Introduction to Guattari on Trandisciplinarity

With his call, ‘transdisciplinarity must become transversality’, Félix Guattari points the reader of this brief text (originally titled ‘The Ethico-Political Foundations of Interdisciplinarity’) in a direction that he had been endeavouring to push knowledge production in the field of the human sciences since the early 1960s. For the concept of transversality – which, in truth, is as much a name for an evolving series of practical and institutional engagements in which Guattari had invested his own very considerable energies as it is a concept – is at the starting point of an intellectual adventure into the exploration of, and experimentation with, an unconscious that has challenged the autonomy and sufficiency of any and every project.

Written in 1991, at a time when he was elaborating the theoretical and practical approach to the production of subjectivity that he had started to call ‘ecosophy’, Guattari’s brief text casts an interesting light on his understanding of research. Thematizing the question of the foundations of transdisciplinary research in the context of his growing concern with ecological issues – issues explored across the natural, social and mental realms – Guattari appears here as someone concerned with the problematic sufficiency of professional expertise as the basis for undertaking research. As someone who did not have a position as an academic, who worked for many years at the La Borde clinic as well as in his own psychoanalytical practice, and militated extensively not just around obvious political causes but also in significant relation to the possibilities of conducting collective research, Guattari was certainly no stranger to the problematic cloistering and compartmentalization of intellectual expertise. Indeed, his own endeavours at reformulating analytical ideas about the unconscious consistently point towards a critique of professional expertise that was central to his ‘toolbox’ understanding of the role of concepts and his more substantive theorization of an unconscious that would be open to all. Furthermore, given his own early history exploring the possibilities – and problems – of translating psychoanalysis into the psychiatric institution, the idea of research acquired for him a particularly existential hue that may not be readily evident from the text translated here.

The concept of transversality emerged as the fruit of an ongoing and intensive engagement of workers in the field of psychiatry in France with psychoanalysis and, more specifically, with the limits of traditional psychoanalytic technique when faced with patients in an institutional setting. In this respect (although it did not, at least in the first instance, play this role), the concept also forms a part of Guattari’s incipient critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its insufficiencies with regard to the treatment of psychosis. This in turn precipitated its extension and revision, with the assistance of Deleuze (whose own strategic interest in psychosis was made fully evident in Logic of Sense), as part of a more nuanced response to the structuralist ideal in Lacanian analysis. It is, of course, easy to read the development of the concept of transversality retrospectively, in the light of Deleuze’s more obviously philosophical proclivities, but doing so can blind us to elements of Guattari’s thinking that are of signal importance with regard to his later interest in research as such. As writings from towards the end of his life indicate, the ‘singular experience’ of working at the La Borde clinic where these ideas were first developed, not only marked Guattari deeply but informed his understanding of the ‘ethico-political’ roots of all analytic work (Guattari, 2012).

In a series of texts written in the early to mid-1960s, Guattari can be found wrestling with the ossified and bureaucratic quality of psychiatric institutions, referring (no doubt in part with Tosquelles in mind) to the experiences of prisoners of war and concentration camps as giving some people a different view of the psychiatric hospital. Given that, as he puts it, the ‘habitual proliferation of institutions in contemporary society only results in the reinforcement of the alienation of the individual’, he asks, ‘is there a possibility that a transfer of responsibility may be brought about and that an institutional creativity might take the place of bureaucracy?’ (Guattari, 2003: 39). In this context, a question about the nature of groups within the psychiatric institution emerges for Guattari, evidently influenced by Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Considering the institutional locatedness of ‘the mad’ and the situation of psychiatry and psychiatrists – as those socially delegated to deal with a group lacking the aptitude for ‘normal’ commerce – Guattari sought to reformulate psychoanalytic thinking in such a way as to overcome the problems raised, in an institutional setting, both by its reliance on a kind of methodological individualism and its emerging reworking by a focus on language.

Referring even at this early stage to the institutional subject as a ‘collective agent of enunciation’, Guattari’s aim was to avoid a situation in which the institution might become a structure, a possibility that he felt would, analytically, imply a reification of the institution. Thinking in terms of groups rather than structures allowed Guattari to retain a concern with praxis and its possibilities vis-à-vis an institution which necessitated a commitment to the transitory in order to make good on the idea of breaking down the barrier between reason and madness. And making a distinction between subjugated groups (groups that are the object of the discourse of others) and subject groups (groups that are the subject of their own enunciation) further facilitated the possibility of developing an analytic exploration of the social unconscious operative within the institution. The concept of transversality intervenes here as a way to introduce distinctions between groups with regard to their degree of openness towards, and aptitude for bringing to light, the desire that circulated within the institution. This in turn made a critique of professional expertise not only possible but necessary, for given that those normally in charge of the institution were just as likely to be the objects of other discourses, invested in the vertical dimension of hierarchy both inside and outside the institution, there could be no guarantee that they would be in a particularly good position to bring to light the desire operative within the institution. Hence, in a text from 1962–3, discussing institutional psychotherapy, Guattari argued for the importance of

[having] done with the doctor as individual, colleague, citizen, who puts himself forward as the one who ‘speaks for …’, who is the ‘spokesperson’ of the subject that the institution could be. And not necessarily in full knowledge of so doing. Is he not himself as much the unconscious prisoner as the agent of this process, with his conjugal life, his culture, his opinions, etc.? (Guattari, 2003: 39)

In his preface to Psychanalyse et transversalité, Deleuze brings out well a crucial aspect of the functioning of the concept of transversality for Guattari: it breaks down the opposition (even the dialectically complicated one) between analysis and desire. As he put it in typically Deleuzean terms, institutional analysis has the practical aim of ‘introducing into the institution a militant political function, constituting a sort of “monster” that is neither psychoanalysis nor hospital practice, even less group dynamics, and which aims to be applicable everywhere, in the hospital, the school, in militancy – a machine to produce and to enunciate desire’ (Deleuze, 2003: x).

In the context of the essay translated here, what is particularly interesting about the discovery/invention of transversality is that, by ‘detotalizing’ the institution, it implied the need to extend the analytic possibilities of the social unconscious out into society more generally, a point that Guattari made readily in a discussion of institutional training written at the end of the 1980s. ‘Whilst working on a day to day basis with its hundred or so patients, La Borde found itself progressively implicated in a more global calling into question of health, pedagogy, the penal condition, the condition of women, of architecture, of urban planning’ (Guattari, 2012: 68). This implication led in turn to a series of group initiatives that were, as he puts it, set up with a view to exploring ‘unconscious formations that didn’t just concern the two protagonists of classical psychoanalysis but could be broadened out to much larger segments of society’ (Guattari, 2012: 69). Dosse has suggested that the Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Research (FGERI), set up in 1965 – to which Guattari is alluding in this quote – aimed, in this regard, to ‘convert intellectual work into a programme of non-academic research’ (Dosse, 2007: 99), a programme in which research that might otherwise be considered the privileged domain of academic institutions could acquire a different set of connections with the social field. In any case, the editorial of the second issue of the journal Recherches that formed the mouthpiece of the federation (and later, the Centre for Institutional Study, Researching, and Training [CERFI]) makes it clear that the transversal approach to research that was envisaged would not be divorced from a concern with the institution. ‘Recherches is the mouthpiece of every group that works in a social field directed towards the analysis of the institutions in which everyone is inserted and agrees to be constantly addressed by groups planted in other sectors’ (Dosse, 2007: 100).

The reality of this programme – a testament equally to the political upheavals of the years following the events of May 1968 – was doubtless somewhat chaotic. CERFI, which was set up on the back of FGERI in 1967 and became a fully-fledged research organization, received numerous grants from the French government, and it is probably true to say that the experimental contestation of the division between analysis and desire it facilitated in relation to research didn’t always result in decisions that facilitated the kind of research that Guattari wanted. The activities of CERFI have proved to be of interest to scholars interested in aspects of the history of French theory, not least, perhaps, because of the involvement of Foucault with some of its projects (see, amongst others, Mozère, 2004). In the present context, CERFI is interesting because a number of the projects that it undertook have a direct bearing on the substantive issues mentioned in the essay by Guattari presented here. Publications that resulted from the third of CERFI’s substantial research grants, devoted to studying the ‘genealogy of collective equipment’ are of special note in this regard.

In addition to the involvement of Foucault and Deleuze, the focus of this project gives its title to a manuscript written by Guattari whilst he was working on A Thousand Plateaus with Deleuze, ‘Collective Equipment and Semiotic Subjection’ (2011). Engaging specifically in the study of issues that might now be considered the province of urbanism, town planning or urban geography, the first of the issues of Recherches exploring the loosely conceived genealogy included two interviews with Foucault. And whilst the discussions are not entirely conclusive, they do point towards some of the ways in which the transversal approach to transdisciplinary research Guattari was interested in extended into a reworking of his understanding of the social unconscious, which is flatly identified, in the first of two discussions with Foucault, with ‘collective equipment as such’ (Foucault et al., 2001: 1316). The idea of collective equipment is notably absent from A Thousand Plateaus, which is, in some respects, regrettable. It is largely the exploration of collective equipment undertaken by CERFI (and other CERFI projects such as that by Anne Querrien) that informs the concern with machinic enslavement in that book, and in Guattari’s own later references to the planetary networks of integrated world capitalism (Guattari, 2013: 36–7). His references here to ‘machinic transdisciplinarity’ should, perhaps, be understood in this context. More pointedly, the connections between the work of CERFI and the philosophical project undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari suggests that, for Guattari, the call for transdisciplinarity to become transversality, explored in the article we present here, was already operative theoretically and practically – institutionally – in the work Guattari was undertaking with Deleuze throughout the 1970s.