Guattari, Félix

French activist-intellectual Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930–1992) was trained as a psychoanalyst by Jacques Lacan, with whom he had a rocky relationship. Guattari maintained a clinical and a private psychotherapeutic practice, and developed a variant of psychoanalysis called schizoanalysis, which was an outgrowth of his longstanding work within the institutional psychotherapeautic tradition. It is instructive to situate Guattari in the trajectory of major figures in this tradition beginning with the red Catalonian psychiatrist François Toquelles, decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, and heterodox Lacanian Jean Oury, founder of Clinique de la Borde, in Cour-Cheverny, France, where Guattari worked for some 40 years.  

Guattari is internationally recognized for his multiple collaborations with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the capitalism and schizophrenia volumes L’Anti-Oedipe [Anti-Oedipus], Mille plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus], and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? [What is Philosophy?] in addition to a book on Kafka: pour une littérature mineure [Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature]. He also wrote with Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri on the prospects for the renewal of Communism in Les nouveaux espaces de liberté [New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty]. Growing interest in Guattari’s single-authored books has moved him out of the philosophical shadow of Deleuze. His appeal remains strong among scholars of twentieth century-French Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis.    

Guattari’s formation as a young militant in the suburbs of Paris was assisted by a range of activities that included the lay youth hostel association, the institutional pedagogy movement in the schools that branched off from the Freinet tradition in France, writing for newspapers such as La Voie Communiste, resistance to the war in Algeria, as well as participating in the youth group from the nearby Hispano-Suiza car factory. Young Guattari’s contact with Fernand Oury, and later, with his brother Jean, provided a way forward for him, despite his failure to secure a university degree, through innovative institution building exercises based upon his experiences in a range of popular pedagogical projects.  He joined Jean Oury at La Borde when the clinic opened in 1953.

Overview of Single-Authored Publications

In his first book, a collection of essays Psychanalyse et transversalité [Transversality and Psychoanalysis], Guattari was preoccupied with the question of the production of institutions, the kinds of subjects they produce, and the necessity of analyzing them: to treat the institution was critical since it was ill. Insisting on creativity as an antidote to bureaucratic alienation, Guattari developed concepts to theorize and to modify the production of institutions. He put to work his expertise in institutional experimentation and developed his key concept of transversality that became the cornerstone of a new kind of analytic practice. Transversality opened the dual psychoanalytic transference to artificial families known as base therapeutic units or teams. Transversality made the transference relation mobile, a space of potential and collective creation, by focusing on groups in a clinical setting in which the institution itself played a dynamic analytic role in relation to all of its participants. Transversality surmounts both vertical and horizontal impasses, and seeks out diagonal, non-hierarchical, connections or communications that can be maximized.

Upon his arrival at La Borde, Guattari organized the clinic around a complex, rotating system of tasks and responsibilities that scrambled power relations among staff and patient groups by having them change roles on a regular basis and take on unfamiliar duties. He called this la grille [‘the grid’]. Medical staff would participate in nonmedical activities in rotation, and likewise nonmedical staff, including patients, would undertake some medical tasks. Guattari likened the organizational diagram of group membership and task assignment to a double entry table of rotating duties and times that mediated between all members of the clinic and jumbled their defined roles and relations, demystifying patient–physician relationships and reorienting individuals’ assumptions about their role and place. This was less a Foucauldian timetable than an evolving diagram of calibrated disruptions, which transited through several iterations between relatively centralized and decentralized formations. However, it made possible detailed analyses of relations of power, privilege, and the circulation of affect by providing a context in which the institution itself could be exposed as a key factor in the analytic relationship, and, if necessary, modified in a way that encouraged patients to accept new responsibilities and answer new demands within innovative universes of reference. Polyphonic atmospherics rebounded on symptomatology, affecting transference, multiplying libidinal investments, and addressing the problem of everyday social alienation in the lived context of the small groups that made up the institution. Simple things like patients’ freedom of movement, the absence of standard uniforms, and small daily responsibilities such as sweeping that gave a body consistency, became extremely important, as were the new coinages of acronyms and sudden valorization, and deflation, of certain tasks such as cooking and places such as the laundry room.

Guattari’s adherence to concepts first developed by French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre served as an antidote to a period of postmodern political abdication and as a model for drawing lines between militant political struggles against capitalism and advocacy for the mentally ill, as well as organizing against state repression. Guattari developed a non-absolute contrast between subject groups and subjugated groups that reflected Sartre’s theorization of a group-in-fusion (subject) and a serial (subjugated) or inert group. Guattari identities the subject group as transversal because it can manage its fragile openness to new intersections and not become bewitched by its phantasies, which remain transitional, unlike the subjugated group that receives direction from the outside and tends to retreat into its alienating phantasies.

The transitional phantasy that animated the 22^nd of March Movement during the spring of 1968 in France was that of a subject group that successfully resisted prematurely decaying into a subjugated group, that is, passively accepting from outside itself its goal, despite the fact that it consisted largely of university students whose reference points were identified with the very institution against which they initially struggled but to which they remained temporarily attached. The group phantasy allowed the active resistance against forms of imposed “fatalism” (historical, economic, religious, labourist, etc.), enabling the exploration of its finitude against demands for eternalization, maintaining a processual and creative character, with a sense of humour intact.  

Guattari often had recourse to the concept of a “cut” in his early writings to capture the effects of militant action on an existing field of potentialities. The subject group’s  phantasy enables what Guattari called a “radical cut” that marks out something newly emerging. A cut of this sort by student militants draws out the singularity of an event rather than resignifying goals that were projected onto them. The concept of the revolutionary cut is derived from an event of world historical order, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Leninist cut that ruptured historical causality.  

Guattari’s debts to Sartre may also have steered him in the direction of writing scripts, a literary passion he pursued but did not publish during his lifetime. Unpublished in his lifetime, Guattari’s screenplay, Un amour d’UIQ [A Love of UIQ], is a good example, but there are a number of theatrical experiments that take up ancient philosophical motifs, such as dialogues like Socrates and Parmenides.

In L’Inconscient machinique [The Machinic Unconscious], Guattari developed a critique of linguistics and of semiology, championing a micropolitical pragmatics that would vanquish the so-called imperialism of linguistics by tactically eroding the abstraction of “language” in itself and destabilizing the notion of a linguistic “structure,” opting instead for relative stabilities and minor variations. Not a science of language aiming to discover universals, then, but an analysis of how processes and economies of power inhabit and are crystallized in types of encoding like the effect of standard grammar on the shaping of normal individuals. Thus, the introduction of the question of power into language marked a moment of concept invention and creativity for Guattari, in pursuit of a hybrid semiotics that would recognize typically extra-semiotic features like a-signifying jumps over denotation in the formation of unique linguistic assemblages like the hijacked prone verbs used in idioms. Having found that power typically supports processes of subject-formation with capitalistic aims, Guattari set about defining, categorizing and diagramming all of the componential consistencies, redundancies, and transformations involved in assemblages of enunciation, wih an addition to the role of facialized signification, the traits of capitalistic faciality in power relations and their own sets of redundancies,  pragmatic implications, simplifications,  and limitations that help to crush any residual polyvocal possibilities. This is part of a language-face-landscape integration that is how consciousness is normalized. In addition to faciality, Guattari developed a concept of the refrain to help define a key model that guides how one typically relates to the world.  These concepts constitute a detailed analytical insight into the micropolitical infrastructures of capitalism and sets the stage for a description of schizoanalysis as a non-neutral, politically progressive, and provisional transformation of situational power relations. In eschewing neutrality, the schizoanalyst’s micropolitical task is to discern among expressive assemblages of components those with mutational potential, explore their textures, and produce and extract singularities from them for the sake of the analysand’s self-invention.  This makes schizoanalysis in this book a highly philosophical anti-capitalist undertaking. But it is does not make it a socialist revolutionary project, either.   

The tri-ecological vision presented in Guattari’s book from the late 1980s, Les trois écologies [The Three Ecologies] (encompassing mental, social, environmental ecologies), situated embodied experience in an existential Territory and built around it incorporeal Universes of references specific to cultures and eras; while the material and semiotic Flows of labour, capital, and desire are plugged into the raw processual Phyla of technological possibilities. As a political testament of sorts, Guattari called for ethico-aesthetic responsibility of subject formation that resists Integrated World Capitalism (another term for globalization and post-Fordism: a technologically progressive view, but socially conservative, and with a shrinking state) at the intersection of art and ecology in this most accessible book. Here the tri-focal lens points toward emancipatory praxes that will assist in incarnating new assemblages of subjectivity. For Guattari, ecological praxes have a significant aesthetic dimension that helps develop a taste for the deepest ethical questions about future developments in the anthropocene.

In Cartographies schizoanalytiques [Schizoanalytic Cartographies], his theoretical magnum opus, and the popular version, Chaosmose [Chaosmosis], his final published book, Guattari elaborated a pragmatic ontology with four functorial domains of the unconscious: on the bottom from the left to right: material and energetic Fluxes and existential Territories; on the top from the left to right, machinic Phyla and incorporeal Universes. This quadrant was a cartography that projected its territories, both intrinsically and extrinsically, and is used to plot the transformations of subjectivity. Augmented with modifiers that elaborated micro-features – the division between real, finite material and existential functors (Flux and Territory) and possible, infinite highly abstract domains (Phylum and Universe), stacked vertically as actual on the left (Phylum and Flux) and virtual on the right (Universe and Territory). The movement from the left to right, that is, from discursive to non-discursive and, from bottom to top, is from an incarnated, grounded domain to an incorporeal one. Guattari mapped desire as it pursued deterritorialized flight in a machinic eros embedded in a Phylum of machines, or took refuge in a more stratified space framed by sets of dualisms (Flux); or, entailing a deterritorialized investigation of varieties of alterity in hitherto unheard of Universes, or taking refuge in circumscribed, repressed, Territories. Guattari explained how the schizoanalyst tries to bridge virtuality and actuality by discerning how virtual universes become real by gaining existential consistency, balancing manifestation and retaining surplus potentiality as subjectivity emerges and pursues dissident vectors that sit astride abstract Phyla and material Fluxes. He considered the fourth functor (Universe) to be beyond the coordinated threesome of Flux, Territory, Phylum; as a complex virtual possible Universe, this domain possessed intensive, aesthetic and affective lines that the schizoanalyst seeks to release and to find anchors for in the existential Territories of each analysand.   

While Guattari did not typically publish case studies in the Freudian fashion, his essays “Monograph on R.A.” from Psychoanalysis and Transversality, and “The Refrains of Sense and Being” from Schizoanalytic Cartographies are exceptions, as he outlines the role played by a portable cassette tape recorder in his analytic sessions in the former; in the latter self-study,  he analyzed his own dream about losing his car (a Renault 25 that artist and friend Jean-Jacques Lebel put at the centre of his homage, Monument à Félix Guattari, in 1994). Guattari attempts to diagram all of the central motifs bearing upon his inhibitions; he greatly admired the early Freud of the dream and joke books, and the thesis on parapraxes, and considered dreams to be viable interpretive substances. Indeed, in Soixante-cinq rêves de Franz Kafka, Guattari collected sixty-five of Kafka’s dreams, primarily from his letters, in order to develop non-symbolically fixed interpretive categories open to semiotic heterogeneity. 

In his final published work Chaosmosis, Guattari elaborated a vision of subjectivity that instead of being located at the heart of interiority, was found in information and communication technologies. Published shortly after the birth of the World Wide Web, this conception was framed by impending global ecological disaster and the advancing immateriality of capitalist production. Importantly, Guattari considered subjectivity to be displaced from the privileged centrality of the individual human, and is thus of a new machinic type. He projected a proto-subjective animistic dimension into network environments. He considered subjectivity to consist of components of different types, including human, non-human, and inorganic elements assembled together in unstable patterns, beyond and before the person, at all scales. The relation to alterity is reconfigured by Guattari so that it does not refer to human others but to an adjacent field of emerging properties, a situation in which subject-object poles, the traditional phenomenological orientations, become fusional. Guattari calls these subjectities (object-like subject components) and objectities (subject-like object components). At its most abstract, Guattari imagined vibrating particles of subjectivity distributed trans-individually across space and time, bringing immaterial Universes into existence, which in turn hit their limits in the Territories into which they precariously fold themselves.

Guattari developed his science-fiction scenario of UIQ, with the guidance of American director Robert Kramer, of a loosely distributed machinic subjectivity (an infra-quark universe) manifested as a proto-face across the matrix of communication technologies and frequencies on the basis of his theory of subjectivity.  Although the screenplay was never produced, the manner in which he mixed genre fiction and philosophy, with high-tech models, and psychoanalytic borrowings, made his blend of theory not only quite unique, but adaptable to various media. His interest in aesthetics was matched by his aesthetic preoccupation as a writer of literature, scripts for the theatre, television, and cinema.

Guattari contributed several pertinent concepts to media and film studies. In the 1980s and early 90s, he speculated about entering a post-media era. This era that would be post-mass in the sense that new forms of interactivity would provide users opportunities for the self-production of subjectivity beyond massively passive and alienated audiences. He envisaged that as costs of participation dropped, and with widespread availability and portability, a telematic revolution would be possible in which subject groups could take shape and aesthetically reappropriate for new ends of images, sounds, and texts in the name of a redemocratization of media production and consumption. His hopes for new social ecologies among producers and consumers would open access to repositories of research (open access) and the proliferation of secret (paywalled) knowledge curbed; that copyright and intellectual property regimes would be loosened; and national ethics commissions would be established to address the challenges of abusive media monopolies, personally invasive technologies, and the need for public re-education about what constitutes news. These prescient ideas were the subjects of occasional pieces written for newspapers and journals (“Towards an Ethics of the Media” and “Towards a Post-Media Era”).

In a section containing occasional pieces assembled under the title of “Cinema: A Minor Art,” in La révolution moléculaire [The Molecular Revolution], Guattari outlined a theory of cinema in which filmmakers could disturb a dominant standard in favour of creative becomings deviating from it. His approach to the minor gathered films that explored alternative psychiatric practices with attunements to mental illness which taken together connected all kinds of errant and experimental trajectories across genre, nation and period. Guattari borrowed heavily from militant cinema the criteria that the means of production are democratized, alternative distribution networks are established, and subjects assist in making the films. The audience is not given but is rather a potential anticipated public that may be catalyzed.  

Contribution to Semiotic Theory: A New Variation on Signaletics

Guattari developed in La revolution moléculaire [The Molecular Revolution] (1977) the salient idea that semiotics could be considered at its lowest end in a productive way. In this he took the position of signals, typically deemed to be at the lower threshold of semiosis, and converted them into a-signifying signs. He used as his primary example the emerging information economy to describe a kind of semiosis of linked machines, specifically the bank card and automated teller interface. There isn’t any room for interpretation in the strings of numbers and characters on a typical magnetic stripe. Framed by start and stop sentinels, field separators between system/bank/account/and redundancy check, all of which are recognized automatically, and have a limited string of numbers and characters. A-signifying signs like PINs have no meaning, they are below the semantic horizon, and thus they also lack a representational dimension, a relevant “psychical” component, although they may be supported by mnemonic aids.  More importantly, these signs display case sensitivity and syntax specificity, which need to be in order to trigger a verification routine and to complete a  transaction. What a-signifying signs do is initiate procedures and open barriers. They are triggers in an integrated informational network. 

Guattari adopted and modified the categories developed by Louis Hjelmslev in his glossematics. Considering the planes of expression and content as they intersect with the matter, substance, form trio of categories, he produced a dynamic typology, adding two facets: a non-semiotically formed matter (matter already relatively formed)  and material fluxes. It was the separation of non-semiotically formed matter and semiotically formed substance that informed Guattari’s sign construction.

Two key ideas about low semiosis emerged. Non-semiotically formed matter is genetic or naturally encoded and does not involve substance, that is, what may result from the imposition of an imported code or a grid projected upon it.  Whereas a-signifying semiotics, which is also post-signifying (see the separation and refinement below), contrasts with signifying semiologies centred by language. A-signifying semiotics are non-representational ab do not require a psychical dimension, as in physics and chemistry with descriptions of atoms and electricity. This makes this sign type decentered from representation, from language and form the human. Examples of a-signification may be found in mathematics, music, economics, science and tech- nology, and more generally in art. The purpose of a-signifying semiotics is to skirt around signifying semiologies, either of a type based on non-verbal gestures or on language (or any single substance of expression). Bringing together form (flux) and matter without passing through the formation of well-settled substances by means of hylomorphic models, is Guattari’s strategy of allowing for an overflow of fluxes without meaning, without a centre, without a given hierarchy, that connect in a way that cannot be easily contained and controlled by dominant sign types and embedded powers. In other words, this entails the mutual engenderment of matter and form (flux) in a way that does not result in the self-mutilation of either or the resulting intensities by means of overcoding, through the signifier or the subject.

How these two kinds of signs are deployed later in his joint writing will concern us below. 

In his collaboration with Deleuze in Mille plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus], Guattari’s existing semiotic preoccupations took the form of elaborate typologies of signs that combine to form regimes. All semiotic regimes are mixed and do not presuppose purely linguistic entities.  Thus, general semiology is not a possibility within this system. However, there are four basic types: signifying (limitless semiotic or significance is supported by interpretance that makes given signifieds knowable, and imposable, and this regime has a centre in the power accorded to a single form of expression, namely, a face); presignifying (pre-semiotic natural codings are the most similar, and do not have projected upon them either a face or a single form of expression, instead, they are plural, like organismic, pre-representational signalling systems studied by biosemiotics); countersignifying (taking flight from the despotic face, under threat of death,  segments are detached and utilized to bring an end to the signifying regime by a kind of conquering that re-mixes its prerogatives); postsignifying (pre-, counter- and post- types are already at work within signifying regimes, churning away at converting the negative value attributed to lines of escape into positive values, for the founding of a point of liftoff, no longer surveilled by a face, no longer hemmed in by signifier-signified relations, no longer centred, but passionally driven). These types are less a series than a trans-semiotic of mutually translatable and creatively transformational regimes.  

Semiosis is low when, as Deleuze and Guattari insist, language is neither informational nor communicational, and more a matter of obedience than belief. Thus, for them, the “order-word” is a key concept as long as language meets the minimal conditions for the transmission of such messages.

Deleuze and Guattari attribute power – domination and standardization ­– to major languages­, which are set­ against the counter-powers of dialects and idiolects. In counting the latter as among the “minor,” they emphasize the initiation of potential becomings that produce “bastard” forms by means of the introduction of continuous variation within major languages. 

In compiling typologies of signs, Deleuze and Guattari hope to puncture the notion of unlimited significance, curtailing perfusion, and unwinding the circles and spirals of the signifying regime, instead, excavating “lines of flight” that exceed the signifying regime’s level of tolerance and that are subject to attempts to block them through by marking them as negative. Attempting to regain what is marked as excessive, utilizing a contraband resource, leads to countersignifying practices in the effort to de-centre the “supreme” signifier as a pure abstraction. Eventually in the post-signifying regime what was coded as negative is recoded as positive and promising, entailing an aversion to signifiers of power, and the proliferation of departures.

All of this typologizing has the goal of a trans-semiotic that is truly mixed and does not permit the generalization and universalization of one regime to the detriment of  the others.  Transformations of regimes into other regimes  allow for the production of  new semiotic regimes.