Schizoanalytic Cartographies

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* Book: Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Felix Guattari.

Discussion

Brian Holmes:

"The radical Left movements that reemerged in the Nineties sought explicitly to go beyond the impasses of the Sixties and Seventies. A totalizing ideology (classical Marxism-Leninism) was one such dead-end. A withdrawal to archaic social relations (hippie communalism) was another. The coming revolution would have to be protean, multiform – a molecular revolution, in Guattari’s words. The arrival of network technologies offered a glimmer of new expressive and cooperative possibilities, the dawn of a postmedia era. As he wrote in 1989, in Schizoanalytic Cartographies:

“The emergence of these new practices of subjectification of a postmedia era will be greatly facilitated by a concerted reappropriation of information and communication technologies in so far as they will increasingly authorize:

1. the promotion of innovative forms of consultation and collective action, and in the long run, a reinvention of democracy;

2. the miniaturization and personalization of apparatuses, a resingularization of mediatized means of expression. One may assume, in this respect, that it is the extension into a network of databanks that will have the biggest surprises in store for us;

3. the multiplication to infinity of ‘existential shifters’ permitting access to creative mutant Universes.”9

In short, Guattari believed that the equation “media = passivity” was on the way out. Yet the experience of the programmed society led many to realize in his wake that the upcoming struggles would also have to face new and increasingly sophisticated techniques for channeling expression, neutralizing events and stifling what Michel de Certeau, in the aftermath of ‘68, had called “the taking of speech.”10 Of course De Certeau’s phrase cuts both ways, and today there is no more double-edged technology than the Internet. The messianic promise of the net was pushed hard by industry, less so by activists and artists. Indeed, much of tactical media is a sophisticated critical and satirical discourse aimed at deflating what a group like Critical Art Ensemble has called the “promissory rhetoric of technology,” while revealing the hidden agendas of corporate and governmental power. Once again it is a matter of self-subversion: entering the structure to derail it.

This whole discussion is pointing toward something like a counter-program. And maybe it’s bigger, more self-conscious than you think. Let’s put on Guattari’s glasses and look not only at the exploits of tactical media, but at the ways they are rooted in existential territories, etherealized in aesthetic rhythms, engaged in self-organized social movements and dissolved into acid critique. Let’s try to map out the main vectors of eventwork.

Four Ways In

Guattari’s approach to analysis tries to help open up “collective assemblages of enunciation,” or possibilities for taking speech. This does not just mean speaking in the restricted sense: it could be gestures, affects, symbols, practices. The point is to articulate something singular, not systematized, not overcoded in advance. And the point is to articulate it collectively, in public. But the strange thing is that Guattari approaches the collective assemblages through a schiz, that is to say, a splitting, a dissociation. Schizoanalysis splits subjectivity into four incommensurable dimensions: Territories, Universes, Phyla and Flows. They are separate and more-or-less autonomous assemblages, even within the experience of a single individual. They are not functions of any primary cause or mobilizing energy; but they can be approached as functors, that is to say, operators of a relational process. Life does not necessarily add up, but we all move through it anyway. Here goes:

1. Existential Territories. They are literally grounds, inhabited spaces of the body, pacings, ranges, graspings, sinkholes and sometimes dead ends. Think of a landscape, an ocean, a neighborhood, a street corner, the four walls of your ecstatic and unbearable room. Territory is not only a category of human settlement but also of ethology, it is the home and at the same time the nest, the lair or the den, the warm and familiar haunt that can coax you into well-being or veer off into obsessional repetition: the clamminess of sweat, the black hole of anxiety. It is crucial to realize that in Guattari’s fourfold matrix, the Territories lie at the intersection of the real and the virtual, so they can be expressed as the Territories of the Virtually Real. Through their virtuality they relate (or not) to something else:

2. Incorporeal Universes of reference (or of value). Now we’re talking about the insistence of rhythms, forms, images, aesthetic patterns of all sorts, fragments of poetry or film that return in memory as what Guattari called “refrains.” It’s not the painting on the wall, but the one you see in the dark that matters here. These constellations of Universes are never complete, they are in but not of the body, they point beyond themselves to further horizons. Yet they are what sparks the pathic trance of self-reference, or “autopoiesis”: an affective appropriation, a singularizing process that turns the outside in. Reaching beyond the real, these are the Universes of the Virtually Possible. And it is by following their incorporeal call that the bounds of an existential Territory can be overstepped, so as to relate (or not) to something else:

3. Material and semiotic Flows. Here is the domain not only of speech but also of action, in a world understood less as one of things and more as one of processes, that is, things that appear in streams: signs, bean counters, money, libido, gasoline, semen, milk, electricity… The space of flows is taken by social science as the very realm of reality, institutions, economics, relations of classes, things we can measure – or even things that we can change. So this is the dreaded realm of acting out, where you move from intuition and upwelling desire to concrete statements and irrevocable deeds. These Flows of the Actually Real are as different from Virtual Territories as the word on the tip of your tongue is from the one you’ve just spoken. Yet the force of actuality relates them (or not) to something else:

4. Abstract machinic Phlya. Now we arrive at the realm of the symbolic, of code, of formalized concepts: rhizomes of abstract ideas whose destiny is to complexify forever, like science, philosophy, mathematics, law, and everything that fills the Borgesian Library of Babel. The notion of the “phylum,” with its connotations of metamorphosis over time, is a way to indicate this evolutionary movement. As formalized codes, the machinic Phyla exist beneath the regime of the Actually Possible. They interact with the realm of material and semiotic Flows, not only through the dialectic of theory and practice, but also in a more estranging or deterritorializing relation where practice is pulled outside itself and into the endless labyrinth of ideas. Guattari seemed to think that abstract ideas have a direct relation (maybe not) to the glimmering of aesthetic Universes.

Schizoanalysis offers four pathways into the complexity of human experience. It could also have been six or seventeen: four is just the first number beyond the binary pair and the threefold dialectic of opposition and synthesis (aka the Oedipal triangle). The point of a four-field model is to understand subjectivity as a generative matrix rather than a calculable system.

Before their formalization as a book, the Schizoanalytic Cartographies were developed in a seminar with a group of therapists.11 In that context, the four assemblages were conceived as aspects of the patient’s experience, and as entry-points for the therapist’s practice. The idea was never to carry out an instrumental mapping that would lay hidden contents bare to the therapist’s intervention. Instead it was an activity of “meta-modeling,” or in other words, a conversation with the patient about the ways in which he or she represented, imagined or perhaps joked about the different aspects of his or her own existence. In this way the therapist could experiment with the approach to one assemblage – whether corporeally, aesthetically, materially or discursively – while remaining sensitive to “transitional components” that might touch or transform the others. As in structuralist activity, what was sought on the way in was the way out: an excess or overflow into a relation. By recognizing the schiz of the self, you can start to hear a collective assemblage of enunciation, even when the speaking subject is ostensibly an individual. The larger question – the one that Guattari the activist pursued throughout his life – was this: How does a collectivity “take speech” in contemporary democratic societies?


...


Notice that a schizoanalytic mapping would look for at least two different assemblages on the scene of these public protests. One is the existential territory of the street. In societies of controlled and captivated flows, the occupation of the street is an ecstatic discovery (maybe that’s the reason for all the drumming). Along with the exceptional circumstance of thousands of people with nothing to focus on but each other, there is an invitation to a new mobility. A crowd moves with a multitude of legs and arms and eyes and tongues. It dances upon itself like a swarm of bees (the general assembly). Then it surges like an uncurling wave, whose powerful current (the protest march) can instantly scatter into glittering, self-reflexive spray (the flashing cameras). Subjectively, the territory of the street is a release from imposed privacy, a space of possibility, an opening of social desire. But on the objective level it is all about deliberation, organization, communication, action. Some bodies made the meals, put together the library, facilitated the assembly, took the notes, did the dishes, set up the websites, wrote the communiqués, scouted out the scene and bore detailed witness to the police abuse. There is a rough-and-tumble technical precision to grassroots political events, not only in the electronic communications but in all the skill-sets that are delivered over to collective elaboration. The key is deprofessionalization, or the shift away from protected, quasi-sacralized circuits of exchange to a profane world of everyday use.13 The occupation of the street – the opening of the existential territory – is what makes this difference.

Another difference is made where pragmatic activists would expect it the least: in the realm of social theory. Political action in a complex society is impossible without theory. First, the structures of everyday capitalist life and the strategies of those who impose them must be analyzed, deciphered and correlated with the latest trends in technoscience, economics, governance and military practice. Next, the conclusions must be crafted into concepts that can be seized and used by those who do not make such things their specialty. This is not particularly easy. Theorizing in, for and against the street is a tightrope act where the inevitable fall is not only openly desired by the crowd, but needed by the theorist as a reality check. Universities, where the acuity of thought is pursued most intensively, are not by accident a disciplinary space that seems dedicated to the ultimate neutralization of all ideas. The communications machine of the social movement offers a test for those whose philosophy of praxis forbids an infinite delay of commitment in the search for theoretical perfection. If that machine can be thrown off the rails – if inquiry can remain open and sharp at the very heart of political urgency – then it is possible to go on mobilizing for the next decisive phase of the endless revolution."

(https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/activism-schizoanalysis/)

More information

  • Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002),
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