The Reinvention of Social Practices

Essays on Félix Guattari

Gary Genosko

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786605078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The Reinvention of Social Practices shows the relevance of Félix Guattari's thought for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural encounters, ranging across an alternative ‘skateboard’ school, informatic subjugations, urban ecological dilemmas, drug subcultures, and countercultures. Gary Genosko, the leading English interpreter of Guattari, expands upon Guattari’s conception of schizoanalysis as a transformative process of critical self-modelling that leads to the creation of new maps of existence, highlighting an interpretive dream pragmatics, a peripatetic psychiatric practice, a rethinking of epilepsy, and a post-media vision of digital interfaces beyond the keyboard. The folds of Guattari’s collaborations with Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri are explored, and his philosophical friendship with Franco Bifo Berardi is brought into focus.

Part I

In the Social Field

1. Transversality of the Oasis Skateboard Factory Alternative School
2. Informatic Striation in Indigenous Canada and Australia
3. Promises of the Post-Media Era

Introduction

The first two chapters in Part I required bringing theory into the field. A combination of theory not so much applied to situations but requiring two different kinds of access to institutions and lived experiences. The first took the form of an immersion in the life of the Oasis Skateboard Factory in Toronto, through the alternative school’s Community and Parent Council, as a volunteer member specializing in language arts and publishing; the second was undertaken in Iqaluit, Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic, by my former graduate student, Adam Bryx, under a license issued to me by the provincial authority for on-site research. Dr. Bryx conducted on the ground observations and held informal conversations with volunteers, courtesy of the local Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio station, about local cultural practices in reusing government identifiers that Inuit were once required to bear in lieu of their names. Both of us had to parry the objections of entrenched researchers because of the incredible public freedom we gave to our interlocutors to redress wrongs. Despite political resistance to the discs that had emerged publicly by 1968 with the election of the first Inuk to the Northwest Territories council (Simonie Michael), an incredibly powerful phantasy persists in the scientific and policy communities about the programme’s innocence.

The concepts that made the trips were, first, transversality and, second, an informatic model of smooth and striated. These chapters are not applications of concepts, just as Deleuze wrote of Guattari that he did not apply psychoanalysis to groups.¹ Rather, they deploy concepts in order to see how they work in new contexts. It is not possible to transfer wholesale the practical lessons of transversality from the psychiatric clinic where it was incubated and used to understand and modify group relations and the institution’s analytic role, to a high school in downtown Toronto. But the concept works well there, too, as it helps to pose a certain number of key questions about the relations between the student body, teachers, and the neighbourhood they inhabit for part of their days, but also the many different kinds of relationships between the students, teachers and the businesses, graffiti artists, designers, and skateboarders who are engaged in the extended pedagogy that is structured around the construction, design, and marketing of skateboards. I have published extensively on transversality in book chapters and dictionary entries.² Chapter 1 does not explicate Guattari’s essay but pursues the implications of transversality for the life of Oasis Skateboard Factory by emphasizing the encounters of the students with the school (to what degree does the teacher’s social status rehearse the alienation that some of the students already experienced in mainstream classrooms?) and the object at its centre, the skateboard, with reference to the extra-institutional connections that help to define the school as an alternative (precisely, a credit recovery programme) and enable it to fulfil its goals with regard to the guiding themes of art and social change. To what extent is the structure of transversality that Oasis has set up maximized in its current situation, and which are the sticking points that diminish the potential for open transversal communication and self-directed movement?³ The delicate balance that the school achieves in advancing the diagram of skateboard culture against the social identities it promotes, around gender and indigeneity, must reckon with the tendency of molar determinations to arrest becomings and the creation of the new, and the need to cultivate progressive molecular processes that everyone can affiliate with, a becoming-woman and a becoming-indigene.

Plateau 14 concerning the smooth and the striated in A Thousand Plateaus presents multiple models: technological, musical, maritime, mathematical, physical, and aesthetic examples of the translation of smooth into striated and reversal of striated into smooth spaces.⁴ Chapter 2 adds a further model, an informatics of Inuit space and identity by means of striated datafication and programmes of the welfare state, but in addition reversal of striated space by means of the cultural repurposing of identifiers. The informatics model draws upon features from some of the other models. The study in Iqaluit is extended to several Australian examples in order to expand the informatics model through further indigenous references.⁵ It may seem counterintuitive to align striation with datafication (personal information), new information technologies, and cellular and satellite telephony, but it is perhaps the complexity of the “simple” opposition between smooth and striated that is better illustrated. Informatics interrupts the haptic smooth space of expanses of ice and the peoples who inhabit it by introducing sedentary principles, geographic points (house numbers), and extracted properties. The ordering of intensities by the Dew Line radar early warning system simply means the occupation of smooth space can be re-smoothed by its dereliction at the end of the Cold War, so that it becomes the name of a journal (McLuhan’s Dew-Line Newsletter), and by the proliferation of artificial oil rigs, “neonomadic” nuclear submarines of American and Russian origins, and container ships plying the melting Northwest passage. Global warming imparts a troubling smoothness to the high arctic, which is re-striated by northern scientists and their research stations, submersible probes, and ice-tethered devices.

Chapter 3 was originally my contribution to a collection of essays on post-media theory,⁶ and it is adapted to include further material relating to Guattari’s vision of a growing machinic orality that is de-linguistified (de-centred from a speaking subject), collectivized (de-individuated), and bestowed with a semiotic polyvocity. One of the most important and provocative dimensions of Guattari’s post-media vision is his sense of machinic orality that he gained through his participation in the Paris-based Polyphonix festivals, courtesy of his friend and event co-founder Jean-Jacques Lebel, and in the Québec City–based In(ter)ventions festivals, courtesy of Richard Martel. A recording of one of Guattari’s own performances was integrated into Lebel’s sculptural Monument à Félix Guattari (1994), as his voice emanates from a gutted Renault, the same model Guattari drove. Guattari’s sensitivity to the emerging machinic oral enunciative possibilities points forwards and backwards at the same time, to the need for a media archaeology of voders and vocoders, but also to the need to account for developments in AI and digital speech synthesis. Guattari wanted to separate spoken performance from written texts, and for this reason he disliked giving academic papers and lectures. In his Brazilian dialogues with Suely Rolnik, he complained of the irrevocable loss of non-written elements such as “the intrinsic rhythm, the particular sensibility, capturing the impact produced by a certain kind of problem in a certain group of people, in certain situations… . Really, for me, what’s taking place though this journey in Brazil is a debate in twenty or thirty parts.”⁷ A flourishing contrapuntal enunciation exudes the energy and ingenuity Guattari associated with the most collective (multiple, machinic, impersonal, affective) spoken word performances.

Guattari’s line of escape from the conservatism of postmodernism to the post-media era catapulted him into a science-fictional universe in which machinism and humanity “entertain fruitful symbiotic relations.”⁸ He ultimately worked out this symbiosis of machinic subjectivation in a film script, A Love of UIQ, in which UIQ (univers infra quark) is a subatomic alien that falls in love with a young woman who learns that there is no escape from its desire, with disastrous results.⁹ The lesson of such symbiosis is tragic in Guattari’s script, and it reflects his general ambivalence about the prospects for the post-media era. There is no doubt that his commitment to film was an exception.¹⁰

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems,” in Félix Guattari, Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–71, trans. A. Hodges, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015, p. 16.

2. See my first and second chapters of Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Continuum, 2002, and chapter 2 of Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto, 2009; also, on transversality and architecture, my article “Transversal House: Deleuze and Guattari in Japan,” 2A+P [Rome] #1 (March 2000): 56–61; and entries on “transversality” in The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, eds. E. Young, with G. Genosko and J. Watson, London: Continuum, 2013, pp. 320–22, and an early attempt with (Adam Bryx) to address both Guattari’s and Deleuze’s concepts, “Transversality,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. A. Parr, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 117–19 and 285–86.

3. This up-to-date version of chapter 1, based on follow-up discussions with the school, is published here for the first time. A short version appears in Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, ed. C. Boundas, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 475ff.

5. A short version of chapter 2 originally appeared with Adam Bryx, “After Informatic Striation: The Resignification of Disc Numbers in Contemporary Inuit Popular Culture,” in Deleuze and Space, eds. I. Buchanan and G. Lambert, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 109–25. The Australian material was gathered during a sabbatical year spent in Sydney in 2005–2006 and later appeared in chapter 5, “Informatic Striation” in my Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. The corrected and updated version appears here.

6. G. Genosko “The Promise of Post-Media,” in Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, eds. C. Apprich et al., London: MUTE and Post-Media Lab, Leuphana University, 2013, pp. 15–25.

7. Guattari and Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. K. Clapshow and B. Holmes, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008, p. 439.

8. Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. A. Goffey, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 40.

9. Félix Guattari, A Love of UIQ, trans. S. Maglioni and G. Thomson, Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016.

10. See my work on minor cinema and transversal television. “Félix Guattari,” in Film, Theory and Philosophy: Key Thinkers, ed. Felicity Colman, London: Acumen, 2009, pp. 243–52. Reprinted in J. Blankenship and T. Nagl, European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015, pp. 337–49; and “Guattari TV, By Kafka,” Deleuze Studies [Special Issue on Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism] 6/2 (2012): 62–75. Reprinted with minor revisions as “Transversal Telelvision: For Guattari, by Kafka,” in Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Guattari and the Arts, eds. A. Calcagno, J. Vernon, and S. Lofts, London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, pp. 149–61.

Chapter 1

Transversality of the Oasis Skateboard Factory Alternative School

Throughout his career Félix Guattari referred to the accomplishments of radical French teacher Célestin Freinet, whose work he discovered through his youthful outings in the hostelling movement with pedagogue Fernand Oury, the brother of his long-time collaborator at La Borde, Jean Oury. The institutional pedagogy movement in France dovetailed with the institutional psychotherapy practised at La Borde—paying critical attention to how institutions generate subjectivities—although the followers of Freinet and Oury were not often able to cooperate. Theory was not a strongpoint of Freinet’s work, and his school’s distance from the hotbed of theoretical innovation in Paris contributed to the estrangement. Nevertheless, formations of subjectivation were engendered in an original way through Freinet’s use of a classroom printing press: in a way complementary to how an institution itself and its organizational diagram were foregrounded in the grid, the table of rotating duties and personnel assignments at La Borde. Inspired by Freinet, Guattari adapted practices designed for schoolchildren in rural France in the 1920s and 1930s to a psychiatric clinic specializing in the treatment of psychosis, developing the process over his career there from the mid-1950s to the early 1990s.

Looking across institutions and bringing diverse historical practices into a contemporary context, I want to report on my participation in a downtown Toronto alternative school that is built around the mediating technology of skateboards. I don’t mean simply riding skateboards, although that is not a simple matter at all. I focus on the delivery of state-mandated curriculum from the ground up by means of the construction, design, and marketing of different kinds of boards and an immersion in youth street culture through the production of buttons, ‘zines, graffiti, T-shirts, and of course, skateboards. I want to provide in a preliminary way a contemporary schizoanalysis of the mediations, institutional constraints, transversal extra-academic challenges and successes, as well as the prospects for its students and teachers, of this small, one room, alt-high school. I will begin with a few reflections on Freinet’s techniques and methods and then turn to the skateboard factory, where I participated during 2011–2012 in the life of the school as a member of the Community Council as a specialist in publishing.¹

Skateboard Philosophy

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Table of contents

• Foreword: On Genosko’s Method
• Part I: In the Social Field
• Part II: Passages of Desire
• Part III: Criss-Crossing Paths
• Part IV: Search for a Method
• Afterword: Post-Media Singularities
• Index
• About the Author