventional psychoanalysis in terms
of reduction, especially 'familialism… The
reduction of the representation of the unconscious
to a certain family triangle'. However,
reduction has always been present, given Freud's
scientific legacy and interest in biological and
physiological research, interests which never
totally disappeared. Freud did attempt to
read subjective phenomenon differently, as with
dreams or jokes, but on the other hand he
'constructed a reference machine, or psychology,
the claim to be scientific, and that he developed
feverishly' (300), 'capturing, collecting, and
classifying the singularities of the unconscious'.
Freud first developed a topography, locating
significances in the 'containers' of the
Unconscious, the Preconscious and the Conscious
(302). In the Unconscious, all sorts of different
meanings and statements and images are organized
according to a particular logic, as in
'displacement, condensation, over determination,
hallucination, and so on'. This organization
engages in defensive conflict with the
Conscious. Analysis therefore involves
uncovering the latent meaning of statements in the
unconscious, overcoming conflict and
repression. However, this diversity and
differentiation is not sustained in the second
topography—the id-ego-superego. The
specificity of the primary processes in the
Unconscious are now found in the other areas as
well, and Unconscious logic is just seen as
'chaos, or drive disorder, reified in the form of
a death drive' (303). The three stages are
linked by an account of maturing and normalising,
so that the logic of the Unconscious is seen as an
obstacle, and overcoming these obstacles is an
important stage 'in the actual assembly of the
psyche' (303). Whereas the initial process
talked about repression of 'heterogeneous modes of
semiotics' (304), the mature model talks about
integrating heterogeneity into social order.
The genetic reading presuppose some evolutionary
development, through a 'systems of imaginary
identification known as "personological poles"',
identifying certain figures like a mother figure
for the oral phase, paternal figures for oedipus
and castration and so on. This explains and
normalizes the Unconscious primary processes, and
the differentiated Unconscious material, 'the
phenomena of singularity of the unconscious' loses
significance. Later, these figures, already
dangerously close to actors in a real social game,
become objects of desire, again inviting a
conventional concept of object relations, and
losing 'the imaginary dimensions'(305).
Lacan in particular saw the object as a function
of the symbolic order 'the so-called object
"a"'. We can talk about paternal or maternal
functions completely detached from actual
families, understood in terms of the logic of the
partial objects, as more abstract prototypical
relations. Eventually, we come to be able to
offer 'the general interpretive reference that, in
principle, should allow a reading of all
subjective phenomena, based on fixations on the
mother's breast, based on a certain economy of the
anal object present in the entire social field,
based on a certain logic of the phallic object
present in all the power relations… and
based on an ascetic submission to the logic of
social modelization'. Contemporaries of
Lacan further systematised the argument, relating
it to linguistic theories, especially those 'that
reduce language to systems of distinctive
oppositions. The concept of libidinal energy
was almost definitively eliminated'. Lacan
even conceived of the Unconscious representing a
universal mathematics, '"mathemes of the
unconscious"'that could be used to construct all
the kinds of subjectivity.
It is necessary to avoid such reductionism by
going back to see what is 'the mutations of
subjectivity were during that very [original]
period' (307). The perspectives since simply
offer 'different modes of cartography of the
unconscious', and it is possible to see them as
offering particular grasps on the 'reality of
semiotization'[blow me down, he is going to do a
transcendental deduction!]. It is not worth
comparing these perspectives on the basis of
whether they contain more truth or reality, or
whether one is more scientific than another—'all
of these readings are absolutely true', because it
is reality that is heterogeneous. The issue
then becomes one of trying to articulate them, and
explain the mutations. To do this, we need
to re-examine some of the early cases of
'craziness and genius' (308), even President
Schreber. [Notoriously, Lacan sees this case
to show that the only way to understand the
particular hallucinations is by reading the
Unconscious as a language, an early case for the
triumph of linguistic reduction]. Cases like
this cannot be reduced to the oedipal triangle, or
to the 'semiotization of the signifier', however.
Guattari's model once proposed connections between
various modes of semiotization—Freudian drives and
drive energies; iconic components and iconic
semiotics, independent of the semiotics of
language; certain '"automatisms of repetition"';
an existential notion of the unconscious like
Sartre's [?]; a structuralist account which
stresses the signifier; productions of the
unconscious that depend on collective formations,
as in Jung; a model built on 'anagogical
semiotics'(309), apparently building on archaic
semiotic productions and myth, which is
prediscursive: modern music contains archaic
traces of this kind, 'the potentiality of
polyphonic or harmonic universes' (310) combined
with modern forms of music; '"capitalistic
unconscious"'produced by the culture industries;
'"machinic unconscious'", which articulates the
other components, producing an assemblage which
goes on to open single quote produce subjective
singularities'(310). The last 2 arise from the
work with Deleuze.
[This
might be more than just a nice pragmatic list
aimed at keeping the peace. It could be that
Guattari is suggesting that the specific states
of conscious described by these approaches are
singularities produced by the same multiplicity.
Actual psychiatrists come along and discover
these actualizations and they are not wrong of
course but on;ly in so far as it goers. Only a
Deleuzian would go on to think of them as
products of a multiplcity though, so Deleuze
wins by being reintroduced at another level]
We find
symbolic models in political movements as well,
often ordered around binaries, and these serve to
overcode processes of desire and
spontaneity. Desire can appear to be
something fuzzy and disorganised, something
needing to be channeled, and you could classify
the ways in which this is supposed to be
disciplined. It would be wrong to call
heterogeneity 'chaos' requiring to be channeled,
however, more a matter of 'thousands of outlines,
thousands of capitalizing elements, highly
differentiated and capable of being articulated to
one another'(317)
Desire can be seen as 'all forms of the will to
live, the will to creates, the will to love, the
will to invent another society, another perception
of the world, and other value systems'
(318). This looks extremely utopian in
modern capitalism, which usually poses a choice
between following desires and conforming to
reality or efficiency. However the problem
is to devise other realities which do not 'have
this castrating position in relation to desire'
and which introduces blams and guilt. Even
social sciences attempt to domesticate desire in
some way, and always offer a way to order
it. But desire is not undifferentiated
energy or disorder. It has no essence, but
is always attached to producing or constructing
something. We see this with children's
desire, which operates 'in an extremely
productive, creative manner.' (319): 'it is the
modelization of the child's semiotics by the
school that leads it to a kind of process of
undifferentiation'.
It is common to see desire or something that must
be controlled in order to produce social order,
even speech itself, but this is desire that is
'constructed and produced by IWC… In its
deterritorialization'. It is particularly
wrong to see it as a matter of animal
characteristic, since even they are capable of
semiotization [relying on unquoted
'ethologists']. Organizing desires, drives
disorders and so on in binaries is reactionary,
and is quite possible to think of a new kind of
society 'one that would preserve processes of
singularization in the order of desire, without
entailing total confusion'(320). It is
capitalist subjectivity that leads to disorder and
catastrophe.
Consider the reading of dreams. We
understand dreams in terms of '"grids" of reading
that are increasingly reductionist' (322).
This reductionism belongs to the 'assemblage of
enunciation and loss of interpretation'. We
starts with a particular form of 'oneiric
semiotization', in which we are not individuated
necessarily. At the second level we work on
this material, compressing it, for example, and
stripping out some of the richness. When we
recall a dream we're operating a further level,
and we can go back to unpack elements that we
recall to rediscover their original semiotic
richness: this is Freud's discovery. Telling
someone else about the dream is a fourth level,
classically stripped of affects and
feelings. It is quite possible that there is
yet another enunciation directed to
psychoanalysts. We can use elements of the
dream in other semiotic productions such as the
novel or even another dream. As we move down
the levels, we also leave behind latent meaning
and its deformations. Each of these levels
is equally true, but they do not display the same
processes of semiotization— 'In the transition
from one to another, what takes place is a rupture
of assemblage' (323), and each has to be
understood in its own terms, without reduction: it
is particularly misleading to regard the
enunciation directed to the psychoanalyst as a
privileged one.
The same connection between assemblages is found
in other psychological examples such as relating
to social reality or artistic products, but here
the assemblages are even more complicated and the
differences between them more marked—they involve
institutions, various machinic systems and so on,
and that cannot be traced to a single individual
actor speaking in different ways. A number
of 'modes of production of subjectivity' are
involved in these assemblages.
It is not that there is a necessary conflict
between these levels, as in classic
freudianism. Instead 'there are blocks of
possible that replace one another as such'(325), a
matter of mutation of possibles, constellations of
them. They coexist. They are not
related to each other dialectically. It
follows there can be no Freudian talking
cure. 'We are always everything all at the
same time: awake, conscious, in love, ambivalent,
and so on' (326). There is no sublimation,
no constancy. As we change states, for
example between watchfulness, delirium and so on,
or change enunciative contexts, talking in a
group, say, or typing, 'each time a different
assemblage is created'. If there is conflict, this
results from 'capitalistic flows'
It is necessary to avoid lapsing into one general
universal model of our own, when we make
criticisms of other models. At the same
time, Lacanians are wrong to deny that they have a
model. They tried to insist that they are
explaining phenomena not in terms of their
meaning, but in terms of their structural
characteristics [Guattari is particularly critical
of the 'shameful practice of short sessions, and
with the shameful practice of maintaining a
silence that can go on for years' (330-1)].
In fact, this is 'capitalistic modelization' and
organizes elements in terms of equivalents
and exchange value. The power of Lacanians
lies in their 'creation of the kind of
sado-masochistic situation that I have just
described'. It is a neutralisation of
subjective potential at the micro political
level. It has become important because it
seems to have been embodied in hierarchies and
structures in various fields, including the
university. It has even become part of
training for elites, who now have to manage
'highly differentiated processes of semiotization,
involving infernal micropolitical
problematics'(332). Lacanian practice helps
train bureaucrats and technocrats. It
reflects this standpoint itself. We should
understand it as involving practices of
'interpretation, neutrality and transference'
which are really 'major micropolitical
interventions'[more critiques of Lacan follow].
In place of talking about acts, including analytic
acts, we should refer to assemblages. These
are: (a) movements of flows of any kind,
demographic flows, electricity, hormones; (b)
territorial dimensions as processes of
subjectivation; (c) processual dimensions,
machinic dimensions; (d) 'dimensions of
universes', dimensions of existence, aesthetic
discovery, and new fields of the possible (335-6).
[Good stuff on this in Chaosmosis]
[Discussing a particular case of a seven year old
girl who has become socially isolated]. This
is like the case of Little Hans who also could not
cross the street and visit friends. All his
territories were blocked, all his assemblages
disrupted, some by Freud's intervention. He
needed 'more assemblages which would allow him to
assert himself among children of his age, allowing
all the differentiations to function, including
sexual differentiation' (342). It is
important to understand this kind of personal
'shit' as well as to analyze institutions and
power relations.
We also need to analyze things like the workers'
movement, especially in regard to 'the formations
of the unconscious' (344). Work practices
changed, and this produced new modes of
subjectivation, including some radical forms of
resistance. This was opposed by the state,
who took in Italy '4000 political prisoners'
(345), and possible political and social
transformations were blocked. In other
cases, including Poland, new formations of desire
have been reinvested in traditional formations,
'such as the Church'. If this is to succeed,
the workers' movement 'will have to incorporate
the analytic problematic', to mobilize 'the
immense force that all this represents'.
We can analyze formations of the unconscious in a
number of areas, in our own dreams or creative
productions, and then follow them through the
various grids or meshes of reading, interpretation
and communication. At the institutional
level, there are whole systems 'of interpretation
and decoding, which involves elements of laws,
rules, and regulations' (346). These can
have effects on primary forms of subjectivation,
as we see from dreams which reproduce
'institutional, political or geopolitical'
orders. That is, codes and rules and so on
are not metalanguage, but elements that can
operate at primary levels. This is not the
same as internalization, but more to do with a
form of collective articulation, which has an
effect directly on the formation of the
unconscious. We should not therefore
interpret the appearance of leaders or whatever in
dreams as a symbol, but as an indication of how
the 'social register in which the individual being
considered is situated' (347). There are no
universal symbols or signifiers. We need to
see these elements as opening up possibilities of
relating to different universes.
There is no way to guarantee genuine autonomy via
the release of desire— 'it is equally true that,
on the other hand, [desire] can be oriented within
each of us in a microfascist direction' (348).
[On the machinic unconscious]. We should
think of desire as machinic, using that term to
include technological and social aesthetic and
theoretical machines, some which are
territorialized [taking a limited physical form]
and others deterritorialized. Desire is
produced, it helps us understand the links with
work to say so. Otherwise we think of desire
as something instinctual or primitive. The
desiring machine expresses this idea. It
implies that 'desire has infinite possibilities of
assembly' (354), and this is the problem with
psychoanalysis which reduces desire to its
schemas. Desire is actually connected with
quite different elements in surroundings
[Chaosmosis is a good source again].
Children are perfectly capable of accessing
abstract forms of semiotics creativity. This
is not to support spontaneism—machines can always
be jammed or blocked, implode, or self destruct,
as in micro fascism. In every case, we
should establish 'what the economy of desire
really is, on a pre- personal level, on the level
of identity relations or intrafamilial relations,
a non all levels of the social field'.
Mental illness operates at all these levels too,
even economic dimensions. Symptoms are
produced by a number of articulations. An
example might be a child who is diagnosed as
isolated and unsocial. You might be
diagnosed as suffering from a fixation on his
mother, but we also have to consider much wider
social relations, with neighbours and friends,
relations with territory outside the family, how
he considers the production of his own life and
subjectivity and how Ed ciphers the outside world,
what happens at school, what happens when he tries
to be creative. It is these total issues
that produce the behaviour. There are
levels, of the body or of the psyche, or family,
but we should not be operating exclusively at that
level. Instead we should try to 'understand
the totality of the articulations of the totality
of the assemblage that causes this subjectivity to
suffer' (366-7).
We can only partially grasp these assemblages, and
we should not try to impose interpretations which
can be oppressive. Nor should we prematurely
attempt to normalize mental patients. We
should and stared try to grasp the complexity of
subjectivity. We should not expect patients
to be in control of this, since there are
substantial collective influences on
communications, 'you to the family, social groups,
and primary groups of all kinds' (317). 'The
individual who we see before us is often nothing
but the "terminal" of a whole group of social
assemblages' (371), with collective and
unconscious dimensions. It is a mistake to
think that the individual speaking is really
'"what is speaking"', especially in cases of drug
addiction.
We can explore these '"matrixes" of ordinary
subjectivity'in cases of psychotics, where they
are breaking up. We should see the
conditions such as drug addiction as 'an active
micro politics… The micro politics of
apprehension of one's self, of the cosmos and of
otherness' (374). It might be possible to
see this general analysis as presenting 'A
"transverse" view of drug addiction, anorexia,
sado masochism, mysticism, paranoia, and so
on'. They all involve attempts to create a
subjectivity with the basic personality having
broken up. They manufacture their own
versions of subjectivity. If we pursue the
notion, we can understand not only
psychopathology, but 'conditioning of work by the
use of images from the media, by phantasmatic
scenes triggered off in order to "calm one down,"
to ward off the absurdity of existence'in the
absence of conventional social supports. In
a way, we are all drugged, but to a lesser
extent. This is not to defend drug taking or
schizophrenia. The worst cases can be seen
as the result of 'the tenacious refusal or a will
to affirmation or at any price' (375). This
might also applied to delinquency. Policy
should consider this 'axiological
dimension', not to promote drug users as
heroes, but because they show best 'the most
intense problematics' (376). It is difficult
to trace this 'ethical and political
dimension'unless we pursue 'new assemblages of
enunciation and analysis'. Our institutions
should practise polyphony. Institutions are
still necessary, as long as they operate at the
right combination of levels, accepting that
personalities are complex and heterogeneous,
encouraging processes of subjectivation, even if
this means tolerating mutations at first.
[An example of clinical practice—the free radio
movement in France]. This was an attempt to
question the use of the media and develop
democratic expression, experimenting with small
groups and how they might be brought
together. This modest technology 'had a
surprising semiotic efficiency' (379). It
was initially illegal, opposed by the law, and
also the conventional parties and unions.
However, it soon 'had the effect of totally
paralysing the system of repression'. It
mobilised a number of people, and even caused the
crisis among radio professionals. This is
because it operated 'as an intervention in the
register of the social unconscious, the mode of
collective semiotization', and disrupted the
normal relation with the media and
information. It is fair to say that it was a
'extensively coopted', but it did point to a
breaking point, just like a small pebble can
shatter a whole windscreen.
The first broadcast took place in an ecology radio
station. Before being jammed, they manage to
do something 'which escapes the information
control grid' (380). The broadcasters were
pleased, but not the technician, who had expected
much better 'fantastic programmes'. An
Italian enthusiast defended 'low production
values] since they are open up 'a universe of
utterly different possibles' (381). Certain
experiments in journalism also had an impact, for
example the establishment of newspapers for
children by 'a great innovator in pedagogy'
[Celestin Freinet]. This transformed the
usual way of 'subjectivating the school class',
and it can easily be applied to other social
groups.
[back to Freudian practice]. Individuals do
not have particular qualifications or functions,
'the analytic processes are necessarily be centred
in relation to people or individuals' (385).
Analysts to have specific desires for analytic
power, expecting a result, or building a
model. Sometimes it can take the form of
transference, which introduces alienation as an
obstacle to real analysis, and this has happened
in Guattari's own practice [example described 386
F].
Schizoanalysis goes much further than conventional
psychoanalysis, which confines itself to 'an
individual oral performance', (395) usually in the
familial context in industrial societies. It
limits its understanding of 'affective
manifestations' because it is interested in
healing. Schizoanalysis wants to operate at
the collective and objective levels as well,
'human and/or animal, vegetable, cosmic, and so
on', exploring assemblages of enunciation,
including their place in 'an evolutive
phylum'. Is this limit the traditional
interest in evaluation and scientific
prescription? Should be abandoned the
notoriously difficult 'hidden libidinal
parameter', and focus on a collection of
'energetics', physical, biological, social and so
on, instead? The classic model of energy
being discharged and psychic operations was
useful, but it lead to extended use of a
'thermodynamic concepts outside their original
field of validity'(396), and this had the effect
of excluding incorporeal objects and processes, an
imposing a false universality, say by deploying
the concept of entropy. In 'ordinary
life'discharges of energy are really based around
defence rather than 'balance and constancy'.
So we need to reject this model of quantitative
drives in favour of a different form of model of
transformation. This can help us see how
things like egos, material flows, machines of
desire, and semiotic assemblages can all be
produced from each other. We don't need to
differentiate between physical energy and
subjective anima. We can likewise see the
physical world as a result of transformations
between her 'heterogeneous domains' in various
kinds of 'transversality' (397).
The new cartography uses different forms of
quantification [to consider intensive forms], and
abandons the idea of univocal object complexes,
'that is, complexes in which the elements have
been collected exhaustively in advance'.
There are assemblages that can change the
configuration and reorder themselves,
'schizoanalytic entities', illustrated in
dreaming, for example but also in 'intellection in
a nascent state'. We can understand
monads and myriads, as points on a general plane
of immanence, at different 'levels of consistency
of energy'. They must be understood as part
of complex assemblages. To do this we need
to break with Saussurian semiotics and turn
instead to Peirce [who apparently took a more
encyclopaedic view of semiotics]. We can
also borrow from Hjemslev [who also saw semiotics
as more than language, and as a 'fundamentally
"immanentist"'(398) [pass --but a bit more below].
The interest is in assemblages of enunciation,
instead of psychic apparatuses. We need to
leave behind all the dichotomies in psychology,
including those in Freud between the physical and
the psychic. Lacan has done this by reducing
everything to the issue of the object and its
relation to mathemes of the unconscious.
This leads to a loss of important areas such as
libido, and dynamic concepts in general.
This has implications for interpretation that used
to be about the hidden meanings that were
repressed or blocked in various situations of
conflict. Instead, everything is turned into
signifiers. We should not return to Freudian
models of psychic energetics, but focus instead on
'"semiotic energetics"' (400). We need a
concept of energy to explain any kind of
transformation of translation, including semiotic
transformations. Thermodynamic notions of
energy will not do, though. We need a 'much
more anthropological conception of energetics',
relying on a notion of energy that is not confined
to the way in which physicists understand it, but
includes other kinds of value and qualitative
dimension. Physical notions can be seen as a
specific level in a broader 'sphere of the
possible' (401). Are the same time, we do
not need some notion of a general energetic, such
as 'libido'. Instead the need to look at
specific semiotics systems, connected by
'passageways' and 'machinic processes'.
[Why is Hjemslev so important?]. He offers a
philosophy of language, based on expression.
He becomes important just like other philosophers
do, including Spinoza. In fact he is linked
to Spinoza in terms of a general interest in
expression and semiotics in the most general
sense. Hjemslev can be used to rebuke all
those linguistic systems that 'reduce everything
to the signifier' (402). His notion of
expression is part of a more general notion of
articulation, which relates to 'matter, substance,
and form'. This produces, 'six expression -
content categories'[might be in Thousand
Plateaus?] . Deleuze and
Guattari have also introduced an additional
dimension by referring to 'the opposition between
the modes of encoding', or modes of expression:
these depend on 'coordinates of universe,
incorporeal systems/non systems, territorial
becomings, sensible becomings, qualitative
becomings, value becomings'.
Chapter 5 Emotion, energy, body, sex
[More on the need to be careful about using the
term energy, because it seems to imply that desire
is driven. Instead, we should think of
'desire as being immediately of the nature of
highly differentiated and elaborated machinic
systems' (403).
[Why is there so much caution in Thousand
Plateaus?]. We are not advocating so
much taking a trip, as undergoing a process.
There is no simple subjectivity involved, since
subjectivity 'is always taken in rhizomes, flows,
machines… Always processual' (404). We
need to develop 'a schizoanalytic undertaking', to
try to develop a more creative assemblage.
But the effects are not always cumulative, and
they can end in 'dead territories'. This
often happens 'in the conjugal economy, in the
domestic economy' where a process of love ends
with a closing of territory and the end of
richness. This is why you need
caution. There is no general moral point
being made. It is particularly useful to
counter the spontaneism 'of a certain era'.
It is not a matter of freeing your body or
whatever. We need a proper account of the
richness and precariousness involved. It is
like the process whereby the feminists withdrew
from LC and produced implosion
[above]. Psychedelic drugs can help semiotic
processes, and there are examples of people using
them that way, but these 'are not very common',
and they often find implosion or 'black holes'
(405). Fascism can develop as a result of an
accumulation of microfascisms, as a particular '
hyperactive totalitarianism'.
It's necessary to use machines of all kinds to
recreate the world, not just to revolutionize it,
hence 'I am not postmodern. I don't think
that scientific progress and technology are
necessarily accompanied by a reinforcement of the
schiz in relation to the values of desire, of
creation' (408). We have to defend the
environment, but we also have to see that science
and technology are irreversible. We need
molecular and molar revolutions to change its
objectives, to steer away from catastrophe.
We might use artificial subjective production
[IT?] To produce new forms of sociability and
therefore molecular revolutions.
There is no reduction to the body, since 'language
is not a biological function as such'(409), and
nor do all sensibilities spring from the
body. It is not a matter of reforming
bodies. In industrial societies, the body is
actually attributed to us, located in a particular
social and productive space. In other
societies, there are other conceptions of bodies,
for example as 'a subset of the social
body'. Our bodies are initiated into
'capitalistic flows' by domesticating our body,
making it subject to the dominant
subjectivity. The tensions caused can
produce various psychological problems—entry into
social assemblages is both possibly productive of
singularity, and also normalizing.
Some of these capitalistic facilities are found in
the whole system, others appear to be separated
according to the conventional sociological
categories [especially class and gender, one
questioner wanted to insist]. We must not
examine only those that function according to
these categories. It is also important not
to confine desire to specifics such as sexual
desire. That would run the risk of reducing
problems of life to physiological functions.
There are some 'complex singularities' that
existed before social structures, even 'before the
individual and the body'(411).
Chapter 6 Love, territories of desire, and a
new smoothness
Loving desire in capitalism often turns into 'the
kind of appropriation of the other', leaving
closed territories. For that reason, it
might be important never to dissociate machinic
processes from reterritorialization. We
might use the term bodies without organs as a
fundamental territory on which machinic becomings
are inscribed and embodied, but this still raises
the ambiguities of territory, and de- and
reterritorialization. This ambiguity is
sometimes found in marriages [as above].
There might be a new smoothness possible, a
relation with the body, one that 'is present in
becoming - animal' (416). We can avoid all
the usual modes of subjectivation with human
bodies, conjugal relations, power over each
other's bodies and so on and we can consider
different types of becoming as an exploration of
'the rhizomes of modes of semiotization' which do
not risk social relations. Once, we can only
develop through war machines and industrial
machines, military force, 'manly values'. We
still find these in Russia and in fascist
countries, including the United States. But
now new forms of subjectivity can experimentally
invent new social orders and new forms of
expression of the becoming of desire outside
'these phallocratic, competitive, brutal
values'(416).
We have reaffirmed and relegitimated social
struggles, including class struggles. In
discussions had on this trip, it is necessary to
avoid a false dualism between autonomy and large
scale social struggles. Both are important,
but both have different logics and appear as 'a
contradictory mode'. The trend towards
micropolitical dimensions 'is basically
inapprehensible in terms of militancy'
(429). What this means is that the micro
political dimension is continually appearing in a
larger scale, reintroducing 'all the asignifying
elements, all the elements of singularity'.
This makes politics much more complex. This
is 'the line of flight of micropolitics outside
the field of militancy'. As a result,
apparatuses such as parties should be seen as only
temporary. Militants appear like religious
believers, prepared to reify themselves in
belonging to organizations. We should see
membership instead as 'precarious, provisional',
aware that organizations will disappear
eventually, and new problems and conceptions
appear instead. This is implied by
transversality and its implications for the
subject group. They are finite, just as
individuals are. This can actually increase
the value of an undertaking, though, by
recognizing contingency and singularity. It
helps us to produce 'rhizomes of all kinds' (430).
It is important for these trips to understand the
ways in which capitalism is projected and
semiotized in different and distinctive
contexts. It is important to 'talk to real
interlocutors' to understand their specific
problematics. It doesn't really matter what
comes out, but the will to create is
stimulated. We can even see as a game,
developing 'a little communication
machine'(438). Lectures or academic talks
are not suitable. Instead we require a
collective assemblage of enunciation, proper oral
interventions and debates. This is the only
way to capture sensibilities. Classic
lectures followed by questions represent 'an
investment of sadomasochistic affects' (439), and
people would see visiting professors as an
'imaginary punching- bag'(439). The
discussions here did not take this form [hard to
tell -- sometimes Guattari did not answer or
repeated his answer] , but provided 'a climate of
expression' which can be worked on later.
It is important to act in various sectors and
various places, to avoid becoming 'planted like
mushrooms' (442). Deleuze is 'planted, tied
like a goat to the university'.
[Isn't the work with Deleuze in danger of turning
into a system after all?] Deleuze is a
philosopher, and Guattari is not—he's more
interested in 'maneuvers of expression in a
certain context' which can be abandoned for
something new. Deleuze is more of a
philosopher working in a philosophical
territory. What emerged is 'an event of
writing, an event of creation... almost like
a work of art' (449-50). It doesn't matter
if this irritates people. Rereading a text
is unbearable and unpleasant, another reason for
not attempting to build a model.
Collaborations in particular can never be simply
repeated, because they emerge from specific
assemblages, which in turn 'depends on a climate,
a potential audience, an attendant language—in
short depends on thousands of things that are not
reproducible'(451).
The diversity in Brazil is traversed by
capitalistic flows. At least a certain
vitality remains, unlike the United States, for
example. In the USA, creativity is confined
to the marginals, and even white creative artists
have to 'participate in a "becoming - black"'
(453). It's possible that Brazil is becoming
a world 'productive centre', when it comes to the
production of subjectivity.
It is not just a matter of reacting to
industrialization and its accompanying
abstractions. Is important to defend
abstract machines, and abstraction. It is
this that permits interesting structures combining
archaisms and machinic processes. What is
most differentiated is also most machinic [so 'I
always trust in the people, in childhood'
(458)]. This is not a plea for togetherness
or community, as in Illich: 'the primitives, the
people, children, the insane, and so on are the
bearers of the most elaborate and the most
creative abstract machines'. The masses must
become radically deterritorialized, ceasing to
become masses, so they can become singularities
engendering 'unaccustomed rhizomes'.
NB there is also a glossary of terms in the back
of the book -- none of the definitions is terribly
helpful though. There is no definition of
singularization! Shows the problems with any
glossary -- context is all! As for
rhizomes:
Rhizomes,
rhizomatic: Arborescent diagrams proceed by
successive hierarchies, starting from the
central point to which each local element
refers. On the other hand, systems in
rhizomes or in "lattices" can drift endlessly,
establishing transversal connections that one
cannot centre or close up. The term
"rhizomes" was taken from botany where it
defines the systems of underground stems of
perennial plants that produce adventitious
shoots and roots on their underside (example: an
iris rhizome)
A note helpfully explains that
Guattari meant the sorts of trellises that support
climbing plants. For those requiring further
clarification, we are referred to to a book by
Deleuze and Guattari On the Line (1983). I
still read the ultra-mystical discussion in Thousand Plateaus,
and ask myself -- were all those pages really
necessary with all their baffling asides,
allusions and repetitions when this simpler
definition seems to be OK here?
back to Deleuze page
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