as it harbors simmering “struggles, wounds, dominations, and subordinations.”26 For Guattari, this discursive materialism can result in such a state of war, but it can also be a revolutionary medium that redistributes enunciation, matter, and existence on a flat plane. In this context, discursive singularity anticipates Bruno Latour’s investigation into modes of existence as well as multiple tendencies within object-oriented ontology in which objects, including linguistic objects, literary objects, or texts that become the object of translation, are fully vested as existents.
Guattarian micropolitics adopts Foucault’s focus on discursive subjectivation, but transposes its micro to the molecular. In La Révolution moleculaire (1977), abridged in the English translation (The Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics), molecular networks of lateral links connect everything: fascism, desire, and even cookery. Molecular micropolitics is invoked to document how fascism permeates every kind of activity and social organization: from the passivity and complacence produced in response to machinic violence; to everyday forms of fascism in the family, on the shop-floor, in the trade-union hall or in any place where “local tyrants and bureaucrats of all sorts perform hysterical antics and paranoid double-dealing.”27 Molecular Revolution gives rise to political praxis insofar as it denounces libidinal economies that fuse oedipal organization to state structure, and promotes initiatives “to remove select areas of science, art, revolution and sexuality from dominant representations.”28 The micropolitical subject of this resectorization takes on a more robust existence as the “infra-individual” in Lignes de fuite (Lines of Flight). More vector or “trans” function than subject of ontology, the infra-individual crosses unconscious desires with bodily attributes, material orders of expression with semiotic ones.29 Infra-individuals are the micropolitical subjects of social movements; at once popular and transversal (bi-polarized in schizo-analytic terms), they transgress the boundaries of privatized individualism securitized by law under oedipal capitalism.
A molecular micropolitics of desire is integral to the Guattarian vocabulary of anti-psychiatry, geophilosophy, chaosmosis, information theory and schizoanalytic cartography. Arguably it is really the only politics at issue in Deleuzean/Guattarian notions of deterritorialization, rhizomatic arboreality, minor literatures, and the hyphenated group-subject. Its imprint was palpable in post-’68 collectives and groupuscules pursuing creative practices at the juncture of poetry, punk, theater, plastic arts, theory, anarchism, ecology and anti-psychiatry. A constant among these experimental group-subjects was the desire to channel the therapeutic demiurge into modes of theatrical and political existence, be it a politics of care, a principle of disponibilité (availability) and acceuil (unconditional welcome), a resolve to live in immediacy rather than in bankable intervals of postponed gratification, or a recognition of small acts, unrecompensed gestures, and unidentified modalities of experience.30 Many small-group adherents apprenticed in the institutional psychotherapy of Guattari and Jean Oury, who welcomed at La Borde a host of intermittent residents who sojourned in the clinic as patients, staff, students or a combination of all three. An underlying ethic was the constant renewal of the clinic itself, echoed in Oury’s injunction to “remake the therapeutic group, at all times” (“refaire le club thérapeutique, tout le temps”). Remaking included the physical labor of rebuilding environments of habitation. Oury sought to transform architecture into something other than a “renfermerie” (space of enclosure)—a current that was, in his view, exacerbated in the 1960s by the Brutalist style of concrete and glass walls that afforded no respite from surveillance. In an essay on “architecture and psychiatry” published in 1967, he called for the reconstruction of community according to simple steps: find a space with enough rooms to shelter people in precarity; explore materials; build through bricolage.31
Oury’s spatiotemporal therapies are reprised today by the Invisible Committee (Comité Invisible) in their call for a blockade on infrastructure, considered to be the “mise en forme de la vie qui est le ravage de toute forme de vie” (modes of life-formation that wreak havoc on every form of life).32 Small groups implanted in unprepossessing, semi-abandoned places—town edges, rural redoubts, graveyards for retired machines—attest to ongoing experiments in micropolitical living that take inspiration from past countercultural settlement movements—what Felicity Scott, in Outlaw Territories, groups under the heading “Woodstockhome.” Scott’s examples include the Open Land movement communes of Morning Star and Wheeler Ranch in Northern California during the late sixties, and the Hog Farm Tent City in Stockholm of the early seventies, both dedicated to experiments in environmentalist living. Throughout the book, an implicit question hovers: what is the relevance of these communes to the politics of now? An answer can be gleaned from Scott’s opening quote from the Invisible Committee’s 2009 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, which indicts the conglomerate of global organizations responsible for the current state of the environment as “the vanguard of disaster.”33 Scott, it would seem, is advocating for an insurgent architectural practice that has little to do with building types and more to do with a futural militant ecology. Her study complements McKenzie Wark’s eco-militant treatise Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, which, as its title suggestions, harks back to the Guattarian revolution, and to molecular micropolitics in its appeal to a “Carbon Liberation Front.”
Wark’s invocation of a Carbon Liberation Front echoes the Invisible Committee’s neo-communist ecopolitical exploits. In 2005 the Invisible Committee, shepherded by the philosopher/Situationist/activist Julien Coupat, established itself in a farmhouse in the Corrèze region of southwestern France. Though the collective would be accused as the “Tarnac Nine” of terrorist activity by the Sarkozy government in 2009, and prosecuted by the French anti-terrorist division as an anarcho-autonomist cell suspected of plots to sabotage train lines and global summits, it was officially acquitted for lack of evidence. Signing itself Tiqqun, a Hebrew term for repair, resurrection and healing, the group published Theory of Bloom, a poetical pamphlet that nominated James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom (alongside Melville’s Bartleby and Robert Musil’s “man without qualities”) as the figurehead of outliers and social outcasts. Bloom, as both character and principle, was hailed for his stigma-inducing sexuality as a “prisoner of the non-sensual sexualization [Ulysses] is riddled with.”34 In his suffering and embodiment of “radical insufficiency” (Agamben), Bloom allows for the burgeoning of a theory that recruits eco-activists for an environmentalist Commune.
The Invisible Committee belongs to a loosely associated network of communities that survive in the interstices of the society of calculation and are occasionally characterized as manifestations of the contemporary groundswell for new utopias. Visiting the railway town of Vénéray-les-Laumes in summer 2015, I stumbled on one such collective at La Quincaillerie du Moulin, a building that had been boarded up for years and was gradually being reclaimed from the spiders, room by room, by Alexis Forestier and a group of friends and visitors. A bridge that cuts off this village siphons traffic from the giant regional supermarket (“Super U”), to feeder roads for the motorway. La Quincaillerie lowers under the bridge, a redoubt championing a site marked by dwindling residents and closed businesses. Forestier reclaimed this rambling factory compound, turning its outbuildings into spaces for performance and film projections, art ateliers and workstations, and hideaways for reading and sleeping. The place corresponds, as one visitor put it, to the dream of “the perfect palace of a peasant intellectual” (“le palais idéal d’un intellectual paysan”).35 Oneiric and eccentric, La Quincaillerie offers a refuge of hospitality: the furniture is scavenged; the front door remains open; tea and coffee are on the table; books on psychotherapy, philosophy, literature, and anarchism are ready for consultation by whomever. A woman with CDs to donate appears, followed by an expatriate British farmer. An actor tends the garden. It is this rhythm of coming and going, casual interruption and encounter, that makes of the site what the group called, in the first issue of their journal, a “place for making living possible,” a kind of habitat factory (“un lieu de fabrique et d’un habiter possible”).36 Formerly, Forestier had collaborated with Jean Oury at the La Borde clinic while running through a range of hybrid métiers that included architecture, farming, ethnomusicology, psychotherapy,
