The Communization of Fantasy
Revolutionary Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis
Christopher Skeaff
Can the group face the problem of its own death? For Félix Guattari, this was the animating question of institutional analysis, the “monster” he helped to create by combining elements of psychoanalysis, institutional psychotherapy, and political militancy. Institutional analysis, as Guattari saw it, was a matter of pursuing, beyond the dyad of traditional psychoanalysis or the clinical space of the hospital, an analysis of unconscious formations within and across more encompassing social segments, exploring various arrangements (“institutions”) or conditions of subjectivity production in schools, prisons, factories, urban areas, etc., and attempting to modify these conditions in more creative, emancipatory directions from the inside. In the mid-1960s, on the basis of his work at the La Borde psychiatric clinic and in dissident communist groups such as La Voie communiste (The Communist Way) and Opposition de gauche (Left Opposition), Guattari developed a dynamic distinction between two modes of group formation—those of subject groups and subjugated groups—that could, on a theoretical level, avoid reifying the institution as a structure and, on a practical level, open it up to collective “enunciations of desire” and creative reappropriations. The “cure” was to emerge in and through the expressive activities of the group. Subjugated groups subsist in the passive, alienated state Sartre called “seriality,” heteronomous in their organization and stereotyped in their behavior, maintaining an imagined cohesion through defenses against otherness. Subject groups, by contrast, wield the capacity to articulate their common projects and interpret their position precisely by metabolizing their limits in relation to other groups and processes. The subject group assumes responsibility for its finitude—it remains open to its own alterity, the unconscious sense (or, rather, “non-sense”) of its own discourse—as a condition for accepting the historical, transitory character of its praxis. In this way, it works through and toward its own death.
Beyond its importance for the project of escaping seriality, the question of group death was, for Guattari, an eminently revolutionary challenge. So much is clear in his fuller framing of the issue:
Can the group at once pursue its economic and social objectives while allowing individuals to maintain their own access to desire and some understanding of their own destiny? Or, better still: can the group face the problem of its own death? Can a group with a historic mission envisage the end of that mission—can the State envisage the withering away of the State? Can revolutionary parties envisage the end of their so-called mission to lead the masses?
Masses, party, state. The challenge is embraced or avoided within a revolutionary horizon. And in the background is Marx’s proletariat, that peculiar class which is, in reality, a process of self-abolition. To what extent can nominally revolutionary groups and institutions like the party situate and delimit themselves within that larger process? Or to what extent will they turn in on themselves and turn away from their finitude? We can, of course, hear in this passage Guattari’s antivanguard and anti-bureaucratic drive to overhaul the received institutions of the organized left, such as the French Communist Party (PCF), to say nothing of the Trotskyist splinters or Maoist groupuscules, which had become retrograde, inertial structures, rather than vehicles for the mass-led transformation of society. We can also hear contemporary reverberations: Left formations keep hitting the same wall (or ballot box); they can’t think their own ending as anything other than failure, an impasse that is a libidinal problem and not just a strategic one. Guattari had his subjugated groups; we have ours.
Against alienating fantasy infrastructures that “ritualiz[e] eternity” for group members at the cost of absorbing all subjectivity, for Guattari, properly revolutionary groups undertake what could be called the “communization of fantasy,” in that they effectuate a direct break with capitalist psychosocial relations and catalyze sequences of collective self-overcoming. The proletariat abolishes itself as a class; the subject group abolishes its phantasmatic identity; the analysand traverses their symptom. In Guattari’s telling, revolutionary subject groups articulate lines of desire in their historical specificity, thus dissolving the sense of eternity pervading existing arrangements and giving provisional, experimental form to the social unconscious, “the reality to come.” Especially in its early stages, he thought, the March 22 Movement (M22M), a diverse coalition of students and leftist militants at Nanterre whose agitation helped to trigger the shockwave of May ’68, exemplified revolutionary subjectivity. (Colleague and comrade Anne Querrien notes that Guattari had “invested all his energy” in the movement at the time.) Guattari later reflected, “Starting at Nanterre, a signifying chain developed, an ever-mounting escalation led to questioning every element in French society, and indeed there were international repercussions as well.” M22M, he said, could
be looked upon as the prototype of a group-subject: everything revolved around it without its becoming part of any overall movement or being taken over by any other political group. Those involved set out to interpret the situation, not in terms of some program laid down at successive congresses, but gradually, as the situation itself unfolded in time. . . . They refused to present their movement as the embodiment of the situation, but simply as a something upon which the masses could effect a transference of their inhibitions.
In its capacity as both enunciator and environment of desire, facilitating the transfer of mass inhibition and the articulation of situated truths (“utterances in revolt,” to use Gilles Deleuze’s phrase), M22M had actualized analysis as collective rupture.
What happens to subject groups, though, when such transference and transgression give way to re-inhibition, as was the case in the occupied French factories that fateful spring? What happens when the revolutionary breakthrough fails to materialize? As Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira document in their impressive new book, CERFI: Analysis Everywhere, CERFI names one of the institutional afterlives of the “militant analysis” that detonated in the would-be revolution of May ’68. CERFI, or Le Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionelles (The Center for Institutional Studies, Research, and Training), grew out of the cross-pollination of student militancy and institutional psychotherapy as practiced at the La Borde Clinic. For a span of about fourteen years (1967–1980), in addition to its professional ambit as a research cooperative, CERFI became an important node for experimentation with the libidinal and material forms of collective self-management. Its members would ultimately deploy CERFI’s unique style of institutional analysis in and across the fields of urban planning, mental health, education, cultural criticism, and political-theoretical research.
“For Guattari, properly revolutionary groups undertake what could be called the ‘communization of fantasy,’ in that they effectuate a direct break with capitalist psychosocial relations and catalyze sequences of collective self-overcoming.”
CERFI’s analytical ambitions were first and primarily tested at the heart of state administration, via research projects centered on “programming collective equipment” in newly urbanizing areas (villes nouvelles, new towns) of the Paris region. Within French urban planning and administration, the practice of programming traditionally denotes the preparation of design briefs for architectural teams. The French term équipement refers roughly to shared infrastructure or public facilities, such as libraries, community centers, swimming pools, and more. (In 1960, the French Ministry of Equipment was created from what were previously separate ministries for transport, public works, and construction. In 2007, it was merged with the Ministry of Ecology.) In the planning of three new towns, Évry, Marne-la-Vallée, and Melun-Sénart, CERFI was tasked with redesigning mental health and childcare provision. Seeking to circumvent the technocratic model of planning bequeathed to them by the state, CERFI endeavored in these cases to dynamize the process and allow it to be driven by the users and inhabitants of the towns. Caló and Pereira ultimately show how “CERFI had aimed for programming as a process of self-analysis qua collective self-management . . . to move the institution from a serial to a fusional condition,” only to find that aim redirected by the vastly more formidable administrative powers and finalities of the state.
CERFI’s forays into programming surfaced conflicts that the group explored openly in its meetings and in its journal, Recherches, among other places. (Along with dossiers and visual documents of some of the original CERFI materials, such as architectural plans, maps, diagrams, and schedules, Caló and Pereira provide new translations of several texts by CERFI members, including discussions such as “CERFI takes stock,” evaluating the group’s programming work and shortterm contracts.) Various CERFists noted how they became stuck simply mediating between state administrators indifferent to the creation of self-reflexive processes in service provision and town residents uninterested in either “speaking up” (prendre la parole)—a shorthand for the enunciative capacity of subject groups—or taking collective responsibility for the programs in formation.
These frustrations with programming within the state (i.e., within preexisting bureaucratic structures) informed the group’s subsequent shift to a style of programming from below, closer to the populations and, in certain respects, against the state, as in the racialized suburbs of Alma Gare in Roubaix and Petit Séminaire in Marseilles. There, the implementation of weekly meetings—open to everyone and maintained an “empty space” for the emergence and discussion of any topic—along with innovative analytic tools such as film and photography, spurred meaningful interaction and initiative across the affected communities. Still, if the initial aspiration of the CERFIsts in their urban experiments was to catalyze collective processes of analysis and thus to jumpstart “a permanent discovery of desire instead of fulfilling predefined ‘needs,’” the more modest result of their efforts, even in successful cases like Petit Séminaire, was to bolster slightly the participatory dimensions of existing forms of urban planning and management: more deliberative democracy than group-in-fusion.
Caló and Pereira underscore how CERFI was itself an experiment in group analytical self-management, a way for members not only to earn a living in the usual sense of the phrase but to reinvent modes of living outside of social “normopathy.” Some of the more noteworthy CERFI ventures on this score came from what co-founding member Anne Querrien called the “other” CERFI of the margins, the one less tied to state funding and professionalizing imperatives. These “minor” streams of research, which CERFIsts sometimes called “exceptional” or “erotic” research objects, included research groups on drugs, sewing, film, and theater.
CERFI’s video group, Group Imago, carried out practical experiments using video in an exploratory (rather than documentary) way, through strategies that included having patients or children film their surroundings and projecting recorded footage at its original institutional site to examine the feedback effects of showing people what they had said or done. “All too often, institutional analysis consists of nothing more than reports, presentations and minutes,” wrote the members of Group Imago in 1974:
Video, on the other hand, deals with material that has nothing to do with the object, and we use its data to extract verbal sequences, image sequences and institutional sequences, in order to edit them in a way that is still marked by our own particular way of seeing things. . . . We’re not trying to explain it in order to understand it better, but to find out if it’s a determining element, an a-signifying element, a machinic index.
They cite the example of a child in a facility banging pots and pans in the kitchen. How to approach this occurrence analytically? The group elaborates:
Two conceptions of the unconscious emerge here:
—That of an unconscious ‘from within’, which opens up to the incomprehensible, only to close in on comprehensible structures (the Oedipus complex and all sorts of complexes and pre-established ideas concerning people, the family, laws and fixed identities);
—that of an unconscious ‘outside’ that follows actual actions and direct consequences. The child’s action in the kitchen has visible consequences. People complain, intervene.
This implies a certain mode of libidinal functioning that can be followed in other circuits, with friends, etc. What interests us then is the consequence of this gesture and its relationship to the institution. It’s not a question of trying to understand, but of looking for the way it works, the effect of the gesture on an external whole.
Few passages better crystallize the renovation of analysis pursued by Guattari, Querrien, François Fourquet, Liane Mozère, François Pain, and other CERFIsts in the direction of a machinic unconscious—one assembled from the heterogeneous elements of the “outside” and turned toward the future. Indeed, in Caló and Pereira’s view, this “minor” CERFI of “exceptional objects” was more faithful to the group’s originary “analytical militancy” than its main research projects, insofar as it evinced “a radical openness to entering into composition with the world instead of closing into institutionalised forms” and a “practice of research seen existentially more than epistemologically, as a mode of collective life, and as a continuous analytical endeavour.”
Likewise, a strength of CERFI: Analysis Everywhere is its sensitivity to the complex, polyphonic character of the CERFI collective. Caló and Pereira do an admirable job allowing their object to speak for itself in its multiple voices, which permits more of the contingency, risk, trial, and error at stake in CERFI’s schemes to come through. A key illustration concerns CERFIsts’ openness to publishing the work of other groups and movements in Recherches. Aside from the notorious “Trois milliards de pervers” (“Three billion perverts”) issue of Recherches (#12, March 1973), a collaboration with the Homosexual Revolutionary Front (FHAR), which garnered Guattari a fine and an order to seize and destroy the issue’s entire run for “affronting public decency,” CERFI later published Recherches 37 (April 1979),“Fous d’enfance: qui a peur des pédophiles?” (“Mad about childhood: who’s afraid of pedophiles?”), with contributions by FHAR’s Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, and Luc Rosenzweig, and which included articles sympathetic toward pedophilia. Issue 37 received little public attention at the time of its publication. In the 1980s, however, the journal’s editorial team removed the issue from its catalog, acknowledging the “catastrophic results of the few experiments” with the “credo” that pederasty was “a prerequisite” for emancipatory education. They explained that the “decentralized nature of the journal’s editorial staff at the time allowed the expression of a viewpoint that was insufficiently discussed, contrary to ethos of the journal, which stipulated that the different points of view involved should contribute to clarifying a problem.” Far from regarding it as simply an embarrassing lapse and duly skeptical that the criterion of “problem clarification” typically guided the group’s editorial decisions, Caló and Pereira view the publication and subsequent retraction of Recherches 37 as illustrative of CERFI’s modus operandi: “to allow for the analytical potential of creating the conditions for the ‘objects of research’ to speak or prendre la parole, while having no issues with abandoning something when they felt it was wrong.”
By the same token, Caló and Pereira’s account of CERFI’s vicissitudes invites more than it settles the question of how “militancy” and “analysis” hang together. For their part, the authors discern an unresolved tension or fluctuation in CERFI’s fourteen-year itinerary between “two priorities, militant analysis within and of the state, or militant analysis everywhere, of every social formation.” This gloss is telling, in that it spatializes the issue and gives the impression that the same form or process, “militant analysis,” simply found different points of application and mobilization. Or, put differently, it seems to indicate a valorization of form, such that militancy chiefly meant militancy about a certain process of collective institutional analysis: a continual vigilance regarding both the perils of alienation and the prospects of autonomously reshaping institutions.
Another way of looking at the perceived tension in CERFI’s analytical politics, though, is to read it symptomatically, as an ambiguity regarding content. We might then ask, analytical militancy to what end? The question of the criteria of militancy—what militancy does and what it is for—opens, in turn, again, onto the question of criteria for revolution. With CERFI, one sees many instances in which a distinct form (collective analytical self-management) proved to be radical, in that in it subverted “normopathic” social arrangements that reify desire and reinforce social hierarchy and, by implication, forced a local breakdown in the psychosocial reproduction of capitalism. And yet this kind of radicalism is not necessarily revolutionary in content. As Jasper Bernes writes, “unless it commits to abolition of capital, autonomy from capitalism will always be autonomy within capitalism, a contradiction in terms.”
When Guattari proposed that institutional analysis turned fundamentally on the question of group death, he was presenting his thoughts to a working group at La Borde in 1966. That presentation, entitled “The Group and The Person,” was put into writing in April 1968. He would later say that by the time the upheavals of May ’68 had dissipated, “the time for institutional analysis had also passed.” Adopting the idiom of “molecular revolution,” he was now focused on the intensification, so to speak, of class struggle, of how it must extend from political economy to the struggles of desire underway at all levels of the libidinal economy “contaminated by capitalism (the individual, the couple, the family, the militant group, madness, prisons, homosexuality or whatever).” Despite his continual remodeling and reconceptualizing—he would later jettison the language of “groups” for the concept of “the assemblage”—we can see throughout Guattari’s body of work an insistence that analytical militancy serve a revolutionary function of metabolizing the process of proletarian self-abolition in its overdetermined, experiential richness.
It’s an insistence worth heeding. Given what the late Joshua Clover has described as the two defining structural limits of our time, namely the end of growth (capital accumulation) and climate collapse, it seems as urgent to find ways of working through the fantasy formations that bind people to existing arrangements (subjectivities organized around the affordances of cheap oil, say, or the Keynesian imaginary of green jobs and New Deals) as it is to break with procedures of capital through measures that enable social reproduction to proceed without reference to wage and market. Communization must include a communization of fantasy.