La toupie folle / The mad spinning top

It’s been a while since we last posted a blog so a few quick updates before the Right to Research Event news.

Patrick has written an article on the background to the production of issue 13 of Recherches with a specific focus on the tensions between the broadly Marxist paradigm of leftist militancy and the emergence of a Nietzschean ethos. The paper is under review and we aim to post more about this soon.

We have also discussed a work-in-progress piece of writing on method on ‘how to do a pragmatic genealogy of concepts’.

We are planning a research trip to Paris in May for archival research and possibly interviews. The schedule of this will depend our family lives and we are also attentive to France’s pension protest and strike plans.

Now for the Right to Research. The event is part of a research stream I proposed inspired by the “Right to Research” manifesto, written in 1975, by CERFI members. The manifesto was a reaction to the French State's termination of 'research by contract' in the social sciences. Thereafter state funding for research could be granted only to those with a formal academic affiliation, either as part of the CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) or a University.

Although the right to research manifesto is not immediately related to Recherches 13, which is the main focus of our project, there is continuity between the issues raised in the “militant interventions” penned by Anne Querrien, Françoise Lévy, Marie-Thérèse Vernet-Straggiotti and in François Fourquet and Lion Murard’s preface, and the manner these are raised, with the 1975’s manifesto and with our own research interests in La Toupie Folle.

The publications of these ‘interventions’ in Recherches 13 intercalate the theoretical and historical part of the research and allow looking at the genealogy group as a living subject of research. Members of the genealogy research group use these discussions to talk about the life of the research, the militant desire, and to frontally raise the various libidinal conditions of the research process. Through these, we encounter the subject of research, not necessarily in the manner of the researcher’s gaze or situatedness, but in the manner of the material and libidinal conditions of research production.

These ‘interventions’, if read together with the historical and theoretical research, inform the pragmatics of the latter and the two together form the work that interests us in La Toupie Folle. The pragmatic genealogy of concepts would require an exercise of this kind, an exercise of seeing theoretical production at the light of its conditions of research.

This is also our inspiration behind the blog feature in La Toupie Folle project, where we might refer to issues of money, work, ethics, life that impact our research. Purposely, and as a research practice, we have tried not to obliterate these from our reflections and our public output.

The “Right to Research” manifesto argued that putting an end to the financial autonomy of groups would end the possibility of self-management and experimentation with a variety of forms of work, research, and styles needed for social research. Moreover, the professionalization of research would come with a focus on the (professional) researcher as an individual to the detriment of collective research experimentation.

More importantly, and something we haven’t engaged with yet here, the manifesto speaks primarily of the value to guarantee conditions of existence for ‘non-professionalised research’ and for those who were usually treated as objects of research to become subjects of research.

With the manifesto as a starting point, the “Right to Research” event will take place on 10th June in May Day Rooms. It will be a meeting with research collectives, associations, foundations, and varied groupings engaged in research and experimentation, and individual researchers to share their work, challenges, modes of organisation and management, funding strategies and research ethos to re-think what the right to research might mean today.

In the morning, each organisation will deliver a brief presentation about themselves and in the afternoon, we will with a collective discussion on topics such as the professionalization of research, financial self-management, organizational processes and the articulation between social production and theoretical production.

I thank Olivier Quérouil, member of CERFI, who first drew my attention to the manifesto and send it to me. I was immediately drawn to it, particularly being an independent researcher myself!

Patrick and myself have translated the manifesto. This is a picture of the beautiful cover.

We will post more about the event and participants soon and also share a link to Eventbrite.

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Conversation (remote) with Susana yesterday (Thursday 14th July): practical matters – the website is nearly ready to be launched, pending upload of corrections of a few typos in the blogs and other pages. We need to buy a domain name and opted for the name ‘latoupiefolle.org’. This will entail changing the current title to ‘La toupie folle’ from ‘Mad Spinning Top’, and adding a note of explanation (already on the ‘About’ page). We’ve used software to transcribe the dialogue with Godofredo Pereira, which Susana will now edit. It’s not irrelevant to the theoretical concerns of the project, i.e. to its research questions, that we are able to use the budget to pay Susana to do this work. I checked this with the research administrators at King’s. The reason why it’s not irrelevant is because it bears upon the question of the professionalisation of research, and the extent to which the role of the academic (in the University sector) often comes down to control and policing of knowledge. In other words it relates directly to the question of the ‘Right to Research’, that is, to the right to undertake research as (paid) work. This is nevertheless work that is paid by the hour, so a form of piece work, which does not substantially alter the conditions of precarity which underpin the work of research. CERFI proposes an example, for a ‘brief moment in time’, when this structure was different, soon shut down, and thereafter reverted to control. Daniel’s work on the website, which is far more than ‘merely’ technical (in other words it operates at the interface of the human and the technological), also comes into the frame here.

Although we didn’t make the link explicitly, this connected to the other things we talked about, including the potential ‘output’ on the ‘Right to Research’. While the text on this written by Guattari et al. considers the historical moment at which the structure was shifted, and gives us the opportunity to elucidate the historical conditions of research as work, and work as research, in France in the early 1970s, we discussed the ways in which this could be linked to and speak to the present. One point was that there is a strong emphasis, now, on inclusivity, ‘research culture’ (Wellcome especially) and co-creation. But does this really breach the boundaries of the academic sector, and does it effectively function as a further form of control of knowledge? We thought about an ‘output’ with two parts, one historical, and the other a form of ‘manifesto’. Issues around gender (in)equality, conjugality, pay, etc are all relevant factors. To be continued.

Otherwise we discussed my suggestion of trying to think of a non-traditional format for the ‘output’ on Nietzsche 1972-1973. The idea, as mentioned before, is to illuminate the ways in which Nietzsche is ‘put to use’ in the specific socio-political conditions of that time. Deleuze’s talk ‘Nomad Thought’, at the 1972 Cérisy conference, is a key reference, especially his question ‘Who are the young Nietzscheans of today?’. No conclusive answers yet, but the open question is itself productive.

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There is a long gap between this and the last blog, due to what is often referred to as 'life events', as if the work were separate from the life; this is actually what the R13 'experiment' puts into question, and the subject, often, of the 'interventions militantes' of the issue. In any case, coming out of the pandemic has been, in another stereotype, more difficult than going into it. This says something about the value, the hidden value, of enforced periods of withdrawal, but also more pragmatically, about what has been opened up and closed down by the facility of online communications. In any case, Susana and I applied for and were granted a 12 month 'no-cost extension' to the project, which means that the archival visits and interviews will take place in autumn-winter 2022-23, as well as an interdisciplinary workshop. We now have Daniel Nemenyi working with us, particularly on the technical issues of the website, and he is bringing his considerable expertise with systems to bear upon it, while also building the website for us, with these blogs, and what I have been calling a map of nodes, which indexes all the names in the blogs and connects them.

We have also decided on a new distribution of labour, whereby I focus on the blogs, and Susana intervenes punctually. In terms of the work to do, we need to develop our ideas around what we initially called the 'mapping of concepts', and find a way of doing this; the idea is to track the way in which theoretical concepts constitute a kind of toolbox for doing things with the material, the material in this instance being the analysis of collective equipment, the history of infrastructure, and, on the other hand, ways of thinking about the nature of collective research, the 'libidinal and affective elements' of the process. The discussion between Foucault and Deleuze, 'Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir' is interesting in this respect, since it mentions the idea of theory as a box of tools. Monique David-Ménard picks up on this interestingly in her book Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle.    

So it was good that we decided to aim for two article-length pieces as 'outcomes' of the project. One would be more historically oriented and relate precisely to the deployment of concepts, in 1971-1973, in this conjuncture. The other would take as its starting point the 'Right to Research' piece published in Le Monde in 1975 as a reaction to the State's termination of 'research by contract'; thereafter State funding for research could be granted only to those with a formal academic affiliation (e.g. in a University or the CNRS). This key step in the 'professionalisation of research' can be seen, and was seen, as a good thing, with benefits for the researcher in terms of a solution to precarity. However professionalisation also has effects of bureaucratisation and the normalisation of the process of research. We think this debate speaks to contemporary issues. The current focus on 'research culture' or collaborative research, and impact, tends towards the involvement of non-professionals (non-academics) in research, not as objects but as partners, in a way which might be seen to reverse the process of the State decision of 1975. How should we understand what is at stake here, what are the risks on either side; should the context be assessed in terms of risk? is not risk assessment one of the key drivers and a dominant element in the ideology which underpins the University sector as many others? The issues of money, conjugality, equality will come into play, but, I imagine, quite different ethical, socio-political and subjective factors will be at stake. In other words the apparently pragmatic focus and subject matter opens up substantial theoretical avenues to explore.

For the other article I was thinking of basing it around the topic of 'Nietzsche in France 1973'. This would not be an account of the place of Nietzsche in French theoretical writing in the 1970s, but would take the 'event' of the reading of the Genealogy of Morals by the R13 group as the centre of a series of concentric circles radiating around it, exploring how an encounter with a book like this, and with this particular book, can generate effects, create connections, instigate a 'spin' of the toupie folle. 

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Blog 16 – 25 February 2022

Conversation with Godofredo

Our work conditions and relation to R13

And decision to spin

It’s Friday, 25th February.

We had our first conversation piece and it was with Godofredo Pereira.

Our project continues to spin.

Having started in the Summer 2022, this is my third blog post. Patrick has been writing with an amazing flow and I really enjoy how we are developing this project as we go along.

The alternative title ‘la toupie folle’ or the ‘mad spinning top’ reminds us that the project is not just about content, but also about the devices or mechanisms that we put in place to produce content. ‘The mad spinning top’ as Patrick noted points towards a practice of involuntary spinning and rotation, a surprise element and a rotation. We discussed that I should take over the blog from Patrick now – do the first spin – and we should spin it again when it feels right.

We have some freedom to experiment, which is unusual in academic research. We have proposed to make a pragmatic genealogy of concepts. This means inventing a way to capture the life of concepts beyond the text, exploring its resonances with life, or its social life, as we have called it elsewhere. This requires studying how concepts are appropriated socially and collectively and in turn transformed by the same appropriation. Such project demands paying particular attention to reports, collective discussions, looking at social life and making interviews.

My contribution to the project has been affected by life and work conditions. I recently moved abroad, my family had Covid and I lost a series of research funding applications which would have given me some peace of mind to dedicate to this project and others, and so the last 6 months were particularly difficult.

Patrick and I talked about this and how the different work conditions impact on our project and therefore should - in the spirit of CERFI - be acknowledged and not be hidden from sight. On a parallel thought, it makes me reflect on how the work conditions academics are under now are so different from the CERFI context. For a book project on the CERFI I am working with Godofredo (I will write a separate post about this in the future) I have interviewed a series of CERFI members and in an interview Michel Rostain (who was in charge at some point of the accountancy and the administration of the group) told me that work groups were constituted around specific funded projects and that if there was no money there was no work. It seemed very simple when he said it, unpaid work was not even a question. Indeed, CERFI was created as a research cooperative to allow its members to earn a living, first and foremost, as a group. Today, we spend so much time writing comprehensive funding applications – all of us – that last several months, subject to incredibly competitive panels and yet all of this for a mere application to funding. At its best, these applications turn into veritable collective works in themselves. After all you discuss what topic is worthy or not of study today and why and hence it’s a pity when you receive a no. But indeed, for some of us the work is already in motion. To use our own terms, it has already a social life and thus it continues …

Going back to Recherches 13 -the fact that the conditions of work and the tensions lived in the research process enter so explicitly in the text of R13 is a value. The inclusion in the issue of the dialogues between the researchers allow us to understand with great insight the stakes involved. How deeply involved the ‘researchers’ were affectively with the research process or research group and how affect and research were intertwined.

The conversation with Godofredo was the first time we discussed La Toupie Folle with someone else. Godofredo has been working on CERFI for the last 5 years on a book project looking at CERFI at large and particularly how it experimented with analysis in the programming of oneself and collective equipment. Presenting the project to him was great in the sense in which he knows the material very well and we could exchange ideas and received advise and suggestions, but he also had good insights in terms of the research process and working methods. We plan to transcribe the conversation and publish it under ‘dialogue pieces’ soon.

Summary of the conversation with Godofredo Pereira:

1. The manner in which Fourquet and Murard read Braudel is different from the way Guattari and Deleuze use it in AOE

2. It’s important to make a genealogy of desire / need in Lacan in relation to its use in R13

3. we should think more about ‘the mad spinning top’ and incorporate elements of rotation in our collective methodology, radicalise it as working method

4. how do we refer to the work produced on R13, who is the author, CERFI, R13, the genealogy group? – think about this and perhaps write a piece about it. Patrick remarked how he had the same question writing the blog posts.

5. Godofredo gave us the idea of tracing which concepts used in the research articles of R13 enter into the militant discussions included in chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, or which concepts live in these militant discussions; qua have life outside theory. He gave an example of his work with students when they go to fieldwork.

(Transcription to come of this conversation.)

It seems to me that the dialogue as a working method is also another ‘spinning’ device…

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Meeting between Patrick and Susana in London.

Transfer notes from the meeting here

Reflections on research and life

-- writing in progress -

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(trying to write this to self-reflect on the work) -- incomplete

This is my first blog entry 5 months into the beginning of the project. Patrick has been working more diligently than I have. We have created this way of working together whereby we can work together being apart. We have a shared dropbox which means that whenever Patrick or I change something in one of the files the other one receives a notification. Sometimes that prompts me to see what the changes are and my mind drifts back into the project each time this happens. We also meet periodically either in person or on teams. When we meet in person we might speak about other things that do not relate the project directly but that inform our way of working. This has been a difficult term. This is the third year of the covid now and we are all trying to adjust to new ways of life. Recherches 13 and the philosophical, political and social conjuncture that surrounds it does not cease to become a site of fascination for me.

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So I have been ‘carrying on with that’ by looking at the reception and criticisms of R13 and R14 by Rancière, Linhart etc, and this is reflected in the ‘Reception and Critique’ dossier. In the meantime, and in the interim between the last blog entry and this one, have instigated another dossier on FHAR.

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Back to Pragmatic Genealogy after a bit of a lull during which I’ve been still obsessively excavating the ‘Klossowski dossier’. Other factors in ‘affective life’ have also intervened. One more general insight occurred to me – I met with my friend Gavin Bowd last week, in the Coach and Horses in Soho. Gavin is a Communist, or at least knows a lot about the history of the PCF. I described the R13 project to him, and he suggested that it had some resonance with the Nouveaux philosophes! What a horrible thought! That R13 could be aligned with what I think of as a kneejerk reaction to Marxism, and part of the dismantling of the Marxist framework. But reading Fourquet’s R14 there are certainly resonances. It reminds me that I should carry on with that.

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Since the last entry I have, true to what I said, been extending the ‘Klossowski dossier’. This has included accumulating the bibliography and sporadically parachuting in to the key texts, which include Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, La Monnaie vivante, but also critical essays by Deleuze and Foucault (also Blanchot and Lyotard), and the Klossowski-Deleuze correspondence. It is difficult to get hold of a French edition of La Monnaie vivante, which, despite its brevity is signalled as a major, unsurpassable work by Foucault and Deleuze alike. But I have downloaded a rtf version of it and have the translation, Living Currency, published by Bloomsbury in 2017. This also includes ‘Sade and Fourier’, a translation of a more or less contemporary (1970) essay in the psychoanalytic (4th group) review Topique, special issue on Fourier. The relevance for R13 is indirect, OK, but generally, feeding through Anti-Œdipe, R13 relies on a ‘theory of intensities’ which stems from Klossowski, via his readings of Nietzsche, but also Sade. This connects with another of my research tasks which is to write a chapter on Tel Quel, Sade and modernism. Klossowski’s ‘Sade ou le philosophe scélérat’ was originally a Tel Quel lecture from 1966. Plus Fourquet’s text in R14 is directly influenced and informed by Klossowskian theory, even if K is named only once; this revolves specifically around the term ‘suppôt’ as outlined above. See the dossier for more on this.

Coincidentally came across a chapter by Stuart Elden in M. Dillon and A. Neal (eds.), Foucault on Politics, Security, and War (Macmillan 2008) called ‘Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as collaborateur’ which has detailed discussion of R13. Have downloaded it from Stuart’s blog page and put it in the ‘Documents’ folder. It looks indispensable. It looks like it is included in Elden’s The Birth of Power.

Last week – borrowed JF Lyotard’s Économie libidinale (1974) from the Maughan library. It has no index, but the usual quick leafing turned up a reference to Fourquet’s R14, p. 123., which relates to the sense of guilt and ressentiment of the (Marxist) militant ideal. There is extensive discussion of Klossowski, including to La Monnaie vivante, pp. 17-115.

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Yesterday, at work again, and finished the draft translation of the ‘Presentation’. My plan is now to go through it and annotate, picking out, as ‘translation problems’, or as translator’s notes, the salient problematics or conceptual nodes that might merit further discussion, or suggest ways in to what is emerging as the nexus of theory and libido. We could call it the libidinal economy of theory.

In the meantime, following up on a slight reference in the Presentation, going to do some work on a ‘Klossowski dossier’. Why? 2 reasons: the term/concept ‘suppôt’, derived from his work (Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, and La Monnaie vivante) is important in R13 and especially R14, for Fourquet. It is equivalent to the ‘subject’ but avoids the Cartesian legacy and suggests something more like ‘henchman’… So here is a concept at work. Second, while only a minor mention to some extent, the more one looks the more Klossowski’s influence appears crucial for a whole range of thinkers, inc. Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard… This seeps in to R13 in the form of a ‘theory of intensities’.

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A few ideas from yesterday, following a discussion with Susana:

In the ‘Presentation’ Fourquet/Murard contrast the tendency for some, post 1968, to depart for the Cévennes to set up rural communities on a pre-capitalist artisanal model, with the will, within CERFI, to experiment with urban community fully embedded in the capitalist mode of production etc. It strikes me then that the geography of CERFI’s different locations is an important factor in this ‘urban community’; the location of the CERFI office is thus important, and the distribution of the participants’ apartments – Boulevard Beaumarchais, Rue Baudricourt etc.

One of the questions posed by our discussion yesterday revolved around the extent to which the CERFI/Genealogy group, the ‘toupie folle’ ‘succeeded’, or not, in what they refer to as a group analytic practice; in other words did their response to this, or the response to it, extend beyond a consciousness and and recording of the consciousness of the conflicts and ‘rapports de force’ which came to light? Was there an ‘analytic practice’ of the kind that was exercised at La Borde, for example? If so, what did it look like. One way of thinking about this is to conceive of the ‘widening out’ of individual problems or issues to more global issues in the socius, in the light of the deleuzeguattari idea of desire being directly plugged into the socius (i.e. bracketing the family). It’s true that in the ‘interventions militantes’ there is nothing really in the way of oedipanization. Problems and conflicts are written as symptoms of wider social conflicts or relations of force. Another way of asking this is to ask if transversality, seen as a displacement of the threshold assumptions of the super-ego (acc. to Guattari) was in operation?

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Re-reading Fourquet and Murard’s preface, with a view to adding to the ‘Index of Concepts’ on which Susana has been working, and drawing inspiration from the ‘writing idea’ which she added to the folder yesterday, a shift of perspective occurred to me: the volume of R13 is as noted at the outset, heterogenous, in terms of its different sections and typography. I had been thinking of the chapters as the main, substantial element of the dossier, and the ‘interventions militantes’ as parenthetical, supplementary additions. The other perspective would be to see the primary objective of R13 as its investigation and experimentation of the ‘militant libido’, or of the ‘libidinal practice’ of the group’s research. Why? Because in this period – post-1968, of a near ‘police state’, and the ‘underground’ activities of the Gauche proletairienne etc. militancy is at stake. To think of it, as R13 do, as an ideal, as invested with ‘fantasmes’, and as ‘libidinal’, is to bring to bear Nietzschean and Deleuze-Guattari perspectives upon it, but also to narrate the living of the contradictions it entails. A libidinal practice at a collective level which does not resolve the contradictions inherent in the group. Bion’s work in Experiences in Groups is relevant. What are the ‘basic assumptions’ at stake? When does R13 operate as a group on the basic assumption of fight or flight, when as a group form coupling, when as a work group? Fourquet’s discussions in R14, of the ‘idéal historique’ also confirm this emphasis on the ‘rapports de force’ and ‘libidinal’ underpinnings of ‘theory’ and ‘critique’, and the structuring of R14 does too. So we could think of ‘collective equipment’ etc, the ‘object’ of R13’s enquiry, as secondary to the primary objective, to explore and analyse the libidinal practice of collective research and critique the ‘militant’ ideal or fantasy. Of course this structural pattern – primary object/secondary object is not fixed; it’s a revolving mirror; at high speed the objects blur, as in a ‘toupie folle’.

Later in the day – in the course of translating the ‘Presentation’ – a really good way of getting thoroughly into the material, it struck me – what are the ‘libidinal’ components or coefficients of our own relation to this object, the object being R13, but also the whole set of relations and problematics that it brings into play. This relation has to be thought in the context of the political and libidinal avenues open to ‘us’ now, that is, in 2021, which are different, one would think, from those available in 1972/73. When Fourquet talks about the shaking up of organisational possibilities in the ‘rout’ of after May, and the options open – go and live in the Cévennes, become a professional manager, etc., it provokes the insight that, as a University academic, ‘we’ are ‘already’ professional managers; thus there is a certain amount of … cynicism, kidding oneself, having one’s cake and eating it, I don’t know, involved here. Double consciousness, at least. In any case, one mode of the libidinal relation to the object of R13 is nostalgia, melancholy, mourning. The loss of a (virtual) life which exists only as a possibility at that moment. Melancholy of the left. I remember a conversation with Sanja about this. Walter Benjamin as its thinker and witness.

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Via a text by Deleuze on the ‘New Philosophy’ in Two Regimes of Madness (yes, reading in translation), a reference to BH Lévy’s Barbarie à visage humain in which, in a critique of Anti-Oedipe, the author accuses CERFI of racism. Also a ref. to the ‘Co-ire’ issue.

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Taking a step back from R13, and attempting to identify the broad issues that are at stake in it and around it (a move facilitated in part by the indexing work on names, but also by fairly random reading, especially of the ‘interventions militantes’), I think it may be possible to propose the following as overarching propositions:

R13 is a collective project, the work of a group. However this group is not cohesive or coherent; the fractures, lines of dissent and conflict, the differences, styles and modes of writing are not melted into a seamless unity. There are indications within the volume of how the process of its composition was somewhat chaotic; specific sections are authored by different individuals or pairs of individuals within the group; some bits of text ended up not being included. Moreover, the group was not without its conflicts and hierarchies, with the ‘Genealogy’ group consisting of Fourquet, Murard and Vernet-Straggiotti (with Querrien and Lévy as somewhat peripheral or intermediary) having more power and authority. The point is that the ‘collective’ work of the group is characterised by a play or relation of forces, and these are foregrounded and made explicit as part of the ‘report’ itself. In other words, R13 is an example of a collective work in which the conflicts implicit in that collective are exhibited.

Second point: these conflicts extend into what elsewhere we have called the ‘libidinal and affective dimension’. But what this really means is that the work is inseparable from the ‘micropolitics’ of money, time, sex, childcare, love and hate, which affect the lives of all of the adherents. This dimension is not like some kind of background or autobiographical subtext; it is fundamentally part of the dynamics of power and the politics of the time. In the terms of R13, this dimension in that of desire, desire in its interaction with power. When we say that R13 is a case study of the ‘pragmatic genealogy of concepts’, I think what this means is that R13 exemplifies the idea of theory (concepts) being libidinal objects, objects of libidinal and affective investment, objects and vectors of desire. This in itself is a manifestation and actualisation, so to speak, of the (Guattarian) notion of transversality, and the post-May 1968 shattering of militant leftism into multiple avenues of ‘micropolitical’ struggle (as opposed to: the Althusserian primacy of theory; the dogmatism of the Party and of Maoists).

Both of these factors relate closely to a third point, which is that R13 manifests a tension between theory and… not practice, but ‘deployment’, perhaps. The R13 authors are hyper-aware of their relationship to the triumvirate of Foucault-Deleuze-Guattari (FDG), who they call the ‘grosses têtes’, of the ‘risk’ of ‘vulgarising’ the ideas of the latter. FDG’s interventions appear as separate from the work of the group as such. There are multiple references to the genealogy group’s consultation of texts and lectures by FDG, and some resentment, for example, that FDG, Guattari in particular, is not more involved in the Genealogy group. There are certain allegiances, with e.g. MTVS seeming to be known as a Deleuzian, while others are more aligned with Guattari, or Foucault. There is some discussion of the ‘ownership’ or provenance of the ideas and concepts. Fourquet is perhaps on a slightly different footing, with more authority, but even here, in the discussion with Guattari, there is the sense that the former ‘hasn’t got it’ (i.e. the concept of anti-production and axiomatic of capitalism). In the FDG interventions, especially around the question of ‘catégories logiques’, there is a kind of supervisor/student relation, wherein FDG seem to suggest something like, ‘this is not the right way of conceptualizing collective equipment’ etc. Again this is upfront, and R13 thus appears to be something like an inverted architecture (like the Pompidou Centre), with all of its workings on the outside. So even though FDG promote the idea of theory as a toolbox, and the collective deployment of concepts, when it comes to it it’s not as easily done as said. The relation between theory and ‘practice’ is thus itself determined by the play of forces, as in the Nietzschean ‘genealogical’ method.

Other overarching or broad issues:

R13 is funded by the State; what it is not is either PCF orthodoxy (Althusser), nor Gauche proletairienne militancy.

It appears in a conjuncture, post May 1968, of a dominant and authoritarian State (the ‘police conception of history’ described by Kristin Ross in May 1968 and its Afterlives) alongside tendencies toward renewal and reform (‘new society’, Vincennes, the funding of CERFI projects by the Mission de la recherche urbaine, CORDES etc). This is particularly schizophrenic (in a weak sense).

It is symptomatic of a decisive shift away from Marxist theory, especially that articulated by Althusser, instigated in the main through the reference to Nietzsche and genealogy (relations of force, the play of desire). Foucault and Deleuze are key players in this regard.

There is a trajectory across the issue, from the discussion of the ‘representations’ of collective equipment (e.g. urbanism), to the history of ‘territories’, to the analysis of the discourse of French planification as such.

Potential outputs, then, might include an article on the ‘moment of genealogy’ as evidenced in R13, and another on the ‘social life of concepts’ (to adopt the AHRC project’s title), which would specifically focus on the ‘interventions militantes’ and how they construe the way in which the concepts discussed are ‘lived’ by the women in particular, with issues of personal formation, conjugality, desire, love and hate…

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After a hiatus, due to work on other projects – translation of Pierre Fédida, Social Life of Concepts reviewer responses, editing of ‘Proust-Machine’ chapter with Tom Baldwin, work on Deleuze-Guattari-Proust for the Italian Journal of Semiotics issue, Barthes and Fragments journal issue, Tel Quel and Sade chapter, La Personne en Médécine paper and Critical Medical Humanities dossier, etc!… now returning to R13.

I realise that the notes on the ‘Medical Equipment’ chapter are unfinished, as are the notes on Chapter 5, ‘Le Discours du Plan’. My plan is to look at the ‘Educational Equipment’ section, return to finish off ‘Medical Equipment’, then ‘Green Spaces’ and ‘The revolt of the mètèques’.

To note that the preface tells us that ‘Medical Equipment’ was written by Lion (Murard), Marie-Thérèse (Vernet-Straggiotti) and Françoise (Lévy); ‘Education’ by Anne (Querrien) and Alain (Fabre); ‘Espaces verts’ by Gilles (Châtelet).

Educational Equipment

To note first of all a substantial focus by Anne on education, especially primary schools.

See Stuart Elden’s post on this. Anne is the author of the CERFI report: Généalogie des équipements collectifs [1] L’école primaire – Anne Querrien, Fontenay-sous-Bois: CERFI, 1975. Funded by grant number 73 01 503.

Elden says that: ‘Querrien was a former doctoral student of Henri Lefebvre’s sociology programme at Nanterre, and general secretary of CERFI. This study also appeared as L’ensaignement 1. L’école primaire, Recherches no 23, 1976; and its themes are reprised as L’école mutuelle: Une pédagogie trop efficace? Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2005, with a preface by Isabelle Stengers’.

Pedagogy, education, and children is in effect a substantial thematic right across Recherches. The first 5 non-thematised issues of Recherches, from 1966 through to 1967 feature regular focus on it, including contributions from Fernand Deligny, Fernand Oury, René Lourau (on self-management; Lourau’s contribution to R1 merits reading as it gives an autobiographical history of the author’s engagements with the different currents; Lourau aligned with ‘institutional analysis’ and co-authored with Georges Lapassade); material from a journal written by pupils at a Dijon lycée (R2); F. Oury on Freinet (obituary) (R3-4); issues 6-7 on ‘enfance aliénée’; issue 9 on institutional analysis and pedagogy; issues 18, 20 and 24 convened by Deligny (Cahiers de l’immuable); issue 22 ‘Co-ire (Schérer and Hocquenguem); issue 23 which is Querrien’s ‘Ensaignement’; R27 on crèches (Liane Mozère); 37 (Fou d’enfance);

R1 mentions a ‘Commission de Pédagogie Institutionelle’ among the groups affiliated to FGERI. R2 mentions a ‘Groupe d’Education thérapeutique’, directed by Fernand Oury and a ‘stage pédagogique’ involving Deligny, F. Oury, Michel Rostain(g), Prisca Bachelet…, a ‘Club pédagogique’;

N.B. that the thematics of psychiatry, ‘alienation’ and childhood overlap in Deligny’s work, since he is pioneering in the treatment of ‘enfants arriérés’. Also in Lourau, it seems, as the ‘institution’ is a common focus.

N.B. that Anne Querrien’s father, Max Querrien, was a ‘haut fonctionnaire d’Etat’, directeur de l'architecture au ministère des Affaires culturelles de 1963 à 1968; then ‘conseiller d’Etat’ from 1970. He contributed to R6 on architectural programming.

There is thus scope to open an ‘education dossier’, but this might go beyond the limits of the focus on R13.

The ‘Educative equipment’ section opens with epigraphs from Michelet and Bismarck (!) which stress the importance of education for politics.

From the rise of urban centres in the 12th century primary schools become an instrument of the subjugation of the children of the people, with the mastery of the Church. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a special tax was instituted to support the creation of catholic and protestant schools; this was the first time that the State got involved in education – in the ‘production of educational equipment’; this is qualified as ‘passer tous les enfants au même moule’; in 1724 a ‘royal intendant’ was responsible for their functioning. Schools thus initially under the mastery of the Church, but soon became part of the ‘rouages d’appareil d’Etat’. Note the Althusserian terms here. The aim was to bring children into the body of the State and citizenship. Fines for parents who did not send their children to school. Notes the extreme diversity and apparent chaos of the system. ‘L’école est avant tout l’espace dans lequel se déploient des châtiments corporels permanents, l’espace de Sade, l’espace de l’instituteur (à venir).’

Enlightenment authorities (Diderot, Turgot, Mirabeau) insisting on the necessity of uniformity. Turgot: universal instruction is the basis of an ‘Etat policé’. Children taken out of the family to be brought up in common at the expense of the State.

Goes on to say that this is the basis of what will eventually become law with the development of a real ‘appareil d’Etat’ across the whole national territory; post-Revolutionary projects: normalising and moralising ‘quadrillage’; ‘imposition d’un ration uniforme’. Uniformization and rationalisation (thus the term ‘normale’ to designate the schools who will train the teachers). This is referred to as ‘la machine à former des citoyens français’, but the different attempts to do this 1789-1833 failed, and the church regained power. The July Revolution (1830) was a popular revolt against the Church in favour of the ‘méthode mutuelle’.

Quadrillage idéologique imposed by ‘reterritorialisation’ of University, which ensures homogeneity and ‘surveillance.’ Guizot – Prime Minister and architect of national education system. Creation of a system of surveillance via the inspectors. Adult education. Sexual segregation. Creation of ‘maternelles’ or ‘salles d’asile’.

‘Ainsi s’est constitué en deux années, d’un seul coup, l’appareil qui va recoder aux niveaux national étatique (celui de la carrière de l’inspecteur national), départmental et communal, les flux de futurs travailleurs, détachés de la famille par le travail industriel.’

The ‘Manifesto of the 60’ in 1864

Summary – ‘équipment unique’ – lieu institutionnel producteur d’assujettissements’ – injtection of the State and hierarchy – ‘figures les plus redoutables de la territorialisation’

The principal emphases of the education section are on the homogenisation of the educational apparatus and the role of the State in this. Suggestions of the ‘territorialisation’ and ‘subjection’ of the populace.

Commentaries on some of the ‘interventions militantes’**

Anne’s ‘intervention militante’ pp. 159-61: Anne writes of the parallel ‘series’ of the ‘genealogy of collective equipment’ project and her own ‘social insertion’, in which issues of education and formation are a primary concern. At stake are her ‘education’ i.e. her academic work (at Nanterre? Sciences Po?) and her decision to leave to ‘collectivise’ her ‘intelligence’, and capacity to write etc. Seems to be conscious of the class divisions between herself (daughter of a State functionary) and the disadvantaged. Can ‘intelligence’ be collectivized, and destroy intelligence as an individual qualification? Anne says this was what was at stake in UNEF, the Movement of the 22nd March, FGERI and the Opposition de gauche. All opposed to the PCF and the State it represented. She contrasts the ‘democratic’ struggle against the State apparatus and the ‘partial struggles on a heterogeneity of objects of investment’, including education. She says that problems of education and formation had been left out of focus. She refers to the law of July 1971 on ‘formation’ (the right of the waged to permanent formation or what would now be called professional development); she says it has become a ‘good object’, but communal organisations lack a profound reflection on this and are thus often obliged to reject those who ‘do not know how to work’.

A refers to a ‘Formation’ group, which has few funds; it has a small contract with an archaic University in Grenoble; but this group is not very much ‘coded’ within CERFI; there is a ‘desire to write’; (‘chez les femmes’); in this context, the Genealogy group appears as a close ‘imaginary site’, disconnected from the ‘necessity’ of permanent formation. It was in the Genealogy group that the relation between ‘executor and executed’, and ‘persecutor-persecuted’ ‘spoke’ itself. Anne says that everyone relied on Marie-Thérèse to assuage the blockage of François and Lion. But MT went on holiday to Germany, pleading her wish to not be part of this and her love of conjugality. She was delegated the part on logical categories, ‘toujours deleuzienne imaginaire’.

But MT leaves, and Anne has to serve. The MLF has not fixed anything. Anne says she has moved to Rue Baudricourt and there are now two ‘women theorists’ (with Francoise). Anne is absorbed in the sexual, conjugal, homosexual-masculine problematic and accords more importance to theory insofar as she sees herself as inferior to the ‘specialists’ (Foucault, Deleuze), who are nevertheless not attuned to the political practice (ref. to relations with the Gauche proletairienne and the Grandmontagne meeting).

So – a branch of FHAR was ‘catapulted’ into Cerfi by the ‘éclatement’of FHAR – the strategy of Christian (Hennion)? Comes into the Genealogy group for the preparation of the ‘drague’ issue. The group suddenly becomes invested by transsexual research which falls to the group of women; can sex itself be deterritorialised?

Marie-Thérèse’s ‘intervention militante’, pp. 175-79, ‘La révolte des mètèques’ (the title suggests those who were not formal citizens of the Greek city, i.e. those working in the periphery of CERFI.) is an extremely interesting reflection on the internal politics of CERFI and the conflicts that arise within the collective, as well as on the nature of the relation to ‘theory’. She thinks about the ways in which the work they are doing is really collective, and if so, is this not simply ‘in the service’ of or in continuity with capitalism. While she concludes that the usual answer would be that the collective work is not about democratic majority or the ‘law of numbers’, but rather about connected and fragmented practices which are ‘transversally’ joined up, she thinks that this is susceptible to produce conflicts. Money is a key aspect of this – CERFI did not practice a ‘value’ system, where money was given to people for a certain amount of work or time; rather, it was distributed according to ‘desire’ (not according to need). Nevertheless, ‘clans’ did surface in CERFI, especially as the ‘Genealogy’ group became more important; there was an apparent division between the ‘permanent’ people and the ‘peripheral’ people or the ‘métèques’. She mentions a proposal from Guattari to transform the distribution of funds to a minumum wage and a collective fund for childcare, parking etc. But with the Genealogy group, Lion (Murard) and François (Fourquet) and would hand out cheques. A certain ‘despotism’ emerged, which also was in evidence in decisions about texts, about what to include and what not to. Earlier she had referred to this as an ‘ordinary fascism’, with reference to the 1969 film ‘Hunting Scenes in Bavaria’. The relationship to the Ministry is also at stake; she makes it clear that it’s not a ‘hold-up’, i.e. just completing whatever needed to be done for the Ministry; there was an investment in it, and the sense of a ‘subversive’ work. She doubts however if this ‘subversion’; is it not just a cover for not doing anything? i.e., perhaps, for the abandonment of militant activity. On the relation to ‘theory’ she asks if Anti-Oedipus functions as a doctrine. She says she does find it annoying that sometimes the language of Anti-Oedipus, - ‘multiplicity of flux’ etc, is used as a dogmatic, empty, and normative injunction. She wonders whether they are vulgarising and ‘selling’ Deleuze and Foucault (mentioning an accusation from the latter). Has Anti-Oedipus become a norm? if there are repressive norms and non-repressive norms, how does one tell the difference? There are no rules, but only ‘relations of force’, authority, opposition, and so on.

The point to draw out of all of this is that these conflicts and doubts are brought to the fore and articulated. There is only desire, the socius, and relations of force. The idea of consensus, of objective work, of a model of value and agreement is out of the window. Yes, there are conflicts, yes, theory is a doctrine, yes.

Marie-Thérèse also writes the next ‘intervention militante’ (191-94), where the relation to theory is also the primary topic. She is ware of a kind of hierarchy, with the ‘grosses têtes’ Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari constituting a kind of ‘tribunal’, something like a ‘soutenance’, especially around Wednesday meetings which MT succeeded in abolishing. She mentions Félix’s intention to abolish the ‘privileges’ attached to the theoretician and make theory into a series of tools for us, but the theory/work division persisted; theory was not ‘socialized’; hierarchy was maintained, with the ‘grosses têtes’ simply apposing their signature(s). She mentions the difficulty of working with the concept of genealogy and the sense that this was not what they were doing; Foucault’s ‘Hommage à Hyppolite‘, and a conversation with Deleuze about finality and usage were important; Anne was ‘branché sur’ Foucault’s Archeology; conflicts around where the ideas of ‘genealogy’ came from. So as well as a hierarchy, there is a sense of ownership of concepts brought to light here.

Third ‘intervention militante’ from Marie-Thérèse (257); Conjugality and territoriality in the group. A frenetic, ‘schizophrenic’ production of texts. The story of Lion’s wife Catherine alone with the baby who threatens to leave with some other guy but he is involved with the production of the ‘gros pavé’. The group ‘closed on itself’. Here the instances of desire and the ‘distribution’ so to speak of desire make themselves felt, and are articulated as such. This is especially pertinent insofar as the volume ends with the question of the family. How do conjugality and collective work function in relation to one another?

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Now looking at Chapter 5 of R13, ‘Le Discours du Plan’. Will come back to the various introductory parts which include a discussion between Deleuze, Foucault and Guattari and a subsequent summary around ‘logical categories’ of collective equipment, then ‘interventions militantes’ from Marie-Thérèse. The various sections thereafter go through each of the 6 plans.

Understanding and documenting this discussion involves setting out the history of the French State’s plans and the administrative structures involved. After several unsuccessful attempts to find a digital version of the ONU Bulletin No.5 on ‘Installation et services collectifs’, which R13 say is the origin of the idea and expression ‘équipment collectif’ (eventually ordered from the BN reproduction dept., but too expensive to copy), I found digital versions of each of the 6 plans via a French gov website celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first, the ‘Monnet Plan’. These are the documents to which R13 refer, although they look at the sixth via its publication by 10/18 (surprising instance of 10/18 publishing State documents!).

So, although the term ‘collective equipment’ relates to the use of the term ‘collective services’ (‘services collectifs) in the United Nations report from 1953 (Bulletin no 5 of the ‘review’ Habitation, Urbanisme et Aménagement des campagnes) R13 focuses in the main on the 6 ‘plans’ (1: 1946; 2: 1954-1957; 3: 1958-1961; 4: 1962-1965; 5: 1966-1970; 6: 1971-1975).

These ‘plans’ have their origin in the immediate post-war when de Gaulle was advised by Jean Monnet to draw up a strategy for economic renewal following the war. [See Cobban 1965, pp. 218, 244 ff].

[Note added later: John Ardagh, The New France: De Gaulle and After, orig. Secker and Warburg 1968: ‘the war offered the French a breathing space in which to re-think the future’ (19); ‘the most important of these groups was formed around Jean Monnet in Washington, and out of it grew the ‘Plan’ which has played such a vital role in the French revival’ (20). ‘belief in expansion and progress’; ‘The innovating technocrat began to come to the fore, in place of the conserving bureaucrat’; De Gaulle’s ‘high-handedness’ and resignation of liberal ministers e.g. Edgard Pisani (first Minister of Equipment); fruits or prosperity were not shared, leading to greater social division and failure to devote resources to social progress; May 1968; Monnet’s first Plan for long-term recovery, aided by Marshall Plan (from 1947); describes the Plan as a ‘voluntary and pragmatic association between State and industry’ and points to the ‘specifically French’ element of the ‘technocrat’; ref. to nightmare vision of technocrats in Godard’s Alphaville; the main breeding grounds of the technocrats are the ‘Grands écoles’ e.g. Ecole Polytechnique or Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) – ‘Some even elevate this (idealistic faith) into a kind of philosophy; technology is for them a key to human happiness, and an elite possessed of this secret will guide and save the world.’

Emergence here (22nd August) of the concept of technocracy; resonances with the arguments of Simondon.

Ardagh mentions that the Secretariat du Plan was based in a private house ‘in the shadow of the Ste Clothilde church on the Left Bank’ (41). Mentions that the Third and Fourth Plans ‘widened the range to include social needs, such as welfare and housing’ (46)

A lot more on the development of industry, lacks detail on culture. ]

The first plan or ‘Plan Monnet’, titled ‘Premier Plan de Modernisation et d’équipment’, focused on industrial strategy in the context of the ‘dilemma’: ‘modernisation or decadence’. The Commissariat Générale du Plan was established in 1946 to take this forward, with Jean Monnet as the lead. The report itself is in the form of a letter addressed by the Commissariat to the ‘advisory group’ or ‘Conseil’. It stresses the need for modernisation, for economic stability, and ‘collective effort’ (involving the support of Unions). It has a strong rhetorical force, arguing that modernisation is not only necessary but inevitable if France is to be a serious competitor on the global stage (that is among developed States). The problem is set out at the outset – unless France develops its own resources it will reply on imports and its financial reserves will run out. The 4 objectives it sets out are: 1) to develop national production and exports 2) increase the revenue from work 3) to ensure full employment of ‘manpower’ (main d’œuvre) 4) to elevate the quality of life of the population and the conditions of the habitats of the population. It’s worth noting that while the consultations for the national plan have to a large extent been accomplished, those on the ‘territoires d’outre-mer’ have not.

The Plan then notes that social equipment will involve further investments in 1947. The main emphasis throughout is on economic productivity (in comparison to other states which during the war had a considerable industrialisation e.g. the U.S.). The work of repair necessitates a substantial investment, particularly as concerns the ‘centres nécessaires à la vie ouvrière’. If the fundamental task is to elevate the conditions of existence of the population, there is only one efficient means: ‘Or, il n'y a qu'une façon réelle d'améliorer le standard de vie insuffisant d'aujourd'hui: c'est de produire davantage’. Immigration and the extension of the working day are only immediate measures. This (fairly cynical) perspective – more productivity for the same number of hours – is to be attained by better machines and methods. In other words, from a Marxist perspective, the worker is seen uniquely as a tool, as a ‘force of production’. Previously, it is noted, French workers produced about a ¼ less than those in the US.

Overall the emphasis on ‘equipment’ arises as part of the problem and solution – France is economically unproductive compared to other nations. In order to be competitive it has to improve the productivity of its production i.e. the value produced by each hour of work. It can’t rely on immigration (cheaper labour?) or on more hours of work, thus the machines themselves must be improved. Equipment is closely related to the machine. It is a question of ‘rénovér l'appareil et les méthodes’. E.g. in this proposition: ‘la masse d'équipements qu'elle exigera sous forme de machines, de constructions immobilières et de travaux de génie civil, sera nécessairement très importante’ (23). And this sentence is interesting: ‘A l'intérieur, il faudrait plus de travail pour produire une même quantité de marchandises et de services. La population devrait donc ou travailler plus longtemps, et cela d'une façon permanente, ou voir ses conditions d'existence considérablement aggravées, tandis que les autres pays continueraient de progresser sur la voie du bien-être.’ The first Plan thus establishes a kind of equation between the length of the working day and social conditions, and ‘well-being’. The problem is also put in terms of the productivity of e.g. 4 hours of French work vis a vis 1 hour of US work i.e. productivity per hour of work. Monnet seems to suggest that such a situation, along with the consequent lowering of salaries is susceptible to produce a ‘reaction’, hinting at the (Marxist) analysis that capital gauges working conditions against the possibility of social revolt.

Consumption is envisaged as a consequence of an increased productivity of labour i.e. it is the necessary resourcing for the labour force. ‘On peut discuter s'il n'est pas préférable de développer ou de créer telle industrie de transformation plutôt que telle autre, quels niveaux il faut se proposer pour les différentes productions agricoles, avec quelle rapidité doit se faire la reconstruction, etc ... , mais il est évident que l'expansion de la production, dans quelque direction qu'elle soit orientée, exigera des quantités considérablement accrues de charbon, d'électricité, d'acier et de ciment, une agriculture suffisamment mécanisée pour assurer à la population le ravitaillement necessaire et enfin des-moyens de transport proportionnés’.

Despite what was said earlier, the specific plans for each element point to the need for immigrant workers, especially since the departure of prisoners of war will affect the level of manpower! Each of the sections on the different areas of production underline the lack of manpower. Drawing on ‘non-active sectors’ (including ‘travail féminin’) is proposed as part of the solution, also including Algerian immigrants. All of this is on the basis of a 48 hour week, i.e. with an increase from 40 hours.

There is an important footnote on p. 85: ‘Le programme d'équipement social (hôpitaux, écoles, crèches, etc...) n'a pas encore été précisé, les dépenses de cette catégorie sont comprises dans la ligne “autres investissements” et ne sont isolées jusqu'à présent que pour 1947’. These ‘other investments’ are footnoted as: ‘Bâtiments et équipements publics divers (routes départementales, écoles, mairies, etc.), équipement social (hôpitaux, hygiène scolaire, lutte antituberculeuse, terrains de sports, etc.) et recherche scientifique’. These are costed at 80 million francs.

Consumption has to be regulated, the report goes on to say, so that the French do not consume more than they produce and allow for a certain amount of investment (saving): ‘L'exécution du plan a également pour condition que les investissements somptuaires et mêmes les investissements utiles, mais moins utiles que ceux prévus par le plan, soient différés’. ‘Il s'agit de faire en sorte que la production se relève 'plus vite que la consommation, afin de dégager une marge suffisante pour réaliser des investissements et des exportations plus importants qu'avant-guerre’. There is thus a sort of equation between production and non-production and consumption, and the global market. Consumption has to be limited, ‘si les Français le veulent’.

As noted above, throughout the report the notion of equipment is used in reference to the physical machines and raw product needed to increase productivity. Social equipment is an extension of this. Thus the idea and expression ‘social equipment’ is introduced as a kind of adjunct or extension of economic or industrial, agricultural equipment.

The commission for ‘Consumption and Social Modernisation’ entails, says the report, the examination of the ‘human and social problems posed by the Plan’. There is an acknowledgment that the provision of ‘medico-social’ equipment is insufficient. There are plans for schools, hospitals and habitations (collective ones are proscribed). P. 197 gives composition of the commission for Consumption and Social Modernisation.

Moving to R13’s analysis of the first report, we see that they underline the aspect of ‘reconstitution’, after the damages incurred by the war, and the orientation of the plan around the notion of equipment. They cite the introductory statement: ‘la reconstitution des outillages et équipments publics et privés endommagés du fait des événements de guerre’. Although the emphasis of the plan is on economic productivity, the Plan mentions in the last para. of its introduction, that: ‘L'équipement social, en raison de ses insuffisances actuelles n’a pas moins besoin d’être développé que l’équipment économique, essentiellement visé par le décret constitutive et l’un des Commissions de Modernisation a été spécialement chargée d’en dresser le Plan. Dès maintenant, une place a été réservée aux hôpitaux, écoles, terrains de sports, etc. parmi les investissements à réaliser en 1947.’

R13 underline, however, that ‘social equipment’ is subordinated to economic equipment (and that a similar proposition is included in the 6th plan, in 1971!, i.e. it is the lowest of priorities): ‘La base de départ sera ainsi créée pour entreprendre, dans une seconde étape, la transformation des conditions de vie et notamment du logement’.

The ‘special commission’ mentioned above is the ‘Commission pour la Consommation et Modernisation sociale’, the purpose of which, according to the Plan (as noted above), was to examine the ‘human and social side of the problems posed by the Plan’ (173). R13 pick out the mention of ‘medico-social’ equipment and stress the rapidity with which this is passed over. They note that there is nothing on education (presumably Universities).

The analysis in R13 identifies four related terms: economic equipment – production/social equipment­­–consumption. R13 thus identify the implicit idea here of ‘equipment of consumption’.

Further documents are identified, including the ‘report’ on the plan from the ‘first semester’ 1947, which includes a chapter on ‘public equipment’. Figures are given for the investments in each of several sectors, including ‘equipment social’, distinct from ‘research-teaching’. R13 detect ambiguity around the notion of ‘educative’ equipment. In the ‘Etat des operations du Plan’ from Dec 1949 they find the term ‘collective rural equipment’.

In other words, in keeping with the previous section in which R13 stress the importance of the terminology, (i.e. ‘collective equipment’ comes into being as a concept when the expression is used), ‘collective equipment’ is non-economic (non-productive), linked to consumption, and collective, or social, rather than individual.

The second Plan, March 1956, makes no mention of collective equipment (though it does refer to ‘equipment scolaire’ and ‘sanitaire et social’. The emphasis is on the crisis of ‘logement’. This is referred to as ‘social equipment’.

In the Third Plan (1958-1961) educational ‘equipment’ becomes a ‘social’ priority. There is opposition between ‘productive sectors’ and ‘expenditures of investment of a social character’. In other words social equipment is seen as an unproductive expense. This reinforces the distinction of the first plan between economic equipment and social equipment, but ‘economic’ becomes ‘productive’. Social equipment is seen as a kind of building. Thus a ‘glissement silencieux’ whereby ‘social’ becomes ‘unproductive’ + the new category of ‘urban equipment’.

Fourth Plan 1962-1965. Here the term ‘collective equipment’ appears for the first time, and R13 underline this. The ‘uses’ of consumption are considered. It is noted that the ‘consumer society’, assoc. with the US, veers towards ‘satisfactions futiles’ which generate ‘malaise’. ‘Perhaps’, the Plan goes, it would be preferable to put progressive abundance in the service of a ‘less partial idea of Man’. In view of a ‘greater equilibrium of human groups.’ This is a ‘texte déjà celèbre’ , say R13. I wonder why.

Collective equipments are seen as a ‘fruit’ of expansion: ‘la production est aux equipment collectifs ce que l’arbre est la consummation du fruit’. The same opposition i.e. productive/unproductive or production/consumption. But this is supplemented by another opposition between ‘individual consumption’ and ‘collective consumption’. ‘Individual’ consumption is associated with the US, which produces ‘futile satisfactions’ (for false needs). Collective consumption relates to a ‘real need’ and a total man. R13 comment: ‘on est dans le champ de l’humanisme.’

Collective equipment is thus immediately and organically linked to the representation of man but also to ‘man in the city and the ‘movement of urbanisation.’

Social is confused with ‘public’.

5th Plan – 1966-1970. Collective equipment becomes part of the language. It is put on the side of (unproductive) consumption. But there is confusion over where it comes in terms of financing. Collective equipment is confused with administrative financing. R13 say this is a ‘telescopage’.

6th Plan 1971-1975 – floating terminology. ‘Les mots dansent’. ‘Collective function’ appears.

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Still at the desk, although I have been to my office in KCL to recuperate various books I thought useful. This time I am looking at the ‘Medical equipment’ section of Chapter 4, which has entailed reading around Foucault’s Histoire de la folie and Naissance de la Clinique.

Les équipments médicaux

1963 Publication of Foucault’s Naissance de la Clinique: une archéologie du regard médical in the collection ‘Galien’, ‘Histoire et philosophie de la biologie et de la médecine’, PUF, directed by Georges Canguilhem. Revised edition 1ere trimestre 1972. Published simultaneously with Raymond Roussel, coll. ‘Le Chemin’, Gallimard, nrf, directed by Georges Lambrichs. The preface points to the influence of Canguilhem (on the normal and the pathological) and Merleau-Ponty (in the visible and the invisible), while the division between spatialisation and verbalisation, seeing and saying, echoes the terms of Raymond Roussel.

David Macey draws attention to the importance of ‘le regard’ in the subtitle, evoking Sartre, but the term ‘archaeology’ has more valency, prefiguring the later ‘archaeology of knowledge’, and the reference to the archive, whence the voluminous bibliography. The 1972 revisions to the 1963 edition replace some of the appeals to ‘structure’ with ‘history’, e.g. ‘Ici, comme ailleurs, il s’agit d’une étude structurale qui essaie de déchiffrer dans l’épaisseur de l’historique les conditions de son histoire elle-même’ becomes: ‘Ici, comme ailleurs, il s’agit d’une étude qui essaie de dégager dans l’épaisseur du discours les conditions de son histoire’. Elden has a brief blog post on the subject, and points, as does Macey, to Bernauer’s study of the revisions in Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight. The key question for us is which edition do the R13 group refer to. The bibliography says 1963, though the footnotes (e.g. p. 148) says 1972.

Reading the chapter ‘Les Équipments médicaux’ in R13…

Emergence of the couple normal/pathological in the 19thc. From two postulations: 1. illness is an essence, or a specific entity; thought in terms of botanic species (e.g by Kraepelin on schizophrenia) 2. Illness is a deviation in relation to nature. The references here are to Durkheim (statistical norm) and Ruth Benedict (‘pattern’). Neither are footnoted or in the bibliography. [Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934; Échantillons de civilisation, 1950].

Focus on ‘équipement sanitaire’ thus instances of conformity in relation the norm of health, but the notion of the hospital as a site of care only developed slowly through ruptures and displacements; the idea of ‘normal man’ thought as anterior to any illness is a ‘creation of the 19th century’; in order to understand how illness became a mode of deviation and the ill person a deviant, we need to undertake a genealogy not of illness itself but of what constituted it, i.e ‘hospital equipment’ [‘l’équipment hospitalier’]

Care as such is a recent invention; it had to be dissociated from poverty. It is from the fracture of indigence and illness that the modern hospital was born as a site of care.

The norm of health had to be distinguished from the norm of work. The early hospital as a site of enclosure (enfermement). Beggars (nomads) were excluded from the city and interned. Thus the idea of the ‘hosp-ital’. The reference here is to Gaston Roupnel, La ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle. Etude sur les populations du pays dijonnais, 1955. This work is in the bibliography, published by SEVPEN (Service d'Edition et de Vente des Publications de l'Education Nationale). Roupnel, b. 1871, d. 1946, friend of Gaston Bachelard. It is not cited by Foucault in Naissance de la clinique, but is by Braudel in La Méditerrannée and Civilization et capitalisme.

Move (glissement) whereby the place of internment takes on an ethical vocation. The hospital as a place of correction to bring the nomadic and poor back within the realm of productivity. Reference here to Foucault’s Histoire de la folie, on the hospital in the pre-modern period as a ‘forteresse de l’ordre moral’, in the chapter on ‘Le Grand enfermement’ where Foucault is discussing the workhouses of protestant Europe of the 17thC.

But suddenly internment encounters limits. 1749 – arrest of all beggars; 1765 – creation of centres for beggars (depôts de mendicité) [discussed by Foucault in Histoire de la folie chapter on ‘Le Nouveau partage’]. The idea of the hospital as a place of ‘assistance’ and repression of unemployment is put in question. The moral question of poverty etc becomes an economic question, insofar as rather than being put out of circulation in spaces of internment, the poor become a cheap labour resource.

The inherent contradiction of the mixed economy in the hospital thus needed to be dissociated; indigence and illness needed to be distinguished; the poor and ill was the negative element par excellence; needing ‘assistance totale’; illness separated from poverty;

But illness was immediately separated from the hospital; the hospital seen as the creator of illness and the family as the site of cure (this is familiar from the first few chapters of Naissance de la Clinique, chapter on ‘Le Champ libre’, pp. 38); illness should disappear in the natural milieu of the family.

The hospital as recompense for the family, and symbolically constituted in relation to it. The doctor as father and judge, on the model of the Father; hospital as microcosm of bourgeois social structures.

The Revolution: sought to abolish the charitable function of hospitals and make them attain a ‘social duty’. The general hospital as having a social function. Ref. to Foucault Naissance de la clinique on the ‘contractual’ relation between the poor whose treatment is paid for and right for whom this knowledge may be useful (p. 85, chapter ‘La Leçon des hopitaux’). Ref. to Maurice Rochaix, L’évolution des institutions hospitalières de l’ancien regime à nos jours, ed. Federation hospitalière, 1959. Not in Naissance de la clinique. Rochaix was president and founder of the society for the history of hospitals and was himself a hospital director.

Doctors nevertheless have a specific knowledge independent of hospitals ‘savoir noséographique’; epidemics as a salient issue; power decides to take medicine in hand faced with the ravages of epidemics’; create a knowledge turned towards the population in the form of prescriptions; ‘constitution d’un sur-savoir retourné en pouvoir’. Creation of Royal Society of Medicine in 1776.

This broadly follows the narrative of Naissance de la clinique.

The revolution: turned this power into collective equipments accessible to all, collective equipment without State apparatus’ (‘un equipment collectif sans appareil d’Etat’); because medical space coincides with social space; the medicine of classes = free circulation = homogenous social space – ‘rêve démocratique’.

Hospital structures put into question – nationalisation of hospitals – social assistance and repression (of illness) are dissociated (ref. to Naissance de la clinique). But social assistance is medicalised in its turn and takes on a new function – prévoyance – (prevention) – creation of Caisses de Retraite and Caisse Nationale de Prevoyance. Replacement of centres for beggars;

Para. p. 152 follows Foucault exactly in linking the enunciatory power arising from the medical ‘regard’ to police surveillance of the population, doctors-police-prison; linked to the Charter of Athens;

Reaction (post revolution) attempts to reinstitute the charitable order but comes up against a new power which is that of medical knowleldge – practice and teaching and giving the doctor the power of enunciation.

Still following Naissance de la clinique and citing its references, but adding Haroun Jamous’ contribution to a University (Paris 7) collective publication on medical sociology.

Reduced role of the State, except as police… social assistance reduced. The hospital increasingly a space of return to work…

Important reference to J. C. Polack, La Médecine du Capital, Maspero, 1972, Cahiers libres 222-23.

The conclusion to the chapter summarises and interprets: the ‘equipment of health’ is an instance of conformity to a norm, the genealogy of this collective equipment involves an account of the nature of this norm and how the equipments realise it. The norm of health and thus the collective equipment of health must be linked to the social power or norm and the realm of work and production; those who don’t work must be fixed, territorialised. There is a substantial quotation here from Jean-Claude Polack’s 1972 book La Médécine du capital, published in Maspero’s Cahiers libre collection in 1972.

[Cahiers libre was a collection with an important radical standing and legacy, having published Nizan, Fanon, Guevara, the Mouvement du 22 mars, Macchiocchi, Castells, Cathy Bernheim on ‘droit à l’avortement’; connections to CERFI include Roger Gentis, Les Murs de l’asile, 1972]. Indeed Gentis ran a new psychiatry collection, so ordained by Maspero. Guattari’s Psychanalyse et transversalité was one of its first publications. Maspero’s publishing series and bookshop was a key site for the ferment of militant leftist groups around 1968 and after].

Medical knowledge cannot be dissociated from its equipment, that is the organised field of its usage. Is medicine defined by its equipment? Non-medical treatments and equipment are rejected outside the ‘concrete’ (le béton). It remains a servant of the State.

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[Found online a 2015 PhD thesis (Picardy) by Antoine Idier, Les vies de Guy Hocquenghem Sociologie d'une trajectoire à l'intersection des champs politiques, culturels et intellectuels français des années 1960 aux années 1980, with much on the political and radical contexts around ‘68, and details on CERFI]

Continuing on genealogy and the concept of collective equipment:

The concept of collective equipment is thus not assured (in the Hegelian sense of coinciding with its object), ‘La généalogie, ici, fonctionnera comme puissance d’éclatement du concept’.

There follows a note on terminology, that of ‘inscription’ and ‘enregistrement’, which might imply an agent, and thus a ‘culturalist’ approach. A long footnote here the text points to an article by Françoise Choay (whose 1965 Urbanisme book was a key ref. for Chapter 1). The article referenced, ‘Histoire et méthode en urbanisme’, appears in a special issue of Annales on ‘Histoire et urbanisation’ of July-august 1970. Choay is criticised, again, for having postulated an unconscious, transcendent subject or agent of urban development.

(Choay’s article is available via Persée)

Inscription is not made by a process of writing, but a ‘social and material process’ through which the material forces of the unconscious ‘fluides et libres’, come to be fixed and stuck on the social body, where they function thereafter as rigid and closed systems of relations of force, coded and institutionalised relations of production.’ (more or less translating here).

So fluid desire on the one hand, fixed or territorialised relations on the other. I wonder about this notion of the ‘material forces of the unconscious’. Anti-Œdipe seems more complex in its picture of this process.

‘Enregistrement’, on the other hand, designates the way in which a social power (State, capital, oriental despot) impresses on these relations of production ‘the form of its domination and the rules of their functioning’.

A historical case follows: the masses (individual and collective) liberated at the end of the 18thC by the failure of previous systems of relations of production and of social institutions only function in the ‘frame’ (cadre) of the capitalist mode of production once they have been ‘registered’ as ‘working class’ or as an identifiable and nameable group of workers. This entails also the rejection of the mass of ‘barbares’ (sauvages?) ‘entassée dans les bas quartiers des villes’. For this, say R13, criminality had to be invented.

NB. If this draft can be placed in late 1972, it is significant that Foucault is lecturing at the Collège de France on ‘Théories et institutions pénales’ from Nov 1971 to March 1972, and then on ‘La Société punitive’ from Jan 1973 – March 1973.

The second section of Chapter 4 concerns the ‘conjugal family’, the thesis being that the State creates collective equipments as a kind of prosthesis for the family.

The history of collective equipment is as discontinuous as its concept, yet it is important to focus on the period of the Revolution and the Empire. There is a presupposition, provisionally, of a ‘system’ of collective equipment’. What is certain is that there is a genealogically founded relation between the system of collective equipment and the putting in place of the Napoleonic state on the ruins of the Ancien Régime. We are marked by the Napoleonic State, say R13. A series of disjunctions and exclusions e.g. family-civil society/State; public/private etc, all founded on the category of the person. There is a citation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right pointing to the universal category of the person. Spaces of inclusion and exclusion : hospital/asylum/school/pègre/. A pratico-inert universe sealing any threat that the mass could ‘fusion’ into a ‘masse-sujet’, ‘foule libre’ (ref. to Revolutions of 1848, 1871). [Note the Sartrean terms here].

The family as a unit of production is shattered, artisanal production is marginalised. Work is organised around machines. ‘Tout ce que la fabrique ne parvient pas à fixer se retrouve errant, hémorragie qui coule des ruines des métiers ou des familles paysannes, mendiants, indigents, vagabonds, nomades des temps modernes.’

The logic here is of fluxes and codes; what was fixed and coded by the expanded family is destroyed by capital which in destroying former modes of production destroys this system of ‘fixation’ and liberates flows (‘redoutables’) which need to be neutralised and fixed in turn.

[Cf. later, Guattari’s disagreement with this model]

Populations flow towards the cities where there is no system of ‘codage’. The ‘grand enfermement’ of the 17thC and the general hospital are the prototypical event for collective equipment. Reference here to Braudel, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme 1 on the number of abandoned children at the end of the 18thC.

The chapter moves on to describe, with reference to Chapter 5 of Foucault’s Naissance de la clinique, ‘La Leçon des hôpitaux’, the ‘hesitation’ at the time of the Revolution between care in the family or care in the hospital (risk of hospital illnesses). i.e. illness is not separable from the question of the family. The dichotomy – family/hospital – is reproduced in the current debates on sector psychiatry [and still!]. But the real problem is that the family cannot contain the mad, and thus a social territory must be found for them – the hospital. Confusion of ‘assistance et soin’ (welfare and care?). Collective equipments are needed, e.g. in 1794, because of the consequence in terms of indigence and vagabondage. ‘On craint les mouvements populaires’, unattributed, but is another citation from Chapter 5 of Naissance de la clinique where Foucault discusses the re-organisation of the hospitals during the Revolution. The summary conclusion is that: collective equipment is the non-familial territory over which the State exerts its sovereignty directly.

So the ‘sealing’ of the threat is not done by capital, but by the State. The general hospital is on the basis of complicity between absolute monarchy and the bourgeoisie, the Church cut out of the deal.

Whenever something escapes from the family, the State differentiates itself and creates a specific organ to deal with it. Thus emerges a new species of collective equipments. Territorial ‘quadrillage’ (grid); anything susceptible to flow (fluer) triggers a new collective equipment. Sector psychiatry is a priority for the desire of the State.

But this collective equipment soon becomes redundant: ‘ça fuit de toutes parts, vite, un nouvel equipment collectif!’. Adjacent or peripheral collective equipments are added to recuperate the ‘ratés’ etc.

This ‘obsession’ with fixation of manpower is accelerated as new and more massive potential forces of production (and of subversion) develop in tandem with the rise of industrial capitalism. Reference here to the Charter of Athens and to its ‘famous’ 8th point about the ‘chaos’ which entered into the cities at this time.

The question is – is this the ‘chaos’ or disorder of urbanism, (as the ‘context’ [i.e. architecture, urbanism] Charter of Athens or a geographer Pierre Georges would suggest, or does it refer to the mass of semi-proletarians and the unemployed, ‘le nom noble de la pègre’. The masses uprooted by capitalism and drawn to cities needed to be ‘occupied’. Thus grand works, public work programmes, and railways etc. Large urban projects. The ateliers nationaux’ of 1848.

The Pierre George (a ‘precursor’ in urban studies) reference is to Géographie urbaine, pub. 1961 by PUF, (another scholarly work).

A footnote cites George, pointing to the contradiction between the ‘creative power of liberal economics and speculation’ and the ‘logical ordering of cities’. The resonance with Le Corbusier is underlined.

A further scholarly quotation from Louis Girard, La politique des travaux publics sous le Second Empire, Armand Colin, 1951. This one is about the ‘ateliers nationaux’ which functioned as a kind of ‘army’ depot for masons and unemployed diggers.

And, à la Foucault (‘grey’ work in the archives) – a quotation from ‘Merreau’ from 1851 comparing workers making sewerage and gas piping to protesters making barricades with the ‘pavés’. Evidently this quotation has some bite at this moment (barricades, paving stones). ‘La comparaison est saisissante’, an aside, is telling. The unreferenced quotation is from Charles Merreau (1807-1882), former General Secretary of the Prefecture of the Seine, Souvenirs de l’hòtel de ville de Paris.

Thus a little known dimension of the ‘great works’ (grands travaux), which at the time were called ‘équipments nationaux’, to make barracks, prisons and ‘fabriques’ (factories) near the national workshops to ‘fix’ ‘la main d’œuvre’. A ‘secret dimension’ of collective equipment – the construction site of the grands travaux as a nomadic collective equipment, a mobile territorialisation of a flux of uprooted workers or unemployed under the direction of the State.

Movement from a ‘revolutionary energy in reserve’ in national workshops to an energy productive of use value and surplus value. The dilemma: barricades or grand travaux? The unoccupied workforces, a consequence of growth, appears as a dominant motive for the accumulation of capital; capitalism exorcising the demons to which it had given birth. The construction of collective equipments thus as a use of productive forces at the same level as colonisation.

Then this, which is tricky: As soon as it is a question of freezing the overproduction of capital, it sees no difference between productive uses and unproductive uses; everything is useful since it contributes to maintain the forms of the production of surplus value.

What is tricky here is what is meant by ‘improduction’ [see later discussion with Guattari).

I think the point is that collective equipment is not productive in itself, i.e. a hospital, railway, etc is not a profit making exercise, so it looks something like a safety valve of a sort to manage the labour forces when productivity reaches a certain threshold.

A note on the factory – it is inherent to capitalism and to its territory; it is collective equipment par excellence even though it is not classified as such. (?) It fixes the new ‘savages’ to the territory. A reference here to Jean Pierre Rioux, La révolution industrielle, Seuil, Points 1971. Rioux was ‘maître-assistant d’histoire contemporaine à l’université de Paris X Nanterre entre 1970 et 1980’ and on the committee of Esprit.

But this was not always the case, e.g. glass workers at Carmaux (town known for glass work in the Tarn) were mobile, and only fixed in the second half of the 19thC. This progressive fixation needs to be studied.

Class consciousness, wage claims, strikes… the working class appears to have always been ‘coded’ but was coded on the very site of the work, which is only a production of surplus value on the condition of the exercise of capitalist despotism (this is not so clear!). I think the point is that the workspace is hierarchically organised on a despotic model. Another unclear point about capital delaying bureacratisation, which, they say, is not inherent to capitalism – see contemporary attempts at ‘management’ through decentralisation, self-organisation of workers as collectives, freedom to organise time, on condition of satisfying the quantitative criteria of profit. I think the point is that despotism or ‘self-management’ are equally valid modes of capital, as long as the profit is maintained. Again see later discussion Fourquet-Guattari.

Still on industrial capitalism – the factory destroys social links; the despotism of the factory replaces the dislocated family models. Further quote from Rioux about English workhouses.

So why does the family still function? Answer: It’s not the same family. The expanded family has been replaced by the conjugal family. A note here points to a special issue of Annales on ‘Famille et société’ from July-October 1972.

The issue includes articles from Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre Bourdieu; the note says that the question has to be nuanced as some historians find it peremptory.

Lateral alliance of couples replaces generational filiation. Inheritance replaced by contract. [see Anti-Œdipe on this]. The originary functions of the family are taken on by collective equipment. The new family is thus a kind of prosthesis for the new mode of production. Collective equipments, alongside the factory and the habitation are: ‘un dispositif d’ensemble soutenant l’existence de la famille conjugale’. [NB use of later Foucauldian term dispositif]. Collective equipments are thus articulated with the family habitation and the ‘activities’ of factories, office, businesses etc. Whence the insistence of the Charter of Athens of the ‘cell’ or family unit (house) as the starting point of the operation of urbanisation.

Collective equipments as non-familial territory and external condition for the functioning of the conjugal family.

[NB. The resonance of this with Anti-Œdipe and the theses of anti-psychiatry. David Cooper’s Death of the Family translated in Seuil’s ‘Combats’ collection and the ‘Points’ in 1971 and 1972. See also Cooper’s Psychiatrie et anti-psychiatrie, coll. Le Champ freudien, 1970].

New section on production and non-production or ‘anti-production’. Productive and unproductive sectors. Social classes are valued for their productivity. In other words, capacity to produce surplus-value. Everything else is in the domain of non-production. E.g. the State. Or it is invisible – this is the domain of collective equipment.

The class struggle is highly visible, but collective equipments are concerned with the ‘unclassifiable’, the masses of those who are neither this or that; they are ‘hors-capitalisme’, ‘hors règles-du-jeu, hors-la-loi’.

Is it then a sort of territory of the unclassifiable? But rather to see things from this perspective – a counter-history of the domain of non-production, a result of the triumphant capitalist ‘distribution’ (partage). The history of collective equipments can only be effected on condition of putting this distribution radically into question. A mode of inscription of the real processes of production which separates the productive from the unproductive. But processes of production and of anti-production function everywhere, in ‘production’ as well as in ‘non-production’.

This is tricky, again. The punctuation implies that there is on the one hand a schema whereby capitalism defines (or inscribes) production, and classifies what is not productive as unproductive, on the other hand a ‘wider’ sense of production (not in inverted commas) in which both production and anti-production are modes of production.

Production and anti-production are indissociable; the inscriptions at the level of the social (between State, capital, family) are not known at the unconscious level. The unconscious is not transcendent in relation to social relations. In other words there is not, on the one hand, the social domain, and on the other a ‘lower’ level of unconscious processes. The unconscious is immanent to the social field. The relation is not of hidden to manifest, under to higher, but production and registering, connection to disjunction, free energy (sexual as well as social) and coded, fixed, stocked energy… flux/frozen, crystallised fluxes…

So the matrix is not determined by the opposition between production and anti-production, but between flow and cut, energy and recording (capture).

So they are not thinking of collective equipment on the model of need, of which the State would be the interpreter (the oracle of modern times). The subject of need is an effect of the mechanisms which inscribe a subject of need.

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In which, not really having had a summer holiday, due to COVID etc, I continue working on R13, as I am now naming it as a shorthand.

Schematic chronology of R13

This will be ongoing – need to establish a proper chronology with R13/CERFI events mapped against Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari etc and State events. [See Chronology]

• September 1971 – Response to offer of funding – Drafting of Chapter 1 ‘La Ville-ordinateur’

• May 1972 – discussion Guattari, Fourquet, Foucault (pp. 27-31)

• [June 1972?] 6 months of funding for exploratory research (the key questions are: Is there a specificity to the urban? What is meant by ‘Genealogy’?)

• July 1972 publication of Les Temps modernes issue Nouveau fascisme, nouvelle démocratie

• September 1972 – discussion Guattari, Fourquet, Foucault (pp. 27-31)

• October-December 1972 ‘la toupie folle’ – intensive drafting of texts

• October 1972 – ‘regulation’ of ‘Ville-métaphore’ (Chapter 2)

• October 1972 – Marie-Thérèse Vernet-Straggiotti goes on holiday

• November 1972 – ‘première mouture’

• November 1972 – drafting of Chapter 2

• Arrival of FHAR adherents

• March 1973 Publication of R12 Trois milliards de pervers

• December 1973 – Publication of R13

Notes on Chapter 4

Chapter 4 – ‘La Formation des équipments collectifs’ is announced in the preface as inaugurating a change of object and method; confronting collective equipment head on, and incorporating genealogy. This is where the influence of Nietzsche’s Genealogy is most explicit, although previous chapters include references to it. The first section of the chapter is titled ‘Nietzsche se met de la partie, et en change le cours’.

It makes sense then that the chapter begins with a long quotation from the Hildebrand and Gratien translation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, which we can recall had been published in May 1971 as volume 7 of the new complete works established by Giorio Colli and Mazzino Montinari under the direction of Deleuze and Maurice de Gandillac (see Nietzsche dossier). The quotation comes from Section 12 of the ‘second dissertation’ on ‘guilty conscience’.

The key idea here is that the notion of utility which is invariably used to explain, for example, the function of punishment, is a retrospective interpretation on the part of a superior power in view of subjugating and dominating, and which obscures the previous usages. Goal or aim and utility are rather symptoms of a will to power which has ‘captured’ (s’emparé de) something less powerful.

The first point made in R13 is that this view is radically different from the Hegelian conception of history, and from its Marxist inversion. A comparison is made via a quote from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, in its 1939 translation by Jean Hyppolite: the truth is its own becoming… the problem this conception poses for the R13 group is that the ‘truth’ of collective equipment would always be supposed as original, and as ultimate resolution. Any discontinuities in the history of collective equipment would be mere mediations of negations in their self-becoming. There is no origin, write R13, but rather ‘coups de force’.

‘Function’ is thus redundant, and collective equipment cannot be explained by usage within a ‘system of needs’. This is a major insight or provocation of R13, which I’d say somewhat subverts the initial brief from the Ministry, - what is the social need or demand for collective equipment? What needs to be understood and brought to light, rather, is the ‘coup de force’ which ‘gave birth to it’ (naissance) as an instrument of subjugation. After Nietzsche, ‘use’ must be seen as an effect which has imprinted on collective equipment the meaning (sens) of a function. The Nietzschean term interpretation is slanted towards the Deleuze/Guattarian terms of inscription and coding, or more precisely, collective equipments are inscribed as instruments of coding and exclusion of free social energy.

[The later discussion with Guattari suggests that this schema is too simplistic – collective equipments not as instruments of coding, but effects, again, of a more anterior axiomatic].

Along with the system of needs, what is also criticised is the concomitant idea of a Subject (social or individual) of these needs, and classical economics is supposed guilty of such a postulation. Moreover, the idea of an ‘unconscious’ subject of needs, or who needs, is no less transcendent and to be rejected.

The mode of production of collective equipment (Marxist vocabulary) is distinct, then, from the uses which result from them, or to which they are put. Rather, what ‘coup de force’ or ‘administrative decision’ (suggestive vocabulary here, hinting at the contemporary regime and the research project itself, the Plan) was at stake, and what ‘mobile mass’ or ‘flux of people’ or ‘rebut social’ (social rejects?) was fixed, territorialized, subjugated… What was the event at which or through which desire in the social order emerged and was fixed in collective equipment?

[So here we have again the quite straightforward idea of collective equipment as the territorialisation, the fixing, of social desire, or social flux…]

The underlying reference here is to Foucault’s Histoire de la folie, and madness is presented as a paradigm of the ‘wild’ or ‘uncivilized’ social flux which is only utterable or sayable at the moment it is fixed in a structure: ‘faire une étude structural de l’ensemble historique … qui tient captive la folie dont l’état sauvage ne peut jamais être restitué en lui-même; mais à défaut de cette inaccessible pureté primitive, l’étude structurale doit remonter vers la decision qui lie et sépare à la fois raison et folie’. This is taken from the preface to the 1961 (first) edition of Histoire de la folie, published by Plon with the title Folie et déraison, a preface substantially transformed for the 1972 re-edition. The full quotation is as follows:

Faire l'histoire de la folie voudra donc dire : faire une étude structurale de l'ensemble historique - notions, institutions, mesures juridiques et policières, concepts scientifiques - qui tient captive une folie dont l'état sauvage ne peut jamais être restitué en lui-même ; mais à défaut de cette inaccessible pureté primitive, l'étude structurale doit remonter vers la décision qui lie et sépare à la fois raison et folie ; elle doit tendre à découvrir l'échange perpétuel, l'obscure racine commune, l'affrontement originaire qui donne sens à l'unité aussi bien qu'à l'opposition du sens et de l'insensé. Ainsi pourra réapparaître la décision fulgurante, hétérogène au temps de l'histoire, mais insaisissable en dehors de lui, qui sépare du langage de la raison et des promesses du temps ce murmure d'insectes sombres.

The citation from Foucault’s 1961 preface is significant, because it hones in on a sentence elided in the 1972 preface, and one which (according to Jean Khalfa in his introduction to the translation into English of the full text with its variants) was significant for the anti-psychiatry movement, at least for David Cooper in his introduction to the Tavistock Press 1967 translation of the work, who refers to madness as a ‘lost truth’. The idea of a ‘wild state’ of madness, or, as the (progressively downgraded) title of the 1961 edition has it, déraison, resonates well with the idea of nomadic fluxes that are fixed and territorialized by collective equipments, or, in Foucault’s schema, by reason, and later, discourse. The notions of ‘état sauvage’, ‘inaccessible pureté primitive’ and ‘murmure d’insectes sombres’ betray a somewhat romanticized idea of fluid, nomadic desire and expression which the R13 group seem prey to at this point. The R13 team presumably have access to the 1964 10/18 (abridged) edition, and to the 1972 Gallimard full text (with revised preface; the one mentioned in the R13 bibliography and notes) but choose pointedly (and explicitly) to refer to the 1961 preface, which they also highlight in the bibliography.

So R13 extend Foucault’s conception of the event of a ‘partage’ between reason and unreason, and the consequent discourse on madness, to all kinds of flux which ‘only appear decoded and free’ at the point when they are ‘civilized’. But not only this, they continue, all these fluxes and flows are madness itself (it’s not only an analogy); ‘folie’ is the name for all fluxes which are decoded or uncoded, dissociated. The idea here relates to a point in Histoire de la folie, repeated in the ‘medical equipment’ chapter, which is that the ‘hospital’ was, in the pre-modern era, a site for the ‘care’ and then ‘internment’ of the poor, the mad, the sick, etc, i.e. the nomadic, those who were not part of the economy of production and of the family. The ‘hospital’ is thus there to ‘recode’, reterritorialize, fix, normalise, register, represent this quotient of humanity and give them the figure of a ‘person’. The person is a key figure here, which seems to operate as a form of territorialisation in itself.

The discussion moves on to stress the discontinuous character of the ‘coups de force’ which instigate collective equipments as modes of territorialisation. There is neither a social consciousness at work, nor a material logic. It is a question of emphasising and putting into play the differences. No historical dialectic. The succession of ‘formations of equipments’ is accidental (backed up with a clause from the Nietzsche quotation already cited). What is essential is the process of ‘subjugation’ which puts them to work.

Return to Genealogy, and to the earlier quotation. Nietzsche says that the ‘meaning’ or ‘concept’ of punishment is a difficult synthesis of different interpretations; it is a ‘unité difficile à résoudre’ and impossible to define. Presumably because there is no linear cause-effect or need-satisfaction logic to it, but rather an amalgam of uses promoted by forms of instances of subjugation. The presupposition, then, is of a radical heterogeneity of the meaning (concept) of collective equipment, despite its apparent derivation from the time of the Liberation (see later); the questions are: what does it replace, what objects does it designate, in what discursive formations it is present?

This opens up the possibility of a discursive history, or genealogy rather, of the notion itself, which does not remain at the level of vocabulary, since it can have other names…

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Part 2 of Chapter 2 sees the CERFI group working through texts by Marx on the opposition between the town/city and the country and identifying the model for this opposition in the ‘early’ work (The German Ideology) as town = civilization/country = barbarism; the town is thus proposed as the ‘Subject’ or ‘motor’ of history. CERFI want to question and critique this model; they show that it persists in the later work (Kapital) but that Marx also abandons the town as a focus or interest, in favour of a stress on the ‘system’. They look closely at Lefebvre’s La Pensée marxiste et la ville to criticise the way Lefebvre also seems to ‘subjectify’ the city as a pure (‘contentless’) motor of history. This ‘aporia’, they say in a footnote, determines the sociology of urbanism in its entirety, referring to Raymond Ledrut, Sociologie urbaine (PUF, 1968), Pierre-Henri Derycke, L’économie urbaine (PUF, 1970) and an Annales issue, ‘Histoire et urbanisation’ from July-August 1970. They are a little more charitable to Manuel Castells (who had taken up a post at the Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales in 1970) whose first book, La Question urbaine, was published by the leftist publisher Maspero in 1972, and which CERFI refer to as ‘une véritable somme’. Despite suggesting that Castells was ‘formed’ with Marx and Althusser, like them, they are critical of Castells’ recourse to the ‘unscientific’ concept of ‘expression’ – the city as the expression of a social structure -, adding that Althusser’s reconfiguration of Marxist concepts seemed to be disallowing any engagement with the specificity of the problem. The city/town is thus progressively evacuated as a working concept or problematic, and shifted towards that of ‘territory’ (via reference to [[ Lucien Febvre ]] and Fernand Braudel, both of the Annales school – though Febvre is an earlier presence).

CERFI thus recognise the ‘impasse’ into which they have got themselves: they are stuck with the city/country model, which is confined within the space of representation and does not enable them to think the forces at play; the ‘genealogical’ work is still to be done. Again the reference to Nietzsche and Foucault comes in, but awaits its fuller exposition in a later section.

The multi-factor title of the whole volume thus makes more sense now: Genealogy of Capital 1. The Equipments of Power: towns, territories, collective equipments [I am keeping this translation strictly literal for the time being]. This is part 1 of a genealogy of capital [part 2 is L’Idéal historique, which I will look at subsequently]; the equipments of power is a key expression; and there is a translational/semantic crux here – equipment - appears to be a term related to the Ministry which has commissioned the research, but it would be interesting to know more about the provenance of the term itself.

Françoise (Lévy)’s intervention clarifies that she wrote the part on Marx, while Anne wrote the critique of Castells, which will also be deferred until later. Françoise also says she is writing a piece for Esprit and that she was attending Foucault’s course. What she says about Foucault’s point on how the bourgeoisie ‘naturalises and animalises’ those it wants to expel should allow us to date it.

Chapter Three – ‘Les Territoires’

Begins with ‘Le territoire despotique’, and again the proximity with AO Part 3, with which it shares common references (Wittfogel, Mumford, Braudel) is evident. But there is also a strong presence of the idea of power or will to power which brings forward the Nietzsche-Foucault angle. NB. That Foucault’s cours ‘71-73 was Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Should open a separate dossier on that.

I’ve created a separate dossier on Nietzsche which is now quite substantial (thus far). This occupied the intervening period up to the next entry.

See Nietzsche dossier

See further handwritten notes which need to be typed in, including the interesting lapsus around Jean/Richard Deshayes.

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Copying Stuart Elden’s blog style, but this is the pile of books on my table:

So, I read Chapter 1 – ‘La ville-ordinateur’, the ‘intervention militante’ from Anne (Querrien), and the discussion with François (Fourquet), Félix (Guattari), and Michel (Foucault). These materials appear to have been written in 1971-1972. So if this can count as a first series it shows the strong influence of the theses being developed by Deleuze-Guattari for Anti-Oedipus (henceforth AO) [see correspondence in Deleuze, Lettres et autres textes; the account of Deleuze and Guattari ‘s encounter in Dosse, and the transcriptions of Deleuze’s lectures at Vincennes on Webdeleuze, and in particular the third part ‘Sauvage, barbares, civilisés’.

The starting point for Chapter 1 is the anthology of writings on urbanism collected by Françoise Choay (1965).¹ If the picture that emerges from the latter is the opposing tendencies of the ‘functionalist-rational’ city as developed by Le Corbusier in the ‘Charter of Athens’² and the ‘culturalist’ tendency embodied by Lewis Mumford and Henri Lefebvre, among others [see images below], the CERFI team seek to displace this by addressing its epistemological underpinning (‘le socle épistemologique’ – which, in inverted commas, is plausibly a reference to Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, e.g. p. 233), a framework which assumes the pre-existence of a Subject; CERFI’s postulation is that the city should be understood rather as a means (moyen) of production which produces a Subject as Consumer (consommation). Deleuze & Guattarian thematics are very evident here, with the notion of the city as a ‘coding’ or ‘cutting’ (coupure, decoupage) of flows (flux) or energy. Certain terms (despote, territoire, organs, capitale, corps inerte) relate directly to the concerns of Deleuze and Guattari in Part 3 of AO. There is also a strong emphasis on the idea of the machine and information, whence the title, ‘ville-ordinateur’ – the city as a coding of semiotic (informational) flows; the influence of cybernetics is in the background. There is also a passing reference to the city as a self-producing organism like a cell via Jacques Monod.

Anne Querrien’s intervention discusses the irony of the investment in ‘theoretical’ activity versus ‘militant’ activity, given the turn of the ‘theorists’ (Deleuze, Foucault) towards militant activity (presumably the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons), and Guattari’s absence due to work ‘en chambre’ on AO with Deleuze. A fault-line appears to emerge here between those who think of the city as ‘antiproduction’ (Hervé Maury), with production on the side of the militant activity seemingly aligned with ‘collective equipment’; Anne mentions that François Fourquet, Lion Murard and Marie-Thérèse Vernet-Straggiotti have been attending Deleuze’s lectures at Vincennes and have ‘pirate’ typescripts of it. These presumably enable a clearer situation and a more subtle dynamic between production and anti-production – the city codes or stops the flow of energy from the ‘social machine’, aligned with ‘collective equipment’, but it is only in the despotic order, itself aligned with the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ that this can be seen as complete anti-production (or ‘body without organs’). These thematics are developed in the discussion between Guattari and Fourquet. Anne adds that for her part she thinks genealogy has more to do with the ideas developed by Foucault in his work on madness and the clinic, and goes back to her notes on Foucault’s Archaeologie du savoir.

The Fourquet-Guattari discussion revolves around the issue of whether the city is an instance of anti-production (as above). Fourquet seems skeptical about the idea of collective equipment as a productive flux, seeing it only in terms of coding and accounting. Guattari holds out hope in the capitalist era for the uncontrollable energies emerging from the social machine, escaping from the control of the city as ‘body without organs’. There is an interesting thematics of writing and inscription, straight out of AO.

Various bibliographic researches around this identify a ‘first synthesis’ of the report on collective equipment (Fontenay-sous-bois, CERFI, 1973), which Stuart Elden has in his possession (as reported on his Progressive Geographies blog). The authors include the usual suspects (Fourquet, Maury, Mozère, Querrien, Murart (sic.) but also Christian Hennion (see later)). Elden’s account of the first Foucault dialogue in Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity, 2017), pp. 168-77, is instructive, but understandably slanted towards Foucault’s input. Elden usefully situates Foucault’s intervention in the context of the Collège cours on Théories et institutions pénales and La Société punitive and the shift away from the Althusserian insistence on ‘appareils d’Etat’, and the interesting insistence on the detail of e.g. roads and mills.

Other bibliographic discoveries, not all of them essential, include the following:

Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (MIT, 2014), which mentions CERFI urban projects briefly and approaches from the perspective or urban planning and new towns.

Christian Tutin, ‘Ville et reproduction’, Cahiers de C3E, 78 (sept 1988) proposes the city as space of the reproduction of capital and has much overlap though not a lot of reference to CERFI; Castells is a key reference.

Edmond Préteceille, ‘Équipements collectifs, sciences sociales et planification’ in Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, N°20, 1983. Décentralisation et la recherche locale? pp. 31-52. Passes over CERFI projects on collective equipment but the real interest is elsewhere. Potentially useful bibliographic references.

The Foucault dialogues in Recherches 13, in French in Dits et Ecrits I, are translated in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1964-1981, ed Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotexte, 1996), pp. 105-112. Trans. by Lysa Hochroth.

François Fourquet, ‘L’accumulation du pouvoir, ou le désir d’État: CERFI, 1970-1981’, Recherches, No. 46,

1. This is a recapitulative history of CERFI which needs to be read in parallel to Issue 13 and its related publications.

Site, No 2, 2002, http://www.sitemagazine.net/issues/2_2002; online architecture-theory periodical which includes ‘CERFI: and Introduction’; Anne Querrien, ‘Four Remarks on CERFI; François Fourquet, ‘History of CERFI’; Sven-Olov Wallenstein, ‘CERFI, Desire, And The Gene-alogy Of Public Facilities’; ‘Schizoanalysis And City’ By Helena Mattsson; ‘The Urban Mental Hospital And The State of Research’ By Meike Schalk; ‘Nietzsche, Foucault, And Genealogy’ By Brian Manning Delaney; ‘The First Discussions, First Tentative Efforts: Is The City A Force Of Production, Or A Force Of Anti-production? Despite Its Sharpness, A Fabulous Discussion Does Not Succeed In Penetrating The Enigma Of Capital (Excerpt from discussions 1972–73).

Liane Mozère, ‘Foucault et le CERFI : instantanés et actualité’, Le portique, No 13-14, 2002 (see notes on this below).

From Elden’s blog, a link to a CERFI related document ostensibly from Foucault which looks like a report on a funded project on collective equipment ‘Emergence des equipments collectifs’ (note difference from ‘Genealogy’) with a presentation by Philippe Chevalier, in the online review Ici et ailleurs. Chevalier’s presentation suggests that it includes echoes of Surveiller et punir. He identifies that it is a CERFI contract with the ‘Service des affaires économiques et internationales (SAEI) du Ministère de l’équipement’ dated June 1973. ‘Le nom attaché au contrat était alors Gilles Deleuze pour le CERFI’. He situates this project as the same as the ‘Genealogy’ one, ‘dans le cadre d’un contrat engageant le CERFI, la Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique et technique (DGRST) et le SAEI. Ce travail se composait d’une première partie dédiée à l’école primaire et d’une seconde aux équipements sanitaires (avec elle-même trois volets : l’institution hospitalière au XVIIIe siècle, les équipements psychiatriques au XIXe et l’histoire de la psychiatrie de secteur). […] ‘D’une partie de cette recherche, il sera rendu compte dans l’ouvrage collectif Les machines à guérir. Aux origines de l’hôpital moderne (Paris, Institut de l’environnement, 1976)’.

Chevalier adds some useful refs. to Daniel Defert, « Hétérotopie : tribulation d’un concept entre Venise, Berlin et Los Angeles » in Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique, les hétérotopies, Paris, Nouvelles éditions lignes, 2009, p. 49. I happen to have this on my shelf and indeed Defert does give an interesting account of the CERFI projects and others in the context of Foucault’s interactions with architects. Defert says that Foucault hung out with Françoise Choay in the 60s.

The manuscript is typed out on the site and includes valuable footnotes, and two responses, including this one, from ‘Scala’, which is interesting:

‘Afin de compléter votre information, le CERFI a conjointement financé deux programmes de recherche cette année-là (1972-73), l’un sous la direction de Michel Foucault (les équipements du pouvoir) et l’autre sous celle de Gilles Deleuze (les machines de guerre). Chaque équipe était constituée de trois jeunes chercheurs. Les travaux de recherche de l’équipe dirigée par Gilles Deleuze n’ont donné lieu à aucune publication, ils ont sans doute donné matière à l’élaboration par Deleuze & Guattari de leur concept de machine de guerre dans* 1000 plateaux*.’

‘Scala’ could be ‘André Scala’.), who was a student/friend of Deleuze and attended the Vincennes lectures. He was Foucault’s last interviewer, along with Gilles Barbadette, cf. – ‘Le Retour de la morale’ in Les Nouvelles littéraires, 1984. Dits et ecrits 354. But I can’t find any evidence of a CERFI contract on war-machines. In that chapter of Mille plateaux D & G do refer, however, to Anne Querrien’s book Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de l’État, published by CERFI, and ‘unpublished studies by Anne Querrien’.

Other references on this site, which beg the question of what and where these ‘Copédith’ publications are. The ‘Imprimerie Copédith’, whose address was 7 Rue des Ardennes in the 19th, seems to have been the printers for a range of 1970s periodicals and short form texts, including psychoanalytic journals Ornicar? and le Coq Héron.

Anne Querrien, Généalogie des équipements collectifs, Les équipements de normalisation, L’école primaire, Paris, CERFI, Impr. Copédith, 1975

Michel Foucault (dir.), Généalogie des équipements de normalisation, Les équipements sanitaires, Paris, CERFI, Impr. Copédith, 1976.

François Fourquet, Histoire des services collectifs dans la comptabilité nationale, Paris, CERFI, Impr. Copédith, 1976.

Susana says that Godofredo [Pereira] can tell us about the CERFI contracts 😊

The Chevalier website includes a reference to: Taga Shigeru, ‘Foucault et Guattari au croisement de la théorie du micro-pouvoir et de la psychothérapie institutionnelle’, dans Hervé Oulc’hen (dir.), Usages de Foucault, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2014, p. 99-107. See here: https://www.cairn.info/usages-de-foucault--9782130621102.htm. The Shigeru article can be bought online. He is a Professor at Kyoto University. Author of Jean Oury Rencontre avec le Japon, 2005.

Notes on Liane Mozère article: “Foucault et le CERFI : instantanés et actualité”, *Le portique*, No 13-14, 2002

Liane Mozère starts with the emergence of CERFI in 1965 with young people excluded from UEC – Union des étudiants communistes – who met Guattari. [Reference to: Liane [Mozère], Le Printemps des crèches. Histoire et analyse d’un mouvement, L’Harmattan, 1992, which tallies with other mentions of the ‘groupe crèche’ in R13]. Description of CERFI as: ‘cette bande liée autant par des convictions que par des affects’. Militants one day and the next attending Lacan’s seminar on Tuesday. ‘Ainsi, évoquer la figure de Michel Foucault qui a assuré la direction scientifique des premiers travaux du Centre d’Étude, de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelles (CERFI), groupe de recherche créé à l’initiative de Guattari en 1967, qui associe ces anciens militants, impose d’adopter une posture susceptible d’articuler apports théoriques – la démarche généalogique – et enjeux (micro)politiques.’ Foucault and Deleuze were used as names or guarantors for the CERFI projects funded by the Ministère de l’Equipment. Mozère suggests that the context can allow theoretical issues e.g. genealogy – to be linked to micropolitical issues, which is exactly the focus of our project The Pragmatic Genealogy of Concepts, I think. Genealogy, moreover, is a key term here; arising from Foucault’s Archèologie du savoir and ‘Nietzsche, Génealogie, Histoire’, often referred to as the Hommage à Hyppolite, since Hyppolite died in 1968. Foucault’s essay appeared in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, PUF, 1971. See more on genealogy later.

Liane continues: Cerfi allowed salaries via ‘la recherche contractuelle’, and without making a difference between ‘experts’ and others. Liane’s note is important: ‘Ce financement provient du Budget civil de recherche et développement (BCRD) attribué à des Services de recherche des différents Ministères qui contractent avec des chercheurs ou des collectifs de recherche. Le plus souvent sous la forme de contrats passés de gré à gré, le financement de la recherche sera transformé en profondeur du fait d’une réduction drastique des crédits du BCRD sous le gouvernement de Raymond Barre et du fait de l’instauration d’un système d’appels d’offre avec constitution de Comités scientifiques auxquels participeront dans la plupart des cas des membres des différentes instances académiques (CNRS, Universités). Si un tel principe n’est pas illégitime, il n’en demeure pas moins qu’il a, de fait, placé les collectifs de « hors statut » en position précaire, leurs demandes de financement ne pouvant pas faire l’économie des dépenses de salaires que les laboratoires n’imputaient pas dans leurs budgets prévisionnels. Un nombre considérable d’équipes « hors-statut », comme le CERFI ont ainsi disparu de la scène de la recherche sociologique alors qu’elles avaient fait la preuve depuis plus de dix ans de la pertinence et de la valeur de leur travail. (François [Fourquet], L’accumulation du pouvoir ou le désir d’État, Recherches n° 46, 1982).’

The BCRD – Budget civil de recherche et développement – allocated to research depts of different Ministries – established contracts. But the BCRD budget was drastically cut under the govt. of Raymond Barre (Prime Minister 1976-1981). After that research funding was allocated by scientific committees usually involving universities & CNRS). This placed research collectives ‘hors status’, and budgets could not cope with salaries. See Fourquet’s article in the last issue of Recherches. This instance relates to the ‘Droit à la recherche’ publication, and Mozère’s point is of crucial importance for the research strategy aspect of the project; is research funding now moving back, with its emphasis on co-production, to a situation where non-academic researchers can be paid salaries, or is this just a kind of figleaf?

‘C’est dans un tel contexte que Michel Foucault, sollicité par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, accepte de se porter garant du troisième contrat de recherche d’importance sur la Généalogie des équipements collectifs pour le compte du Ministère de l’Équipement 5 et en général des activités du CERFI.’

[Foucault was thus the guarantor of third research contract, on the Genealogy of Collective Equipment ; what were the other two?; see above, but Liane also answers this in the note:

‘Deux autres contrats de recherches avaient précédé le projet dit Généalogie : un avec le Ministère de la Coopération sur un projet d’éducation télévisuelle en Côte d’Ivoire qui devait permettre le développement de l’enseignement en sauvegardant les langues vernaculaires (Recherches n° 15, « La coopération en pratique », 1974) et l’autre sur la programmation architecturale d’un équipement psychiatrique (*Recherches *n° 6, « Programmation, architecture et psychiatrie », 1967).’

So the two other CERFI ‘contracted research’ projects up to 1973 were :

1. Televisual education in the Ivory Coast. The main contact here was Janine Christiany, who went to the Ivory Coast with Liane M and Hervé Maury and François Fourquet. See Morford and ‘La co-opération en pratique’ in Recherches 15. This needs to be read. It is the second ‘Programmation’ issue.

2. Architectural programming of a psychiatric equipment. Recherches 6. This was the first issue of the journal which mentions CERFI as an ‘official’ organisation. Two doctors were at that point the ‘guarantors’ – Guy Ferrand and Jean-Paul Roubier. Need to read this too. It was this issue from 1967 which gained the attn. of Michel Conan, according to Querrien and Dosse.

Foucault attended CERFI meetings. [when? Probably around 1971, when the CERFI ‘local’ would have been probably 103 BVD Beaumarchais, though need to check]. Liane says that Foucault’s work at this time entered into resonance with Guattari’s work on the ‘conceptualisation’ of the analysis of capitalism Guattari had been developing for some years. This seems exaggerated to me. Secondly, both Foucault and Guattari were thinking about new forms of political engagement. Liane refers to the GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons), established by Foucault in Feb 1971, and involving Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Marie Domenach, Daniel Defert (linked to the Gauche proletairienne movement), Maurice Clavel, eventually Deleuze….

Liane adds in a note that there were a number of ‘croisements’ btw. CERFI and the GIP, Ariane Cotlenko and Claude Rouot, for example, moved across from the GIP to CERFI, though the ‘Claude’ referred to in R13 could also be Claude Harmelle.

On the question of how these militant organisations gave ‘voice’ to aspirations and desires occulted up to then, Liane refers to Alfred Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, publ. 1970 in the US.

The Nietzsche/Hegel faceoff comes into play again:

‘La démarche généalogique que Foucault emprunte à Nietzsche permet d’opérer une rupture décisive par rapport à Hegel en n’attribuant pas la naissance d’une chose, d’un corps ou d’une institution à son utilité. C’est au contraire par une succession de processus de subjugation que cette chose, cette institution ou ce corps prennent forme et apparaissent. Et Foucault montre que ce qu’il convient d’éclairer c’est le coup de force qui les a engendrés, coup de force qui casse tous les systèmes d’usage prévalant jusque-là.’

Nietzsche versus Hegel. This is the perspective Foucault develops in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. But it’s also worth pointing out that Georges Bataille, among others, is also a key figure in the Hegel/Nietzsche dynamic, having attended Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel at the Ecole pratique des hautes études in the 1930s, and having attempted to ‘rescue’ Nietzsche from the fascist interpretation in an issue of Acéphale. See also Bataille’s Sur Nietzsche, 1945, and Mémorandum. Recall that Bataille’s Œuvres complètes had been published in 1970, with a preface from Foucault. See also Hollier, Denis: « De l'au-delà de Hegel à l'absence de Nietzsche », in Philippe Sollers (éd.), Bataille. Colloque de Cerisy, Paris 1973, 75–105.

Against this background the ‘genealogy’ group of CERFI (Fourquet, Murard, Querrien, Lévy, Vernet-Straggiotti): ‘va chercher à montrer comment un équipement particulier n’est d’aucune utilité en dehors de sa fonction d’instrument de codage, de confinement, de limitation et d’éradication de l’énergie sociale libre’. I’d say that the terms here, e.g. ‘codage’ sound much more like those of Deleuze-Guattari, but that the displacement of ‘utility’ does key into the Second Treatise of Nietzsche’s Genealogie de la morale (see further on, and Nietzsche dossier). It’s a movement away from the Hegelian ‘rational’ emphasis on the development of society according to desires (needs) and utility, and towards Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ and subjugation.

Liane then says her interest is in the way Guattari’s work on ‘subjugated groups’ and ‘group subjects’ was articulated with Foucault’s. Refers ‘group subject’ to Sartre. Evokes the encounter of Deleuze and Guattari, and says that: ‘On pourrait, par exemple, dire qu’au CERFI l’apport de Foucault a été nourri et fécondé par les concepts créés par Deleuze et Guattari qui ont permis de ménager un passage de témoin.’ [which allowed the arrangement of a passing of the baton?].

Liane then refers slightly obscurely to an ‘invitation’ from Fernand Braudel (see dossier on historians): ‘Lorsque Fernand Braudel invite, dans les années 1970, M. Foucault, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, P. Bourdieu, M. Godelier et quelques « jeunes » du CERFI, Godelier est laissé seul par Bourdieu pour défendre la position structuraliste face à un trio de voix, à la fois proches et distinctes’.

This might relate to a debate involving Foucault and historians which took place slightly after the publication of Surveiller et punir of which there is an account in L'impossible prison: recherches sur le système pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle / réunies par Michelle Perrot; débat avec Michel Foucault (Seuil, 1980). See review by Michael Ignatieff.³

But no, actually, this is not it. The Dits et ecrits say that in 1976 the historian Michelle Perrot gave a lecture to the general meeting of the Society for the history of the revolution of 1848, and series of articles in the Annales historiques de la revolution francaise followed, to which Foucault responded. On this issue (OK, so this is a digression), this article is interesting and potentially useful. But I can’t find the ‘invitation’ to which Liane refers.

Liane points to a reference to Foucault in ‘3 Group Problems’ (preface to Psychoanalysis and Transversality) to underline the ‘proximity’ btw, Foucault and Guattari. There was thus continuity btw the micropolitics of CERFI and that elaborated by Guattari at La Borde and outside it. The common point is the reaction to the ‘intolerable’ rather than the ‘universalist’ position of the intellectual. Liane cites Deleuze’s Foucault at this point, to underline the common insistence on micropolitics. She goes on to evoke the FHAR (mentioning that it emerged out of the Vive la revolution movement) and the MLF. Mentions that some members of FHAR came to CERFI seeing it as hospitable. Liane mentions some of the names involved (of the group involved in the ‘3 milliards de pervers’ issue): Catherine Bernheim, Gilles Châtelet, Michel Cressole, Fanny Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze, Laurent Dispot, Michel Foucault, Jean Genet, Félix Guattari, Daniel Guérin, Christian Hennion, Guy Hocquenghem, Georges Lapassade, Marie-France, Anne Querrien, Christian Revon, Jean-Paul Sartre. Liane then says that (homo)sexuality became the ‘pierre angulaire du rapport à soi’. The rest of her article is of more theoretical interest.

Uncategorised notes from web-searches

List of projects financed by the Ministère de l’Equipment, 1974-1982

• 1974-76: CERFI : « Recherche exploratoire sur la signification sociale de l'accident ».

• 1977-78 CERFI, Convention n° 75 000 220 022 575 01 : « La représentation sociale de l'accident, enjeux de pouvoir ».

• 1979-80 CERFI, Convention n° 76 00 060 225 75 01 : « Étude exploratoire : la mobilité généralisée contribue-t-elle à la constitution de nouvelles sédentarités ? »

• 1980-81 CERFI, Aide à la recherche n° 77 7 1768 : « Représentation sociale de l'automobile et genèse de sa crise - 1ère partie ».

• 1981-82: CERFI, Aide à la recherche n° 77 7 1768 : « Représentation sociale de l'automobile et genèse de sa crise - 2e partie ».

• Also – this report
• a research report on new towns in the Isère? Quite a lot on CERFI, but mostly related to the ‘programmation’ project it seems.

Names for the Ministry:

• Ministère de l'Équipement et du Logement from 7 avril 1967 to 5 juillet 1972

• Ministère de l'Aménagement du territoire, de l'Équipement et des Transports from 1er mars 1973 to 27 mai 1974

• Ministère de l'Équipement et de l'Aménagement du territoire from 30 mars 1977 to 31 mars 1978

• Ministère de l'Urbanisme et du Logement from 23 mai 1981 to 17 juillet 1982

Notes on Chapter Two – La ville-métaphore

Drafted in November 1972, i.e. after publication of Anti-Oedipe. Right from the start the authors mark their encounter with Fernand Braudel. Braudel is among the foremost representatives of the Annales school of historians, and based at the 6th section of the EPHE (Ecole pratique des hautes etudes), which he directed after the death of Lucien Febvre in 1956. There is more to say on this evidently (see dossier), but a potential tension between Braudel’s insistence of ‘longue durée’ and Foucault’s on discontinuities, ruptures. The works by Braudel in the ‘ouvrages cités’ are: La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, of which the first edition was 1949, with a reprint 1966, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, 1967, Ecrits sur l’histoire, 1969, and ‘La Catalogne, plus l’Espagne’, in Annales, March-April 1968. The first two of these are major works, long in the gestation. The first reference of Chapter 2 is to Civilisation matérielle, but it is worth underlining that the 1967 publication to which CERFI refer is only the first volume of a work which would have multiple further vols. The 1967 volume is on ‘Les structures du quotidien’ and to its 8th (and last) chapter on ‘Towns and Cities’. The footnote which tells of the encounter with Braudel cites the first sentence of this chapter which in Sian Reynolds’ translation is ‘Towns are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life’ (p. 479).

Summarising the first chapter, CERFI say that they had started with a challenge to the functionalist/culturalist alternative (of F. Choay’s anthology) and proposed the city or town as a means of production or an ‘informatic machine’ thus as ‘collective equipment’. They highlight this a shift from the topic of the city to that of collective equipment. They say this entailed conflating one with the other, and not acknowledging the specificity of cities, which they say they will come back to. So the city is a ‘screen-notion’ (i.e one that hides another) behind which what is at stake is capitalism and territory, State collective equipment. It is these latter concepts which are their desired focus – in other words they want to escape from the constraints or urbanism and think the material very much along the same lines as [[ Deleuze and Guattari ]] in AO, Part 3 – ‘Sauvages, barbares, civilisés’ – territory, State, capital. Collective equipment, on the other hand, is not a term with much currency in AO.

Interesting to think about the prominence of the concern with the State here. Of course CERFI are undertaking research for the State, but this is also a prominent topos e.g. in Foucault’s first three courses at the Collège, in AO, and in e.g. Pierre Clastres, La Socièté contre l’Etat. Althusser’s theses on State apparatuses, repressive and ideological, is a significant anchor point for a number of discourses in 1970-1973.

It is also interesting that the beginning of Chapter Two involves a kind of auto-critique on the part of CERFI of their own conceptual moves in Chapter One; the concept of the city has dissolved itself, and they see it now functioning as a displacement and condensation (classic Freudian mechanisms of the unconscious or more specifically of the dreamwork), standing in for collective equipment, and collecting to itself all sorts of heterogeneous material. A psychoanalytic approach is adopted here which suggests that the discourse on the city (e.g. Lewis Mumford) is a ‘screen-discourse’ which hides a lack of material reality and historicity. In Braudel as well, the authors say, the town/city is used as a ‘territorial’ stand-in/substitute for capital. This ‘process of substitution’ is linked to the ‘mechanisms of representation itself’. The authors say that like Mumford and Braudel they are caught in the same ‘unconscious rules’ which flatten everything on the same homogeneous surface of representation. In other words, everything is already territorialised. They are not thinking at the level of flows (this seems to me the implication) – ‘la dimension territorial fait partie des mécanismes de la représentation’.

There is a Foucauldian and a Deleuze-Guattarian impulse here, although perhaps more of the former – to move away from representations and perceptions; this is precisely the genealogical method as explicated by Foucault in the ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ essay. One question to explore here is whether there is a conceptual tension between the Foucauldian ‘genealogical’ impulse and the Deleuze-Guattari emphasis on ‘territory’; there are two overlapping vocabularies at work here, symptomatic of the different impulses within the CERFI team, as Anne Querrien set out in the first part.

[NB. The point above – that ‘collective equipment’ is not a term with much currency in AO – points me twds Lignes de fuite, ed. by Liane Mozère, where she says (note 4) that the unpublished text included there, ‘Assujetissements sémiotique et équipments collectifs’ was drated by Guattari in late 1979 as a research report submitted to the Ministère de l’Équipment for CERFI. See later.]

The second part brings us to Marx. The city is part of the pairing town/country. Reference to the Communist Mainfesto in which ‘the bourgeoisie subjects the country to the town/city’. The emergence of the city as the motor of history. CERFI says that they will trace the foundation and the functioning of the town/country opposition in The German Ideology. Industrial and commercial work, on the one hand, and agricultural work, on the other. The city/country opposition is thus not specific to their spaces, but rather a result of a division of labour btw. Industrial and agricultural work.

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Having met up with Co-I Susana Caló in London last week to talk about the project – first face to face meeting for at least a year! – I started ad hoc research and reconnoitring the territory around Issue 13 of Recherches, which bears the title Généalogie du capital: 1. Les équipments du pouvoir. This issue appeared in December 1973. I have two hard copy versions of this issue which I am reading against each other: the first is the issue of the review itself, now nearly 50 years old! (There is a strange temporality here which I would like to think about more).

The other one is the 10/18 volume, published in 1976. Reading Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée it seems that at some point in the 1970s (tbc) Florence Pétry – the current director of Editions Recherches (who is very willing to collaborate with us) - arrived in CERFI and began advising Guattari on the value of a wider dissemination of the volumes of Recherches, as well as of other books. 10/18, affiliated to the publisher Christian Bourgois was one of the major and cheaper outlets through which ‘French theory’ was disseminated in the 1970s, Dosse says in the rayons of Gibert Joseph in the Boulevard St Michel (now sadly defunct, and recently).

One of the first things I discover is that the 10/18 volume amputates the 1973 issue of some of its ‘interventions militantes’ and of some of its paratextual detail, so that it appears as ‘authored by’ François Fourquet and Lion Murard, whereas the journal issue does not indicate any specific authorship and mentions a wider group not referenced in the 1973 version. Already affective and subjective issues are raising their head, or heads, so to speak.

Looking around the edges of Issue 13 the story begins to emerge of a rather tortuous editorial process which involved three key ‘scriptors’ François Fourquet, Lion Murard and Marie-Thérèse Vernet-Straggiotti and a wider group, about which more later. What is fascinating though is how the journal issue in punctuated by what they call the ‘interventions militantes’, in which various actors (I’ll name them in a minute) write about their libidinal and affective investments, in today’s terms their ‘feelings’, about what is going on with the project. So they really did put into effect the vision of a research project which involved the manifestation and articulation of intersubjective and affective aspects of a collective research enterprise.

It was also interesting to try to trace the chronology of the whole project from the initial ‘commission’ from Michel Conan at the Mission de la recherche urbaine (more on this later). It looks like an initial focus, in the first few chapters, on ‘La Ville ordinateur’ and ‘La Ville Métaphore’ was perturbed and extended by the ‘arrival’ at CERFI (in concrete terms in the apartment where they authors were based for their collective authorship activities – 103 Bvd Beaumarchais and, nearby, Rue Popincourt, where François Fourquet and Michel Rostain (key members of the CERFI ‘mafia’ as they were called) had set up and lived – of the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR), or a delegation thereof. The ‘official’ history, i.e the one recounted by Dosse which tends to highlight individuals, says that Guy Hocquenghem arrived at CEFRI having read Anti-Oedipe – which apparently provided the theory for the movement (‘c’est mon livre’)- and asked to take over an issue of Recherches for FHAR. The issue did appear as Issue 12 (thus one before our focus on 13), and it was this one - Trois milliards de pervers, which gained Recherches and CERFI immediate notoriety and Guattari a law suit. It may also have influenced the decision of Giscard d’Estaing’s government to withdraw funding from CERFI in 1975. To find out more I watched Carole Rossopopoulos’s video film FHAR on Mubi, thinking of Ros Murray my colleague and friend who is working on this right now.

So it looks like there are several intersecting micro-histories here:

1. the history of the policies of the State, specifically of the Ministère de l’Équipment (under various names) vis a vis ‘l’aménagement du territoire’ (I need to look into the lexis here, since ‘équipment collectif’, ‘aménagement du territoire’ etc bear interesting comparison and cross-reference with the conceptual terms in play, e.g. in Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari – dispositif, agencement) and the specific policy of CERFI to seek State funding for radical and experimental projects (rather than going to the Cévennes to set up pre-industrial communities as they say). I’ve asked a relative of mine who was a British civil servant if she knows who to ask more about this, but she doesn’t.

2. the composition and reception history of Anti-Œdipe, which, together with 1), put CERFI and Recherches on the map for any post-1968 radical project needing funding or just wanting money (parallel with the 1970s/1980s GLC!?).

3. the internal politics and micro-history of the Recherches people ….

Going too fast here to try to tabulate this… I’m still scoping out the territory. I am thinking that the first things to do would be to map out a Chronology and a survey of the Actors (with their biographies), then a, overview of Issue 13, and go from there. [See Chronology and Index of Names].

Actors

Named as contributors in the Preface to Recherches 13

• Gilles Châtelet

• Laurent Dispot

• Alain Fabre

• François Fourquet

• Philippe Guillemet

• Françoise (Paul-) Lévy

• Lion Murard

• Anne Querrien

• Alain Siboni sometimes Sibony

• Marie-Thérèse Vernet-Straggiotti

  Discussants

• Michel Foucault

• Gilles Deleuze

• Félix Guattari

• + Luc ?

Other names are mentioned in the ‘Interventions’ and the discussions:

Anne mentions:

• Felix (GUATTARI)

• Gilles Deleuze

• Hervé (MAURY)

• Lion (MURARD)

• Marie Thérèse (VERNET-STRAGGIOTTI)

• François (LÉVY)

• Colette (JOLY)

Françoise (1) mentions:

• Anne (QUERRIEN)

• Thomas ?

• Liane (MOZÈRE)

• Nicole (LINHART?)

• Robert (LINHART?)

• Nicole P

• Hervé (MAURY)

• Ariane (COTLENKO)

• Prisca BACHELET

• Michel (ROSTAIN)

• François (FOURQUET)

• Georges (PRÉLI)

• Christian (HENNION)

• Philippe (GUILLEMET)

Francoise (2): mentions:

• Geneviève (AUBERT?)

• Michel (ROSTAIN?),

• Anne (QUERRIEN?),

• Liane (MOZÈRE?),

• Camille (Liane’s daughter?),

• Catherine (BERNHEIM?),

• Flore, ?

• Colette (JOLY?),

• Claude (HARMELLE? Or ROUOT?)

• Christian (HENNION?),

• Gilles (CHATELET?),

• Ariane (COTLENKO?)

Anne (2) mentions:

• Marie Therese (VERNET-STRAGIOTTI)

• Francois (FOURQUET)

• Lion (MURARD)

• Françoise (LÉVY)

• Christian (HENNION)

• Alain (FABRE)

Marie Therese (1) mentions:

• Lion (MURARD)

• Francois (FOURQUET)

• Alain (l’autre Alain) ?

• Gilles (CHÂTELET)

Marie Therese (2) mentions

• Francois (FOURQUET)

• Lion (MURARD)

• Felix (GUATTARI)

• Gilles Deleuze

• Michel Foucault

• Jean-Pierre ?

• Herve (MAURY)

• Anne (QUERRIEN)

• Colette (JOLY)

• Marie Therese (3) mentions:

• Francoise (LÉVY)

• Anne (QUERRIEN)

• Catherine (BERNHEIM)

• Lion (MURARD)

Reading the interviews in Morford, and Dosse, confirms that the ‘mafia’ or ‘noyau dur’ of CERFI was Fourquet, Murard, Maury, Mozère, Rostain, and Anne Querrien, although the latter was often more in the role of intercessor between the two tendencies in the group – Fourquet, Rostain and Murard who sought independence from Guattari, and Mozère, Maury who were more in his orbit. There are other ways of distributing the CERFI actors, according to their provenance e.g. from the UEC, UNEF, of ‘Opposition de gauche’, La Borde (often combined), the FHAR contingent, etc. Need to find a way to map all of this and present it visually.

Issue 13 features four types of writing: 1) the chapters on the different aspects of the genealogy of collective equipment 2) the ‘interventions militantes’ 3) transcriptions of discussions usually involving the three tutelary figures and the editorial group 4) paratextual additions

In more detail:

• Presentation (written by Fourquet and Murard)

• Chapter 1 – ‘La ville-ordinateur’ (‘redigé en Septembre 1971’)

  • Intervention militante – Anne

  • Discussion – Guattari, Fourquet, Foucault (discussions of May-September 1972)

• Chapter 2 – La Ville-métaphore (‘redigé en novembre 1972’)

  • Intervention militante – Françoise

• Chapter 3 – Territoires (undated)

  • Interventions militantes: Marie-Thérèse, Françoise

• Chapter 4 – Formations des équipments collectifs (undated)

  • Discussion: Guattari, Fourquet, Querrien

  • Interventions militantes: Anne, Marie-Thérèse

• Chapter 5 – Le Discours du Plan

  • Discussion – Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault,

  • Intervention militante – Marie-Thérèse

• Chapter 6 – Economie politique sans famille

  • Intervention militante - Marie-Thérèse

• Bibliography

• Index of Names

Given the different types of writing one gets a different picture depending on how one engages with the text. The chapters are footnoted and include references, while the interventions refer to people by their first names, except Deleuze and Foucault. One task then would be to try to map the names mentioned in the interventions to CERFI membership.

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