Guattari + 30 conference at Paris 8 – 20-22 October 2022
LIENS/CONNECTION LINKS/ZOOM LINKS (one per room)
Salle de la Recherche BU
https://univ-paris8.zoom.us/j/96846689924?pwd=TDc4VklUcjhQTll6SW1Gck0zbXlKZz09
password (if required): 200653.
Maison de la recherche MR002
https://univ-paris8.zoom.us/j/95240557791?pwd=elBDd0dpT0NqNldaSDVwbzRIejV6QT09
ATTENTION: the CREPEAU CORMERY dialogue at the end of the day on 20 October is cancelled
INTERNATIONAL GUATTARI+30 DAYS
University of PARIS 8, 20-21-22 September 2022
CHAOSMOSEMEDIA association
https://chaosmosemedia.net/en/
Research Room of the B. U.
Hall of the BU
Amphi MR 002
COUPOLE Hall
A 133 – A 1-174
Abstracts/résumés
Nelson Fernando Roberto ALBA (Paris 8, Philosophy/ Santo Tomás University, Bogotá, Colombia) –
Dissipated Molecular Revolution and National Strike in Colombia (zoom)
A “cartography” of the collective equipment of capitalist power in the recent history of Colombia makes it possible to see specific modes of semiotic subjugation, also linked to productive and libidinal functions that pass through the state and, paradoxically, through subversive groups competing for its economic, political and territorial control, by subversive groups competing for its economic, political and territorial control, of which the guerrillas (M-19, FARC, ELN), peasant self-defence, narco-paramilitarism (BACRIM or criminal groups) and its relationship with the political parties in power would be just some visible expressions. The armed conflict that the country has suffered since the beginning of the 20th century has not ceased to reproduce regimes of increasingly unusual social and economic violence. The impoverished peasant, the displaced person begging in the city, the unemployed, the worker and the precarious employees, the young people known as “ni ni” (they neither study nor work), the informal traders, the part-time employee, the student, the pensioner and the housewife, all have in common the fact that they are subjective modulations produced and reproduced by the great collective Equipments.
Moreover, the neo-liberal management policies implemented by governments since the 1990s have exacerbated the enormous social inequalities already existing in most of the population; The privatisation of health care, education, public transport, various tax and pension reforms, free trade agreements with the United States and the precariousness of working conditions in general with the “uberisation” of the economy were concrete reasons for the population to demonstrate in the streets of the country in the National Strike of 2021, which entails, not without material and symbolic violence, a rich and complex collective agency of enunciation.
This paper analyses from a micro-political perspective the Molecular Revolution triggered in the events of the Strike and seeks to problematise the political option matter operating in the modes of semiotisation of collective facilities, but especially in the politics of collective enunciation and the polycentric, plurivocal and horizontal organisational forms that arise from it. We pay particular attention to other non-linguistic modes of semiotisation such as dance, artistic manifestations in the street and squares, mimicry of somatisation modes, modes of perception of space and possible a-signifying semiotic components.
Anne ALOMBERT (University of Paris 8, philosophy) – From the post-media era to the post-truth era. From “persuasive technologies” to “contributory technologies.
In a 1990 text entitled “Towards a post-media era”, Félix Guattari questioned the evolution of media technologies: the junction between television, telematics and computer science should, according to him, lead to a reversal of practices, allowing passive receivers to reappropriate the “machines of information, communication, intelligence, art and culture” and thus overthrow the “mass-media power”. Thirty years later, we have to admit that the “alternative molecular practices” anticipated by Guattari were not enough.
The “post-media era” has been replaced by the “post-truth era”: if the “mass media power” of the audiovisual “cultural industries” has been disrupted by the digital revolution, it seems to have given way to new forms of attention capture, through “persuasive technologies” based on the collection of data and the exploitation of impulses, which generate phenomena of disinformation and exacerbate the polarisation of opinions. In such a context, the question that arises is not so much how to control content as how to rethink the technical functioning and economic models of the digital media, in order to put them at the service of controversy and argumentative debate, which are characteristic of scientific activity as well as of the political life of societies.
Can we design platforms that allow for the sharing of interpretations and the confrontation of singular points of view, and not just the dissemination of information or the ‘following’ of personalities? Can we move from a data economy based on the logic of the audience and targeted advertising to a knowledge economy based on an “isonomic” digital public space? Based on the work of Bernard Stiegler, we will argue that despite their appropriation by a hegemonic computational capitalism, digital technologies conceal unprecedented contributory potential, likely to overcome the situation of “symbolic misery” inherent to analogue media. The challenge is to think of digital “associated environments” in which the functions of production and reception of symbols are no longer separate, and where new forms of reflexivity could develop.
Jean-Philippe ANTOINE (University of Paris 8, Arts)
Manola ANTONIOLI (ENSA Paris La Villette, programme director at the Collège International de Philosophie) – Desiring machines, technical machines
We will propose a rereading of the text “Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes”, first published in the second issue of the journal Minuit in 1973, and then included as an appendix to the reprinted editions of L’Anti-Œdipe. In this text, Deleuze and Guattari try to clarify certain aspects of their recourse to “desiring machines”, in a perspective that goes beyond psychoanalysis to engage in a debate with philosophy and the history of techniques, which anticipates the developments of Guattari’s reflections on the contemporary “mechanosphere” or “technosphere” and its role in the production of subjectivity in later works.
Martin Bakero. Action Conference
“RadioTheoretical Chaosmosis: What is Schyzophonic Metanoia?”
Special guest: Angelina Rud Carasceaux
From the radio waves, from the mixes between Felix’s voice and those of the Chroniclers of Radio Métanoïa in sector 14 of the Ville Evrard hospital: we propose a broadcast of the provocative “chaosmotic” ideas of the schizophrenic (im)patients and put into music and poetry by Martin Bakero (sax, radio, voice, electroacoustics) and Angelina Rud Carasceaux (piano, synthesizers, percussions, voice, electronics). We will mainly deal with radical ideas around ecosophy, deterritorialization, chaosmosis, and delirious certainty.
Vincent BEAUBOIS (Philosophy, University of Paris Nanterre, IRePh) – A Guattarian philosophy of technology: for a pharmacodynamics of techniques
Guattari insists a lot on the fact that his thinking of the “machine” is by no means limited to an understanding of “technical machines”: the “machinic” is not reduced to the “technical”. However, does Félix Guattari’s “machinic” thinking allow us to envisage a philosophy of technique as such? What meaning does he give to technique and our coupling to it? At first glance, technique seems to have an ambiguous place in Guattari’s writings, being as much synonymous with alienation as with emancipation. For example, in The Three Ecologies, ‘techno-scientific transformations’ are presented both as a ‘threat’ and as a potential ‘resolution’ of ecological problems. Similarly, in the interview with Toni Negri published in 1990 in the journal Futur antérieur, while the latter insists on the impasses and dangers of a “planetary computer age”, Guattari seems to maintain an openness of possibilities specific to these technologies.
This ambiguity that operates at the heart of our technological couplings must obviously not be thought of as a “neutrality” of technique in itself that would emancipate or alienate solely according to the “uses” that we would make of it. It is at the “machine” level of the production of subjectivities that this ambiguity must be thought through, and in particular in the production of what Guattari calls “capitalist subjectivity”, i.e. a certain form of dominant subjectivity that works on all of us insofar as it is shaped by our mass-media industrial system. This capitalist subjectivity is characterised in particular by a particular shaping of our experience of time and space. The image that Guattari often uses to characterise the couplings that take place with mass-media technologies is that of the ‘drug’ as a particular experience of a certain relationship to time and space. By reading together the texts on the “machine” and those that Guattari devotes to the question of “drugs”, we would like to show to what extent Guattari’s philosophy engages a “pharmacological” thought of technique, no longer centred on the question of care as deployed by Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy, but on practices of adjustment, transactions and existential experimentation. We will thus try to show that Guattari develops what we could call a pharmacodynamics of techniques attentive to the dynamic operations of mutation of environmental, social and mental fields.
Swan BELLELLE (IRTS Nancy)/ Experice, Paris 8) – Felician analysis in adult education (zoom)
The following proposal will attempt to re-engage the permanent Guattarian construction site in the pedagogical field of adult education, particularly in the social work sector. Re-engaging means that a concept is only as good as the life we give it. Its function is not so much to guide representation and action as to catalyse the reference universes that frame a pragmatic field1 , that of social work and what it transversalises and transversalises2 . Guattarian meta-modelling constitutes, for the practitioner that I am, a praxical invitation, a transdisciplinary theoretical-practical singularisation.
This proposal will grow and cultivate different Guattarian (or Deleuzo-Guattarian – if this distinction really holds since Guattari worked in interference with various social practices) concepts in order to test and experiment with the other logic(s) approached by Guattari. Indeed, the angle I take when reading Guattari is that he was trying to establish other logics: the “eco-logic”3 (oïkos-logos) of the Three Ecologies, the “pathic logic”, “logic of intensities” and “logic of affects” in Chaosmose4 allowing to grasp or even follow the taking of consistency of objects which are then more transistantial than substances or essences.
As we proceed, from our pedagogical experiences and experiments (from an immanent and pragmatist perspective – so that it works in arrangements), the path outlined, which we could call praxis, will attempt to approach the concept of transduction that Guattari (but also Deleuze – in Mille Plateaux) summons up in continuation of Gilbert Simondon. We will even return to the Ecrits pour l’Anti-Œdipe where the concept of collective agent of transduction is evoked several times. The possibilities of this active formula make it possible to activate that of collective transductive arrangements.
In an experimental and creative perspective of indisciplinary research and creation, the challenge is to build a praxical meta-modelling that allows for the transversality of objects and subjects (insofar as, here too, the distinction still holds), their becoming and transistantiality according to a logic that should not be invented, but rather welcomed and transduced, here too, and to attempt to give it praxical consistency: The logic of singularity, the logic of the encounter, the logic of alterities, all of these are prompts that put in crisis the formal, causalist logic, the inherited thought, to use Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept; the insistence of the “already there”, of the instituted.
What if clinical professions (in the broadest sense of the term) were established at the crossroads or the intermingling of these logics (instituted and instituting), which would not only consist of “finally” (in the sense of “in the end”, of the retrospective “aftermath” – identities); but rather, “along the way”, of grasping or following the consistencies (institutional matter, our dough to be modelled and modulated) taking place here-and-now and in their becoming: heterogeneses (alterations, alterities, interests), what we call here contexturations, that is to say, centres of entangled individuations, transversal and transductive existential territories. These contexturations are in permanent transformation and take shape through precarious, temporary takes on existence (cf. the vertigo of immanence).
The plane of consistency is then not so much an abstract ensidic, stable and identitarian machine as a singular and metastable pragmatic hodological machine. This other logic, open to processuality, complexions and singularities, is not so much opposed to the universal and to classical logic as it is to a praxical crossroads that is a vector of ethical scope and subjective creation: we are then faced with choices to be made with regard to the consequences of these. A “culture of dissensus” is outlined here, of heterogeneity opening up the possibilities of alternative rather than alternative individuations in education.
Volker BERNHARD (Media Theory, Bauhaus-University Weimar (Germany) – What Is Ecosophical Dwelling? What is an ecosophical dwelling?
The question of the extent to which the private sphere is political was constitutive for an entire generation of the last century and continues to have an effect today under changed socio-economic conditions. In “The Housing Question”, Friedrich Engels addressed the precarious living conditions that industrial capitalism produced. But this understanding of space was based on segmentation and closure – today, by contrast, the mental, social and environmental ecology extends right into the living room. Adorno already stated in 1951: “Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible”.
Therefore, even in the face of an impending climate catastrophe and a fully digitalised, semiocapitalist present, a reformulation of the housing question under the auspices of Guattari’s ecosophy seems necessary. In “The Three Ecologies”, he derives the core of his ecosophy from the word “eco” in a very remarkable footnote, and lays out a trail of what a significant role dwelling would have to play in this: “The root ‘eco’ is used here in its original Greek sense of oikos, that is, ‘house, domestic property, habitat, natural milieu’. Since Guattari’s entire work also aims at a revolutionary practice, it seems all the more remarkable that, apart from the forms of life in La Borde, the possible role of dwelling in the sense of an ecosophy is not situated: What could a resingularised, ecosophical dwelling – alongside collective housing projects – mean in a digital world? And how does it resist neoliberal individualisation and rebourgeoisation at the same time?
My contribution attempts to address these questions experimentally from the perspective of critical media theory, remixing Félix Guattari with Vilém Flusser, Max von Pettenkofer, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Giedion. It is an open question what ecosophical dwelling could mean theoretically and practically. It would depend on the attempt.
JOFF P. N. BRADLEY (Teikyo University, Tokyo)
In this experimental and playful talk, I want to create an imaginary dialogue between Guattari and R. D. Laing, who actually met in their lifetime but who have somehow come back to the living to reflect on what went on in their time and what they now see in the contemporary moment. My intention is to make some serious points about Kingsley Hall and La Borde, about climate change, about the rise of fascism, about all forms of liberation (ecological, economic, sexual and so on), about the crisis of technological addiction, but also to write the dialogue with a sense of humour as well.
Bio: Joff P. N. BRADLEY is Professor of English and Philosophy in the Faculty and Graduate School of Foreign Languages at Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. He is visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia (University), New Delhi, India, and a visiting fellow at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Joff has co-written A Pedagogy of Cinema, and co-edited: Deleuze and Buddhism; Educational Ills and the (Im)possibility of Utopia; Educational Philosophy and New French Thought; Principles of Transversality, Bringing Forth a World; Bernard Stiegler and the Philosophy of Education. He published Thinking with Animation with Catherine Ju-Yu Cheng in 2021. He is currently writing two books on schizoanalysis and postmedia and will publish them in 2022.
Felix Brieden and Elena Vogman (“Madness, Media, Milieus”, Bauhaus Universität, Weimar): Transversalist Ritual. A performative analysis (in French).
Stills from François Tosquelles, Société Lozerienne d’hygiène mentale “one can hear the overlay of an ensemble of teeming voices, calling and answering each other, criss crossing, fading out, passing over and under each other, inside the automatic voice, very short messages, utterances obeying rapid and monotonous codes. […] in our example communication attains a higher degree, inasmuch as the voices enter into the make-up of the machine, become components of the machine. F. Guattari
Felix Guattari’s lifelong obsession with the ritornello – in therapeutic, social, philosophical and aesthetic domains – can be seen as an incessant “exploration of the expressive levels of pathic temporalization”. Time is not homogeneous, not an a priori to our experience. It is “beaten by concrete assemblages of semiotization.” It constructs territories. This is how the ritournelle becomes a critical model of subjectivation, capturing heterogeneous existential qualities through rhythms and refrains. Our performative lecture explores Guattari’s multilayered use value of the ritornello through a number of manipulated speech acts. Using performative techniques such as polyphonic reading, sound and voice recording, live sampling, quotations and role play, we want to unfold the coexisting therapeutic, aesthetic and political implications of the ritournelle. Equally we would like to trace the inscription of Guattari’s experimental therapeutic practice with media in his philosophical and political writings.
The ritournelle emerges notably long before A Thousand Plateaus (coauthored together with Gilles Deleuze) in Guattari’s concrete clinical practice at La Borde in the early 1950s. In his analysis of the psychotic patient R.A. Guattari uses a magnétophone – a “magico-machinic technique of the tape recorder” – in order to evade the two bodies psychology and to introduce a third “technical other. This media-therapeutic intervention coincides with Guattari’s gradual distancing from Lacan’s structuralist model of the unconscious. However, in 1955 the concept of the ritournelle equally appears in Lacan’s seminar Les Psychoses in reference to Daniel Paul Schreber’s paranoid repetition of short sentences. Schreber describes these as a looping “ringing of phrases.” In his structuralist gesture Lacan describes it as the “form which meaning assumes when it no longer refers to anything. […] the formula that repeats itself, starts over again, is drummed in with stereotypical persistence.” Lacan coins this phenomenon as la ritournelle referring to “Echo”, the Oreade of Greek mythology which denotes a semantically emptied phrase repeating and imposing itself as meaningless. Whereas for Lacan it invokes a structural model of what he sees as the deficient and redundant elements of paranoia, for Guattari the ritournelle explodes the status of repetition in psychoanalysis while critically addressing the phallocratic anthropomorphism of psychoanalytic discourse. Exploring the expressive levels of the ritornello as pathic temporalization, our lecture aims at staging the theoretical confrontation between Guattari and Lacan while emphasizing the ritornello’s therapeutic function. “Analysis has everything to gain from enlarging its means of intervention,” Guattari writesSpeech, but equally modelling clay (Gisela Pankow), video, cinema, theatre, institutional structures and family interactions can become such therapeutic means. Enabling the a-signifying facets of such ritournelles to set off their “catalytic functions” instead of being closed into a circular perspective, Guattari continues François Tosquelles’ institutional psychotherapy undertaken at Saint-Alban in its collective therapeutic effort to transform the concentrationist establishment. This dimension allows us to think Tosquelles’ and Guattari’s use of media as socially constituted ritornellos in their immanent political implications. Tosquelles’ film Société Lozerienne d’hygiène mentale offers a wide range of such collective ritournelles: printing workshops, theatre plays or carnival processions opening the clinic visitors from Lozère and beyond. This milieu of carnival (fête votive) can also be described by Guattari’s notion of an “existential ritournelle,” referencing Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony: a “polyphony of modes of subjectivation” that allows a multiplicity of modes and ways to emerge beyond hierachical stereotypies.
Bouazza BENACHIR – Psychoanalysis in the footsteps of the saints, Morocco (zoom)
By tracing lines of flight, the introduction of psychoanalysis in the Arab world and particularly in Morocco (1956) and the essays of Jalil Bennani for example invite us to explore the margins or the planetary transversality of Félix Guattari… to dismantle “the North African syndrome” (Frantz Fanon).
Felix Guattari having been (being…) sensitive to J. Lacan, to the negative constellation of the concept, and then when he and Gilles Deleuze took on its most affirmative, Spinozist or Schysoanalytic dimension, it is legitimate to wonder about the genealogy and effects of the introduction (via René Laforgue and therefore via the French Society of Psychoanalysis of which Lacan was one of the co-founders) of psychoanalysis in Morocco: “land of the saints” and Afro-Maghrebian possession rites and adoring mediumism (see the work of Georges Lapassade).
Susana CALÓ (philosophy, U. Porto, Portugal) with François PAIN – My concepts, these little machines
Isis CASTAÑEDA and Paula JOUANNET – The political power of dreams in their resonance
In her book Staying with the Trouble, feminist philosopher Donna Haraway emphasises the importance of storytelling. The context in which she writes is a world damaged and torn apart by capitalism, racist, slave and colonial history. From this perspective, Haraway invites us to imagine and create alternative ways of living by sharing narratives that disrupt hegemonic accounts. Following Barbara Glowczewski in Angry Dreams, dreams seem to us to be fertile territories where we can give birth to new forms of life, insofar as the space of the dream can in the mixing of desires, territories and times: making with heterogeneities; allowing for the subversion of common representational markers of experience, by organising different traces of narratives and materials in other temporalities.
Taking up Félix Guattari’s preoccupation in Chaosmosis with mobilising collective and transformative subjectivities, we raise a series of questions: how do we capture dreams in their subversive power? How can we share dreams – and their narratives – without capturing them in the apparatuses that seek to understand them, individualise them and make them purely psychic? To what extent would it be possible to bring them to life in material form? In an action-research modality, we address these questions in particular by means of an artistic production conceived around dreams produced in the social and political context of revolt in Chile, militant experiences and textile creation, which are situated on the border between dream and matter, between the real and the virtual, between the individual and the collective; a way of giving dreams another life in their resonance in different materials and forms of sharing. The resonance of dreams thus appears as a creative, singular and potentially subversive movement of production of political experience.
Isis Castañeda. Psychologist and psychoanalyst. Doctoral student in political philosophy at the University of Paris-Cité (LCSP) and at the University of Paris 8 (LLCP).
Paula Jouannet. PhD in didactics of mathematics at the University of Paris-Cité-Artiste Textile, feminist activist in the Brigada serpientes collective
Camille CHAMOIS (FNRS/Université Libre de Bruxelles) – “Traits de visagéité” and “traits de silhouette”. Psychology, ethology and biology in Félix Guattari
In his attempt to describe the various components of the “dumping ground” that he calls pragmatics, Félix Guattari focuses largely on the non-verbal communication of visageness features5 . The notion of “visageness” refers to two dimensions: downstream, a culturally situated system of expression, so that each empirical face expresses itself in relative conformity with an “a priori face”; and upstream, “models” of perception, motricity, intellection, imagination” that lead to the interpretation of perceived signs in accordance with a given sociohistorical code. In doing so, Guattari seems to be following the history of sensibilities, seeking to describe the evolution of historically variable thresholds of authorised expression and degrees of self-control – a history that, in the manner of Norbert Elias, would see in the treatment of the face evidence of socio-historical variations in superego and sublimation. However, this is not the case: in order to give a positive account of these phenomena, Guattari does not mobilise the psychoanalytical corpus, even if understood in a broad sense, but rather experimental psychology and ethology. The most decisive references are the ‘gestalt’ arguments of René Spitz, Kurt Lewin, Daniel Stern and Otto Isakower, in the field of child psychiatry; the analysis of micro-expressions by Irenaüs Eibl-Eibesfedt, Harry McGurk and John MacDonald – i.e. in ‘cognitive’ developmental psychology; the analysis of ‘silhouette traits’ in animal courtship, in the field of ethology, and in particular by Paul Géroudet; and the hypothesis of an epigenetic history with multiple references (Lynn Margulis in the lead). The aim of this paper is to study the role that Guattari gives to the traits and surfaces of visageness in order to clarify the place that psychology, ethology and biology play in his work – and, incidentally, in the schizo-analytical programme that he implements. More broadly, we will seek to use the question of visageness as an entry point to reflect on the relevance of the confrontations between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology that structure part of the contemporary field.
Loreline COURRET (Paris 8, philosophy) – “Ecology and Literature: On a fourth ecology of Félix Guattari
In 1989, Guattari published Les trois écologies and Cartographies schizoanalytiques in one fell swoop. The former being the introduction to the latter, a literary thread is woven from one to the other: on the one hand, it is a question of opening up environmental ecology and the militant movements that have been building it for half a century to two ecologies, social and mental, taking on the question of the environment on the subjective level of existence, rather than on the purely technocratic level of nuisances; on the other hand, it is a question of thinking of the “environment” as a semiotic production, the historical models of which are aesthetic. That this semiotic production in which beings are engaged is susceptible to an ethic implies shifting ecology from the phenomenological centre of corporeality to a narrative approach to the environment, including the sensitive components of the experience of the environment.
This paper will focus on Félix Guattari’s singular contribution to the field of environmental aesthetics. Against the evidence provided by works in which nature is directly the material (land art) or the object (representation of nature), Guattari maintains a literary ecology, centering this environmental aesthetic on the least obviously natural art: written art, caught in a culture that is itself written. Our aim is to start from Guattari an ecological reflection on writing, both as a social technology and as a means of ecological emancipation.
Thomas CUVELIER – Micropolitics of disfigurement: between “repressive grimace” and the power to pout
The effectiveness of less lethal weapons (LW), particularly in law enforcement operations, is based on the psychological handling of force by means of a military and police technology of shock, ‘striking to stun, stun or paralyse’ (M. Rigouste; 2015). Although it is therefore supposed to kill less, the use of LRAs nevertheless unlocks the range of violence, with an extensible and sophisticated handling that mutilates without appearing to do so, invisibilising injuries that are nonetheless very real.
Facial mutilation, particularly in the form of euthanasia, has become an emblem of the violence perpetrated by LRAs. The face is not the head or the skull and its anatomical parts. It is a surface whose eyes, nose and mouth are the particular points of its animation on the one hand, and of the expression of the identity and communication of a subject on the other. So much so that the subjectivation of the whole body passes through the face. This is why the face, understood as a surface of subjectivation, depends on an original machine that Guattari first, and then Deleuze, call “visageness”.
Apart from the fact that this machine allows the face to become a signifier, it makes it a focus for concerns involving what is most intimate and desirable in the collective and social field. It is therefore at this double level of subjectivation, at the intersection of the personal and the political, that the violence of LRAs, understood as a ‘semiotic coup de force’ (Guattari, 2011), is said to affect. The notion of visageness would then make possible a micro-political analysis of subjectivation in terms of the disfiguration of the face.
By approaching the traumatic dimension of mutilation through interviews, we would like to show how the desiring capacity of a body is put into play by the police and libidinal repression that overwhelms it. The deformity of the face sometimes sends the mutilated person away from any community of fellow human beings, placing him or her at the limit of any possible subjectivation, and confers on him or her a strange power of sideration/seduction likely to open up a new space of contestation in which the exit from the trauma is the issue.
Quentin DUBOIS (Paris 8, philosophy) : Hocquenghem and Guattari – revitalizing queer theory
This paper takes as its starting point Guy Hocquenghem’s inaugural gesture in 1972 (Le désir homosexuel). By establishing, on the basis of the Guattarian analysis of groups, homosexual desire as a group desire that refuses to obey civilised institutions and to replay the values linked to them, Hocquenghem affirms the mortality of institutions (and by extension of civilisation). Moreover, this intervention is part of the polemical field opened up in the 1980s in the United States by Leo Bersani (Homos 1988) and more particularly by Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), a field that would be described as an anti-social thesis. In this work, Lee Edelman determines a reproductive futurism as the horizon of all conservation politics and a resumption of the queer counter-civilisational task based on a death drive capable of exploding the great collective future of civilisation.
The task at hand is twofold:
– on the queer theoretical level: it will be a question, based on Guattari’s work, of refusing the reification of a death drive that would be opposed to a life drive, a regressive oedipal death, but on the contrary, seized from its de-oedipianising (or de-civilising) aim.
– on the micro-political level: avoiding the traditional impasse between reformism and revolutionary that each of the enunciating positions would embody (LGBT versus Queer), it will be a question of investing queer theory with a force of resistance to general traductibility (subjectivity of generalised equivalence) and to the establishment of civilisational values (family, marriage, conservation analysed by Edelman’s reproductive futurism), starting from Hocquenghem’s watchword: “homosexual desire is the murderer of civilised selves” (Le désir homosexuel, p. 121).
Sara FADABINI (Paris 8, Philosophy) – The idiolects of the unconscious: a Guattarian hypothesis
We have the unconscious we deserve! And I must admit that the structuralist psychoanalysts’ unconscious suits me even less than the Freudians’, the Jungians’ or the Reichians’! (F. Guattari, 1979 ).
What if the unconscious was structuring like a language rather than being structured like a language? This is the impression I got while reading Guattari’s Essays in Schizoanalysis. Every living language is heteroclite, deterritorializing and unpredictable. Heteroclite, because it is immanent to the voices that articulate it and to the situations of enunciation in which it is inscribed, by transforming them. Deterritorialising, because to speak, even within oneself, is to expose oneself to the interpretative listening of the Other, the matrix of arrangements often at odds with those generated by our mouth or our heart. Unpredictable, because, under the pressure of obscure forces, language is destined to become foreign to itself, by becoming a stammer, silence or style. Placed under the sign of the irreducible multiple, of inexorable becoming and of the chance that no throw of the dice will ever be able to abolish, the Guattarian unconscious would thus be a moving device, which would welcome in its bosom an otherness forever renewed (does the epithet “machinic” mean that?). For the analysand, it would no longer be a question of translating its manifestations into Oedipal meanings (like any great novel, it will end up disavowing the primitive scene that it humorously presentiments at times), but of discerning its effects. Consequently, when the symptom appears, we will not ask ourselves: – what does it mean by this? but: – what is the unconscious doing to me by speaking in this way? or: – what powers of creation and life are released by this or that idiolect?
I propose to trace Guattari’s critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis of the sovereign signifier. I will recall his collaboration with Deleuze, his encounter with French and Anglo-Saxon pragmatics, and his readings of Kafka and Proust, painters of unconsciouses structured as languages, and more precisely as ‘minor’ languages.
Anthony FARAMELLI – (Visual Cultures, Co-Program Leader, Fine Art and History of Art BA, Goldsmith College, London) – Mapping digital space after Guattari with Joff BRADLEY and Michael GODDARD
The panel will be focused on critical postmedia to ask how to fabulate a new pharmakon of internet technologies to contest the collective algorithmic unconscious gone berserk. In this panel we will draw on our collaborative and on-going research on digital and the alt-right, the manosphere and Hikikomori via, among others, Guattari, Lacan and Reich, to suggest a new series of alternative diagrams to rival and contest Guattari’s fourfold of territory, flux, incorporeal universes and phyla.
Luis Diego FERNANDEZ (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina) — The “revolución molecular disipada” [the dissipated molecular revolution] in Latin America. Misunderstandings and limits in the political-militant uses of the philosophy of Félix Guattari (zoom)
The expression ‘revolución molecular disipada‘ [dissipated molecular revolution] was used by the Latin American far right (Alexis López Tapia) and then disseminated by former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe to refer to social events in Chile (2019) and Colombia (2021) based on a particular use of Félix Guattari’s notion.
Then, we will try to think the articulation between molecular and molar from an ontological-political point of view with regard to the present, particularly Latin American; in the same way we will analyse the convergences and divergences of the becoming-revolutionary in the micro-political dimension and the macro-political revolution. We will present, on the one hand́, the incorrect, pejorative and forced appropriation of the Latin American far right that has made use of Guattari’s philosophy from a conceptual misunderstanding and, on the other hand, the very lucid criticism of the autonomist left (especially Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato) about the lack of development of the notion of revolution in Guattari’s thought.
To conclude, our position will try to distance ourselves from these readings, considering the contributions of Alliez and Lazzarato, in order to argue that there is not a deficit in Guattari’s thought but an approach that is not convergent with certain Marxist ideas.
Gary GENOSKO – Magic Within and Beyond Animism (zoom)
The task of this intervention is to gather together Guattari’s scattered references to magic, from Chaosmosis and Schizoanalytic Cartographies, and to reconstitute his position, using animism as a guide. For magic is a bulwark against positioning schizoanalysis as another specialism, and in maintaining what Guattari called its “eccentric” relation to professional psychotherapeutic practices. Indeed, Guattari warns his readers that animism is not simply another model. Whereas animism served Guattari’s decentring of subjectivity from the human individual, and his critique of the prevailing dichotomies of subject/object, human/nature, sign/real, to bring magic into play in schizoanalysis is to open it to ethno-psychiatric investigations of sorcery, as well as neo-pagan ecosophy. Magic is indispensable for understanding contemporary assemblages of enunciation, as it exists concurrently with the very forces that would try to banish it, as well as those which would attempt to exploit it for fascistic purposes in claims about “magic ballots” and “voter fraud”, for example.
Igor GALLEGO – (Visiting Student Researcher, University of Berkeley, USA) “From automedia to contributive media. Guattari and the media-political experience of the Gilets Jaunes”.
While the Yellow Vests movement is undoubtedly the largest French socio-political movement since 1968, it differs from previous French struggles by a new political appropriation of NICTs and digital social networks, but also by new attempts at media self-production. Today, these offer us an unprecedented experience of reflection on the forms and democratic stakes of the organisation of media production in order to rethink and criticise the post-media era dreamed by Guattari. The objective of this presentation will be to outline the design of this new technical individuation and to imagine new circuits of media transindividuation from and with the experience of the Gilets Jaunes, by asking the following questions: How have the infrastructures of digital capitalism transformed the maker practices of mediactivism to give rise to the automedia genre? To what techno-economic power devices are automedia today subject and constrained in the experimentation of new automedia individuations and transindividuations? What are the new values, norms and mediatico-political protocols carried and manufactured by the automedia? And finally, how can we redesign the manufacture of information through contributory processes in order to produce confidence and truth in information within working-class environments?
Igor Galligo initially trained in the humanities, leading to four masters degrees: contemporary philosophy, visual arts and aesthetics at the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, then political science at the École des Hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Since the end of 2012, he has been conducting research on the ecology of attention, the design of attention and the relationship between attention and aesthetic experience. In 2013, he joined the “Reflective Interaction” research programme at EnsadLab, the research laboratory of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. He also became an associate researcher at GERPHAU, a research centre in architecture and urbanism, attached to the ENSPLV. In 2013, he was appointed as a researcher for the Ministry of Culture and Communication at the Directorate for Research, Higher Education and Technology. From 2013 to 2015, he directed three international seminars with Bernard Stiegler on the transformations of our attentional capacities in our digital environment. In 2016, he was appointed Research Associate at the Institute of experimental design and Media Cultures in Basel. In 2018, he founded NOODESIGN, a think tank on the design of mind operations. In 2019, under the direction of Yves Citton, within the COMUE ArTeC, he began the completion of a doctoral thesis on the themes of Automedias, contributory media and post-truth, and then founded AUTOMEDIAS.ORG, an organisation that brings together researchers, computer engineers and activists from the popular worlds (notably from the Yellow Vests movement) to rethink the democratic future of media production. In 2021, he was appointed associate researcher at the COSTECH laboratory, at the Technological University of Compiègne. Since September 2022, he has been a Visiting Student Researcher at the University of Berkeley (USA), within the NEST programme, under the supervision of David Bates.
Barbara GLOWCZEWSKI (CNRS, LAS) – Ecosophical (de)territorialisation: examples from Australia, Guyana and France
Félix Guattari became interested in the Australian Aborigines in 1983 when he was making his chaosmose of schizoanalytic cartographies. For him, the collective dream work of Australian totemism, both semi-nomadic and anchored in sacred places, resonated with the elaboration of his founders: existential territories, incorporeal universes (or ritornellos), flows and machine phylums.
Andrew GOFFEY (Philosophy, Nottingham University, UK) – Schizoanalysis, a technical practice?
In a text titled ‘Relaying a War Machine’ Isabelle Stengers raises the question of how to pass on Guattari’s singularly experimental mode of thinking. Guattari presciently anticipates the complex environmental, social and mental challenges of ecologically destructive hyper capitalism, short of reading him as a prophet or treating his writings as a repository of solutions to pre-existing problems, relaying Guattari necessarily means reinventing his work, updating, adapting modifying his toolbox to address – to formulate – new problems. For Guattari, in 1989, the “knowledge economy” was perhaps still only really just emerging and one could easily imagine a liberatory dimension to the process of planetary computerisation then underway. That situation has since changed somewhat and it is necessary, I would argue, to try to explore a different relationship to technology and to technique. This paper proposes an exploration of Guattari’s work from the point of view of a reimagining of technique. Part one returns to the invention of transversality and asks to what extent one can read it as proposing a kind of technical approach to working with/in institutions. This entails an exploration of the work of the GTPsi around transference and a renewal of the connections made between the latter and laboratory experimentation. Part two will address the role that science plays in Guattari’s thinking of the machine, from his early engagements with this concept (where its effects are imagined analogously to a scientific discovery) through to the latter schizo cartographies, with their systems, paradigms and meta-models). Part three will consider the possibilities that the ethico-aesthetic thinking Guattari proposes in Chaosmosis can offer for a pragmatically consequential addressing of schizoanalytic practice as a process of co-creation (signalled by Guattari with his references to Bakhtin but implicit too in his invocations of Daniel Stern and his references to hypnosis.
Antonia GOZZI – Michele CORLEONE – RITOURNELLES PROJECT –
A reading of Ritournelles by Caroline CHANIOLLEAU
music A. Gozzi – E. Abela
Maël GUESDON -On a case of “graphic stereotypy” and its resonance in Guattarian ritornellos
If a whole branch of the clinic of psychoses has tried to define stereotypy, in various directions, it is certainly for its semiological value in the clinical tables, but also probably because it is one of the most radical forms of the equivocality of behavioural repetition which becomes autonomous and swells up by folding itself up from within.
Gradually, repetition transforms the intention and becomes, in its insistence, its very rhythmicity, the essential operator that acts on the situation, that filters relations, protects, isolates or threatens. Starting from a case of “graphic stereotypy” described by Antheaume and Mignot in 1906, I would like to follow how the concept of ritornello as it unfolds in the Guattarian clinic from the mid-1950s onwards takes up and displaces the issues at stake in the clinic of psychiatric stereotypies in order to construct a thought of repetition between the clinical, aesthetic and political.
Eloi HALLORAN – Guattari and the strategy of the wage: on the materiality of the pathways of the recomposition of subjectivity
The point behind this is that the societies in which we live – the societies that I call capitalist, because they concern both Eastern and Western countries – only value a certain type of production. I believe that, from my point of view, we should not be satisfied with the Marxist couple of exchange values and use values. We should go beyond that. I think we need to introduce two other types of value: “desire values” and what I call “machine values”. And, thus, understand that exchange values are something, in society, that must also be articulated with desire values and machine values, with the values of machine progress… Machine values: these are values of creation, values of invention. Today, a technological innovation or a scientific equation will only have value in the register of exchange values if it is immediately useful in the production process. But there are aesthetic and scientific creative values that do not have an immediate effect on exchange values and that deserve to be financed. So, for me, I say: machine values and desire values are things that should fit into exchange values in the same way as other use values. For example, women’s work in the home or children’s work in school. This may be a utopian vision, but it is something that allows us to understand and criticise the capitalist mode of valorisation. 6
Some may recognise in these words by Félix Guattari a particular arrangement between the autonomous-feminist-Marxist strategy of the wage for/against housework and student labour and the productivity of desiring machines. In “the perspective of a molecular revolution”, Guattari criticizes the social division of labour which “always converges towards the values of capitalism”, in order to reorient “the objectives of the social purpose of labour” towards “everyday life, the arrangement of the environment, the possibilities given to the values of desire, the values of creation”.7 Here, the productivity of desiring machines allows for the overcoming of what the critique of value-dissociation calls “labour”, read: human activity in the form of real abstraction without content or end, except its own accumulation-reproduction – labour as capital. I propose a reading of Guattarian analyses from and in dialogue with these two tendencies, but, above all, a thought experiment that seeks to reconcile them with the values of machinic desire emphasised by Guattari. In line with his collaboration with Negri to redefine communism as “the way to a liberation of individual and collective singularities, that is to say, the very opposite of a regimentation of thoughts and desires”8 I articulate, with contemporary Marxist theorists such as Morgane Merteuil and Beverley Best, the wage for/against labour as a material tool that paves “pathways to the recomposition of subjectivity”. 9I attempt to bring these Marxist perspectives closer to Guattari in order to emphasise the importance of anchoring “the rhizome of autonomous and singular processes” that the liberation of labour can constitute “on the terrain of a new collectivity”, beyond the “yoke of capitalist over-coding “5 . This is to define the wage as a material and strategic precondition for a communism that transforms the tyranny of value into a new space of proliferation of desiring and machine values
Jay HETRICK – Machinic Animism in Japanese Contemporary Art
At the core of Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic imperative is resistance to the serialization of subjectivation through the production of singular modes of subjectivity that are characterized, quite remarkably, as “polysemic, animistic, and transindividual” (Guattari 1995: 101). Even though this seemingly Romantic return to animism seems questionable, it forms the very framework that Guattari asks us to pass through, at least provisionally, in order to fully grasp his last project. I will attempt to demystify this important concept theoretically before showing how the “aesthetic machines” (Guattari 1995: 90) of Japanese contemporary art – and more specifically, the conceptual art of Yoko Ono – stage one key aspect of Guattari’s animism: machinic heterogenesis. Guattari travelled to Japan many times in the years leading up to the publication of Chaosmosis and Japanese contemporary art helped him to ‘elucidate his somewhat vague concept of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm by focusing upon concrete examples’ (Hetrick 2015: 138). Further unravelling the consequences of this basic insight, I will argue that it is indeed through the lens of Japanese contemporary art that Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm might propel us beyond the old-guard “programs of the first half of the 20th century” (Lazzarato 2008: 174). Just as we are asked to pass through a certain notion of animism to understand the relational onto-logic of Chaosmosis, Japanese contemporary art itself demands a similar conceptual framework in order to be disappropriated from an all-too-Western canon. To this end, I supplement Guattari and Deleuze’s work with speculative readings of Japanese philosophy.
Jay Hetrick has published in the fields of critical theory and contemporary art and is the co-editor, with Gary Genosko, of Félix Guattari, Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan (Univocal, 2015)
Sonja HOPF, My journey with Felix
My journey with Félix Guattari consists of two books.
Book I shows two series of my engravings, one under the title Eye-hole, the other under the title Eye-monster. A comic strip follows in third place. The monster-eye looks through the hole-eye at a falling head.
Book II is the account of my dreams and working notes during the first year of my analysis with Félix Guattari from November 1981 to December 1982. The analysis continued and ended with Félix’s death in 1992.
Jean Sébastien LABERGE (U. Ottawa/Paris Nanterre) – From mass media infantilisation to post-media consultation
A primordial programmatic point of social ecology will be to make these capitalist societies transit from the mass media era to a post-media era; by this I mean a re-appropriation of the media by a multitude of groups-subjects, capable of managing them in a path of resingularisation. (Guattari 1989c: 61)
This contribution aims to account for the project of a transition from the mass media era to a post-media era by situating it within that of a reinvention of democracy also carried by Félix Guattari who speaks of the ‘passage from the consensual media era to a dissensual post-media era’. (Guattari 1989a: 23) While the emergence of the new information and command technologies [ICTs] has allowed for the appearance of stunning capture devices, Guattari sees the possibility of mobilising these technologies to create new spaces of freedom. No longer mobilising the media to serialise the masses in an infantilizing simplification of reality, but developing means of dialogue that solicit collective intelligence by making room for the singularities and complexity of situations.
Post-media is not simply opposed to the infantilizing mass media, but to the whole of the collective equipment that prefabricates normalized subjectivities.
The conjunction of heterogeneous elements characteristic of transversality makes it possible to emphasise the fact that enunciation is always established at the interface of several perspectives. It is even from its capacity to resonate in different universes that it draws its consistency.
In the face of change, as the postmodern position leads to the crowning of disengagement in accordance with neoliberal laissez faire, and before others claim the end of history, Guattari considers that ‘what we can conclude is that previous social practices, those of trade unionism and the various iterations of left-wing parties, have gone bankrupt!’ (Guattari 2013: 211) Hence his insistence on the importance of reinventing practices, of finding practices that respond to current conditions.
Frédéric LENEVEU (philosophy) – The Misery of Affects, the Optional Rules
This work is a way of fighting and responding to a certain order of distribution of the philosophical word, by proposing lively face-to-face activities in order to affirm a “word” that “has not given up on producing embodied meanings”, in the words of F. Guattari.
We will discuss and attempt to unfold with Félix Guattari, how the control of the production of affects is a political issue that operates in the formation and transformation of subjectivities: “Misery is a misery of affects, whose privatization leads to a devaluation of life’s possibilities…”
Sensitivity, as the power to be affected and to affect, determines and expresses the distribution between the sacred and the profane. It is contingent and partly implies a geography of governing practices and resistances.
Viviana LIPUMA – “An octopus in dirty water”: the necessary interweaving of struggles of desire and struggles of interests in techno-liberalism.
For Félix Guattari, capitalism is not only a social system for the production of material objects, but also a semiotic operator that creates and puts into circulation a set of signs in order to ensure the basis for its maintenance and development, thanks to the segmentation of subjectivity and the resulting social stability. “What capital capitalises is semiotic power”, he asserts: the mass media, advertising, television, but also, more broadly, the school, the family and the hospital are thus the instances of production of such capitalo-compatible signs. It is in the hope of countering the devastating effects of this subjective lamination that Guattari hails in ecosophical writings the event of a “post-media era”. The development of new information and communication technologies (NICTs), accessible to a large number of people and easy to handle, allows for the emergence of processes of singularisation on the part of groups-subjects, breaking with capitalist standardisation and therefore revolutionary from the point of view of mental ecology. It is a question of new enunciative arrangements, the basis of expressivity for individuals and the reconstitution of collective political imaginaries, which work towards a “molecular revolution” in the fields of sensitivity and desire. At the same time, computer science and telematics are creating a new regime of signs for a new mode of extracting surplus value. Governance, data collection, algorithms, and new modes of digital writing are signs that do not refer to any signifier that can be linked to semantic referents aiming at a subjection to the existential models of capitalism, but which are no less harmful from the point of view of the elaboration of a social alternative to it. From the beginning of the 1980s, Guattari was attentive to the events that heralded the computational turn of capitalism, which he called
In this context, how can we believe that the “molecular revolution” can bring about a social revolution that is increasingly necessary? Under these conditions, how can we believe that the “molecular revolution” can bring about a social revolution that is increasingly necessary?
Thirty years after The Three Ecologies, the problem is even more acute. In several texts, such as ‘Integrated World Capitalism and the Molecular Revolution’ (1981), Félix Guattari suggests that, while central, the micro-political perspective cannot suffice and that we must therefore find ways to articulate post-media expressive arrangements with political and social ‘struggles of interest’. In other words, new forms of organisation and new institutions must emerge from the new mental ecology, capable of producing consequent changes in our ways of inhabiting the planet and relating to others on a global scale. We believe that these indications are still very valuable. We will try to explore these avenues by questioning the role that NICTs can play in the advent of a new post-capitalist social organisation, thus dispelling the first lure of the CMI: the feeling of our powerlessness.
Tina Mariane Krogh MADSEN (Berlin, Akusmata) – Geological Flows and Machinic Potentialities (zoom)
This presentation takes its departure in an artistic work with sound and philosophy which evolves around affective encounters and their relation to modes of stratification, on the road to becoming. It is a remote and exploratory paper-format which will be composed of relocated transmissions of geological deterritorializations, words, and live-coded sonic sequences that interweave as an experiment in textuality. I wish to regard this as an assemblage of enunciation which can bring into existence new modes of proposition (Guattari, 1989/2012), based on resonances flowing between human and nonhuman entities – fingers, code, stone-fragments, and words. It uses processual creativity to discuss how a total deterritorialization can be reached (Guattari, 1992/1995).
One could state that it is paradoxical to try to deterritorialize and regard the potentials of becoming through live coding based on its algorithmic foundation, though in the act of writing code live, and via the use of its inherent potentials for failure, mistyping, and sonic chance encounters, we can say that these are navigating at the immanence between complexity and chaos (Guattari, 1992/1995), as a transversal connectivity of algorithms and improvisation. The specific use of geological sounds as source adds a further layer of relation via the ethics of sourcing the lithic, fragments of stones, for human use – their origin and life-cycle. Thus engaging these in a sound art practice which opens up for an ethico-aesthetic realm which discusses the macro through micro- gestures, awareness, and listening. Together with Deleuze, Guattari emphasizes that the plane of consistency and the total deterritorialization is always present immanent to the stratification process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). It enables a potential, where the multiplicity of agents in the sonic output is crucial, for both its happening, and what is tells us about the environment.
Thomas MICAL (Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Delhi, India) – From Botanical Schizoanalysis to Acid Ecosophy (zoom)
This project arises from the need for a return to the revolutionary impulses teeming within the principles of desiring- production and nomadic subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and later A Thousand Plateaus (1980), specifically to reformat the mind-nature dualism through processes of terraforming the unconscious of the individual through imaginative mutations in the spatial arts. In this work-in-progress, we first assert and sketch a divergence model of Botanical Schizoanalysis as the first movement, to counter the structuralist claims of Kasem’s The Science of Love: Botanical Psychoanalysis (2019). Botanical Schizoanalysis, if possible, would traverse the mind-nature dualism towards an entangled hybridity, here proposed as a hyper-activation of the mental ecology (Bateson, Guattari) as world, psychic and vegetal in reciprocal intensifications. Here we draw upon recent theories of plant intelligence in Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, of nature itself as an alien intelligence, which is actually already rooted in the subconscious. Botanical Schizoanalysis fuses together plant intelligence, alien intelligence, second natures and unnatural nature to imagine the world reanimated and life re-enchanted with the cornucopia of liberations and desires outpouring. In the contemporary model of mental ecology the mind is not an archive-herbarium but a mind- nature reciprocating mechanism spawning new experiences and schizo-adventures. The unconscious is a secret garden, lush with experiences of desiring-production coiling and uncoiling into the wider outside of the world. Outside, where the natural is encoded as a vast machinic phylum of strangeness. Guattari’s looping explorations give metamodels for producing another order of thought, and these wild ecologies are extended to include trace comments from Guattari’s final Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989). Multiple natures, multiple ecologies, each terraforming the unconscious opening up new contours of thought is the schematic for a Botanical Schizoanalysis.
We will illustrate these conjectures and conceptual maneuvers suing a range of botanical illustrations from India in Rao’s Hidden Kingdom (2019) as provisional data categories to function as visual / indexical figures to stand for emergent mental ecologies.
The reciprocating wasp-orchid coupling in nature is duplicated in the 2-part structure proposed here – but it demands not a single wasp but a wasp factory. This liberation-desire project demands diverse techniques for creating active agents for initiating the shift from mental ecologies to Guattari’s later re/turn to ecosophical change in the world. Here the recent spatial (geographical) turn to world-building could follow some lines of flight identified in Jellis & Gerlach & Dewsbury (eds) Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics (2019). Back to origins, contemporaneous with the writing of Anti-Oedipus, we find the 1970s countercultural happenings (spatial artists siding against capitalism and for schizophrenia!) can be located in the ecosophical-artistic happenings and processes of Joseph Beuys and his circle. There is an unexplored near-convergence of Beuys’ and Guattari’s ecosophical aesthetics, and traces of this near-convergence can be found in today’s bio-art, spatial arts, environments, and installations. MacCormack & Gardner’s Ecosophical Aesthetics: Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari is helpful here, in deploying a range of tactical operations. From this range we seek to develop a more extreme version of active ecosophy, where accessing compelling visions and experiences can be done following the model proposed by Mark Fisher in his last unfinished writing (“acid communism”). Fisher reasoned a temporary change of state of consciousness (“turn on, tune in, drop out” of the psychedelic era) would initiate a dynamic vision of the future perfect communism – but we propose a recoding of this into a very specialized notion of the ecosophical (more shamanic than political). From Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964) we can track the acid revolution in consciousness, the taste for altered states, and a search for new nature/s. The challenge of Acid Ecosophy is how to access a higher state of temporary occupation of the strata of wonder, from which brave psychonauts then would return to the everyday – ideally to implement that hallucinatory reality, as an active botanical Schizoanalysis for creative life / creative project(ion). The return to the machinic phylum of the present environment is a call to spore the world with new wonders for wild productions and explosive desires, free of superstructures for reconfigure environments to liberate a bio-mechanical carnivalesque, and to terraform inwards and outwards with many new soft machines. We call this second movement Acid Ecosophy.
Véronique NAHOUM-GRAPPE : A political friendship (with Félix)
Yan Menezes OLIVEIRA :
(Psychologist, PhD student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)
Visagerity and the historical capitalist project. A dialogue between Guattari and Segato
This paper proposes a dialogue between the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and the Argentinean anthropologist from a decolonial perspective, Rita Segato, a dialogue facilitated by the concept of visageness and by discussions on the role of gender, race and minorities in the historical project of capital. Guattari presents the face as a particularly important pragmatic component in the micropolitics of semiotization, selection and the fabrication of a “social body” within the system of Integrated World Capitalism. In Guattari, the theme of the face is directly related to the theme of the major and minor and their modes of existence in capitalism. Segato contributes to the reflection on the distribution of power and prestige from the event of colonial modernity, in particular the colonisation of the American continent. Following the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, Segato links the emergence of capitalism and its predatory and exploitative historical project to the inventions of the Americas and the races. In the dialogue between the psychoanalyst and the anthropologist, opportunities arise to research the decolonial contributions of both the genealogical formation of the components of the formations of visageness from the reading of the capitalist historical project, and on its mode of functioning through the understanding of race as a sign and the hierarchical system of gender status modified with the colonial invasions. The thematic dialogue is justified by the importance of debates on gender and racialization in contemporaneity, by the importance of updating the problematic of becoming-minority in a decolonial perspective, and by the possibility of revisiting Guattari through a rapprochement between his understanding of the signifying power of capitalist semiotization, or semiotization of the White Man, and the decolonial understanding of the expropriating and predatory modern colonial project.
Faciality and capitalist historical project: a dialogue between Guattari and Segato
This communication proposes a meeting between the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and the Argentinian anthropologist from the decolonial perspective Rita Segato, a meeting facilitated by the concept of faciality and by discussions on the role of gender, race and minorities in the historical project of the capital. Guattari presents the face as a particularly important pragmatic component in the micropolitics of semiotization, selection and the making of a “social body” within the system of Integrated Global Capitalism. In Guattari, the theme of the face is directly linked to the theme of the major and the minor and their modes of existence in capitalism. Segato contribute to the reflection on the distribution of power and prestige from the event of colonial modernity, in particular the colonization of the American continent. Following the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, Segato links the emergence of capitalism and its predatory and exploitative historical project to the inventions of the Americas and races. Faced with the encounter between the psychoanalyst and the anthropologist, opportunities arise to seek the decolonial contributions both of the genealogical formation of the components of the formations of faciality from the reading of the capitalist historical project, and on its mode of operation. through the understanding of race as a sign and the hierarchical system of gender status modified with the colonial invasions. The thematic dialogue is justified by the importance of debates on gender and racialization in the contemporary world, by the importance of updating the issue of becoming-minority in a decolineal perspective, and by the possibility of revisiting Guattari through a rapprochement between his understanding of the signifier power of capitalist semiotization, or White Man semiotization, and the decolonial understanding of the expropriating and predatory modern colonial project.
Paola PELAGALLI and Silvia ROCHET – Deserting the myth. An analysis of a group-subject fixation.
“It is insofar as the material and territorial conditions are favourable to them that groups-subjects, that is to say groups that have a collective investment of desire, can appear and find their full effectiveness. And, from this point of view, the structure of the Clinic and its social and economic context being what they are, things go hand in hand for the staff and for the residents.
Félix Guattari, ‘Le Club de La Borde’, extract from Laborde Eclair, 10 October 1973
Based on the observations and reflections of a psychologist and an ethnologist whose respective paths have been blazed by contact with the heritage and enduring legacy of institutional psychotherapy, we would like to contribute to the reflection of these meetings around Félix Guattari by taking as our object the transformation of the group-subject into a subjugated group with the constant fixation on the group Ideal.
Based on the evolution of the group dynamics of a contemporary therapeutic club, our paper would like to demonstrate that the symbiotic loyalty to the institution – both of the users and of the nursing staff – is dependent on the curling up of the identity on the participation in the institutional myth. We would like to discuss situations in which, in this time of crisis, individual collapse depends on the destitution of the myth – and thus constantly conjures it up. They show how individuality was already subject to the group dimension, constituted by and not constituting the Collective; in these recurrent cases, the binding force of the group becomes the performativity of a ceremony and of the narration made around the institutional myth, more than the collective dimension understood as an arrangement of singularities.
We are in fact living in the aftermath of the winter years, when the extra-hospital medical-social environment, like various sectors of society, in order to ward off the collapse of public institutions and the successive capture by neo-liberal war machines, finds itself caught up in a new tendency to claustrophilia (Facchinelli, 1983). How does the ‘open’ group, whether an organised institution or militant subjects from ‘outside’, when it can no longer fight an external enemy, find its new enemy in the threat of the group’s dissolution and the betrayal of the ideal – and end up keeping only those who remain holders of the myth of the open group?
Following a university career at the crossroads of human and social sciences, Paola Pelagalli is currently following a double training in Clinical Psychoanalytical Psychopathology at the University of Paris and in Theatre Studies at the doctoral school of the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3.
Silvia Rochet is a PhD student in social anthropology at the University of Lille (Clersé) and the University of Paris-Cité (Cermes3)
Fred PINAULT – Wall of sound. The breeze block orchestra. Sound performance. For 4 performers and an electric plug.
The cinder block orchestra has no conductor
The cinder block orchestra has no minimum or maximum limit of performers The cinder block orchestra involves no other instruments than electric cinder blocks and amplifiers
The cinder block orchestra has no other object than to deprive consciousness
The cinder block orchestra has no other subject than to give to see and hear the sound of cinder blocks amplified by loudspeakers
The cinder block orchestra is not beautiful like the chance meeting on a dissection table between a sewing machine and an umbrella
The cinder block orchestra is physical and literal
“Capital, Energy, Information, Significance are all categories that make us believe in the ontological homogeneity of biological, ethological, economic, phonological, scriptural, musical referents, etc. In the context of a reductionist modernity, it is up to us to rediscover that each promotion of a machinic crossroads corresponds to “a specific constellation of reference universes from which a non-human enunciation is instituted”.10
This performance is a practical experimentation of machine heterogenesis in the musical domain. If music such as free jazz or free improvisation have for many years now questioned the relationships of hierarchy, composition or signification within musical expression and plural creation, the mode of instrumental play inherent in these musics and the underlying modality of thought do not seem to allow one to completely extricate oneself from a certain relationship to discourse, language, dialectic or more generally to the usual modes of categorisation of the Signifier. By regressing from sound to noise, and by being interested in the interactions between sounds, noisy music has, since at least John Cage, contributed to the existence of a creative approach that is emancipated from the musical sign, whether it is considered melodically or harmonically, by being interested in the sound signal in its most material aspect. This performance is in keeping with this tradition by making visible and audible, through the musicians’ play with this impractical, heavy instrument with dubious sound properties, the physical interactions of the sounds and the musicians with each other through feedback, interference and movement effects, implying a co-constructive approach to sound that is free of any determining logic.
Noëlle PLÉ (Université Libre de Bruxelles/Toulouse Jean-Jaurès) – Thinking with preverbal intensities
In Chaosmose, a work aimed at rethinking the concept of subjectivity, Guattari writes: “The term ‘collective’ must be understood here in the sense of a multiplicity unfolding both beyond the individual, on the side of the socius, and below the person, on the side of preverbal intensities, pertaining to a logic of affects more than to a logic of a well circumscribed whole.
Thinking with these preverbal intensities and this logic of affects shifts the question of subjectivity outside the limits set by the notions of structure, signifier and identity. This implies that nothing is fixed in a given and unalterable form: our bodies, our identities, our groups, our ways of living and dying together do not designate fixed entities that can be grasped by language at once. This zone of the pre-verbal, below or beyond the regime of discursivity, this desire to contaminate language with other dimensions of what we are and what happens, leads me, with Guattari, to the side of the soma and of living bodies.
The vibrant fabric of reality does not pre-exist the movements it generates: it mutates according to the multiple interactions that take place there. Gestures shared by a plurality of human and non-human existences, such as drawing, breathing, growing, building, being born and dying, participate in a transformation of our living environments, where a multiplicity of bodies and incorporeals coexist. These gestures, which vary and repeat themselves, shape our lived landscapes; they speak of interaction with oneself, with the other, with the earth, but also of the sensitive materiality of our lives and the traces of our passages. These gestures force us to think at the level of experience in the making, where it starts to think, to weave, to experience.
In the continuity of your call, I would like to question Guattarian thought by formulating this question: How can we think of our bodies as zones of intensive experience where other powers of action and desire can be cultivated? My interest is in traces and other imprints in order to glimpse what is going on in this intensive zone that discursivity misses, a zone populated by signs of all kinds and perpetually replaying the question of meaning.
Nicolas PRIGNOT, (ESA St-Luc and ERG, member of GECo (ULB), Brussels ULB Brussels) – Machinic Illness and regimes of subjectivity (presentation in English)
The machinic character of Guattari’s work has never ceased to be present. We would like to show how thinking through the machine allows us to understand the correlative production of subjectivity, of socius, of world, through a case of controversy around the existence of a disease, electro-sensitivity. This pathology concerns people suffering from the presence of electromagnetic waves (linked to mobile telephony, WiFi, Linky, etc.) in their environment. Activists and patient associations see it as a harbinger of major health risks. Pathology plays a central role in the debate on the dangers of waves, since it serves as proof of the possibility that they affect human bodies. Its detractors constantly relegate the pathology to a strange form of technophobia, a psychopathology that has nothing to do with waves.
This controversy around electro-sensitivity shows two opposing machine regimes of subjectivity production. Beyond the scientific controversies surrounding electro-sensitivity, two regimes that define the world differently are at odds with each other. They define not only what belongs to the psyche, but also which components of the world are considered to be active (waves on minds or bodies), which logics have the right to be at work, which social arrangements are acceptable, etc.
This case shows how the ‘domains’ defined by Guattari in the three ecologies are not independent, but enter into regimes of co-definition: the psyche is defined in relation to the social and the natural, and neither of these poles makes sense without the others. The controversy appears as a struggle (minority on the side of the activists) for the existence of a particular regime of world.
John PROTEVI (Loyola University, Chicago University, USA) –
On the use of the term ‘autopoietic’ in Chaosmosis (zoom)
Radek PRZEDPELSKI (Trinity College, Dublin/Maynooth University) – What is Machinic Phylum?
My paper draws on Guattari’s diary entries from the early 1970s annotated by Deleuze, in order to perform a media archaeology of a fundamental, yet notoriously underresearched concept in Deleuze and Guattari. Machinic phylum is set in opposition to mechanism and related to contingent autoregulation across a number of heterogeneous registers. However, rather than a form of Simondonian transductive materialism-a Simondonism which marks the horizon of creative thought today, I am going to excavate a Leroi-Gourhanian and Nietzschean lineage of this elusive concept, zooming in on how it constitutes at once a form of decolonial geophilosophy grounded in an inquiry into Early Iron Age Eurasian metallurgical technics AND a form of contingent ungrounding, drawing a continuum of deterritorialization processes. I am going to conclude by signalling resonances with Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics.
BIO:
Dr. Radek Przedpełski is a migrant artist as well as media and contemporary art scholar lecturing in interactive digital media in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin and at Maynooth University. Radek graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in Digital Art and Humanities. At TCD, Radek organized a conference on Art in the Anthropocene (2019) where he curated a thematic strand on post-cinema; a conference on Deleuze and art (2016); and a symposium on Deleuzian aesthetics and multiplicity (2018). Radek is the editor, together with Steve Wilmer, of a volume on Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020. In the academic year 2020/21 Radek was a postdoctoral research associate on the Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media transdisciplinary project developed at Simon Fraser University by media scholar Laura U. Marks and ICT engineer Stephen.
Peter PAL PELBART (U. P. C. Sao Paulo, Brazil) – The ecology of the virtual
Félix Guattari referred to an “ecology of the virtual”. This notion needs to be explored further along two lines. The first is conceptual, bringing into play the mental or subjective ecology as it appears in The Three Ecologies, on the one hand, and the four-headed diagram of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, on the other. This intersection will allow us to better define the status of virtuality in the Guattarian machine. The second axis emerges from the concrete contexts in Brazil today, notably the issue of Amerindian struggles, but also schizoanalytic practices. The political function of the Enchanted for some, the schizo-scenic experiments for others, only highlight the misery of our colonised normopathy. However, certain contributions by Stengers, Tobie Nathan, Desprett, Glowczewski, Viveiros and others, by making room for the Invisible, show its heterogenous effects.
At the end of this cross-cutting journey, it should become clear how, in concrete terms, in multiple domains, the part of virtuality, with the various names and declensions that it receives in Guattari and others, ensures the openness and vitality of the processes considered. We hope thus, by starting from one of the components of the ecosophical perspective, to insist on its urgency and growing actuality in our context, but above all to show its resonances with what is happening today, against the current of dominant fascism, in the tropics that Guattari liked to frequent.
Marcelo REAL (U. Republica, Montevideo URUGUAY/Paris 8) – The composition of sensation in Félix Guattari
The Deleuzoguattarian tripartition is well known: from the moment someone connects to his or her own present, tears himself or herself away from it in order to explore its futures and virtualities, he or she intersects with the chaos of the brain-subject either as a form of concept, a scientific function, or a force of sensation.
Guattari’s oral and written communications, which deal in particular with the subject of sensation, the drafts of which are preserved at the IMEC, and which immediately precede and follow the release of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? give us an idea that is quite different from the current version concerning the history of this book, which leaves a depressed Guattari little room in its writing. Guattari adds to the philosophy-science-art tripod a variant of art as a plane of composition of sensation and which challenges the “scientistic paradigm” of the humanities and social sciences (their objectifying neutrality): the plane of the unconscious (primary process) or plane of existential territorialities. In this respect, the plane of sensation is the plane of the production of subjectivity which is not reduced to the field of art, but which also includes psychoanalysis and institutional psychotherapy (the object of desire, the partial object in the sense of Winnicott, the institutional object [group-subject]), transference and the collective arrangements of enunciation produced in these fields. In other words, it is also the plane of the (micro)politics of sensation.
In denouncing the radical separation of the literary and scientific fields that seems to be an axiom of Western culture, Guattari pointed out that ‘literary people do not realise that a work such as La Recherche constitutes a scientific exploration, in the same way as the work of Freud or Newton’: research on “perceptual overlaps”, mutations of perceptual components and sensory coordinates, the dimension of sensation (the sensitive becomings); the same is true of the “psychedelic” work of Michaux and the beat generation, all of whom invented languages of sensation.
I would therefore like to address the processes of construction of a new sensibility that Guattari calls “the new aesthetic paradigm”.
Barbara RETTIG: “Dreams“.
“The truth is not in one dream,
but in many dreams.
Radio stream of recordings from the “Dreams” seminar 2020-2022
Direct listening address :
http://stream.transglobal-studies.org:8000/reves.mp3
The seminar “Dreams (the archive between poetics, politics and the violence of history)” was interested in dream life, and in what affects us by simultaneously affecting our relationship to the world. It was not only about questioning the dream as an object of research, but also about the dimension of subjectivity.
While psychoanalysis has developed a conception of the dream that defines it as a process and a movement, it has tended to interpret this movement in an abstract way. It has almost forgotten the subversive power of what Freud, in The Interpretation of the Dream, called dreamwork as a productive movement that changes the way we experience the world. For post-Marxist thinking, this movement is one of the expressions of subjective life, following a dialectical approach that emphasises negativity, or a plural ontology. It is no longer a question of an absence of self in consciousness but of the integrity of human experience, transversal to the individual and collective dimensions, where memory and history are inscribed, and which are related to the movement of creation.
Hence, notions of sovereignty in the creative gesture or in the classical psychoanalytic schema give way to a renewed questioning by the adventures of institutional analysis, narrative socio-analysis, anthropology and critical theory, political studies, feminist, gender and subaltern studies, and literary and art inventions.
By following the trail of dreams, par excellence themselves an outside of instrumental reason, we discover the figures of the other that were included in a subordinate way, whose emancipating charge of their insubordination they remain, and some passages between philosophy and creation.
Archive of the seminar programmes:
https://llcp.univ-paris8.fr/seminaire-reves-jeunes-chercheur-e-s-2020-2021
https://llcp.univ-paris8.fr/seminaire-reves-ii-jeunes-chercheur-e-s-2eme-semestre-2021-2022
https://llcp.univ-paris8.fr/journee-d-etudes-au-dela-de-l-archive-19-06-2021-2428
Patrick RIECHERT (Politikwissenschaft Department, Freie Universität Berlin)
Environment, machine, subjectivity: configurations of experimental governmentalities
This contribution posits a provocative reading of Guattarian – and adjacent – theory and practice, elaborating a point made in a recent collaboration with Elena Vogman (“Machinic Extimacy”, 2021), pp. 126-9): its isomorphisms to the ‘counterculture-cyberculture’ (Turner, 2006) assemblage that would shape contemporary digital subjectivity.
It aligns Guattari’s ‘machinic production of subjectivity’ (1995; 2009) with the lines of subjectivation of Foucauldian dispositifs (Deleuze, 1992), wherein they serve a strategic purpose (Foucault, 1980). ‘Experimental governmentalities’ thus designate assemblage wherein governmental techniques and rationalities drawn from heterogenous domains are attempted in bounded settings, functioning as ‘governance laboratories’; intentional or not, they may eventually integrate with the prevailing governmentality which they had formed in critique of.
In t’he case of this Guattarian/Institutional Psychotherapy assemblage, it did not. However, its Californian ‘parallel’ did, crystallising personal computing and information economy from American 1960/70s countercultural milieus (Turner, 2006). Though vastly different in approach and scope, they reveal isomorphisms insofar as they respond to similar problematizations of psychic alienation, aim to produce new subjectivities, share an epistemological lineage in cybernetics, reach to media and art as crucial tools, employ (quasi-)algorithmic ordering (c.f. Caló, 2016), exert institutional-infrastructural design, attempt to foster contingent encounters, create new forms of valuation, and feature similar aesthetics of representation (remarked also by Erkan, 2019). Moreover, in their emphasis on production, choice, dehierarchization, and singularisation – as well as their disposition to “environmental regulation” (Dean & Zamora, 2021) and critique of institutions – they reveal strategic-functional resemblances to neoliberalism and attendant projects such as “neuroliberal” behavioural policy, design economics, and platformisation.
The aim here is not to reduce one domain to another (as e.g. Goffey, 2020 warns against), but to identify where and how these distinct approaches address the same problems, similar problems, and elucidate the conditions of their divergence. To a large extent, the project is one of interdisciplinary translation. As the terminology of governmentality intimates, Foucault’s genealogy of governmental rationalisation (2008, 2009) provides a framework for this project, deploying the concept of the dispositif as a particular, “strategic” (Foucault, 1980) form of the Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage or machine. Following this prototypical approach, it aims to create a conceptual mapping between established, emergent, and experimental forms of governing (such as behavioural datafication,
visualisation and interface design – see e.g. Bratton, 2016) and may point towards new potential paths to explore.
References
Bratton, B. H. (2016). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press. https://doi.org/ 10.7551/mitpress/9780262029575.001.0001
Caló, S. (2016, April 23). The Grid. Anthropocene Curriculum. https://www.anthropocene- curriculum.org/contribution/the-grid
Dean, M., & Zamora, D. (2021). The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the end of revolution. Verso Books.
Deleuze, G. (1992). “What is a dispositive? “In T. J. Armstrong (Ed.), Michel Foucault, philosopher: Essays (pp. 159-168). Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Erkan, E. (2019). Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 15(1), 214- 241. http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/804
Foucault, M. (1980). The Confession of the Flesh: A conversation with Alain Grosrichard, Gerard Wajeman, Jaques-Alain Miller, Guy Le Gaugey, Dominique Celas, Gerard Miller, Catherine Millot, Jocelyne Livi and Judith Miller. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (1st American ed, pp. 194-228). Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2009). Security, Territory, Population (F. Ewald & F. Alessandro, Eds.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Goffey, A. (2020). La Borde and the Analytic Practices of Jean Oury. Visual Cultures Public Programme Lecture Series, London. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLITiFxAB9E
Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press.
Guattari, F. (2009). Chaosophy: Texts and interviews 1972-1977 (S. Lotringer, Ed.; D. L. Sweet, J. Becker, & T. Adkins, Trans.). Semiotext(e).
Reed, P. (2018). Uncertainty, Hypothesis, Interface. _AH Journal, 00. https://web.archive.org/ web/20180322080411/http://www.ah-journal.net/issues/00/uncertainty-hypothesis-interface
Riechert, P. U., & Vogman, E. (2021). Machinic Extimacy. In Lou Cantor (Ed.), Intersubjectivity. Relative Intimacies (Vol. 3, pp. 120-132). Sternberg Press.
Robcis, C. (2016). François Tosquelles and the psychiatric revolution in postwar France. Constellations, 23(2), 212-222. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12223
Schmidgen, H. (1997). Das Unbewusste der Maschinen: Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan. W. Fink Verlag.
Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.
Whitehead, M., Jones, R., Lilley, R., Howell, R., & Pykett, J. (2019). Neuroliberalism: Cognition, context, and the geographical bounding of rationality. Progress in Human Geography, 43(4), 632-649. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518777624
Ricardo ROBLES RODRIGUEZ (University of Paris 8) – Transfeminist Cartographies: The influence of Félix Guattari in the feminist and sexual dissidence movements in the Spanish-speaking world.
Spanish-speaking transfeminisms propose new ways of conceiving of trans issues outside of the “thirst for universalization and homogenization” (Torres, 2014). This aesthetic-political movement (Guattari, 1989) questions sexual difference, hierarchies, identities and spaces of knowledge production. Formed during the 2000s from a diaspora of collectives (Medeak, Guerrilla Travolaka, Post-Op), philosophers and artists, it often finds a founding act in the publication of the Manifesto por una Insurreccion Transfeminista (2010). Their legacy extends to the present day in all social movements, and crosses the borders of the Spanish-speaking world.
This work highlights the originality of transfeminisms in their innovative re-readings of Félix Guattari. Firstly, it presents a redefinition of transfeminism based on the Guattari concept of transversality (S. Valencia, C. Meloni, H. Torres). In the second part, he analyses the re-actualisation of schizoanalysis by Paul B. Preciado based on new concepts such as queer analysis (2008) or ren@rde cartography (2012). Finally, this work analyses the practices of transfeminist collectives of the 2000s and 2010s (drag-king or squirting workshops, post-porn), and the complexity of their collective enunciation arrangements that deploy new gender micropolitics (Preciado, 2010).
This work aims to contribute to the poststructuralist theoretical back and forth between France and the Spanish state. It also aims to counteract the reterritorialization of some contemporary discourses on trans issues. It proposes transfeminism as a rhizomatic anarchism formed by a multiple political subject, by unusual alliances (Galindo, 2013) and by non-hierarchical social demands.
Suely ROLNIK (Sao PAULO, UCP, Brazil) – Spiders, Guarani and Guattaris. Notes for decolonizing the unconscious
The “Guattari” is one of the names we could give to the group formed by the agents of one of the perspectives in dispute within the thought of the modern European western world. It is a perspective that directs thought towards the theoretical-pragmatic diversion of the regime of the colonial-racial-patriarchal-capitalist unconscious, a regime from which the existential consistency of the world in question is produced, without which it would not materialise. In Latin America, this perspective has always been present among Amerindian and Afro-descendant peoples, but its presence in the public arena has been activated and intensified in the last decade by the movements led by these peoples, in parallel to its activation by the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements. My starting point will be the affects generated by three encounters and by the reverberations between these affects in my body: first, the encounter with these movements (privileging vocables in Guarani); then the encounter with the “Guattaris”; and finally the encounter with the spiders. In this way, I wish to suggest paths around the regime of the unconscious (mentioned above) and the mode of subjectivation that it produces: structural neurosis. I will focus my attention on the gears of the factory of worlds managed by such a regime and the centrality in this factory of the notion of race applied to humans as a structuring principle of the axioms with which its formations in the social field are produced. These suggestions are presented in the context of the collective work of creating tools of combat in the sphere of the unconscious, a sphere that Guattari calls micropolitics. It is in this sphere that a world is produced and reproduced, but it is also where its power to mutate lies. Guattari has obsessively insisted all his life that it is impossible to confront the disaster of the current state of affairs without also fighting it in this sphere, while articulating this fight with its confrontation in the macropolitical sphere.
Vladimir SAFATLE (Philosophy, University of Sao Paulo Research Laboratory in Social Theory, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
Anne SAUVAGNARGUES (Philosophy, Paris-Nanterre) – Chaosmosis
Mathias SCHÖNHER (University of Vienna/ Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar) – Guattari’s Animism
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wrote to Donna Haraway: “Animism is the only sensible version of materialism.” In line with this, Bruno Latour explains, it is a great enigma “that many people still hold the rather naive belief in a supposedly deanimated ‘material world.'” In current debates about the Anthropocene, the humanities are increasingly emphasizing the relevance of animist positions (Arianne Conty, Jemma Deer, Ewa Domanska, Shoko Yoneyama, and others). Conty, for example, argues that given the massive ecosystem destruction, it is necessary to devise “an animistic relational ontology.” She argues for a redefined animism as “a new conceptual paradigm for the Anthropocene,” in order to overcome the dichotomy of human culture and non-human nature that is fundamental to Western modernity and manifests itself in the devastation of the Earth. However, it is not clear from the ongoing discourse how this redefined animism distinguishes itself substantially from New Materialism as well as from Actor-Network-Theory (apart from the significantly stronger consideration of non-Western modes of existence). Against this background, the presentation attempts to specify the possible significance of a New Animism by tracing the discourse back to the work of psychoanalyst, philosopher, and political activist Félix Guattari, and thus to one of its most important sources. Beginning in the late 1980s, Guattari emphasizes several times, “it is urgent that we return to an animistic conception of the world.” With reference to this and other statements by Guattari, Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato have drawn attention to Guattari’s “machinic animism.” Apart from brief commentaries, for instance by Isabelle Stengers as well as by Joshua Ramey, and Jacob W. Glazier’s project of developing “a new animism for the post-media era” based on Guattari and Haraway, the systematic importance and critical potential of Guattari’s indication of an animism has not yet been explored.
Mathias Schönher is a postdoctoral researcher associated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and the Media Studies Department at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He is currently preparing a new research project that will examine Guattari’s animism and aims to devise a philosophy of nature for the age of computation. Mathias Schönher has published several articles on the late philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Qui Parle, Cosmos and History. Together with Henning Schmidgen and Elena Vogman, he organized the international conference “Madness, Media, Milieus. Félix Guattari in Context,” which was held in June 2021 at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Henning SCHMIDGEN (Bauhaus Universität, Weimar) – Machinic Normativity. Félix Guattari and the Problem of Technology
One of the dominant themes of Félix Guattari’s theoretical work is undoubtedly that of the machine. From his early interventions in the context of Institutional Psychotherapy to his late philosophical works, the machine proves to be the leitmotif, vanishing point and line of flight of his theoretical and practical work. With an eye on the seemingly contradictory positions of Karl Marx and Georges Canguilhem, I argue that at the centre of Guattari’s thought stands the connection between technology and subjectivity. When the late Guattari claims that there is a “machine addiction” of subjectivity in the age of planetary computation, his argument is based on the premise that technical action is a basic need of vital beings, who in this way appropriate and design their environment – like a kind of existential “bricoleur,” or tinkerer. Viewed from this angle, it becomes clear that Guattari’s understanding of machinism is closely related to Canguilhem’s notion of normativity. As a result, Guattari’s machine theory remains a crucial resource for critically discussing the complex configurations between technology and biology, media and organs, materiality and life.
Silvia MAGLIONI & Graeme THOMSON, film screening
In Search of UIQ (2013)/Un amour d’UIQ.
After its premiere at REDCAT (Los Angeles), In Search of UIQ made a long journey to several countries around the world and with many allies (mostly friends of Felix).
Among the screenings: FID-Marseille (international premiere), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), b_arco (San Paolo), The Showroom Gallery (London), Modern Art Institute (Brisbane), EYE film (Amsterdam), Casco (Utrecht), NYU Film Theory Program (New York), UCSB (Santa Barbara), Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia
The film was recently presented at the DARE 2019 conference “Machinic Assemblages of Desire” (Orpheus Institute, Gent, Belgium). Several articles have been published in Chimères, Frieze, Vertigo, Cahiers du cinéma, Les inrocks, Mediapart, Springerin, Cabinet, Mouvement, Real Time Arts. etc.
Stevphen SUKHAITIS – University of Essex. Presentation of the Minor compositions editions.
Stevphen Shukaitis is Reader in Culture & Organization at the University of Essex, Centre for Work, Organization, and Society, and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions (http://www.minorcompositions.info). He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009), The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016), Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons (2019), and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.
SUSTAM Engine Guattari’s Molecular Revolution and the Constitutive Transformation of Kurdish Space
Our proposal aims to interrogate the way in which Kurdish space intervenes as a bricolage of a micro-political approach to constituent power and allows us to illustrate the concept of “molecular revolution” in Syria in Rojava and in Turkey (Kurdish region), through municipalism. We propose a study of this molecular revolution according to the Guattarian perspective, which consists in thinking a mutation of political, societal, cultural and institutional values of life, cartography and territoriality. It is a transformation of the paradigm of “revolution” from self-determination based on the cantonal systems in Rojava, in a post-nation-state perspective.
Kuniichi UNO – Félix Guattari : a ritornello analysis
Guattari proposed a Ritournelle-analysis in addition to or parallel to the Schizo-analysis. An exemplary case of this analysis can be found in his text on Proust. According to Guattari, Odette’s face crystallises with a ritornello of Vinteuil, resulting in an infernal ritornello-hole that encloses Swann’s jealousy and love, while another amorous ritornello comes to constitute a creative opening with Albertine’s face, analysed by the narrator herself. “To take into account the ritornello repetition, which gets in the way of the “normal” order of things, which insists without reason, synonymous with a breaking of the paradigmatic technical-scientific moorings and a rearrangement of social and analytical practices on the side of ethical-aesthetic paradigms, to produce another subjectivity, other enunciative modalities, to dis-pose existence differently. This is what the programme of a ritornello analysis could be, a ritornello analysis”. (Schizoanalytic Cartographies)
The extraordinary repetition of his experimental bricolage with his studies of the four “functionals” schema in his Schizoanalytic Cartographies also always triggers the search for the ritornello that can achieve the perpetual deterritorialisation, and finally the remarkable opening of flows and territories. We will trace and examine the itinerary of this search for the Ritournelle-analysis and the way in which a ritournelle is extracted and crystallised, defeated, recomposed and how it is introduced into a positive or negative, creative or destructive, open or closed arrangement or connection according to the movements and materials involved. The face is also deeply involved in the formation of the ritornello and even its dismantling, its molecularisation, its disfiguration are connected with an extraordinary process of inventive, creative lines of flight.
Quentin VERGRIETE (clinical psychologist) – Micro-ecosophy: the story of a collective gardening in psychiatry
The aim is to extend the thread of a first reflection on the setting up of a gardening group in a psychiatric sector using methods inspired by permaculture. Through the account of the “garden commission” which constituted a rejection (in the botanical sense) or rather a sucker for the initial group, I will try to articulate some components of an institutional experience in psychiatry with the Guattarian concepts of the last period, those of the analytical cartographies and ecosophy.
Brett ZEHNER (Performance Studies, Brown University) – The Production of Subjectivity in the Wake of January 6th
On January 6th, 2021, a crowd of far-right insurrectionists stormed the capitol building in Washington, D.C. Over a year later, both the state and leftist organizers launched a forensic investigation into the ideological apparatus that allowed something so outrageous to occur. Thus far, the methods of these investigations have yielded few insights. The obsession of this inquiry is focused on the rioters’ motivations and placing blame on Trump himself. Yet a more interesting question arises – who currently makes up the neo-right? Indeed, it is not just the bible-banging white underclass that liberals constantly chastise for ruining their democracy. And similarly, January 6th was not only precipitated by the Proud Boys. The neo-right, the mutation beyond Trumpism in the U.S., is anything but a monolithic identity group. Everyone from suburban white housewives to coal miners, racists, and crypto bros placed Trump into office in the first place. Further, symbolic epistemological explanations fail to provide insight into the new right’s subjectivities. Strange bedfellows like Manhattan art scene influencers and Arizona Q-Anon conspiracy freaks alike have adopted irony, shit-posting, and lame transgression as a mode of political affiliation. Liberals bemoan truth value while the neo-right ramps up their campaign of a-signifying libidinal economics. So, we are left to contend with an incoherent ideological assemblage of everyone from Peter Thiel (prominent benefactor of a new crop of fascists) to longtermist planetary engineers, Silicon Valley stoics, incel gamers, suburbanites, cottage core trad wives, and libertarian rugged individuals. Sadly, the left has very few answers to this emergent counter-culture.
In this vein, I argue that we need a new analysis of the right: beyond Donald Trump as an individual, towards a more comprehensive structure of subjection. Felix Guattari knew this long before anyone else. Writing of Trump in 1989, Guattari situated Trump in a larger social ecology that allowed his subjectivity to proliferate like invasive algae, redeveloping through the destruction of social reproduction. So, in honour of Guattari +30, my essay explores an analysis of January 6th as an ongoing post-media event galvanizing the neo-right in the United States. In this endeavor, I follow Guattari’s insights from Chaosmosis. Specifically, I am interested in Guattari’s production of subjectivity which identifies two modes of power that operate in a contradictory manner. On the one hand, we face systems of social subjection. Social subjection categorizes us with assigned identities – it gives us a gender, a race, a profession – a position of symbolic representation. This is the typical analysis of far-right ideology. However, the production of an individuated subject is also coupled with a different process that proceeds through desubjection. Guattari writes that desubjection dismantles the individuated subject, consciousness, and representations, acting on both pre-personal and supra-individual levels. In desubjection, the individual is no longer instituted as an “economic subject” or a “citizen.” Instead, she is “a gear, a log, a component in financial and various other institutional assemblages” (Guattari , cited in Lazzarato 2017, 25). In this essay, I consider the various subjectivities that make up the neo- right. I speculate that perhaps we have seen the rise of a kind of online dopamine fascism of desubjectivizing triggers, gates, and floods of behavioral impulse. Here Guattari’s concept of asignifying desubjection moves us beyond ideology and symbolism. It would be foolish to follow down the rabbit hole and assign symbolic meaning to the Q Anon narrative or the brutal functions of a cryptocurrency/crypto fascism circulating through the art world. My essay, instead, demonstrates that desubjection and a-signifying production allow us to understand and combat the enemy of the neo-right directly at the level of subjectivity production.
1 Félix Guattari, De Leros à la Borde, Clamecy, Éditions Lignes, 2012, (preface by Marie Depussé), p. 81
2 Félix Guattari, Psychoanalysis and transversality, Paris, Maspero, 1972.
3 Félix Guattari, Les trois écologies, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1989.
4 Félix Guattari, Chaosmose, Paris, Galilée, 1992.
5 F. Guattari, “Visagéïté signifiante, visagéïté diagrammatique”, in L’inconscient machinique. Essais de schizo-analyse, Paris, Éditions Recherches, 1979, pp. 79-115.
6 Felix Guattari, ‘Translocal: Tetsuo Kogawa interviews with Felix Guattari. Part I: October 18, 1980″, in Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick (eds.), Machinic Eros: Writing on Japan (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015), pp. 30-31. [Loosely translated and supported by the interview recording: https://anarchy.translocal.ip/guattari/index.html]
7 Ibid. p. 31
8 Félix Guattari and Toni Negri, Les Nouveaux espaces de liberté, Paris, Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2010, p. 11
9 Ibid. p. 99.
10 F. Guattari, “L’hétérogenèse machinique” in Revue Chimères 11, pp.90-91.