Guattari Won’t Stop Proliferating
Seminar PEI Open Program
Right from the start of the jointly produced output of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, and up until quite recently, there has been a marked tendency to erase the former from the scene that was created inseparably by both, a phenomenon that only worsened since the thinker’s death. Nevertheless, Guattari's influence has enjoyed a strong resurgence in various spheres of thought in globalised society. Chief among them are arts and curatorial practices, particularly when they activate political sensibility and institutional criticism; the new forms of social movements and activism, specially when their actions include an aesthetic dimension; network theories and practices, and queer theory. Without forgetting his continuing influence in fields in which he has played a major and recurring role since the seventies, such as psychoanalysis, psychiatry and health (mainly in Latin America) and ecology. This seminar aims to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, to shed light on the underlying problems and decipher the ways in which the search for devices that could help him to grapple with these problems led Guattari to a sensitive resonance, a direction for action and an interpretative slant, an ethics of existence that must be activated - not just in his joint writings with Deleuze, but also in his individual texts and in his actions.
Thus the speakers have been chosen with the idea of bringing together personalities linked to different implications/updates of Guattari’s legacy in the contemporary world. Or, to put it the other way around, personalities for whom Guattari functions as one of the foundation-agents of their own ideas-actions in the production of individual and collective reality. In this way we hope to sketch a blueprint for a cartography of the effects of his living legacy, and its implications that spread without pause - in spite of the determined efforts of the ghosts of European modernity, which insist of exorcising the Guattari vector from the explosive duo. We are interested in the dialogue between different updatings of Guattari’s intelligence of incitement, which reunites the political, the clinical and also the poetic so that they become powers intertwined with thinking action in its will to interfere in the present.
Programme
Friday, November 27, from 6 to 9 pm; Saturday, November 28, from 10 am to 2 pm
Friday November 27, from 6 to 9pm
Introduction to the seminar: Suely Rolnik
The Micropolitics Research Group
«Art, life, work: the micropolitics
of desire today»
Open discussion
Saturday November 28, 10am to 2pm
José Pérez de Lama (osfa)
«Art as an Ecophysical Machine. Guattari beyond Guattari»
Franco Berardi (Bifo)
«Senility in Europe and the Schizotherapy of Depression»
Ricardo Basbaum
«On Group “Virus”»
Questions and discussion.
Participants
Ricardo Basbaum
Richard Basbaum is an artist, writer, critic and curator. His research into interpersonal relations has led him to develop a communicative approach to stimulate the circulation of actions and forms. He works with diagrams, drawings, texts and installations that create interactive devices in which the personal, individual experience of participants plays a major role. He is teaches at the Instituto de Artes at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and the Faculdade Santa Marcelina in São Paulo. He is the author of the book Alem da pureza visual (“Beyond Visual Purity”).
Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Franco Berardi is a writer, media-theorist and media-activist. Founder of the magazine A/Traverso (1975-1981) , he was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Like other intellectuals involved in the Autonomía political movement in Italy during the seventies, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. His latest book, Soul@Work, will be published by Semiotext(e) later this year.
The Micropolitics Research Group
The Micropolitics Research Group investigates the forces and procedures that entangle artistic production and the subjectivities of its producers into the fabric of late capitalism. Based primarily in London, the group carries out analysis of issues ranging from the production of subjectivity in creative work, diplomacy, institutional analysis radical pedagogy and concrete situations of free labour in the creative industry.
José Pérez de Lama (osfa)
José Pérez de Lama has a PhD in Architecture from the University of Seville, where he is associate professor in the Architectural History, Theory and Composition Department. Since 2001, together with Pablo de Soto and Sergio Moreno, he has been part of hackitectura.net, a team of architects, programmers and activists who explore the relationships between traditional spaces, electronic flows and social movements, from the perspective of free software and hacker culture.
Suely Rolnik
Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, researcher, curator and professor of Clinical Psychology at the Catholic University of São Paulo, where she directs the Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Subjectivation. Between 1970 and 1979 she sought exile in Paris, where she obtained qualifications in Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology. Her research looks at the politics of subjectivation from a cross-disciplinary perspective, and in recent years she has concentrated on contemporary art and its political and clinical links. Her public work focuses on the invention of devices for the activation of poetic-political potency, which are shaped by the singular contexts of the media that they fall within. In this framework she has created a project for enhancing sensitive memory towards Lygia Clark and her context, which is compiled in an archive of 53 DVDs of interviews. She is co-author, with Féliz Guittari, of Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo, published in Spanish.
Bibliography
Franco Berardi (bifo): "Patologías de la hiperexpresividad"
MACBA Public Programs
pei [at] macba [dot] cat
