Guattari Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

168 Pages·2012·7.282 MB·English

by  Paul Elliott

Guattari Reframed
Contemporary Thinkers Reframed Series
Adorno Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84885 947 0
Geoffrey Boucher
Agamben Reframed ISBN: 978 1 78076 261 6
Dan Smith
Badiou Reframed ISBN: 978 1 78076 260 9
Alex Ling
Baudrillard Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 678 1
Kim Toffoletti
Deleuze Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 5470
Damian Sutton & David Martin-Jones
Derrida Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 5463
K. Malcolm Richards
Guattari Reframed ISBN: 978 1 78076 233 3
Paul Elliott
Heidegger Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 6798
Barbara BoIt
Kristeva Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 6606
Estelle Barrett
Lacan Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 5487
Steven Z. Levine
Lyotard Reframed ISBN: 978 1 84511 6804
Graham Jones
Merleau-Ponty Reframed ISBN: 978 1 848857995
Andrew Fisher
Rancière Reframed ISBN: 978 1 78076 168 8
Toni Ross
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1 LB. T AU RI S
Published in 2012 by LB. Tauris & Co. Ltd
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175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
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Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by
Pal grave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2012 Paul Elliott
The right of Paul Elliott to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
AlI rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this
book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or
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ISBN: 978 1 78076 233 3
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Page design by Chris Bromley
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Contents
List of illustrations vii
Introduction: Guattori De-Ieuzed?
Pari One: How to critique your milieu
Chapter 1. The clinical milieu - transversality 11
Chapter 2. The cultural milieu - the molor and the
molecular 25
Chapter 3. The political milieu - the micropolitics
of desire 38
Part Two: How to make a wall' machine
Chapter 4. The machine 53
Chapter 5. Schizoanalysis 65
Chapter 6. Faciality 76
Chapter 7. The refrain 88
Part Three: How to think chaoSOIPhiiCOlllv
Chapter 8. Molecular revolution 101
Chapter 9. Cinematic desiring machines 115
Chapter 10. Ecosophy 126
Conclusion: Guattari reframed 138
Glossary 145
Select bibliography 153
Filmography 157
Index 159
List of illustrations
Figure 1. Balthus, La Rue (1933), oil on canvas. 29
Figure 2. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890), oil on
canvas. 71
Figure 3. Shin Takamatsu, The Ark Building (1982). 79
Figure 4. Michael Rakowitz, paraSITE (2001), mixed
media. 107
Figure 5. Michael Rakowitz, paraSITE (1998), mixed
media. 108
Figure 6. Yoke and Zoom, Movement art gallery situated on
Worcester Foregate Street train station (2010). 141

Introduction: Guattari De-leuzed?
When people talk about 'Deleuze' they are often referring to
Deleuze and Guattari, and in even the most dependable of books
on their work the latter is often relegated to the role of collaborator
or colleague. However, this fact is perhaps unsurprising. Thanks in
part to the reticence that each writer displayed in fully articulating
their working relationship (often claiming that they were one
philosophical machine rather than two people) and also to
Guattari's OWIl reputation as an agent provocateur rather than a
dedicated and methodical intellectual (the French media dubbing
hiIll 'Mr. Anti'), his work has been overshadowed by Gilles Deleuze's
since the beginning of their collaboration in the early 1970s.
As you will see by the end of this book, however, Felix
Guattari's ideas are of major importance not only to Deleuze and
Guattari but to twenty-first-century culture - especially visual
cultures such as television, cinema, art and architecture. Guattari
was a diverse and impassioned thinker writing on a wide-ranging
series of subjects, from institutional psychiatry to Japanese
architecture, from photography to metalwork and from the
attraction of Nazism to the sex lives of Martians! Guattari was a
revolutionary, but a revolutionary for the twenty-first century. He
believed in what he termed 'molecular revolutions', small acts of
rebellion and change that (if carried out on a wide enough scale)
could transform the world. He was interested in spontaneous acts
of mini-transformation that expressed the desire of both the
individual and the group as a way of providing a more authentic
counter-argument to capitalist culture. The late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries saw a series of such acts: the
flowers laid at Buckingham Palace after the death of Princess
Diana, the public displays of affection in New York during the
power loss after 9/ Il, and the spontaneous dancing of Michael
Jackson fans in city centres after his funeraI. AlI of these are
testament to the human propensity for molecular revolution, an
idea that was most certainly Guattari's.
As we shalllook at in this book, Guattari saw in these acts a
new fOTIn of consciousness, one that had remarkable power and
that could potentially engender great political and psychological
change. The concepts that he developed in his solo work and in
his work with Deleuze, described a society that was only just
coming into being. Ideas such as the 'rhizome', 'nomadology',
'machinic heterogenesis' and 'schizoanalysis' are more easily
understood in an age of the internet, global terrorism and media
simulacra than the period in which Guattari was writing. His
death in 1992 meant that he never really saw the predictive nature
of his ideas coming to fruition. He never got to see just how
relevant his philosophy was to become. This book looks at sorne of
these ideas and finds that, des pite their obscure-sounding names,
they are strangely familiar and remind us of many structures and
fOTIns that we have come to take for granted: hypertext, virtual
communities, globalisation and ecological protest groups. AIl of
these come close to the ideas put forward by Guattari almost 40
years ago.
Guattari Reframed, then, is an introduction to his thought
through the medium of visual culture, but it is also a fOTIn of Haw
Ta guide to living a more philosophically engaged life. Whereas
Deleuze was a philosopher in the traditional sense, Guattari was a
practising psychiatrist at La Borde clinic in France (an institution
he also helped to found when he was only 22 years old). He was
also a Marxist and a supporter of a variety of different political
groups including the Gay Liberation Front and the Women's
Movement. This meant that his ideas were always connected with