<< 1 >>
Rating: Summary: Hardcore. Review: Worldweary eco-activist, renegade psychiatrist, authentic poet-socialist, Felix Guattari is a first-rate contemporary thinker whose writings have long pined away in the shadow of his loving cohort, Gilles Deleuze. But unlike the latter, Guattari abandoned Academe as soon as possible, becoming an agent for the interiorized police-state of the modern psychiatric hospital. No academic canon could have prepared him for the horror of the wards, for the sequence of oedipal territories which derange and invalidate psychiatric praxis. Like the prison in Foucault's writings, the mental hospital became for Guattari only a more intense restatement and synecdoche for the wider regime of cultural repression. What could an intellectual offer these morbid precincts of madness incarnate, without bitterness and cynicism, without a Ballardian post-despair fetishization of the Postmodern? The opening sequence of essays illustrate Dr. Guattari's travails as one of the spearheads behind France's notorious "anti-psychiatry" movement. His profound and unsettling career in the clinical matrices of institutions more deranged than their denizens provides a much-needed analogical narrative for those uncomfortable with D & G's scorching brand of C-Theory. The dangers and vicissitudes of the French psycho-pharmaceutical complex are engaged by Guattari's unrepentant desire to make the mental hospital a true community-culture, where "the real relations of force between the personnel and the patients"(42) are restored to the schizo-subject. Parts II and III escape momentarily from the psychiatric compound to schizo-analyze the mechanosphere of our transglobal Technocracy, disseminating the "postmodern impasse" of ethical abdication, sounding the alarm for new and more complex forms of political resistance. "It is necessary to reinvent the body, to reinvent the mind and to reinvent language. Perhaps the new telematic, informational, and audio-visual technologies can help us to progress in this direction"(115). Rejecting the paranoid neo-Luddism of the Heideggerians, Guattari sees infinite possibilities for forming alliances with the engineering sciences, coeval with perpetual danger, caution, a selectively informed resistance. Part IV, "Polysemiosis," showcases Guattari's stunning agon with Hjelmslev and Peirce, a crucial body of text for anyone who needs the anti-Saussurean translinguistics of D & G further enlarged upon and clarified. Here, the order of elements is secondary in relation to the axiomatic of flows and figures (i.e. creativity in languages may be eternally binded to dominant syntactic and grammatical machines, yet there's always an engine of creation pushing these laws beyond their prescribed ends). Twenty pages later, Guattari steers this apparatus onto the political stage with a pair of essays raging through the microphysics of Foucaultian power. Part V traverses the uncompromising byways of Red and Green eco-revolutionary constructs, queer politics, a delightful and surprising exegesis of Jean Genet's classic autopoetic *Prisoner of Love*, along with more powerful satellite-imagery and theoretical fine-tunings of Guattari's always-developing theories of machinic subjectivity. Part VI proves once and for all that the pomo abdication of life-critical issues is anathema to our world community and its institutions. Intellectualism which forsakes political aptitude and activism can only put us further in the hole. "Our problem is to reconquer the communitarian spaces of liberty, dialogue, and desire"(255). The meaning of social life, for Guattari, is to engineer institutions and practices that provide open channels for the exploration of our own subjectivity, supplemented by clinical pathways ready to disinfect those persons who've been wounded by this unrepentant promethean drive. All in all, a required body of texts for those in need of paradigmata to orienteer D & G's more byzantine theoretical forays, without having to reread (yet again) your spine-rolled volumes of M. Foucault.
<< 1 >>
|