Félix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism: Deleuze Studies Volume 6, Issue 2 9781474468404

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Contents

Editor’s Acknowledgements Introduction: Felix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism Gary Genosko

v 149

Articles To Be or Not to Be Socrates: Introduction to the Translation of Felix Guattari’s Socrates Flore Garcin-Marrou

170

Socrates Felix Guattari

173

Guattari and Japan Toshiya Ueno

187

Guattari TV, By Kafka Gary Genosko

210

Art as Abstract Machine: Guattari’s Modernist Aesthetics Stephen Zepke

224

Machinic Animism Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato

240

Play as an Affective Field for Activating Subjectivity: Notes on The Machinic Unconscious F. J. Colman

250

iv

Contents

. . . And . . . and . . . and . . . The Transversal Politics of Performative Encounters Anja Kanngieser

265

Go Fractalactic! A Brief Guide through Subjectivity in the Philosophy of Felix Guattari and Transversal Poetics Adam Bryx & Bryan Reynolds

291

Culture as Existential Territory: Ecosophic Homelands for the Twenty-first Century Janell Watson

306

Institutional Schizophasia and the Possibility of the Humanities’ ‘Other Scene’: Guattari and the Exigency of Transversality Michael Eng Notes on Contributors

328

353

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following group of colleagues who worked with me on the review of manuscripts for this special issue: Felicity Colman, Verena Conley, Laura Cull, Jason Demers, Chris Drohan, Kane X. Faucher, Alex Ferentzy, Michael Goddard, Paul Hegarty, Gene Holland, Simon O ’Sullivan, Patricia Pisters, Bryan Reynolds, Charles Stivale, Nick Thoburn, Janell Watson and Stephen Zepke. I am also grateful for the assistance provided by Toshiya Ueno, Enzo Cormann and Maurizio Lazzarato. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity in granting permission to translate by Bruno, Emmanuelle and Stephen Guattari on behalf of the Fonds Felix Guattari, IMEC, France.

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): v DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0053 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

Felix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism

Edited and introduced by G ary Genosko Twenty years after Felix Guattari’s untimely passing in 1992, this special issue of Deleuze Studies presents a series of essays that will assist readers in bringing Guattari into the present by providing examples of how to read him anew, perhaps even for the first time. In the recently published collection The Guattari Effect, editors Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey introduce their project with reference to the Guattarian concept of the collective assemblage of enunciation that ‘operate[s] to enable novel emergences to be detected and the urgency of events to be elaborated’ (2011: 1). Semiocapitalism plays a similar catalytic role here, with a no less experimental and urgent task of diagnosis and micropolitical elaboration. Why semiocapitalism? Among Guattari’s numerous prescient concepts may be found a three-tined insight: ‘capital is a semiotic operator’ that ‘seizes individuals from the inside’ (1996b: 200, 212) and has the goal of ‘controlling the whole of society’. This statement contains three closely related insights that introduce the semiocommodity; situate subjectification at the heart of a subsumption that has turned intensive, thus marking the passage from an incorporative, formal to a real subsumption; and, pose the question of resistance within a predicament of massive control that is only superficially blamed on machines (surveillance). Subjectification in Guattari’s estimation is a political concept that has a machinic character defined by the invol­ uted relationships between users and information technologies (the latter emerging in great variety and with profound influence from the machinic phylum that more and more entangles human and non-human ecologies). Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 149-169 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0054 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2007: 76) defines semiocapital as ‘capitalflux that coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materializing itself’. This focuses attention on a middle state of coagulation that displays reticence before materialisation. Coagulation of capital flux in semiotic artefacts suggests that there are nuanced states of substantialisation that do not yet accede, or at least immediately proceed, to hard materialisation; this process of slowing down and pooling, a semiotic settling, describes the immaterial factors of pre-material existence betwixt immateriality and materiality. In a Guattarian vocabulary, then, a semio-commodity consists of the material aspects of the semiotic-affective and productive - and in infotech often consists of a-signifying part-signs whose production and passage through digital networks are akin to signals perfectly adapted to the quasi-material fluxes of their environment-they precisely trigger, activate and work flush with automated processes of information exchange and do not require a representational dimension, which is superfluous (but may undoubtedly exist). Guattari disliked the language of signs because it had for too long entailed a divorce from materiality. In this context, Bifo, too, wonders why we need such a term as immaterial, anyway (2008: 157). Both Guattari and Bifo emphasise that entire circuits and overlapping and communicating assemblages integrate-that is, machinically enslave -cognitive labour and the capitalistic exploitation of its content. Mental as opposed to manual labour involves a closing of the gap between execution and innovation and a deferral of materialisation: Bifo’s explanation contains a key qualification: ‘The materials to be transformed are simulated by digital sequences. Productive labour (labour producing value) consists in enacting simulations later transferred to actual matter by computerized machines’ (2009: 75). In this temporal qualification, labour does not so much have ‘residual materiality’ but is mental work on abstract ‘signs rich in knowledge’. Flexibility and fluidity are imposed on such labour by means of the reticular form that frames, captures, commands and recombines the fragments produced in and through it. Devices of recombination or partsigns are multiplying in the personal digital assistants, laptops and cell phones that accompany us throughout our entire days and nights-this is our machinic apprenticeship. For Guattari, this is an example of how machinic subjection enters human labour. For Bifo, labour has become cellular activity: as production becomes semiotic, precariously employed cognitive workers-on occasional, contractual, temporary bases without guarantees or benefits -engage in labour that involves the

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elaboration of ‘a specific semiotic segment that must meet and match innumerable other semiotic fragments in order to compose the frame of a combinatory entity that is an info-commodity, Semiocapital’ (2009: 89). Semio-commodities are thus: partial, combinable and recombinable; and dependent upon the digital network. Bifo’s re-employment of semiotic for immaterial, in the context of cognitive labour within a networked environment, points to the role of technology in integrating fragments previously allocated to dedicated sites of a dramatically fragmented labour process. He also specifies that semiocapital depends upon simulation of ‘signs-in-formation’ (2011: 106-7). There is a certain degree of overlap between the Guattarian conception of Integrated World Capitalism, Semiocapitalism and post­ Fordism. During the 1980s Guattari developed in collaboration with Eric Alliez a theory of globalisation called Integrated World Capitalism (IWC). This stage of post-industrial capitalism is marked by the preponderance of modes of machinic production and their integration (that is, by means of permanent crisis); by dominant semiotic-economic systems in which the market becomes transnational; and the state becomes minimal and speculative. The authors wrote: ‘Integrated World Capitalism. . . [is] based upon semiotic means of evaluation and valorization of capital which are completely new and have an increased capacity for the machinic integration of all human activities and faculties’ (Guattari 1996a: 244). Corresponding to some of the features of post-Fordism, as well as hinting at the emergence of the importance of immaterial labour, Guattari and Alliez announce the emergence of semiocapitalism. Guattari clarifies: ‘Post-industrial capitalism, which I prefer to describe as Integrated World Capitalism, tends increasingly to decanter its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and. . . subjectivity’ (2000: 47). In post-Fordist production, industrial labour does not disappear; it is relocated to regions where wages are low and regulations are lax. Certain segments of cognitive activity follow along and are ‘externalised’ for the same reasons. Accompanying Bifo’s deferral, geographic marginalisation of the moment of hard materialisation is the automated support of the processes of recombination so that program languages, data formats and robotic systems cohere and combine into a legible frame for the assembly of an info-commodity. Bifo forestalls materialisation by means of coagulation in semiotic artefacts because he wants to underline the dependency of cognitive labour on information fluxes in the global networks of semiocapitalism.

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He does more than suspend the manufacturing moment; he is offering a variation on the Guattarian matter-function relation. We have inherited from linguistics the idea that languages give different forms to thought. Louis Hjelmslev figured the projection of form onto matter as the shadow of a net, a grid, cast onto what was for him undivided sand. This inspired Guattari to recast form as an abstract machine (irreducible to language) that constitutes and conjugates the components of assemblages. It is not the net but its shadow; it is not the form but its function. In Guattari’s thought, an abstract machine is a function rather than a form. A function is not yet semiotically fully form ed-it is a formless form that has no substance-and this makes it ‘pure MatterFunction’ because the matter it works is ‘not yet’ formed (into stratified substance) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141). Using the conceptual language that Guattari adapted from Hjelmslev that form as a pure matter-function maintains its independence before the emergence of distinct breaks that apply to itself and to what it distributes, the conceptual indebtedness of semiocapitalism to this reticent semiotics is perhaps obvious in the form that is distilled into a function and does not (yet) culminate in a distinct thing, a physically formed matter as a stratified substance. What Bifo is suggesting is that ‘neuro-workers’ plug themselves into terminals of the net, tap into a vast pharmacological support battery, not to mention absorbing many ideological fictions from the cyberlibertarians of the new economy. This precipitates widespread psychopathologies, drug dependencies and social dysfunctionality because life and work tend to bleed together, with diminishing returns. Bifo pays close attention to how the machinic arrangements of fixed capital are evolving, and describes the semioticisation of the production process in a mutating, artefactual ecology with long tendrils reaching across the globe in which partial manufacturing may be spread widely, and these quasi-material fragments coordinated by computerised assembly in another peripheral location: ‘the process of production is in large part dematerialized’ (2008: 20). One may also say that production is in som e part still materialised but that this passage is heterogeneous and involves semiotic substantialisations with their own characteristics that differ in nature from an obvious end product, which is not always the destination of the coagulated part-signs. The language of coagulation suggests, then, not a direct and immediate concreteness, but a viscous semiosis requiring attention to the divergences of semiotic types, gradients of formedness, container effects (‘artefacts’). Coagulation of blood is a chemical process of clogging

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that requires the internal and active presence of platelets and specific proteins that become sticky. The theory of semiocapitalism counts on the complexity of soft substantialisation, and the flutter of inactuality (not yet) that makes it impossible to exhaustively grasp, and suggests the fundamental fragmentariness of what is being combined and recombined through capitalistic networks but in ways that confirm openness and multiplicity, certainly before materialisation. Consider Maurizio Lazzarato’s two-pronged statement that imma­ terial labour ‘produces the information content of the commodity’, in this way pointing to changes in ‘workers’ labour processes’ with skills involving ‘cybernetics and computer control’; and indicates the kind of activities that produce this content ‘are not normally recognized as “work” ’ which includes ‘defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and . . . public opinion’ (Lazzarato 1996: 132). This remains a landmark theoretical reformulation for understanding recent restructurings of labour and new mutations of capitalism. As the subjectivity of workers becomes a raw material for the production of the kind of social relations that grow up around and persist in the immaterial dimension of commodities, that is, immediate sensory and more abstract affective attachments like excitement, fidelity to certain virtual environments, logos and cultural codes, Lazzarato asks his readers to cast off their ‘factoryist prejudices’ in order to grasp the temporality of the cycle of production that is summoned by the capitalist for the duration of a task after which it disappears back into the networks that make it possible. Productive units consisting of self-employed workers, intellectual proletarians of a dispersed precariat, whose professional and managerial skills are exploited in the technical and semiotic labour of producing a commodity’s content, and who are often required to coordinate the immaterial labour of others, underline the significance of labour’s intellectualisation and immaterialisation without eschewing either embodiment (for the sake of a purely cognitive labour) or materiality (in favour of completely intangible commodities). Indeed, over almost ten years from the publication of Empire to Com monwealth, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s presentation of the significance of immaterial labour has accumulated a number of models: where first the intangible products of immaterial labour were modelled on affective (health and entertainment sectors) and symbolic-analytic services (computer and high-tech sectors) (2000: 290-1), the most recent work more fully acknowledges the feminisation of labour without gender equality as a model for how affective labour, which is ‘required

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of women disproportionately on and off the job’, (2009: 133) has come to assume a central place for capitalist valorisation. Acknowledging that immaterial labour processes are not entirely cognitive but may involve manual applications, and that the products of such labour may have material manifestations in autonomous objects, suffices to affirm the kind of hybridity insisted upon by Negri above, and cannot be read as mere capitulation to the necessity of corporeal mediation. Together Hardt and Negri (2009: 132-3) insist that immaterial factors may ‘outweigh’ the material aspects of commodities, and the labour that produces them is both corporeal and cognitive. Immaterial labour points to a fundamental change within post-Fordist production in which human semiosis (‘general intellect’) has become directly and immediately productive of value without any immediate material mediation. Theorists of semiocapitalism want to regain, from the capitalist exploitation of not yet material products, by pulling out, redirecting and reapplying the latent potential ‘coalesced’ in their semiotic substantialisations, stealing it away from capital’s semio-operations, from evaporating in the chimerical value production of financial capital, and forging a social time distinct from capital time. Perhaps it may be put this way: the creativity of cognitive labour harbours a potential to be otherwise that coalesces as a counter-tendency in the very process of coagulating semio-commodities. In this way coalescence breaks from coagulation. On the question of resistance, Negri (2008a: 25) writes in a Guattarian tone: There is no outside to our world of real subsumption of society under capital. We live within it, but it has no exterior; we are engulfed in commodity fetishism -w ithout recourse to something that might represent its transcendence. Nature and humanity have been transformed by capital. From now on, all aspirations to alterity . . . are not only outdated but also vain. And yet: from inside this fetishistic world, the antagonism of living work is affirming itself and resistance is building.

There are cracks in the world that practices of immanence-like the horizontal participatory multitude forms of the Occupy Movement identified by Hardt and Negri (2011)-m ay regain for different ends against the setting to labour of all of life and the equation that life equals labour time (Negri 2008b: 214). Whatever leaks through the cracks and cannot be contained by capital, in the mutual hybridisation of material and immaterial labour, in its control networks of television and other

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mass media, is available for the creation of the common no matter how awkward the transitions. Reading together old colleagues Negri and Guattari reveals a quandary of alterity: for Guattari, alterity is vitally important to the collective process of subjectification that takes place before and beyond the person, and is itself non-human, but always in relation to ‘an alterity that is itself subjective’ (1995: 9), even if this is a machine, social, technical, large or small. Indeed, Guattari imagined a process that involved the detachment of ‘semiotic segments . . . from the field of dominant significations’ (1995: 13), these ‘part-signs’ serving as vehicles of autonomy and ‘the promotion of a mutant desire’. Subjectification is for Guattari an ethico- and politico-aesthetic process of singularisation that works in and against the dominant modes of capitalistic subjectification, on the scorched earth of the social field wrought through ecological destruction, decimation of the public sphere by means of deregulation, and irresponsible-often criminal-financialisation. He describes this as a semio-chemical process of ‘extraction’ and ‘separation’ that is both poetic and precarious. There are a number of different alterities in Guattari’s understanding of subjectification and they involve multiple interfaces: the other-machines (not only technological devices, but values possessing a ‘specific enunciative consistency’ [1995: 34]); other singular subjectifications; but also at the basis of the pathic logic/knowledge rather than rational production of subjectivity, an autonomous alterity installs itself prior to the binary subject-object relation that is not received passively, but is actively intensive and without extrinsic coordinates. In short, for Guattari there remains a choice, an ethical and political one, to be made between forces of normalisation that level and reduce everything, or for richness, polyvocality, processuality and singularisation, with the proviso that taking a chance on the latter is no guarantee of escaping from the daily grind. For Guattari, subjectification is animated by an intensive machinic alterity (a ‘supplement’ [1995: 37]) that resists structuralisation and initiates breakdowns, hiccups and stalling as it diagrams a virtual universe for other human and non-human machines to enunciate. This machinic node places a ‘proto-subjective’ feature at the heart of subjectification. These two basic alterities -human-machine and machine-machine -a re ramified by Guattari into multiple registers: between machines and their components; alterification of internal material consistencies; formal diagrammatic consistencies; difference from the evolutionary phylum itself; and between machines of war and

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desiring machines; as well as alterities of scale and their correspondences across different levels (1995: 45). In his ‘Letter to Felix Guattari on Social Practices’, (2001a: 560-2) Negri had already in the mid-1980s isolated the need for a destructive dislocation that would defeat modernisation by ‘removing and freeing’ the technical and material means for its realisation from the control of the ‘totality’ that imposed them. In this period of bitter defeat, Negri recognised the ‘fragility of the relations of domination’ especially in the ‘capacity to produce subjectivity’. While this has increased in semiocapitalism, the liberation of independent components of ‘radical ontological difference’ and the transversal assemblage of singularities has also increased with the emergence of the social worker and the growing importance of his or her personal qualities that can become, as Negri hoped, ‘consciousness of singularity’ (2001b: 573) and the communitarian, international and cooperative dimensions of social production. The optimism that Negri and Guattari shared was focused on the potential for new subjectifications that desire ceaselessly constitutes, and which coalesce in the present, but also move towards a new future. In the same way Guattari sought out multiple ‘machinic modalities of valorization’ that capital, which tries to redirect them into the mortiferous spiral of its own law of value, could not capture and reduce, in a hopeful deduction of the determinations of the economic and juridical from an ‘axiological complexion’ -th e maintenance of its heterogeneity remaining vital for its survival and the condition of its ‘untiring renewal’ (1995: 56). How did Guattari overcome the allergy to ethics that haunts leftist politics? He valorised activist practices that engage artistic production towards maximising the incomparable and automodelising traits of mental and social ecologies with a commitment to ethically responsible negotiations of collective actions and large-scale ecopolitical engagements, since subjectivity is intimately imbricated in mutually dependent bio- and mechano-spheres. The ethico-political articulation across the three ecological registers would be accomplished with attention to both micro-and macro levels, by building a critique of technocratic solutions, and highlighting the role of artists in fostering emancipatory eco-praxes. In short, Guattari closely linked art and ecology in the production of subjectivity in a way that would assist in extracting potential for existential change and assisting in the development of new processes that are more complex, sustaining and enriching. It is the aesthetic, however, that characterises innovation in subjectification as ‘one creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same

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way that an artist creates new forms from the palette’ (1995: 7). He underlines that the most promising selection of components will result in authentic alterifications and fructuous auto-modelisations that make themselves available for new collective assemblages of enunciation. The first texts in this special issue show us how Guattari himself took up writing and drama as a practice of auto-elaboration and collaborative experimentation, imbued with his own select heterogeneous components borrowed from his critical repertory. While she was a doctoral candidate at University Paris IV-Sorbonne, Flore Garcin-Marrou discovered six plays written by Guattari between the years 1980-90. These plays are bursting with ribald pastiche of psychoanalysts and their beloved concepts, not to mention sacred cows of philosophy. The play, for example, The M oon Master (Le Maitre de Lune) from 1985 ridicules Lacan’s objet petit a. The IMEC Fonds Guattari contains in addition to the plays found by Garcin-Marrou further theatrical dialogues that remain to be read-for example, ‘Parmenides’ -filed under ‘Ecrits litteraires’. In her contribution, ‘To Be or Not to Be Socrates: Introduction to the Translation of Felix Guattari’s Socrates'1, Garcin-Marrou notes the following plays: The Affair o f the Lancel H andbag (L’Affaire du sac de chez Lancel) is a political drama in the satirical cabaret style that dates from 1979 and Nighttime, the End o f Possibilities (La Nuit, la fin des m oyens) is Guattari’s final play, and a work of childhood memory, written in 1990 and read at the Avignon Festival. Psyche G host Town (Psyche ville morte) displays Beckettian elements and offers a critique of desire. Aim ed at the Black Man, Killed the White One (Visa le noir, tua le blanc) is a formal exercise displaying a tension between drama and non-drama. The play that Garcin-Marrou introduces here in the first English translation by Solene Nicolas is titled Socrates (Socrate). While there is no shortage of plays bearing the name of the famous philosopher in their titles, Guattari’s homage is to a cuckolded schizosopher. Socrates was performed in 1988 at Theatre Ouvert Paris with playwright Enzo Cormann. Guattari knew Cormann from his work with director Philippe Adrien on the production of Les Reves de K afka in 1984 (see Genosko 2009). According to Francois Dosse, of all the plays that Guattari had sent to Cormann, Socrates was the only one he kept ‘because its facetious tone amused him’ (Dosse 2010: 430). Cormann considers his reading of the play together with Arnaud Carbonnier, with Felix in the wings, and the occasional shout-outs to Felix inserted into the truncated text, to be a good example of ‘schizotheatre’. Heavily indebted to Aristophanes’

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satirical Clouds, Guattari’s Socrates bounces around with madcap glee between conjugal breakdown, a Pythonesque postman trying to deliver a parcel of what appears to be hemlock; postal jokes on Freud; cracks at Geneva School linguistics as an anti-humanitarian weapon (‘signifying gases’) and a Challenger we never knew from A Thousand Plateaus. Guattari ecrivain, to adopt a coinage from Barthes, is a new way of reading Guattari today. Guattari’s commitment to the free radio movement is often located specifically in Italy with Bifo Berardi, Radio Alice and A/traverso. But there is also the equally famous example of his creation of Radio Tomate in Paris (for which his son Bruno was a programmer), as well as participation in the Minitel group 36-15 Alter, with the journal Terminal, and its notorious regulars like Eric Alliez and Pierre Halbwachs (Prince and Videcoq 2005). Guattari displayed a great deal of curiosity about free radio wherever he travelled, and this is evident in M olecular Revolution in Brazil, where he spoke at length about the movement during an interview with journalism professors and students at Pontifical Catholic University in Sao Paolo, detailing the differences between molar uses of free radio by national politicians and molecular deployments of the medium by mobile, neighbourhood militants. In a detailed discussion, Guattari explained the hybrid significations of machinic orality in such broadcasting, technical limitations on broadcast range, the effects of state interventions in the sector, and organisational innovation in some of the micro-stations such as Radio 93 and Radio Coeur d’Acier. Circa 1982, his interlocutors underlined the degree of media repression by the Brazilian state and explained to him that ‘here not only would a free radio station be jammed, but also those involved could go to jail. My question is, if Lula were to create a Workers’ Radio, would that lead to repression? (Guattari 2008: 155-6). For Guattari, the question of post-media did two things: it superseded postmodernism and presented a quandary about whether media and singularity could coexist. In his contribution to this volume ‘Guattari and Japan’, Toshiya Ueno places Guattari in the headquarters of the mini-FM station Radio Homerun in Tokyo and recalls the events of the visit. Regaining pirate aesthetician Tetsuo Kogawa’s important contributions to post-media theory in Japan,1 and specifying the singular dimension of the Japanese free radio experience, Ueno participated in the ‘political pilgrimage’ that Guattari undertook into the most troubled zones of Tokyo, including the Yakuza-controlled slum of day labourers known as Sanya. Ueno opens up this discussion by finding precursors and cross-references in Japanese letters and philosophy for Guattarian thought, focusing on the novelist

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Kobo Abe and philosopher Kiyoteru Hanada. As Deleuze studies enters China with the translation of A Thousand Plateaus (Massumi 2010) and a major conference this year, there is a tendency to forget the role that Japanese scholars (translators), artists, architects and activists played for Guattari in furthering his understanding of the relationship between subjectification and global capitalism. Ueno reminds us about ‘Cool Japan’ and the ‘bubble economy’ of the 1980s that had both collapsed by the early 1990s. This was Guattari’s Japan (Genosko 2002: 122-54) and his visits are marked by strange sponsorships from the most radical to the most conservative of hosts. There is still important work to be done on Guattari’s visits to Japan in the 1980s as his dialogue with Min Tanaka is yet to be translated from Japanese (see also the rarely screened film by Josephine Guattari and Francois Pain, Min Tanaka a la Borde, 1986). Of course, today in the shadow of the terrible events of Japan’s 3/11 (earthquake and tsunami) and the Fukushima nuclear accident, there has been an upsurge in the anti-nuclear protest movement and large-scale, politically effective, and creative forms of youth agitation are integrated globally into the Occupy Movement (for instance, Japanese activists of Shiroto no Ran [Amateur Riot] brought their no nukes message to the Occupy Wall Street Movement in New York in November 2011). Post-media radicalism, assisted by social media, no longer sees mini-FM and micro-TV as adequate for social change in the technical cartographies of minoritarian becoming. Yet new hardware and software hacks remain vital. In my contribution to this special issue ‘Guattari TV, By Kafka’, I consider the ambivalent role of television in Guattari’s life and work with reference to his ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’. Readers of Deleuze Studies will be aware of Guattari’s plans dating from the 1980s to produce a film based on Kafka’s oeuvre. He left many rough drafts that survive in the archives. There is a ‘final’ posthumous version, but no dialectical progression or corpus to speak of. Guattari envisaged a workshop spread over six months in which video would be shot, scripts developed and panels of experts convened that would generate enough material for a series of television programmes. Guattari believed he could use high-quality video to provide continuity between workshops. With around twelve to twenty hours of video in hand as ‘basic material’ after the workshops were complete, Guattari then envisaged a phase of script development and: a series of TV shows, with the aim of absorbing co sts. . . might result in a cultural series. But it should be understood from the outset that at no point

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should the workshop be impelled by the video team towards ‘making a show’. The video team will have to submit a report, and participate in the rest of the work, without imposing its point of view, which would be that of the presentation to television viewers. (Guattari 2 0 0 9 : 153)

Here, then, television is a means of generating revenue for a project that would, in its initial workshop phase, yield a broadcast-quality ‘series’, which could be purchased by a network; ultimately, a stand-alone film would result. Television is a stepping stone. Details about each phase are not given in detail. Guattari even suggests that the ‘making of a show’ may not be a necessity if a producer decides to take the project on and find a co-producer for the film project alone. The likely order of events is relevant here as television is a proving ground for the final cinematic version (which might again be shown on television). Many state-run television stations have lost their production wings over the last twenty years due to cost-cutting, but during this period many new speciality and ‘premium’ cable channels and indeed entire networks have emerged with commissioning budgets. Networks like HBO (owned by Time Warner) have promoted themselves as TV-against-itself innovators with critically praised dramatic series such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and such success has elevated the television writer and producer (David Chase and Alan Ball respectively, among others) to lofty auteur status, whose signature vision shows through in the series format and the bureaucracy of television itself. But HBO also has a film wing that has been dubbed an ‘auteur studio’ (Auster 2000, quoted in Heller 2008: 45). And Cahiers du Cinema recently asked its readers to ‘savour the consecration, by the small screen, of genuine auteurs’ in the guise of Chase and his colleagues (Tesse 2010: 7). Guattari would have been well versed in French ‘auteur TV’ in the halcyon days of Institut national de l’audiovisuel commissions, and he likely modelled his project on this phenomenon. I maintain, however, that a number of critical provisos are required in the course of my exploration of this claim for the tele-auteur model that is subject to a theoretical displacement through the theory of affect. The transition from theatre to television and film (and, in fact, across the latter two media as the latest incarnation of auteur theory insists), widens the scope of media in which Guattari wanted to practise, notably in the last two decades of his life, and also complicates the reception of what is considered to be his contribution to media theory. The question of Guattari’s modernism, which is evident in his ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’, is explored in depth by Stephen Zepke in ‘Art as Abstract Machine: Guattari’s Modernist Aesthetics’.

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Guattari’s modernism presents a diagram (‘abstract line’) of aesthetics based on painting-his ‘unpopular’ choices include Balthus, Pollock and Modigliani, among others. Eschewing conceptuality for material processes of expression, Guattari embraced a modernism that was transformative, producing what is to come, and fundamentally political. Zepke provocatively regains this modernism against critical tendencies to situate Guattari’s aesthetics in the anti-art tradition, which he debunks. Zepke reminds us of the synthesiser as Edgard Varese described it in terms of the expression of the ‘intense complexity of materials abstracted from their referents’, and the figure of the ‘cosmic artisan’, who far from rejecting art, seeks a modernist politics in which a ‘new future’ is summoned by means of abstraction that frees the singular. This approach describes well Guattari’s hopes for Kafka TV through which a new people is sought in a way that is not determined by the present, yet immanent to it and acting on it. Here, then, art is not overtly political but exudes a utopic excess. The catalogue essay ‘Machinic Animism’ by audiovisual artist Angela Melitopoulos and social and political philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato was created as part of the curated exhibition ‘Assemblages’ which explored the role of animism in Guattari’s thought; this contribution appeared in the ‘Animism’ show curated by Anselm Frank of Extra City, Antwerp, in 2010. Drawing on images from films by Fernand Deligny and Victor Renaud, as well as Francois Pain, and video interviews with a number of Guattari’s friends and colleagues, the authors consider Guattari’s scattered remarks on animism that are indexed to both Brazil and Japan and, more generally, to the archaic and its hybrid, modern mutations. Guattari often commented about the mixture of animistic religions, such as Shinto-Buddhism and Candomble, with contemporary media technologies, as offering interesting recipes for subjectification beyond the typical impasses capitalism makes available (1996a: 105). This ‘reconversion of the archaic’ that Guattari identifies with the reinsertion of animism into contemporary life is not restricted to religion. In M olecular Revolution in Brazil, Guattari’s sense of the opposing poles of identity (individual and cultural) and subjectifications such as Candomble, which serves as a form of resistance for the Black population of Bahia (2008: 37, 96-7), expresses his concern with how fundamentally different worlds of reference like the latter act as bulwarks against capitalistic modes of subjectification. In a canny way, Melitopoulos and Lazzarato point beyond these obvious examples into more complex ideas within Guattari’s Chaosmosis in which animistic elements occupy diverse worlds from infancy to creativity as such,

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inhabiting objects, and overlapping subjectifications, that may form a powerful ‘nucleus’ within an assemblage (Guattari 1995: 101-2). What Guattari strives for is to understand how animism works as a partial enunciator with ‘unframing’ effects within assemblages of enunciation (131); recall how a particle-sign might catalyse an innovative coalescence outside the frame of the semio-commodity. Guattari shifts from religious (from the role of orishas in ritual possessions to aesthetic extractions from the real) to semiotic and machinic considerations as animism crosses the domains of anthropology, psychoanalysis and aesthetic production into how in its updated guises it influences subjectification. Felicity Colman pushes off from Guattari’s recently translated The Machinic Unconscious (2011) in order to investigate the molecular revolutionary potential of the machinic aesthetics of play in ‘Play as an Affective Field for Activating Subjectivity: Notes on The Machinic Unconscious'. Her efforts to regain play from capitalistic valorisation work through an analysis of mediatisation and its effects on subjectification with an emphasis on how processes resistant to dominant models stir in aesthetic activities. Mediatisation, Colman argues, is open to all kinds of connections, and is not a deterministic or closed interpellation. Rather, play displays a mobile transversality in a ‘field' that guides machinic assemblages through various media. Colman is attentive to the affects-times-speeds of how subjectification is positioned by media platforms, demonstrating that subjective assemblages are embedded in the evolutionary phylum and conditioned by the machines of one's time. She picks up Guattari's example of the pile of stones mentioned earlier in my essay on television as mediatic modelisation of a proto-machine, a pile of stones, into a wall (and its crumbling), and the political and aesthetic ends that such a process entails. For Colman, mediatisation produces and occurs through machinic interfaces, and she pursues their affective workings on the knife edge of machine and structure. We see how play is an extract that opens new universes of virtuality and options for aesthetic cartographies, in this sense gathering in Melitopoulos and Lazzarato’s insistence on the animistic effects of aesthetic activities. Guattari (1995: 107) specified that the aesthetic machine has the power to disclose new dimensions of finitude, alterity and incorporeality, as well as requiring responsibility: ‘Machinism, in the way I understand it, implies a double process-autopoietic-creative and ethical-ontological (the existence of a ‘material of choice’)-w hich is utterly foreign to mechanism’ (108). Colman's investigation of play's transversal field is conceptually consonant with Bryan Reynolds’ theorisation of minor criminality as

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a ‘gateway’ to transversal territory: it may be entered upon exiting from structure and individuation and identity (‘subjective territory’) and affords ‘experiential alterity’ (Reynolds 2002: 19). Field and territory as they are deployed by Colman and Reynolds recall Guattari’s specifications of different types and interactions of pragmatic fields (Guattari 2011: 59ff.): the individuated, for instance, is vulnerable to capitalistic abstractions; whereas the diagrammatic finds potentialities in non-human machines and a-signifying semiotics. Play in an affective field disturbs the impositions of order, is less attached to abstract identities and attuned to more complex assemblages. Acknowledging the important contributions of performance theory in Deleuze studies from the work of Reynolds to Laura Cull and Gerald Raunig (bringing together war and theatre machines in the performances of micropolitical agitation in Europe [Raunig 2010: 73]), Anja Kanngieser advances a concept of the ‘performative encounter’ in ‘. .. And. . . and. . . and. . . The Transversal Politics of Performative Encounters’ that does not take a theatrical form as such and is characterised as mobile, allusive and transversally transformative of collective subjectifications and enunciations. The primary cases under study are the German Umsonst campaigns of the zero-zero decade. Just as Colman situated play and, just plain fucking about, on an affective field of transformation, Kanngieser underlines the playful, pleasurable and temporary characteristics of the activist encounters in her analysis, but without neglecting the anti-capitalist and ‘movement without bosses’ spirit of the organisations at issue. But Kanngieser is most interested in the role of transversality and the subjugated-subject groups distinction as a conceptual tool for understanding Umsonst. Regaining Guattari’s early practical and theoretical innovations, Kanngieser exposes the emergence of a theory of groups that distinguishes non-absolutely between subject (actively exploring selfdefined projects) and subjugated groups (passively receiving directions), each affecting the relations of their members to social processes and shaping the potential for subject formation and for molecular revolution. A subject group is best able to accept openness and role definition without letting it become a threat to its negotiation of otherness, a loss of security precipitating its decay into a subjugated group; a subjugated group is able to pass through the walls of its silent retreats and subservience and find its voice. It was through the modification of introjects such as alienating fantasies of a leader’s power, or realisation that a group was not the revolutionary subject of history, and cleansed of the familialism and mythical

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psychoanalytic complexes, that the superego could admit new ideals and demands. The application of Guattari’s group/assemblage theory to Umsonst actions renews the richness and subtlety of the original formulations and brings them to bear upon a post-militant, transitory, leaderless assemblage, initiating a trenchant critique of German neo­ liberalism evident in the ‘performative encounters’ that touched everyday issues such as public transportation that were felt most acutely by socially marginalised groups and precarious labourers. The nuances of Umsonst subjectifications and transversal relations are delineated in both their micropolitical but also aesthetic dimensions, detailing the temporary subject groups of Umsonst and their moments of ‘affective composition’. In her case study Kanngieser extends the trajectory of transversality which, within Guattari’s lifetime, began at La Borde, where he developed the ‘grid’, a double-column entry table consisting of rotating tasks and times, that redefined roles, created new groups, introduced novel orientations. From this emerged a new way to communicate involving a specialised vocabulary, the feuille de jour (daily sheet), as well as challenges to and parodies of supervisors, and sudden valorisations or ghettoisations of activities and places. The grid changed over time during periods which saw the waxing and waning of centralisation and decentralisation, and was modified to maximise its therapeutic effects in response to changing conditions in the clinic from which were extracted whatever displayed the greatest transversal potential. Transversality began as a way of diagramming the unconscious of an institution and graduated to a descriptor of the potential for new progressive axes unleashed in processes of political depolarisation, which is also how Guattari understood the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kanngieser contributes to the renewal of the somewhat dated German reference points of Guattari’s thought. In the contribution of Adam Bryx & Bryan Reynolds, ‘Go Fractalactic: A Brief Guide through Subjectivity in the Philosophy of Felix Guattari and Transversal Poetics’, the stakes of group subjectification and transversality are laid bare as the authors extend Guattari’s practices of metamorphosis in a clinical setting through a new conceptual vocabulary that fearlessly regains drug experience as a key touchpoint. Passing beyond the Guattarian bestiary and in Reynolds’ established vocabulary, mapping departures from subjective territories, Bryx & Reynolds situate ‘unblinkering’ through a meditation on the tensions within wilful parameterisations of dissident becomings. Drawing from popular literature on LSD, which,

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incidentally, recapitulates key issues within psychedelic psychiatry and the role of colourful characters like ‘Captain Tripps’ (A. M. Hubbard), who was director of the West Coast-based Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination, and whose refinements to the clinical setting were well received by professionals (Dyck 2008), parameter settings serve protective ends but are not fail-safe. The phantasy architecture of a good trip, just like the trappings of a romantic evening, guide subjectifications in practical ways and expose the contours of control that spikes toward the unexpected while taking cover under the predictable. Regaining The Guattari Reader as a kind of user’s manual, Bryx & Reynolds seize upon opportunities for reinjecting the role of reflexive-consciousness into alterification, not as a by-product, and in order to win it back from deferment in the name of sustainability. This emphasis generates an array of suggestive concepts that describe the dynamism of subjectification along emergent and vectorial lines as it passes into transversality: fractalactic occurrences are akin to event-advents about to pop into place during the pauses of motoredconsciousness: a combination of shifting speeds with the persistence of reflexive consciousness. Bryx & Reynolds remind us that drugs posed intractable problems for Guattari; his productive use of gamma OH (gamma hydroxybutyrate) in the construction of his own subjectivity should not be taken as evidence of an attitude of casual experimentation with illicit drugs and alcohol. It is useful to think of his use of this ‘uncontrolled’ (at the time in 1971) substance in terms of a ‘controlled’ chaoticisation that danced around the rim of a subjective black hole. Many drugs, both legal and otherwise, would seem to count as substances that increase powers of action, and while Guattari supported decriminalisation of all illicit drugs, especially marijuana in the light of France’s draconian search and seizure legislation, he also debunked the Beat mythologisation (theatricalisation) of drug culture (Genosko 2012). In a recent essay on the meaning of pharmacoanalysis and the illusions of consciousness, Gregg Lambert (2011) leaves no room for sustainable drug experiences in finding that all lines point to abolition and the diminishment of desire. Yet ‘the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 299) hangs in the balance as the recalibrations of subjectification have both successful and failed elements that, as Bryx & Reynolds advise, require careful parameter settings. One key challenge of how to read Guattari today is the requirement of inventively applying his examples from the 1970s, 80s and early 90s to the heterogeneous unrests appearing around the globe against the

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‘1% ’. This is the project of Janell Watson in ‘Culture as Existential Territory: Ecosophic Homelands for the Twenty-first Century’. Here it is not so much an issue of the prescience of his concepts, but rather, which features are best deployed to scrutinise contemporary issues. Watson pursues the mutating assemblages of singular subjectifications through an analysis at the ethological level of affective politics, utilising Guattari’s ontological quadrant in ways that allow her to highlight the simultaneously progressive and reactionary roles of machinic phyla and focus on the necessity of existential territories that have become increasing portable and mobile. Watson regains some of the political essays from Guattari’s under-read Les Annees d ’hiver ([1986] 2009) in order to regain his sense of what the ‘fifth world nationalitarianism’ of the twenty-first century might look like. Guattari’s prediction of a reflux of archaic and residual ethno-nationalism that would vanquish the enemies of humanity is critically investigated by Watson who accepts certain hypotheses-the contestatory dimension of alt-modernities among second- and third-generation immigrants - but points out that certain others have not materialised, such as the waning of religious monotheisms, the enthusiasm for which seems inexhaustible. Using a case study of the Islamic headcovering as a focal point, Watson refocuses critical commentary by shifting the conceptual vocabulary from socio-semiotics to Guattarian componential analysis and providing an intimate picture of how an existential territory opens onto universes of reference. Finally, Watson opens up what is surely a Guattarian can of worms: culture as a deterritorialising force and how to move it beyond mass media and capitalism. Guattari once remarked that culture is a reactionary concept because it prevents us from grasping the processes of capitalistic subjectification based on equivalence (value and time) and uneven distribution of assets; it is guilt ridden and animated by infantilism: ‘there is only one culture: capitalistic culture’ (2008: 33). Understanding how culture compartmentalises semiotic productions as attributable cultural expressions and spheres, makes use of scales of measure to judge and classify cultural levels, and how the programmes of state agencies seek to increase cultural assets of places and peoples, are all part of a diagnosis whose treatment requires the cultivation of machinic, molecular singular becomings, processualities, and the garnering of all-even the most unlikely-challenges to capitalism. At low points in his later life, Guattari was less than optimistic: ‘one is forced to admit that there are very few objective indications of a shift away from oppressive mass-mediatic modernity toward some kind of more liberating post-media era in which subjective assemblages

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of self-reference might come into their own’ (1996a: 98). The task for Guattarians today is to forge contemporary tools adequate to the passage beyond mass media and to assemble components whose processuality defies the lures of mass culture. In ‘Institutional Schizophasia and the Possibility of the Humanities’ ‘Other Scene’: Guattari and the Exigency of Transversality’, Michael Eng applies Guattari’s group theory to the contemporary predicament of the humanities and the long, slow burn of the ‘end of the University’ itself. In this innovative take on the humanities’ predicament or, more precisely, the predicament of those of us situated within the humanities, Eng writes from the perspective of a American philosopher on a death watch of sorts. His Guattari offers a trenchant analysis and escape route from the semiocapitalism of the contemporary neoliberal university with its penchant for more and more a-signifying pedagogical strategies (real­ time student responses and automated performance analyses of attention drift and knowledge retention), precarisation of labour (‘sweated’ and hidden), and corporate research partnerships (tropes of excellence and knowledge transfer and community partnerships). But first some hard questions need to be posed, and some even harder answers given. Is the threat to the humanities another case of scholarly narcissism or an effect of the corporate university? Eng’s argument is that defences of the humanities illustrate Guattari’s understanding of the dependencies of a subjugated group that is incapable of recognising the core, capitalist purpose of the contemporary university. It is the complicity of the humanities in the fulfilment of this purpose, that is, in their own deaths, the orders for which are passively received, that troubles and interests Eng and he deploys the concept of transversality as a practical exploration of this untenable condition. What makes this approach innovative is that Eng regains the university as an institution of concern as it did not figure largely in Guattari’s thought. Of course, Guattari had little interest in university life and did not move in academic circles. But it is not exceptional. Eng’s analysis of the complicity of the humanities in the reproduction of capitalistic subjectivity in the university is through a number of gateways-consumer goods, psychoanalysis, linguistics. These function as institutional objects not easily given up, and result in a double failure to grasp the humanities’ own group fantasies and assume some responsibility for their predicament. Eng’s question is not so much the need to take a sober look at how phenomena like rank and other comforts from anxiety shield the humanities from itself and from the realisation that only academic publications hear their cries, but rather,

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what to do about this situation with the tool of transversality in hand. How, then, to disturb the status quo? In quite different ways Colman, Kanngeiser, Bryx & Reynolds, and Eng return to transversality and Guattari’s theory of groups in a search for new ways to configure resistance and innovation in the age of semiocapitalism.

Note 1. See http://anarchy.translocal.jp/ (accessed 11 January 2012).

References Alliez, Eric and Andrew Goffey (2011) ‘Introduction’, in Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (eds), The Guattari Effect, London: Continuum, pp. 1-14. Auster, Al (2000) ‘HBO Movies: The Cable Giant as “Auteur” ’, Television Quarterly, 31:1, pp. 75-84. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2007) ‘Schizo-Economy’, Substance, 36:1, pp. 76-85. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2008) Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, trans. G. Mecchia and C. Stivale, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2009) Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. F. Cadel and G. Mecchia, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2011) After the Future, ed. G. Genosko and N. Thoburn, Baltimore: AK Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dosse, Francois (2010) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, New York: Columbia University Press. Dyck, Erika (2008) Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Genosko, Gary (2002) Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Continuum. Genosko, Gary (2009) ‘Introduction to the English Translation of Felix Guattari’s “Project for a Film By Kafka” ’, Deleuze Studies, 3:2, pp. 145-9. Genosko, Gary (2012) ‘Daddy’s Little Helper: Felix Guattari and Gamma OH’, Parallax, 18:1, pp. 47-61. Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosm osis, trans. J. Pefanis and P. Bains, Sydney: Power Institute Press. Guattari, Felix (1996a) The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Oxford: Blackwell. Guattari, Felix (1996b) Soft Subversions, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 202-24. Guattari, Felix (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, London: Athlone Press. Guattari, Felix (2008) M olecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. K. Clapshow and B. Holmes, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix [1986] (2009) Les Annees d ’hiver 1980-85, Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires. Guattari, Felix (2011) The Machinic Unconscious, trans. T. Adkins, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Em pire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009) Com m onw ealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2011) ‘The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street’, Foreign Affairs, 11 October, available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136399/michael-hardt-and-antonio-negri/ the-fight-for-real-democracy-at-the-heart-of-occupy-wall-street (accessed 11 January 2012). Heller, Dana (2008) ‘Films’, in Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (eds), The Essential H BO Reader, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, pp. 42-51. Lambert, Gregg (2011) ‘What is Pharmacoanalysis?’, Deleuze Studies, 5 (Supplement: Deleuzian Futures), pp. 21-35. Massumi, Brian (2010) ‘What Concepts Do: Preface to the Chinese Translation of A Thousand Plateaus’, Deleuze Studies, 4:1, pp. 1-15. Negri, Antonio (2001a) ‘Letter to Felix Guattari on “Social Practice” ’, in Gary Genosko (ed.), Deleuze and G uattari: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, vol. 2, pp. 553-63. Negri, Antonio (2001b) ‘Interview with Toni Negri (Brian Massumi and Alice Jardine)', in Gary Genosko (ed.), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, vol. 2, pp. 564-83. Negri, Antonio (2008a) The Porcelain W orkshop: For a N ew Gram mar o f Politics, trans.N. Wedell, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Negri, Antonio (2008b) Em pire and Beyond, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity. Lazzarato, Maurizio (1996) ‘Immaterial Labour’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds), R adical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 132-46. Prince, Bernard and Emmanuel Videcoq (2005) ‘Radio Tomate and Minitel Alter: Felix Guattari et les agencements post-media', Multitudes, 21 (Summer), pp. 23-30, available at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Felix-Guattari-et-lesagencements (accessed 11 January 2012). Raunig, Gerald (2010) A Thousand Machines, trans. A. Derieg, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Reynolds, Bryan (2002) Becom ing Criminal: Transversal Perform ance and Cultural Dissidence in Early M odern England, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Tesse, J.-P. (2010) ‘La serie continue’, Cahiers du Cinema, 658 (Juillet-Aout), p. 7.

To Be or Not to Be Socrates: Introduction to the translation of Felix Guattari's

Socrates

Flore Garcin-Marrou

Abstract The Fonds Guattari contain a number of unpublished manuscripts catalogued under the title of ‘ecrits litteraires’ which include a set of theatrical dialogues. Noting the scope of these titles, as well as their likely models, Guattari’s theatrical practices are introduced with reference to the only play that was actually staged, Socrates, courtesy of Enzo Cormann at the Theatre Ouvert, in Paris, in 1988. Keywords: theatre, postdramatic, schizosophy, archives Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are not known for having a deep, enduring interest in theatre. Deleuze ([1988] 2004) explained in L’A becedaire his disinterest in theatre with force and clarity: ‘Theatre is too long, and too disciplined’; it is ‘an art that remains entrenched in the present and in daily issues, while never advancing beyond the dimensions of the present’. While showing admiration for the directors Bob Wilson and Carmelo Bene, he nonetheless expressed regret unambiguously: ‘I cannot sit in an uncomfortable armchair for hours anymore. That alone destroys theatre for me.’ While Deleuze took theatre along new lines of flight and pushed it to the verge of pure abstraction, Guattari explored the links between theatre and television, theatre and cinema, and theatre and music. He intimately hoped to become a man of letters or a man of theatre, and he wrote six plays for the stage between 1980 and 1990: The Case o f the Lancel H andbag (LA ffaire du sac de chez Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 170-172 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0055 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Lancet), Psyche G host Town (Psyche ville morte), The M oon Master (Le Maitre de lune), Socrates (Socrate), Aim ed at the black man, killed the white one (Visa le noir, tua le blanc) and Nighttime, the End o f Possibilities (La Nuit, la fin des moyens). All these plays are unpublished in France. These are neither philosophical dramas, nor are they what is often referred to as ‘Theatre of Ideas’ -th e theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance. Instead, these plays are sometimes reminiscent of the Ubu cycle of Alfred Jarry, at other times suggestive of the Dadaist and surrealist theatrical experiments. Guattari referred to them as ‘chaosmic sketches’, and he wrote them rapidly and with no intention of philosophical seriousness. The plays are composed in the tone and style of daily life, peppered with occasional childish wit. Guattari satirised and mocked the patrons and icons of psychoanalysis (Freud, Melanie Klein, Jung) and of philosophy (Socrates, Lucretius), and, of course, himself. Guattari stages a crisis of the character which implies a crisis of dialogue and fable. The personalities of the characters are ill defined. They are devoid of idiosyncrasy and like the coming together of collective enunciation, so that their subjectivities are schizophrenic and kaleidoscopic. The dialogues no longer mean anything: words are scattered like palimpsests; they go through the bodies of the characters which thereby become the source of jumbled social, political and poetical thoughts. The story that is being told has lost its logic along the way. The heterogeneity of dramatical elements is the foundation of a rhapsody whose elements are assembled like a patchwork reminiscent of the Riemannian framework that is repeatedly mentionned by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. What Guattari brings on stage is the ‘schizo’ theatre which was devised with Deleuze as early as Anti-Oedipus: it is no longer an opportunity to interpret theatre but to experiment with it. Socrates may have been written for one of the theatrical representations that used to be staged each year, on 15 August, at the La Borde clinic where Guattari worked for most of his career. In March 1987, Guattari and the lighting designer Jean Kalman considered staging Socrates and they thought of the following cast: Ryszard Cieslak (a favorite of Jerzy Grotowski’s) in the role of Socrates, Maite Nahyr in the role Carmen, Hans-Peter Cloos in that of Alphonse and Gabisou in that of Challenger. Socrates is actually the only play by Guattari that was staged: the playwright Enzo Cormann and actor Arnaud Carbonnier organised a performance in the Theatre Ouvert, in Paris, in 1988. In Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Socrates had already been portrayed as a ridiculous character: Socrates was a bum, sleeping on a pallet full

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of fleas, and trying to see the world of Ideas by ascending in a basket suspended from a tree bringing him up to within a few metres of the sky where Ideas were supposed to be located. Guattari, in his own manner, places the Father of all philosophers upon the stage in a most unflattering light. The plot of Socrates can be summarised as follows: the character called Georges claims to be Socrates. Carmen, his wife, tries to calm him down. Georges seems to be suffering from a spasm of delirium, a spell of mystical hallucination, during which he thinks he is the Greek philosopher. Socrates is now nothing more than a schizophrenic, the herald of the terrorism of the Logos, detesting Lacanism, evoking the poisonous thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, and connecting linguistics to the Geneva School and the Geneva Conventions of humanitarian law . . . The play starts with a triangle made up of husband (Georges), wife (Carmen) and lover (Challenger)-typical vaudeville material-and builds to something quite different: subjectivity enters a crisis as relativism and falsification are unbound, echoing the restoration of illusions that was expressed in D ifference and Repetition as well as in The Logic o f Sense. The bombing that rains on the scene marks the end of a world, and the scene then transforms itself, first into an icefield, then into a tundra with a burning bush. Georges is trapped in his delirium, or in a locked room (possibly standing for his brain), but this situation is eventually disrupted by Challenger’s appearance-a deus ex machina wearing the uniform of an American soldier. Challenger is a recurring character in the works of Deleuze and Guattari: an heir to the character of Conan Doyle’s The L ost World, he embodies the concept of the double bind in A Thousand Plateaus. This play confirms that the theatre of Guattari is consistent with the definition of the postdramatic theatre theorised by Hans-Thies Lehmann: there is a crossover at work as all the other arts are involved in it. This is another form of theatre total, and it considers that neither the action, characters nor the dramatical conflict are essential elements to produce theatre. Drama, which entered a crisis in the late nineteenth century, is taken beyond its own limitations, towards new lines of flight. This drive carries it towards freer forms, and sometimes towards the absence of forms altogether.

Reference Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet [1988] (2004) L A becedaire, Paris: Editions Montparnasse.

Socrates

Felix GuattarF In a shadow y light. Georges: Carmen: Georges:

Carmen: Georges: Carmen: Georges:

Challenger: Georges:

Carmen:

I am Socrates. Now, now, here he goes again! What? What’s wrong with this? I am Socrates, big deal! There’s no need to make a mountain out of it! He goes near Carmen and starts talking with a Russian accent: What is it, my Karmen, my candy Karma? It’s ok, drop it! Would She rather be my Catholic Caramel? Stop it, you’re a real pain! Notwithstanding, could I have the great good fortune and privilege to have a conversation with Her about a question that I dare describe as being in our common interest? Can’t you see she just answered: not now! Could I be a-dreaming? Or could it be that someone just had the nerve to talk to me instead of her? Stand back, turkey turnkey! Will you please stop your act! Come on then, come here: what was it you wanted to tell me? She beckons Challenger to walk aw ay. Challenger, you will give us some space for a minute, won’t you? To Georges: And don’t you take advantage of the situation. And try to understand this is the last time.

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 173-186 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0056 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Georges:

Carmen: Georges: Carmen: Georges: Carmen:

The very last one! Damn! If that is so, I will relinquish it for good then and might come to wearing my heart on my sleeve and having death on my banner. Surely you expected this to happen, my darling chimera: I’m not really the half-hearted kind. Shit, I’m a proud man after all! Threatening: Shut it! Come here, and come here quick. G eorges moves near her, scared, with bulging eyes. But I haven’t done anything wrong! Come on, what is it you wanted to say? Don’t you worry! It’s nothing really. For one thing, I’ve already told you. What? That you’re Socrates? He nods pitifully.

Carmen:

To Challenger, who is still within earshot, though with his back turned: Did you hear him this time? See, it’s all starting up again.

An increasingly loud droning o f planes can be heard. It is reminiscent o f the bom bers o f the previous world war. Challenger:

Sidles up to Georges in a friendly way. Are you at least positive about this? Georges points to the sky.

Challenger: Georges: Challenger: Georges:

Challenger:

Yes, I know that it’s the Americans, but we should not worry too much about it! It sounds more like military sedition to me. Forget about it. I’d rather hear about how it all came back. Casually. How what came back? My being... Socrates? Oh, that’s easy enough. First there was like the striking of a match that is being broken in the middle, except that this time there was also the empty shape of sound-does that make any sense to you? So tell me, you really think that there is going to be war again? Maybe you haven’t counted properly?

S o cra te s

Carmen: Georges: Carmen:

Alphonse: Challenger: Alphonse:

Challenger: Alphonse:

Challenger: Carmen: Alphonse: Carmen: Alphonse:

Challenger: Carmen: Alphonse: Carmen: Alphonse: Carmen: Alphonse: Challenger:

175

How many weeks late? I don’t really know, it’s difficult to say. But what I know for sure is that all the tests are positive. Surely you should have taken precautions.

Greeting Carmen ceremoniously. Do you know, fair lady, that this could be a massive breakthrough! What’s-that-you-say? My heartiest apologies, ladies and gentlemen, for interrupting your conversation. But when I saw what was brewing, it came as a shock and I said to myself, dear old Alphonse, surely the time has come . . . What’s that intrusive one going on about? In my defence, you cannot ignore that in case of force majeure, they’ll discard you as vain and smug if you don’t have a stooge, but if there’s two, or three, or four, or plenty of you, then no one will question your words. Therefore, bear with me, though I do not have the honour of a formal agreement, things can go smoothly . . . That’s what you say! But Mister . . . what’s your name again? Alphonse, from Belgium. Dear Alphonse, since Alphonse you are, what have you inferred from your first approach to the problem? The truth is, little more than the common folk, except that in this type of case one is entitled to expect additional information. . . . That’s what I was expecting. Information about what, if you please? Doubtfully. Something like a spiritual increase, a right to follow, a guarantee that it’ll work or die . . . . Couldn’t you be any more explicit? Oh, but what do I know? Something that’d say he is mortal . . . . Quite a vague thing to say! Or that he is a m an. . . I can’t see any connection here!

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They say the final lines from the top o f their voices: the droning o f the planes, which had at first decreased, gets louder and louder until it completely covers the voices. All the characters eventually flee from the explosion o f bom bs, leaving no one on the stage but Georges.

Georges walks to and fro. Georges:

In the shell of anguish A voiceless So Soundless Sound Stone-deaf Signifier signifying little Beginning of something new. . .

An extremely tall postm an who is very busy deciphering the address on a parcel walks past without seeing him. Postman: Georges: Postman: Georges: Postman:

Georges:

Carmen:

I say, this thing here is absolutely illegible. B E R ... M A C R ... A R B E IT ... H e walks up to him: May I? Who are you? Me? Hem. . . Let’s say I’m Socrates. Wait a minute. . . That doesn’t look right. That’s pushing it a bit! What with our poor wages! By the way, your thing, how do you spell it? What? Socrates? The way it is pronounced: S for Socrates, O for Octavian, C for Caligula. . . But let me have a look . . . Interrupting: Don’t give it to him! Don’t you give it to him!

The postm an raises his arms, holding the packet really high, so that none o f them can reach it.

S o cra te s

Postman: Carmen: Postman:

Georges: Postman: Carmen:

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God! Make up your minds! But I’m telling you he’s not the one! Showing the parcel. But then, this thing here, who’d that be destined for? Showing Carmen. And that whirligig there, where does she come from? You might call her my wife. Good heavens! That’s the story of my life, when there’s too many things and too many people, I get mixed up. Stop the chatting, give that to me now.

She grabs the postm an by the sleeve and tries to grab to parcel. Postman:

Ouch! Mrs Socrates, have mercy! I happen to be extremely ticklish! No! Anything but that! Stop it or I’ll call for help! Help! Someone help me!

Challenger walks in. Challenger: Postman: Challenger: Postman:

Hey! You weirdos! What’s the racket all about? It’s because of the Socrateses, Sir, they keep pestering me while I’m on duty. But you’re mistaken, my dear friend! These people have nothing to do with Socrates! Ah! Teach me something! It’s my lucky day! But then . . . But then . . .

H e scrutinizes the label on the parcel again. Postman: Georges:

Challenger: Georges:

Heavens! It does look like this is the name that’s written there. Shouting in triumph: Ah Ah! Of course! Zounds! I told you! Who was right? And how much had we bet on this? Be that as it may, Mister postman, rest assured that your man is not here. Stop there! It’s postmarked isn’t it? What do you make of that? Where does it come from? Check the postmark! G eorges starts jumping in the air again to try and grab the parcel. The postmark! The postmark! We want the postmark! I’m a taxpayer, I am! And I am entitled to read the postmark . . .

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Carmen: Postman:

Reproachfully. See the state he’s in because of you! Calm down, my friend. Wait, we’ll check that together. It seems indeed to be a foreign stamp. He shows the postm ark to Georges who is standing on the tips o f his toes. There, you read it, for I haven’t got the right glasses.

Georges deciphers the postm ark painfully. Georges: Challenger: Postman: Challenger: Postman:

D . . . E . . . L . . . Deli. New Delhi? I’d rather expect something like Delicatessen. In that case, you could have Delfzije, Maigret’s hometown. No, it’s D e . . . l i . . . gny. Or maybe: Del . . . phoi. Yes, that right: Del . . . phi. Delphi, in Phocis, on the hills of Montparnasse. Ah! Hometown! Home sweet home! Benzai! Benzai!

He catches the postm an unawares, snatches the parcel out o f his hands and flies away with it. Postman:

Wait! Wait and see! Per favor, Sir Socrates! You could at least sign the receipt for me!

Upset, he turns towards Carmen and holds out his ball point pen to her. Postman:

You, Mrs Socrates, you’re the last reasonable person on this planet! You ain’t gonna let me down, are you? You’re gonna sign my receipt for me, aren’t you?

Carmen walks away with a shrug o f her shoulders as the poor postman falls on his knees, his arms still outstretched in her direction. Postman:

Facing the public: It’s no wonder, in front of such ungratefulness, that the tricuspid valves of a man end up falling apart. Oh! I know that quite a few of us would have equally overlooked such an apparently futile stumbling of the symbol. Nothing to write home about, nothing to upset the original cosmic soup. Ok!

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I grant you that! Except that this comes as an echo to the cracking of the match that was previously pinpointed by our dear Georges, so don’t we have ground to fear for the worst now: a general tumbling down of the dominos, a thorough and rolling disorder of all sports! But let’s not procrastinate any longer, and let’s now hunt for our unfortunate friend.

Georges, holding the parcel in one hand and a bike in the other, is walking deeper into the ice flow. Georges:

They wouldn’t have treated me any worse than this if I had robbed the key to the wind and rain!

Challenger’s indistinct talking in the distance. Georges: Challenger:

Goodbye! Vain mobs! Watch as I’ll go and vanish into the chasm. Georges! Don’t screw things up! Wait for me!

Challenger trips over a tree stump and falls down into a pond. Challenger:

OUCha! Somebody help me! Georges, can’t you see I’m burning?

The head o f Georges com es out o f a burning bush on the tundra which is standing, as though on purpose, right next to Challenger. Georges: Challenger: Georges:

Challenger:

Who art thou? Who comes hither and dares interrupt my celestial journey? But Georges! Don’t you recognize me? Georges, Mister Georges! It’s me, Challenger, your faithful adversary. Raising his arms in the air: Ah, dear Mister Challenger! What a surprise! And how is war developing? And how is our Lady-Wet-Blanket doing? You must be referring to Mrs Carmen? Well, she is as good as can be really. By the way, she insisted that I bring you back home presto.

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Georges:

Challenger: Georges: Challenger: Georges:

Well, there, sweet companion. . . for the time being, I am far from being done with all the life that’s going on here. He holds out the parcel. What! You still haven’t opened it? It takes a fair amount of caution, if I may say so. And in those days. . . . Do you fear something like a parcel bomb? Please! Don’t make me say things that you wouldn’t want anyone else to have hushed from you! And do mark that I leave you with the entire responsibility of your assumptions. For, the truth i s. . . I have been through so many tropical torpors, Brain horrors Semantic storms Used so many verbs in the spring of the future In the present of the summer In the imperative of the winter, In the imperative of the autumn. I have been through red fire, I have swallowed purple pills, I have chewed some. . . What’s their name again, those flowers with orange bells, as crispy as pizza crusts?

Challenger: Georges:

Hem! With a m otion o f his mouth. Ok then. May the bubbling torrents of octopus ideas and one-eyed algae that stew in my heart of hearts overflow and cover all things. But, enough emotion, tender Challenger, I’ve had enough of your standing here, sheepishly listening to me, you drive me nuts and bolts.

He holds out a huge gun and starts firing in the air.

S o cra te s

Georges:

Challenger:

181

Away you go, villain! Or it will be the end of you. Let’s go! A fair amount of soup and to bed! And give the certified copy of my feelings to Carmen loud and clear. Precisely, she had thoroughly insisted that I . . . .

Gunshots again, this time aiming at Challenger’s legs. Georges: Challenger: Georges: Challenger: Georges:

Challenger:

Georges: Challenger: Georges: Challenger:

Georges: Challenger: Georges:

Challenger:

We know your tricks, you scoundrel! The bugger is going for my legs! Me, a mere messenger. Have mercy, mercysir, have mercy. Derisively. Mercysir! Mercy sir who? With a ceremonious bow : With your permission, I figure . . . . There ain’t no father figure or mother figure anymore, not as long you haven’t poured your heart out, my good man. So, back to steerage. And first, port. What can you see? From port, I see the tundra’s heart beating wildly. I see the chamois on the top and brim of laws, I see the gossamer sparrow and the tarantella mozzarella, I see . . . . Here, right in front of you! Damn! Right h e re -he points to him self -w hat is there that you can see? Hem! Avanti, popolo! What I see here, Master? But with no hesitation and no stooge, I see you, quite simply you, in your unflinching splendour, both unmatched and unequalled. Isn’t that just great? Pure wool! And with a handsome model, I grant you that. But me who what? Aside. The bugger! He’s trying to trap me! Come, speak boldly, regardless of my opinion and if you have something better to say, you’ll have my blessing, I promise. I wouldn’t be so surprised if your views turned out to be better than mine, for you seem to have studied these questions and learnt from the lessons of the other. When the salting came Salazar

182

Felix Guattari Went to meet With Balthazar Hola, Caesar!. . .

Georges:

You’re evading my questions, you fool! Will you answer? Am I, or am I not the ultimate destination of this parcel? And there’s no room for any mistaking, for you could presto become the final destination of the present bullet.

Showing his pistol. Countdown: 7, 5, 14, 8, 3, 2 . . . The bom bing starts again. Challenger: Georges:

That’s it! You’re Socrates! Have it your way, scum! I didn’t quite hear you, say it again. And double-quick or I’ll blow your brains out!

There is som e shy knocking at the door, which is soon follow ed by by various sounds o f pipes coming from the opposite wall. This gives way to new, louder sounds from the ceiling. It all combines to form a kind o f symphony. Georges stands up cautiously and goes to look through the keyhole. H e turns the lock as noiselessly as possible and comes back to his seat. Georges:

W hispering. At first, I hadn’t taken it really seriously. Those things, you think that it will always be soon enough to think them through again. Moreover, in those days, I was still chased by that pack of children who cried out to me, from morning to night: ‘Hola! Father Hemlock, aren’t you going to open your parcel?’ So I would turn around, good-humouredly, and threaten them: ‘Just you wait, scoundrels, wait until I catch one of you!’ They went and came like a flock of robins. But the day when there was no one and nothing . . . .

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Scratching at the door. Carmen:

With a plaintive voice. Open, I beg you. Open, I know you’re in there!

The phone rings. G eorges’s gaze goes from the door to the phone that is on the floor, and back again. He tiptoes his way to the phone, lifts up the receiver and puts it down without bothering to listen to it. Georges:

It feels like it’s all starting up again!

Crystal clear voices seem to be raining from different sides: Chorus: Multiple voices: Georges:

A B C D time has come. . . when time’s up . . . it’s not time . . . when time's up Daglock, clock, knock, flock, lovelock, hemlock, wedlock, unlock, Sherlock. . . Where was I? Yes, at first, I always came back without frowning to the cracking that they would later describe as essential: CRACK DIMENSION NO HESITATION This is all very nice, but, then, you’re kind of stuck there. And meanwhile, I heard the echo of the nagging nag of the poor postman's despair or, to put it differently, it was like the bursting of all possible factorial analysis, what others had hurriedly linked to the fall from the post horse, which is famously crucial in the monograph of ‘Little Hans’.

Som eone kicks in the door. Georges leans against it to prevent it from being destroyed. Carmen: Georges! Georges darling! Open to your Candy Carmen. Come back to me, don't leave me! You'll be my Socrates for life and I'll be your tarantella for the

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Felix Guattari weekends. And every now and then, I swear to you, I’ll hallow thy name, oh, my Socrates! The only object of my impact!

She puts her ear to the door, as Georges starts whispering again. Georges:

Apparently, nothing proves that this is actually hemlock. There’s no tag on it, after all! Let’s suppose it is though, we can’t be sure that the bloody parcel was really addressed to me in vino veritas. We can’t be sure that Postman Lanky wasn’t the king of cheats and, supposing, just supposing, that the name here on the label is indeed Socrates, we still have to prove with no manipulation whatsoever that the applicant is indeed recto verso the one that’s here talking to you Ladies and Gentlemen, and moreover that he-had-alwaysbeen-that, that is, that he was a man, and to top it off, that he was mortal and all that comes with that. Therefore, during that time, you must realize that. . . (He gives the finger) I’m taking to my heels! Especially since we’ve left aside the question of whether it is possible to be a man without being mortal and vice versa, to be mortal without being a man, which is a lot less economical, I grant it, but there's no avoiding that you'll always have variations galore, all you can eat, and even, in the most extreme cases, it would have been seriously wise to actually give me some hemlock, but we should have checked in good time: PRIMO that it was safo, of the Conium maculatum type, not Aethusa cynapium or dog parsley, or sweet-and-sour-to-wash-itdown and, SECUNDO, that I hadn't myself been mithridatparalized in my suckling days or by a habit contracted while ambling around the world. And if they relentlessly told me that I moaned so much about the soup that someone would eventually think something about myself, vergogno! I would say to them, in vitro and in p eto , that even facing them and without hindsight I would always have the liberty to come back to the shortest way, that is, speaking from a phenomenological point of view: what is that little thing our lives come down to? A something outside

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185

surrounded by a certain quantity of something inside. Presumably! Or if you’d rather, an outward doubled with some kind of interiority. That’s not bad, boy! It has the same hard-on as Archimedes’s lever. From then on, you can gather the ins and outs of why I fell pregnant. For, beware, my friends, no one ever speaks about that thing here! It has become, sort of, one two three, Totem and Taboo. But let us just suppose-a simple supposition, that we tie it back to that story, a medley of a story, with a clown’s knickers and with my sister who has a bun in the oven! Mehr licht! Yet another bountiful idea! They give you three caskets: that of the body-jug to pour life (he puts his hand on his stom ach), that of the gloom-room that is besieged by that mad woman (he points to the door behind which Carmen is still restless) and that of the hemlock to see the spry old birds through (he pretends to drink a cup). Alleluia, come down Yahweh! Bring down dawn and some phylum to unfreeze what’s coming next. . . The ceiling tumbles down under the weight o f Challenger who is dressed up as an American soldier. The strings o f his parachute keep him hanging in the air. Georges: Carmen: Challenger:

Georges:

Oh my! You again! From outside: What’s the matter with you my angel? You’re not hurt, are you? Would you like me to call the firemen? Telling him not to reveal anything with his forefinger on his mouth. Hush. H e now points to his ears: Mission Alcibiade: I have come incognito. Turning in Carm en’s direction: Don’t you worry, ginger, everything’s ok.

Georges climbs on a chair to try and take Challenger o f f his h ook but the latter pushes him away. Challenger:

Let me do this, it’s a rising model.

Challenger now shows what he meant and uses a rem ote control to go up and down. Then he starts twisting and turning above the parcel.

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Georges:

Carmen:

Challenger:

Georges: Challenger: Georges:

We can see what the little bastard is driving at. So that’s why he had come back to see me. I’m such a scatterbrain: I thought he wanted to take care of my transcendence! But why do they all make such a fuss about the bloody grinding process of the partial object! Georges! My beloved Socrates, I sense that you’re hiding something from me. Will you open to me, psychoram a m io ? Whispering. Don’t do anything! It’s probably a trick from the left. I’d rather you gave me the th in g -he points to the parcel with his foot. Quick! I still have quite a bit of shopping to do: the night is coming and the shops will close. H e goes up and down impatiently. Stubbornly refusing. There is no reason to do this! There is no reason to do this! It could only upset me! Cut the crap: if you’re a French patriot, you have to give it to the American scholars. By Jove! And in no time they’ll be coming up with some devilish object!

Challenger is gesticulating like a m ad man while ordering him to remain silent. Georges:

After Star Wars, the logo war! That’s where one hundred years of Lacanism took us! But as far as I know, the Saussurian Conventions of Geneva haven’t ruled out the use of signifying gases have they?

Challenger, in one final effort, manages to grasp the parcel with his feet and starts to rise. Georges:

Stop! Not so fast! Sign a receipt or, at least, an acquittal, and I’ll go and join him on the road of sex, join him in the alembic of sex!

Georges holds on to Challenger’s leg; they both disappear through the ceiling while Carmen keeps on whining, desperately banging on the door.

Note 1. Translation by Solene Nicolas. © Bruno, Emmanuelle, Stephen Guattari, Fonds Guattari, IMEC.

Guattari and Japan

Toshiya Ueno

Abstract Revisiting Guattari’s visits to Japan in the 1980s during the country’s ‘bubble economy’, this paper investigates from a personal perspective the Radio Homerun mini-FM station as well as other stops on Guattari’s Tokyo ‘pilgrimage’. Guattari’s reception and influence in Japan is contextualised through the writer Kobo Abe and philosopher Kiyoteru Hanada, in addition to the groundbreaking work of Tetsuo Kogawa, against the backdrop of the rise of postmodernism. Similarities between Guattari’s sense of Japan and Brazil are then broached. Keywords: Japan, free radio, mini-FM, bubble economy It is well known that Felix Guattari was so fascinated by Japan that he visited the country several times. This essay aims to explore the conceptual and political meaning of his interest in Japan. Of course, given that his works could never be reduced to ‘Japanology’ in any sense, the scope of this paper must also be deployed in a broader sense. His address of Japan, for instance, is to be interpreted along with his positive assessment and almost enthusiastic regard for Brazil. Even in his interviews and workshops held throughout Brazil, Guattari frequently draws on Japan and posits various comparisons with Tokyo. Both societies are for him quite symptomatic cases that consist of a strange mixture between modernity and archaism (pre-modernity at least) (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 453-4, 457). The second section will look at two key Japanese intellectuals who came before Guattari, but who develop concepts that overlap with his: Kobo Abe and Kiyoteru Hanada. Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 187-209 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0057 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Toshiya Ueno

I. ‘Micro-political Pilgrim’: Guattari’s Visits to Japan During his visit to Japan in 1985, Guattari joined in ‘a political excursion’ wandering around downtown Tokyo. This was organised by Gen Hirai, an anarchist writer and friend of Ryuichi Sakamoto (a well-known international musician and ex-member of Yellow Magic Orchestra) stretching back to their days in the high-school student movement in the late 1960s. As part of his ‘fieldwork’, Guattari visited our tiny pirate station, Radio Homerun, in order to have a discussion about cultural politics in the street, slum and (post-)media situation of Japan. Due to the strict regulation of the airwaves, free radio in Japan was only allowed to broadcast inside a radius of one kilometre; this is the reason why it is called ‘mini-FM’. This also enabled us to invent the post-(mass-)media concept of ‘narrow-casting’, which differs significantly from the conventional idea of broadcasting in mass media. A critic and media theoretician, Tetsuo Kogawa, a friend of Guattari, who had introduced the political theory of Italian Autonomia and practice of free radio into Japan in the early 1980s, did not join the fieldwork with Guattari despite their regular correspondence. Strangely enough, although Francois Dosse’s (2007) biography of Deleuze and Guattari dedicated an entire section to the reception of their philosophy in Japan, he never mentions him. Kogawa invented the term ‘informational capitalism’ (Jyoho Shihon Shyugi), which can roughly be understood as a synonym of semio-capitalism, in order to criticise all strains of neo-liberal deregulation in the economy, gentrification in urbanism, and control in (mass) media. Even Guattari’s typewritten manuscript of the book he wrote with Negri, Communists L ike Us (1990), was delivered to Kogawa by ‘snail’ mail in 1984. Kogawa’s (1984) name was constantly raised during the excursion, however. In my view, at that time, he seemed sceptical about this excursion and tried to distance himself from the rising current of postmodernism and its accompanying political apathy in Japan. Kogawa had already criticised the manner of introducing Deleuze and Guattari’s works into Japan since its very early stage from the late 1970s. He contended that the Deleuze and Guattari boom in Japan was deeply based on the discursive formation of an apolitical climate, that is, an inclination to ‘Deleuze & Guattari minus activism’, or ‘Deleuze without Guattari’. The same holds true for the Anglophone world, despite Slavoj Zizek’s (2004) complaint about a ‘Guattarised Deleuze’. Zizek calls Guattari a delirious thinker tripping within an ‘interpretive delirium’ (191). I am tempted to use the term ‘Deleuze Guattariser’ against the

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Figure 1. Felix Guattari (centre right, seated) and the author (near left, seated) at Radio Homerun in Tokyo, 2 7 November 1985. (Photo: Toshiyuki M aeda, reproduced by permission.)

grain woven by Zizek, because it figures Guattari as a creative catalyser of Deleuzian thought and philosophy in terms of micro-politics and molecular revolution in a pragmatic sense. The Guattarian thesis that ‘before Being there is politics’ should be recalled here as a clue for thinking of multiplicity within the machinic unconscious. Seen from Kogawa’s critical perspective, the majority of interpreta­ tions of Deleuze and Guattari by Japanese audiences seemed to com­ pletely lack a linkage with politics and activism. Despite his insightful, rich but slightly provocative socio-philosophical interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari, Kogawa’s works have been known exclusively in media-art scenes, as pieces not by a theoretician but by a micro-radio performing artist (Fuller 2005; Berardi [2007] 2010). As a member of Radio Homerun, and a graduate student of social philosophy, I also participated in this ‘political pilgrimage’, visiting the Sanya district, a notorious slum in Tokyo, from where many precarious workers were sent to thousands of workplaces of urban construction, including nuclear power plants, coordinated by local Yakuza (Japanese mafia) agents. The term ‘pilgrimage’, utilised by Guattari, derives from the assassination of a filmmaker engaged with producing a documentary

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film featuring homeless, precarious workers in this area (see Genosko 2007; Guattari 2007). The following year Yakuza assassinated our guide for that day, Kyouichi Yamaoka, on the street in Shinjuku. My report below is not merely a narration of empirical facts, although some lines reflect our experience directly, but rather is concerned with the more conceptual and philosophical issues around Guattari’s thoughts at the time. As Guattari himself realised, there was a certain degree of conflict among the participants and even organisers of the excursion: an uneasy balance existed between postmodern writers/publishers and political/media activists. Guattari sensed a difficult tonality from the atmosphere. He proclaimed during his presentation, ‘Amazing, we are like a small conflict zone traversing Tokyo!’ Certainly, this echoes his own statement such as ‘we are all groupuscules’ as well as Deleuze’s remark that ‘Felix was a man of groups, of bands or tribes, and yet he is a man alone, a desert populated by all these groups and all his friends, all becomings’ (Deleuze 2006: 12-13). However, on the occasion of his second visit in Japan, the speculative (so-called ‘bubble’) economy had peaked. And, surprisingly, his third visit was subsidised by a major department store (Seibu Group). He even appeared in an advertisement for Suntory Whisky in the Nikkei Newspaper in April 1987! In the essay concerning his second visit to Japan entitled ‘Tokyo, the Proud’, Guattari did not hide his enthusiasm for both Japan and Brazil in terms of a coming cultural revolution, which could provide ‘a kind of huge cyclotron of production of mutant subjectivities’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 453-4). His expectation of Brazil was not really betrayed by its history, but contrary to his belief, Japan did not become ‘the northern capital of the emancipation of the Third World’. Lula, a politician with whom Guattari was sympathetic, for instance, became the president of Brazil later and his party (PT) retains in power there today. But Guattari’s ‘vertigo of another Japanese way’ takes another vector in this world, even though it never exhibits an image of revolution, but of regression or involution in the form of infancy through a series of info-aided addictions and mental illnesses. Often represented by manga, anime and computer games, this nevertheless has a potentiality as micro-politics in the era of post-media. ‘Japanisation’ in popular cultural consumption, which made Tokyo the capital of anti-revolution or a ‘cyclotron’ for a regressive subjectivity, still haunts this globe. Of course, the bizarre hype around ‘Cool Japan’ no longer prevails because of the long economic recession and its adjunct mental

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stagnation, and especially in the aftermath of the recent big earthquake and its subsequent nuclear crisis in 2011. Becoming-child (or just remaining a ‘mature youth’) in Japanese society is a kind of imperative imposed on people as the regulation of molar bio-politics, which sometimes misleadingly results in an essentialism about the particularity of Japanese culture that is celebrated as a peculiar ‘animalisation’ of mankind in Japan (and in the United States), from a pseudo-Hegelian view on the end of history (courtesy of Alexandre Kojeve); or, is critically articulated in the term ‘infantile capitalism’ used by Akira Asada (1989: 274) in comparison with the ‘elder capitalism’ of Europe and ‘adult capitalism’ of America. In contrast to such theses, in Guattari’s view, the notion of childhood is not always ascribed to a negative moment but rather retains a positive implication. Guattari often evaluates the capacity of people, especially their infancy or childhood, as a sort of creative madness composed of machinic differentiation (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 458-9). Putative Japaneseness is radically deconstructed and transferred to his interest in a mixture between archaism (pre-modernity) and hyper-modernity, the molar and molecular. Guattari had already recognised a paradoxical appearance of the molecular process of production of subjectivity within Japanese society that is normally regarded as a whole molar process. He even envisioned the threshold of negotiation between the molecular and molar in the most vulgar part of everyday life of Japan. For instance, after business hours employees in firms (Sarariman) - mostly consisting of men-gather with their colleagues and even boss(es) to drink, talk and eat. During his excursion, Guattari questioned me about this tiny spectacular chaos, asking whether there is something in common with queer culture in such a gathered-drinking ritual. The same question goes for presentday gatherings of male geek (Otaku) subcultures. Although my response to him was, and still is, negative-‘just because these are completely dependent on homosocial masculinity’ - I must admit some potential exists for traversing processes of both the molecular and molar in such a quasi-socio-dramatic process in Japanese society.

II. Betise of the Left During this gathering, Akira Asada, the top postmodernist attributed with introducing poststructuralism in Japan, undertook the crucial role of moderator and reliable transcriber. In this discussion Asada endorsed a more orthodox approach of trade union-based struggle, evident in

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the term ‘betise of the Left’ and to deny the potentiality of post-media cultural movements such as free radio. His intention was straightforward and rather simply modernist. He was also sceptical of the ‘humanistic’ tone in the discourse of alternative media, contra Kogawa, that seemed for Asada dependent on a strange mixture between phenomenology (phenomenological Marxism) and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. In several interviews with Guattari, Kogawa repeatedly questioned him about the role of phenomenology in conceptualising machinic assemblages-in part because of his involvement with the Telos Group in New York city, once a stronghold of phenomenological Marxism in the United States. But there is still room to consider this point: at least, Guattari also presupposed a ‘machinic phenomenology’ in explaining a pragmatics of assemblages in The Machinic Unconscious: a pragmatics of assemblages does not presuppose a phenomenology of essences or a phenomenology of existents, but instead a machinic phenom­ enology taking account of every entity escaping the subject’s immediate consciousness to the extent that it presents a definitive degree of machinic consistency (‘purely’ theoretical consistency, experiential consistency, aesthetic, fantastical, etc . . . ) . (2011: 190)

Put simply, Kogawa’s position seemed for Asada to be influenced by the theory of alienation that tended to regress to ‘humanism’, precisely because this view shared an idea of the ‘living world [lifeworld]’ (Lebenswelt) or the pre-linguistic human-body as a conceptual safety zone of leftist discourse and a narrative of emancipation. For Guattari, subjectification within a machinic phenomenological support would be entirely self-constructed by whatever is convenient and ‘at hand’. In D ifference and Repetition (1994) (the fifth postulate of the third chapter), Deleuze contended that, insofar as individuation can neither give a background nor a form to thought, betise is just an interaction between thought and individuation, which traverses the ego/self by constituting the cognitive through what is not recognised, that is, unknown. Betise is always inevitably humanistic-or at least, immanent to humanity - which nevertheless retains an animality or beastly in/human part. In terms of the discussion with Guattari, the ‘betise of the Left’ should be read in an affirmative or tactical sense. Both traditional leftism and post-media activism can depart from a mere ‘humanism’ but indicate a reverse side of humanity as ‘betise, or the notion of humanism as becoming-animal or -imperceptible’. Guattari moderately intervened in this topic by suggesting that people, under oppression in a broad sense, are condemned to marginalisation

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in a condition of betise, rather than provided with critical (collective) intelligence, so as to require a certain assemblage that catalyses relations. The free pirate radio movement, Guattari insisted, can be utilised as one of these catalysers. Asada hesitated to agree completely with this suggestion. Our station, Radio Homerun, was based in a small apartment in Shimokitazawa, near downtown Tokyo. During the discussion, Guattari got hungry and reached his hand to a wrapped rice-ball (Onigili), a popular fast food in Japan. Though a traditional food, this one was bought from a convenience store in the neighbourhood. Usually, each wrapper is made of a piece of cellophane, which needs a specific motion to open by pulling a red ribbon, a feature with which almost all Japanese are familiar. But Guattari could not figure out how to open it by himself, so I exhibited to him the way to unfold the wrap. His astonishment was so serious that he was totally fascinated by the procedure for a while and, after laughing, remarked, ‘This is the very technology!’ Beyond a mere anecdote, it is also possible to recognise in this a core of Deleuze and Guattari’s significant conception in his surprise, for instance, a folding/unfolding/refolding of an incorporated body and existential territory.

III. Translocal Comparison for a Deleuze Guattariser To focus on the potentiality of the ‘raving’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 457) thinker or ‘Deleuze Guattariser’, and drawing from Guattari’s interest in Japan, this essay will embark upon a comparative approach which intends to think through an unavowable potential alliance of Deleuze and Guattari with Japanese post-war intellectuals. Certainly it does not rely upon an empirical perspective to create a work of conventional comparative cultural theory but rather draws on what I call a ‘translocal’ cultural theory, a term used frequently by Kogawa in his Internet studies, but also by scholars working in diaspora studies. The term ‘translocal’ is utilised in this essay to suggest that as detailed, singular moments are dug in and out of any local site, something common emerges from within. ‘Translocal’ indicates a horizon that overcomes local limits and inverts the borders within different cultures. The translocal perspective is distinguished conceptually from both globalism and regionalism (localism). Unlike the universal current of global political economy (and its geopolitics), it tends to focus on a

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singularity that is cooperative with transversality among heterogeneous moments, even under driving forces of unification such as globalisation. Interpreting Guattari through some notions in Japanese post-war thought, and, conversely, reading Japanese literature or critical theory in terms of Guattarian philosophy, this twofold attitude is a crucial part of the following section of this essay. This attempt focuses upon unknown transversal alliances that result from a ‘textual unconscious’ rather than an intertextual relation.

IV. Abe and Hanada Japanese novelist Kobo Abe (1924-93), whose works have been translated into numerous languages, is known for the similarity of his fiction with the literature of Kafka. In many respects, most of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of Kafka can be applied to the interpretation of Abe: losing face, minor literature (jamming and stuttering in the mother tongue), and cartography, etc. Moreover, Guattari referred to Abe in his essay ‘Tokyo, the Proud’, which was compiled in the book Tokyo Gekijou (Tokyo Theater) (1986) after his visit to Tokyo. Guattari addressed Abe’s famous novel, The Ruined Map (2001), in terms of an uncanny cartography of urbanism through the view of a detective wandering through a suburban cityscape, so as to express his impression about Abe’s statement on the slum: ‘Sanya is perhaps less representative of an absolute misery than an irrevocable refusal of the existing order’ (2007: 98). According to journalist Corinne Bret, who was a correspondent with the French daily Liberation and also a friend of Guattari, as well as one of the members of the aforementioned pilgrimage, Guattari had a conversation with Abe about the literature of Kafka and Elias Canetti, etc., first in Paris and then a second time in Tokyo in the 1980s. Therefore, there is evidence that they met, although the details are not yet known. There is another intellectual figure fitting for my attempt at a translocal comparative approach. Kiyoteru Hanada (1909-74), a Japanese dissident leftist critic, was known as an organiser of varied cultural movements in the 1950s and 60s. Kogawa is deeply inspired by him in his elaboration of the notion of post- (mass) media and micro­ politics, although Hanada has remained unknown outside of Japan. During the Second World War (the early 1940s), Hanada survived by contributing to a pro-fascist newspaper, using his excessive rhetoric in order to avoid censorship by the Japanese military regime, and successfully hiding his own leftism. His critical works on cinema,

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literature, art, TV and radio in the post-war period have been accepted as a precursor of cultural and media studies in his emphasis on the active agency of consumer, audience and reader in popular cultural consumption. In Anglophone academia on Japanese studies and literature, Hanada is sometimes introduced as a mentor for Abe but this is not true. Just after the Second World War, Hanada and Okamoto Taro-w ho was a Japanese surreal artist and also known as a member of Acephale, a secret society in Paris during the 1930s, and a close friend of Georges Bataille-began to organise the workshop called the ‘Circle of the Night’ (Yoru no Kai), an avant-garde group which consisted of novelists, artists, filmmakers and critics. Abe was also a member of this experimental workshop. Both Hanada and Abe were attracted by the concept of schizophrenia, as symptomatic gesture that presents ambiguity, ambivalence and double-binds under the formation of capitalism and nationalism. Hanada and Abe may be counted among other artists and intellectuals in the Circle of the Night who were interested in the process of ‘transforming’, that is, ‘becoming’, rather than a mere magical mutation or cultural mimicry of behaviour. Becoming-plant, -animal, -insect and -mineral, etc. is aligned with, but at the same time beyond, the Freudian concept of the death drive, and this was a crucial theme for the avantgarde theory and literature of both Hanada and Abe. These authors deal with metamorphosis, transmutation and transforming in their writings; Abe wrote many stories that address metamorphosis or becomingsanimal, -plants and -materials. Certainly, as Deleuze and Guattari insist, becoming is never about imitation and mutation of what has already existed, nor has it anything to do with the imagery of surrealism or phantasm in psychoanalysis. While granting this point, it is possible to envision ‘becoming-’ within/through the (surrealistic) transmutation into the inhuman, a theme which Abe and Hanada developed in their writings. In his personal draft of Anti-Oedipus, Guattari himself writes: ‘the ultimate meaning of machinic filiation is a sort of surrealism, residues, witness to the impossibility of ‘reducing’ desiring machines’ coded flows (singular infinitives)’ (2006: 183). Hanada asks how can humans become animals, plants or minerals? Or how can these transformed beings turn back into humans? In a more contemporary context, these questions can be paraphrased like this: how can the singularity of humans produce itself in becoming post-human? During and just after the situation of wartime inhumanity, at least Hanada already held a germ of an idea of post-humanity. In his essay ‘The Narrative of Metamorphosis’ in The Spirit o f Revival

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([1946] 1986), this is Hanada’s main question under the wartime fascist regime. Here, he potentially articulated his disguised political conversion from the Left to the R ig h t-if not he did not explain it so literally-as tactical camouflage or pragmatic performative mimicry in ‘passing’, just like a tactical transvestitism of women into soldiers as described in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 237) in the notion of becoming-woman. Hanada envisions the mode of ‘becoming-material, -thing and -object’ (Buttai ni N arukoto) as a task of the proletariat who can fall in love and sympathise with non-living beings and even machines. This figuration is comparable to ‘conceptual persona’ such as the general intellect in Marx’s Grundrisse as a crystallised form of collective intelligence or group-mind. In ‘Objective Materialism’ ([1949] 1971), Hanada writes of how in the process of objectification and reification, subjectivity finds liberation as ‘becoming-object’. It is no wonder that Hanada had an idea that at the edge of self-abandonment one could reclaim and retrieve identity. This passage is not a theory of alienation but rather can be understood as another version of ‘becoming-imperceptible’ in the proximity to other existences, or ‘becoming-material’. He articulates certain units or modules constituted by the correlation between machines and humans under the Fordist formation of production which requires workers to be in tune with assembly lines and assemblages of organisation, for which Hanada adopted the term ‘collage’. Hanada had already engaged with the issue of cyborg-hybridity composed of man-machine in terms of ‘becoming or transmuting animal or plant, and material, etc.’, a becoming which is never reducible to metaphor or imagination but rather is envisioned as the very multiple articulations of heterogeneous moments before and beyond individuality or humanity. In Avant-garde Art (1954), Hanada drew on the ‘law of participation’ by French anthropologist and philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 25) to analyse Kafka’s novel, The M etamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa transforms into a strange beetle. Nevertheless, not only is there supposed to be a certain kind of resemblance, but also an intensive transmutation or mutual incorporation among human and non-human. In shamanistic rituals and totemism, a myriad of metamorphoses are confirmed, which is basically a consequence of pre­ logic (or savage mind) in primitive tribes, a phantasm for a certain schizophrenic process, but even an individual in contemporary society might have such an altered state of mind. The ‘law of participation’ is a principal logic for thought in primitive societies, in which, unlike conventional perception based on a distinction between subject and

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object, the law of participation destabilises and even disturbs perceptions and affects of humans. For Guattari, this notion of participation indicates a collective subjectivity of investing (cathexis) in a certain object, which is meaningful for focusing the singular point of the existential group subject. In some types of literature and philosophy, ‘participation against nature’ is recognised in a radical conceptual modification of LevyBruhl’s term. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari utilised several times a strange term which might derive from this conception, ‘unnatural participation’, by addressing the literature of Lovecraft, Woolf and Hofmannsthal, etc. Writers, authors and philosophers are always engaged with becoming and belonging to something or events through their own writings. Many writers have committed suicide, not because they sought to sacrifice themselves for their own works or for the sake of the world, but as a way of inventing a series of unforeseen alliances within nature, where nature was never posited as an object of correspondence or filiation; that was the reason why the issue in becoming and writing was ‘not pity but unnatural participation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 240). Unlike the evidence of substantial influence among authors or intellectuals presented by positivistic explanation, or the filiation by heredity in the biological world, unnatural participation proceeds with epidemic and contagion as in the case of ‘vampire’, more physically in the conjuncture of a bacterium, a virus and a molecule. I am almost tempted to call it ‘informatic participation’, just because it precedes the emergent or structural combinations. While anthropological concepts of participation could afford the model of symbiosis among different social groups, the notion of ‘unnatural or informatic participation’ might posit a matrix of conviviality in which a variety of cultures - including ‘races’ or ethnicities, and different semiological regimes-could live together. Hanada also elaborated his own minor philosophy by using eth­ nology and anthropology. Although Hanada did not yet know about the development of Internet technology, his posture in critical theory and practice is still very valuable for understanding the contemporary info-socio-environment. Aligning him- or herself with the thinking of materiality, a Guattarian would respond with a vision of the future: the existential territory of human individuation will emerge from a propensity toward inhuman and incorporated universes enabled by the escalation of informational technology, as transfigured in the develop­ ment of the net-based subjectivity, which will then entail the unfolding or opening of animal, plant, mineral, machine and cosmos, etc.

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V. Becoming-Organisation For Deleuze and Guattari ‘becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, and a multiplicity’ (1987: 239). In Hanada’s theory and practice (the same holds for Abe especially in his involvement in literary, theatre and filmmaking circles) mass populations, or simply, folks or crowds, can be grasped as ‘materials’ or ‘objects’ rather than as individual agents. Hanada’s theory of groups and collectivities, deployed in his varied essays on social and cultural activism called ‘the circle movements’ in the late 1950s, consisted of a variety of genres of activity ranging from publishing zines through filmmaking to writing novels or poetry with manual workers in industrial factories, in addition to working with all kinds of corporate firms. As I suggested earlier, Kogawa’s media theory and his initiative of free (pirate) radio activism was inspired by Hanada’s writings and cultural-political activity. Both his attempts to create circle groups and to co-edit informaticdata in expressive assemblages of visual art, cinema, literature, plays, as becoming unforeseen forms of organisation, are closely tied up with a vital resistance, in contrast to readings that might dismiss them as simply lazy or unproductive. It is no wonder that so many activists in the Japanese Communist Party or other leftist initiatives in the post-war period were enthusiastically interested in film and its theories. Such an activity is deployed precisely because it is playful without any ground that is conventionally attributed to ideology. Information, affects and activity all are compiled and translated into the collaboration as a collective ensemble of expressive enunciation. What Hanada tried to deploy in theory and practice around the circle movements in the 1950s has its counterpart in Guattari’s engagement with the institutional psychiatric cure at La Borde, where Guattari strived to have less hierarchical and more flexible relationships between patients, non-medical and medical staff. The subject for Guattari is neither simply an individual ego nor an individuated person but rather is woven by an interactive dynamics consisting of moments of pre-individual and extra-individuation so as to constitute an entangled assemblage of different moments, where each subject is posited itself as a terminal for transition, criss-crossing and networking. ‘Becoming-organisation’, in this context, is interpreted as becoming an agency of collective intelligence or ‘general intellect’, which undertakes the role of catalyst for the emancipation and subversion of the ‘status quo’ of a given society. ‘Becoming-organisation’ does not intend to construct a political party or group with a shared idea,

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but instead, constitutes by gathering through the gesture of rendering organisation more complex and multiple. In Hanada’s essays the term ‘circle’ is frequently utilised with the concept ‘transversalising’ (Sougouka), which echoes Guattari’s crucial notion of ‘transversality’. Usually Sougouka in Japanese is translated as universalising, integration and synthesising. However, Hanada’s notion does not convey the meaning of generalisation or universalisation, but is rather concerned with a dynamics of assemblage, connection, association and collaboration of different genres and regimes of art, discourse and expression, that is, ‘an opposition without synthesis’. What is at stake in his (post-)media theory is the issue of how to integrate pre-modern modes of communication (expressive regimes of oral, dance and gestural communication) with modern technology or contemporary culture in a transversal manner. In order to extend this argument, Hanada addressed disciplines such as ethnography and folklore by combining an emergent sociological media theory with the conceptual resources drawn from anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork and even Surrealist art. His view on the trans-modern or overcoming modernity has a more radical potentiality. Hanada wanted to conceive of a new or trans-modernity through the available resources of pre­ modernity as well as the non-Occidental, which Guattari prefers to call ‘the archaic’. This gesture, however, cannot be reduced to taking a path of regression to the past or ‘Orient’. An anti-modern or anti­ Enlightenment stance is never at issue but rather his critical assessment of the present is always folding moments of the past. Hanada envisions oral communication in folklore, ritual and festival in pre-modern (Japanese) culture and society as tactical or alternative resources for the singular/collective arrangement of enunciation and expressive activity in the future. The conditions of hypermodern or the vision of ‘overcoming modernity’, which should be distinguished from the same term utilised under the Fascist/Imperial regime of Japan in the 1940s, and post-media can arise in a dynamic and practical hybridisation between the pre-modern and modern. In this sense, Hanada’s theory can be seen as a precursor of Guattari’s concept of post-media. The post-media gesture is embodied by a hybridisation of plural media and mongrel mixtures of expressive genres constituted by varied subcultures. Hanada’s re-evaluation of pre-modernity intends to open up alternative possibilities of media, no longer dependent upon ‘printing culture’ (Insatsu Bunka), by deploying ‘airwave culture’ (Dennpa Bunka) based on pre-modern moments such as oral expression (myths or fairy tale) or improvised performance (dance and music). In his

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view, the transversal relationship of various arts may be achieved by the conjuncture between ‘electronic airwave culture’ (Denpa Bunka) and ‘printing culture’, a connective junction that will be treated as a machinic phylum in Guattarian terms. For instance, it is easy to find such a collision between old and new communication in the initiatives and experiments of free radio. In most Euro/American contexts, free or pirate radio (including student or community radio) usually has high-power equipment for broadcasting, which could cover the same range as local corporate stations. In France, after the Socialist Party’s victory in the early 1980s, hundreds of free radios were ‘legalised’ with official licences by the government. As a result of the deregulation of the airwaves, all free radio initiatives were co-opted into corporate forms while losing their radical virtues delivered from illegal or pirate media. Such an ironic recuperation or legalisation of pirate media has never happened in Japan. But due to the particular limitations within both technological and legal conditions of free radio, the micro-radio initiative in Japan (mini-FM) displayed a different potentiality. Because of the very small power of transmission, mini-FM broadcasting could not so much cover wide areas as, instead, constitute a ‘virtual’ extended body connected in a chain (network) of numerous micro-radio stations; admittedly this might sound old wave in the present era of Internet streaming. Putting aside the ‘renaissance’ or re-actualisation of pre-modern (oral or performative) communication in electronic media, the initial spirit of free radio is still open to different dimensions of media technology, which, for instance, have often been observed in open-air techno party scenes and Internet radio streaming of club parties or live gigs. Expressive post-media such as free micro-radio is an unfolding or explication of what expresses itself; in other words, the one manifesting itself as multiplicity, emerging as thousands of Radio Alices or Homeruns, etc. Conversely, the expressive multiplicity assumes a kind of unity, which inclines towards a mutual solidarity or tolerance. Mass media always involves a vector towards the one, whereas post-media relentlessly proliferates existential territories and universes of reference.

VI. Losing Face, Faciality and Masks ‘With Nietzsche, everything is mask,’ Deleuze once proclaimed. This insight is well suited for reading one of Abe’s novels, The Face o f Another (2003). The protagonist is a scientist seriously injured in a laboratory accident in which he lost his face; he tries to recover his

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relationships with others, including his wife, by wearing a mask that is a perfectly undetectable copy of his face. He even attempts to seduce his wife with the mask of another person. In this novel, the face provides the very kernel of politics in which the decomposition of the face is at issue, accompanying a variety of becomings. Through the protagonist’s reflection, Abe contends that the face is a passageway connecting the inside (interiority) and the outside (exteriority) in the sense that the human mind, physiology and formation of subjectivity are herein combined. A face is an entrance of binding, a disjuncture of folding and unfolding of immanent planes, both the inside and outside of human agency. A face is always already a mask, a view that is the main scheme of the novel, whose logic can be explained as an assemblage and abstract machine that enables one to become others. Abe also seems to consider a coupling of face and mask to be a sort of technology, media, supplement and machine, not just an instrument. ‘According to one theory a mask is apparently the expression of an extremely metaphysical aspiration to give oneself a kind of transcendental disguise, for the mask is not simply something compensatory’ (2003: 19). Thus a mask is a machine producing the expressions of a face, while a face as such can function as a mask. For Guattari, losing face is not directly at issue, but the concept of faciality enables us to conceive of defacement or dismantling of a face. Language, by definition, is always indexed on features of the face or faciality. That is the reason why the protagonist in The Face o f Another has to weave different expressions of language for his relentless meditation on his decomposed face and its effects on others. The face belongs to the regime of icons but at the same time is set out in the reterritorialisation of signifying systems. However, faciality is constantly transformed into the a/post/signifying affective regime with its redundancy, insofar as it is operative of a ‘body of the signifier’. From another angle, faciality is a point of departure for a dynamics of deterritorialisation that permits everything else to bring about a line of flight. The production and constitution of a face, which forms an organised body and cuts a head from a body, is a process of significance which escapes from a conventional physiological scheme, that is, a function of signification which is outside the signifying scheme in an organism and deterritorialises the regime or form of communication. Here a face itself emerges as a kind of fetish or simulacra. A face is deployed as a redundancy of signification beyond any meaning of words, or conversely with some lack of signification. A face seems to look like a

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sort of white screen that affords a structural grid of interpretation, while it is emerging as the field for subjectification of affect and meaning, a vital or creative void in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, which engulfs all impressions and expressions, a black hole penetrating an empty spot on a white wall. In the early days of his collaboration with Guattari, well before publishing the chapter on faciality in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze wrote: The movement of betrayal has been defined as a double turning-away: man turns his face away from God, who also turns his face away from man. It is in this double turning away, in the divergence of faces, that the line of flig h t-th at is, the deterritorialisation of m a n -is traced. Betrayal is like theft, it is always double. (2006: 30)

This gesture of betrayal could explain the strange relationship between protagonist and wife in The Face o f Another: he cheats on her and she has an affair with another, knowing his real identity as her husband. It can neither be said that an ethics which cannot evade responsibility to the other precedes politics, nor that, through relentless acts of negation in thinking, a certain absolute is posited beyond each moment of communication. The same holds for Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes (1991) in terms of an uncanny coupling constituted by the protagonist and the woman in the sandpit, which presents a diagrammatic machine to reject the conventional form of loving and conviviality. If we see a radical dynamic rapport and interrelation within the mutual betrayal of faces, then in encountering an exposure of face, we must focus on micro-politics as a relationship of betrayal that is prior to society and ethics. Or rather, it may be said that there is a politics which has priority over ethics. The assumption that the face is political does not intend to prefer politics or ideology to literature or art, but instead to situate betrayal as the primal form of micro-politics at the roots of literature and cultural expression. For both Deleuze and Guattari and Abe, losing face, and mutual betrayal, are the condition of literature and writing as such. This novel shows that one has to lose one’s own identity and face for the advent of singularity in which to disappear, becoming imperceptible, indiscernible and unknown. Such an idea was already present in Hanada’s early essay, ‘The Expression of the Mask’ ([1949] 1971: 44), in which quoting Nietzsche, the mask is a way to the discovery of one’s true face. For Deleuze, the concept of mask has always been a reference point, in which everything can be a mask with Nietzsche, for whom his health as such is a first

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and significant mask for his genius, and, in turn, whose suffering also becomes a mask for both his genius and health. The same can be said for the protagonist of The Face o f Another. It is helpful to refer to this passage because of a fundamental paradox that the revelation of true (face) is deduced from a mask. If a moralist hates a mask, then instead a mask holds a certain ethics, because envisioning a mask leads to delivering the freedom of play and the capacity to disguise, as well as taking responsibility to affect the will and desire of others beyond the distinction between good and evil (Saldanha 2005). During the Second World War, fanatic nationalists and Japanese ideologues seemed for Hanada to be wearing inappropriate masks to address their identity. Both Bororo tribesmen and Japanese nationalists have something in common in this respect. Hanada thinks that a particularity of Japanese culture may not only be ascribed to something Japanese, but at the same time, is always the effect inspired by the West (through culture, technology and economy). Their entanglement is an objective reality of Japaneseness. Even contemporary hype such as Cool Japan or cute (kawaii) culture amidst globalisation is evoked as an example: these have nothing to with a Japanese cultural essence or originality but, by themselves, are a result of circulation, intersection and translation driven by global capital. Hanada’s insight just after the war does not indicate any sense of eclecticism between the Japanese and the Western. His point in this essay can be summarised like this: a mask can be a clue to reaching the exposure of the ‘real’ face, just as a hypothesis is a prerequisite for scientific discourse. Fanatic nationalism in Japan, for Hanada, seems to reveal a kind of symptom of schizophrenia during wartime. Put differently, the inadequate mask was mistaken for the interaction between concealment and defacement of the constructed ‘true’ face. Hanada seeks to convince us that fanatic Japanese ideologists share a similar attitude with both schizophrenics and tribal peoples. Hanada applied again the ‘law of participation’ of Levy-Bruhl to explain the ethnocentrism of wartime Japan through the logic of the mask. Fanatic ethno-centrists and nationalists were crazy about searching for their ‘real’ (proper) face, and under the law of participation, A can be A at the same time being not-A, a status which Hanada called ‘schizophrenic’. He insists that a self-identity can always exist and appear by detaching from oneself. The mutual exchange and substitution between the Eastern and Western, the Orient and Occident, for Hanada, is focused as an actual issue of thought. But is it dialectical? Certainly, Deleuze’s philosophy is defined as the philosophy of anti­ dialectic, the evidence of which is hard to deny, even though Deleuze can

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be called ‘a thinker of synthesis’ (Jameson 2009: 182), but Guattari’s position is more complicated and subtle. Guattari’s ambiguous position with regard to the dialectic is closer to Hanada’s. Beyond a conventional mode of dialectic in the Marxist sense, Hanada had already posited the very contemporary-if you prefer ‘postmodern’ -concept of dialectics, called the ‘dialectics without synthesis’ that is also called the ‘dialectics without ends’ or ‘endless dialectics’ which Jacques Derrida once utilised for his deconstructive interpretation of Georges Bataille in terms of his concept of general economy, which raised the model of dialectics with a lack of integration, synthesis and telos. The strange dialectics of Hanada is defined as an attempt to traverse both sides of opposing terms by preventing the very opposition from integrating, or what may be called conflict without synthesis. There is a commonality between Guattari’s complicated relationship with the notion of dialectics, and all kinds of ‘diamat’ type of thought including Sartre’s philosophy, in which he posits himself as an anti-systemic or a-systemic thinker. Guattari pointed towards a liquidation and fragmentation of dialectics in terms of enduring yet functional antagonisms (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 237). This strange ‘dialectic without synthesis’ is, in A Thousand Plateaus (Guattari 1987: 330), articulated within the conception of the abstract machine.

VII. Refrain and Crystallisation No one can deny a link between thinking and rhythm; without rhythm, neither thinking nor living is possible. It is significant to see tonality, musicality and repetitive beats in this respect. Life goes on, ‘terrifyingly repetitive’, considering heartbeats and ritual practices. Certainly, Guattari (2011: 146) was not the first to think rhythm, which he admitted by referring to the philosophy of Ludwig Klages. It is remarkable that Hanada also thought of the significance of rhythm in the humanities. Addressing the nonsense in Alice in Wonderland and M other G oose in Avant-garde Art (1954), Hanada introduced an opposition between ‘interior reality’ and ‘exterior reality’. The former indicates the drive of the unconscious or subconscious, that is distinct from a mere psychological reality; whereas the latter represents ‘the very reality of material things’, called simply ‘the outside’, and contains a dark side that has not so far been grasped by consciousness. It resembles the Lacanian Real, insofar as it is difficult or almost impossible to reach. Exterior reality as the outside world or materiality is no less ‘nonsense’ than interior reality. Avant-garde artists and thinkers,

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in Hanada’s perspective, should not fear facing up to an irrationality and absurdity of exterior reality as such, because one has to regard the exterior world by the gaze which has so far been poured into the interior reality. The same holds true for post-media activists in contemporary society, insofar as exterior reality should not simply be reduced to practical or empirical reality. In this context, Hanada presents a similar conception to the machinic unconscious, in which the turn from the interior to the exterior never constitutes a return to empirical factual reality, but instead a recursive turn that appropriates the way of tracing interior reality for pursuing exterior reality. Herein something emerges akin to the Deleuzian fold. Abe’s famous short story, D endorocacalia (1973), must also be interpreted in this respect, in which the surface and inside, the exterior and interior of the body of the protagonist, Mr Common, is turning upside down by becoming a plant called D endorocacalia in an uncanny reversibility. Certainly the plant in this novel provides us with the issue of the double, which is never merely a projection of his interiority but is an interiorisation of exteriority, an eruption or intrusion of the outside. A turn or fold between exteriority and interiority, Hanada insists, has a close affinity to music and rhythm in thinking, where an improvisational performativity holds a crucial point that can be observed in jazz or gestures in the theatre play of com m edia dell’arte. By making disjunctive links, rather than correspondences, among the concrete objects delivered from the exterior into the interior through a series of metaphors, analogies and rhetorical figures, thought is becoming ‘musical’ so as to create repetitive beats like in the syncopation or ragtime of some music genres. Hanada contended that ‘musical thought’ and ‘filmic thought’ as machinic expressions converge and intersect with each other in various arts. Deleuze and Guattari can say here, ‘a color will ‘answer to’ a sound’ (1987: 330). In the machinic beauty (KikaiBi) rather than the beauty of nature, or in the expression of machinic reproduction such as film or popular music rather than drawing pictures or sculpturing, rhythmic thought emerges as a hinge of a turn from interior to exterior, which is a resource for Hanada to read the interior reality incorporated within the nonsense of exterior reality. When Hanada thinks about the relationship between repetitive rhythm and social organisation, the issue of the refrain is front and centre. Refrain is part of the movement and dynamics of repetitive heterogeneity, which is raised to a sort of stop motion of dialecticaloppositional movement. Refrain as repetition within Hanada’s endless dialectic is not a doubling of the same or the identical, but a redundant

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duplication of the other, insofar as it does not reproduce the identity, but just repeats the other. The refrain provides the existential territory for the collective assemblage of expression, such as avant-garde art and literature, that is a great resource for contemporary tactical media experiments. Hanada conceives of crystallisation as transformative organisation. Hanada was interested in the process of transfiguration from something inorganic to organic. In Two Worlds ([1949] 1989), Hanada asks how can the stiff, ordered structure of society turn into a more vital, flexible and infinitely complex organisation? He then invokes the concept of crystallisation, as in the case of a generating organism passing through a crystal in the natural world, as the period of transition or transformative epoch for revolution or evolution. In a more contemporary context, especially in the era of digital media and network technology, the process of organisation and production shapes something analogical to the biological, so as to bring about an autonomic organic system that is comparable with both human and social nerve systems. Any group or firm can be treated theoretically as a quasi-living organism, especially in the post-Fordist formation of immaterial and cognitive-affective labour, with which Hanada’s intuition is aligned (Pasquinelli 2008). The crystallised structure of matters/substances communicates and transmits itself by reproducing a form, which is delivered through components of atomic or molecular particles, while in the case of animals or plants, the transmission is accomplished by a serial metabolism through genetic codes. Even our cognitive process for various info-environments is enabled by an effect of crystallisation of actual percepts and virtual objects. The situation of informatic reality as such is defined as a crystallised conjuncture of exteriority and interiority in Hanada’s perspective. The image we grasp in watching cinema and television emerges as the crystallisation of dynamics between what has already been projected and what is going to be projected. For Hanada, cinema was not a mere metaphor to explain our cognitive reality; rather, the pragmatics of the image in audiovisual media could provide the very constitution of reality. The same may be said for the potentiality of the net culture and electronic media, which can appropriate a wide range of resources from different types of media that predate computer-aided technology. In other words, the reality or situation crystallises a criss­ crossing conjunction between the actual and the virtual. For Guattari, an abstract machine is always in charge of transforming or deterritorialising matter and flow that is constituted of crystals of potentiality catalysing virtual connections. In his understanding and definition, crystallisation is

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a process that passes through an infinite series of expressive assemblages linking discursive actual moments with non-discursive virtual moments. Usually the possible is understood as an equivalent of ‘dynamis’ in the lineage of Greek philosophy, such as that of Aristotle, and considered to be a primal material potentiality waiting for deployment in reality, ‘energeia’, as a form of embodiment in/of this world. Among the plural possibilities embedded within this pure potentiality, one is opted for as the reality of random choices, which nevertheless is retroactively conceived as a destiny or fate for human agency. It should be remarked, however, that the possible in Guattari’s conception proceeds in a different way. Within the ongoing reality deployed here and now, other options of the possible are always already functioning. That is the reason why the notion of the virtual is evoked here in both Guattari and Hanada’s thought, in which the virtual as pure potentiality is constantly operative within this ongoing world as the actual. When one finds some figurations of animals or somebody’s facial traits in the shape of clouds or constellation of stars, one comes across the indexes of ontological crystallisation, which generate and modulate heterogeneities. Herein faciality as an abstract machine can make a concrete face from within the crystal of possibility. Put simply, Guattari posited an idea of the economy of the possible, which is determinant and operative in the affects, material scarcity, desires and empirical percepts, etc. In his thought the virtual can transverse the real, and the possible, the actual. If we consider his idea of chaos or chaosmosis, which is neither a simple confusion nor indifference, but a singular ontological weft-chaos as ‘sieve’ - i t is from within delirium or ecstasy that a nucleic point may be extracted and articulated, such as an ultimate awareness in Zen which, in my mind, Guattari himself exemplified. In this way both Guattari and Hanada conceived of crystals of pos­ sibility which could weave singular points of ontological crystallisation by generating their own organisation and producing something other than themselves in modulating heterogeneities. As the result or effect of crystallisation between the possible universe and the actual situation, both grappled with the chiasmic cutting edge of the virtual and the real as the point of singularity.

VIII. Conclusion What I have developed in this essay is articulated in the following five points. First, Guattari was very interested in Japan and attracted

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by its putative cultural singularity, which nevertheless is not restricted to a cultural essentialism. Aligned with his affirmative view of Brazil, Guattari sought to find something positive in Japanese society and its tactical micro-media experiments such as mini-FM. Second, it is possible to pose an affinity between Guattari’s philosophy (‘ecosophy’) and certain philosophical approaches adopted by some Japanese post-war intellectuals. In fact, exactly during the period in which Guattari started to engage with his practical and theoretical elaboration of institutional analysis at La Borde, Hanada was engaged in the circle movements and avant-garde experiments. Abe’s literature was also very much indebted to the theoretical articulations of Hanada. Guattari greatly admired Abe and considered him, alongside Beckett and Kafka, as a great analyst of subjectification. Third, Japanese intellectuals who predated the critical analysis of infoculture and globalisation (integrated world capitalism) still provide us with many useful resources, especially for contemporary media activism, and my approach has been to regain their ideas and bring them into the present. Fourth, there is a productive crossover between Guattarian and Japanese thought engaged with the elaboration of idea of an aestheticpolitical perspective that articulated the emergence of post-human becomings. And the last, fifth, both Guattari and Hanada saw the significance of rhythm and refrain for thinking and social action. Gary Genosko once remarked that ‘Guattari himself was a subject group, a collective assemblage, a machinic il rather than a structural personal m oi-je’ (2002: 226). The same can be said about Hanada and Abe’s idea and practices of collaboration and organisation. From this perspective the works by both Hanada and Abe can be utilised as tactical resources for reading Guattari together with Japan. Subjectivity is always a wrecked and failed cogito, while a pragmatic map (perhaps a deviant cartography) emerges from archipelagos in which the conceptual desert islands, such as certain Guattarian insights and some Japanese post-war intellectual production, disjunctively intersect with one other.

References Abe, Kobo (1973) Bunko, 1973. Abe, Kobo (1991) Abe, Kobo (2001) Abe, Kobo (2003)

‘Dendorocacalia’ (1949), in D endorocacalia, Water City: Shincho The Woman in the Dunes, New York: Vintage. The Ruined Map, New York: Random House. The Face o f Another, New York: Vintage.

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Asada, Akira (1989) ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale’, in M. Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds), Postmodernism and Japan, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 271-8. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) [2007] (2010) D ell’innocenza, 1977: I’anno della prem onizione, Kyoto: Rakuhoku Shuppan. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) D ifference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2006) Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam and E. R. Albert, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dosse, Francois (2007) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Biographie croisee, Paris: Le Decouverte. Fuller, Matthew (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA: The M IT Press. Genosko, Gary (2002) Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Continuum. Genosko, Gary (2007) ‘Introduction to “Tokyo, the Proud” ’, Deleuze Studies, 1(2), pp. 93-6. Guattari, Felix (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. K. Gotman, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix (2007) ‘Tokyo, the Proud’, trans. Gary Genosko and Tim Adams, Deleuze Studies, 1(2), pp. 96-9. Guattari, Felix (2011) The Machinic Unconscious, trans. T. Adkins, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix and Suely Rolnik (2008) M olecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix and Antonio Negri (1990) Communists L ike Us: N ew Spaces o f Liberty, N ew Lines o f Alliance, New York: Semiotext(e). Hanada, Kiyoteru (1954) Avant-Garde Art (Abangyarudo Geijyutsu), Tokyo: Shinzenbisha. Hanada, Kiyoteru [1949] (1971) Adventure and Opportunism (Bouken to Hiyorimi), Tokyo: Sojyusha. Hanada, Kiyoteru [1946] (1986) The Spirit o f Survival (Fukkouki no Seishin), Tokyo: Kodansha. Hanada, Kiyoteru [1949] (1989) Two Worlds (Futatsu no Sekai), Tokyo: Kodansha. Jameson, Fredric (2009) The Valences o f the Dialectic, London: Verso. Kogawa, Tetsuo (1984) ‘Beyond Electronic Individualism,’ available at http:// anarchy.translocal.jp/non-japanese/electro.html (accessed 11 January 2012). Pasquinelli, Matteo (2008) Animal Spirits: A Bestiary o f the Commons, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Institute of Network Cultures. Saldanha, Arun (2005) Psychedelic White: G oa Trance and the Viscosity o f Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zizek, Slavoj (2004) Organs without Bodies, London: Routledge.

Guattari TV, By Kafka

G ary Genosko

Abstract Guattari looked for crossovers between film and television in a posthumously published ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’. His critical comments on television and the mixed reception of television within the Deleuzo-Guattarian literature provide the occasion for an investigation of what Guattari thought television could do for his project. The auteur model best suits his needs in this regard, with the proviso that it is animated by a modernist aesthetic oriented towards the conjuring of a people to come who would join the Kafka assemblage as part of their viewing experience. Keywords: Kafka, television, auteur, modernism, minor A heap of stones is not a machine, whereas a wall is already a static proto­ machine, manifesting virtual polarities, an inside and outside, an above and below, a right and left. (Guattari 1995: 42)

Guattari’s ‘Project for a Film By Kafka,’ translated by Jakub Zdebik for Deleuze Studies in 2009, is based on a series of notes for an unrealised project. We know that Guattari was fascinated with Kafka’s dreams; he collected and numbered them (Soixante-cinq reves de Franz K afka, 2007), commenting that they ‘engage the most diverse and heterogeneous semiotic means: those of theatre, dance, cinema, music, plastic forms, and once again, to be sure, writing!’ (2007: 29) Moreover, these dreams are ‘open, machinic indices' consisting of literary and schizoanalytic machines; they are open in ‘how they have fertilized and broken such and such semiotic or behavioral chains’ (2006: 405). Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 210-223 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0058 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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A machinic dream interpretation follows the deterritorialising line and its sputtering flows of particle-signs. Francois Dosse (2007: 294ff.) reminds us of another Guattari: an inventive curator-though the heavy lifting was done by Yasha David (Guattari 1996a: 235; Guattari 1984: 1 ) - o f multimedia exhibitions, a ‘Kafka event’ on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, mounted in the summer and autumn of 1984 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In this exhibition we find dream texts, dream theatre courtesy of Philippe Adrien, seminars, dream cinema (by Francois Pain, a good friend of Guattari and a key connection to his visual production). It may be said without exaggeration that Guattari never stopped working on Kafka, who was, after all, his favourite author (Guattari 2006: 146). There is, however, a semiotic mode at issue: cinema. To the existing relation of Kafka and minoritarian becoming in a literary key, Guattari adds a cinematic project that passes through television. What he envisaged was a made for television film in the form of a cultural series that would help to fund the final film project. His ideas were quite practical since he wanted to attract funding and engage a professional production team. Project for a film by Kafka? Guattari’s emphasis is deceptively simple. The affects with which Kafka wrote may live in film and television because they are independent and survive their author, remaining available for ‘non-human becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173) of readers to come: ‘artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them’ (175). The question is: does minor cinema assist us in conceiving of a ‘minor’ Guattari TV? For Guattari, minor cinema precipitates becomings minor (practical enrichments of schizo desire) in the mass, just the sort of people he wanted to reach with ‘Le Siecle de Kafka’. And to become minor is not to be in a minority or the representative of a minority or even to formally acquire the characteristics or status, what we call ‘identity’, of a minority through some affiliation. It is not a question of mimesis or membership, but how to produce becomings that might summon a people with whom minor cinema connects. Guattari thought that anti-psychiatric cinema worked in this way, reaching the uninformed and misled and changing the way they thought of and connected to madness. The fundamental theoretical problem is what it means to summon a new people without teleological or messianic politics. But the semiotic is also hybrid, for the film at issue involves television. Television was a transitional medium in Guattari’s search for

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a potential public, a public yet to come, with which he attempted to connect through minor Kafka becomings, engaging sensibilities not yet fully entangled in dominant normative modelisations; assembling Kafka affects that connect across existing strata and blend with real material fluxes, intervening in and resisting stolid representations, enriching flight paths of singularisation and auto-modelisation. Guattari’s sense of television is often confined to a scene of decoding, an existential territory bathed in the blue glow of the screen; a vivid machinic assemblage of subjectification and flickering sensory affects of all sorts. At the same time it needs to be kept in mind that Guattari was no stranger to mass television, appearing over the course of his career a number of times, but his attitude to the medium was often linked to becoming stupid: ‘I watch tv like everybody else. I’m just as dumb, no question about it’ (commenting on the first Gulf War) (Guattari 1996b: 139). Yet he insisted that one has to watch it but without becoming trapped in its ‘infernal circle’. Watching television is for Guattari an intense experience of territorialisation and he uses ethological concepts to describe how the milieu components of broadcasts (voice, music and image) initiate animal becomings. By the same token, we know that Guattari could be found in the depths of his depression slumped before the television, a black hole of subjectification which resonated all too well with the condition of his desire at the time (see Helle 2008: 497; Dosse 2007: 291). What I wish to reach in this paper is an understanding of Guattari’s ambivalence about television and his desire to work in it by first appreciating the limits of transferring the principles and goals of minor cinema to television. A second task is to find the most appropriate model of television to explain this ambivalence. Rather than taking the route of connecting minor with autonomous media experimentation such as the bold example of Telestreet which taught many ‘how to do television’ (Berardi 2008: 152-3), I turn elsewhere. Instead, the long-standing, but recently renovated, idea of the tele-auteur working in a creative capacity for the small screen has been in circulation in Europe for many decades, and has recently found a new place in discussions of American speciality cable networks and select series. Although Guattari (1996b: 152) expressed misgivings about the development of cable channels in the context of ‘capitalist eros’, noting that ‘nothing guarantees us that what they will develop . . . will not be even more reactionary than what is broadcast by national television’, and did not witness the blossoming of the cable universe and its passage into territories of art and new assemblages of subjectification, I suggest that his ‘Project

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for a Film By Kafka’ is closest to auteur TV. Of course, I stake this claim with the proviso that the figure of the cine-auteur is limited as Guattari was prepared to eschew the signature style of a master for the sake of anonymous, more participatory, DIY aesthetic production and for ethically and politically committed documentary work (one of his exemplars in this respect was Sato Mitsuo, director of YAMA: An Eye for an Eye [1985] about the Yakuza-controlled slum in Tokyo). However, with these provisos in mind, it is productive to grasp the incredible care for content and detail of execution that is found in Guattari’s ‘Project’ outline as fundamentally different from tactical media and closest to the auteur TV model, yet not divorced from the minoritarian becomings of cinema. The cerebral and abstract qualities of Guattari’s ‘Project’ (the emphasis on the wall and faciality), however, as well as the expressionistic elements that he links together in a series of highly austere shots, are punctuated with comic moments, imagistic fragments and incomplete dialogue. It is this kind of content and aesthetic that evokes modernism and the auteur-not bastardised, but shrunk to the size of the small screen. Guattari’s ‘modernism’ with respect to painting has been well documented (Zepke 2011: 213-14), and it is linked not to a flight from art institutions but to a return to them in order to initiate a search for subversive singularisations. A further issue may be flagged at the outset of this investigation: the displacement that Guattari operates of the auteur-author-personal direc­ torial style from himself to K afka-not the author and his intentions but an assemblage of autonomous affects that Guattari attempts to respect­ fully gather in his ‘Project’ and to connect with a potential viewership.

I. Auteur TV The Pompidou Centre Kafka centenary event is instructive because it tells us that Guattari’s ambition as a cultural animateur was referenced to large public arts institutions with national and international profiles. In this respect I consider the place of Guattari’s minor television to be in the arts programming of public or state broadcasters, perhaps even independent commercial interests that develop new projects. But this location should remind us of the mutual imbrication of Guattarian concepts: minorising the mass or traditional media is cultivating a rhizome in the branch of a tree. That is, one cannot think the minor-micro without the molar-macro. Therefore, one cannot jump the traditional media reference for the sake of independent, autonomous or tactical media (like Japanese micro-TV or Italian Telestrada).

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Rather, Guattari TV is embedded in the tradition of modernist (and later) experiments with television from Godard to Lynch, and the intellectualism (the ‘Grands Entretiens’) and multiple aesthetics of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). The INA has a long tradition of co-production with public broadcasters around the world as well as with private and public speciality channels such as Sundance in the US and ARTV in Canada; moreover, it engages in extensive preservation activities and software development and training. The signature of ‘Guattari’ may have been enough to participate in the tele-auteur model of ‘creative television’ in France (Emanuel 1999: 86). Thus, ‘auteur TV’ was a likely model and he would have been familiar with the idea of seeking something along the lines of an INA commission for his project (note that the INA ceased producing television in the 1980s), or at least a co-production agreement between a sponsoring producer and a commercial channel with a legally mandated requirement to assist national film production. Guattari would have joined filmmakers like Raul Ruiz and Eric Rohmer who had found the little screen much to their liking, and the new opportunities it afforded in terms of distribution in a changing technological environment: ‘TV is seen as a lifeline of cinema rather than as a proverbial Cain’ (Ostrowska 2007: 32). Indeed, Guattari did not rehearse the traditional split between cinema and television but recognised how the former had absorbed the latter, even if the motivation (commercial) was largely unpromising (1996b: 152). Guattari worked with Yasha David on the Kafka exhibition. Here and there he mentions this collaboration, sometimes referring to it as a joint project, at other times suggesting he had ‘entrusted’ the running of the event to David (Guattari 1996a: 235; Guattari 1984: 1). Whatever the case may have been, Guattari also notes in every instance the trouble he experienced with the arts administrators at the Centre Pompidou: ‘Those in charge at the Pompidou Centre made it so difficult that, on several occasions, we thought we would have to abandon the project’ (1996a: 235). So Guattari, in a very Kafkaesque manner, plugged into a bureaucratic machine and came face-to-face with strategies of denial and meta-languages of control and demoralisation. One wonders how he would have fared in a highly bureaucratic television environment.

II. A Wall ‘The whole film takes place along a wall’, Guattari indicates (2009:154). Continuing, Guattari explains: ‘The design and musical unity of this wall

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should traverse the whole film, the different scenes somehow detaching themselves from it.’ The scenes are thematically linked: wall of the farm at K’s arrival; wall across which runs a beam of light, indicated by the woman who writes in the night and whom children join; the wall of the inn through which Frieda indicates that Klamm is sleeping; wall along which two children run and ‘catch’ little Hans; wall of the farm, this time seen from the inside, and that will open to let the official procession go past. (Guattari 2 009: 154)

Why a wall? It divides and conceals a mystery (the castle), which is later exposed as ‘not mysterious’ at all. The wall is ‘synonymous with the absence of face and the absence of eyes’, Guattari specifies (2009: 154). But we know from Guattari’s writing on photography that faces accomplish ‘existential transferences of enunciation’ to viewers (1989: 311). From another perspective, faces are already walls, white or black walls of the signifier. And walls are Kafka materials par excellence: the abstract machine of faciality as one finds in Kafka’s ‘novella “Blumfield”: the bachelor returns in the evening to find two little ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the “wall” constituted by the floor’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 169). Guattari immediately considers as an alternative an immobile face shot close up (augmented by a booming voice) which turns into a wall. Like Keiichi Tahara’s photographic de-facing and resurfacing of the celebrity artists who posed for portraits, the face is a wall that might recur and have projected upon it cityscapes and offices, corridors and the like to underline the ‘whole paranoid, bureaucratic discourse’ (Guattari 2009: 155). Guattari also thought that at a certain moment, this face could perhaps be composed of about forty videos showing the same urban images, a sort of ballet of changing figures, with systems of gliding lines, symmetries, and dissymmetries, rhythms, images that skip, etc. (2009: 155)

The face de-composes into a wall, perhaps moving from noisiness to silence; the face is a ‘megaphone’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 179) but the wall may be bounced off of or crashed into or broken through. The wall is a molecularised face, a face of geological strata, cement, moss and the pissing of men.

III. TV By Kafka The first part of the draft script has four segments. A horse-drawn cart races towards the wall and crashes into it. In the second segment, the

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cart moves in the same way but suddenly stops short of the wall. An explosion of sorts takes place, but it is a dance of peasants in hooded habits like tiny medieval monks. In the third segment, the cart slowly rolls along parallel to the wall; the legs of a young boy hang over the wall. In the fourth segment, two men hail the cart and it pulls over. The legs of the boy go down a ladder. Guattari breaks the text into images and sounds in describing a series of shots. The first shows the wall as a surface of inscription that is ‘suggestive’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168) in its ‘greyish whiteness’, an off-white wall; in ‘double exposure. . . a face in extreme close-up, but that we can barely distinguish. As the camera imperceptibly approaches the wall . . . the face loses its contour, only the fixed eyes and a talking mouth still vaguely appear’ (Guattari 2009: 156). Akin to the face pushed up against the white wall of the breast in nursing (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 169), this close-up heightens intensity but through a voice that has a ‘bass tone’ and enunciates in a rather didactic way Russian bureaucratic desire in the form of a speech from the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR in January 1937 concerning the treason trial of Karl Rudels (Guattari 2009: 157). Having confessed, Rudels rambles on about not defending himself but ensuring that those who have known him for decades recognise the truth of his testimony. This speech is voiced over an ‘arrhythmic sonic mass’ that becomes the wind and then silence. The bureaucratic speech comes in jolts; it is the rhythm of its self-pleasure. The second shot breaks through the wall with a ‘fade-in dissolve or another device’ (Guattari 2009: 157). But there is nothing behind it. And nothing changes in the process as there is no loss of continuity, no change in the intensity of light. Yet ‘little by little’ a line appears on the horizon-it is a wall that cuts across the shot. The camera jerks several times and our point of view is of a passenger in a cart pulled by a mule, obstructed by a roughly textured sleeve of an arm and a hand wearing a ring; one of the aforementioned peasants appears, accompanied by K. The first, third and fourth segment contained references to K as well. The Kafka references are numerous but fleeting. Here Guattari deploys mannerisms in the manner of Kafka’s ‘schizobuffoonery’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 80): there is a hand signalling from a window before K’s execution (first segment); K finds two old men eating soup in a room at the farm and these are joined by children (third segment); two old men get up from the table and lead K through the barn door (fourth segment); likewise, two gentlemen functionaries from The Trial lead K to his execution (Kafka 1968: 80). The soundtrack is a grinding cart and the mule’s steps.

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The third image is a series of shots (some establishing, some closeups) in rapid succession-cart, mule’s eyes, hands, etc. Yet ‘in passing we catch, but very quickly, without really distinguishing what it is: three heads above the wall’ (Guattari 2009: 158). Nothing about sound is indicated. The fourth shot reveals the cart aligning itself before the three heads: the middle one is higher than the others and sports a long red beard. K returns gesticulating to one of the peasants who refuses to go further. Again nothing about sound is noted. Shot five presents a white screen and sounds of the projector. This ‘dream screen’ is not the result of a technical problem as little by little, Guattari notes, numbers appear and then, vaguely, the three heads. Together these constitute a facial unit. One is reminded of how the ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ plateau ends with the question about three states or heads (primitive; Christ; probe); (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 191): ‘Must we leave it at that. . . ? ’ Shot six brings K back in a long shot in which he turns back to the wall, after advancing toward a ‘sombre tree', as if looking for the heads, and starts up a conversation with a peasant. Shot from close up, K calls out: ‘Who was that guy we could see awhile ago above the wall? No answer’ (Guattari 2009: 159). The peasant is not very helpful with any request. Shot seven continues the conversation as the peasant points in the direction in which K came in response to the question about where he can find an inn. The eighth image shows K pissing on the wall. The last image is a fragment involving Frieda and Klamm (from The Castle) and a peasant woman who spies on them from the tree. The text breaks off at this point.

IV. There Is Nothing on TV Let’s say that some people will watch anything, or simply watch, and others will be intrigued by Guattari TV, by Kafka because the wall gets one dreaming, it gives by drawing one into its own assemblages and in this way summons a viewership, a following. What is it to follow a televisual series? It consists in joining an assemblage by diagramming its potentialities: this wall concerns everyone. This is the kind of catalysis of home viewers that images are good at tripping, even if all this means at a base level of academic jouissance is citational play of the sort: oh yes, that wall reminds me of the ‘high white wall' from the first fragment of the eighth octavo notebook, the one that the coachman drives along and notes that its bulges make it ‘a forehead’ (Kafka 1991: 79); or, isn’t

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the sound of the cart similar to the creaking of a cart in the summer heat in the short fragment ‘Children on the Road’ (Kafka 2007: 3)? Guattari seems to confirm that the televisual cocktail includes hypnosis, distraction and daydreaming, which is to say that an ‘attractor’ that in Brian Massumi’s words ‘induct[s] sensation’ (2002: 84) that oscillates between interesting and boring, not between recognition, which is boring, and uniqueness, which is interesting, but that which gets one dreaming and running off on tangents and losing focus in a sketchy and dynamic diagram whose intensities at least make available one existentialising function, joining the Kafka assemblage. The diagram would be productive of a new kind of machinic reality: the Kafka literary machine and the Guattari machine dance, conjoined, and ‘open like a non delimited collection’ (Guattari 2006: 404). Guattari’s draft would be then reticent about being converted into televisual formats, and would transmit this, after all he underlines it, coiling it through the drafts and into production and post-production and the broadcast ready succession of images. But not just this, a certain randomness, too, hard-to-understand bits that seem involuntary alongside the obvious and not so obvious references to Kafka texts. These are the non-passive seeds of subjectivity’s production before a programme that does not feed pap to its viewers but interfaces with them. Guattari was ambivalent about television and we can sense this in his description of the hypnotic experience of watching. If the hypnotic dimension of this machinic drug trip services mediatic alienation by erecting an artificial neurosis that masks more serious family social problems, then television withdrawal by remote control is the consequence (Guattari 2002: 18). Yet Guattari wanted to mount a counter-example that would inspire, an extraordinary television which would engage viewers as potential users and makers, in addition to providing impetus for their mobile imaginaries that move toward dismantling the artificial neurosis. This would require seizing upon and redeploying the already permeable television buzz for the purposes of ethico-aesthetic resingularisation. It is easy to get lost in this ambivalence and, like my colleague Janell Watson, throw up your hands and ask about a fictional solution: ‘where are the independent basement TV stations such as that imagined in Wayne’s World?’ (Watson 2002: 43). Indeed, can we imagine transversal TV on YouTube where the illusion of participation is often too opportunistically framed by feedback in real time. In the age of live audience responses to webcast events, joining the Kafka assemblage might be construed as nothing more than contributing to the feedback loop of cheap content and exploitable data.

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Struggling with his own scepticism, Guattari wondered about the prospects for a ‘person who comes home exhausted, spent after a draining day, who automatically turns on his television’ in search of a minor buzz through ‘another personal reterritorialisation by totally artificial means’ (1996c: 102). Television interminable. Guattari’s television project by Kafka is not only designed to unleash fabulation, but through television’s boring formal machinic effects implant complex affects not in virtue of representational content alone-though as we have seen this is carefully wrought-but in a way that pours out of the home viewing situation and turns its passivity inside out. Guattari’s Kafka project is not a spectacularisation, but concerns itself with little triggers - intensities, gestures and particle signs-that help viewers put some distance between themselves and television’s banal tendencies and strive to exist differently through the ‘alterification’ of joining the Kafka assemblage. Any link between television and becoming is hard to grasp for a scholarly community that has not wanted to appreciate television’s potential. Perhaps the most powerful statement of this suspicion is Maurizio Lazzarato’s (2004: 165) claim that television produces a subjectivity that neutralises becoming and blocks minoritarian proliferations. Lazzarato is referring to a mass medium rather than a post-mediatic television, and he echoes Guattari’s own comments on the erosion of subjectivity by the former and the need for ‘aesthetic reappropriation of the production of images, of audiovisual production’, in the latter (Guattari 1996b: 134). Lazzarato precludes minoritarian becoming through television. However, another approach is framed by Massumi as part of a ‘dynamic midst’ of an ‘event-space’ (2002: 82ff.). ‘Project For A Film By Kafka’ might diagram the transduction of the general form of Kafka as a collective assemblage into the televisual medium as an idea for a ‘cultural series’. We can only imagine as readers the experience of the arrival of such a series into the living rooms of a people to come and we can do this with Massumi’s help, although his example is a live transmission of the Super Bowl game and ours is a sound stage and set production of a work with an entirely different sensibility. Having scrambled the literary signal of Kafka by running interference through multiple semiotic media, Guattari TV flows into the room by scrambling the already constituted socio-historical arrangement of the household with its delicate divisions of gender, labour and generation. The series acquires the status as a ‘catalytic part-subject’ by potentialising the homebodies in terms of how they can go about joining the Kafka assemblage; this is not an

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insect-transform but an initiation into a not so strange universe. Admittedly, this potential is unevenly found in the bodies that would realise it in different ways; indeed, the catalytic part-subject needs a boost, thinks Massumi, because there is typically ‘nothing on TV’ and this makes ‘distraction. . . more catalytically operational’ (2002: 84). The fields of an event’s potential are layered with intersecting and overlapping subfields and codes (informal regularities that govern households). The Kafka series becomes through its transmission of images (inductive signs); upon their arrival in new spaces, a re­ conditioning of the space takes place. A television broadcast is an extremely complex and variable event; what’s on the screen is but a small part (and, frankly, the audience for Guattari TV would be small). The programme arrives into a relatively porous space whose entrances and exits are monitored, and enters the mix of a collective assemblage with its coded but open enunciations; this programme is only one of many flowing through the home alongside other semiotic transmissions. Let’s say that something is on TV, and it’s Kafka. But the images are of a wall. Is there a potential public for Guattari TV by Kafka? Or, will this remain a marginalised broadcast within a sea of banality? For instance, one is subjected to tv insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation. . . one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly ‘make’ it, but intrinsic component pieces.. . . In machinic enslavement there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 458)

It is instructive to compare this explanation with another concerning television in Chaosmosis. Guattari TV, by Kafka contributes to polyphonic subjectivity production in the manner described in Chaosmosis (Guattari 1995: 16ff.). When Guattari wants to embed his theorisation of machinic subjectivity production in everyday life he selects watching television to organise his presentation. His explanation recapitulates an earlier discussion of the same points in an appendix to Cartographies schizoanalytiques, but with reference to the red curtain in his apartment, and he softens a somewhat dualistic typology of problematic (fading and thickening) and sensory affects (immediate and perceptible). There is a ‘complex refrain’, Guattari indicates, that holds together diverse components of subjectivation before the television set:

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When I watch television, I exist at the intersection: of a perceptual fascination provoked by the screen’s luminous animation which borders on the hypnotic; 2. of a captive relation with the narrative content of the program, associated with a lateral awareness of surrounding events (water boiling on the stove, a child’s cry, the te le p h o n e ...); 3. of a world of fantasms occupying my daydreams. My feeling of personal identity is thus pulled in different directions. How can I maintain a relative sense of unicity, despite the diversity of components of subjectivation that pass through me? It’s a question of the refrain that fixes me in front of the screen, henceforth constituted as a projective existential node. (1995: 16-17)

The risk of machinic enslavement that characterised the description of television in A Thousand Plateaus gives way in Chaosmosis to the problem of assemblage consistency and the role of the refrain. The sensory elements of fascination, of the ‘gluey’ screen to which one may be stuck, and the force of narrative that drags one forward yet is not so exclusive as to be beyond insistent interruptions of lateral awareness, introduce the scenario and lead into more abstract matters like fantasms that sweep one away. Guattari is a tributary of the figure on the screen because enunciation enjoys a certain autonom y-‘my identity has become that of the speaker, the person who speaks from the television’ -and the refrain fixes the sensory environment and props up the world of fantasms. This refrain is a ‘motif’ and ‘attractor’ that installs itself in the scene, as if under collective ownership, enjoying both independence from a functional anchor and transversal potential to freely circulate, and couples the diverse components at play as it marks the existential territory of Guattari as TV viewer. Guattari is no more than a ‘fluctuating intersection’ or constellation of relatively heterogeneous components, and inchoate affects, held in place by a stabilising, existentialising refrain, which is a non-ordinary, non­ semiotic, repetitive motif (a hypnotic feature), holding together different kinds of worlds (marked existential territories and universes of reference whose emergence refrains catalyse). Refrains help negotiate intra- and inter-assemblage passages. In this example, the refrain owes much to the tone of the voice emanating from the television, which can close down the viewing experience because it is so cliched or loosen something from the viewer and refresh him or her by helping one move along in some manner. The scenes of reception of television and cinema are quite different to the degree that the complex social semiosis of televisual decoding is, at least in terms of sensory affect, muted by the darkened public space of the theatre; whereas the blue glow of the television screen is a milieu component that becomes purely expressive without any

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content as it marks a territory of viewing for all irradiated in its range and subjected to its flashes. Turning on a television is an important step in understanding how a territory is built.

V. Conclusion The examples of playwrighting (see Socrates in this volume), envisioning a television series and film (not the only cinema project that he had in mind in the 1980s) reveal that Guattari was actively thinking through the relationship between his theoretical principles and different kinds of artistic production. While there has been an unfortunate tendency to trap him in the vicissitudes of free radio, this strategy of critique has limited significance (Barbrook 2001). Guattari worked directly with playwright Enzo Cormann, filmmakers like Francois Pain (and planned a film with Japanese photographer Keiichi Tahara) and curators such as Yasha David, and thought about the need to get involved in television as well, despite his own ambivalence about the medium’s role in formatting capitalistic subjectivities. The example of auteur TV would have been familiar to him, but of limited interest in its pure form of directorial personal signature. Rather, by displacing the centrality of the director’s distinctive vision, but without losing it entirely, Guattari sought in affect the autonomy necessary to stake the claim that his project was by Kafka. ‘By Kafka’ does not signal another auteur, but affect’s distance from intention and the contagiousness of its channelling and passage through different media to a potential viewership. The readiness of this imagined audience to join in the Kafka assemblage through the affects delivered by television is evident in Guattari’s sense of himself as a viewer and a tributary of intensities that are not obviously positive or negative but ambivalently transformative.

References Barbrook, Richard (2001) ‘The Holy Fools: Revolutionary Elitism in Cyberspace’, in Patricia Pisters (ed.), Micropolitics o f Media Culture, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, pp. 159-75. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2008) Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, trans. G. Mecchia and C. J. Stivale, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1986) K afka: For a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Dosse, Francois (2007) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Biographie croisee, Paris: Le Decouverte. Emanuel, Susan (1999) ‘Quality, Culture, and Education’, in M. Scriven and M. Lecomte (eds), Television Broadcasting in Contemporary France and Britain, London: Bergahn, pp. 83-92. Guattari, Felix (1984) ‘Un oubli et un lapsus dans un reve’, Chimeres online. Les seminaires de Felix Guattari (30 October), pp. 1-13, available at http://www. revue-chimeres.fr/drupal_chimeres/files/841030.pdf (accessed 11 January 2012). Guattari, Felix (1989) Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Paris: Galilee. Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosm osis, An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Felix (1996a) ‘The Refrain of Being and Meaning’, in Soft Subversions, trans. Jill Johnson, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 233-47. Guattari, Felix (1996b) ‘Did You See the War?’, in Soft Subversions, trans. Andrea Loselle, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 131-42. Guattari, Felix (1996c) ‘Machinic Junkies’ in Soft Subversions, trans. Chet Wiener, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 101-5. Guattari, Felix (2002) ‘Toward an Ethics of the Media’, trans. Janell Watson, Polygraph, 14, pp. 17-21. Guattari, Felix (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stephane Nadaud, trans. Kelina Gotman, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix (2007) ‘Projet pour un film de Kafka’, in Soixante-cinq reves de Franz K afka, Paris: Lignes. Guattari, Felix (2009) ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’, trans. Jakub Zdebik, Deleuze Studies, 3(2), pp. 150-69. Helle, Anna (2008) ‘The Philosophical Friendship of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’, E phem era, 8(4), pp. 489-98. Kafka, Franz (1968) The Trial, trans. Willa Muir, Edwin Muir and E. M. Butler, New York: Schocken. Kafka, Franz (1991) The Blue Octavo N otebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, Cambridge: Exact Change. Kafka, Franz (2007) ‘Children on the Road’, in M etamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Michael Hofmann, New York: Penguin, pp. 3-6. Lazzarato, Maurizio (2004) Les Revolutions du capitalisme, Paris: Les Empecheurs de penser en rond. Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables fo r the Virtual, Durham: Duke University Press. Ostrowska, D. (2007) ‘France: Cinematic Television or Televisual Cinema: INA and CANAL+’, in D. Ostrowska and G. Roberts (eds), European Cinemas in the Television Age, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 25-40. Watson, Janell (2002) ‘Guattari’s Black Holes and the Post-Media Era’, Polygraph, 14, pp. 23-46. Zepke, Stephen (2011) ‘From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari’, in E. Alliez and A. Goffey (eds), The Guattari Effect, London: Continuum, pp. 205-19.

Art as Abstract M achine: Guattari's Modernist Aesthetics

Stephen Zepke

Abstract Felix Guattari was a modernist. He not only liked a lot of modernist artists, but his ‘aesthetic paradigm’ found its generative diagram in modern art. The most important aspect of this diagram was its insistence on the production of the new, the way it produced a utopian projection of a ‘people to come’, and so a politics whose only horizon was the future. Also important for Guattari’s diagram of the ‘modern’ were the forces of abstraction, autonomy and immanent critique. Together these elements construct an artwork that is radically singular and separate, composed of a-signifying, a-temporal and invisible forces, sensations that go beyond our human conditions of possibility. In this Guattari’s modernism must be understood as being quite different from his co-option by contemporary art theorists influenced by postOperaist thought. Post-Operaism understands politics as ‘being-against’, a dialectical form of negation that finds its political condition of possibility in what already exists. Because such thought sees modern art as being entirely subsumed by the institutions and markets that contain it, art itself must be negated in order for aesthetic powers to become political. This has lead post-Operaist thought to align itself strongly with the avant-garde positions of institutional-critique and art-into-life, or ‘non-art’. Guattari’s modernism takes him in a very different direction, affirming modern art despite its institutional enframing, because art is forever in the process of escaping itself. This makes modern art the model in Guattari’s thought for politics itself.

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 224-239 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0059 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Keywords: modernism, modern art, abstraction, autonomy, singularity, immanent critique, post-Operaism, politics It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath recodings and axiomatics: the pure process that fulfils itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfilment as it p roceed s-art as ‘experimentation’. (Guattari and Deleuze 1983: 3 7 0 -1 )

Felix Guattari believed in art, he believed in the creative and revolutionary power that gave it a ‘privileged position’ above philosophy, science and politics (1995: 101). Without art, Guattari would say, without its ability to invent new feelings, there can be no real politics. No doubt this strikes us as odd today, when contemporary art seems determined to subordinate or suppress its production of autonomous sensations in favour of a political activism based on conceptual and discursive engagement. Art into life! This slogan has echoed from Duchamp to the neo-avant-garde of Conceptual art, before reaching its drab and almost hegemonic status today as an institutionalised theory of ‘non-art’. Guattari is often enlisted as part of this movement, but such claims leave out one rather important point: Guattari was a modernist! This is important because contemporary art has largely defined itself against its modernist heritage, from its conceptual beginnings through to the a priori postmodern irony of its ‘representations’. Guattari often vents a righteous anger and disgust at postmodernism’s cynical apotheosis of the signifier, and its turn away from the aesthetic raptures of sensation in favour of representation and realpolitik.1 Against this Guattari advocates a return to Modernism, although what is ‘authentic’ about ‘modernity’ has been ‘present in art from its beginnings’. It is then, a Modernism that comes after postmodernism and refutes it, but only because it is continually reinventing itself, rejecting the ‘post-’ in favour of the ‘new’. Guattari calls for ‘At the very least an originary fantasm of modernity constantly under scrutiny and without hope of postmodern remission’ (1995: 77). In the spirit of his cheeky revisionism, I would like to present Guattari as the advocate of our ‘return to the future’, as our greatest ‘contemporary modernist’. What then is this ‘originary fantasm’, this contemporary fabulation of a modernity that forever remains ‘to come’? It is certainly a selective version of Modernism, one that rejects the ‘modern myth’ of origins (1996: 65), the techno-scientific concept of ‘progress and modernity’

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(1996: 109, 2011: 50), and the modern ‘ideologies that once claimed to serve as guides for reconstructing society on a more just and egalitarian basis’ (1996: 109). A Modernism without teleology or transcendence, but then what of Modernism is left? What is left is modern art, or perhaps better a modern aesthetics, which Guattari affirms as the ‘diagram’ or ‘abstract machine’ for modern politics. The ‘epistemological grounds’ of the ‘machine’, he writes, are not found in ‘math or physics, but art’ (2006: 387).2 Guattari is serious, and he gives painting, or more generally art, as the model for the production of subjectivity (1995: 7, 2008: 74, 2011: 41), for ecosophy (2000: 52), for schizoanalysis (2000: 41-2, 2008: 329, 2011: 47-8), for politics (1995: 90-1, 133-4, 1996: 202, 2008: 189), for revolution (2008: 64), for his collaboration with Deleuze (2008: 450) and for ‘life itself’ (2008: 94). And this list is by no means exhaustive. In fact, even the oft-quoted remark that it ‘might be better to speak of a proto-aesthetic paradigm, to emphasise that we are not referring to institutionalised art’ (1995: 101-2), inevitably given as the ground for aligning Guattari with the avant-garde movements of art-into-life and institutional-critique, can only be understood in terms of the modernist diagram that remains at its base. So what is Guattari’s modernist aesthetic diagram? It is also selective, on the one hand rejecting the ‘formalist abuses and reductions of modernism’ (1996: 109),3 and railing against the institutional and financial controls placed on art, while on the other affirming in the highest terms the modernist commitment to abstraction, autonomy, materialism and immanent critique. In this sense Guattari is not defending Modernism against the contemporary, instead he wants to liberate the contemporary from the post-modern, so that it might become - always for the first time-modern. In this regard Guattari is a champion of the modern, but only when the modern is understood as a process of transformation, as the emergence of the ‘to come’, as the production of the new. This is the political value of modern art, he says, its ‘incessant clash against established boundaries’ and ‘its propensity to renew its materials of expression and the ontological texture of its percepts and affects’ leading to ‘a direct contamination of other domains’ and the ‘re-evaluation of the creative dimensions that traverse them all’ (1995: 106). To steal a phrase from Owen Hatherley’s aptly titled book Militant M odernism, Guattari wishes to defend Modernism against the defenders of Modernism, by extracting from it a diagram of creation by which the modern might renew itself. Guattari’s insistence on modernist artistic practices is most clearly expressed in his repeated rejection of postmodernism and Conceptual

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art. This is quite different from Jacques Ranciere, who has recently suggested erasing the modern-postmodern ‘rupture’ by sublating it within an ‘aesthetic regime’ in which the modern and postmodern are its two poles, united in their shared sensible ‘dissensus’ from the established framework of perception, thought and action. Ranciere thereby understands aesthetics in political terms, whereas Guattari insists upon the modern-postmodern rupture in order to reject the latter, precisely because aesthetics for him precedes politics. As a result, some commentators try to excuse Guattari’s taste in modernist art, because they see his love of Balthus, Modigliani, Turner or Pollock as embarrassing or absurd in relation to contemporary art’s desire to do politics. But Guattari affirms these painters precisely because of their political importance,4 and his rejection of Conceptual art cannot be blamed on his ‘age’, nor used to suggest he was not up with the latest fashions in art; both are mean-spirited and misleading accusations that the facts clearly refute. Not only does the rejection of Conceptual art in What Is Philosophy? echo Benjamin Buchloh’s famous essay ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’ which had been published in the catalogue to a large retrospective exhibition of Conceptual art held at Musee d’art moderne de la Ville in Paris in 1989, but it also echoed statements by Guattari made at least as early as 1971.5 In a remarkably prescient passage found in The Anti-Oedipus Papers Guattari laments: ‘ultimately, there will be no more “modern art”. Just because art is going to adopt the category of signification itself for itself’ (2006: 249). This is a precise description of what Conceptual art was doing at this time, as artists not only took over language as a medium, but also started to explore the binary oppositions of structuralism as a conceptual frame for their work.6 It is true that Guattari does try to soften his position in Chaosmosis (1995: 95) and the late interview with Oliver Zahm (2011: 43) by claiming that Conceptual art produces ‘a concept that creates sensations’, but this does not change his fundamentally modernist affirmation of art as the realm of sensation; it rather ambitiously (and ultimately unconvincingly) tries to align Conceptual art with it. So although Guattari claims that he and Deleuze lack a better term than ‘modern’ to describe our current age, he is being disingenuous (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 382). This is because Guattari - like Deleuze-inherited his ontological understanding of aesthetic processes from the modernist tradition, where simple materials and cosmic forces achieve a consistency, Guattari says, ‘exclusively through technique’

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(377). This is the secret of modern composition: materials are ‘abstracted’ from their external referents so that their intense complexity can be expressed. Varese’s technique at the ‘dawn’ of the modern age is ‘exemplary’ in this regard, a sound machine ‘molecularizes’ matter (that is, it deterritorialises sounds so they can be composed on the same plane) in order to harness their ‘cosmic energy’. Varese’s ‘sound machine’ assembles or synthesises various sounds (some recorded, others produced) and the means of modulating these sounds (oscillators, generators and transformers), arranges them, and in so doing ‘makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter’ (378). This ‘modern’ technique singularises its material in order to open it onto its outside, at once expressing and constructing a new future, a new cosmos. At this moment of what Deleuze will call ‘transcendental empiricism’, a singular sensation (a real experience) expresses and constructs the becoming of the universe (its real conditions) (1994: 69). This process involves a Kantian conception of critique that was the basis of modernist art history stretching from Alois Riegl to Clement Greenberg, and which interpreted the artwork as an expression of the a priori categories operating as its formative principle or Kunstwollen. Guattari and Deleuze discover various ahistorical ontological diagrams of the aesthetic composition of materials, with the most significant of these being the ‘modern’ diagram drawn by the ‘abstract line’, which composes a ‘smooth space’ that is ‘an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process’. This is an ‘absolute of passage’ that in modern art ‘merges with its manifestation’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 545). The Kunstwollen of modern art is, in other words, experimentation. Guattari’s term for this modern and immanent critique is ‘self-reference’ (auto-reference), which describes ‘a processual subjectivity that defines its own coordinates and is self-consistent [auto-fondatrice de ses propres coordonnees, autoconsistancielle], but can nevertheless establish transversal relations to mental and social stratifications’ (1996: 96). For Guattari, modern art offers the model (or as he calls it, the ‘metamodelisation’) of an autonomous process of autopoiesis, it does not seek its categorical a prioris (qua conditions of possibility) but detaches (one could say ‘abstracts’) material-forces from these conditions, in order for them to repeat as difference. To return to Guattari’s discussion of Varese, the synthesiser takes the place of the grounds of a priori synthetic judgement (instead of transcendental categories we have a transcendental compositional technique), replacing conceptual conditions of possible experience with a synthesising machine

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capable of producing a real experience of ‘unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 378). In other words, alterity becomes the a priori of art.7 Modernism in this sense is a pure constructivism, or Constructivism perhaps, as Guattari seems to suggest when he writes with Deleuze: The modern figure is not the cosmic artisan: a homemade an artist, creator or founder, milieus and the earth behind.

child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the atomic bomb. To be an artisan and no longer is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the (1987: 380)

But this is art-into-life only if life is understood as chaosmosis, and the ‘artisan’ describes all those great artists Guattari loves not for rejecting ‘art’, but because their art was already a real political engagement. The explosion of the material composition into its outside, its summoning of an immanent people to come, or a new future defines Guattari’s ‘aesthetic paradigm’ as a modernist politics. This opening out onto a new future is achieved by the technique of abstraction, which is a process of self-reference that deterritorialises experience so that it loses its optical cohesion and its representational content, and becomes a ‘visual block’ or sensation. This abstract sensation produces its own outside, reterritorialising experience on this movement of becoming that encompasses subject and object.8 Abstraction is therefore Modernism’s double movement, on the one hand an absolute deterritorialisation of a material’s signification (whether representational or linguistic), and on the other ‘a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 545). This paradoxical nature of abstraction as both singular and universal is the real condition of a transcendental materialism of becoming, and was present in modern art from the beginning: ‘Art as abstract machine’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 547). And it is as art - or as the aesthetic paradigm - that this double movement is realised in politics. Why? Because it is only by deterritorialising our present conditions of possibility, by turning these material conditions singular and abstract, that critique can make the present take flight. As Guattari wrote with Negri, ‘the collective potential is realized only when the singular is free’ (1990: 17). Finally, Guattari and Deleuze ask, what should be called ‘abstract’ in modern art? Their answer is ‘a line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form’, and finds its exemplary case in ‘the abstract line defined by Michael Fried in relation to certain

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works by Pollock’ (1987: 646).9 This is not to say that art should continue painting a la Pollock, which would be ridiculous, but that contemporary art must find its own ways to be modern, its own political techniques that might reclaim the means of producing the future. Let us turn to another exemplary figure Guattari and Deleuze associate with the modern age to see how this might work. Paul Klee’s book On M odern Art (1948) gives a good example of the immanent and yet transcendental critique Guattari calls self-reference. Three ‘elemental’ dimensions constitute the painting, Klee explains, line, tone or value, and colour. Line is a measurement, tone or value is a weight and colour is a quality. These formal, abstract and transcendental elements and their relations compose a refrain (Klee calls it a ‘motif and theme’ [1948: 37]) out of which emerge the dimensions of form and content. Each composition of the elemental ‘forces’ (the term is Klee’s) is a ‘constructive expression’ that ‘flies from the earth’, ‘rises above it to reality’ and finally ‘embraces the life force itself’ until it is ‘one with the universe’ (43). This is a straightforward account of the double movement of modernity; the self-reflective abstraction of materials to the point where they can construct their own cosmos. In this way the artist, Klee writes, ‘places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves’ because ‘he sees the act of world creation stretching from the past to the future. Genesis eternal!’ (45). Finally, and most importantly, Klee connects the artistic technique of expression-construction to politics. Although, he says, artists dwell within the source of creation and express it in their work, they lack the ‘ultimate power’, ‘Um tragt kein Volk’ (‘the people are not with us’ [55]; see also Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 372). This suggests that politics on a molar scale, on the level of real political movements, is something beyond the power of art. Artists seek a people, a people yet to come, a people that their work attempts to create. But, and these are Klee’s final words, they cannot do more than form a community of artists such as in the Bauhaus, which composes the materials they have and are, in a modern practice of auto-reference. It is this, Guattari and Deleuze say, that ‘confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event’ (1994: 176), in a ‘forewarning’ or ‘summoning’ of a people, that is not yet their actual creation (110). ‘More,’ Klee says, ‘we cannot do’ (1948: 55). In this sense, then, and as Guattari put it, ‘artists are like errant knights, like Don Quixote’ (2011: 42), tilting at the windmills of capitalism and governments ‘with unfortunately incomparable, but nevertheless competitive means’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 381). Indeed, despite modern art’s seeming

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insignificance in the face of constituted powers, the modern artist does enjoy one significant advantage. The ‘competitive means’ shared by art and capitalism is the deterritorialisation of peoples and their earth that produce new and abstract sensations, but whereas capitalism tries to reterritorialise these sensations in normalised subjectivity (Oedipus) and quantified representations (commodities)-a biopolitical process ‘to which art contributes’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 381)-modern art can push these further, in order to make the people and the earth ‘like the vectors of a cosmos that carries them off; then the cosmos itself will be art’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 381). In this sense, and it is one we will return to, political art for Guattari is the most abstract and modern art, and therefore the most cosmic. If, as Brian Massumi recently put it, ‘an art practice can be aesthetically political, inventive of new life potentials, or new potential forms of life, and have no overtly political content’ (2011: 54), then what are we to make of those-and there are many-who read Guattari as advocating the avant-garde position of art-into-life? This position has been most forcefully argued by the Italian postOperaist movement, some of whom-most notably Antonio Negri and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi-had close personal ties to Guattari. Post-Operaist thinkers see the dialectical process of the negation of the present as the necessary form of any political resistance, and understand Guattari’s process of self-reference in these terms. As a result, post-Operaist aesthetics often begins from the opposite position to Guattari (although often in his name), the negation of modernist art. This is not exactly the negation of art as such, but it does bring Guattari into line with the tradition of modern or ‘contemporary’ art known as ‘non-art’. Hardt and Negri laid the foundations of this reading in Empire when they directly reject Bergson’s concept of the ‘virtual’ (what we have been calling the ‘cosmic’ force of becoming, or the ‘to come’ of the future) in favour of the ‘possible’ (2000: 356, 468). Hardt and Negri reject the virtual because it does not, they claim, give sufficient ‘ontological weight’ to reality (468). The possible on the other hand, dialectically defines politics as a negation of the existing situation. In this sense the possible is the ontological category of what Hardt and Negri call ‘beingagainst’. Indeed, in one of the most startling metaphors of the book they argue that Empire is the ‘inverted image’ of the multitude’s ‘productive activities’, something ‘like a photographic negative’ (211). In this strange inversion it is Empire that appears as the condition of possibility (the photographic negative) for the multitude’s creative work. Politics must begin with a dialectical negation of existing oppression that, according to

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Hardt and Negri, grounds the creative event in the ‘reality’ of everyday life. As a result, they claim, Guattari and Deleuze: seem to be able to conceive positively only the tendencies towards continuous movement and absolute flows, and thus in their thought too, the creative elements and the radical ontology of the social remain insubstantial and impotent. Deleuze and Guattari discover the productivity of social reproduction (creative production, production of values, social relations, affects, becomings), but manage to articulate it only superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate horizon marked by the ungraspable event. (2000: 28)

What is so wonderful about this rather acerbic description of Guattari and Deleuze is that it is absolutely right. Guattari does affirm the artistic event in its most ungraspable and autonomous sense, in its creativity entirely undetermined by what is, in its absolutely virtual and heterogeneous aspect. These are events’ real conditions of im-possibility! This is an affirmation of, as Nietzsche had it, art and nothing but art, the great stimulant to life. Although the post-Operaist claim that art has been subsumed by the aesthetics of biopolitical capitalism is an important one, it is often made in order to subsume art’s creation of the future to the more important political gesture of the negation of the present. This leads to the inevitable post-Operaist understanding of art’s ‘self-reflection’ as its self-negation, and the equally inevitable consequence that ‘political art’ is by definition ‘non-art’, it being only in this form that art can enter into the politics of everyday life. Perhaps the most symptomatic effect of the post-Operaist position has been its apotheosis of Duchamp and his readymade as the heroes of art-into-life. This apotheosis has had many champions, but I will take as my example Maurizio Lazzarato’s suggestion of developing a ‘new assemblage of being-against (the dispositives of power) and of beingtogether (the process of political auto-emancipation)’ (2008: 173), based on a reading of Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm inspired by Duchamp. This ‘new assemblage’ draws on what is certainly most interesting about Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm, the way in which modern art provides a diagram for political transformations. But Lazzarato is going to base his understanding of this diagram on what he calls the ‘polemic’ the readymade launches ‘against’ art’s institutional frame (2010: 110). Lazzarato’s understanding of Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm therefore begins from ‘being-against’ art because, as he says, ‘art and culture are entirely integrated into the logic of the dispositives of subjugation

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and control in contemporary capitalism’ (2008: 174). As a result, Lazzarato argues, the ‘aesthetic paradigm’ is neither ‘an aestheticization of the political’, and ‘nor does it have much to do with the avantgarde programs of the first h a lf of the twentieth century’ (174). We might think this a strange statement given that Lazzarato will champion Duchamp, but in fact it has its own kind of historical consistency. What Lazzarato-perhaps unwittingly - tacitly acknowledges here is that the avant-gardes of the second h a lf of the twentieth century, most notably the so-called ‘neo-avant-garde’ of Conceptual art, have already deployed Duchamp’s readymade ‘against’ modern art and its institutions. By embracing Duchamp’s claim that the concept was the new medium of artistic creation, Conceptual artists sought to de-institutionalise art, and so democratise its creative processes by disengaging them from any specialised techniques (an aspect of the readymade Lazzarato explicitly praises, because it puts non-art directly in contact with the newly emergent practices of cognitive capitalism). But these attempts to politicise ‘art’ by making it ‘non-art’ (that is, by rejecting sensation in favour of the concept) were in fact easily assimilated by cognitive capitalism, which either instrumentalised Conceptual art within the emerging ‘creative industries’ of advertising and marketing, ignored them because ‘non-art’ is on the one hand too banal and on the other too esoteric to be recognised by anyone but art-insiders,10 or simply maintained their status as ‘art’ by consuming them as such. As Guattari and Deleuze succinctly put it: ‘This is a lot of effort to find ordinary perceptions and affectations in the infinite [i.e., as art] and to reduce the concept to a doxa of the social body or great American metropolis’ (1994: 198). What I am objecting to in Lazzarato is how he treats art, and not, I hasten to point out, what he says about the potential to use ‘artistic techniques beyond the realm of art’ to develop new forms of political organisation, expression and activism (2010: 101; see also 2008: 175). Artistic techniques can and should be used by political movements, just as the institutionalisation of art should clearly be critiqued. But these ‘political’ uses of art should not conflate art and its frame, which inevitably leads to ‘political art’ defined as the negation of art or non­ art. Although it is true that Guattari launches polemical attacks against the way culture in general and contemporary art in particular are ‘enframed’ or ‘surrounded’ by capitalist valuations and institutions,11 he nevertheless makes a clear ontological distinction between art and its frames that conserves and even privileges the political role of art qua art. As I have tried to show, Guattari affirms modernist artistic

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practices despite their institutional enframing. Guattari makes the point very clearly, arguing that although the work, the artist, inspiration, talent, and genius are ‘hijacked by the signifier’, it nevertheless seems that the evolution of modern art is tending towards a politics of a-signifiance: the figural, and machinic assemblages, are getting the upper hand on representative systems, expressive and iconic codes.12

This is no better seen than in Guattari’s reading of the readymade, which emphasises its material process of expression rather than its conceptual foundation of the tradition of ‘non-art’.13 For Guattari, the readymade is a refrain, it is the selection of an object that turns it into an expressive territorial marker (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 349), a biological definition of art-into-life that means ‘we no longer know what is art and what nature’ (1994: 185). When the readymade acts as a mechanism of singularisation (by no means assured, as the refrain can also operate the most conservative reterritorialisations) it therefore becomes the epitome of art rather than its negation. In fact, Guattari will argue that the Bottle R ack ‘singularizes’ a ‘constellation of referential universes’ in such a way that ‘the Benjaminian aura arises from this genre of singularizing ritornellization’ (1996: 164).14 This aura is not only due to the readymade’s utterly singular nature, but is also an aspect of its process of composition, an ongoing becoming by which its assemblage remains open to the infinity of the cosmos. In this sense, as Guattari goes on to say, the readymade ‘induces an aesthetic ecstasy, a mystical effusion’ (165). This is the highest political value of art, and ‘I am not’, Guattari stubbornly insists, ‘interested in exchanging some virtuous group jouissance for some individual jouissance that might be a thousand times more intense and fertile (mystical jouissance)’ (2006: 251). Guattari expresses the same commitment to the political power of philosophy in What Is Philosophy?, a power philosophy shares with art and that he gives the name ‘utopia’.15 ‘Modern’ philosophy, he argues there, takes the relative deterritorialisation of capital to the absolute; it makes it pass over the plane of immanence as movement of the infinite and suppresses it as internal limit, turns it back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people. (Guattari and Deleuze 1994: 99)

It does so in a similar way to modern art, by employing abstraction, singularisation and autonomy to create a ‘nonpropositional form of the

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concept in which communication, exchange, consensus, and opinion vanish entirely’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1994: 99). Like modern art, philosophy is able to lead these bio-political mechanisms towards their absolute deterritorialisation or ‘deframing’ (187), in order to call forth a new people and a new cosmos.16 Utopia is therefore the immanent, abstract and autonomous dimension created by philosophy and art within the conditions of the present, while remaining undetermined by them: ‘There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 326).17 Utopia is what is within European capitalism that exceeds it, but what is this? It is something utterly autonomous and abstract freed through immanent critique, but in itself it ‘is’ nothing because it is ‘becoming’, forever ‘to-come’. Like the late paintings of Turner, political Modernism is the expression and construction of utopia, an ‘eternal future’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1983: 132) undetermined by the present, but acting upon it. It is an event of ‘absolute deterritorialisation at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1994: 100). This is the point at which philosophy and art expresses what is unthought, invisible and not-felt, like, they claim, what Adorno called a ‘negative dialectics’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1994: 99). Despite the simi­ larity of the terms, this is quite different from what the post-Operaists call ‘being-against’, which does not exceed the present (this being precisely the ‘ephemerality’ and ‘impotence’ of the virtual they reject), but finds in the present the conditions of possibility for the political. Guattari’s diagram is based instead on the real conditions of creation, as he puts it: ‘This is art, this unnameable point of non-sense that the artist works’ (2011: 47).18 In this way, and as Adorno said, ‘in art the particular is literally the universal’ (1997: 45), because, as Guattari and Deleuze argue, becoming is both singular and transcendental. And the one necessarily through the other, for the transcendental alterity of the future appears through a technique operating on the materials of the present, by abstracting them, absolutely deterritorialising them, so they can compose something new.19 Art is, Guattari says, ‘an alterity grasped at the point of its em ergence...’ (1995: 117), it is autonomous from all present conditions of possibility, and this is the real condition of its politics. Guattari says as much in Chaosmosis: Fabricated in the socius, art, however, is only sustained by itself. This is because each work produced possesses a double finality: to insert itself into a social network which will either appropriate or reject it, and to celebrate,

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once again, the universe of art as such, precisely because it is always in danger of collapsing. (1995: 130)

It is precisely this double-finality that means art can never be simply identified with its bourgeois and institutional frames, and in fact always exceeds them. Rather than an institutional-critique that affirmed non­ art, Guattari favoured an ‘institutional therapeutics’ (1984: 17). This is a critical practice we could call ‘institutional reflection’, by which its most creative elements-perhaps the artworks, but not necessarily-act as catalysts for an institutional becoming that both maintained its compositional consistency, and continually opened onto its outside by producing creative events of subjectivation in others. This is an institution of double becoming in which the abstract machine of modern art retains its autonomy, the better to intervene in the present through a cosmo-politics of experimentation. Modern art for Guattari was not something to be against; it was something to be affirmed as our most effective laboratory of the future.

Notes 1. Guattari could barely have put it more harshly; ‘the virtual ethical and aesthetic abdication in postmodern thought leaves a kind of black stain upon history’ (1996: 116). 2. Similarly, Guattari writes; ‘Art, as the epitome of the gratuitousness of the sign, is the horizon of the liberation of science’ (2006: 395). 3. These are sketched out in A Thousand Plateaus and elaborated more fully in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon, the L ogic o f Sensation. Put schematically, they are the tendency of geometrical abstraction to become a symbolic code for ideal forms (even, as in the case of Kandinsky, when this ‘spiritual’ dimension is composed of affects), and at the other extreme where random elements degenerate into a ‘scribble’ or ‘scramble’ and the work ‘lapses into a statistical heap’ as in the music of John Cage (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 379) or the paintings of Pollock, who from Bacon’s perspective ‘creates a veritable “mess” ’ (Deleuze 2003: 109). 4. A claim that is entirely self-evident. Guattari writes about Balthus’s paintings, for example, that they give an ‘ethico-political’ critique of ‘capitalistic subjectivation’, through their ‘heterogeneous, multicentred, polyphonic, polyvocal approaches, installed outside pre-coded equilibriums’ (1987: 85). 5. Which refutes the claim that the rejection of Conceptual art came from the ‘aesthete’ Deleuze. 6. For a more detailed discussion of this see my ‘Eco-Aesthetics: Beyond Structure in the work of Robert Smithson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,’ in Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 7. Guattari writes something similar in relation to the refrain’s priority to time, ‘Time is not an a priori form; rather the refrain is the a priori form of time, which in each case fabricates different times’ (Guattari and Deleuze 1987: 385).

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8. Brian Massumi’s recent book Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts calls this a ‘constructivist technique of existence’ (2011: 100) that takes as its object its own process of emergence. This is what he calls an ‘occurrent art’, which operates through ‘diagramming’ as a ‘procedure of abstraction’. This is close to my own account, although what I call Guattari’s modern art diagram, Massumi calls-drawing on a much wider range of thinkers-‘technologies of lived abstraction’ (14-15). He also emphasises ‘autonomy’ (53-4) and the operation of abstract art (69-71, 137-8), along with another of Guattari’s terms I don’t discuss here, ‘metamodeling’ (103). 9. Guattari also mentions Pollock in M olecular Revolution in Brazil, where he explains that one cannot repeat-as in reproduce-Pollock’s work, precisely because it ‘belongs to assemblages that go right beyond the confinement of an act of creation’ (2008: 451). In other words its abstract singular event is transversally repeated qua difference, and this is its politics. It is perhaps relevant to mention here how Deleuze was also a fan of the great modernist ‘American critics’ Fried and Clement Greenberg, along with Harold Rosenberg. See Deleuze 2 0 0 3 :1 0 5 ,1 9 9 4 : 91-2. 10. For example, conceptual work that took the form of classified ads in newspapers, such as Joseph Kosuth’s Second Investigation 1. Existence (1968), in which the artist placed the eight categories organising R oget’s Thesaurus into various newspapers and magazines. This work perfectly illustrates what Benjamin Buchloh famously called Conceptual art’s ‘aesthetics of administration’, and that he criticised for merely ‘mimicking’ the practices of cognitive capitalism, rather than attacking them. In this sense, the only thing the work is ‘against’ is modernist art. 11. For example, in a passage quoted by Lazzarato (2008: 183), ‘Let us say that contemporary art remains enframed. There is a universe of reference, a universe of valorization, including economic valorization, which enframes the work, qualifying it as such, capturing it in a social field. There is an institutionalcutting out’ (‘L’an 01 des machines abstraites’, Chimeres, 23, Summer 1994). Other examples are 2008: 21-34, 2011: 46. 12. My thanks to Gary Genosko for his translation of this passage from p. 276 of L a Revolution M oleculaire (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Encres/Editions Recherches, 1977). The existing translation is clearly inadequate (see Guattari 1984: 106). 13. To be fair, Lazzarato does not understand the readymade in purely conceptual terms, and in fact offers some interesting ideas of how Guattari’s own suggestion of a ‘concept that creates sensations’ (2011: 43) could be understood in terms of ‘belief’ (2010: 105-13). 14. Bifo, another post-Operaist advocate of ‘non-art’ symptomatically claims that for Guattari ‘the aura [of art] was definitively forgotten’ (2008: 34). 15. Guattari vacillated somewhat about the term ‘utopia’, on the one hand voicing suspicion over its dialectical relation to history (Guattari and Deleuze 1994: 110), while on the other affirming it in the face of those who accuse him of it, finally claiming that ‘when it comes to dreaming and utopia, the future is wide open’ (1996: 106). 16. It is worth mentioning Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du reel, 2002) at this point, which contains a chapter about Guattari that was first presented in Guattari’s seminar and then published in Guattari’s journal Chim eres. There are various problems with Bourriaud’s application of Guattari’s thought to contemporary art, including his insistence on the place of the concept in contemporary art (101). More importantly for us here, however, is his downsizing of Guattari’s utopian optimism in modern art’s radical political potential, to the construction of consensual and ‘convivial’ ‘relations’. Regarding

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this last point, Eric Alliez has launched a convincing attack in ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of Relational Aesthetics’, in S. Zepke and S. O ’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and Contem porary Art, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 17. As Guattari says of one of his favourite painters, ‘Turner’s art, from his most famous period, signifies nothing. It has no assignable historical coordinates. It designates and manifests a-temporal machinism’ (2006: 249). 18. As a result, and as Adorno puts it, ‘Aesthetic autonomy encompasses what is collectively most advanced, what has escaped the spell’ (1997: 53). Aesthetic autonomy, in other words, is what is most modern-and therefore most political-about art. 19. Adorno once more: ‘A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable utopia’ (1997: 41). These brief quotations from Adorno stand as a promissory note for a future essay on his relation to Guattari and Deleuze.

References Adorno, Theodor (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London: Continuum. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2008) Felix Guattari, Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography, trans. and ed. G. Mecchia and C. J. Stivale, London: Palgrave. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) D ifference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon, the L ogic o f Sensation, trans. D. Smith, London: Continuum. Guattari, Felix (1984) M olecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. R. Sheed, London: Penguin. Guattari, Felix (1987) ‘Cracks in the Street’, trans. A. Gibault and J. Johnson, in Flash Art, 135 (summer), pp. 82-5. Guattari, Felix (1995), Chaosm osis, An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Baines and J. Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications. Guattari, Felix (1996) The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Oxford: Blackwell. Guattari, Felix (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pinder and P. Sutton. London: Athlone Press. Guattari, Felix (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. K. Gotman, ed. S. Nadaud, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix (2008) M olecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. B. Holmes and K. Clapshaw, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix (2011) ‘On Contemporary Art, Interview with Oliver Zahm, April 1992’, trans. S. Zepke, in E. Alliez and A. Goffey (eds), The Guattari Effect, London: Continuum. Guattari, Felix and Gilles Deleuze (1983) Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seers and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guattari, Felix and Gilles Deleuze (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Guattari, Felix and Gilles Deleuze (1994), What Is P hilosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Guattari, Felix and Antonio Negri (1990) Communists L ike Us, trans. M. Ryan, New York: Semiotext(e).

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hatherley, Owen (2008) Militant Modernism, Ropley: O Books. Klee, Paul (1948) On Modern Art, trans. P. Findlay, London: Faber and Faber. Lazzarato, Maurizio (2008) ‘The Aesthetic Paradigm’, in S. O’Sullivan and S. Zepke (eds), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production o f the New, London: Continuum. Lazzarato, Maurizio (2010) ‘The Practice and Anti-Dialectical Thought of an “Anartist” ’, in S. Zepke and S. O’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and Contemporary Art, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, Brian (2011) Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

M achinic Animism

Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato]

Abstract This catalogue essay is based on a series of interviews conducted by the authors with international scholars who were asked to reflect on Guattari’s scattered comments concerning animism. Interviewees are: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (anthropologist, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro), Eric Alliez (philosopher, Paris), Jean Claude Polack (psychoanalyst, Paris), Barbara Glowczewski (anthropologist, Paris), Peter Pal Pelbart (philosopher, Sao Paolo) Janja Rosangela Araujo (master of Capoeira Angola, and professor, Salvador de Bahia) and Jean Jacques Lebel (artist, Paris). Animism was thought by Guattari in relation to a number of themes and places in excess of religion and ritual but in the context of the shattering of capitalism. Keywords: animism, machinism, subjectification, anthropology, archaic societies, ritual There has been a sort of de-centering of subjectivity. Today, it seems interesting to me to go back to what I would call an animist conception of subjectivity; to rethink the Object, the Other as a potential bearer of dimensions of partial subjectivity, if need be through neurotic phenomena, religious rituals, or aesthetic phenomena for example. I do not recommend a simple return to irrationalism. But it seems essential to understand how subjectivity can participate in the invariants of scale. In other words, how can it be simultaneously singular, singularising an individual, a group of individuals, but also supported by the assemblages of space, architectural and plastic assemblages, and all other cosmic assemblages? How then does subjectivity locate itself both on the side of the subject and on the side of the object? It has always been this way, of course. But the conditions are different Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 240-249 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0060 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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due to the exponential development of technico-scientific dimensions of the environment of the cosmos. I am more inclined. . . to propose a model of the unconscious akin to that of a M exican Cuandero or of a Bororo, starting with the idea that spirits populate things, landscapes, groups, and that there are all sorts of becomings, of haecceities everywhere and thus, a sort of objective subjectivity, if I may, which finds itself bundled together, broken apart, and shuffled at the whims of assemblages. The best unveiling among them would be found, obviously, in archaic thought. (Felix Guattari) We do not know, we have no idea what a society without a state and against the state would be. Animism is an ontology of societies without a state and against the state. (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro)

Guattari brings about a de-centring of subjectivity in separating it simultaneously not only from the subject, from the person, but also from the human. His challenge is to escape from subject/object and nature/culture oppositions, which makes man the measure and the centre of the Universe, in making out of subjectivity and culture specific diversions (differences) between man and animals, plants, rocks, but also machines and mechanics. Capitalist societies produce both a hyper­ valorisation of the subject and a homogenisation and impoverishing of the components of its subjectivity (parcelled out into modular faculties such as Reason, Understanding, Will and Affectivity, governed by norms). It is within this framework of a search for a new definition of subjectivity, one that could escape the capitalist enterprise, that the reference to animism is often made. In Guattari’s work and in the same manner as in animist societies, subjectivity loses the transcendent and transcendental status that characterises the Western paradigm. Guattari’s thought and that of animist societies can find common ground in this understanding of subjectivity. Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, expert on the Amazon Indians, commented: I very much enjoyed a passage in which Guattari speaks of a subject/object in such a way that subjectivity is just an object among objects and not in a position of transcendence above the world of objects. The subject, on the contrary, is the most common thing in the world. That is animism: the core of the real is the soul, but it is not an immaterial soul in opposition or in contradiction with matter. On the contrary, it is matter itself that is infused with soul. Subjectivity is not an exclusively human property, but the basis of the real and not an exceptional form that once arose in the history of the Cosmos. (Our interview, Rio de Janeiro, 2009)

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It is not subjectivity that separates man from ‘nature’, because there is nothing ‘natural’ about it. It is not a given, but it is, on the contrary, both an epistemological and a political operation. There is indeed something before the subject/object opposition and it is necessary to start from their fusion point. Guattari prefers to speak about ‘objectity’ and ‘subjectity’ to mark their non-separation and their reciprocal overlapping. Guattari does not make a specific anthropological category out of animism, nor does he focus on a particular historical phase, since he does not limit himself to non-literate, non-governmental societies. Aspects of polysemic, transindividual and animist subjectivity also characterise the world of childhood, of psychosis, of amorous or political passion and of artistic creation. Guattari’s attachment to the La Borde clinic is surely linked, as Peter Pelbart suggests (our interview, Sao Paolo, 2009), to the radical alterity in which psychosis plunges us with regards to the subject and its modalities of ‘human’ (linguistic, social, individuated) expression. Psychoanalyst Jean Claude Polack observes: And it is true that among psychotic people, and notably among schizophrenics, this practically daily commerce with particles of self or perhaps with corpses, outside the self, does not pose a problem . . . There is a certain very particular ‘animist’ sensibility that one could call delirium. Of course, it is a delirium by our standard; it is something that cuts the psychotic off from the social reality that is completely dominated by language, social relations, thus effectively separating him from the world. But this brings him closer to the other world from which we are totally cut off. It is for this reason that Felix maintained this laudatory view of animism, a praise of animism. (Our interview, Paris, 2009)

Guattari’s summoning of animism (he goes so far as to say that it would be necessary to temporarily pass through animist thought in order to rid oneself of the ontological dualisms of modern thought) does not signify in any way a return to some form of irrationalism. On the contrary, for Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, this conception of subjectivity is completely materialist, even permitting a renewal of materialism. I just read the passages that you sent me on animism in Guattari’s work that I was not familiar with, in fact. I find this artificial alliance between animism and materialism incredibly interesting, since it allows one to separate animism from any other form of idealism . . . To reintroduce a subject’s thought that is not idealist, a materialist theory of the subject, goes along with the thought of the Amazon peoples who think that the basis of humans and non-humans is humanity. This goes against the Western paradigm, which maintains that that which humans and non-humans have in common is ‘nature’. (Viveiros de Castro interview, supra)

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The ‘animism’ that Guattari claims to represent is not at all anthropomorphic, nor is it anthropocentric. The central concern is one of ‘animism’ which one could define as ‘machinic’, to recycle the terms of a discussion that we had with Eric Alliez. In Western philosophy there are traditions of thought (neo-platonic, monadological, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large - Leibniz, Tarde, etc.) which can coincide with the cosmologies of animist societies in certain places. Alliez remarked: Animism is present in the work of Deleuze before he meets Guattari. And it is a horizon, a totally expressionist category which participates in that which one could call, more globally, a universal vitalism. There, according to the neo-platonic tradition, everything breathes, and everything conspires in a global breath. This vitalism is visible in authors like Leibniz, but also in Spinoza across the general category of expression and expressionism ... To my mind, what is going on in his collaboration with Guattari is that animism is no longer invested from an expressionist or vitalist point of view, but from a machinic point of view. And this changes everything, because it is necessary to understand once and for all ‘how it works’, and how it works in our capitalist world whose primary production is that of subjectivity. (Our interview, Paris, 2009)

What are we to understand by machinic animism? The concept of a machine (and later of assemblage), which allows Guattari and Deleuze to free themselves from the structuralist trap, is not a subgroup of technique. The machine, on the contrary, is a prerequisite of technique. In Guattari’s ‘cosmology’ there are all sorts of machines: social machines, technological, aesthetic, biological, crystalline, etc. To clarify the nature of the machine, he refers to the work of the biologist Francisco Varela who distinguishes two types of machines: allopoietic machines which produce things other than themselves, and autopoietic machines which continuously engender and specify their own assemblage. Varela reserves the autopoietic for the biological domain in reproducing the distinction between living and non-living which is at the foundation of the Western paradigm, whereas Guattari extends the term to social machines, technical machines, aesthetic machines, crystalline machines, etc. In the universe there exist everywhere, with no distinction between living and non-living, ‘non-discursive autopoietic kernels which engender their own development and their own rules and mechanics’. The autopoietic machinic asserts itself as the for-itself and the for-others, that is, non-human others. Guattari explains: ‘The for-itself and the forothers cease being the privilege of humanity; they crystallize everywhere

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that machinic interfaces engender disparity, and in return are founded by it’ (1995: 109). All over the Cosmos there exist becomings, haecceities and singularities. If they are not the expression of ‘souls’ or of ‘minds’, they are the expression of machinic assemblages. The disparities they create in variations have their own capacity for action and enunciation. ‘For every type of machine we will pose a question, not about its vital autonomy - it’s not an animal-but about its singular power of enunciation’ (Guattari 1995: 34). Every machinic assemblage (technical, biological, social, etc.) once contained enunciative facilities, if only at the embryonic stage. It thus possessed a proto-subjectivity. There, too, like subjectivity, it is necessary to separate the singular power of the enunciation of the subject from the person and the human. This goes against our philosophical and political tradition that since Aristotle has made language and speech a unique and exclusive characteristic of man, the only animal which possesses language and speech. Guattari, detaching himself completely from structuralism, goes on to elaborate an ‘enlarged conception of enunciation’ which permits the integration of an infinite number of substances of non-human expression like biological, technological or aesthetic coding or forms of assemblage unique to the socius. The problem of assembling enunciation would no longer be specific to a semiotic register, but would cross over into expressive heterogeneous matter (extra-linguistic, non-human, biological, technological, aesthetic, etc.). Thus, in ‘machinic animism’, there is not a unique subjectivity embodied by the Western man -male and w hite-but one of ‘hetero­ geneous ontological modes of subjectivity’. These partial subjectivities (human and non-human) assume the position of partial enunciators. Additionally and most importantly, the expansion of enunciation and expression concerns artistic materials which the artist transforms into vectors of subjectification, in ‘animist’ autopoietic facilities. Guattari writes: The artist and more generally, aesthetic perception, detaches and deterritorializes a segment of the real in order to make it play the role of a partial enunciator. Art confers meaning and alterity to a subset of the perceived world. The consequence of this quasi-animist speech effect on the part of the artwork redrafts the subjectivity both of the artist and of his ‘consumer’. (1995: 131)

Guattari’s great friend and accomplice, artist Jean Jacques Lebel, on whom Jean Rouch’s M ad Masters (Les maitres fous), filmed in

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Cameroon on the occasion of a society of witch doctors’ trance ritual, ‘left an indelible impact’, was one of the first to emphasise the filiation between the thought of non-Western ‘savages’ and the ‘savage’ artists of the East. Guattari was not only in the friendly company of anthropologists, who included Pierre Clastres of Society Against the State, but also artists who solicited the ‘wild libertarian flux’ of the unconscious and its intensities. Lebel comments: [This leads us] above all to the ‘savage’, to savage thought. Permanent and major influence. Thanks to Artaud and his Tarahumaras, thanks to the Surrealist gaze resting on magic art, and thanks to my father who turned me on (starting in childhood) to the art of primitive peoples, with respect to art that is radically different from that which is considered classic, I never considered Paris or New York, Rome or Berlin to be centres of the world. The intensity that comes from primitive art at its peak is the standard against which I judge what I like or what I do not like in Western art. (Jean Jacques Lebel, our interview, Paris, 2009)

Lebel’s Direct Poetry provides a critique of the ‘imperialism of the signifier’ in ‘blowing up language’ and in carrying out an a-grammatical poetry that is ‘beyond and beneath the verbal’. This is another theme that runs throughout Guattari’s work: that of a-signifying, a-grammatical or a-syntactical semiotics. The privilege of speech has a profound political meaning. Not only have signifying and linguistic semiotics served as instruments of division between human and non-human, but also of hierarchisation, subordination and domination inside the human as well. All of the non-linguistic semiotics, such as those of archaic societies, the mentally ill, children, artists and minorities, were considered for a long time to be lacunar and inferior. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that these non-linguistic modes of expression began to be appreciated for their major political role and for making up an experimental field of psychiatry, like at La Borde or as in the work of Fernand Deligny with the autistic ‘savage children’ and their a-signifying modes of expression: It was an obsession in all of the history of Western thought to define what was natural and what was not, to the point where people thought that if there was no spoken language, it was necessarily animal. Thus they forbade the ‘savage children’ who grew up among animals and without speech to express themselves with signs. People behaved in a similar fashion towards deaf people. For 100 years the Vatican forbade the use of sign language, though it is a language par excellence. (Barbara Glowczewski, our interview, Paris, 2009)

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Polysemic trans-individual animist subjectivity does not constitute a ‘vestige’ or even a simple ‘renaissance’ of ritual ancestral practices in capitalist societies. It is also updated and activated as both a microand macro-political force which fuels the resistance and creativity of the ‘dominated’, as Suely Rolnik and Rosangela Araujo explain. ‘Trans-individual polysemic animist’ subjectivity uncovers the possibility of producing and enriching itself in societies such as that of Brazil (and, according to Guattari, in another way in Japan) by means of updated ‘animist’ rituals. This fascinated Guattari. The Capoeira and the Candomble, as described by Araujo, known as ‘Janja’ (our interview, Salvador de Bahia, 2009), a master of Capoeira Angola, are mechanisms of production and singularisation of subjectivity that renew themselves and use semiotic symbols of the body, dance, postures and gestures to speak the language of Guattari, as well as a-signifying semiotics such as rhythms, music and so on. The function of speech is not discursive but existential. With other semiotics and with no privileged role, it helps bring about the ‘mise en existence’ or the production of existential territories. In these practices, the fluctuations of signs act upon real fluctuations without the mediation of representation, of the individual subject and its consciousness. In a remark by Guattari on the subject of ritual, we find, as if in a mirror, his entire concept of the collective (or machinic) assemblage of enunciation and the power of the non-metaphorical use of signs and words: primitive ‘magic’ is illusory. This is how ethnologists see it. Primitive peoples are realists, not mystics. The imaginary and the symbolic are real. No backwaters. Everything extends into everything else. No break-separation. The Bambara does not imitate, does not use metaphors, does not index. Its dance and its mask are a full sign, a total sign that is at the same time representation and production, i.e. transduction. It doesn’t watch the performance impotently. It is itself, collectively, the scene, the spectator, the stage, the dog, etc. This is a sign that is connected to reality. Or rather a sign such that there is no break between reality and the imaginary mediated by a symbolic ‘order’. No break between gesture, speech, writing, music, dance, war, men, gods, the sexes, etc.’ (Guattari 2 0 0 6 : 258)

Thus there are possible echoes and cross-checks between updated ancestral rituals in contemporary capitalism and machinic assemblages, as was discussed by anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski who worked with Guattari. Rituals like collective enunciation mechanisms produce the body as they manufacture an enunciation. But in one case as in others, it is not a question of anthropomorphic productions. The

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‘collectivity’, as Glowczewski reminds us, is irreducible to a human grouping, it is other than belonging to inter-subjectivity or simply to the social: ‘If people are interested in Felix today, it is precisely because he defines subjectivity by assemblages according to which humans are just as soon with other humans as with collectivities, with concepts, with animals, objects, as with machines. . . ’ (Glowczewski interview, supra). The ritual, like assemblage, is a machine that concomitantly determines the action of the cosmic and molecular fluctuations, of real and virtual forces, of sensible affects and corporeal affects, and of incorporeal entities such as myths and universes of references. These rituals and these cultural practices produce a subjectivity not based in identity that is becoming, since ‘the process is more important than the result’ (Araujo interview, supra). This is reminiscent of the processdriven concept of the assemblage of activity in Guattari’s work. As through art as Guattari understands it (and which constitutes for Eduardo Viveiros de Castro an authorised reserve for ‘savage thought’, providing that it does not transgress assigned boundaries), ritual pierces the chaosmosis, bringing us back to the point of subjectivity’s emergence, to the condition of the creation of the new. ‘Art is, for Guattari, the most powerful means of putting into practice some aspect of the chaosmosis’ (Polack interview, supra), to plunge beneath the subject/object division and to reload the real with ‘possibles’. These indigenous cultures of the Americas do not represent a simple survival of ancestral practices that are doomed to extinction. They do not constitute a simple quest for the improbable ‘African’ identity in the face of the reality of slavery and the social inequalities in Brazil. These processes of subjectification are actualised through the use of the myth (and, for Guattari, mythograms - from Leninism to M aoism -are indispensable in any process of subjectivisation) of an Africa that never existed: ‘It is a reinvented Africa, an Africa before slavery, where men and women are free, in order to be propelled into a future of liberty and autonomy for all’ (Araujo interview, supra). What fascinated and intrigued Guattari during his numerous voyages to Brazil and Japan was not only the power of practices like the Candomble (‘passed on more or less directly from the African cultural heritage, which [is] now escaping [its] original ghettoization and spreading throughout society’ [Guattari 1996: 105]), but also the meaning and the political function of these modes of subjectification. For Rolnik, these practices contain a ‘popular knowledge of the unconscious which is very strong and very effective’ (Suely Rolnik, our interview, Brazil, 2009). If they play a major role in the elaboration of

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the trauma of slavery in a ‘beyond post-colonial’ situation, they can and should play a major political role. If there are hierarchical class divisions at the macro-political level in Brazil which seem insurmountable, at the micro-political level this ‘questioning of’ and ‘this other politics of subjectivisation’ cross the same divisions and class hierarchies and circulate and diffuse into the population as a whole, through bodies. According to Rolnik, the richness of the micro-political dimension expresses all of its power when it assembles with the macro dimension, as has occurred at certain moments in Brazilian history (1968, the beginning of the 1980s. . . ) . The valorisation of this ‘production of other subjectivity’ has a long history in Brazil, since the ‘anthropophagic’ manifesto of the 1920s had already legitimised it. Guattari was particularly attentive to all of the modes of production of subjectivity that recharge themselves in non-Western traditions, since the primary production in contemporary capitalism is the production of subjectivity. This production, having never been ‘natural’, means we have things to learn about these practices if we are to be capable of updating them for contemporary capitalism: ‘Archaic societies are better armed than white, male capitalist subjectivities in charting the multivalence [of alterity]’ (Guattari 1995: 45). For a reversal of history, science will force us deeper and deeper into an animist world: ‘Every time science discovers new things, the world of the living gets bigger. . . It is obviously a thought problem. The certitude of knowing what is living and what is not continues to shift . . . we are in an animist problematic, of the soul, of animation. . . ’ (Polack interview, supra). It is not only the evolution of science, but the development of capitalism itself which forces us to an ‘animist’ thinking and politics: That which appears natural to us-springs, ro ck s-a re loaded with history for the aboriginal peoples, who practice forms of totemism, and are thus cultural and non-natural. . . There are those here among us who function this way even more today than in the past, because we have less and less apprehension regarding what is natural, while the category that philosophy contributed to setting up opposes humans to untouched nature. And the greater the desire was to leave it untouched, the more it was developed. This sort of opposition no longer really makes any sense. The nature/culture opposition nevertheless constricts our thinking a great deal. It is still our paradigm, since we continue to fantasise about natural peoples, natural environments, about the fact that we must preserve nature. And as much as we think this way, I think we are wrong when it comes to the solutions to be found for the different problems. For example, the question of the environment is not really about protecting

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nature by stopping pollution. On the contrary, it is necessary to invest it with new forms of assemblages and cultural mechanisms. (Glowczewski interview, supra)

But, as in archaic societies, one cannot imagine an ecology of nature without simultaneously considering an ecology of the mind and of the social. One must then update a cosmic thinking, where ‘soul’ and ‘machine’ exist everywhere concurrently: in the infinitely small as in the infinitely large. The three ecologies of Guattari, leaving behind the parcelling of reality and subjectivity, reacquaint us with the conditions of possibility of a cosmic thinking and politics.

Note 1. Revised by Gary Genosko.

References Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosm osis, trans. P. Bains and P. Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Felix (1996) The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Oxford: Blackwell. Guattari, Felix (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. K. Gotman, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

P la y a s a n A f f e c t iv e F ie ld fo r A c t iv a t in g S u b je c t iv it y : N o t e s o n

The Machinic

Unconscious

F. J. Colman

Abstract How often does an interest or pleasure in your life become something that has to be managed, given a hierarchical position amongst other tasks, and thus becomes a chore alongside other chores? When content and possibility are stripped by scheduling and the demands of capitalist required labour mean that free play or time required for speculative and/or creative thought is removed in the interests of deadlines, what happens to the compassionate, generous and intimate functioning of thought and life? This paper considers how Guattari argues that subjectivities are produced and organised by what he describes as machinic assemblages. Machinic assemblages are those aspects of life that operate to regulate the affective powers of life. Guattari’s work on activities such as art making, game play, music and performance provides ways to consider the labour of subjectivity outside of work. I ask the reader to consider what the notion and motivation for play signal. Arguing that a singular life at play is the collective event of play, I describe play as a mediatising form for the production of subjectivity. The play field situates and directs the machinic assemblage of subjectivation through its own forms of mediatisation. Keywords: mediatisation, affect, play, work, aesthetic, machinic unconscious, subjectivation

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 250-264 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0061 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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In the final days of 1977 the movie Saturday N ight F ever showed a new working class, happy to be exploited all week long, in exchange for some fun in the disco. (Berardi 2 0 0 9 : 27)

What are your motivations to stop w ork and play? The answer to this question depends on a number of factors: how do you define work and what motivates you? What is enjoyment? And what is play? All things are controlled and determined by aspects of the societies to which you and your collective culture are bound. Abstractly, we can observe some things about play: whatever technological medium it uses and whatever (a-)rhythmic, algorithmic or aleatory structures direct it, play is one of the enjoyments of life. Play is fun. Play is productive and destructive of existing categories of normativity; play messes with epistemologies. Play is essential for healthful mental and physical life, providing as it does an intensive concentration upon singular, and not routine task, requiring team as well as individual participation. Play may be repetitious, but its many modalities offer a range of extensions, distractions, commentaries, and existential and aesthetic redirection of current events that surround and engulf the subject. The processual nature of play provides its hermetic intensity. A singular life at play is the collective event o f play. However, as play remains tethered to its cultural allowances, we must be careful not to posit some utopic originary fixed notion of play, yet alterity can be achieved by play in many instances. To consider motivation, under the post-industrial conditions of world capitalism, is to consider the complex determinations of collective and individual subjectivity. Of enjoyment, we might note that this is an idealised, contentious and often commercialised emotive response that is modelled by different value paradigms, dependent upon what value or what some articulate as ‘truth’ systems are subscribed to. No matter what modelled behaviour is positioned by a system, its determined direction must be motivated; moved in some direction by some affective force. How do we articulate the strange and different modes of intensity and affect that organise people under those enormous, unstoppable sovereign entities into the broad paradigms of work and play? Propelling motivation are different forms of energy, which we can characterise broadly as inevitably entropic, yet creative of different and as yet unknown entities. In addition, when one enters either the affective or political dimensions of motivation, then the epistemic, energetic and social mediation of bodies are also of consideration. The motivations for play are many: relaxation, avoidance, protest, simulation, modelling, puzzle solving, role play, entertainment and

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so on. Each and more of these have qualifiers that direct the nuances of the play; even abstractions are subject to the organisers of subjectivity, or what Guattari describes as the ‘machinic unconscious’ of subjectivation-genetic, chemical, sexual, tactical, implicit, explicit, political, cultural, formal, historical, familial (2011: 12, 19, 39; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 130ff.). Above all, forms of play provide encounters with new things, new materials, new ideas, new positions. In connecting with other things - whether imaginary, tangible, auditory, visual, tactile, etc.-play forms mediatise subjectivity through this encounter, which in its affect of plus one substance or idea, something must change, consolidate, dissipate, alter.

I. No Subject; Just Subjectivation ‘The machinic production of subjectivity’, writes Guattari (1995a: 5), ‘can work for the better or for the worse. . . . At best there is the creation, or invention, of new Universes of reference, at worst there is the deadening influence of the mass media to which millions are currently condemned.’ Guattari’s development of the diagrammatisation of the ‘machinic unconscious’ enables critique of the collective machinic structures of given groups. Why do some groups of people work and play less than others? What motivates similar groups to increase their work or play time? Individual and institutional perception of the world and of living is directed by the images and language of collective structures; the determination of forms of capitalism. Guattari’s thinking about exactly how capitalism exerts its immanent and ever-intensive direction of the collective machinic unconscious provides methods that illuminate the affective politics at work in the organisation of things-from different modes of work required for capitalism’s desires; for the desires of the controlling powers, as well as the range of leisure activities also required for capitalism’s progress. In working to dismantle psychoanalytic and structuralist conceptions of the structure of the unconscious, Guattari’s aim was to demonstrate how a m olecular revolution - a revolt against power-is only possible if we collectively understand how the machinic unconscious operates. Guattari argues that subjectivities are organised by all kinds of machinic assemblages, which are those aspects of life that operate to regulate the affective powers of life (Guattari 1984, 2011; Watson 2009: 55). Guattari qualifies the unconscious with the term ‘machinic’, as he says, in order ‘to stress that [the unconscious] is populated not only with images and words, but also with all kinds of machinisms that lead it

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to produce and reproduce these images and words’ (2011: 10). While different kinds of machines have ‘singular’ and ‘specific enunciative consistency’ (Guattari 1995a: 34), the machinic details a collective enunciation of power, is a complex structure, and is not to be confused with the term ‘mechanism’ (although mechanical things are not excluded from becoming part of a machinic structure) (2011: 342, n.15). Guattari describes the general largess of the collective machinic unconscious as ‘something that we drag around with ourselves both in our gestures and daily objects, as well as on TV, that is part of the Zeitgeist, and even, and perhaps especially, in our day-to-day problems’ (2011: 10). Throughout his writings, Guattari uses the word machine in various ways and coupled with other terms, but contextually uses it in order to ascribe the varieties of the affective workings of machinic structures and the things constituted within and by these machines (see Guattari 1995a: 33-57). His critique of the machinic unconscious provides a new description of the economic systems at work in capitalism, and the aesthetic correlations that different abstract machines facilitate, and in political terms, the desired mediatisation of all bodies within that group or community. While we can collate the ‘for the better or for the worse’ that Guattari addresses of the terms of the machinic production of subjectivity, it is the possibility for creative change, and the conditions required for molecular revolution, that I am interested to address here, through a focus on the machinic aesthetic of play. As I have argued previously, Guattari’s work in the area of mass media provides us with tools for thinking about the ways in which subjectivation processes occur (Colman 2008a: 69-70). Within those processes lie the creative domains of art making; a mode that enables existence to be realised in terms of its social or a communal value that is not always for the purposes of capital accumulation - despite its inevitable co-option by some marketplace. Guattari’s work on what aesthetic activities-such as art making, game play, music, performance-can provide for thinking about the terms of subjectivity are significant. As distinct from ‘economic, social, religious or political’ spheres (Guattari 1995a: 99), the fields of aes­ thetics (and here we may include things and forms that offer ways of connecting with other things -sensorial, spiritual, sexual, ritual, eco­ logical) incorporates all epistemologies and/or experiences that require some type of mediating platform to facilitate or ‘crystallise’ aspects of subjectivity (for example, through thinking or activity) (Guattari 1995a: 98). Guattari describes many of the affective outcomes of what happens when you join the technicalities of technological platforms with other

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types of platforms that are themselves not at all technological (Guattari 1995b). He observes, ‘One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette’ (1995a: 7). In the sense that Guattari is attendant to the possibilities of modelling, Janell Watson is right in characterising Guattari’s work as precisely being concerned with the perceptual account of the affective aspects of self-awareness of the world’s processual nature (Watson 2009: 56). Guattari describes how a schizoanalytic metamodelisation can counter the range of the affects of repressive machinery upon subjectivity (1995a: 58-63). To detail aspects of the terms of the ‘modelling’ of subjectivity (which refer to the larger determining factors of life-ecological, mili­ taristic, familial, genetic, biological, cultural), I am using the notion of ‘mediatisation’. In this sense, I hope to retain the inferences of modelling larger universal referents upon subjectivity (see Genosko and Murphie 2008), and enable the position for detailing of the processual aspects of subjectivity by its connection within its collective mediatised universes of reference-as these differ across communities. Guattari’s insistence on connections as opposed to determinations situates his work for media philosophies interested in process, such as Franco Berardi (2009: 27), who notes that moments of play operate as reward for labour. In media theories of the mass media, the term ‘mediatisation’ is applied to describe the political controls that mass media forms take (cf. Castells 2001; Hjarvard 2008; Lundby 2009). To consider how this process works, I am engaging Guattari’s machinic unconscious to articulate how mediatisation can connect with anything. Replacing the Lacanian ‘unconscious’ with the ‘machinic unconscious’, Guattari describes life as a processual dynamic, bound by continuums of hetero­ geneous, polytemporal and cosmic components, not bound by linguistic signifiers of the old psychoanalytic ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ type configurations. In the psychiatric terms of Guattari’s view, the Lacanian ‘unconscious’ describes an archaic structure, whereas the machinic unconscious allows Guattari to sketch out the complexities of systems that will direct consciousness and subjectivity. Images and descriptors of things are not the only determining factors, but operate along with the social and political ‘machinisms’ that direct the aesthetic of any given society into being able to understand, and ‘see’ the nature of the thing (Guattari 2011: 10). What are the functions of play within and for those subjectivation processes that Guattari details? As I described in the opening of this article, play is an abstracted field, dynamic, with transversal movements creating different outcomes for subjectivity, limited only by the scope

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of the play design and game structure. Yet, play offers a processual modality where, as in processes of making art or doing work, a political determination of aesthetic preferences for living is activated-whether through force, social design, or by machinic choices that alter according to definitions of labour forms, such as ‘play-bour’ (Moore 2010: 27). Play is one of work’s dialectic paradigms; it is a counter movement to the capitalist-determined work-ethic, and thus contributes to the terri­ toriality of the symbolic field that Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari describe as a field that is productive of the machinic unconscious. Hence, the play field situates and directs the machinic assemblage through its own forms of mediatisation. To speculate on the operative functions that media of all forms enable reorients subjectivity through the uncoupling of normative subject mediatisation from historicised roles into different mediatising fields. Entering into either states of work and/or play, a platform for subjectivity is entered - a polytemporal, polyhistorical and collective platform for Being. Its features are defined by its contemporaneous media technologies: printing press, spinning jenny, thaumatrope, cinematographe, wireless sensor-modal reactive data player, digital sound recorder, iPad. In addition to the technological platform is the determination of the expression of content as selected, focused and framed by the technology deployed. Technology and content affect the ontology of each, in turn affecting the modes of collective subjectivity, the results of which form a complex mediatised field (as a political and aesthetic refrain). Looking to the modes of ‘machinic interface’ that direct subjectivity with ‘orders’ of ‘proto-subjectivity’ (Guattari 1995a: 8), we can consider the operations of work and/or play within this field, and identify the catalytic affects of the mediatisation of material. The mediatisation to which I refer here engages the non-materialist agency of the machinic production of subjectivation as and within the collective unconscious that Guattari outlined (Guattari 2011: 9-22). There are two key avenues that mediatisation takes, first, through the materiality of the technological platform, and second, through the types of schematisation of information and experiences. Things do not require a material body to be real; ideas can have tangible affects the same way that a pop song, or a hacked credit card can have affects. Mediatisation thus engages the materialist propositions and the conceptual, or idealist movements through machinic interfaces, all of which carry degrees of affectivity. Media affects determine somatic responses to the sovereignty of capitalism’s call to work; to liberal education; to be submissive to capitalism’s forms of control of minority

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and favouritism for difference that can be exploited. Media affects manifest as reactive, inventive, sounds, signals, pain or stimuli, and are perhaps more noticeable when routines, or concentration are interrupted or augmented. For Guattari, there is no aesthetic distinction to be drawn with the types of mediatisation of subjectivation by the structures of the machinic unconscious, but I see the terms of machinic mediatisation as referring more accurately to a breadth of machinic aesthetics, of which the machinic unconscious is but one component. The machinic aesthetics of the realised forms of any subjectivation are recognisable through its historical form or situation. In thinking of specific applications-art, playforms, games mediatisation fixes points within chaos. [Writing/speaking/reading these words.] These are not spatial points, they are affective points to which temporal structures are attributed through the discernment of speeds of movement, in order for structures to be formed through normative consistencies. Those affective points have within them their own ontological immanence, perhaps recognisable, perhaps as yet undetermined. These affect points are positioned by media platforms that provide temporal consistency (writing, radio waves, motion sensor technologies, visual and audio screens, mobile screens, art forms, medications, stimulants), diagrammatise experience, and frame real events of the world, directing information and attention to material and implicit things in the world -w ar, water, food, drugs, love, satisfaction, time, work and play.

II. Machinic Mediatisation In the first section of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari title a section ‘the subject and enjoyment’ (1983: 16-22). What they discuss in this section is how it is the pursuit of the intensive quantities of energy involved and engaged through any processes of consumption of material or existential experience that is the ‘motive force’ for a subject’s unconscious (17). What are the motive forces for work and play? What determines the level and direction of energy to be ascribed to a process? Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus diary charts his daily process of w riting-as w ork for Deleuze; the ways in which various machinic operators extol him to be ‘productive’, to be ‘professional’, and to expend energy in ways that are accountable by his social system. Speculating on his anxieties about producing texts and keeping his diaries that were then sent to Deleuze to be massaged into the philosophical texts that comprise their first collaborative book Anti-Oedipus, Guattari writes that he

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is: ‘Writing so that I won’t die. Or so that I die otherwise. . . Deleuze is concerned that I’m not producing anymore. . . I’m home kind of fucking around’ (Guattari 2006: 399). He then describes himself, that he is not suited to the task at hand and is, in fact: ‘a do-it-yourself guy, a sort of Jules V erne- Voyage to the Centre o f the Earth. In my own way I don’t stop. . . But you can’t tell. It’s the work of never-ending reverie. Lots of ambitious plans. Everything in my head, nothing in the pocket. Epiphany’ (399-400). Mediatisation fixes temporal points for history. Capitalism’s history of [media/art/material/excess] objects displays the affective movements of power of this history (hierarchies of race and gender, obsessions, fetishes, desires). Guattari is suffering under his own mediatisation through the demands of the writing machine, which requires product. Product is at odds with process, the latter being the way that life naturally progresses when not under enforced determining machinic outcomes, required for life under capitalism. Of work, Guattari noted how the industrial manifesto perverts the sense of being human, with its party line of ‘sado-masochistic enticement[s]’ (Guattari 1984: 190). Of play, or pertaining to the intensity that play offers, Deleuze and Guattari describe the intensive refrain: ‘Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities, even if they develop in extension’ (1987: 482). Through Guattari’s thesis of the machinic unconscious, we can see that the influences of the machines of one’s times are what constitute the collective of which one is a part. Guattari’s aesthetic direction provides a paradigmatic shift for thinking about subjective assemblage within the social system-no matter what processual type of mediatisation or institutionalisation runs that system. In developing his accounts of the processes of abstract machines, Guattari situates the territorial nature of subjectivity through the relationships generated between and amongst what Watson describes as ‘the evolution of technology and the production of actual machines’ (Watson 2009: 128). While the evolution of technology can be described in its historical, material terms -from the other-worldly realms, the creation of aesthetic paradigms, to their use in the vernacular world, the portability of information and modes and speeds of communicative technologies - i t is the ‘production of actual machines’ that is not so readily accounted for. For the machines that Guattari describes belong to the affective realm of the world-and the energies by which they move are not all tied to power grids, electrical batteries, radio waves and antennae-as their components are epistemological, and contingent, and their platform

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accessibility controlled by the precarious movements and foci of political capital. According to Guattari, ‘a heap of stones is not a machine, whereas a wall is already a static proto-machine, manifesting virtual polarities, an inside and outside, an above and below, a right and left’ (1995a: 42). Guattari further qualifies: ‘These diagrammatic virtualities take us beyond Varela’s characterization of machinic autopoiesis as unitary individuation, with neither input nor output; they direct us towards a more collective machinism without delimited unity, whose autonomy accommodates diverse mediums of alterity’ (42). One key aspect for media theory and philosophy is to account for ontological change after mediatisation-the rock is modelled into a wall which may be reterritorialised for political ends, or for aesthetic ends, each of which is consolidated through their respective mediatising refrains (fields of play/work/militarisation) for collective subjectivities. Mediatisation is a paradigm that we see affecting all dimensions of life (in the Spinozist sense of affect, where a change occurs between two or more bodies after an encounter [Deleuze 1988]), in the same way we speak of paradigms of domesticity, institutionalisation or game world paradigms. There is an affective, behavioural economy at work in such paradigms. In relation to cinema, Deleuze describes the sense of how such points of change might be considered as perception-images, that are the result of action and affection-images, or vectorial fields that arise from affective movements, and thus in some cases contributing to images of thought (Deleuze 1989: 130; Colman 2011: 115-16). However, for Guattari, thought is the result of an entirely different process. In their final conception of the image of thought, described in their final collaborative book What is Philosophy?, Guattari’s work on abstract machines through the 1970s provides the theoretical support, in defining their manifesto statements on what constitutes philosophy (Guattari 2011: 9-22). In What is Philosophy?, Guattari’s earlier terms of the machinic unconscious emerge as the abstract machine or immanent plane where the image of thought is in movement, but mediated according to the kinds of machinisms that produce them, and the activating points that define singular modes of the thought of subjectivity. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari organise the larger structures of the world into three arenas for thinking-planes of philosophy, planes of science, planes of aesthetics -b u t under the terms of mediatisation that I’m proposing here, these three areas are in fact not at all necessary in order to think machinic subjectivity. Rather, the movement of that plane of immanence that orients subjectivity’s

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intuitions about the world is prephilosophical, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, and does not require concepts in order to be described (1994: 41). Deleuze and Guattari propose the plane of immanence as an abstract machine, in contrast to concepts that are described as concrete assemblage machines. The plane of immanence is extensive, a horizon of events where ‘elements of the plane are diagrammatic features, whereas concepts are intensive features’ (39). Concepts are: absolute surfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal. . . concepts pave, occupy, or populate the plane bit by b it. . . the plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image that gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought. It is not a method, since every method is concerned with concepts and presupposes such an im age. . . Neither is it a state of knowledge on the brain and its functioning. . . Thought demands ‘only’ movement that can be carried to in finity ... (1994: 3 6 -7 )

So, although they describe how an immanent plane works to autoproduce affective thought, Deleuze and Guattari’s account does not adequately accommodate how in fact the results of mediatisation have redetermined that plane of immanence where thought is enabled; by media affects caused through mediatisation. A movement of the infinite requires that a slightly different account be articulated. Guattari’s alogic of the machinic unconscious provides the focus of this plane of immanence where mediatised subjectivity is under process.

III. Mediatised Affect The immanent nature of machinic interface mediatises human consciousness with conditionally produced forms. Mediatisation both produces and occurs through the different types of machinic interface, creating different types of affects. This media affect has been historically charted as instances where encounters with new technologies and/or media forms have generated different types of emotive and/or creative and/or negative responses. Reports of new technologies-from the invention of the calculus to the neutrino, from gothic horror fantasy to vessels for space travel-describe the dual emotions of wonderment and fear at the inferences of the future. Different types of alterations of the world by media forms are charted in media archaeologies (see Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Goddard and Parikka 2011) that describe

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the histories of such affective moments. But there are distinctions to be drawn between affects and the technological platforms that produced them. As Jeffrey Sconce (2011: 71) is careful to point out, the psychiatric diagnosis of ‘technical delusion’ for symptoms where subjects are directed and controlled by electronic media forms has its foundation in end of nineteenth-century power paradigms, rather than in specific technological platforms. In other words, while we might be able to name the singular technology, or historical form, together with its material components, we are advised to consider the affective structures that enabled the paradigmatic history of that thing to come into being; this instead of that; one object holding value over another; my body enslaved, incarcerated or encased in cloth of gold, and holding power-these differences are politically determined. Guattari’s theory of the machinic unconscious does not so much describe how mediatisation occurs, but in describing the collective-and not individual-affects of such structures, he provides a graphic account of what the processes are that come to constitute and enable the affects of ‘all kinds of machinisms’ (2011: 10). These ‘machinisms’ include all of the institutional mechanisms Guattari’s work highlighted and fought against-the repressive affective powers of the normative models imposed upon existential subjectivity through the codified familial and work institutions within their contemporaneous social and legal systems. Guattari outlines the movement of these affective qualifiers in his diagrams (many of which resemble board or chalk games), and in their forms open new refrains (Guattari 2011: 175; 180; see discussion in Watson 2009; on game structure see Colman 2008b). Given Guattari’s critique of the machinic unconscious, and his discussions around the ways in which this unconscious works to processually direct subjectivisation, his work thus provides a catalytic contribution to both the historicisation and speculative theorisation undertaken not only in studies of Guattari (Genosko 2002), Deleuze and Guattari (Stivale 1998; Alliez 2004; Zepke 2005; Lampert 2006) and Guattari in the context of French philosophy (Watson 2009), but also in the media studies disciplines of media theory (Wardip-Fruin and Montfort 2003: 405-6; Genosko and Murphie 2008), media ecologies (Fuller 2005; O ’Sullivan and Zepke 2008; Alliez and Goffey 2011), media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Goddard and Parikka 2011) and in the mediatisation of revolution (Berardi 2008, 2009). Post-Guattari, a critical look at the affects produced through mediatisation considers the internal conditions of a structure and displays the movement of any given structure, as it alters its dimensions.

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The affective workings of different machines are productive of different ontological dimensions. The machinic mediatisation of life incorporates systems that feed collective and individual desire. Formless and formed, we can collate the areas of collective content from which Guattari developed his thinking: psychiatry, drugs, Kafka, homosexuality, relationships of the collaborative and conjugal couplings, war and aesthetic machines (Guattari 1984; Genosko 2011). This machinic affect is the wind that blows the dry head of the dandelion plant and carries its seeds into the neighbour’s plot. That machinic affect is the deliberate planting of a bomb by militant groups, timed to detonate in the midst of civilians. This machinic affect is fucking about at home, playing games. Mediatisation fixes points within chaos-through abstract machines, and we can call them fields of play. Their political and aesthetic determination feeds into the collective unconscious of their time, and of the possible future state of the collective, machinically determined field. It is a machinic territory, argues Guattari, because of the relativity arising through movements of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation (2011: 11-12). Structured affects are used to organise bodies politically-this is Guattari’s argument in his discussion of the machinic unconscious. Watson (2009: 56) describes this unconscious in terms of the ‘sociopolitical sphere’ and ‘the perception of the world’ but here I am extending ‘perception’ to infer the breadth of machinic mediatisation. In their work, Deleuze and Guattari are interested to describe a certain kind of processual thinking about life; how a life is made is in fact, that life. This is a truism that any socially active person already knows about; namely, what are the factors that come to hold something together, or rip it apart? What motivates you to work or play? The factors that comprise machinic mediatisation include consideration of what are the multiple dimensions to thinking about how a situation, an environment, a particular timeframe, an organisation and biological factors of existence can come together-or not-and provide the means by which these factors might achieve or deny various degree of function in relation to the larger organisation in which they operate. The consolidation of motivation is through a politically determined normative dynamic that ‘planes of consistency’ demarcate as refrains of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 328, 333; Guattari 2011: 11). The components of Guattari’s diagrammatic organisation(s) of subjectivity appear deterministic in their systematicity, yet he is insistent on rejecting any form of structural determination when one considers that such organisations are never static-walls require maintenance or

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they crumble (1984: 114). The power matrix from which Guattari draws upon is historically situated in 1970s politics where labour forms are gender and ethnically hierarchised, and where better public access to the scale and variety of governmental mismanagement and economic mistakes reveals them to a larger number of people through the medium of television (this is the era of the first televisation of a w ar-the twenty-year Vietnam war conflict, 1950-70). Yet as Guattari reproduces certain aspects of those structures (the aporic diagrams), his work enables a measure of sight of them in a way that situates their deterministic moulding of subjects and makes their mediatising affects all the more apparent. Guattari describes what allows the molecular affects to be detailed. The media machinic where the processual nature of mediatisation arises can be anything: At a particular point in history desire becomes focalized in the totality of structures; I suggest that for this we use the general term ‘machine’: it could be a new weapon, a new production technique, a new set of religious dogmas, or such major new discoveries as the Indies, relativity, or the moon. (1984: 117)

From a universalising process of the production of a collective subjectivity, a description of subjectivity’s own field of play allows an ‘extract’ from the world (Guattari 2011: 12). Play, like art, is a creative processual activity, and in this activity, subjective alterity can be sited.

References Alliez, E. (2004) The Signature o f the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s P hilosophy?, trans. E. R. Albert and A. Toscano, London: Continuum. Alliez, E. and A. Goffey (eds) (2011) The Guattari Effect, London and New York: Continuum. Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’) (2008) Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, trans. G. Mecchia and C. J. Stivale, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’) (2009) Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies o f Post-Alpha Generation, trans. A. Bove, E. Empson, M. Goddard, G. Mecchia, A. Schintu and S. Wright, London: Minor Compositions. Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colman, F. J. (2008a) ‘Affective Vectors: Icons, Guattari, and Art’, in S. O ’Sullivan and S. Zepke (eds), Producing the N ew : Deleuze, Guattari and Contemporary Art, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 68-79. Colman, F. J. (2008b) ‘Any-Space-Whatevers: Affective Game Topologies’, Refractory: Jou rnal o f Entertainment Media, vol. 13: ‘Games and Metamateriality’, ed. C. McCrea, D. Jayemanne and T. Apperley, available at http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/2008/05/21/affective-game-topologiesany-space-whatevers-felicity-j-colman/ (accessed 11 January 2012).

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Colman, F. J. (2011) Deleuze and Cinema, Oxford and New York: Berg. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M . Seem and H. R. Lane, New York: Viking. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986) K afka: For a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Fuller, M. (2005) Media Ecologies, Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Genosko, G. (2002) Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Continuum. Genosko, G. (2011) ‘Daddy’s Little Helper: Guattari and Gamma OH’, 4th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Denmark: Copenhagen Business School, 27 June. Genosko, G. and A. Murphie (eds) (2008) ‘Models, Metamodels and Contempo­ rary Media’, The Fibreculture Journal, 12, available at http://twelve. fibreculturejournal.org/ (accessed 11 January 2012). Goddard, M. and J. Parikka (eds) (2011) ‘Unnatural Ecologies’, The Fibreculture Journal, 17, available at http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/ (accessed 11 January 2012). Guattari, F. (1984) M olecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. R. Sheed, New York: Penguin. Guattari, F. (1995a) Chaosm osis, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guattari, F. (1995b) ‘On Machines’, JPVA Jou rnal o f Philosophy and the Visual Arts, 6: ‘Complexity’, ed. A. Benjamin, pp. 812. Guattari, F. (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. S. Nadaud, trans. K. Gotman, New York: Semiotext(e). Guattari, F. (2011) The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. T. Adkins, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hjarvard, S. (2008) ‘The Mediatization of Society’, N ordicom Review, 29: 2, pp. 105-34. Huhtamo, E. and J. Parikka (eds) (2011) Media A rchaeology, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press . Lampert, J. (2006) Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy o f History, London: Continuum. Lundby, K. (ed.) (2009) M ediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, New York: Peter Lang. Moore, P. (2010) The International Political Econom y o f Work and Employability. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Sullivan, S. and S. Zepke (eds) (2008) Deleuze, Guattari and the Production o f the N ew , New York and London: Continuum. Sconce, J. (2011) ‘On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine’, in E. Huhtamo and J. Parikka (eds), Media A rchaeology, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 70-94. Stivale, C. J. (1998) The Two-Fold Thought o f Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations, New York: Guilford Press.

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Wardip-Fruin, N. and N. Montfort (2003) The N ew M edia Reader, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Watson, J. (2009) Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought, New York and London: Continuum. Zepke, S. (2005) Art as Abstract M achine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, New York: Routledge.

. . . And . . . and . . . and . . . The Transversal Politics of Performative Encounters

Anja Kanngieser

Abstract This paper examines Guattari’s notion of transversality through a creative and ambiguous form of political intervention, the performative encounter. Drawing from Guattari’s work on subject groups, in combination with Deleuze’s conjunctive ‘and’, via contemporary theorisations of creative activism and affect, it maps out a movement that destabilises categorical dualisms between activists and non-activists, artists and non-artists. It proposes that transversals such as those enacted by the performative encounter open spaces for the emergence of new subjectivities, relations and worlds. In doing so it critically extends Guattari’s conceptualisations of political organisation, group subjectivation and aesthetics into radical political terrains that are antagonistic of the nation-state and capital at the same time as being affirmative of possible present and future conditions. Keywords: transversality, performative encounter, aesthetics, activism, affect We can no longer separate the prospect of revolutionary challenge from a collective assumption of responsibility for daily life and a full acceptance of desire at every level of society. (Guattari 1984: 272)

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 265-290 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0062 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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A certain form of ‘politics for politicians’ seems destined to be eclipsed by a new type of social practice better suited both to issues of a very local nature and to the global problems of our era. (Guattari 1995: 121)

Questions of politics infused the work and life of Felix Guattari. They were very particular articulations of politics, however. For Guattari, the political was always bound to processes and forces of subjectivation, organisation and desire (Guattari and Rolnik 2008); a position that was often neglected in the logistical and psycho-corporeal operations of the institutions and groups he was embedded within and witness to. In his early work on the clinic Guattari began to develop a concept of transversality related to subject groups that was to later inform his theoretical and practical experiments in revolutionary organising. Critical of crystallisations of organisational power and fixed role hierarchies, he proposed that a transversal movement, which would be achieved ‘when there is a maximum communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings’ (1984: 18), could fracture tendencies toward reification. In this movement, he argued, space is opened for the self-determined engendering of collective and singular subjects. This is why transversality was seen to be the ‘ideal limit of all activity’ (Bosteels 2001: 156). Guattari’s vectoral approach challenged the strictures of the totalising ‘militant’ circles and the psychotherapeutic settings in which he moved. He found one prototype for the subject group in the early radical practices of the Situationist enrages. It is from within such practices that a radical political potential for the transversal unfolds. This paper will examine the transversal through one such practice, what I refer to as a performative encounter:1 a collective, creative articulation that is inherently political in its focus (in this configuration, having a militant engagement and critical relationship to the nation­ state, law and bureaucratic repressive apparatuses); that uses tactics of humour and play, hoaxing and faking; that is ambiguous in identity (taking place in realms or contexts disassociated from orthodox aesthetic and political activity); that is dedicated to activating new relations between people, and is affirmative of autonomous and convivial ways of living and being.2 It focuses specifically on some of the ways in which the mobile nature of the encounter makes visible the compositions of subjects through the formation of subject groups, transversal identities and categories, and affective worlds. I begin by introducing two performative encounters of collective appropriation (or

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collective stealing, occupying and re-claiming) launched by the German Umsonst (for free) campaigns. I then turn to Guattari’s early readings of transversality and subject groups to illustrate how the organisation of the encounter gives rise to new modes of relating, followed by Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of the conjunctive and to argue for the encounter as a mechanism for the production of transversal subjectivities. Because the encounter is understood as a world-making dispositif, the affective political spaces and relations it constitutes must be included; by bringing a discourse of affect into an exploration of the performative encounter, the spatial and temporal geographies of the encounter’s mobilisation can also be considered.

I. A Performative Encounter of Collective Appropriation A performative encounter is a multidimensional event that creates subjects. (Rosello 2 0 0 5 : 2) The positing of the new cannot be anything else but the positing of different modes of exercising and articulating social pow ers. . . we need to extend the realm of commons in more and more spheres of our social doing, at any scale of social action, t o ... run our lives as free social individuals. (De Angelis 2 0 0 7 : 12) We don’t want to make reforms and we don’t want to beg, all we want to do is to say: not like this! Now we will take what we want: fun, culture and life. (Berlin Umsonst in Kanngieser forthcoming)

In 2003 the network Berlin Umsonst (Berlin for Free) launched Nulltarif in protest against public transportation fare increases, which saw counteraction through the mass distribution of forged train and bus tickets. In 2005 the more sustained campaign of Pinker Punkt was instigated. Responding to repeated fare increases and the restructuration of the student discount card, Pinker Punkt encouraged commuters to travel for free collectively. The name ‘pinker punkt’ was strategically conceived as a way to dislocate and queer the racist and criminal connotations from practices of ‘schwarzfahren’/riding black or fare evading. On designated days commuters on various Berlin lines were met at the platform by people carrying large pink circular signs. These marked aggregation points for collective travel. Each group had participants that were informed of their legal rights and equipped to deal with state repression. Commuters on the trains were told what was happening and why, and were invited to take part. Over its

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duration, each collective journey attracted anywhere between three to fifty participants.3 In 2004, the MoMA came to Berlin. Dismayed by the exorbitant entry costs and long queues, avoidable only for VIPs, Berlin Umsonst launched the MoMA Umsonst action. The first part of the campaign involved Umsonst participants donning suits, distributing fake entry tickets and successfully entering the exhibit for free. Following this, over two thousand posters were printed closely resembling the official MoMA advertising, stating in German, Turkish and English that on 17 April the MoMA would be open to all. The campaign received citywide media coverage, and on the day between four to five hundred people were in attendance. As the ‘activists’ were visually ambiguous, dressed in suits and smart clothing, a media furore ensured; reporters were uncertain whom to target for interviews and commentary. This destabilisation of identity also displaced the force of state apparatuses, for it was unclear whom to charge for instigating the event. As one of the constituents explained, ‘in Berlin at these large rallies, somehow the police are always managing to beat people up . . . fun makes it more difficult for them. . . You dance around and confuse the police, who can never be quite sure: is this a political action or a cultural action? It’s good to break down these clear divisions’ (Eshelman 2005). ‘Alles fur alle, und zwar umsonst/everything for everyone, and for free’: this was the influential slogan that accompanied the Umsonst campaigns, which arose from the European radical left in 2003 as an atypical form of ‘activism’ employing creative gestures of resistance, participation and liberation through direct action. Enacting encounters of collective appropriation inspired by a long tradition of auto-reduction and refusal (Virno 1996; Tronti 1980; Negri 1984; Cleaver 1992), Umsonst was a critical response to the precariousness of everyday life and labour, one aspect of which was manifest through the increased costs and privatisation of public services, spaces and cultural resources.4 Central to the campaigns was the capacity to tap into collective and common points of dissatisfaction. This was seen in their rhizomatic and populist autogenetic character, and resulted in the promulgation of similar campaigns across several German cities over the succeeding years. The intra-national circulation of the Umsonst agenda helped to open discussions on social protest and appropriative political action within radical left movements, to both greater and lesser acclaim.5 Unlike many of the current German alternative movements, the Umsonst campaigns followed a socially directed method intent on dis­ covering imbrications between public resentment against state-imposed

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regulations and micro-political, often individual, covert acts of appro­ priation based on anti-capitalist sentiment such as illegally entering pools and public buildings, fare evasion, sneaking into cinemas, petty theft and so forth. According to the initiators, these individual tactics were politicised through a visible, collective presence in an attempt to establish everyday practices of resistance (Kanngieser 2007). This shift from what Augusto Illuminati referred to as ‘individual defection’ to ‘collective exodus’ (1996: 181) pointed to the subversive aspect of the activity, both for its strategic reference to historical social protest, and for its composition of affective spaces of common struggle come together through circuits of collective desire. In these struggles ‘for the re-appropriation of social wealth produced by the working class but unpaid by capital’ (Ramirez 1975), such encounters were designed to agitate flows and crystallisations of power and strategically intervene in and redirect them. An emphatic commitment to public engagement meant that the methods and concerns of the Umsonst encounters were framed in a language far more exoteric than those usually associated with ‘leftist’ politics. This was apparent in campaigns around public transport such as Pinker Punkt (2005) and N ulltarif (2003) outlined above, and around cultural resources such as MoMA Umsonst (2004), amongst others.6 The rationale for this was simple, as a member of Hamburg Umsonst explained: ‘we address whoever is there and sees what we do, and we invite people to re-think and to join us’ (Kanngieser forthcoming). For Umsonst, the uncertainty of participants in the encounter signalled the necessity for a flexible political discourse, which was partially apprehended through the rejection of an encompassing political ideology in favour of what was described by a Berlin Umsonst campaigner as an ‘orientation­ less left’. This was further ameliorated through the incorporation of organisational techniques, such as relatively open and publicised meetings and facilitation, which when enacted in coordination with creative, pleasurable tactics including hoaxing, drag and occupation, enabled an inventive, a-centric platform for collective enunciation. This reasonably mobile and unfixed organisation and a connection to public and popular sites of dissent through a playful form of encounter indicate some of the ways in which Umsonst instigated movements across differential social groupings and structures, art and politics, urban spaces, and political nodes and institutions (Kanngieser 2011). By creating these encounters what was set into motion were ‘forms of resistance to subjectification which, in producing novel alliances and connections, are also creative of new possibilities of life, new

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modes of existence and types of practice’ (Armstrong 2002: 49). Following Guattari and Deleuze we can look to these in terms not of ‘recommending the liberation of “life” from all forms of molarity and subjectification’ but as a means of theorising ‘a “becoming­ revolutionary” pursued in a piecemeal fashion at the level of the local or sub-political’ (Armstrong 2002: 49). To look at this process of ‘becoming-revolutionary’ it is useful to begin with transversality in terms of the subject group, through which Guattari first sought to express this movement, and its implications for thinking about subjectivation.

II. Transversality and Subject Groups Transversality belongs to the processual subject’s engendering of an existential territory and self-transportation beyond it. The key concepts involved are: m obility (traversing domains, levels, dimensions, the ability to carry and be carried beyond); creativity (productivity, adventurousness, aspiration, laying down lines of flight); self-engendering (autoproduction, self-positing subjectivity), territories from which one can really take off into new universes of reference. (Genosko 2 0 0 2 : 55)

The production of ‘new universes of reference’: this is a phrase that both Guattari (1989) and Gary Genosko (2002) deploy when they write about transversality and its effects on the individual and collective subject, or as Genosko puts it, the ‘processual subject’s engendering of an existential territory and self-transportation beyond it’ (2002: 55). For Guattari, transversality pertains to the production of radical collective subjectivities, in one sense by enabling what he described in his early text M olecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1984) as subject groups. Through his appraisals of subjectivation, Guattari sought to depart from both Freudian and Marxist traditions. These traditions reduced ‘sociopolitical relationships to the personal unconscious’ in the former case and interpreted ‘cultural productions as being overcoded by the material environment’ in the latter by arguing for causal, linear and unilateral structuralised definitions of society and subjectivity (Bosteels 2001: 151). In contrast, Guattari was keen to map complex operations of power informed by and informative of the ways in which subjectivities, social codification, ecologies and capitalist regimes mutually produce one another. What the concept of transversality provided for Guattari was a way to ‘think the interactions between ecosystems, the mecanosphere, and social and individual universes of reference’ (1989: 135).

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For Guattari transversality became a central institutional and conceptual tool, employed clinically for ‘heightening and maximising an institution’s therapeutic co-efficient’, existing in its ‘bureaucracy and officialdom, structures, roles and hierarchies’ (Genosko 2002: 55). Guattari conceived of transversality operating in a clinical setting as a measure (a so-called coefficient) of how much communication exists between different levels, in different directions, of an organization. The goal is to increase the coefficients of transversality, that is, to reduce blindness and bureaucratic-mindedness, in favour of openness, overcoming the impasses of both vertical and horizontal organizations, by means of creative organizational innovations. (Genosko 2 0 0 2 : 200)

A means by which to induce this co-efficient or measure is through the modifications of relations, forces and environments between groups (and their effects) within and across institutions. Within these institutions Guattari was intent on discovering the sites of latent power, often not coincidental with the structural distribution of roles, being held in the relationships between subjects. Through his work at La Borde clinic Guattari developed a thesis of group formation within institutional environments in which he (non­ absolutely and non-judgmentally) distinguished two types of group: the subjugated group and the subject group. The subjugated/dependent group are those constantly subsumed to Power in some form (which is correlative of their desire for authoritarianism), and are usually linked to molar activity, being totalising and, as Mark Seem puts it, ‘global in ide­ ology’ (1974: 38). The principal characteristic for Guattari is the group’s heteronomy, seen in their incapacity for statement, their determination from outside and the subsequent withdrawal into protective group phantasy and insularity (1984: 14). This is the problem that confronts the ultra-leftist militant, who according to Genosko, gets swept into the phantasms typical of the subjugated group and tends to get ‘hung up on the significations produced by the leadership rather than producing their own signifiers and speaking in the name of the institutions they create adequate to the course of their actions’ (2002: 96). Group subjects/subject groups are conditionally opposed to subjugated groups. These groups are molecular by nature, localised, and generative of processes of becoming-action rather than of encompassing structures. Unlike the external determination dictating the subjugated group, the subject group ‘endeavours to control its own behaviour

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and elucidate its object, and in this case can produce its own tools of elucidation’ (Guattari 1984: 14). Put another way, it upholds an active position in terms of its own project. This suggests that for those constitutive of the subject group, the means for articulation and signification exist in interdependence and difference, synchronously aggregated through the collective process. ‘The subject group’, Genosko proposes, ‘is a kind of group in fusion. . . come together in ‘the flash of common praxis,’ in mutual reciprocity rather than mutual Otherness’ (2002: 86). Through Genosko’s description of the collective affirmatively arising out of ‘the flash of common praxis’ we begin to sense the potential that Guattari envisaged in this new organisational structure: a rhizomatic, non-representative, non-programmatic assemblage of singularities. The campaigns of Umsonst established the terrain for a potential subject group in the performative encounter through their dedication to the composition of a collaborative and transitory collective. For Guattari, ‘a subject group is not embodied in a delegated individual who can claim to speak on its behalf: it is primarily an intention to act, based on a provisional totalization and producing something true in the development of its action’ (1984: 33). From their genesis the campaigns of Umsonst disinherited the models of organisation usually associated with so-called militant practices. Conceptualised as a series of campaigns rather than a group, there was no real possibility for permanent unification. Rather the collective converged around individual encounters addressing the privatisation of cultural and public resources and spaces, state discourses around economic rationalism and later, the precarisation of life and labour. Bringing to the fore the economic and class delineations leveraging the segregation of necessity from luxury, each encounter was a direct retaliation against the disenfranchisement vested by the neo-liberal rhetoric of scarcity rampant in Germany. At the same time the en­ counter acted to live out more desirable conditions-free transport and free cultural events, for instance. These resources and services were employed by variegated demographics, and hence had broadly felt effects, meaning that these were not isolated nodes but, rather, multiple constellations for contestation and re-imagination. Because what was at stake was the encouragement of a ‘culture of everyday resistance’ -th e self-valorisation of constituents through the subversion of capitalist conditions - i t is clear why an exclusive or ideologically demarcated group was not considered strategically appropriate. Recalling Guattari’s subject group, Umsonst was ‘primarily an intention to act’ (Guattari

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1984: 33), without the entropic, socio-systematic category of the individual entitled to comprise the action. The flexibility within the organisation of the Umsonst campaigns does not imply what might be understood as a fixed horizontality, in the same way that management and facilitation cannot be reified into a vertical hierarchy. Each campaign required significant planning phases conducted by small committees, and there were oftentimes around a dozen ‘initiators’ to each encounter. There is nonetheless a marked difference between how these encounters were calibrated and the orthodox ‘militant’ subjugated groupings identified by Genosko. The campaigns of Umsonst tried to maintain as malleable as possible the range of collaboration, with a disposition of transparency and accessibility. The saturation of the encounters with spectacular and novel elements, such as slogans, costumes, stickers and props, generated diffuse interest leading the proliferation of the moniker and modus throughout other collectives and networks. Although the publicity of the planning stages was tempered by the illegality of the interventions, which prohibited the relay of certain decisions, there was wide solicitation for the materialisation of many of the encounters. At the same time, such emphasis could not eliminate constraints on the constitutive body, both in terms of those differently-abled and those made precarious by state documentation risking deportation or repression, and the limitations arising from mass-media conservatism. To facilitate collaboration and participation to the most viable extent, the development of the encounters stressed integrative methods including open workshops, research groups and discussions to build solidarity between groups such as minimum wage earners and underemployed workers, those on age and disability pension, students, artists, interns and the like, that the accelerating processes of privatisation specifically made precarious. While these did not always proceed or conclude as initially envisioned in terms of sustained community relations, recurrent endeavours were persevered with.7 Networks of autonomous groups targeting the specific areas that the individual campaigns responded to-public transport, education, cultural resources, casualised labour, housing-were also invited to co-convene workshops; as one campaigner recounted, ‘we always approached other groups that were working on these specific conflicts, we ran workshops with them and tried to develop this appropriation perspective together’ (Kanngieser forthcoming). These collaborative workshops arose as an experiment to move beyond prescriptive, abstracted or ideologically based narratives, and intended to forge connections between activists and non-activists, as

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well as those engaged in different lines of struggle. Emphasis was placed on inviting people to examine the effects of structural reform on their everyday lives, and co-creating spaces for collective, self­ articulated protest. It was proposed that common direct action could make this dissent visible, and it was hoped that such political visibility would inspire pluralistic flights of organisation beyond the borders of recognised activist spheres. From even this brief introduction to the organisation of Umsonst, the transversal dimension of the encounter, and its tendency toward subject groupings, begins to emerge. By identifying common sites of unrest, and by committing to an unfixed organisational format, the encounter of Umsonst animated collaborations that connected minor compositions into new formations.8 Further vital to this assemblage is the way in which the participants were considered to be the very conditions through which the encounter is constituted as such.9 This signals a shift away from hierarchical and closed conceptions distinguishing those that ‘would’ (activists/artists/specialists in social and political change) from those that ‘wouldn’t’ (non-activists/non-artists/non-specialists), fundamentally reconfiguring the contours of the activity along with its processes of subjectivation. In this way transversality has immediate consequences for how such practices transform the textures of conventional organisation; transversality becomes a tool for ‘creatively autoproducing themselves as they adapt, cross, communicate and travel, in short as they transverse different levels, segments and roles’ (Genosko 2002: 55). This is a significant juncture, and one that requires further teasing out. In Guattari’s later conceptions of transversality, he emphasises its congruent accents, which coupled with the Deleuzian conjunctive and allows for a reading of how productions of subjectivity take place in the performative encounter, as we shall shortly see.

III. Political Artistic Transversals and their Radical Organisation New social practices of liberation will not establish hierarchical relations between themselves; their development will answer to a principle of transversality that will enable them to be established by traversing, as a rhizome, heterogeneous social groups and interests. (Guattari and Negri 2 0 1 0 : 123)

Through crossing and reconfiguring ‘different levels, segments and roles’, theories of the subject group and transversality may link to

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radical political organisation. But it is not only in the production of experimental politics that transversality acts as a mutational force: it is also present in the domain of aesthetics. It is interesting to think about aesthetics here both for the inherently creative nature of the encounter, and the new subjectivities, relations and worlds it instigates. In Chaosmosis (1995), Guattari elaborated the movement of transversality with respect to artistic creation. For Guattari, ideal aesthetic praxes and activities are not limited to professional artists and are made up of transversal lines that affectively engender ‘unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being’ (1995: 106). The lines that activate these qualities of being are thus notable in what Guattari calls a new aesthetic paradigm, as well as in political organisations without coagulated hierarchies. The specific manner in which Guattari sets up these thematic vectors of aesthetics and politics, and the processes of subjectivation implicit to them, has been usefully taken up by Gerald Raunig. Throughout his writings Raunig employs several of Guattari and Deleuze’s conceptual apparatuses to explore European historical and contemporary politicoaesthetic events, institutions and methods of organisation. In these explorations he configures aesthetics and politics via an assessment of the exchange between ‘art machines’ and ‘revolutionary machines’. He contends that when art and revolution come into contact, temporary overlaps between the two are catalysed. These overlaps do not entail incorporation, but rather indicate ‘a concrete exchange relationship for a limited time’ (2007: 18), which is transversal insofar as it transforms the terrains of both aesthetic and political regimes, institutions and categories. The affective and transformative labour of the transversal occurs through the accumulative linkage of singularities and collectives in experimental new relations, modalities and co-operations without the goal of permanent synthesis (Raunig 2002: 4). Echoing Guattari’s thesis, Raunig’s notion of transversality implements radical gestures that fundamentally challenge the limits of these categories and institutions. If we acknowledge this analytical proposition, rather than concentrate on art forms that are thematically concerned with political struggle but are un-reflexive in their processes of production and dissemination, we can turn to aesthetics that are organised from the perspective of liberatory politics.10 This is particularly pertinent given that encounters are as reliant on their creative and relational elements for their operation as they are on their political elements. What is most significant is how these processes function with respect to the reconfiguration of organisation, and how this describes a movement between categories and

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subjectivities. For Guattari, the transformative nature of the transversal brings about a parallax shift in discussions on aesthetic constitution and subjectivation, because ‘the emphasis is no longer placed on Being... it is placed on the manner of being, the machination producing the existent, the generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity’ (1995: 109). That is to say, the transversal renders visible the vectoral nature of subjectivation, showing that there is no fundamental subject form but rather movements and compositions. When considered in terms of politico-aesthetic organisation, a transversal exchange can be found both in the ambivalent and critical relationship to the institutions being moved through, and in the structure of the creative political collective itself. The performative encounter, as a politico-aesthetic phenomenon, is demonstrative of such an exchange. Encounters such as Pinker Punkt and MoMA Umsonst move across and between the boundaries enforced by disciplinary regimes (art, politics) of recognition and naming, situating these interventions in a process of constant transformation and re-territorialisation of artistic and political activisms. The performative encounters of Umsonst negotiate impasses around hierarchical or discrete categories of identification by transversing art, life and collective identities - becoming both activist and non-activist, artist and non-artist, in addition to innumerable and mutable other possible identities and relations. Through this exchange the encounter furthermore unequivocally calls into question the dynamic between power and resistance. Being spatio-temporally transitory, indeterminate in its classificatory status and peripheral in its actualisation, the encounter generally circumvents channels of documentation and solidification through its ambiguity. As such the encounter challenges the hierarchising logic of both the capitalistic market and the institutionalisation of creative and political insurrection. What transversality and ambiguity help to generate in the encounter is a perpetual contradistinction between power and dissidence. Transversal structures and lines avoid the reproduction of dominant flows and regimes of power because rather than vertical or horizontal, hierarchical networks they compose a-centrically. That is to say, they do not necessarily move down given pathways or channels, they do not necessarily connect multiple centre points. Rather, they elide systems of coordination, crossing anywhere, everywhere and nowhere, in flight. What organisational models such as the campaigns of Umsonst are thus inclined towards are momentary overlappings and linkages, stratifications of political organisation that have no discrete beginning or

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end. This is why we see the creation of relatively decentralised, flexible and diffuse political territories, which do not operate as a hermetic unit but are open for participation, further discussion and re-appropriation. From this position, it is evident how transversal organisation can jettison seemingly immutable hierarchies wherein an individual or elite group would claim organisational authority over its participants. Posited as a move away from orthodox structures, transversal organisations signify a critical departure from models of organisation predicated on statist and vanguardist forms and ideologies. Moreover, transversal modes problematise hierarchies invisibly embedded in alternative ‘activist’ discourses, that find it difficult to reconcile the rhetorics of inclusivity and poly-centralism with actual practice. These are mediated via malleable and non-specialist modes of engagement that attempt to overturn stratifications of value based on expertise. This overturning challenges the often hidden meritocracies lurking in activist organisation that (self-)delegate tasks according to systems of legitimation based on recognition within activist subcultures. In taking on experimental transversal methods of organising within the encounter, what is given priority is diversity through the acknowledgement of different skills, knowledges, desires and socio-cultural affiliations.

IV. Political Artistic Transversals and Accumulative Subjectivities Transversal movements c a n . . . be launched by extraordinary actions, astonishing occurrences, and traumatic events that challenge subjective territory, permeate its borders, make the familiar strange, and turn the world topsy-turvy. (Reynolds 2 0 0 2 : 18)

The changing relationship between how the artist/activist conceives of herself in relation to the public is where we find correlations between organisational transversals and the making visible of processes of subjectivation. Through these junctures, the roles generally upheld in differential hierarchical structures (artist/revolutionary over public/masses) are problematised. This problematisation can be seen both in the categorical indeterminacy prompted by the encounter’s transversality through the arenas of politics and art, and through its accumulative aspect: what can be attributed to the Deleuzian conjunctive and (1987). This and is of paramount importance, for it helps us to think about how art and revolution, artist and non-artist, activist and

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non-activist, occur in simultaneous profusion. In this promulgation, subjectivities and categories that seek to multiply rather than to subsume or homogenise boundaries of identification are engendered. Here we can see that by recognising multiple contours to identity, individuals and collectives can valorise and orient themselves as heterogeneous and motley agents.11 The multiplication of categories, and their ensuing ambiguity, invoked by Deleuze’s and can be made visible through practices such as the performative encounter-in terms of the form itself and the subjectivities produced through, and productive of, it. This association is best captured by the Critical Art Ensemble, a US-based tactical media collective, and is worth quoting at length. They write that participants in creative encounters and initiatives such as those of Umsonst, are neither fish nor fowl. They aren’t artists in any traditional sense and don’t want to be caught in the web of metaphysical, historical, and romantic signage that accompanies that designation. Nor are they political activists in any traditional sense, because they refuse to solely take the reactive position of anti-logos, and are just as willing to flow through fields of nomos in defiance of efficiency and necessity. In either case, such role designations are too restrictive in that the role boundaries exclude access to social and knowledge systems that are the materials for their work. Here may be a final link to invisibility: these participants value access over expertise, and who really cares about the work of an amateur? (Critical Art Ensemble 2 001: 3 -4 )

The performative encounter does not act as a permanent unification between productions of subjectivities and fields. Rather, it sets up temporary meeting points, which transform the parameters and textures of identities, categories and disciplines in the process. As observed above by the Critical Art Ensemble, this variability means that creative political practices that are predicated upon transversal modes are difficult to recognise within conventional semiotics. This is because they neither fall definitively into the category of traditional activist or political practice, nor into traditional artistic practice; to recall the words of one Umsonst constituent, ‘you dance around and confuse the police, who can never be quite sure: is this a political action or a cultural action? It’s good to break down these clear divisions’ (Eshelman 2005). The dynamic of displacement at work here flags what is at once the most risky and the most substantive aspect of such practices. As they do not arise from legitimised spaces and ways of operating but rather erupt from new inventions of actions and procedures, and as they cannot be easily defined, such encounters are susceptible to invisibility. At the

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same time, it is this ambiguity that affords a flexibility that constantly challenges the limitations of boundaries, giving such encounters and practices the capacity to ‘push against and even re-organise the institutional and political structures o f . . . recognition and production’ (Kelly 2005). In this mutual movement of deconstruction and re-figuration, the transversal produces subjectivities and ‘self-engendering practices that seek to create their own signifiers and systems of value’ (Kelly 2005). With this accent on self-determined value systems that complement those attributed by Guattari to subject groups, it is clear why such conceptualisations of transversality have been instrumental in opening up new vocabularies and discourses. These are especially helpful when seeking to understand creativity in terms of radical subjectivities that inhabit multiple collective identities. This is because qualities of these subjectivities-such as their heightened adaptability to contingency and mutability-inherently infuse them with possibility. This is precisely where we can see Deleuze’s and come into play. ‘Neither fish nor fowl’ as the Critical Art Ensemble write: hence, not the disjunctive ‘artist or activist’, ‘specialist or non-specialist’, but instead the conjunctive ‘artist and activist’, ‘specialist and non-specialist’. Here we can recognise some third (or fourth or fifth) subjectivity that transverses and transforms these categorical concatenations (Deleuze and Parnet 1987). For Raunig, this and should not be thought of as a means by which to escape contradictions through the chance connection of random elements in some act of political propaganda, but as a ‘multitude of temporary alliances, as a productive concatenation of what never fits together smoothly, what is constantly in friction and impelled by this friction or caused to evaporate again’ (2002: 4). It is useful to reflect for a moment on the productivity of contradiction here. For, while evoking ‘new terrains of open co-operation between different activist, artistic, social and political practices’ (Kelly 2005), transversal modes do not signify a permanent interdisciplinarity but instead create temporary mutant coalitions through a movement of accumulation (not absorption), inherently changing the fields and institutions in the process. What is important to remember is that this and simultaneously negates mass unification, as well as factionalisation and splintering. As such transversality is a vehicle of rupture and convergence in a constant state of becoming, a form or mode of operation constituted through events, collective alliances and transitory organisations. Umsonst, as a collation of temporary subject groups, enacts this creation of becoming-subjectivity through its transversal

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elements, which can produce, as Guattari contends, autopoietic and selfvalorising modalities of signification. What is revealed in this additive process is not a forced synthesis or unification of the parts into some ‘whole’, nor the negation of singular­ ity, or the specificity of experience. It does not seek to assimilate-quite the opposite-for as Deleuze comments, even when there are only two terms the and is ‘neither one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity’ (1987: 34-5). When thinking about these accumulations as ‘temporary alliances’ it becomes possible to imagine how, through a transversal between politics and art, the many roles and identities enacted by individuals are made apparent. These roles and identities are distributed across different contexts-sometimes in commonality, sometimes in alterity-without being subsumed into one or the other. What also becomes clear is how this movement threatens narratives of identity and subjectivity that privilege a univocal, individuated subject. However, as we have seen, the challenging of a cohesive concept of the subject does not simply imply a rejection of the possibility of resistance. Rather, what a visibly accumulative, processual subjectivity marks out is political potential itself. This potential is recognised through a radical collective ontology, radical for the proliferation of connections and relationships it opens up. It is a transversal between politics and art, and this radical collective ontology, that performative encounters, such as those of Umsonst, generate to make visible and fracture normative discourses of agency. In these collective processes of struggle and articulation, and in the development of such moments, possibilities are opened out for new permutations of subjectivation. Self-conceptions and repetitions of identities, behaviours and perceptions, the ‘stiffening of the existential refrain’ (Berardi 2008) can be reconceived as multi-scalar and polyphonic through the act of resistance that is in the same breath an act of affirmation. Transversal organisation runs alongside the additive forms of identity and disciplines that the performative encounter engages. The ingenuity of this style of praxis lies in its border-crossing character, which deliberately sidesteps reductive paradigms of categorisation in favour of mobility and perhaps adversely, ambiguity. While traditional political organisation uses ideological doctrines and activities as a validating measure, transversal modes trouble such strict lines of classification. What Deleuze’s accumulative and does for the performative encounter is emphasise that in the act of collectively constituting the encounter, in collectively riding for free, or demanding access to cultural resources

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with hundreds of others, a radical political event unfolds. In this event, the self-identification as an activist/artist is no longer the issue. Through the encounter, the possibility of constituting artist and activist and non-artist and non-activist within different scenes and circumstances is realised. Thus, what is at stake is the self-valorisation that comes through the constitution of such actions. In this way, transversals between art and revolution apprehend political agency, self-determination and collective enunciation.

V. Political Artistic Transversals and Affective Exchanges The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another. (Landauer [1910] 2 0 0 5 : 165)

In speaking about the subjectivities and relations that the encounter is generative of and makes visible, it is important to recognise how these cooperations and alliances-these new collectives and collaborations-are assembled in time and space. By this I mean how they are brought forth and into exchange to invite worlds that affirm conditions alternative to those present; how they act as what Bryan Reynolds calls a ‘transversal territory’, a ‘catalyzing and transitional space from which new experiences, subjective reconfigurations, and, by extension, dissident mobilizations can emerge’ (2009: 287).12 The argument proposed by Stevphen Shukaitis in his essay Affective Com position and Aesthetics: On Dissolving the Audience and Facilitating the M ob (2007) begins to set up a response via a discourse of affect. Shukaitis uses affect to speak about the task of political art as a creative production of common spaces and public realms ‘through intensive engagement not circumscribed by accepted identities and positions’ (2007: 1). These geographies are activated through the affective potential that transversalities between aesthetics and politics open up. Such potential is predicated on a notion of aesthetics that is attenuated more to the relations and transversal places that arise from the process of collaborative production than to the content or the culmination of the product. This is an understanding of aesthetics, that, as Shukaitis explains, ‘is focused on the relations of production not as a concern secondary to the content of what is produced, but rather as the explicit process of self-institution and the creation of a space where the art of politics is possible (1).

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What is pivotal here, as is for Guattari and Raunig, is an idea of aesthetics that concentrates on a ‘process of collective creation’ and on relations of production, again, the how of what is produced through intensities of affect. To understand how this works we must understand affect as a mobile and transitive extra-human threshold of potential, closely tied to thought in action or process (Thrift 2004: 60). This sees affect moving through and across events, bodies, spaces and experiences, in excess of individual or community, and eluding any kind of capture. Affect is in this sense a force that arises out of and through relationality and exchange, through contacts between myriads of singularities and their assemblages (Deleuze 1988). This conceptualisation helps draw attention to the experimental dimension of the performative encounter as an affective political event. The experimental and transversal aspect is what in this instance affords affect potency across different terrains and events-such as politics and aesthetics - giving rise to intensities (Massumi 2002b). The immanence of affect can be traced out in the potential for intensity. Affect, argues Massumi, underlies and accompanies every event, from the exceptional to the quotidian, and is sensed in the ‘perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability’ (2002a: 36); this gives a feeling of embeddedness in one’s experiences and perceptions (2002b: 214). The changeable nature of affect, and our sense of it, intensifies our experiences and our positionalities. Moreover, affect as intensity is both a catalyst for connection and rupture: it is transformative in that it can break open socialities, and it is connective through the new relations and worlds it compels. Simply put, it is catalysed by, and further catalyses, change and transduction. The ethical crux of affect, suggests Massumi, can be found here: in a concentration on the immersion and participation in the world, in belonging to the world and to each other as a lived selfaffirming reality independent from the value of bureaucratic, state or religious apparatuses (2002b: 242).13 This is why an ‘aesthetic politics’ for Massumi is one whose ‘aim would be to expand the range of affective potential’ (2002b: 235). So how is this understanding of affect as intensity taken up in a reading of aesthetics and politics, and how does it pertain to the performative encounter of Umsonst? What is key is a reinterpretation of aesthetics and the spaces of politico-aesthetic engagement, which invites the living out of possible worlds. This reframes aesthetics as the affective composition that comes out of, and produces, relations and experiences from common processes. Rather than isolating the encounter and its content, what is central is the transversal movement in its development.

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That is to say, the additive inter-subjective element that is contingent on the relations of individuals, environments and experiences in its event. The transversal spaces and territories created and reconfigured through this-the train platform and carriage in Pinker Punkt, the museum courtyard in MoMA Umsonst, the workshop and discussion spaces-are affective and ‘common’ spaces, vital to the emergence of connections and conversation beyond the usual designated zones. Such framing reveals the encounter as a political as well as an aesthetic event that mobilises new relationships between people and their environments. These relationships question and antagonise the logics of the nation-state and capitalism at the same time as affirming shared imaginaries of possible present and future conditions. If we follow Shukaitis to argue that ‘the task of politics is precisely the creation of common space through intensive engagement not circumscribed by accepted identities and positions’ (2007: 2), then the performative encounter as a conduit for the creation of affective spaces is a fundamentally political gesture (Massumi 2002b: 234). The encounter is political in its generation and transformation of subjectivities and relations through affective modes of communication and interaction that are based on reciprocity and mutual exchange, which envision alternatives to capitalist and statist socialities. This political dimension is stressed even more so if we understand these spaces as spaces of ‘affective composition’ (Grindon 2007; Shukaitis 2007; Read 2011): a term linking affect with an autonomist Marxist reading of class composition. In bringing a class perspective to affect, a capitalist critique is added as ‘the notion of political composition identifies as political moments of otherwise invisible or illegible performative social relations’ (Grindon 2011: 86). Composition in this sense places the development of forms of capitalism and labour as occurring in synchronicity with, and response to, daily forms of resistance and self-determined organisation (Wright 2002). The double movement of capitalism and its discontents is seen in the constant dance of displacement and re-structuration of both capital and those myriad struggles against its domination (Mezzadra 2007: 5). As such, this argument stresses the multidirectional processes that contribute to productions of class, labour, subjectivity and agency. Consequently, it engenders a theory of ‘revolution’ not only as a mass event of crisis, but also as an ongoing progression of resistance and creation such as seen in the Umsonst campaigns. This demonstrates the complexity of the relations between production and capitalism, and the possibility for spaces and sites of alternative self-managed activity. In this way,

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what gets opened up is what Massumi refers to as ‘that margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do’ in every present situation’ (2002b: 212), which explains ‘why focusing on the next experimental step rather than the big utopian picture isn’t settling for less’ (212). Coming back to the ‘experimental step’ of the performative encounter and following the arguments presented so far, it is possible to understand why, in terms of the encounter and other examples of transversals between politics and art, to use affective composition as a conceptual tool means to ‘examine the capacities they create, and how they contribute to the development of forms of self-organization’ (Shukaitis 2007: 2). Affect, and especially affective composition, provides a means by which to understand how the performative encounter generates new relationships and connective junctures between people and environments that agitate systems of value. It does so by heightening intensities of experience, by implicating each person in the collective constitution of the encounter, and by accentuating singular and collective sites of power and resistance. As a vehicle for reciprocal connection and communication the encounter operates along lines of organisation that depart from usual models reliant on distinct and reified conceptions of hierarchy, roles and specialisation. The lines of exodus charted out by the encounter are not without discrepancy, however, nor are they predictable. They are prone to stutters and collapse as much as they are coalition and concatenation, which is why Shukaitis insists that: the compositional capacities of these ruptures are not unlimited, for they too through repetition become ritualised and fall back into solidified patterns of circulation. The question becomes one of keeping open the affective capacities of the created space: to find ways to avoid the traps of spectacular recuperation and the solidification of constituent moments and possibilities into fixed and constituted forms that have lost their vitality. (2007: 5)

The element of crisis that this illuminates, namely the impasses of reification and recuperation faced by affective spaces and geographies, the fleeting nature of these interventions in precariousness, privatisation and gentrification, might leave us questioning what kind of response a transversal ontology can actually o ffer-a political disposition that foregrounds movement, processuality and transformation, an ontology of ‘becoming’, so to speak.

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VI. Conclusion It was like everything was thrown up in the air for a moment and people came down after the shock in a slightly different order, and some were interconnected in ways that they hadn’t been before. (Massumi 2002b : 234)

Writing about his participation in the various collectives and political work he was involved in at the time, Guattari once commented, ‘whether there was a real effectiveness doesn’t matter; certain kinds of action and concentration represent a break with the habitual social processes, and in particular with the modes of communication and expression of feeling inherited from the family’ (1984: 29). The point he makes is one that I would like to reflect upon here. When asking what kind of political effect a transversal organisation may have, such as that in the performative encounter, we need to relinquish conceptions of success and failure that linearise and evaluate activities on the basis of pre­ existing or external qualifications. What we might look to, rather, are the relations that such encounters open us up to, the breaks in habits and conditioned uses of space and place they provoke and create. The performative encounter, like that of Umsonst, is an experiment. It is a tactic that complements more sustained praxes of organisation, one whose value lies in its potential to construct shared geographies that challenge hegemonic flows and concentrations of power, at the same time as making visible and intervening in processes of subjectivation.14 If we trace out a trajectory linking Guattari’s concept of the transversal, from his early work in the clinic and its translation into the political realm, to Deleuze’s conjunctive and, we can think about how the encounter radicalises subjectivities. By further turning to a concept of affect as intensity, as a connective force, and by politicising this through a reading of affective composition, we see how the spaces of the encounter give rise to radical ways of being and relating that invite alternatives to the nation-state and capital. By forming a common rhythm from a common cause, a common praxis, the subject groups that make up the encounter invent new languages that place less emphasis on the categorisation of identities and more on their destabilisation. The importance for such a conjunctive and transversal approach to political activism cannot be overstated. Over a decade ago, after the 18 June global day of action in London in 1999, a now notorious text entitled Give up Activism was circulated. What made this paper so significant was that it challenged the presumptions held about organisation in contemporary political work. According to the author,

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while radical organisation had been moving away from the hierarchies of vanguardist politics the roles connected to these hierarchies had been retained: there was still an overwhelming tendency to distinguish the activist from the non-activist, a distinction based on an ‘activist mentality’ which designated the activist as ‘a specialist or an expert in social change’ (1999: 161). This had a twofold effect: not only did it segregate and elevate the activist over the non-activist as a political agent, it also divided her from her own participation in a wider social body, from her own desires and her own ‘non-activist’ life. The performative encounter that I have introduced here directly counterposes this segregation, a segregation that is still present in dominant modes of radical organisation, speaking from a position in the ‘global north’. By opening up to transversality, the encounter emphasises desires to move through and beyond political circles, to work on issues that affect people on a day-to-day basis, and to participate in self-determined and shared struggles. The encounter achieves this through its constitution by, and of, a movement that does not fit easily into the traditional categorical discourses of art and politics. These feature creative political praxes that take as their prerogative the disruption of the borders between artist and audience, activist and non-activist, politics and everyday life, amateur and professional, alternative and mainstream. In a final text, Guattari wrote that ‘new collective assemblages of enunciation are beginning to form an identity out of fragmentary ventures, at times risky initiatives, trial and error experiments: different ways of seeing and of making the world, different ways of being’ (1995: 120). In the assemblage of the encounter we see some of these different ways of seeing and being unfold, and it is only through their continual invention, their disintegration and renewal that this unfolding can continue.

Notes 1. To speak of performativity is to also recall the field of performance. Important work has been done in performance studies on Deleuze and Guattari, particularly by scholars such as Bryan Reynolds (2002, 2003, 2009), Laura Cull (2009), Stephen Zepke (2009) and Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody (2009). It is crucial to note that the performative encounter does not fit easily into the tropes of performance, hence the lack of its objectification as a theatrical form. In fact one of its central characteristics is that it is impossible to delineate precisely what the encounter is as it cannot be defined within the parameters of art, nor within the parameters of politics. Many of its constituents do not understand it as performance in any significant way. It is my contention that it is this very

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

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border-crossing and mobile character of the encounter that enables its political potential. I adapt the term, ‘performative encounter’ from Rosello (2005). Drawing upon fictional literary and filmic texts connected to the North African region of the Maghreb, Rosello uses ‘performative encounters’ to identify a new potential emerging in Franco-Algerian relations that stands to counterbalance a violent history of colonisation. Rosello argues that this potential is linked to the transformations that performative encounters effect on subjectivity. For more on the Umsonst campaigns see Kanngieser (2007, 2011). See also Panagiotidis (2007). Perhaps most popular of this genre was the recent Spanish-based group Yomango, who staged spectacles in banks, supermarkets and public squares. The Swedish collective planka.nu also adopted this tactic in their fare-dodging campaigns. More widely contemporaneous to these, politico-aesthetic tactics infused experimental sections of the radical left resulting in anti-capitalist performances such as those of CIRCA, The Vacuum Cleaner and the Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination in the United Kingdom, and Die Uberflussigen and the Hedonist International in Germany, to name but a few. This was polarised because critics saw the method of appropriation as reproductive of, or doubling, principles of consumer capitalism and commodity fetishism. At the same time, it was contended that such methods could not affect the central conflict of labour and capital. However as one constituent refuted, ‘practices of appropriation reduced the pressures to work’, adding that while Umsonst were capitalist critical they were more intent on finding proactive means of subversion than opposition (Kanngieser forthcoming). An additional point of disjunction lay in that, unlike many of the current German alternative movements, the Umsonst campaigns maintained a socially rather than ideologically directed focus. The Umsonst campaigns included Berlin, Dresden, Freiburg, Cologne, Mannheim, Kiel, Munich, Kassel, Dusseldorf, Luebeck, Goettigen and Jena amongst others. This last issue directly confronted Hamburg Umsonst during a day of action against state threats to unemployment insurance in 2004 where difficulties in communication led to conflict between initiators of the encounter and job seekers. This was in part due to the fact that many of those involved in the solidarity event were not unemployed themselves at the time, and many of the job seekers were older and felt disconnected from the protest. Such points of contention signal issues around maintaining a movement between fixed and unfixed organisation and constitution in the Umsonst campaigns. For more on this see Kanngieser (2007, 2011). For more on the idea of the constituent of the encounter and its importance see Kanngieser (2011). Over the past decade a vocabulary has been developing in Europe around such crossovers including ‘tactical media’ (Garcia and Lovink 1997), ‘radical aesthetics’ (EIPCP2005) and ‘communication guerrilla’ (Autonome A.F.R.I.K.A. Gruppe 2002). See Kanngieser (forthcoming) for an extrapolation of this. This is, of course, not to suggest that subjects prior to the encounter are somehow immutable or enclosed. It is more to draw attention to the ways in which the encounter makes visible the variability and processuality of subjectivation. The reader might also recall Hakim Bey’s (1991) writings on temporary autonomous zones.

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13. This ‘each other’ has significance for Massumi who argues for a political response imbued with an ethics of care and hospitality. Because of the uncertain nature of affect this is all the more imperative (2002b: 240-1). 14. The situation of the encounter within, and commitment to complementing, more ongoing and instituted forms of organisation is imperative, for as Guattari writes, ‘these mutating militant machines for transversal and singularized spaces of freedom will not have any claim to durability. This way, they will come to terms with their intrinsic precariousness and the need for their continuous renewal, supported by a long lasting social movement of great scope’ (Guattari and Negri 2010: 126).

References Armstrong, Aurelia (2002) ‘Agency Reconfigured: Narrative Continuities and Connective Transformations’, Contretemps, 3, pp. 4 2-53. Autonome A.F.R.I.K.A Gruppe (2002) ‘Communication Guerrilla-Transversality in Everyday Life?’, trans. Aileen Derieg, European Institute fo r Progressive Cultural Politics, available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/1202/aag1/en (accessed 11 January 2012). Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2008) ‘How to Heal a Depression?’, Minor Compositions, available at http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/bifo-how-to-heal-a-depression. pdf (accessed 19 January 2012). Bey, Hakim (1991) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonom ous Zone, O ntological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Bosteels, Bruno (2001) ‘From Text to Territory: Felix Guattari’s Cartographies of the Unconscious’, in Gary Genosko (ed.), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments o f Leading Philosophers Volume 2, London: Routledge, pp. 881-910. Cleaver, Harry (1992) ‘The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation’, in Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmos Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism, London: Pluto Press, pp. 106-44. Critical Art Ensemble (2001) Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, New York: Autonomedia. Cull, Laura (ed.) (2009) Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Angelis, Massimo (2007) The Beginning o f History: Value Struggles and G lobal Capital, London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, trans. Ron Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press. EIPCP (2005) Faculty fo r R adical Aesthetics, available at http://eipcp.net/projects/ faculty/1148520288 (accessed 11 January 2012). Eshelman, Rob (2005) ‘Everything for Everyone, and For Free, Too! A Conversation with Berlin Umsonst’, Interactivist Info Exchange, available at http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/4588 (accessed 19 January 2012). Garcia, David and Geert Lovink (1997) ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’, Nettime mailing list, 16 May, available at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettimel-9705/msg00096.html (accessed 11 January 2012). Genosko, Gary (2002) Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London and New York: Continuum. Grindon, Gavin (2007) Carnival Against Capital: The Theory o f Revolution as Festival, PhD thesis, University of Manchester.

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Grindon, Gavin (2011) ‘Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde’, The O xford Art Journal, 34:1, pp. 79-96. Guattari, Felix (1984) M olecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin. Guattari, Felix (1989) ‘The Three Ecologies’, trans. Chris Turner, N ew Formations, 8, pp. 131-47. Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosm osis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications. Guattari, Felix and Rolnik, Suely (2008) M olecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Brian Holmes and Kate Clapshaw, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix and Antonio Negri (2010) N ew Lines o f Alliance, N ew Spaces o f Liberty, New York: Autonomedia. Hickey-Moody, Anna Catherine (2009) Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Perform ance and Becomings, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Illuminati, Augusto (1996) ‘Unrepresentable Citizenship’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 166-85. Kanngieser, Anja (2007) ‘Gestures of Everyday Resistance: The Significance of Play and Desire in the Umsonst Politics of Collective Appropriation’, Translate: Practices o f Transmuting Signs, available at http://translate.eipcp.net/ transversal/0307/kanngieser/en (accessed 11 January 2012). Kanngieser, Anja (2011) ‘Breaking Out of the Specialist ‘Ghetto’: Performative Encounters as Participatory Praxis in Radical Politics’, in A. Kuryel and B. Ozden Firat (eds), Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities, New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 115-37. Kanngieser, Anja (forthcoming) Creative Experiments in Making Worlds, London: Ashgate. Kelly, Susan (2005) ‘The Transversal and the Invisible: How Do You Really Make a Work of Art that is not a Work of Art?’, Republicart, available at http://www.republicart.net/disc/mundial/kelly01_en.htm (accessed 11 January 2012). Landauer, Gustav [1910] (2005) ‘Weak Statesmen, Weaker People’, in Robert Graham (ed.), Anarchism: A Documentary History o f Libertarian Ideas— Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300C E-1939), Montreal: Black Rose Books, pp. 164-5. Massumi, Brian (2002a) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian (2002b) ‘Navigating Moments’, in M. Zournazi (ed.), H ope: New Philosophies fo r Change, New York: Routledge, pp. 210-44. Mezzandra, Sandro (2007) ‘Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude’, Transversal, available at http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/ 1107/mezzadra/en (accessed 11 January 2012). Negri, Antonio (1984) Marx B eyond Marx, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey. Panagiotidis, Efthimia (2007) ‘The “Good News” of Precarization: On the Symbolism of Superheroines in the Era of a Post-Fordist Flood of Signs’, trans. Mary O ’Neill, Transversal, available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0307/ panagiotidis/en (accessed 11 January 2012). Ramirez, Bruno (1975) ‘The Working-Class Struggle Against the Crisis: Self­ Reduction of Prices in Italy’, Class Struggle in Italy: 1960’s to 70’s, available at http://www.prole.info/pamphlets/autonomousitaly.pdf (accessed 19 January 2012). Raunig, Gerald (2002) ‘Transversal Multitudes’, trans. Aileen Derieg, Transversal, available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0303/raunig/en (accessed 19 January 2012).

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Raunig, Gerald (2007) Art and Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg, New York: Semiotext(e). Read, Jason (2011) ‘The Affective Composition of Labour’, Unemployed Negativity Blog, 17 May, available at http://unemployednegativity.blogspot.com/2011/05/ affective-composition-of-labor.html (accessed 11 January 2012). Reynolds, Bryan (2002) Becom ing Criminal: Transversal Perform ance and Cultural Dissidence in Early M odern England, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reynolds, Bryan (2003) Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, Bryan (2009) Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after D errida, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosello, Mireille (2005) France and the M aghreb: Performative Encounters, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Seem, Mark D. (1974) ‘Interview: Felix Guattari’, Diacritics, 4:3, pp. 38-41. Shukaitis, Stevphen (2007) ‘Affective Composition and Aesthetics: On Dissolving the Audience and Facilitating the Mob’, Journal ofA esthetics and Protest, 5, available at http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/5/articles/shukaitis/shukaitis.htm (accessed 11 January 2012). Thrift, Nigel (2004) ‘Intensities of Feeling: Toward a Spatial Politics of Affect’, G eografiska Annaler, 86B:1, pp. 57-78. Tronti, Mario (1980) ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, in S. Lotringer and C. Marazzi (eds), Italy, Autonom ia: Post-Political Politics, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 28-35. Virno, Paolo (1996) ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus’, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds), R adical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 189-209. Wright, Steven (2002) Storming Heaven. Class Com position and Struggle in Italian Autonom ist M arxism, London: Pluto Press. X, Andrew (1999) ‘Give up Activism’, D o or Die, 9, pp. 160-6. Zepke, Stephen (2009) ‘Becoming a Citizen of the World: Deleuze Between Allan Kaprow and Adrian Piper’, in Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 109-26.

G o F r a c t a la c t ic ! A B rie f G u i d e th ro u g h S u b je c t iv it y in th e P h ilo s o p h y o f F e lix G u a t t a r i a n d T r a n s v e r s a l P o e t ic s

Adam Bryx &] Bryan Reynolds

Abstract We adventure becomings-Merry Pranksters with Felix Guattari on Ken Kesey’s magic bus to resonate the group’s transversality that we already affect subjunctively, individually and plurally from which our subjectivities crystallise collectively and independently with intensiveextensions to go viscerallectric and fractalactic. Yet in-process, before our consciousnesses go motored, we swim with jet streams of both Guattari and transversal poetics to navigate subjective affects by which wilful parameterisations achieve desirable eventualisations. Keywords: transversality, subjectivity, reflexive-consciousness, wilful parameterisation, motored-consciousness, viscerallectric, fractalactic Felix Guattari deploys his concept of transversality to explain the interactive flux of heterogeneous and polyphonic aspects of subjectivity interwoven through individual and collective practices. While working with patients at La Borde, the psychiatric hospital founded by Jean Oury in France’s Loire Valley, Guattari observed instantiations and expressions of subjectivity catalysed by individuals participating within group dynamics that varied depending on the combined quantity, quality and intensity of the contributions made by the individuals comprising a specific group. For Guattari, after thrashing around the fields of psychiatry, subjectivity is never purely the effect or personal creation of an individual or a group, but a production of both. Subjectivity Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 291-305 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0063 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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collectively forms in relation to alterities, typically as delineated by a society’s customs, laws and beliefs, and constitutes the set of conditions that make a self-referential stance possible. In the interest of making the production of subjectivity more bene­ ficial for patients and staff at La Borde, Guattari’s initial formulation of transversality was intended to facilitate clinical praxis in which open-ended modes of therapy could function and therefore transform institutional environments where top-down hierarchical structures (administrator-doctor-nurse-staff-patient) were conventional and, in his view, counterproductive and delimiting. He wanted to liberate subjec­ tivity from entrapment by established social, scientific and therapeutic models, such as those implemented by psychoanalysis, humanistic approaches and gestaltism, that categorise subjectivity according to psychogenetic stages of development, ideas of whole(some)ness, or classificatory structures of the Oedipal, the linguistic-semiotic or the familial. Essentially, he wanted to explore subjectivity with a mode that reflects the nature of subjectivity itself free from the constraints of normative-oriented hermeneutic approaches. Guattari recapitulates this position in his final book, Chaosmosis, in which he adds an ethical component that will become important to our discussion later in this es­ say: ‘We are faced with an important ethical choice: either we objectify, reify, “scientifise” subjectivity, or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the dimension of its processual creativity’ (Guattari 1995: 13). Guattari maintains that coefficients of transversality operating across a group’s dynamic express emergent and latent affects of the group’s relations under conditions that bypass totalising clinical models and the power distribution manifested by such models through hierarchal administrative structures within institutions. Unlike therapeutic strategies that partition the subjectivity of each individual, whether or not seen as a by-product of a group (for instance, as an imaginary regression to abstractly formulated developmental or classificatory paradigms), group subjectivity as expressed through transversal coefficients makes possible experiences and interrelations of affect along transformative and unpredictable trajectories. Indifferent to top-down power distributions (insurance company-to-doctor-to-patient) or lateral communications (patient-to-patient, human-to-human), transversality metamorphoses group subjectivity multi-dimensionally and manifests a positive force of differentiation for subjectivity. In his account of Guattari’s concept of transversality, Gary Genosko sums this up nicely: ‘Horizontal or vertical-that is not even the question since a creature of the between like transversality must constitute its own set

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of original, polydimensional and polycentered operations in creating an atmosphere conducive to the appreciation of everybody’s singularity’ (2002: 82). The production of positive singularities highlights the integral function transversality holds for Guattari in defining subjectivity from the standpoint of emergent properties, the spatiotemporal constellation through which travel and mutate heterogeneous and polyphonic elements and modes of expression, affect, creativity and so on, that are strictly irreducible to the conditions of their production. Guattari mobilises the concept of transversality to loosen the reins of societal and institutional processes of subjectivation that impede conscious and unconscious desiring forces for group assemblages, that is, the very forces that fuel the generation of subjectivity within the group. Also wanting to challenge mechanisms of subjectivation and liberate desire, through his development of the combined sociocognitive theory, performance aesthetics and research methodology of ‘transversal poetics’, Bryan Reynolds marshals transversality to account for, enable and affect immanent, emergent and transformative processes that inspire perspectivism, subjectivity and experience outside of established codes and parameters (see Reynolds 2002, 2003, 2006, 2009). Significantly, among other possible effects, this causes reconfiguration and expansion of ‘subjective territory’, the conceptual, emotional and physical range through which individuals perceive, experience and comprehend. Normally instituted and maintained by ideological and repressive mechanisms of dominant society in the interest of mutually reinforcing that society, subjective territory is always constraining and often deleteriously oppressive. For Reynolds, transversality is-crucially-dynamism of metamorphosis rather than just concept; as such, it generates opportunities for moving beyond subjective territory, defying society’s modalities of indoctrination, socialisation and regulation, and goings-elsewhere. Reynolds’ and Guattari’s theorisations of subjectivity are both con­ cerned with the irreducibility of transversal movements to circumscribed fields of development, power, communication and classification. By extension, they are both concerned with the unpredictable and perplexing mobility of subjectivity that measures movements of transversality within such demarcated fields of reference. However, transversal poetics broadens the theoretical scope of Guattari’s emphasis on group assemblages to include individual assemblages of subjectivity, thereby comprehending the individual as group -itself a matrix comprised of singularities and multiplicities-integrally participating constitutionally within and among groups and other creatures, objects

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and energies. Simply put, this broadening enriches Guattari’s concept of transversality with theories of mind, consciousness, embodiment, performance, experience and affect; and therefore allows for attributive and generative modes of subjectivity that expand the analytic and experiential reach of the concept beyond formulations of group assemblages contextualised in theories of affect alone. The expansive-incorporation of transversal poetics also moves beyond Guattari’s departure from Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of transversality as unifying consciousness to totalise individuation. For Sartre, consciousness unifies through automatic awareness of the serial passage of consciousness through time as transversally linked by consciousness’s intentional stance toward an object. As Sartre puts it: It is consciousness which unifies itself, concretely, by a play of ‘transversal’ intentionalities which are concrete and real retentions of past consciousnesses. Thus consciousness refers perpetually to itself. . . . And consciousness is aware of itself in so fa r as it is consciou sn ess o f a transcendent ob ject. All is therefore clear and lucid in consciousness: the object with its characteristic opacity is before consciousness, but consciousness is purely and simply consciousness of being consciousness of that object. (1960: 39)

Alternatively, for Guattari, consciousness does not operate by means of temporal and solipsistic unification, but rather it is always nonlinear and spatially oriented towards new emergences of communication and affect, and, because of this, it instantiates intersubjectively within groups, that is, when interacting with both the unconscious and conscious desires of others. Both the philosophy and structural development of transversal poetics itself reflects Guattari’s departure from Sartre’s decisive emphasis on inwardness. For Reynolds, consciousness is always relational, its apparent and contingent individuation the result of organising clusters of complexity, such as in-jokes, humans, rats, computers, tornadoes or rocks. This idea underpins the transversal enterprise of writing this essay, an undertaking that demonstrates and benefits from the collaborative nature of consciousness, as Reynolds regularly collaborates with others who acknowledge and value the production of critical theory as emergent activity in terms similar to subjectivity. For Reynolds, whether prompted by subjunctivity, becomings, comings-to-be, goings, wilderness effects, transversal movements and so on, subjectivity is transversal to the subject. A reactive and/or fugitive ‘eventualisation’ (an event or sequence of events with affective duration), subjectivity emerges from subjective territory and crystallises as ‘reflexive-consciousness’,

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the means by which consciousness regards itself with heightened awareness in relation to its operations and progressions. Subjectivity’s crystallisation occurs in nuanced response to the escalating, spreading and/or waning transversal power that precipitated or was precipitated by the circumstances of its emergence. For Reynolds and Guattari, respectively, transversality promotes forward-looking and forward-moving understandings of subjective processes, that is, it promotes positive and progressive privileging of future eventualisations and new forms of goings, becomings, alterity and affect. In doing so, it invites a post-phenomenological critical terrain -‘post’ because it encompasses inclusion, culmination and supersession of the phenomenological as it exceeds perception and experience-in which to explore relationships between ethics, desire, subjectivity and affect. Dissident and fugitive movements, especially if distinguished by emergent activity, can powerfully foster creative cognitive, emotional and physical development beyond prescriptive and authoritarian discourses, such as those that characterise mainstream academic research methods, institutionalised psychiatry, conventional educational structures, and capitalist ideology and systems. In the context of Guattari’s later works, Genosko provides a productive comparison of the type of subjectivities that reside in Guattari’s and Reynolds’ work. For Guattari, movements of subjectivity aim to exceed the everyday banality of existential territories achieved in the transformative therapeutics of incorporeal universes. For Reynolds, movements of subjectivity aim towards becomings-x from ‘state machinery’, the network of ordering ‘sociopolitical conductors’ (the inculcating apparatuses of family, education, law, government, religion, etc.) that work to structure, delineate and limit social identity and experience-subjective territory-in conformity with a society’s dominant values and normative objectives (Genosko 2002: 58; see also 2009: 262-71). Unintentional events and actions spur, to give one possibility, becomings-dissident that affect transgressions of the cognitive, emotional and physical boundaries ascribed to subjective territories through processes of subjectivation, as administered discursively by sociopolitical conductors. Such departures from subjective territory, when radical and reeling, occupy transversal vectors and in effect alter the multidimensional cartography of cognitive, emotional and physical capacity, a multiplicity of interrelated fluxes and flows. Consider, for instance, disarticulatory vibrations from, say, love at first sight: subjective territory ^ subjectivity ^ dominant values ^ unformed affects, thereby transforming and/or

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expanding subjective territory-range, perspective, experience-and thus the ‘affective presence’ and universe for a given person or people. Whereas our example of becomings-dissident maps trajectories of always dynamic and fundamentally non-subjectified, often subversive, lines of influence when measured in relation to parameters of dominant systems, it would be wrong to position automatically or decisively transversality within dualist frameworks of conformity/subversion and/or subject/other. Instead, transversality in the context of political and cultural frameworks enables unintentional and experiential alterity that while simultaneously defying totalising and/or unifying schemas acts also to express and amplify transitory states. These states, on the one hand, serve to heighten and expand processes of reflexive­ consciousness, and, on the other hand, make accessible empathetic lines of communication, even within the everyday workings of consciousness, what we refer to as ‘quotidian-consciousness’, the stance, awareness and sentience common to second-by-second daily life. Transversal poetics expands beyond the Guattarian bestiary, which exemplifies actualised affective communication and the manifestation of latent desires for group assemblages through productive openings of equine blinkers (Guattari 1984: 17-18), to acknowledge that amplification of alterity via transversality influences, intensive-extensively, the scope of reflexive-consciousness. Such amplification multiplies levels and lines of affect, sentience and thought through the performative and interrelated movements of subjectivity between social identities, codes and discourses. In the emphasis Guattari places on group formations, the individual does not disappear, much less cease to exist, but rather functions, as Genosko aptly explains, as a liberating mirror through which individuals produce new singularities and subjectivities resulting from intersubjective relations, collective affects and enunciation, explorations of desires and passions, among others (2002: 83). Similarly, and by extension, according to transversal poetics, the multiplicity of goings-x (non-volitional travel), comings-to-be-x (unintended), and becomings-x (intended), such as becomings-dissident, made possible through transversality assumes a group dimension in terms of unblinkering the potential for empathetic and affective paths of communication and understanding by crossing previously obstructed or elided cultural, ethnic, racial, species, social, gendered and/or environmental divisions, avenues and conduits. The unexpected events, slippages and wanderings that prompt transversality to emerge immanently and catalyse becomings-dissident have the effect of manifesting for subjectivity a transition away from the stasis of routine and habit and/or inhibitive and repressive structures

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while, also, engendering new paths of cognition and empathy. In short, this is the creation of new universes of reference and meaning for manifestations and performances of subjectivity and therefore also of inter- and intra-subjectivities. We argue elsewhere for the importance of revising the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject along proactive agential lines of potentiality whereon, despite the ultimately open-ended and non­ agential trajectories that becomings-dissident can achieve in terms of both social identities and state machineries, there nevertheless perseveres prospective and contingent opportunities for ‘wilful parameterisation’ of transversal movements (Bryx & Reynolds 2009: 83-123). To be sure, it is possible to find parallels in the administrative methodology put into practice by Guattari that sought to redistribute and rotate the work schedules and roles of participating members of the psychiatric institution, whether employees or patients, so as to maximise the potential of transversal coefficients. Yet, as in the institutional case of Guattari’s ‘grid’ (a non-hierarchical deregulating work schedule for staff at La Borde), wilfully parameterising conditions for transversal movement is not a fail-safe or sure method by which to reach, for instance, becomings-dissident (should this be one’s goal). This is because, at best, when faced with transversal power wilful parameterisation only ameliorates potential and adjusts some configurations for channelling and navigating the passings-through of thresholds of alterity. To refer to some common examples: people often try to establish conditions and set parameters for their journeys on ayahuasca, DMT or LSD. They do this typically by attempting to control as many variables as possible that they might encounter along the way, such as material properties, light, temperature, sound, other people, creatures and energies. Nevertheless, the transversal power of these psychotropic drugs operating in conjunction with consciousness and subjective territory are far from controllable or predictable, and it is precisely this intensiveextensive potential that most drives people to want to enjoy them. In the 1960s, LSD superhero Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters went to great lengths to set the parameters for their famous ‘acid tests’, whether at Kesey’s ranch in La Honda, California or on the Interstates in their magic bus, to ensure that the trippers had the ‘right’ kind of experience, that is, ‘the LSD experience’, a popular catchphrase coined during the era. Tom Wolfe’s account in The Electric Kool-A id Acid Test is representative: Under LSD, if it really went right, E go and N on -E g o started to merge. Countless things that seemed separate started to merge, too; a sound became . . . a color! blue . . . colors became smells, walls began to b reath e like

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the underside of a leaf, with one’s own breath. A curtain became a column of concrete and yet it began rippling, this incredible concrete mass rippling in harmonic waves like the Puget Sound bridge before the crash and you can fe e l it, the entire harmonics of the universe from the most massive to the smallest and most personal- p r e s q u e vu! - a l l flowing together in this very m om ent. . . (1968: 140; ellipses in original)

Convinced of the importance of parameterisation, especially after suffering the ‘bad trip’ of loss of control at the 1965 Beatle’s concert at Cow Palace, Kesey fantasised about building a perfectly controlled environment for the LSD experience, ‘a great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft’ with ‘a great foam-rubber floor. . . everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines, live, replay, variable lag’, and much more (Wolfe 1968: 231). Similar comparisons could be made with people’s elaborate efforts to establish the perfect mise-en-scene for a romantic evening (especially when sex is a desired component), a theatre performance, or a dangerous sport, like mixed martial arts, motorcycle motocross, skate boarding or freestyle skiing. In all of these examples, people desire it in contradictory ways: controlled and free, parameterised and unpredictable, though not necessarily transversal; and in the cases of some of them, particularly when they involve an audience, collective experience is a privileged measure of success. For Guattari, the distribution of desire among a group’s members is crucial to the transversality of the group formation for which a collective subjectivity can be a product. According to transversal poetics, varying outcomes are always at stake when desire is directed towards both acquisition (opportunity, diagnosis, cure) and production (experience, subjectivity, agreement, rapport), even when primarily consumptive as manifested (through conversation, eating, reading, watching), with the attainment and expense of energy (caloric, libidinal, psychic) affecting and enabling further desire. The production of desire is unavoidable, like the effects of a digested psychotropic drug or an adrenaline rush from freestyle skiing, but an individual or a group can channel it through wilful parameterisation (becomings), or, or also, the desired-its desiring force-might channel it (comings-to-be). For instance, physical exertion, such as during aerobic or sexual activity, releases chemicals in the brain that make people feel good, more alert, even euphoric. These chemicals include endorphins, named after morphine because they relieve pain, induce pleasurable feelings and are physically addictive; phenylethylamine, which pleasurably stimulates like amphetamines, increases awareness, reduces depression, and is also addictive; and serotonin, which induces pleasurable feelings, reduces

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depression and is addictive - if only indirectly through, say, cocaine use or excessive ingestion of carbohydrates. The work of these chemicals and many others with similar mood-boosting or antidepressant effects and addictive qualities demonstrates quite clearly, in the context of daily or monthly happenings, the implicative opportunity of choosing to parameterise behaviour through reflexive-consciousness that directly influences the intensity of desire and its generative capacities. In turn, this biochemical, psychic dynamic outwardly expresses, such as through social activity, cultural traits and material relations. Dynamic manoeuvrings of reflexive-consciousness, such as through heightened cognition along subjunctive vectors, can function to recalibrate the body to produce more and different processes of desires and affects. Scrambling together and apart, for instance, chemical intake with sexual and/or aerobic activity at variable intensities and schedules can motivate the production of affect in altogether different calibrations from the static and normalised routines that ordinarily circumscribe subjective territories. The wilful parameterisation of alterity, when successful, generates a recalibrated body where affects threshold in atypical and unpredictable manners, disrupting the linear causality of dependence on serotonin production, for instance, to relieve depression. What intensities of desire do we produce if we devour three dishes of lasagne in the middle of an otherwise sleep-filled night? What affects might this excessive digestion of carbohydrates prompt in terms of mood-boosting pleasurable, addictive or depressing feelings related to heightened and/or lowered processes of reflexive-consciousness and/or hallucinogenic or subjunctive vectors of cognition? The alterity that we advocate-the transversality, goings-x, becomings-x, sometimes leading to becomings-dissident from the alltoo common trappings of a repressive subjective territory (networked with guilt, shame and anxiety), the thresholding of new pathways of cognition-shares the Guattarian sensibility for enhancing the productive dimensions of the navigation of new universes of meaning beyond conditioned and institutionalised modes of existence. We intend the implementable concept of wilful parameterisation to incorporate a practicality with which both to maximise possible encounters and navigations of transversality and concurrently to function as sustainable, albeit perpetually shifting, patchworks of interconnected and productive rhythms of affect, desire and cognition. The analogy to thermodynamics that Guattari employs to illustrate the entropic zero-degree flight of the intensive diminution of transversality characterises effectively, in our opinion, the impossibility of clinging indefinitely to radical

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and undifferentiated transductive metamorphoses. However, seeking transversality opportunistically enhances, we argue, our potential to navigate experience according to mutating ethical and aesthetic rhythms, the production of cacophonous singularities sustainable through the development and recalibration of our bodies and minds through self­ generative and self-channelling dimensions. We share the Guattarian sensibility of seeking both practical and sustainable modes of creative auto-productions, ones that shift and mutate in partial accordance with agential explorations as well as with positive differentiation that defines, in our view, transversal movements. We encounter roadblocks, nonetheless, in relation to some aspects that represent the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject and the tendency therein and in poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophy to underplay the importance of both the sustainability of subjectivity and the immediacy and intensive power with which reflexive-consciousness harnesses the interplay of subjectivities and transversal movements. Whereas we see value in Guattari’s provisional definition in ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’ of subjectivity that emphasises the role of self-referential conditions that tentatively determine the adjacent correspondence of alterity to subjectivity (1996: 196), we are less inclined to agree with the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject that pre-emptively defers reflexive­ consciousness as abstracted and postponed retroactive introspection. In other words, while we value the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of positive rationalism and the Freudian triadic topography of mind, we also see that reflexive-consciousness functions with an integral vitality concerning thresholding and experiential alterity, and that it is not simply the by-product of indeterminate, aleatory, larval and autonomic transductions between intensive states of becomings-other. We see this deferment of the capabilities of reflexive-consciousness in DeleuzoGuattarian concepts of the subject and subjectivity as coinciding with a premise of non-sustainability and machinic breakdown. For them, these concepts always verge towards self-destructive impulses and routes, as in the case of desiring-production or the means (hypochondria, drug addiction, paranoia, schizophrenia, masochism) by which they maintain that people often approximate the always sought but ultimately unattainable Body-without-Organs (1983: 149-66). Conversely, we gravitate towards Guattari’s outlook on subjectivity as sustainable, what we would refer to, with some difference, as ‘eventualising’ (events achieving duration), a perspective that has important implications for ethico-aesthetic and eco-philosophical outlooks on experience, which he repeatedly stresses throughout his

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work. For instance, in ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, Guattari accentuates conjunctive textures: ‘Of primordial importance, however, is the mutant, rhythmic trajectory of a temporalization that is capable of holding together the heterogeneous components of a new existential structure’ (1996: 201). In ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’, Guattari promotes the principle of consistency with regard to self-generative experiential alterity: ‘Paths/voices of self-reference developing a processual subjectivity that defines its own coordinates and is self-consistent (what I have discussed elsewhere under the category of the “subject group”), but can nevertheless establish transversal relations to mental and social stratifications’ (1996: 96). Our point here is that mobilising reflexive-consciousness in an intensive-productive function within the interplay of other constitutive aspects of production expresses a critical component of the self-generation of subjectivities through wilful parameterisations of transversal movements that applies directly to an enhancement of the positive potential for transversality and concomitantly the promotion of experiential alterity and nondirected affective transduction. Avoiding entrapment in pre-individual, rationalist, abstract or otherwise categorised positivistic attributes, our emphasis on the productive function of reflexive-consciousness exemplifies the delight with which Guattari, in ‘The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis’, turns to Samuel Beckett’s work in order to theorise machinic and schizoid processes-the sucking stones in M olloy that connect organic, inert and psychological fragments (1996: 78-9). Similarly, the productive function of reflexive-consciousness exemplifies the self-generative machine of semiosis that, in ‘Genet Regained’, Guattari identifies in Jean Genet as a radical manufacturer of excitement through the copulative conjunctions of flowers and convicts: In Genet, the flower mates with the convict: ‘Convict garb is striped pink and white. Though it was at my heart’s bidding that I chose the universe wherein I delight, I at least have the power of finding therein the many meanings I wish to find: there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.’ Two, three universes crystallize together: the penal colony, flowers, and poetry. Anything else? Excitation. (1996: 225)

Like the copulative semiotisation of flowers and convicts, Guattari also analyses machinic fabulation in Genet’s life and work that produces emancipatory conjunctions between creative processes and masturbation irreducible to pathologies of psychotic episodes or fixated imaginaries, but rather as emergent properties of the subjunctive.

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How do we tarry with the subjunctive to maximise parameterisations of transversal movements and sustain experiences of non-directed affective transduction? One particular style of approach that we want to consider in the context of this essay on the philosophy of Felix Guattari and transversal poetics is engagement with the immanent implosion of processes of reflexive-consciousness when subjunctive lines become ‘inarticulatory’, unable to articulate, perhaps passing first through the ‘disarticulatory’, the undoing of articulation (Bryx & Reynolds 2012). The characterisation of subjunctive movement in transversal poetics asserts this concept as an in-between enabler and affecter, potentially bridging everyday happenings with transversality, occurring when cognitive considerations of as-ifs and what-ifs slip into a smooth spatiotemporality undifferentiated by agency, causality and cogency. A serial effect of this intensive-extensive giving-way of the subjunctive into the transversal, should the variables configure to precipitate such emergent occurrences, involves what we call ‘paused-consciousness’, ‘motored-consciousness’, ‘viscerallectrics’ and ‘fractalactics’. We share these terms now as a coda to this essay that has been working its way toward them all along. During focused physical, sexual, affective and/or mental activities, people sometimes lose tract of the spatiotemporal grids that frame subjectivity-how they are perceived interrelated with the whys and whats of their doing-sometimes causing the forgetting of where they are in space and time. Such paused-consciousness indicates a passing into interstices, a neuropathic spacetime of surrender, slippage and skating where anything can transpire, where any potential connections can be made in its departure from quotidian-consciousness. We say ‘any’ because at certain times/situations/spaces/neighbourhoods we are not in control of our ability to navigate our consciousness; and sometimes we do not want to be, like in theaterspace or psychotropicspace, when we wilfully suspend disbelief and welcome uncontrollable cognitiveemotional-physical transportation. (See Figure 1 for an expression of such transportation.) Unlike quotidian-consciousness, motored-consciousness describes the momentum consciousness achieves when reflexive-consciousness heightens and when, contradictory to reflexive-consciousness, reflexive­ consciousness combines with paused-consciousness to become stream­ lined in scope, that is, intensely aware (reflexive) of its trajectory and simultaneously (because it is paused on the trajectory) unaware of the framing, context and environment. In other words, to achieve motored-consciousness, reflexive-consciousness becomes a myopic,

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Figure 1. F ra cta la ctic O c c u r r e n c e s , by Arturo Desimone. (Reproduced with permission.)

resonating force, a compelled mapping-as opposed to a tracing-when feedback-loops, under such extreme pressure, connectively disjoin with feedforward-flows as an inarticulatory process. Motored-consciousness generates-x (sensations, vibrations, thoughts, perceptions, desires, pleasures, pains, associations . . . ) when the altering of consciousness perseveres relentlessly and exponentially with intensity, like when on LSD, receiving prolonged sexual and/or painful stimulation, or simply because of sensory overload, which can be attained through experiences of sensory deprivation as well as of complex, profuse and/or incongruent stimuli. To give an LSD example from a participant in the 1966 Watts Acid Test: There was much activity in the large room. People were dancing and the band [The Grateful Dead] was playing-but I couldn’t hear them. I can’t remember a note of music, because the vibrations were so intense. [‘Vibrations’ being a term for the effects of LSD.] I am a music-oriented person-sing, play instruments, etc.-w h ich is why this seems so unusual to me. I stood close

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to the band and let the vibrations engulf me. They started in my toes and every inch of me was quivering with th em . . . they made a journey through my nervous system (I remember picturing myself as one of the charts we had studied in biology which shows the nerve network), traveling each tiny path, finally reaching the top of my head, where they exploded in glorious patterns of color and lines . . . (Wolfe 1968: 275)

A result of motored-consciousness, further to the ‘powerbanding’ rush of motored-consciousness that simultaneously surfs on heightened lucidity and the eventualisations it becomes and to which it contributes-the layering of feedforward-flows and feedback-loops refracted by stimuli and asymmetrically corresponding reflexivity, ‘viscerallectrics’ activate subsequent to combined, serial implosions of visceral, intellectual and electric registers. The exponential effects of the momentum of ‘vibrations’ described in the passage demonstrate the LSD-induced viscerallectrics at work. One goes viscerallectric! Like motored-consciousness, viscerallectrics are a sustained, linked, eventualising process of intensity of affect, where and when implosions set adrift particular kinds of transversal vectors (visceral/intellectual/electric), supercharged ‘pulsations’ and ‘tremors’ compared to the ‘motored’ velocity of motored-consciousness. Yet precisely because they are propelled by motored-consciousness, the domino-effected implosions immanent to viscerallectrics sometimes achieve the capacity to generate ‘fractalactic occurrences’: presto, boom, shazam -‘they exploded in glorious patterns of color and lines’ -when enough energy transduces in and through certain forces, organics, planes and objects that splinter, fuse and refract in a multiplicity of unpredictable directions and dimensions. Both fractal and compositional, one goes fractalactic! In turn, when considering their impacts on humans, fractalactic occurrences precipitate transversal vectors, and together, whether cacophonously or euphoniously, they link and manifest feedback-loops, feedforward-flows, continued motoredconsciousness, viscerallectrics, crystallisations of subjectivity, and changes and expansions of subjective territory, and so on, and on, and on . . . we g o . ..

Note We want to thank Arturo Desimone for making the illustration Fractalactic Occurrences for this essay. 1. This is the authors’ preferred way of showing equal authorship.

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References Bryx, Adam & Bryan Reynolds (2009) ‘The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Deleuze and Guattari to Transversal Poetics with(out) Baudrillard’, in Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Subjects: From M ontaigne to Deleuze after Derrida, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 83-123. Bryx, Adam & Bryan Reynolds (2012) ‘The Fugitive Theater of Romeo Castellucci: Intermedial Refractions and Fractalactic Occurrences’, in Matthew Causey and Fintan Walsh (eds), Perform ance After Identity: The N eo-Political Subject, London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Genosko, Gary (2002) Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Athlone Press. Genosko, Gary (2009) ‘Afterword: Subjects Matter’, in Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 262-71. Guattari, Felix (1984) M olecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosm osis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Felix (1996) The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Oxford: Blackwell. Reynolds, Bryan (2002) Becom ing Criminal: Transversal Perform ance and Cultural Dissidence in Early M odern England, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reynolds, Bryan (2003) Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, Bryan (2006) Transversal Enterprises in the Drama o f Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, Bryan (2009) Transversal Subjects: From M ontaigne to Deleuze after D errida, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1960) The Transcendence o f the Ego: An Existentialist Theory o f Consciousness, New York: Hill and Wang. Wolfe, Tom (1968) The Electric K ool-A id Acid Test, New York: Picador.

C u lt u r e a s E x is t e n t ia l T e r r ito r y : E c o s o p h i c H o m e la n d s fo r th e T w e n ty -first C e n t u r y

Janell Watson

Abstract The mass popular dissent which has marked the early twenty-first century, from al-Qaeda to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, can be read as expressions of collective, subjective, existential mutation. This reading is inspired by Felix Guattari, who described the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations as demands for subjective singularisation. In each of these examples of social discontent, past and present, demands vary widely even within the same movement, spanning economics, lifestyle, religion and politics, and ranging from cries for liberation to conservative returns to ancient tradition. In order to perform a schizoanalysis of such amorphous movements, Guattari developed a four-part ecosophic object, composed of existential Territories, Universes of value, material-energetic Flows and machinic Phyla. Assemblages can be dynamically mapped along these four dimensions. Of crucial importance in the age of extreme deterritorialisation is the existential Territory, which could potentially take the form of a homeland based on poetry or music rather than on ethnicity or even place. Such portable homelands would characterise the dissensual processual post-media era for which Guattari longed. Keywords: assemblage, deterritorialisation, subjectivity, ecosophy, three ecologies, machinic phylum, post-media era, processuality, singularisation

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 306-327 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0064 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Popular collective expressions of dissent have dominated headlines around the world since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Targets of dissent vary, although it is in each case some version of a perceived status quo. Plots and attacks associated with al-Qaeda; widespread reactionary anti-Islamism in Europe; Palestinian retaliations against Israeli occupation; Uighur and Tibetan autonomy movements; the Iranian Green movement; the massive upheavals of the Arab Spring; the short-lived Jasmine protests; London rioting and looting which spread throughout the UK; demonstrations against austerity measures in Europe (UK, Italy, Greece, Spain); network attacks by the hacktivist group Anonymous; San Francisco demonstrations that shut down public transportation; Occupy Wall Street with its many offshoots. Some of the causes are progressive, others traditionalist and still others annihilatory. The demands are disparate, contradictory and at times intangible. Motivations that have been articulated or ascribed include religion, cul­ ture, race, secularism, nationalism, territorial claims, democratisation, an impetus toward modernisation, a return to traditionalism, economic precarity, high unemployment, police brutality, disenfranchised youth and criminality. The London looters may seem to have little in common with Palestinians protesting the occupation of their lands or with other Arab populations rising up against corrupt authoritarian rule, but all share an explosive discontent that is manifested publicly, sometimes brutally, and at great personal risk. Some among those who have banded together in opposition had previously led mainstream middle-class lives; this is especially true of the London looting as well as of the Arab uprisings. Even the most coordinated of the collectives involved are decentralised and amorphous. ‘Collective subjective mutation’ is a phrase that captures the spontaneity, amorphousness and unarticulated desires that characterise the disparate collective events in question here. As many have observed of the current wave of uprisings, this is not revolutionary politics as usual. There is no vanguard, no central committee, no formal manifesto. Collective actions have been spurred more by affective intensity than by conscious discursivity. Writing in the 1980s, Guattari cited an array of uprisings similar in diversity to those I have just listed, and many of his comments seem germane to the present unrests shaking various parts of the world. He compared events as dissimilar as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations. His examples also include the Basques, Corsicans, Palestinians and Uighurs, as well as Muslim fundamentalists, Australian aboriginal peoples, black Brazilians and

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non-white second-generation Europeans (Guattari 1986; Guattari and Rolnik 2008). Despite the very different ideologies and demands being made, he notes similarities in these movements’ and events’ ‘contagious, affective burden’. In each case, there is at stake ‘a whole lifestyle, a whole conception of social relations, and a collective ethic’ (Guattari 1996: 193). For him, these movements and events portend ‘a collective, existential mutation’ (Guattari 1995: 2). I suggest that the twenty-firstcentury events and movements that I have listed can be understood as a continuation of the existential transformations that Guattari was observing in the final decade of his life. He describes historical change in terms of mutating assemblages. The trouble with assemblages, at least from the point of view of those seeking to control and manipulate them, is that they mutate. Even the most existentially consistent and stable assemblage is autopoietic, which is to say self-organising, self-reproducing and capable of taking off in unforeseen directions, bifurcating unexpectedly upon the chance encounter of a point of singularity, either disaggregating into entropy or re-assembling itself around a nucleus of subjectivation, regaining existential consistency as a new assemblage with new capabilities. New assemblages are not necessarily better, but social mutations cannot take place without their creation. The variety of needs and wants being voiced by mass demonstrations around the world cannot and should not be synthesised. It is likewise important to recognise that there are leaders and organisers within even the most acephalous movements. However, if Guattari is correct that we are approaching the threshold of a new era, then the collective energies generated by the demonstrations will uncover bifurcation points amidst the chaos. The resulting social mutations will take the form of order emerging from chaos (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Perhaps this is what radical democracy looks like, a ‘democratic chaos which conceals a multitude of vectors of resingularisation, attractors of social creativity in search of actualisation’ (Guattari 1995: 14, 117). These movements are complex systems endowed with ‘a wealth of possible stable and unstable behaviors’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 169). The militant analytic task at hand: searching the ‘democratic chaos’ of today’s amorphous collective movements for ‘attractors of social creativity’. Attractors are the limit points of a system, but near its bifurcation points, resingularising lines of flight may take off in new directions, abruptly transforming the system (Mitchell 2009). The ‘attractors of social creativity’ achieve ‘actualisation’ if they manage to acquire enough existential consistency to self-realise. This requires a

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crystal of singularisation, a nucleus around which a new psycho-social entity can come into existence (Guattari 1989: 52, 60). Guattari plays on the multiple meanings of the word singular: for him, ‘singularity’ denotes both the points at which systems may mutate and also the opposite of standardisation or Sartrean seriality; ‘singularisation’ denotes a bifurcation toward creative complexity. For progressives who advocate for radical democracy, political hope lies in those social mutations that allow for a maximum of subjective singularisation. The problem: how to avoid regressive reterritorialisations? Recent manifestations of public dissent are democratic in the sense that people are expressing themselves collectively and publicly, even if some among them are choosing fascist paths. The task for political progressives is to carefully search these gestures of dissent which have upset the equilibrium of daily life in many parts of the world in order to uncover points of singularity from which new mental, social and machinic assemblages can come into being, seeking out the emancipatory from among the repressive-a distinction which is not as clear-cut as it seems. At stake is the ‘production of human existence itself in new historical contexts’ (Guattari 2000: 34). The ‘production of human existence’ encompasses the complex processes that make up Guattari’s three ecologies-mental, social and environmental. It is a matter of assemblages and their environments. The ‘new historical contexts’ in question include the acceleration of globalisation since the 1980s; increasingly interactive information technologies; economic financialisation; corporate agglomeration; and the rise of global Islam in confrontation with international secularism, global Christianity and a stubbornly territorial Zionism. Human existence, like life itself, requires viable ecologies. Air, shelter, water and food are not enough to sustain a living being. As social animals, humans require assemblages-the shared behavioural sequences that organise the social mechanisms necessary for species survival (Guattari 2011: ch. 5). Guattari’s ecosophy provides a dynamic cartographic method that can help detect existential mutations, conceptualising life in terms of complex self-organising machinic systems, ontologically similar to those of chemistry and biology but with ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Ecosophy is the ethicoaesthetic mapping of mutations traversing disparate assemblages, a cartographic exploration of the complex and intertwined machinations of the psyche, the socius, the mecanosphere, the biosphere and the cosmos. Only such an ‘eco-logic’ can appreciate the particularities, diversities and interconnections among biological, machinic and social life in the twenty-first century.

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Assemblages can exist only in relation to some sort of territory. This relationship is subjective. This is why mutating assemblages can open up to subjective singularisation, for better or for worse. As Jakob von Uexkull puts it, ‘Territory is purely a problem of the environment because it represents an exclusively subjective product’ (Uexkull 2010: 103). Each animal or insect requires a subjectivity in order to survive, for without subjectivity there is no capacity to interact with the environment. Insofar as humans and animals alike adjust their behaviours in relation to each other and to their environment, they are endowed with subjectivity, a subjectivity which is not discursive but which operates in pathic, affective and intensive dimensions. For complex systems theory, a sort of subjectivity can be ascribed to any self-organising system-even a chemical or geological one. That means that mass social movements, even the most acephalous, function as assemblages whose capacity for affect, for affecting and being affected by their surroundings, indicates the presence of a proto-subjectivity. To respond to the environment is to make choices. To the extent that decision making requires a subject, a sort of proto-subjectivity is found throughout the biological realm, since ‘Being alive means being able to make unforeseen decisions’ (Shaviro 2010: 143). As Guattari puts it, ‘A certain kind of freedom and even grace exists on the level of the nervous or digestive system’ (Guattari 2011: 127). Human subjectivity also operates on this non-discursive, bio-social level. For human collectives, ‘many seemingly deliberate behaviours actually relate to an ethological montage’ comparable to animal mating rituals, territorial defence behaviours or the ant colony (131). In this sense, ‘Freedom is not created with subjectivity’ since there is no individuated rational consciousness directing such collective activities (127). The amorphously coalesced collective disruptions of the twenty-first century exhibit this same kind of ethological proto-subjectivity. Autonomy is being sought at the level of an intensive subjectivity of the Body-withoutOrgans type, rather than through stratified discourse, as in the case with vanguard politics. Today’s oppositional collectives are acting out a kind of ethological politics, whose irruptions of democratic chaos can best be analysed in terms of social assemblages. The collectives themselves manifest a ‘making-dissident of subjectivity’ that Guattari equates with the demand for subjective singularisation (Guattari 1986: 68). Historical transformations correspond to the emergence of new social assemblages, hence the importance of looking out for the crystals of singularisation and nuclei of subjectivation around which these new assemblages can form (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). To

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state the obvious, globalisation’s extreme deterritorialisations have upset existing assemblages. As Guattari put it, the world has been taken over by a ‘deterritorializing gangrene’ which has resulted in the ‘general bankruptcy of the “originary” territorialities’ and the ‘ “ungluing” of the collective history of humanity’ (Guattari 2011: 119). The great machines of mass deterritorialisation that have taken over the earth have uncoupled peoples from territories. Economic and political migrations uproot entire populations, as do wars and natural disasters. Even those who remain in a geographical area are being detached from their territories. Marc Auge offers an ethnography of ‘non-places’ such as airports, shopping malls, freeways, refugee camps, mass-designed dwelling space and box stores selling global merchandise (Auge 1995). A non-place is a territory without a people in a world where too many people have no place. Of course, retail non-places offer many of modest means the benefits of low-cost goods and fresh produce made available year round. Likewise, modernised housing offers refrigeration and air conditioning to the growing middle classes in places like China and India. At the same time, non-places are decimating countless long-established neighbourhoods. In many cases, the deterritorialising modernisation schema proposed by mass development is too standardised and therefore insufficiently attuned to the need for subjective singularisation. Collective human history needs new assemblages to replace those that have become unglued. Ecosophy’s schizoanalytic ontology offers a useful framework for understanding the destruction and reconstitution of the assemblages upon which human existence depend. Ecosophy maps assemblages, showing how they form, evolve, mutate and dissipate on the plane of consistency, within the plane’s constant interplay of chaos and complexity. The ‘ecosophic object’ provides a graphic conceptualisation of the plane of consistency, plotted onto four quadrants: existential Territories, Universes of value (or of reference), machinic Phyla and Fluxes (or flows) (Guattari 1989; 2000). To examine mental, social and environmental ecologies it is necessary to consider all four quadrants. Many accounts of global capitalism focus on Flows (resources, energy, capital) and machinic Phyla (technology, machines, knowledge), which are the discursive, stratified, actualised domains of the assemblage. Guattari instead emphasises the assemblage’s non-discursive, intensive, virtual domains of Universes of value and existential Territories, which are the quadrants from which subjectivity emerges. The ecosophic object is especially useful for analysing the collective social movements in question here because it maps both

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the subjective and cultural domains (Territories and Universes) as well as the economic and technological domains (Flows and Phyla). Ecosophy thus accounts for strange ways in which collectively shared affect (the non-discursive domains of Territories and Universes) holds together movements with no clearly articulated unifying agenda (the discursive domain of Flows and Phyla). This four-dimensional map of the assemblage further indicates that resource Flows regulated by the Phyla of social technologies cannot operate without Universes of value embodied in existential Territories. Universes of value and existential Territories are crucial components of both massive-scale social assemblages like neoliberal democracy and smaller assemblages like dating rituals or the territorial markings of urban street gangs. This is why twenty-first-century protest movements, which are themselves assemblages, can suddenly come into existence, wreaking the havoc of democratic chaos in which singularising lines of flight coexist with socio­ economic demands as well as territorial claims that seem to belong to a bygone era. Today’s global elite includes monarchs, dictators, finance capitalists, CEOs of multinationals, communist bureaucrats and third-world kleptocrats. Guattari’s notion of Integrated World Capitalism does not capture the heterogeneity of globalisation’s ruling assemblages. However, his ecosophic object helps account for this heterogeneous yet tightly networked global elite, against which much present-day dissent is directed. Their loosely coordinated actions have led to extreme hyperdeterritorialisation, the above-mentioned ‘ “ungluing” of the collective history of humanity’. They have instrumentalised states, depoliticising them through economisation, in order to transform the earth into Flows of resources and real estate which they ‘develop’ (their term, not mine) for immense profits. The social assemblages that have organised and regulated Western existence since the Middle Ages are being pushed to mutate in response to the integration of the entire world into the various accumulatory regimes devouring the planet. The financialising technocracy has developed sophisticated stratification strategies for reaping surpluses from the libidinal energies unleashed by various assemblages, be they social, industrial, informational or aesthetic. Many of today’s protestors cite economic inequality as a primary concern, a complaint especially common among the Arab Spring, European anti-austerity and American-led Occupy movements. For the so-called 99 per cent, life has grown increasingly precarious, even within the first world. The American middle class is shrinking. The

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working class born of the industrial revolution is disappearing fast. Working conditions in the third world do not meet first-world standards, and the poor everywhere are worse off than ever, even as the elite grows wealthier and more powerful. Small business owners and self­ employed professionals are growing smaller in number as ownership is consolidated; shopkeepers become store managers and physicians go to work for health corporations, moving into what Guy Standing calls the Salariat. Others have opted for the status of Proficians, working on short-term contracts and consultancies, often for good pay. The fastest-growing class is that of the Precariat, ‘the new dangerous class’ characterised by insecurity of residency, of labour and of social protection. Unions and social welfare systems are being dismantled in the first and second worlds, and often never existed in the third world. Today’s precariat lacks the prospects of lifetime employment, bargaining power to demand better wages and benefits, and a government-provided social safety net. Although the salariat and proficians enjoy relative stability, there is always the risk of sliding into the precariat. Moving up from the precariat into the salariat is not at all likely, as sociological research shows again and again. Unemployment is a fate that can befall the salariat as quickly and catastrophically as the precariat. Stability and precarity form a sliding scale, mostly sliding down, while the elite (financial, bureaucratic or monarchical) continually invent complex investment schemes to shelter themselves from risk. This new social stratification scheme has taken hold all over the world, in rich nations and in poor. The precariat includes people from ethnic majorities as well as from ethnic minorities, citizens as well as legal and illegal immigrants. Its members are far too disparate to form any kind of traditional revolutionary consciousness. The precariat certainly needs economic security, juridical rights and political recognition, but it also needs agency, the right to cultural difference and a sense of meaning in life (Standing 2011: 24-5). The protestors’ demands are therefore not limited to economic or energetic Flows (money, clean water, utilities and so on). Guattari emphasised demands for subjective singularisation which manifest themselves most clearly in disputes over language, religion, ethnicity or lifestyle, and may as easily include calls for modernisation as returns to tradition. These cultural dimensions correspond to existential Territories and Universes of value. However, as for example with the NATO military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or with the Israel-Palestine conflict, it is often hard to determine whether the warring parties are fighting over resource Flows or cultural Universes.

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Although the American Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements both advocate reforming financial Flows, they differ in terms of social vision (Universes and Territories). The Tunisian vegetable seller immolated himself not just because he was poor (cut off from Flows), but also because petty official harassment menaced his sense of self (existential Territory). Cultural difference, agency and the meaning of life require attention to Universes and Territories. However, before turning to these two domains, it worth pausing to consider the machinic Phyla which play an increasingly large role in today’s assemblages and their ecologies. Guattari notes that although subjective factors have often played a significant historical role, by the early 1990s the global diffusion of collectively expressed demands through the mass media had brought subjectivity to the forefront of world events (Guattari 1995: 3). Today, digital information technologies are ever more integrated into the most social and most intimate dimensions of human lives. Media coverage amplifies the subjective dimensions of an event, giving a face and a voice to the actors, establishing with the viewer affective bonds that may resonate independently of discursive messages. Interactive social media, which Guattari anticipated but did not live to see fully realised, further enhances the subjective dimensions of history. Both progressive movements and returns to tradition are enlisting the help of the mass media, social networking and interactive personal media. Technology is not the exclusive domain of the modernisers. Social networking spreads anti-Islamic right-wing ethnocentric nationalism across Europe and North America, just as fundamentalists sympathetic to al-Qaeda use the Internet to organise and to promote their cause. ‘The machinic production of subjectivity can work for the better or for the worse’, as Guattari once put it (Guattari 1996: 194). Subjective singularisation may lead toward greater freedoms, or toward renewed repressions or toward self-annihilation. Existing assemblages are not up to the task of producing the kinds of subjectivation required to survive ‘planetary informatisation’ (Guattari 1992).1 Much has been made of the role of the media in bringing into being the various twenty-first-century contestatory movements. From the selfproduced videos of Osama bin Laden televised around the world on the 24/7 news cycle to the demonstrations organised on Facebook and Twitter, both top-down mass media and bottom-up social media have shaped recent popular oppositional events. Given the role of both micro- and mass media in creating and sustaining protest movements over the past 30 years, have we entered the dissensual, processual

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post-media era whose arrival Guattari longed for (Guattari 1992: 31)? The odd mixture of emancipatory, conservative and destructive impulses indicates that the post-media era has arrived only in bits and pieces, and that its technological aspects have evolved much more quickly than its subjective and social aspects. As Guattari predicted, media technologies have indeed become interactive to the point that anyone can produce and broadcast audio-visual materials from devices carried in their pockets, but he didn’t mention that this interactivity also serves the purposes of control society. Sophisticated media technologies, such as closed-circuit digital video and facial recognition software, have played a decisive role in state responses to populist demonstrations. Iran, China and the public transit authority in the San Francisco Bay Area (BART) have all been criticised for blocking social media communication channels, and the UK has discussed doing the same. The technology itself, however, is less important than the subjective and social mutations that go with it. Guattari defined the post-media era as not just interactive and dissensual but also processual. Full entry into the post-media era requires the development of what he calls processual assemblages. Unlike the archaic and capitalist social assemblages of the past, argues Guattari, processual assemblages will be resingularising. Processuality implicates, on the one hand, ‘intimate modes of being, the body, the environment’ and on the other hand ‘large contextual ensembles relating to ethnic groups, the nation, or even the general rights of humanity’ (Guattari 2000: 53). The post-media era is therefore less dependent on technology per se than on the existential conditions of subjective singularisation. ‘Intimate modes of being’ correspond to existential Territories, ‘large contextual ensembles’ to referential Universes of value. The irruption into history of demands for subject singularisation cor­ responds to a general search for viable existential Territories-singular homelands suitable to our age of extreme deterritorialisation. Whether or not Guattari’s utopic post-media era will ever come to be, existential Territories are necessary to any assemblage, processual or standard. Existential Territory is, depending on the context, a domain of the plane of consistency, an essential dimension of subjectivity and a mode of territorialisation. An existential Territory may be individual or collective. It incorporates the affective, pre-discursive and extra­ discursive dimensions of the self. It corresponds to the Body without Organs as well as to the kind of ‘inflatable, portable territory’ mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 320). Whether individual or collective, existential Territory includes the body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space, refrains of the mother tongue,

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familiar faces, family lore and ethnicity (Guattari 1995: 95). It remains pre-discursive, pre-personal and intensive. It is ‘a Territory of action, of physical totalisation, of the location of affect and of proto-history’ (Guattari 1995: 66). As traditional territorialisations give way to modern deterritorialisations, existential Territories become even more crucial to survival. Social assemblages crumble unless they are embodied in some sort of territory. No form of subjectivity can exist without a territory, even in the case of a liberating line of flight. The existential challenge of the twenty-first century remains the invention of a form of territoriality that can benefit from extreme deterritorialisations. Subjective singularisation revitalises assemblages, enabling them to shape their environment, bringing into existence new worlds. This is why Uexkull insists on the subjective nature of territory. He describes a walk through a garden during which the observer becomes aware that each insect and butterfly perceives its environment as if in a bubble that ‘contains all the features accessible to that subject’. To enter one of these bubbles is to entirely reconfigure the surroundings (Uexkull 2010: 43). The bubble is the animal’s existential Territory. The bubble can also be figured as a web or network. ‘Every subject spins out, like the spider’s threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence’ (53). This portable web for transporting a subject’s existence is also the existential Territory. Human subjectivities need their territories, but these need not be tied to a geographical location. Twenty-first-century humans rely more and more on portable existential Territories, given the dismantling of the earth-based territories that had served them for millennia. Deleuze’s famous travelling in place is made possible by the existential Territory’s virtual transportability. Twenty-first-century homelands need not correspond to existing territorial ethnicities, nations, religions or classes, but they may include elements from them. Guattari describes the contemporary era thus: To the extent that ‘original’ territorialised assemblages, like those of the extended family, rural communities, castes, corporations, etc. have been swept away by deterritorialised flows, components of conscientialisation also have been attached to and studded with residual objects or semiotic substitutes. (Guattari 2011: 113)

Assemblages are able to adapt to changes by putting residual objects and semiotic substitutes to creative and productive use as catalysers for new modes of subjectivation, rather than as nodes of disempowerment that

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act as semiotic black holes by sucking components of subjectivity into their vortex. It is thus not a question of modernisation versus archaism. According to the tenets of ecosophy, when it comes to building a social assemblage ‘absolutely anything goes-any ideology, or even religion will do, even the most archaic: all that matters is that it be used as the raw material of existence’ (Guattari 1992: 20). The resingularising processual assemblages of the post-media era cannot come into existence without pulling together available fragments from existing and even dissipated assemblages. Order (that is, existence) can arise from chaos, but it cannot arise from a void. So-called culture clashes symptomatise social assemblage problems. Islamic fundamentalism has been explained away as a culturalist backlash, an anti-Western extremism. Similarly, the post-Soviet nationalist independence movements have been cast as a release of pentup ethnic tensions that totalitarian communism had contained. This is not how Guattari viewed these situations. He reads the demands of these groups as collective refusals of the standardised capitalist subjectivities on offer. No matter how socially conservative their agendas, these groups resist capitalism’s imposition of a system of valuation based on general equivalency and the standardised subjectivities that it produces as a result. He suggests that respite from the flattening, homogenising effects of capitalism’s deterritorialisations can be sought in three directions: reterritorialisations onto the residues of archaic assemblages; destructive annihilation; or the invention of mutant, singularising processual assemblages which are more collective, more social and more political (Guattari 1995: 29). Guattari’s portrait of Integrated World Capitalism remains too monolithic, especially given today’s many capitalisms-industrial, financial, speculative, authoritarian, exportdriven, consumerist and so on. However, his question remains relevant: will the twenty-first century become mired in reactionary reterritorialisations which form in counterpoint to the numerous deterritorialising assemblages that began emerging in the early Middle Ages, or will interactive personal media facilitate the creation of singularising processual assemblages? The refusal of the dominant versions of modernity is not regressive in itself. In a 1985 polemical essay entitled ‘The Nationalitarian Fifth World’, Guattari groups together various social movements manifesting a resurgence of particularity, a demand for singularisation, in effect mapping them onto the crumbling three-world model. Guattari began writing about groups making ethnic and cultural claims during the decade which opened with the 1979 Iranian revolution and culminated

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with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The communist second world was collapsing. The liberal first world claimed victory. Both first-world liberalism and second-world communism had advanced modernist dreams of secular internationalism which would entail a jettisoning of cultural traditions, but by the 1980s it had become clear that ethno-cultural particularities had not been swept away by modernity. Nonetheless, secularist assumptions continue to encode the third world as backwards and stuck in archaic territorial cultures. The fourth world struggles for existence within the borders of the wealthy first world. The outliers, whether they are modernised but disaffected first-world urban youth descended from immigrants, or traditionalists clinging to displaced ethnicities and cultural habits, form the nationalitarian fifth world (Guattari 1986: 71-9). These groups can be characterised by their ‘archaic attachments to cultural traditions’, to borrow Guattari’s own phrasing (Guattari 1995: 3-4). His use of the term ‘archaic’ seems odd, given his general opposition to developmental models, but I would suggest that this usage must be placed in the context of his grand historical machinic assemblages. Traits that he labels archaic have survived as remnants of assemblages whose territorialities are inscribed directly onto the earth itself. Such territorial cultural attachments remain a part of ‘the contemporary subjective cocktail’ because twenty-first-century assemblages still include territorial components of subjectivity (Guattari 1995:4). He interprets these returns to tradition as resistance to capitalist assemblages. He dreams that Europe’s ethnic and ecology movements (Basques, Ulster Protestants, German Greens, Scots and Welsh) will stand together and say: ‘Yes, we are archaic. Take your modernity and shove it!’ (Guattari 1986: 69-70). As an alternative to secular modernist internationalism, ecosophy offers strategies for constructing liveable, particularised existential Territories adapted to changing historical conditions. This is why Europeans ‘have a lot to learn from the way immigrants reinvent and reconstitute their culture’ (Guattari 1986: 40). The fifth world has much more to offer than its quaint cultural relics suitable for display. Schizoanalysis learns from the schizophrenic, who pieces together a world from semiotic fragments. In treating psychosis, the schizoanalyst’s aim is ‘to increase as much as possible the range of means offered in the recomposition of a patient’s corporeal, biological, psychical and social Territories’ (Guattari 1995: 68). Likewise, a schizoanalytic approach to extreme global deterritorialisation would entail expanding the range of components and materials of expression available for enriching and recomposing collective existential Territories, corporeal, biological,

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psychical and social. Immigrants are leading the way as schizoanalysts of globalisation. Guattari places his socio-political hopes in the fifth world because, out of necessity and in order to survive, they are already inventing ways to renew cultural values and social practices for our epoch, wisely retaining what works from previous regimes in addition to inventing completely new existential Territories. Such territories need not be based on ethnicity, culture or even place. Guattari explains that ‘The search for an existential Territory or homeland doesn’t necessarily involve searching for one’s country of birth or a distant country of origin’, adding that ‘All sorts of deterritorialised ‘nationalities’ are conceivable, such as music and poetry’ (Guattari 2000: 65). There are punk rock, heavy metal and hip hop ‘nations’. Immigrants have created lively ethnic neighbourhoods, and their first-world-born descendants have invented urban youth cultures with their own street slang, music, graffiti and fashion (Guattari 1986). It is not a matter of refusing modernisation, but of inventing alternative modernities that revive the world’s mental, social and environmental ecologies. Human social formations likewise rely on existential operators such as the refrain or faciality, as explained at length in A Thousand Plateaus and The Machinic Unconscious. Any cultural element can detach itself and serve as an existential operator or component of passage. ‘The deterritorialisation of his Umwelt has led man to invent diagrammatic operators such as faciality and refrains enabling him to produce new machinic territorialities’ (Guattari 2011: 120). Existential operators create by assembling. Bringing together various components and assemblages, transforming them and keeping them going, existential operators act as the umbilical points of new worlds. ‘A world is only constituted on the condition of being inhabited by an umbilical point - deconstructive, detotalisating and deterritorialising-from which a subjective positionality embodies itself’ (Guattari 1995: 80). The nation is a refrain that binds a people to a territory, but other refrains are possible (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 456). While some fifth-world groups are indeed involved in conventional territorial disputes over land, water and sovereignty (the Palestinians, for example), others are ‘inventing new modes of managing daily life’ (Guattari 1986: 41). Daily life is the terrain of the existential Territory, which lies adjacent to socio-economic flows and information-age machines. The planetary­ wide transformations brought about by rapid globalisation necessitate inventing ‘a new art of living’ (Guattari 1996: 202). The Islamic headcovering provides a good example of a residual cultural object that acts as an existential operator, for better or for

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worse.2 It would be a mistake to see the Islamic headcovering as a mere signifier; it is a semiotic operator because it functions on the level of affect and intensity to organise-and to disrupt-subjectivities as well as social relations. The headcovering is semiotic but non-discursive. It is both a refrain (as ritual object) as well as a form of faciality (demarcating those who belong from those who do not). As such, it is a semiotic component of passage, meaning that it can disengage itself from an assemblage, bifurcating in many directions, whether toward oppressive reterritorialisation, a subjective black hole or a singularising line of flight. Although many argue that the veil cannot possibly contribute to any emancipatory project, it has certainly undergone a series of deterritorialisations. Originally the garb of desert peoples, whose attachment to a hot part of the earth necessitated protection from the sun, the headcovering was deterritorialised by Islam, which detached it from the earth in order to make it a ritual garb required by a disembodied monotheistic god. Many Westerners interpret the headcovering as a simple index of women’s oppression. European neo­ nationalists take it to be a territorial refrain, like a bird’s song or brightly coloured spread tail feathers, deployed in a reterritorialising attempt to Islamise Europe. Mainstream politicians have been accused of restricting and banning headcoverings as a headline-grabbing ploy to capture the far-right vote. In a highly publicised case in France, two sisters expelled from school for violating its headcovering ban turned out to have been recent converts to Islam, having been raised in a leftist secular household by a non-observant Jew and a non-practising, non-Arab Christian Algerian who were separated; the sisters wore the headscarf against the wishes of their parents, an act of religious piety which has been interpreted as a gesture of teenage defiance (Scott 2007: 30-3). In staunchly secular countries like France and Turkey, some women wear the headcovering in defiance, demanding emancipation from official restrictions on public dress. For some who wear the headcovering, it serves as a nucleus of subjectivation, constituting a portable existential territory that shelters the wearer from the penetrating gaze of strangers. In Questioning the Veil, sociologist Marnia Lazreg insists that the Islamic headcovering could never bifurcate toward a deterritorialising line of flight. She provides an overview of the re-veiling trend, based on interviews with women all over the world, in Muslim countries as well as in Europe and North America. While she argues that states and their institutions should neither require nor ban headcoverings, she urges women not to veil. She reasons that the veil it is not required by the

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Koran (at least according to a certain reading); it is cumbersome; its wearing is mandated by men for their benefit; and so forth. Noting that the revival of the veil is an organised campaign promoted by Islamic leaders, she rejects the idea that women may freely choose the veil, because, she maintains, the veil is inextricably associated with patriarchal power structures. She points out that the veil is ‘overlaid with meanings’, but that its wearing is more than symbolic; it is also a ‘complex and internally contradictory custom’ (2009: 11, 35). The veil is both discourse and practice, social convention and personal act (11, 36). It is not possible, in her view, to reclaim the veil as an expression of cultural pride or in defiance of Western prejudices because it is too caught up in conservative convention to be liberated for re-symbolisation. The veil is both an intimate bodily act and a tool of a repressive social apparatus. The personal act of assuming the veil contributes to the construction of an existential Territory. As a component of passage, it can also communicate with other assemblages. More crucially, the veil serves as a relay between the existential Territory of the self and virtual Universes of value. It is because the veil belongs to a larger Universe of value that it cannot be entirely personalised. The self forms at the interface between a virtual-real existential Territory and multiple virtual-possible Universes of value. For example, the infant develops within a ‘proto-social and still pre-verbal Universe’ where ‘familial, ethnic, urban, etc., traits are transmitted (let’s call it the Cultural Unconscious)’ (Guattari 1995: 67). The existential Territory is the organless embodiment of an assemblage’s incorporeal Universes. There are Islamic Universes, Christian Universes, liberal secular Universes, scientific Universes, jazz Universes, conjugal Universes and so on. Operators like the refrain traverse Territories and Universes, catalysing the chaos so that complex subjective formations can acquire consistency. A zone of proto-subjectivity emerges when, on the plane of consistency, a Universe of value couples with an existential Territory. A given existential Territory may open onto multiple Universes. Constellations of Universes offer not only values but also reserves of cultural materials. With the help of the diagrammatisms proper to the machinic Phyla, these Universes of cultural reserves may coalesce into new Universes. Territories incarnate these Universes, which cannot exist without their embodiment (Guattari 1995: 54-5). There are no abstract universals, only embodied Universes of reference. Secularism and religion function as Universes of value, but they operate differently within different assemblages. Western modernity encodes Islam as an archaic territorial assemblage, but Islam is in fact

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already a deterritorialisation with its transcendent invisible god who communicates through a written text, and therefore in this respect it is at least as modern as contemporary Christianity. Guattari’s view is mired in secularist assumptions, but as a theory of history his description of the mutation from polytheistic antiquity to Christianity is worth quoting at length: the incorporeal Universes of classical Antiquity which were associated with a polytheistic compromise relating to a multitude of clanic and ethnic Territorialities, underwent a radical reshaping with the trinitary revolution of Christianity, indexed on the refrain of the sign of the cross, which will recentre not only the ensemble of social, existential Territories, but also the corporeal, mental, familial assemblages, on the unique existential Territory of Christic incarnation and crucifixion.. . . The new subjectivity of guilt, contrition, body markings and sexuality, of redemptive mediation, is also an essential piece of the new social apparatuses, the new machines of subjection which had to construct themselves from the debris of the late Roman Empire and the reterritorialisations of feudal and urban orders yet to come. (Guattari 1 9 9 5 :6 1 )

A refrain, the sign of the cross, repositions all Territories and assemblages onto Christ’s body, its incarnation and crucifixion, existentialising a new Territory around which Europe’s social and subjective assemblages will reterritorialise for many centuries. Christianity offered new subjectivities that helped Europeans live with capitalist deterritorialisations. Christianity in turn deterritorialised onto modern universalist values (Guattari 1995: 62). Christianity and enlightenment universals in turn coexisted with reterritorialisations based on the old nations, classes and corporations of a more territorial age (Guattari 1992: 27). Ecosophic vocabulary could similarly account for the historical mutations brought about by Islam. Like many French intellectuals, Guattari’s staunch secularism led him to predict a fading of religious monotheism with the coming of the processual post-media era, because ‘it is not in the nature of the new subjectivity to be herded’ (Guattari 1992: 35). I must disagree, given the growth of Islam and evangelical Christianity around the world. While it is true that in many cases these monotheisms limit potentially processual singularisations through stratification, circular repetition and imposed values, there is no reason why processual assemblages cannot tap into these religious Universes. After all, a creative line of flight can take off from any assemblage, even a highly stratified one. The Christian aes­ thetic Universe unleashed sublime works of art. The military-industrial machinic phyla gave us cinema, aeroplanes and the Internet. Lazreg

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may well be correct that the veil cannot possibly serve as a liberatory semiotic operator because it remains so entrenched in a referential Universe of value that is too sedimented, too stratified, too repressive, too imbricated in the machinery of states and institutions. However, Lazreg is careful not to dismiss Islam as a whole. Universes can and do mutate. New Universes can also split off to become something new. The new assemblages which emerge will nonetheless have to find a way to draw on the remains of dissipating assemblages. Order can arise from chaos, but the elements of order can only come from the chaos itself. The ungluing of human history has resulted in the twenty-first century’s strange mix of economic demands, emancipatory claims and culturally conservative agendas. However, the very concept of culture may be blocking paths to the processual assemblages that will herald the dawn of the post-media era. The Culture concept belongs to the eras dominated by archaic territorialising assemblages and modern deterritorialising assemblages. Ecosophy respects differences without evoking the hierarchies and grids of class and coloniality that cling to the culture concept. Viewed with the help of the ecosophic object, culture can be defined as a reservoir of shared elements, such as the residual objects and semiotic substitutes that existentialise mental and social formations. These elements work through repetition, redundancy and resonance. They include signs, symbols, verbal refrains, musical refrains, gestures, ritual, clothing, bodily markings, knowledge, belief, prejudices and stereotypes. The elements may be arranged into various domains or institutions, such as organised religions, nations, arts organisations, schools, media industries, festivals and so forth. They may likewise become attached to various types of value-aesthetic, ethical, moral, religious, monetary, etc. Although that which is ascribed to the sphere of culture has by definition already undergone deterritorialising detachment (even if, as in the case of animism, the detached semiotic elements are reattached to the earth), the redeeming feature of the culture concept remains its deep connections to life and to the earth. Culture, as a reserve of semiotising components, couples a population to a territory, and the evolution of the word’s meanings can be correlated to various historical processes of deterritorialisation. As we have seen, the various phenomena which Europeans and their descendants have come to call ‘culture’ persist into the twenty-first century, despite the globalisation of capital, goods, communication, media, labour, technology and lifestyles. However, culture is no longer lived in the ways it was when the term emerged in European languages during the medieval period, its modern meanings not evolving until a few centuries later.

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Raymond Williams provides a famous account of the culture concept’s history (Williams 1976). In the fifteenth century culture referred to husbandry, the tending of crops and animals. It thus already designates a first degree of deterritorialisation, as animals and plants are moved from their original habitats to occupy a space shaped by humans; they are then bred and cross-bred with human intervention. During the Renaissance culture metaphorically extends to human development, especially the cultivation of the intellect. Beginning in the eighteenth century, culture gradually comes to replace the notion of civilisation, with its class and colonial overtones. In the nineteenth century there emerged the most common meaning of culture today, that of the way of life specific to a group or people. At the same time a third meaning had become common, that of the sphere of artistic and intellectual achievement. The culture concept was born on the farm, then extended to include the (liberal and beaux) arts, then human lifestyles. In other words, it is rooted in various modes of deterritorialisation-agricultural, technological, aesthetic, intellectual and social. It is no coincidence that the word culture, with all its etymological baggage, evolved hand-in-hand with ethnographic exploration and colonial conquest, which were among the more devastating and violent deterritorialisations of recent human history. During the centuries of Europe’s global domination, the concept of culture allowed the deterritorialised European peoples to pass judgement on the relatively more territorialised tribal societies they encountered, proselytised, studied and conquered. The culture concept may have peaked with the triumphant global institutionalisation (through journals, books, programmes) of cultural studies in the 1990s, a high point that Michael Denning associates with the culmination of the age of the three worlds (Denning 2004: 226). Around this same moment, globalisation invaded both academic and popular discourse, while anthropologists became ever more highly critical of the culture concept, often motivated by the concerns of postcolonialism (Brightman 1995; Sewell Jr. 1999). The unfortunate coinage of the concept of ‘cultural identity’ further deterritorialised human life by relegating its cultures to the symbolic order, detaching culture from experiential incarnation in order to translate it into networks of signifiers or force fields of power. Culture becomes reified, designating a set of structures and power moves, with little mention of any affect, experience or embodiment. It becomes sanitised for the benefit of tourists and museums. The result is existential impoverishment. Even more problematically, a reified culture can be used to make claims that benefit some of its members at the expense

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of others, or it can be used to justify behaviours or practices, or it can be used to explain the behaviours or practices of others (Phillips 2007). Culturalism tends to obscure agency. It reduces the complexity of subjectivity to the paucity of the subject caught in a signifying network. It suggests a linear temporal progression of developmental progress. The twenty-first century is now more than a decade old, and scholars still rely on the European colonial idea of culture to talk about collective life, despite the rapidly shifting balance of power from Euro-American hegemony toward power-sharing arrangements with Asia and, to a lesser and yet increasing extent, Latin America. Ecosophy offers the advantage of reincorporating the human sphere into the larger context of planetary life. Finance capitalism certainly dominates the planet today, but the historical shift that it indicates may coincide with a much more epochal upheaval. Michel Serres has suggested that the Neolithic Age ended around 1970, by which time mankind had acquired the power to double the life expectancy of humans, to create life in a test tube and to annihilate life on a planetary scale. If the beginning of the Neolithic can be described as the threshold at which mankind began shaping the environment through agriculture and settlement, then its end arrived when mankind began reshaping life itself, from the molecular level outward. We have reached the historical moment at which the mecanosphere has merged with the biosphere. Plants, animals, humans and machines have entered into historically unprecedented assemblages. Few people live in direct relation to the seasons, the weather or the production of their food. The information age has shifted people indoors, and agriculture to mass production facilities. Little wilderness remains. Dwelling space has been irrevocably transformed for man and beast alike (Serres 2001). The new spaces, Auge’s non-spaces, belong to transnational stratifications of financial, material and labour flows, but these spaces have not yet been properly territorialised at the existential level. The culture industry has turned the heritage museum into a Disneyfied destination for mass tourism, creating a non-space where carved-up culture is made spectacle. Culture thus remains stuck in the mass-media era. It is time to open up spectacle society’s mass-marketed museum to the inventive processuality of the post-media era, in order to produce portable, singular homelands, habitable existential Territories whose virtual existence is waiting to be actualised out of the democratic chaos of rhizomatic revolution.

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Notes 1. Guattari 1992 is a translation of the first chapter of Guattari 1989, English edition forthcoming from Continuum. 2. Jasbir Puar characterises the Sikh turban as a ‘strange attractor’ (Puar 2011). Although I like this poetical phrasing, in Guattari’s science-inspired vocabulary veils and turbans are best described as existential operators and nuclei of subjectivation.

References Auge, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an A nthropology o f Super­ modernity, London: Verso. Brightman, Robert (1995) ‘Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification’, Cultural A nthropology, 10:4, pp. 509-46. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denning, Michael (2004) Culture in the Age o f Three Worlds, London: Verso. Guattari, Felix (1986) ‘On a le racisme qu’on merite’, ‘Des libertes en Europe’, ‘Le Cinquieme Monde Nationalitaire’, in Les Annees D ’hiver, 1980-1985, Paris: Barrault, pp. 39-41, 55-78. Guattari, Felix (1989) Cartographies Schizoanalytiques, Paris: Editions Galilee. Guattari, Felix (1992) ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, New York: Zone, pp. 16-37. Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosm osis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Felix (1996) ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, in Gary Genosko (ed.), The Guattari Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 192-203. Guattari, Felix (2000) The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Athlone Press. Guattari, Felix (2011) The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Felix and Suely Rolnik (2008) M olecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lazreg, Marnia (2009) Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, Melanie (2009) Complexity: A G uided Tour, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, Anne (2007) Multiculturalism w ithout Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers (1984) Order out o f Chaos: Man’s N ew D ialogue with Nature, Toronto: Bantam Books. Puar, Jasbir (2011) “The Turban Is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling’, in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse (eds), Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the G overnance o f L ife and Death, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach (2007) The Politics o f the Veil, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Serres, Michel (2001) Hominescence: Essais, Paris: Pommier.

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Sewell Jr., William H. (1999) ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, in Victoria E. Bonnell and LynnAvery Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: N ew Directions in the Study o f Society and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 35-61. Shaviro, Steven (2010) ‘Interstitial Life: Remarks on Causality and Purpose in Biology’, in Peter Gaffney (ed.), The Force o f the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133-46. Standing, Guy (2011) The Precariat: The N ew Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Uexkull, Jakob von (2010) A Foray into the Worlds o f Animals and Humans; a Theory o f Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O ’Neill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Raymond (1976) ‘Culture’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary o f Culture and Society, London: Fontana, pp. 76-82.

In stitu tio n a l S c h i z o p h a s i a a n d th e P o s s ib ilit y o f th e H u m a n it ie s ' 'O t h e r S c e n e ': G u a tta ri a n d th e E x i g e n c y o f T r a n s v e r s a lit y

M ichael Eng

Abstract Transversality occupies a central place in Guattari’s thought, appearing in his early writings on institutional analysis and on through to his final work, Chaosmosis. Transversality is thus particularly pertinent to understanding Guattari’s critique of semiocapitalism and his goal of re-imagining forms of institutional subjectivisation as a way to free the unconscious from structures of lack and the desire for punishment, the very structures upon which capitalism relies for its reproduction. If there is one institution that has taken advantage of semiocapitalism’s ability to mask its role in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity, however, it is the contemporary neoliberal University. This essay thus brings transversality to bear upon the question of the University in semiocapitalism, focusing on the discourses that speak in defence of the humanities. Though defences of the humanities are intended to argue for the humanities’ usefulness in contemporary society, transversality exposes such discourses as the speech of a ‘subjugated group’ whose only effect is to reinforce existing structures of lack and punishment. Keywords: Guattari, transversality, semiocapitalism, psychoanalysis, institutional therapeutics, Oury, the University, institutional schizophasia

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 328-352 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0065 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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The problem of the U niversity-w e certainly found out in May ’68 - is not the students and the professors; it is the problem of the entire society inasmuch as it involves the relationship between the transmission of knowledge, the training of executives, the desire of the masses, the requirements of industry, and finally, everything which could intermingle in the setting of the University. (Guattari, ‘The Best Capitalist Drug’) So the question of inter-monadic transversality is not simply of a speculative nature. It involves calling into question disciplinary boundaries, the solipsistic closure of Universes of value, prevalent today in a number of domains. (Guattari, C haosm osis)

This essay explores the ways Felix Guattari’s concept of transversality may be brought to bear on the question of the contemporary University’s relationship to advanced capitalism, or to what Guattari named Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) and what Guattari’s friend and colleague Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has come to call ‘semiocapitalism’ (Guattari 1984b; Berardi 2009a). I am interested particularly in the implications Guattari's theorisation of transversality has for the antagonism between the group of disciplines that identify themselves as composing ‘the humanities' and semiocapitalism's increased organisation of the contemporary neoliberal University. This antagonism, which has lately appeared under the label of ‘the crisis of the humanities', opposes the research undertaken by such disciplines as philosophy, literature and the arts to what has been described for some time now as the contemporary University's ‘corporatisation' or administrative turn. However, I wish to show that Guattari’s concept of transversality exposes such a discourse as a fantasy that the humanities nurture in the age of semiocapitalism in order to maintain the belief that they, and by extension, the University, have somehow been exempt from capitalist reproduction. Transversality, I argue, exposes the discourse of ‘the crisis of the humanities' as a simulacrum of speech, a kind of ‘destruction of language’ that Jean Oury has labelled ‘schizophasic’ and which I seek to identify with the phrase ‘institutional schizophasia’ (Oury et al. 2007: 42). At the same time, transversality also promises methods by which this simulacrum may be broached and a new form - what Oury calls ‘an other scene’ - of group desire may be achieved (Oury et al. 2007: 40).

I. Transversality and Semiocapitalism Insofar as it attempts to respond to a set of material conditions and ‘extract an event' from such conditions, transversality is a ‘concept'

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in every sense Guattari and Gilles Deleuze give the term in their final collaboration, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 33). Transversality was crafted by Guattari to intervene in a clinical exigency he identified during his tenure at the La Borde clinic. He realised that the institutional conditions at La Borde not only seemed an obstacle to the therapeutic cure but that they actually required the persistence of psychological illness. Observing that the hierarchical structure of relationships within the institution (between analysts and patients, but also between and among analysts and staff) reproduced the relation to punishment and lack to which subjects are first introduced via the castration complex, Guattari enacted a new work system referred to as ‘the grid’ that assigned people tasks that were outside their areas of specialisation (Dosse 2010: 56-7). Cleaning staff might be assigned to aid doctors in the treatment of patients, monitors might be given dishwashing duties, etc. The idea was to shake up established vertical and horizontal relationships in the institution, including conceptual hierarchies such as that of intellectual to manual labour, and create innovative, transversal relations that would show how the older, habitual ways of acting within the institution were symptomatic of a particular, yet far from inevitable, image the institution had of itself, an image that reflected a historically determined ‘group fantasy’. Thus, in addition to appearing within what Deleuze and Guattari called a ‘field’ or ‘ground’ of material relations, transversality served at the moment of its inception as an ‘event’, a new arrangement of ‘things and beings’, by reconfiguring these relations and also by announcing a new ‘image of thought’ of and for the institution of analysis in both its practical and disciplinary forms (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 33, 37). Guattari even brought such transversal relations to bear further during the events of May ’68 by bringing patients from La Borde to participate in the protests and by having them form protest committees at the clinic.1 Opposing itself to the transference, which according to Guattari holds the unconscious hostage to the past, the castration complex and the intersubjective relation of analysand to analyst, transversality projects an image of the unconscious as collective, non-hierarchical, futural and machinic, directed toward the possibility of heterogeneous forms of relation not restricted to human interaction. In freeing the unconscious from its capture by conventional psychoanalytic conceptions, transversality exposes and overcomes the transference’s complicity and continued investment in an unconscious that desires punishment. Since the transference is a condition of the psychoanalytic cure, transversality’s exposure of the transference is also an exposure of the therapeutic institution’s perpetuation of lack and punishment.

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From the critique of the clinical institution, Guattari proceeded to show how the disciplines of psychoanalysis and linguistics, which Lacan put to work in his translation of Freud’s text, participate in the reproduction of the modern capitalist subject, whose life in capitalism is also, not coincidentally, sustained via an experience of lack and punishment. It was then only a short step to seeing how institutions in general organise themselves around structures that interpellate their subjects through similar experiences. In so doing, institutions thus also serve as the site of capital’s reproduction. Institutions that dedicate themselves to bureaucratic inertia benefit from their members identifying as what Guattari called a ‘subjugated group’ (groupe assujetti), a group whose fantasies, desires and speech are determined for it, because such a group is occupied primarily by a futile desire for recognition that keeps it stuck in place and consequently prevents it from challenging the institution in any meaningful way. In contrast, a ‘subject group’ (groupe sujet), conscious of fantasy as a condition of psychic life, both is aware of its fantasies and recognises its ability to shape them through an affective and creative experience of language. Where a subjugated group is caught in an experience of schizophasic language, a subject group embraces the possibility of becoming otherwise through a perpetual recreation of its relation to language. In the well-known interview ‘The Best Capitalist Drug’ from 1973, Arno Munster asks Guattari how psychoanalysis can thus stop ‘being an accomplice’ to capitalism’s ordering of social existence (Guattari 2009: 143). In his response, part of which serves as the epigraph for the present essay, we see Guattari first correct the assumption at work in Munster’s question that psychoanalysis can be confronted in isolation from the institutions that house it, namely the University and the psychiatric hospital, and from the capitalist social order to which they ultimately are all in service. Requisite for a reorientation of psychoanalytic practice, then, is a critique of the institutional production of capitalist subjectivity, especially in those cases, such as the University, that imagine themselves separate from capitalism’s reproduction. In this respect, Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis resonates with similar May ’68-era critiques of the University’s complicity in capitalist reproduction, such as those found in the Situationist pamphlet ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’ (1966), written by the U.N.E.F. Strasbourg student collective, and in Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit’s O bsolete Communism (1968). The Cohn-Bendits’ attack on sociological theory that it evacuates the cases and conflicts it studies of their social context so as to better assist in the market rationalisation of society-is particularly

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consistent with Guattari’s targeting of psychoanalysis (Cohn-Bendit and Cohn-Bendit 1968: 38).2 In Guattari’s critique, if psychoanalysis is ‘the best of all capitalist drugs’, it is because it provides the material with which institutions, and the groups and individuals within them, maintain the fantasy of their separation from capitalism while at the same time perpetuating the twin logic of lack and punishment that capitalism requires. Without the perpetuation of this logic, capitalism’s promises would literally have no sense: according to Guattari, capitalism, as a system of signification and meaning, would be called into question, and the fantasy of a separation from capitalism would be ruptured. It is toward such a disruption that transversality is directed. Guattari’s elaboration of transversality into a critique of the interrelationship of capitalism, institutions and disciplinarity formed the basis of his practical interventions at La Borde and with the militant groups he founded in the 1960s, such as the Federation of Institutional Study Groups and Research (FGERI) and the Center for Institutional Study, Research, and Training (CERFI). On the theoretical register, transversality also served a central role in his collaborations with Deleuze and in his final writings in which he traced the contours of what he called an ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ of subjectivation. Such remarkable conceptual reach marks transversality and Guattari as deserving of sustained critical attention as the forces aligning capitalism, institutions and disciplinary language have only intensified since Guattari’s original efforts. In the years since Guattari’s specific critique of psychoanalysis and the general critiques of capitalist society and the University by the movements of May ’68, it is a sobering and obvious fact that capitalism has more deeply colonised the social than ever before. With IWC or semiocapitalism, capital no longer has to rely on individuals entering a physical factory for its reproduction; the signifying structures of the social itself-the immaterial and affective sites known as media and entertainment - are now the modes through which capital reproduces itself and the castrated subjects proper to it. As an adjunct to this system of signification, the operation of the contemporary neoliberal University within semiocapitalism has achieved a seamlessness in which there is no distinction between the knowledge produced within the University and the information that circulates in the global financial market. Industrial labour has given way to immaterial or cognitive labour in support of a deterritorialised global financial system, and the common slogan that the University exists today to prepare individuals to ‘succeed in the information economy' testifies to Berardi's observation

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that under semiocapitalism the knowledge the University believed was unique to it, and over which it fancied itself as having sovereignty, is no longer autonomous (Berardi 2011). Today, 13 years after Gary Genosko first called for the task of seeking out spaces for its ‘acceleration’ (Genosko 1998), transversality still awaits this acceleration in ways that move meaningfully beyond the theoretical sphere or its simple mimetic application.3 However, if there is anything that marks an exigency to take up transversality once more, and just as importantly, to re-engage the stakes that informed Guattari’s creation of the concept in the first place, it is the set of conditions surrounding the state of the humanities in the contemporary neoliberal University. The exigency lies less in the threat of semiocapitalism to humanistic research, which on its face appears less useful for capitalist accumulation than the sciences. The exigency lies instead in the humanities’ traditional response to this threat, which can be characterised as two-pronged: first, the declaration of a ‘crisis of the humanities’; and second, the construction of a defence of humanistic research in order to win recognition from the market forces that organise the University and the public sphere generally. An analysis of this ‘crisis’ and the relation to language the humanities maintain in response to it will show how the conditions surrounding the contemporary University are indexical of a persistence of those conditions that provoked Guattari to create the concept of transversality originally. This analysis will also reveal more importantly the ways the humanities function within the University as a subjugated group alienated from its own speech, locked in an ‘institutional schizophasia’.4 Transversality shows us that what is at stake in ‘the crisis of the humanities’ is less the humanities’ gaining permission to survive in semiocapitalism than the production of ‘an other scene’ for the humanities’ appearance. What is at stake is the possibility of a new ground of experience or aisthesis, of what Guattari called in his last work a new ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari 1995).

II. Contained Speech: Responding to the Crisis of the Humanities The year 2010 saw what many who work in the University consider the beginning of the end of the humanities and therefore the end of the University as well. A number of wholesale closures of departments and programmes in philosophy, literature and the arts have been seen as evidence that the humanities as a whole are being systematically

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evicted from the contemporary neoliberal University. Some of the more spectacular events that took place confirming this end of the humanities include the closure of the philosophy programme at Middlesex University in the UK, the elimination of the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theatre programmes at the State University of New York at Albany, and the move to dissolve the graduate and undergraduate philosophy degrees at Howard University, the only historically black university (HBCU) to have offered a graduate degree in philosophy.5 Responses from humanists to these events have taken two standard forms: either bemoan what is now commonly referred to as ‘the corporatisation of the University’ or attempt to gain recognition as a worthy subject from this same corporate University by arguing for the humanities’ value for social and economic productivity. In either case, a narcissistic capture is at work. In what is fast becoming almost a cottage industry, which Stanley Fish has labelled ‘The Woe-Is-UsBooks’, entire books, journal issues and blogs take the tack of arguing for the intrinsic value of the humanities’ fundamental inquiry into ‘the human’ for the original idea of the University and therefore for society as a whole (Fish 2010). Alternately, many have sought to expose what they consider to be the incompatibility of market logic and humanistic study, claiming that imposing economic metrics of assessment on the humanities misrecognises the fact that humanistic inquiry does not allow for quantification. A typical question posed in this regard often takes the following form: how does one place a dollar value on investigations into the meaning of death or the possibility of freedom?6 By responding to administrative attacks with arguments for the humanities’ intrinsic value, the strategy is clearly one of trying to convince the University’s administrators that protecting the humanities is the right thing to do. The implication is that to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the University’s responsibility to society. Unfortunately, but somehow not very surprisingly, this strategy has yielded little success. For despite all the efforts at defending the humanities in terms of their inherent worth and contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human, despite all attempts to educate both the University’s administrators and the public in general about the service the humanities perform, it seems it can safely be said that the general response offered by both the powers-that-be and the public is not so much one of disagreement as one of a collective shrug. Should one be astonished by this response? After all, is it not naive to think the University, and the humanities in particular, are suddenly being held accountable to economic metrics? As others, beginning with

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the Frankfurt School, have shown, the conditions that make possible the existence of the humanities include the fact that the humanities, and the University in general, are inseparable from the function of reproducing the modern capitalist state.7 Bill Readings’ well-known The University in Ruins (1996), in a spirit not dissimilar to the Frankfurt School’s critique of the technocratic organisation of the disciplines, documents the role the Humboldtian university played at the time of its creation in solidifying the identity of the German nation-state. Readings also explains quite clearly how the modern University prepared the ground for the emergence of the very modernity that it was supposed to exemplify by providing the Kantian rational schema according to which social existence would be ordered (Readings 1996: 54-69). What is indeed worth remarking against this historical background, however, is the way the standard defences of the humanities appeal to a set of myths, extending from Plato to Jean-Franqois Lyotard, about the humanities’ exceptionalism that the humanities have circulated among themselves and propagated throughout their existence.8 What if the world actually capitalises on that very image of the humanities’ exceptionalism in which humanists, and in my experience, especially philosophers, are so invested in order to contain it? What if the discourse of the humanities’ exceptionalism is not only a kind of mythic speech humanists circulate to uphold an image of the humanities but also a speech assigned to the humanities, a script that we humanists mistake for our own voice? The belief in the exceptionalism of the humanities bolsters the feeling of superiority that has allowed many academics to be dismissive of the world’s failure to understand what humanists hold is the importance of their field of study, and it is simple enough to comprehend the comfort that feeling gives in the face of the public’s collective shrug. If we analysed the belief more critically, however, I think we would see that such psychic investment and dismissal typically signal the presence of an entrenched narcissism. As with the superiority accompanying any other form of narcissism, the tone of superiority humanists often take (even without a crisis in the field) is both a defence mechanism and a fantasy preventing a necessary confrontation with actually existing conditions, namely, the humanities’ role in reproducing the modern capitalist state. Instead of acknowledging the fact of the humanities’ complicity in the reproduction of capitalism, most working within the humanities would rather conceive nostalgic myths of the humanities’ true essence and claim this essence is being lost when in reality it never existed in the first place. In fact, it seems we have been permitted to harbour a belief in this mythic

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essence in order to fulfil our roles as the instruments of capitalism’s reproduction while thinking we were meeting some higher obligation. It seems we humanists have mistaken tolerance for endorsement. The belief in the exceptionalism of the humanities, then, could be described as a form of blindness, a kind of misrecognition on the side of the humanities rather than on the side of the humanities’ detractors that has aided in the humanities’ marginalisation. Nothing appears to testify more clearly to this fact than the impotence of the various defences of the humanities described above. They may represent instances of failed speech, but their failure can be located in the fact that they function above all as contained speech, speech reflecting the fact that the humanities currently speak from a position that has been assigned to, and even more disturbing, embraced by them, which is to say, us. The humanities continue to be on the receiving end of budget cuts and programme closures, even as the arguments decrying these actions increase. Clearly, the arguments have had no effect; yet, like a compulsion to repeat, they proceed nonetheless, following the ebb and flow of an insidious echolalia.9 It is one thing to explain how the language humanists use to defend the humanities is a speech that has been permitted us and is therefore a mechanism of containment.10 It is another question altogether why we would fail to recognise this as the case and seek instead to compulsively repeat the standard defences and perpetuate an echolalia to which no one is listening. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney offer one answer: those who are critical of the University have a great deal of incentive to be so as long as they follow the established script, for it allows them to appear as critical voices while still advancing their academic careers (Moten and Harney 2004). Nonetheless, that only explains the individual’s chase of the carrot. The question is why we, collectively, want the stick. For this, we turn now to the specific steps by which Guattari theorises transversality.

III. The Desire for Punishment Guattari finds in Freud one account of why individuals exhibit a desire for punishment, and uses this account to speculate how this desire lives on in groups. Reading the following passage from the lecture ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’ from Freud’s N ew Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1973), Guattari uncovers a disturbing implication of Freud’s conception of the neuroses:

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If we dwell on these situations of danger for a moment, we can say that in fact a particular determinant of anxiety (that is, situation of danger) is allotted to every age of development as being appropriate to it. The danger of psychical helplessness fits the stage of the ego’s early immaturity; the danger of loss of an object (or loss of love) fits the lack of self-sufficiency in the first years of childhood; the danger of being castrated fits the phallic phase; and finally fear of the super-ego, which assumes a special position, fits the period of latency. In the course of development the old determinants of anxiety should be dropped, since the situations of danger corresponding to them have lost their importance owing to the strengthening of the ego. But this only occurs most incompletely. Many people are unable to surmount the fear of loss of love; they never become sufficiently independent of other people’s love and in this respect carry on their behavior as infants. Fear of the super­ ego should normally never cease, since, in the form of moral anxiety, it is indispensable in social relations, and only in the rarest cases can an individual become independent of human society. A few of the old situations of danger, too, succeed in surviving into later periods by making contemporary modifications in their determinants of anxiety. (Freud 1973: 1 2 0 -1 , qtd in Guattari 1984c: 12)

The passage, whose entirety I have reproduced as it appears in Guattari’s 1964 essay on transversality, concerns the survival and persistence of neurotic anxieties after their ‘particular determinant’, the object inducing the anxiety’s original appearance, is gone. What is particularly striking to Guattari is Freud’s claim that ‘[f]ear of the super-ego should normally never cease, since, in the form of moral anxiety, it is indispensable in social relations’. This is the real question of psychic life, Guattari contends, for we are led to conclude that the one neurotic anxiety whose persistence is the condition for the possibility of the ego’s normal development and normal adult subjectivity is the one developed in relation to the super-ego. What this implication reveals for Guattari, then, is the fact that once the ‘particular determinant’ originally giving rise to fear of the super-ego has receded, such as the parental relation, another structure within the social must step in to perpetuate the anxiety in some form in order that normal adult subjectivity be maintained. This is not a matter of substitution for Guattari; it is rather a matter of the group inheriting and repeating what Guattari will refer to as an act of signification that continually restages the original determinants of anxiety for the sake of the social. Noting Freud’s acknowledgement elsewhere in the ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’ lecture of the ‘unconscious need for punishment’ proper to normal subjectivity, Guattari writes: ‘Henceforth, the authority of this social reality will base its survival on the establishment of an irrational morality in which punishment will

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be justified simply by the law of blind repetition, since it cannot be explained by any ethical legality’ (Guattari 1984c: 12-13). The subjectivity recognised by the social, then, is one whose neuroses are cultivated through the intentional, repetitive exposure to structures supporting psychic anxieties, specifically the castration complex, which combines the threat of punishment and the feeling of lack. The neurotic subject is thus not accidental to the social but required by it. It is in the interest of the social to organise itself in such a way as to maintain the individual’s desire for punishment and feelings of lack, an organisation which, if analysed, would expose the moral law as ultimately groundless (but this analysis never comes). ‘By seeing [the persistence of neurotic anxieties] merely as a continuity,’ Guattari quickly adds, however, we miss the question implied in it. It seems natural to prolong the resolution of the Oedipus complex into a ‘successful’ integration into society. But surely it would be more to the point to see that the way anxiety persists must be linked with the dependence of the individual on the collectivity described by Freud. (Guattari 1984c: 13)

The real question concerning the persistence of the castration complex is not why it persists but how it persists through an exploitation of the individual’s dependence on the social.

IV. Transitional Objects and the Institutional Unconscious For Guattari, it is clear that capitalism exploits the castration complex as a way to solidify the individual’s dependence on the social. In fact, Guattari’s description of capitalism’s exploitation of individual desire gives the impression that capitalism understands the psyche much more thoroughly than psychiatry or psychoanalysis. According to Guattari, capitalism organises itself as a ‘castrating regime’ that ‘neutralize^] all those practices of desire which do not reproduce the established form of domination’ (Guattari 1996a: 30). It does so by coding its o b jects-‘the washing machine, the television, in short all that makes life worth living today’ -a s gateways through which the individual attains subjectivity in the social (Guattari 1984c: 20). If the individual lacks these objects, then he or she lacks recognition within the social and is therefore lacking in subjectivity. Within capitalism, if the individual finds him- or herself unable to acquire these objects, then there is something defective with the individual, not capitalism. Thus within capitalism, the only desire that is sanctioned is the desire for the objects of capitalism and capitalistic subjectivity.

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We recognise such a characterisation of capitalism as consistent with the basic Marxian critique of commodity fetishism. Guattari builds on this basic Marxian position by linking it to D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the ‘transitional object’ (Winnicott 1971). Commodities, Guattari observes, function as vehicles of fantasy in the same way Winnicott observed that toys, teddy bears, blankets, etc. do in a child’s negotiation with reality. Like a teddy bear that a child refuses to give up, commodities can work to forestall the individual’s confrontation with reality and serve as mechanisms with which to deny reality altogether. However, unlike the teddy bear, commodities guarantee that what the individual receives back from their acquisition and manipulation is a fragmentation of the self and a feeling of lack. For as Marx argued long ago, it is in the commodity’s nature to serve at once as a phantasmagoria that promises satisfaction and fulfilment, as well as a mechanism through which human beings are alienated from both their labour and one another. Thus, writes Guattari, the sum of all these part objects, starting with the picture of the body as the basis for self-identification, is itself thrown daily onto the market as fodder, alongside the hidden Stock Exchange that deals with shares in pseudo-eroticism, aestheticism, sport and all the rest. Industrial society thus secures unconscious control of our fate by its need-satisfying from the point of view of the death in stin ct-to disjoint every consumer/producer in such a way that ultimately humanity would find itself becoming a great fragmented body held together only as the supreme God of the Economy shall decree. (Guattari 1984c: 20)

In order to integrate into society, the individual must insert him- or herself into a network of consumption in which what he or she consumes is nothing other than his or her own productive powers. The individual must internalise a self-destructive, self-consuming ‘ideal of consumingmachines-consuming-producing-machines’ (Guattari 1984c: 14), where consumption is equated with desire. This pseudo-desire of consumption is the only kind of desire recognised in the perverse republic that is IWC. By extension, if institutions within capitalism did not work to support and reproduce this relation of self-cannibalisation from out of a feeling of lack, if they did not perpetuate the castration complex and desire for punishment, they would cease to be recognised and consequently cease to exist. This condition of institutional existence within capitalism causes Guattari to note how institutions construct their own versions of transitional o b jects-‘institutional objects’ -th a t mediate the relation between the institution and the individuals within it. These institutional

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objects at the same time serve as a means of fantasy that postpone indefinitely any critical questioning of the institution’s unconscious-the connection between the institution’s existence and the larger social reality outside it, especially its role in ratifying and reproducing the very specific social reality that is Integrated World Capitalism. One pattern Guattari identifies in the structure of institutional objects is the projection of a group fantasy that provides a narrative with assigned roles with which individuals in groups can identify and upon which they can rely to insulate them from confronting reality. Guattari analyses as an example a hypothetical inner monologue of a French soldier: ‘ “I’ve been in the French army for a long time; the French army has always existed, it is eternal. This makes life easier when I’m frightened of dying, or when my wife calls me a fool. After all, I am a regimental sergeant major!” ’ (Guattari 1984a: 41). Guattari goes on to note that the institutional object of military rank to which the soldier cathects provides him a layer of comfort from reality that at once assures him he is ‘ “not nobody” ’ (no matter what his wife or anybody else might say) and that also distracts him ‘from any self-questioning about life and death’ (41). This works well for the established social order. For the sake of maintaining a hold on the institutional object and its accompanying fantasy, the soldier is ‘ready to enforce any repression, to torture, to bombard civilian populations with napalm and so on’ (Guattari 1984c: 13). The institutional object in this case comforts the soldier from any anxiety of lack while also serving as a threat of punishment, because he secretly knows that should there come a moment in which he ceases to be willing ‘to enforce any repression’, his place in the military will be taken from him. Since institutions run according to the same logic as that which organises capitalist society, and indeed that is needed to in order to survive, there is no incentive for an institution to call attention to its objects as fantastic. Thus one consequence of Guattari’s claim about the role institutional objects play with respect to the institution’s relationship to society at large is this: only the overturning of the contemporary organisation of society as such will make possible the overcoming of the Oedipus complex (Guattari 1984c: 13).

V. Groups, Institutional Schizophasia and the Necessity for Institutional Psychotherapy From what we reviewed so far of Guattari’s research, we know that institutions have an investment in perpetuating the threat of punishment

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as a mechanism of producing individual and group subjectivities that ensure their dependence upon the institution. As Guattari puts it, we know that the only forms of subjectivity institutions recognise are those that have internalised the castration complex. The groups that internalise the castration complex within an institution are those he considered ‘dependent’ or ‘subjugated groups’. By perpetuating structures of punishment and dependent group subjectivities, institutions also reproduce, and blind groups to, the institutional or group unconscious-the historical and material conditions of their existence. By encouraging fixed identifications with delusional group fantasies that sustain cathexes with particular institutional objects, institutions also police the limits of speech of subjugated groups. Anyone who has experience within an institution - which is to say, everyone-will recognise the experience of being assured one’s speech is being heard while feeling ignored at the same time. While a subject group, Guattari says, ‘makes a statement’, the only thing that can be said of a dependent or subjugated group is ‘that ‘its cause is heard,’ but no one knows where or by whom, or when’ (Guattari 1984c: 11, 14). Contemporary discourse defending the humanities functions just like that of a subjugated group, and the evidence for that is found in the fact that our ‘ “cause is heard,” but no one knows where or by whom, or when’. The speech of the subjugated group, then, is merely tolerated and contained; it is a simulacrum of actual speech. Through the tolerance of a subjugated group’s speech, the institution thus engages in a practice of destroying the possibilities for speaking, an institutional schizophasia. Left alone, institutional schizophasia results in a group’s ‘bureaucratic self-mutilation’ and absorption into ‘death-dealing impulses’ that in no way destroys the institution but guarantees the obedient reproduction of the status quo (Guattari 1984c: 23; 1984a: 42). The project of institutional psychotherapy, Guattari is careful to warn, is not one of psychologising groups. Rather, it is a project directed at loosening up the relationships that constrain speech so that groups can create and cathect to new objects and create new enunciations, in other words, ‘make a statement’. A group’s creation of real enunciations exposes the group to its indeterminateness, to what it is not (alterity), and to a futurity that solicits the group’s desire to become otherwise than the way it customarily imagines itself. Real enunciations articulate new possibilities for transversal relations, not hierarchical ones.

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VI. Privatising the Unconscious and Language: Psychoanalysis and Linguistics Paradoxically, the very institutions we rely on to demystify the repressive apparatuses of social life and ameliorate the individual’s alienation and desire for punishment-namely, hospitals and schools-are not only less than helpful in these ambitions; they in fact exacerbate the relations of punishment and alienation. One reason for this has to do with the necessity for the institution to serve as a site of capitalism’s social reproduction to ensure its existence. In terms of the psychiatric hospital, however, this reproduction is accomplished through an uncritical adoption of the psychoanalytic unconscious and the conception of language psychoanalysis promotes through its own adoption of linguistics. Thus, the paradox extends to the disciplines and discourses that appear to offer ways of overcoming institutional repression but that are in fact only masquerading as critical, liberating discourses. Confronting this fact will help us understand why the defence of the humanities should not take ‘the humanities’ as a univocal and self-evident object.11 The complicity of some humanistic disciplines in the repressive apparatus of the contemporary University only aids in the humanities’ repression instead of its liberation. It is in this sense of serving as an accomplice to capitalism that Guattari enacts a critical reversal that concerns how we should regard the way psychoanalysis and linguistics function as institutions within other institutions such as the hospital and the University. It is not the case that psychoanalysis discovers the unconscious in some neutral form. Rather, the unconscious psychoanalysis discovers is the one that the modern capitalist state has constructed as part of a ‘signifying logic’ aimed at the state’s self-perpetuation (Guattari 1984c: 13). Instead of inventing the castration complex, the family is its factory. ‘In this perspective,’ Guattari contends, ‘the authority of the father and the images of social hierarchy would only be accessories to this necessary, sacrosanct castration’ inherent to capitalistic subjectivity (Guattari 2009: 146). Psychoanalysis may make visible the existence of the unconscious and the castration complex, but instead of providing a means to engage them, it establishes a number of ways to make itself a part of capitalism’s signifying logic. According to Guattari, the most immediate among these is the image it projects of the unconscious as something private and confined to the family. By confining the unconscious to the sphere of

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the family, psychoanalysis limits the space in which desire can appear. Since the family is the site where subjectivity was initially formed, restricting desire to the family also restricts both it and subjectivity to the past. Without allowing desire to carry some futural dimension, there can be no real futural projection of subjectivity either. Finally, by privatising the unconscious, by making the unconscious private property, psychoanalysis cuts it off from having any commerce with the social. The effect is actually worse than endorsing capitalism; psychoanalysis simply ‘pretend[s] not to be aware’ of it or its values (Guattari 2009: 148). Once psychoanalysis becomes accepted within the University, its sequestration from the social becomes even more intense as its disciplinary status allows it to construct all sorts of initiation rites and passwords to which subjects must submit in order to gain entrance to its field. When Guattari declares, ‘We have the unconscious we deserve!’, it is because we have relegated our responsibility to the unconscious to a few chosen specialists (Guattari 2011b: 9). Moreover, rather than revealing institutional objects for what they are, psychoanalysis circulates its own objects to bolster the separation from the social. Its theoretical regions of the Imaginary and Symbolic are ‘sordid paraphernalia [that are] there only to safeguard the comfort of the couch’ (Guattari 2009: 147). As ‘the best of all capitalist drugs’, psychoanalysis is capitalism’s ‘substitute religion’, according to Guattari. Psychoanalysis’s ‘function’, claims Guattari, ‘is to update repression, to give it a personal touch so it sells better-as has been done for the Ford Pinto or Plymouth Duster’ (148). Psychoanalysis does itself no favours by suturing itself to linguistics. From Guattari’s standpoint, this only intensifies psychoanalysis’s status as accomplice to IWC. Just as with psychoanalysis, linguistics suffers from a blind reversal, which causes it to isolate itself from the social while also ratifying existing forms of social organisation within capitalism. Noam Chomsky’s analysis of language’s deep structure, for instance, presumes a unity of language that does not exist, at least not without the exertion of power and repression, claims Guattari. ‘The unity of language’, Guattari declares, ‘is always inseparable from the constitution of a power formation. One never finds clear boundaries on dialectal maps but only bordering or transitional zones. There is no mother-language except in the phenomena of the semiotic takeover by a group, ethnicity, or nation’ (Guattari 2011a: 27-8). To the extent that all of linguistics shares in this basic presupposition of a single unified object called ‘language’ and pretends to be able to

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account for ‘all the domains related to language’, linguistics constitutes a form of imperialism that fails to see that its quantification of language is nothing more than a transcription of ‘capitalistic flows’ (Guattari 2011a: 25-6, 30).12 Confirmation of this misrecognition for Guattari is found in the binary logic grounding linguistics’ conception of language, which he describes as an act of ‘digitization’ that confines the subject’s appearance in language to the alternating poles of speaker-listener and reduces intersubjective speech to the communication of information on the same order as that of commodity-exchange (23, 25). Finally, linguistics’ cataloguing of the performances that constitute meaning projects an image of linguistic competence that serves as a gatekeeping measure that recognises utterances as legitimate only insofar as they obey the rules of information exchange (31). It is no wonder, then, that Lacanian psychoanalysis locates the subject’s experience of castration and alienation in the subject’s relation to the signifier and language in general. The suturing of psychoanalysis to linguistic categories in Lacan’s thought helps to further systematise a structure of ‘alienated enunciation’ that is both endemic to capitalist society and exploited by capitalism (24). Motivating linguistics’ identification with information theory, Guattari holds, is a desire to appear scientific in order to gain recognition within a society ruled by the logic of capitalist administration (Guattari 2011a: 23). Psychoanalysis’s suturing of itself to linguistics could then be seen as an attempt to piggyback onto the latter’s project of gaining recognition, which, Guattari points out, psychoanalysis tried to accomplish in similar ways by suturing itself to other ‘scientific’ disciplines, such as biology and mathematics (23).13 As Guattari notes, the reduction of language to information and the reduction of the unconscious to the laws of linguistics and mathematics help both fields attain legitimacy within the University and the hospital. But the legitimacy they gain should not be confused with autonomy, for information theory and scientific discourse are in fact so many transitional objects that cut off linguistics and psychoanalysis from the social. Thus, the conceptions of language and the unconscious with which they deal are not only products of specialisation and privatisation; they are also simulacra of the objects they pretend to be. Granting psychoanalysis and linguistics hegemonic reign over the unconscious and language makes it even more difficult to break free of the repressive apparatuses of society and the institution, for the simulacra they promote as rigorous theorisations of language and the unconscious can no longer serve as the source of revolutionary

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inspiration. Instead, they become the means by which revolutionaryminded groups entangle themselves in illusory objects and self­ destructive group fantasy. Guattari witnessed such things take place just as routinely in the institutional therapy groups in which he participated as in the militant groups with which he was engaged. Both groups, he observed, allowed themselves to become susceptible to the reinscription of the super-ego and the regulation of speech (Guattari 1984a: 24-44). Within both institutions and groups, it is not enough to have revolutionary aspirations. In order to break free from the social imperative to reproduce the castration complex, Guattari argues that groups must be attentive to their speech, for their speech is an index to the kind of group subjectivity they inhabit. Guattari’s concept of transversality offers a practical tool for becoming attentive to speech. Yet it does not so much replace the conceptions of the unconscious and language constructed by psychoanalysis and linguistics as free them up from their sedimentations-that is, ‘territorialisations’ - in the practices that populate the institution. Transversality intervenes at the level of the institutional relations that shape the production of speech. It does so by exposing how ritualistic and habitual ways of being within the institution uphold stagnated and self-mutilating forms of collective desire.

VII. Transversality and the Possibility of the Humanities’ ‘Other Scene’; or, How to Tell if You’re a Dependent Group (and What to do about It) Your group is a dependent group, Guattari informs us, if you answer ‘yes’ to any of the following: • Is your group caught up in modes of ‘ “territorialized” transference’, unable to imagine an identity outside of a master-slave struggle with the perceived powers-that-be, fixated on past traumas that have by now taken on the status of origin myths? (Guattari 1984c: 17, 22) • Does your group remain ignorant of its fantasies, especially of the fact that it has fantasies? (Guattari 1984a: 40) • Is your group unable to recognise its institutional objects as transitional? (Guattari 1984a: 39) • Does your group speak a language that is the mirror image of that of the institution? (Guattari 1984c: 20) • Does your group compulsively refuse to recognise different forms of speech, dismissing them as nonsense? (Guattari 1984c: 16)

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According to Guattari, whenever relations within an institution are territorialised in these ways, groups are blocked from pursuing the machinic connections constituting their unconscious. What Guattari formalises under the concept of the machinic unconscious is simply the set of relations-human and non-human-that determine the paths desire can travel (Guattari 1996b: 230-1). If a group operates under the psychoanalytic unconscious, compulsively fixated on objects that invite it to repeatedly return to the scenes of past injuries, wrongs and traumas, it prevents itself from both imagining and encountering the alterity that is outside it and the institution, which means the group blocks itself from engaging the historical conditions of its existence (Guattari 1984a: 36). Guattari compares the scenario to an image of horses running around a fenced-in area, their blinders set to varying degrees of access to the field of vision. What Guattari calls the ‘coefficient of transversality’ in an institution is the level of openness to which a group’s blinders are set. The more closed the horses’ blinders are, the more traumatic their experience will be, and likewise for groups within an institution. The more open the blinders are, the more communication there will be between horses (that is, groups) and therefore the less traumatic will be their experience. Guattari’s implementation of transversal relations at La Borde was aimed at opening the blinders of the clinic’s existing structures. Though a relatively small institution in comparison to a university, the example of La Borde proves it is not impossible to imagine new organisations of relationships and new enunciations among groups within the institution. Guattari’s 1964 essay on transversality opens with his assertion that despite institutional therapeutics’ relatively recent arrival on the psychiatric scene, it ‘has got an object’, and this object is nothing less than ‘the reality of the social problematic’ (Guattari 1984c: 11). His insistence on demystifying the institutional object and revealing the object of all institutions to be ‘the reality of the social problematic’ should provoke a critical reassessment of the objects an institution might currently view as proper to it. In order for scholars working in the humanities to carve out the space of an ‘other scene’ for their own enunciations, it is incumbent upon them-upon u s-to realise first that if we are to be truthful about our situation within the University, we must ask ourselves Guattari’s questions about group status. The instinctual response of a defence of the humanities as opposed to a radical critique of its complicity with the modern capitalist state signals an uncritical subscription to ‘communicative’ modes of speech and a blind mirroring of the language of capitalist administration. By mirroring this language,

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the humanities contribute to the schizophasic destruction of their speech and tacitly endorse the University’s role in reproducing the existing organisation of society. Not only can we understand the idea of the humanities’ exceptionalism as serving as an origin myth; we can now see that it also serves as an originating mythical site of repression while at the same time functioning as a transitional object which, like Winnicott’s teddy bears, the humanities dote over and lovingly fondle. As for other institutional objects we uncritically adopt, how are we to assess the jargon of ‘excellence’ we parrot back to administrators, donors and politicians in order to be recognised? What of the emergence of such fields as the digital humanities, which one might see as legitimating the technocratic relationship to art and knowledge? In my own field of philosophy, Guattari’s critiques of the scientific determinism he finds in psychoanalysis and linguistics raise questions about how one might assess such phenomena as Alain Badiou’s grounding of ontology in set theory, the ‘speculative turn’ of ‘OOP’ (‘Object Oriented Philosophy’), and the current trend known as ‘X-Phi’ (‘Experimental Philosophy’). To say that psychoanalysis is ‘the best of all capitalist drugs’ does not preclude the idea that there are no other capitalist drugs; in fact, such a claim relies on the fact that there are others. As Winnicott observes, the child who cannot give up his or her attachment to transitional objects develops a type of pathology that cannot connect with reality. It is a pathological type that is threatened by the possibility of the loss of reality with the loss of the object (Winnicott 1971: 22-3). Others have conceived this type of pathology as narcissistic to the extent certain narcissistic personalities suffer from an annihilation anxiety that cannot imagine a world in which they are not participants and as a result imagine either the end of the world or their end (Ronningstam 2005). It thus strikes me as the height of narcissism that a field would equate its disappearance with the end of the University, that rather than imagining a different organisation of society in which the humanities might help dislodge the University from the task of reproducing capitalism, it would prefer to imagine (and perhaps take some comfort, that is, pleasure, in) the University’s destruction. This is perhaps a decisive sign of a dependent group: in abdicating responsibility for its speech, it also abdicates responsibility for its own death (Guattari 1984c: 22). Transversality, we must always be sure to remember, is first of all a militant concept. It is a counter-mirror that interrupts the mirroring at work at the heart of existing institutional narcissisms, of subjugated groups blind to their capture by an image

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that is and at the same is not their own. A recuperation of Guattari’s theorisation of the institutional unconscious will provide a frame to view how transversality’s deployment in the context of the humanities would help bring the humanities’ group fantasies to visibility, thereby giving the humanities access to them and enabling the possibility of disrupting the ‘institutional schizophasia’ in which they are locked. Two things must be said in conclusion, however: bringing to visibility one’s speech and one’s fantasies is one slope of transversality (a task that, evidence indicates, historically has proven quite difficult). The other slope of transversality, the diagrammatic aspect that calls for a rearrangement of relations among subjects and between groups and institutions, requires an active and relentless search for new aesthetic encounters aimed at the production of new subjectivities.14 In his final work, Chaosmosis, Guattari offers the following fragmentary proposition: ‘Transversality never given (sic) as ‘already there,’ but always to be conquered through a pragmatics of existence’ (Guattari 1995: 125). The exigency to engage ‘the pragmatics of existence’ will never appear to the humanities, however, so long as the question of the humanities’ subjectivity-and hence the question of the subjectivities the humanities produce-is not broached. This is a matter, though, of distinguishing between the posing of real questions and simply asking questions that have been prepared for us in advance.

Notes I would like to thank Gary Genosko for his editorial guidance, as well as the reviewers of this essay for their critical challenges and comments, which proved extremely helpful in the text’s revision. I thank also Christopher Fynsk and Brenda Wirkus for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. This is a move, however, that would ultimately lead to a break with Jean Oury, Guattari’s friend and mentor (Dosse 2010: 175-6). 2. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of the current essay for reminding me of both the Cohn-Bendits’ critiques and the SI pamphlet. 3. As Genosko has documented, one of the first applications of transversality by someone other than Guattari was the ‘transversal house’ that the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara built for the Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa in Naganohara in 1974 (Genosko 2002: 143). However, Shinohara’s reception of transversality came by way of Deleuze’s 1972 essay ‘The Literary Machine’ from Proust and Signs, which one can argue is also a simplistic application of Guattari’s concept, one that, as Genosko notes, surprisingly evacuates transversality of its social and political stakes (Deleuze 2000; Genosko 2002: 143). 4. Though I cannot develop this line of thought in the present essay, Guattari’s demonstration that the group subject’s relation to speech and language is at stake in the concept of transversality points to a possible dialogue with other attempts

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within the last few years to analyse the problem of the contemporary University in terms of the relation to language, such as: Derrida’s project on the ‘Right to Philosophy’ (2002; 2004), summarised in Simon Morgan Wortham’s Counter­ Institutions (2006); Christopher Fynsk’s The Claim o f Language: A Case fo r the Humanities (2004); and Gayatri Spivak’s D eath o f a Discipline (2003).

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6. 7. 8.

That transversality might contribute to these recent attempts to rethink a relation to the University based on a relation to language testifies to its viability for thinking through the current conjuncture of the University in semiocapitalism. However, for those who may be suspicious of transversality’s applicability in the contemporary scene, it is perhaps worth noting the following: though the genealogy of the concept of transversality can be traced back to Guattari’s experience of the clinical situation at La Borde and the events leading up to and surrounding the movements of May ’68, it would be a mistake to reduce and confine transversality to the moment of its historical instantiation. Critically, transversality cannot be isolated simply as a concept that appears at only the beginning of Guattari’s thought (see Guattari 1995), and it would be odd to arbitrarily bracket off transversality from the other concepts Guattari developed in his work along with Deleuze, such as schizoanalysis and Bodywithout-Organs, which were also forged with the memory of May ’68 in mind and which are deployed routinely in contemporary studies on Deleuze and Guattari. Though the events of May ’68 are conventionally thought of as constituting a failed revolution, scholars across the spectrum of critical commitments, from Bifo (2009b) to Alain Badiou (2010) to Lauren Berlant (1994), have questioned that received judgement. Certainly, the current events involving the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States the last few months along with similar protests in Britain and Italy testify to a spirit reminiscent of May ’68, with students and workers attempting to articulate their collective experience of IWC. Even if most of the Occupy movement’s protesters are not acquainted with Guattari’s concept of IWC personally, they are witnesses to the self-mutilation IWC demands. See Guattari (1996a). The issue of transversality is less about retaining the unity of the concept than of breaking with the desire for punishment required by the capitalist mode of production. To be sure, the end of the University was long in the making, as diagnosed by Bill Readings in his 1996 work The University in Ruins. While one might point to earlier diagnoses, such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing o f the American Mind (1987), Readings’s study differs significantly from Bloom’s polemic to the extent that for Readings those responsible for the University’s so-called ruin are not to be found in post-60s literature departments and their importation of French theory but in the administrative offices of the emerging and fast fullyrealised neoliberal University and its corresponding culture of ‘excellence’. In this way, it would be more accurate to cite Jean-Franqois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979; see Lyotard 1984) as a precursor to Readings’s critique. As an example, see Laurie Fendrich (2009); also Fish (2008a; 2008b). To give just a few examples, see Max Horkheimer (1995), David Pan (1998) and Randy Martin (2004). Both Lyotard’s The D ifferend (1988) and The Postmodern Condition (1984) are cast from the viewpoint that a mode of instrumental rationality has emerged globally which frames any kind of speech that would resist the order of communication as not only incomprehensible and unrecognisable but also impossible, that is to say, as not being able to appear as speech. Both The D ifferend and The Postmodern Condition express exasperation at the inability of the public to sustain a consideration of complex critical writing.

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13. 14.

Michael Eng

The Postmodern Condition complains of the ‘slackening’ that saturates the contemporary public sphere (Lyotard 1984: 71), while The D ifferend foretells the end of the book, because it ‘takes too long to read’ (Lyotard 1988: xiii). Thus each of these works provides theoretical justification for the belief in the humanities’ exceptionalism, the ahistorical idea that the humanities names a sphere radically separate from capitalist administration. In The D ifferend’s preface, in fact, Lyotard describes a differend -a n incompatibility of heterogeneous discourses-inhabiting the discipline of philosophy itself, as a practice caught between economic and academic discourse (Lyotard 1988: xiii). The exchanges strike me as constituting an echolalia not only in the sense that the substance of the arguments remains basically unchanged throughout all the various iterations, but that the audience for these arguments seems to be composed of those who already agree with them and who are also in fundamental agreement with one another. Jacques Derrida accomplished just this in his reading of Kant’s The Conflict o f the Faculties, where he demonstrated that such contained speech, and the fantasy of exceptionalism buttressing it, belongs to the very origins of the modern university. See Derrida (1992). See Fynsk (2004) on this precise point. In this reflection on the relationship of linguistics to capitalism, Guattari makes a connection similar to the one argued by Fredric Jameson in The Prison-House o f Language (1972). Lacan’s turn to a schematisation of the ‘mathemes’ of the unconscious serves as such an example. In this respect, I would argue that there are very interesting avenues to pursue between Guattari’s final work and Jacques Ranciere’s reflections in the last few years on ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible), which Ranciere says conservative, bureaucratic social forces attempt to sediment (Deleuze and Guattari would say, ‘territorialise') into a natural order and limited possibilities of experience. Forces Ranciere identifies as ‘politics,' in contrast, attempt to redistribute the sensible in order to provide grounding for new experiences of ‘what is seen and what can be said about it’ (Ranciere 2004: 13). See also Ranciere (1999).

References Badiou, Alain (2010) The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran, New York: Verso. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2009a) Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies o f the Post-Alpha Generation, trans. Arianna Bove, Erik Empson, Michael Goddard, Giuseppina Mecchia, Antonella Schintu and Steve Wright, London: Minor Compositions. Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2009b) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, New York: Semiotext(e). Berardi, Franco (‘Bifo’) (2011) ‘I Want to Think: Post-U’, e-flux, 24 (April), available at http://e-flux.com/journal/view/223 (accessed 12 December 2011). Berlant, Lauren (1994) ‘’68, or Something’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (Autumn), pp. 124-55. Bloom, Allan (1987) The Closing o f the American Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster. Cohn-Bendit, Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (1968) O bsolete Communism: The Left-W ing Alternative, New York: McGraw Hill.

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Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari [1991] (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1992) ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, in Logom achia: The Conflict o f the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1-34. Derrida, Jacques (2002) W ho’s A fraid o f Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2004) Eyes o f the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug and others, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dosse, Franqois (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman, New York: Columbia University Press. Fendrich, Laurie (2009) ‘The Humanities Have No Purpose’, The Chronicle o f Higher Education, 20 March, available at http://chronicle.com/blogs/ brainstorm/the-humanities-have-no-purpose/6738 (accessed 31 January 2011). Fish, Stanley (2008a) ‘Will the Humanities Save Us?’, The N ew York Times, 6 January, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/willthe-humanities-save-us/ (accessed 31 January 2011). Fish, Stanley (2008b) ‘The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two’, The N ew York Times, 13 January, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/theuses-of-the-humanities-part-two/ (accessed 31 January 2011). Fish, Stanley (2010) ‘The Woe-Is-Us-Books’, The N ew York Times, 8 November, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/the-woe-is-usbooks/ (accessed 31 January 2011). Freud, Sigmund [1933] (1973) ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, in N ew Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth: Pelican, pp. 120-1. Fynsk, Christopher (2004) The Claim o f Language: A Case fo r the Humanities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Genosko, Gary (1998). ‘The Acceleration of Transversality in the Middle’, Architectural Design [Hypersurface Architecture] Profile, 133, pp. 32-7. Genosko, Gary (2002) Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London and New York: Continuum Press. Guattari, Felix (1984a) ‘The Group and the Person’, in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 24-44. Guattari, Felix (1984b) ‘Plan for the Planet’, in M olecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 262-72. Guattari, Felix (1984c) ‘Transversality’, in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 11-23. Guattari, Felix [1992] (1995) Chaosm osis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Felix (1996a) ‘In Order to End the Massacre of the Body’, in Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 29-36. Guattari, Felix (1996b) ‘The Unconscious is Turned Towards the Future’, in Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 225-32. Guattari, Felix (2009) ‘The Best Capitalist Drug’, in C haosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 141-53.

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Guattari, Felix (2011a) ‘Escaping from Language’, in The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 23-44. Guattari, Felix (2011b) ‘Introduction: Logos or Abstract Machines?’, in The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 9-22. Horkheimer, Max (1995) ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others, New York: Continuum. Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House o f Language, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lyotard, Jean-Franqois (1984) The Postm odern Condition: A R eport on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-Franqois (1988) The D ifferend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van, Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Martin, Randy (2004) ‘Introduction’, Social Text, 22:2 79 (Summer), pp. 1-11. Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney (2004) ‘The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses’, Social Text, 22:2 79 (Summer), pp. 101-15. Oury, Jean, David Reggio and Mauricio Novello (2007) ‘The Hospital is Ill: An Interview with Jean Oury’, R adical Philosophy, 143 (May/June), pp. 32-45. Pan, David (1998) ‘The Future of Higher Education-A Conference Report’, Telos, 111 (Spring), pp. 3-14. Ranciere, Jacques (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ranciere, Jacques (2004) The Politics o f Aesthetics: The Distribution o f the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, New York: Continuum. Readings, Bill (1996) The University in Ruins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ronningstam, Elsa F. (2005) Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2003) D eath o f a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press. U.N.E.F. Strasbourg (1966) ‘On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy’, available at http://library.nothingness.org/ articles/SI/en/display_printable/4 (accessed 3 December 2011). Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality, London and New York: Tavistock Publications. Wortham, Simon Morgan (2006) Counter-Institutions: Jacqu es Derrida and the Question o f the University, New York: Fordham University Press.

C o n t r ib u t o r s Adam Bryx, an expat from the Czech Republic via Canada, is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine. He has co-authored with Bryan Reynolds, ‘Cheers to Materialism in Literary Theory: A Diversion with David Hawkes’, in Early M odern Culture, ‘The Fugitive Theater of Romeo Castellucci: Intermedial Refractions and Fractalactic Occurrences’, in Perform ance After Identity: The N eo-Political Subject, and ‘The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Deleuze and Guattari to Transversal Poetics with(out) Baudrillard’, in Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after D errida; and he co-authored with Gary Genosko, ‘After Informatic Striation: The Resignification of Disc Numbers in Contemporary Inuit Popular Culture’, in Deleuze and Space. He is currently working on a dissertation on informatics, the intermedial and technology in contemporary performances of Shakespeare through various perspectives on transversality, from the work of Guattari to Reynolds. Felicity Colman is Reader in Screen Media, in the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the author of Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts (2011), is the editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009), and is co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, L ife (2007). Arturo Desimone (b. 1984), an Argentinian citizen born on the island of Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean, is a visual artist and writer who lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, but leads a nomadic existence. His drawings have enjoyed exhibition at a variety of venues, including Studio-T Utrecht, Trinidad Erotic Art Week, and the Mezrab Gallery in Amsterdam for a solo show curated by Serbian graphic-novel critic Zoran Djukanovic. His stage play, Tattoo M oon, is the first Englishlanguage text to have won the prize in the El Hizjra contest for young immigrant writers in the Netherlands. His poetry has been published in The Brown Critique Literary Quarterly. His political journalism on Tunisia is featured in Arseh Sevom: The Civil Society Zine.

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 353-356 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0066 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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Michael Eng is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University. His areas of research include post-Heideggerian aesthetic theory and the affective dimensions of language, sound and the image. He has essays forthcoming on film, race and philosophy, and is currently writing on Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Ranciere’s respective theorisations of the image. He is also at work preparing two manuscripts: The Scene o f the Voice: Language and the Aisthesis o f Finitude and The Sense o f the Image: The M etaphysical Imaginary in Cinema, Architecture, and Philosophy. Flore Garcin-Marrou studied Philosophy in the Universite ParisSorbonne and is now part of its Research Center on Theatre. She teaches in the Performing Arts Program of the Universite de Toulouse (France). Her PhD dissertation, ‘Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, between Theatre and Philosophy. For a Coming Theatre’, supervised by Denis Guenoun, offers a reconsideration of the importance of theatre and a study of unpublished plays written by Felix Guattari between 1980 and 1990. Gary Genosko is Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University. He is the author of Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (2002), The Party without Bosses (2003) and Felix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (2009), and editor of The Guattari Reader (1996) and Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments (2001). His most recent book is Rem odelling Communication: From W W II to the WWW (2012). Anja Kanngieser is a Lecturer in Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is a cultural geographer, communications scholar and self-taught radio maker working at the intersections of labour self-organisation, migration, experimental politics, voice and radio. She is primarily interested in political and social collectives that use creative strategies to compose temporary commons and organisations by which to re-imagine potential political landscapes. She is the author of Creative Experiments in Making Worlds (forthcoming 2013). Maurizio Lazzarato is an independent sociologist and philosopher based in Paris. His books include Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivitd (1997), Videofilosofia. Percezione e lavoro nel postfordismo (1997), Tute Bianche. Disoccupazione di massa et reddito di cittadinanza (1999), Post-face d M onadologie et sociologie (1999),

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Puissance de I’invention. L a psychologie econom ique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’econom ie politique (2002), Les Revolutions du capitalisme (2004). He is currently completing a manuscript on Guattari’s semiotics. Angela Melitopoulos is an audiovisual researcher, independent artist, curator and teacher currently affiliated with Queen Mary University (London). Her book Contract and Contagion: O ikonom ia, Intimate Self-Management and the Limits to Speculation, is forthcoming. Solene Nicolas is a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure. She teaches literature and linguistics to students preparing for entrance examinations to attend the French Grandes Ecoles. Bryan Reynolds is Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. Raised in Scarsdale, New York, he received his BA at the University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD at Harvard University, both in English and American Literature. He is the Artistic Director of the Transversal Theater Company, a director of theatre and a playwright, whose plays have been produced in many countries and languages. He is the author of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after D errida, Transversal Enterprises in the Dram a o f Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future and Becom ing Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early M odern England; and he is co-editor of The Return o f Theory in Early M odern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, Critical Responses to Kiran Desai, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early M odern English Stage, and Shakespeare W ithout Class: M isappropriations o f Cultural Capital. He is also co-general editor of Performance Interventions, a book series from Palgrave Macmillan. Toshiya Ueno is a Professor in the Department of Transcultural Studies in Wako University, Japan, and is Visiting Professor in the East-Asia Department at McGill University, Montreal. In the mid-1980s he was involved in a free pirate radio movement in Tokyo and, over the past 10 years, has been active as a staff organiser and amateur DJ in underground (open-air) techno parties in Japan as well as Amsterdam, Zagreb and elsewhere. His published works include in Japanese, Urban Tribal Studies (2005) and Thinking D iaspora (1999); and, in English, he contributed to The Post-Subcultures Reader (2003) and Aliens R Us (2002).

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Janell Watson is Associate Professor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Tech, where she directs the Graduate Studies programme, and serves as Affiliate Faculty in the ASPECT PhD programme (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical & Cultural Thought). In addition to her authorship of Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought, she is editor of The Minnesota Review. Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher. He is the author of Art as Abstract Machine, Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (2005), and the co-editor (with Simon O’Sullivan) of Deleuze, Guattari and the Production o f the New (2008), and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (2010).

Call for Papers The First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference, Taipei, Taiwan The English Department at Tamkang University, the publisher of the internationally renowned Tamkang Review, is pleased to announce that it will be hosting The First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference on the theme ‘Creative Assemblages’, 31 May-2 June 2013, and, prior to the conference, the Deleuze Camp, 25-29 May 2013.

Creative Assemblages As one of the most important terms in Gilles Deleuze’s oeuvre, ‘assemblage’ refers to the territory of an object along with its own regime of signs and pragmatic system. Yet assemblage also refers to the force of deterritorialisation underlying the structure which is pending to be effectuated so that new connections can be established. In other words, the Deleuzian assemblage is not only a territorial gesture, framing its own territory but also a performative practice of carving out new routes of thinking. Most important of all, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the epistemological sparks emanating from launching creatively the continual process of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of assemblages. Yet, where can we perceive assemblages? They are everywhere: human beings, as centers of indetermination, are assemblages of images, with which Deleuze ‘assembles’ the brain with the screen, the world with the film to expound his philosophy of time. Even virtual assemblages on digital networks (email, Facebook, Twitter) in our quotidian life can be regarded as assemblages. Assemblages can be practical and political instead of just theoretical. In this light, to what extent can Deleuze’s philosophical thinking assist us to canvass various assemblages in prospect, and what is the assemblage between us and Deleuze in retrospect? Is it possible for us to theorise the new informatics sensibilia by formulating the dispositif of the horizontal/rhizomatic assemblages? And apart from the superficial/superfluous assemblages, is it possible to build any vertical but not arborescent assemblage? Situating this notion in the contemporary world, we are seeking to form transdisciplinary assemblages in order to respond to and have dialogues with the present predicaments. Possible topics for papers may include but are not limited to: 1) Connections between Deleuze and Guattari’s work; 2) Connections among all the different arts, including literature, film, music, architecture, etc. 3) Deleuzian Asian Assemblages; 4) Affect and Asian Aesthetics; 5) Image and Thought;

6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12)

Deleuze and Gender; Psychoanalysis and Schizoanalysis; Creative betrayal of Deleuze; Pros and Cons of Deleuze; Ecology with/without Guattari; Digital Folds; Translation as Expression.

Although we wait to hear from several invited speakers, currently confirmed speakers include: Jeffrey A. Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University, USA) Ian Buchanan (University of Wollongong, Australia) Hsiao-hung Chang (Taiwan University, Taiwan) Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Jiang Yuhui (East China Normal University, China) Kokubun Koichiro (Takasaki City University of Economics, Japan) Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam, Holland) John Protevi (Louisiana State University, USA) Anne Sauvagnargues (Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France) Kailin Yang (Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan) If you are interested in presenting at this conference, submit panel proposals and/or individual abstracts (maximum 250 words) with your institutional affiliation and a short bio. The deadline for submission of abstracts for the conference is 31 January 2013. However, for early notification, you are encouraged to apply by 1 September 2012. The conference registration fee is US$180 for regular attendees, US$150 for early birds, and US$110 for students (the subscription fee of Deleuze Studies is in-built), including refreshments and lunch each day. Prior to the conference, there will be a five-day Deleuze Camp. As spaces are limited, registrations will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis. Applications should include a short bio and a brief statement of one’s research interests in Deleuze. The camp registration fee is US$220. The working language of the conference and the camp is English. The webpage of the academic events http://www2.tku.edu.tw/~tflxcfp/ will be available after 25 March 2012. For further inquiry, please contact Professor Hanping Chiu, the organiser, at [email protected] NOTE: Those who pay the registration fee of this conference can be exempted from the subscription fee of Deleuze Studies if they register for the 2013 Lisbon Deleuze Studies International Conference.