The Machine at the Heart of Desire:
Felix Guattari's Molecular Revolution [excerpt 1 of 4]
_Works & Day_ 2.2 (1985): 63-85
Charles J. Stivale
Wayne State University
[Please excuse typos and anachronisms]
In 1972, the Parisian intellectual scene was jolted by the
publication of a rather arcane and lengthy manifesto of sorts
entitled _L'Anti-Oedipe, Capitalisme et Schizophr?nie_ I
(Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia [AO]. Of the two
authors, only Gilles Deleuze was familiar to the French
intelligentsia as a renowned university philosopher who had
published works on Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Proust, among
others. The co-author of _Anti-Oedipus_, Felix Guattari, while
less widely known, was prominent both in the French political
domain and in the psychoanalytic arena, yet was neither in
lockstep with orthodox Freudian practice, nor entirely in synch
with the reigning Lacanian alternative to orthodoxy. And while
the subsequent collective and individual works of Deleuze and
Guattari have received recognition in France, only the
translation of selected works by Deleuze have attracted any
attention in the American intellectual market place.\1 Thus, the
[then] recent translation of essays from Guattari's political and
psychiatric activities, \2 while unsatisfactory from several
perspectives, is a welcome complement to the better-known
Deleuzian corpus already available in English. In this essay, I
propose to situate Guattari's contribution to contemporary French
thought in light of this [new] edition of translated essays.
As noted in the book's introduction, Guattari worked since the
early 1950s as a psychotherapist at the Clinique de La Borde
founded by Jean Oury. Given that Guattari's orientation to
psychoanalysis was initially practical, his theoretical essays in
this domain were inspired by a decade of clinical psychiatry;
likewise, Guattari political practice, particularly his
participation in the events of May 1968, gave rise to his
extensive political writing. Thus, the first obstacle which this
edition presents to readers is its overall division into three
thematic sections: 1. Institutional Psychotherapy"; '2. Towards a
New Vocabulary"; 3. Politics and Desire." Besides the fact that
this seemingly concise, thematic classification of Guattari's
writing is entirely arbitrary \3, a more serious objection is
that this classification obscures the reader's understanding of
Guattari's concurrent psychoanalytical and political development
from the 1960s to the present. While the editors do provide
footnotes to situate each essay chronologically, the reader
attempting to understand the relationship between Guattari's
psychoanalytical practice and political engagement is forced to
shuffle back and forth throughout the volume in order to
reconstitute the influence of each domain of activity on the
other. I will therefore lay out a chronological overview of
_Molecular Revolution_, an alternate "map" whose function is
solely heuristic, but which will at least provide an outline
allowing readers to trace the author's development: 1. The
Pre-Molecular essays through 1968), 2. Machine and Desire
(1969-1972), 3. Molecular Politics (1973-1978) and 4.
Schizo-Analysis and the Global "Molecule" (essays since 1979).
1. The Pre-molecular
In _Molecular Revolution_, there are only five essays from
Guattari's early period, all of which are taken from his first
collection, _Psychanalyse et Transversalite'_ [PT], and the
earliest essay, "Transversality," relates to an essential
psychotherapeutic concept which Guattari elaborated throughout
the 1960s, the nature of the "group" within the psychiatric
institution. In two earlier, untranslated papers, "Le Transfert"
(The Transfer) and especially "Introduction `a la therapie
institutionnelle" (Introduction to institutional psychotherapy),
Guattari had already described an "effect of subjectivity"
through which a subject affirms him/herself through language on
the plane of groups, thereby constituting a "subjective unity of
the group" on the social plane. Since the ailing subject is "a
citizen first, and individual afterwards" [PT 145], to affect a
cure, the subject must shift from his or her exterior, subjugated
group association (that is, factory, club) to an institutional
subject group constantly interpreting its own position.
Guattari's psychotherapeutic position constitutes a critique of
the Freudian and Lacanian dependence on totalizing, referential
myths (Oedipus, the great Other and the unconscious structured as
language) for rearticulation and interpretation of all subjective
histories.
Readers familiar with _Anti-Oedipus_ cannot help but recognize
herein the seeds of the later manifesto, and can therefore
situate "Transversality" in the direct line of this problematic,
as an initial sketch of the approach which will become
"schizoanalysis": on the one hand, the rejection of the Freudian
"castration complex" which affirms, says Guattari, that since
"anxiety for the external" (MR 12), and on the other hand, the
affirmation of institutional therapeutics whose "object is to try
to change the data accepted by the super-ego into a new kind of
acceptance of 'initiative,' rendering pointless the blind social
demand for a particular kind of castrating procedure to the
exclusion of anything else" (MR 13-14). Opposing what he
considers as Freudian "signifying logic," Guattari thus
foregrounds the social realm as the source from which both
illness and cure derive, the former arising from an essentialism
in which castration and punishment form the basis of "social
reality," the latter produced through institutional therapeutics
by subverting the dominant "logic" and by constructing precise,
transversal relationships which free patients to recognize the
social determination of anxiety.
Guattari then defines the opposition between subject-groups and
subjugated groups \4 as "that of a subjectivity whose work is to
speak, and a subjectivity which is lost to view in the otherness
of society" (MR 14). Guattari affirms that any attempt at group
analysis requires the group to enunciate unconscious "group
desire" \5 in order "to create the conditions favourable to a
particular mode of interpretation, identical...to a transference"
(MR 17). This transference must not be fixed, territorialized,
but must be one of "_transversality_ in a group," an idea opposed
to "a) verticality, as described in the organogramme of a
pyramidal structure (leaders, assistants, etc.); b)
horizontality, as it exists in the disturbed wards of a hospital,
or, even more, in the senile wards; in other words a state of
affairs in which things and people fit in as best they can with
the situation in which they find themselves" (MR 17). Guattari
describes this new concept in terms of a "coefficient of
transversality," comparing it to the "adjustable blinkers" worn
by horses that allow them the visual range from total blindness
to full vision:
"In a hospital, the "coefficient of transversality" is the degree
of blindness of each the each d the people present. However, I
would suggest that the offical adjusting of all the blinkers, and
the overt communication that results from it, depends almost
automatically on what happens at the level of the medical
superintendent, the nursing superintendent, the financial
administrator and so on. Hence all movement is from the summit
to the base. There may,of course, be some pressure frorn the
base, but it never usually manages to make any change in the
overall structure of blinders. Any modification must be in terms
of a structural redefinition of each person's role, and a
reorientation of the whole institution. So long as people remain
fixated on themselves, they never see anything but themselves."
(MR 18)
As "a dimension that tries to overcome both the impasse of pure
verticality and that of mere horizontality," transversality would
be achieved in hospitals "when there is a maximum of
communication among different levels and, above all, in different
meanings.... Only if there is a certain degree of transversality
will it be possible - though only for a time, since all this is
subject to continual re-thinking - to set going an analytic
process giving individuals a real hope of using the group as a
mirror" (MR 18, 20). Since this approach explicitly questions
power relations as it suggests therapeutic aims, the concomitant
political and psychoanalytical implications are evident: "It is
my hypothesis," concludes Guattari, "that there is nothing
inevitable about the bureaucratic self-mutilation of a subject
group, or its unconscious resort to mechanisms that militate
against its potential transversality. They depend, from the
first, on an acceptance of the risk - which accompanies the
emergence of any phenomenon of real meaning - of having to
confront irrationality, death, and the otherness of the other"
(MR 23).
The corresponding early essays in _Molecular Revolution_ branch
from this dual perspective: on the one hand, in "The Group and
the Person" (1966-1968; MR section 1), Guattari continues his
work in "transversality" by aggressively defining his militant
therapeutic approach as an alternative to Communist, bureaucratic
(State) and psychoanalytical totalization; on the other hand,
"Causality, Subjectivity and History" (1966) and "Students, the
Mad and 'Delinquents"' (1969; both in MR section 3) provide
explicitly political readings of two historical periods, the
former article analyzing "signifying breakthroughs" (_coupures
signifiantes_) from Lenin to Vietnam, the latter examining the
"institutional revolution of May 1968." \6
Notes [excerpt 1]
1/ For an extensive bibliography on the works of Deleuze and
Guattari, see SubStance 44/45 (1984).
2/ All references to _Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and
Politics_ will be abbreviated in the text MR.
3/ For example, "Transversality," in section 1, certainly
constitutes a search for "New Vocabulary"; "Towards a
Micro-Politics of Desire," again, in section 1, clearly applies
to "Politics and Desire." In my references to these essays, I
will indicate in which section they are located.
4/ Readers should be attentive to various discrepancies between
the Penguin translation and terminology chosen in other
translations particularly in the Hurley, et. al., translation of
_Anti-Oedipus_: for example, _groupes assujettis_ and
_groupes-sujets_, translated in _Anti-Oedipus_ as "subjugated
groups" and "subject-groups", are rendered inconsistently in MR
both as "dependent groups" and "independent groups" and as
"subjugated groups' and "subject groups" (as in the "Glossary,"
MR 288-90). See Patton [I&C 8, 1981: 41-48] for a discussion of
terminological difficulties in translations of Deleuze and
Guattarl.
5/ "I think it convenient to distinguish, in groups, between the
'manifest content' -- that is, what is said and done, the
attitudes of the different members, the schisms, the appearance
of leaders, of aspiring leaders, scapegoats and so on - and the
'latent content', which can be discovered only by interpreting
the various escapes of meaning (ruptures de sens) in the order of
phenomena. We may define this latent content as group desire': in
the order of phenomena. We may define this latent content as
group desire': it must be articulated with the group's specific
form of love and death instincts (un ordre pulsionnel d'Eros et
de mort)" (MR 15).
6/ It is disappointing that several other essays in PT from this
initial period are not included in MR. In his introduction to the
translation, David Cooper states that "the selection of articles
in this book omits a number of pieces, all of them interesting
but having many local references directed at a French public"
(3). This criterion would also apply to several articles which
are included, and some of the essays omitted have general, and
not merely local, significance: for example, in "Les neuf theses
de l'Opposition de gauche" ("The Nine Theses on Leftist
Opposition," 1966), Guattari presents his first concise political
analysis, which he subsequently revises and develops in "Extraits
de discussions: fin juin 1968" ('Excerpts from discussions, end
of June 196'); "D'un signe `a l'autre" ("From one sign to the
other," 1966) is both a response to the prevailing Lacanian
psychoanalytical heterodoxy and a first sketch of the semiotic
theory which Guattari develops in subsequent periods.
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