Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities

303 Pages·2015·15.93 MB·English

by  Felix Guattari

1
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
Conditions, Alain Badiou
Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou
Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou
Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou
Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou
Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze
Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Molecular Revolution, Félix Guattari
Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Félix Guattari
The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari
Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry
After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri
Althusser's Lesson, Jacques Rancière
Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancière
Mallarmé, Jacques Rancière
Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière
The Five Senses, Michel Serres
Rome, Michel Serres
Statues, Michel Serres
Art and Fear, Paul Virilio
Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio
Ecosophy, Félix Guattari
For another world of possibilities
1
BIo
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Originally published as Lignes de Fuite, © Édition de If\ube, 2011
© Félix Guattari 2011
English translation © Andrew Goffey, 2016
Félix Guattari has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as Author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available fram the British Library.
ISBN' HB 978-1-4725-0735-8
ePDF: 978+4742-7492-0
epub 978+4742-7493-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guattari, Félix, 1930-1992.
[Lignes de fuite. Englishl
Lines of tlight . for another world of possibilities / Felix Guattari ; translated by
Andrew Goffey. --1 Edition.
pages cm. - (Impacts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4725-0735-8 (hardback)
l. Capitalism-Philosophy. 2. Political science--Philosophy. 1. Title.
HB501G738132015
330.12'2-dc23
2015015236
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Translator's introduction ix
1 The unconscious is not structured like a
language 3
The machines of the unconscious 3
The dictatorship of the signifier 5
A non-reductive analytic pragmatics 9
2 Where Collective equipment starts and ends 11
General function of Collective equipment 11
The myth of human nature 12
3 The capitalist revolution 15
After the 'black hole' of the thirteenth century, the 'Peace of
God': a religious machine 15
The mystique of chivalry and free enterprise 17
Bourgeoisie and feudalism 19
4 Bourgeoisie and capitalist flows 23
The bourgeois machine 23
The new bourgeois 'sensibility' 26
The withering of the aristocracy 28
Bourgeois reterritorialisations 32
5 Semiotic optional rnatter 35
Semiotisation of libidinal investments 35
Rhizomatic semiotic research 37
Example of rhizomatic research: the semiotic factory of
childhood 41
6 Equipment of power and political facades 45
The institutional simulacra of instituted politics 45
The mega-network of miniaturised equipment 47
The facialities of power 49
Molar powers and molecular potentials 52
'Collective analytic' interventions and the social
unconscious 54
7 A molecular revolution 57
The third industrial revolution 57
Abstract machines 59
Bureaucratic socialism, the highest stage of capitalism 63
A new type of struggle 65
An analytico-militant labour at ail scales 68
8 The rhizome of collective assetT1blages
71
The collective assemblages of desire 71
A rhizomatic cartography 74
The macro-assemblage of audiovisual means 81
9 Micro-fascism 83
Micro-struggles 83
The politics of fascist and Stalinist equipment 87
The micro-fascisms of capitalist societies 88
Liberatory options, micro-fascist options at the molecular
level 91
vi
10 Self-management and the politics of desire 95
Methodologies of rupture 95
Singularities of desire 97
The traps of ideology 99
Prospects for self-management 101
Social transversalities 104
11 Introduction to principal themes 109
12 Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics 115
Semiotically formed matters 117
The order of things and the order of signs 118
Abstract machine or signifying abstraction 121
The assemblage of content and expression doesn't
come out of the blue 124
Four kinds of expression-content assemblage 127
Semiotic enslavement 132
Competence as instrument of power 135
Do 'pragmatic universals' exist? 137
13 Pragmatics: a micropolitics of linguistic
formations 141
Stratification, stages, and abstract machines 143
A micropolitics of desire 147
There is no language in-itself 150
The unconscious as individual or collective assemblage 152
Tracings and trees, maps and rhizomes 155
Generations and transformations 157
An analytico-militant pragmatics 170
vii
14 On faciality 179
15 The hierarchy of behaviour in man and animal 197
16 The semiotics of the grass stem 207
First series 210
Second series: the Australian finch 211
The traits of matters of expression 216
17 The !ittle phrase in Vinteuil's sonata 225
Notes 245
Index 273
viii
,
1 1
Félix Guattari has not been well-served by the academie machine. He was
marginalised almost from the start of his joint work with Gilles Deleuze,
who was generally seen as the brains behind Anti-Oedipus, the book that
procured for them a certain amount of renown (if not notoriety). And the
extraordinary growth in critieal scholarly commentary on their joint
writings has tended to revolve around an appreciation of Deleuze's work,
whose daim to the production of a metaphysics has all too often been
addressed with seant regard for the important role that Guattari played in
their construction of a philosophy in the years between May 1968 and
Guattari's death.1 Of course, seeing Deleuze as a quirky metaphysician
presents sorne interesting and fascinating problems for profession al
philosophers and there is no doubting the immense subtlety and nuance of
his thinking and the scope ofhis engagement with the history of philosophy.
Yet there was always an institutional - and experiential - challenge
embodied in their double-headed writing machine that all too easily falls by
the wayside when Guatlari's role is downplayed, especially when what is
preferred is an inscription of their thinking within canonised scholarly
problematies (that Deleuze for one was always quick to repudiate).
As thinkers together of an unconscious that invested directly in the
movements of history -- schizophrenie delirium, with its 'world historical,
politieal, and raciaP content serving for them as something of a starting
point for understanding both the 'diabolic powers' knocking on the door, as
well as the compromises established with those powers by psychoanalysis
- it would be all too easy to find in their work the traces of a rather romantie
lionisation of madness that was common currency in the tumultuous
France of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, there is more to Deleuze
and Guattari's invocation of the importance of the experience of psychosis
than the judgement that they romanticise (or aestheticise) schizophrenia
would allow - and it is Guattari's work that makes this point blindingly
obvious.
From a rather early stage in his work, Guattari evinced a des ire to escape
from what he saw as the 'methodological individualism' of psyehoanalysis, its
reliance on one-on-one dialogue and its lack of engagement in the difficult,
ongoing task of treating psychosis in the institution. There was an absence of
sustained direct involvement with psychosis on the part of Freud (Schreber,
through his writings, Little Hans through his father) and only a minimal
involvement on the part of Lacan (the Papin sisters, for diagnostic purposes),
and this, for Guattari, was a problem.3 It limited the value of the idea of the
'foredosure of the name of the father' and, on the basis of a mueh doser -
indeed daily - involvement with psychotics led to far greater emphasis being
placed by Guattari not just on institutional facts, on collectives, and the
non-autonomy of language, but also on the transindividual processes that
are put into play in and by an unconscious that is somewhat refractory to
apprehension within the enunciative space-time of'ordinary' analysis.4 The
phony 'contractualism' of the analytic relationship, with its ostensible
exclusion of third parties and foeus on the individual, was not something
that found a very positive response amongst institutional psychotherapists,
by virtue of the broader institutional qualities of the delegation of the
treatment of madness to particular groups of people in society (to say
nothing of the concrete realities of institutional situation). And the historical
experiences of progenitors of institution al psychiatry such as Tosquelles
during the Second World War (the need to work with non-professional staff,
the use of the Saint-Alban hospital to shelter members of the Resistance, and
so on) would mean that La Borde was a propitious domain for Guattari's
own background of militancy in the student movement.
In his early writings, Guattari's conceptual displacement/relativisation
of analytic 'transference' by institutional 'transversality' is one particularly
fruitful outcome of the complex encounter between politics, therapy,
psychoanalysis and the psychiatric hospital, and it sustained a rethinking of
the unconscious in a social direction, breaking down the tacit hierarchy -
inside and outside the institution on which the 'contract' rested, and
re-instating - first with the idea of the institutional object, then with the
ide a of the desiring machine - the third party putatively excluded in one
on-one dialogue. In addition to generating a perception of the importance
of the group, of relations between groups (as in the division of labour) and
of concrete institution al arrangements themselves (the institution as a
'modelling clay' for the treatment of psychosis), it also, more broadly, leads
to what might be called a 'de-professionalising' of access to the uneonscious,
x