Abstract
The Guattari Effect is an edited book by Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey. It is comprised of a first part containing three of Guattari’s original texts (‘The Schizo Chaosmosis’, ‘The Vertigo of Immanence’ and ‘On Contemporary Art’), a second part on ‘Critical and Clinical Protocols’, a third part on ‘Social and Political Connections’ and a fourth part on ‘Ethico-aesthetic Effects’. Consequently, this book covers the principal fields that Guattari had engaged with during his life, that is to say anti-psychiatry and the clinical practice, radical politics and art. In fact, this book was created after a conference on the ‘Guattari Effect’ held at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at the London based Middlesex University in 2008. The main idea consisted of:
An exploration of both Guattari’s written oeuvre and of the social, artistic and analytic practices that he innervated (…) Functioning as something of a probing device, a ‘probe-head’, the assemblage operated to enable novel emergences to be detected and the urgency of events to be elaborated, drawing together experiments in the making and speculative cartographies of the most varied sorts (p. 1).
This book, as François Dosse’s biography of 2010, endeavours to connect the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and the socio-political context in which it was embedded (p. 7). Accordingly, the Guattari effect should be comprehended as connecting ‘the always singular pathways of transversality, as the opening up of fields of experience’ (p. 7). An important point is that the Guattari-coined concept of ‘transversality’ opposes structuralism and specifically Lacanianism (p. 8). Hence, Deleuze and Guattari’s intellectual collaboration could be summarized as the encounter between Deleuze’s ‘Body without Organs’ and Guattari’s ‘transversality’ (p. 9).
The first chapter (‘Schizo Chaosmosis’) is a text of Guattari’s dealing with the question of the relationship between psychosis, chaos and the production of subjectivity within the framework of critique of the Lacanian triad Symbolic-Real-Imaginary (p. 17). The second chapter (‘The Vertigo of Immanence’) consists of an interview, dating from 1992, of Guattari tackling the issue of his ‘theoretical constructivism’ (p. 28) or the issue of the ‘capitalist subjectivity’ destroying the very notion of subject (p. 29). The third chapter is an interview in which Guattari discusses the question of ‘contemporary art’ (p. 40). Accordingly, art exercises an influence on subjectivity through shaping feelings and affects (p. 41). Additionally, aesthetic formations, for Guattari, are able to ‘resist’ to the capitalist mode of shaping subjects (p. 41).
The second part is comprised of articles dealing with issues concerning the clinical perspective of Guattari. In the fourth chapter, the psychoanalyst Jean-Claude Polack (‘Analysis, Between Psycho and Schizo’) contends that the Guattari project did not consist of rejecting psychoanalysis but rather in radicalizing its theses, as opposed to the antipsychoanalytical neurosciences position (p. 66). In the fifth chapter, Peter Pàl Pelbart (‘The Deterritorialised Unconscious’) affirms that Guattari’s clinical project implied going beyond Freud (p. 80). In the sixth chapter, Anne Querrien (‘Maps and Refrains of a Rainbow Panther’) emphasizes the connection between Guattari’s intellectual production and his practical experience as a left-wing communist activist and in the La Borde clinic (p. 85). In the seventh chapter Barbara Glowczewski (‘Guattari and Anthropology: Existential Territories among Indigenous Australians’) uses Guattari’s concepts in order to describe Aboriginal practices, as opposed to the reductionist Structuralist anthroplogy (p. 109).
Further, the third part deals with ‘Social and Political Connections’ (p. 113). In the eighth chapter Gary Genosko (‘Guattari’s Contribution to the Theory of Semiocapitalism’) tackles Guattari’s analysis of capitalism. Genosko examines, particularly, the relationship between Bifo’s theory of semiocapitalism and Guattari. In fact, Guattari’s ‘abstract machine is the foundation for the theory of semiocapitalism’ (p. 130). In the ninth chapter, Isabelle Stengers analyses the concept of war machine (‘Relaying a War Machine?’). Guattari’s oeuvre would be a ‘philosophy as war machine’ (p. 138). However, Stengers describes Guattari’s thinking as a series of ‘operative constructs’ that need to be ‘put to work in cartographic operations, diagnosing new psycho-social types, experimenting with new tales and modes of intervention’ (p. 141). The tenth chapter consists of an article by Toni Negri (‘Gilles-felix’) on the thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari which was written in 1997, that is to say when he was working on Empire (2000). Negri contends that Deleuze had not been able to overcome structuralism before meeting Guattari (p. 157). Accordingly, Deleuze and Guattari, within Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977, 1987), are very much influenced by the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968 (p. 158). Consequently, this implied a substantial engagement with Marxism from the theoretical and practical points of view. Beyond, Anti-Oedipus (1977) would be a book allowing us to understand contemporary phenomena such as globalization, or the real subsumption of society by capital (p. 159). Negri argues that the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari is compatible with his analysis on the multitude: ‘The shifting of the revolutionary apparatus from centrality to multiplicity is proposed through the theory of the rhizome and of networks’ (p. 163). A Thousand Plateaus (1987) would redefine contemporary materialist philosophy (p. 165). In the eleventh chapter (‘A Schizoanalytic Knight on the Chessboard of Politics’), Anne Sauvagenargues demonstrates that Guattari differentiates modes of subjectivation and individuals and that structures are oppressive and anti-productive (p. 184). In the twelfth chapter, (‘Repression, Expression, Depression’) Bifo tackles the issue of depression produced by the dynamic of the ‘inhuman violence’ of contemporary capitalism (p. 200). Further, he regrets the role of Deleuze, Guattari and other intellectuals in the organizing of the Bologna gathering in July 1977, which announced the end of the 1970s social movement in Italy and the drifting towards terrorism (p. 201).
The fourth part deals mainly with art. Stephen Zepke (‘From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthtics: Art and Life in Guattari’) argues that the aesthetic field is not subsumed by capitalism from the point of view of Guattari (p. 206). Furthermore, art represents the condition sine qua non of politics within the framework of a ‘micropolitics of sensation’ (p. 215). Then, Raymond Bellour, in the fourteenth chapter, reflects on the relationship between sensation and narration in cinema(p. 233). In the fifteenth chapter, Pascale Criton develops the notions of transversality and processualization in order to have an understanding of artistic practices (p. 248).
The Guattari Effect connects different works of Guattari [especially Chaosmosis (1995), The Three Ecologies (2000) and Cartographies Schizoanalytiques (1989)] with practical concerns within clinic, political and aesthetic fields. The three translations of original texts are essential to anyone interested in the evolution of Guattari’s thought because they date from the last two years of his life. This edited book is meritworthy in that it explores Guattari’s whole oeuvre and not only Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977, 1987) or What Is Philosophy? (1994). It is able to create transversal connections (despite one or two overly formalist and ‘prone to jargon’ articles) between an analysis of the unconscious, a processualist and emancipatory politics and aesthetical problematic. The developments on the analysis of capitalism and on radical politics are particularly pertinent within the framework of the economic crisis that the world has been living since 2008. Furthermore, most of the articles avoid a depoliticization of Guattari, as has sometimes been the case with Deleuze.
Conversely, the principal defect of this edited book is its lacks of consistent and coherent narrative from the first page to the last. Nonetheless, the existence of a plurality of voices (and their disjunctive synthesis) would probably not be a problem from a Guattarist perspective.