I enjoy selecting something and then writing something about it, as I read it. I particularly like Félix Guattari’s essays, because it’s like you just have something, about something, and that’s it. Okay, I can kind of guess what he might have written, without even looking at the titles, there’s that, fair enough, but the thing is that he has a knack for surprising me. So, yeah, this time I’ll be taking a closer look at ‘Millions and Millions of Potential Alices’, which is included, for example, in ‘Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics’.
The first thing that I noticed was the title. It made me think of Lewis Carroll, but, alas, the footnote (236) indicates that it’s in reference to Radio Alice, a free radio station that operated in Bologna, Italy, in the mid to late 1970s before it was banned. Then I thought, huh, I was wrong, only to find out that I was right. Apparently, it was named in reference to his works.
Anyway, this essay, I mean his essay, Guattari’s essay, not Carroll’s essay, has to do with guerrilla radio stations or, if you want to keep it civil, independent radio stations. So, Guattari (236) begins his essay by noting that we are taught to think that children should be seen, not heard. Now, he isn’t talking about children, I just made that up. He is talking about people in general, but he is, in fact, pointing out here that this is how people are treated. Why? Well, the thing is that if just about everyone gets to say, just about anything, that might result in some change in society. We can’t have that, right?
But wasn’t this about radio stations? Ah, yes. It is. He (236) makes another point, adding that people should not be given access radio transmitters, because that way people get to transmit their message to a larger audience than they would just by gathering in a specific place.
Now, to be clear, he is not advocating for any of this. He is, in fact, advocating for the exact opposite. He wants to give people a voice. Oh, and it’s not his voice, nor his friends’ voice, but their own voice. He (236) is simply lampooning how the system works and how people tend to simply access that:
“What we want are ghettoes – autonomous if possible – micro-Gulags, as small as the family, the couple, even the individual, so that everyone is restricted, day and night.”
This is not to say that he reckons that there’s no talk. Oh, no, no. There’s plenty of talk, but it’s all the same and even if it comes from all over, it is, as if, it all came from the same source. He (236) acknowledges this:
“They talk, ah yes indeed, they talk all the time. They emit signs, wards, fragments of signs, fragments of wards, all trying to make us accept our roles – son, wife, father, worker, student – to get us to sit up and beg, to be disciplined, obedient, hard-working …”
This is where guerrilla radio stations come in. This is why he (236-237) reckons that it’s important to focus on “[t]he guerrilla war of information” that works through “[t]he interruption and subversion of the fluxes of production and the transmission of the signs given by authority”. But what does he mean by these guerrilla radio stations? Well, the thing is that anyone could run a radio station, which meant that various political groups ran them, both on the political left and on the political right, as he (237) goes on to acknowledge. That’s, however, not what he (237) is after here.
In his (237) view, what made Radio Alice a guerrilla radio station was that it was all over the place. It catered to various autonomie, which he (236) indicates as referring to “particular groups of women, young people, homosexuals, etc.”. We could call these autonomie minorities and, in a sense, you’d be right, but I think it’s more apt to call them minoritarian than minorities, as discussed by him and Deleuze (105-106) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’.
To put that another way, he (237) points out that the radio station was, in fact, a “collective utterance” or as he and Deleuze would put it in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, a collective assemblage of enunciation. So, what made that radio station different from the other radio stations was that it was, again, to use the terms used in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, rhizomatic. It wasn’t about politics, by which I mean party politics, advocating for the left, the right, or something in between. It had elements of politics and, surely, it was political, considering that, for him and Deleuze, “politics precedes being”, as they (203) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but that wasn’t all it was. In his view (237), it also had elements of “theory – technology – poetry – imagination – slogans – groups – sex – solitude – joy – despair – history – meaning – nonsense.”
What’s also notable, what I believe he (237) is pointing out here, is that the radio station wasn’t simply about leftist politics. He (237) opposes the idea that desire must have use or labor value or, even more broadly speaking, that it must be for something. He (237) exemplifies that with reading, noting that it is often thought to serve a purpose, like teaching you something that prepares you for something. Okay, I’d say fair enough. That’s often the case. That’s often why people read something, like, let’s say manuals, but he (237) isn’t so sure, like maybe, maybe not.
How is it not about leftist politics? Well, because, as he (237) points out, there’s this “blackmail of poverty”, by which he (238) means that to be someone, you must work. If you don’t work, you’re poor. So, even the leftist is trapped by work. Oh, and to be clear, I don’t think he was against doing things, making things happen. I think he was well aware of this and/or that must be done in order for us to have nice things, or so to speak. What he (237) is against is making everything revolve around work:
“All our time has always been devoted to working, eight hours’ work, two hours getting there and back, then relaxing over television and family supper. As far as the police and the law are concerned anything outside this routine is depraved.”
To comment on that, from my point of view, I work, like, all the time. So, yeah, in a sense I am trapped by work. I must work, I must do my hours, even though no one keeps tabs on them, so that I get paid. I’m not poor, but I must work to ward off poverty. I could add here that I know what it’s like not to have a job, been there, didn’t enjoy that, don’t want to do that again, but that’s not exactly what this is about. You don’t have to have been poor, or unemployed, to get it, how working is really about warding off poverty. You get it. You realize that, ah, I have to pay for this, and this, and this, etc., and you can only afford it if you work, or happen to have so much money, or capital, that you don’t have to work. Then again, even then, you need to whatever it is that you need to do to ward off poverty.
From another perspective, while I realize that, yes, I work too much, I’m not really working. What do I mean? Well, I’m working, yes, but it often has no clear goal. Sometimes it does have that, but, at the same time, it often doesn’t have that, just like Guattari (238) points out. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know, nor do I really care. I’m fine with both. Plus, if you insist that everything that you do must have a purpose, you’ll miss out on all kinds of opportunities or, as he and Deleuze call them in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, all these lines of flight. Like the only reason, that I can think of, really, that I got interested in virtual reality is because I was in some conference that happened to provide the attendees the opportunity to try it out. It had nothing to do with my work then, but I was like, okay, let’s see, let’s just see.
Anyway, long story short, what matters is that he (238) is objecting to this nine to five life, where you work eight hours per day, five days a week, plus the commute time to and back from work, followed by watching some tv and eating with your family. But why is he objecting to it? What’s the problem? Well, the problem is that you are expected to live your life this way, and love it, while living your life in other ways is deemed to be somehow perverted and warrants correction from the authorities.
He (238) has this simple, yet very apt remark about how “[w]hen people are happy together, it becomes subversive behavior.” Think of all those times you’ve been annoyed by rowdy children, teenagers or university students. It’s like how dare they have a good time! Move along! Disperse! There shall be none of this subversive behavior. Not on my watch!
I’ve definitely been annoyed by such, and caused such annoyance, there’s that, but I’ve changed my view on that. I don’t think I’ve ever yelled at anyone, but these days I don’t feel the urge to yell at people like that, like how dare the children play at the playground, how dare the teenagers hang out at the local park or how dare students have a good time at campus. It’s like, come on, just because you’re not having a good time, doesn’t mean that they should be having a good time.
What comes after in his essay (238-239), I can’t really comment on it, because I don’t know the specifics, like what went down in 1977, so I’ll leave it up to you to figure that out. Anyway, what’s notable is that they, a bunch of “school students, feminists, homosexuals, migrant workers from the south”, as well as “lower-middle-class bastards, drug addicts, queers, degenerates, layabouts”, as he (238-239) proudly refers to them, were running a guerrilla radio that had irregular broadcasting as opposed to regular broadcasting, by which I mean that they did just about whatever. The authorities didn’t like that, nor their flippancy when it came to public unrest, so the radio was shut down.
What drew my attention was how he (239) points out that the people running the radio station were accused of conspiring. He (239) adds to that, yeah, guilty as charged. He (239 reckons it that was exactly what they were doing, in the sense that conspiring means that they were breathing together and not breathing the asphyxiating air of workplaces and homes, as well as couple and family relationships, you know, that nine to five air.
This connects to his (238) earlier remark about how hanging out, having a good time, is often considered subversive behavior. The leftists, some of which were there, hence his (238) remark about comrades, wanted change, but, in his (239) view, society only tolerate them if they were party or trade union members. Why? What’s the difference? Well, a random radio station, with no party or trade union affiliation, or, I guess, corporate or state sponsorship was equivalent to a gang running it. It’s unlawful, unorderly, as he (239) points out.
What he (239-240) is objecting to here is how the parties, the trade unions and, more broadly speaking, the various committees and councils, claim to speak for the people, yet they are the first ones to cave in and thus betray the people they are supposed to speak for. He (240) also objects to how the people are viewed as being improper, if not uncivilized, and how it is suggested that they should get their act together and just toe the line.
There’s also this final part of the essay, in which he (240-241) is super confident that the people will prevail over the parties and trade unions that are in cahoots with the state and corporations. To be clear, none of that happened. In the forty or fifty years, nothing has changed really. It’d be fair to say that things are ever worse in this regard. So, in a way, you could say, ha, you were wrong Guattari.
But was he wrong? Well, that’s the deal. What does he (240) mean by this “revolution quite unlike the revolutions that overturned the history in the past”, “that will sweep away not only capitalist regimes, but also the bastions of bureaucratic socialism” of various kinds? How can he (240) state that its “lines of battle cannot be foretold”, that “they may cover whole continents”, but that may also “be concentrated in one urban neighbourhood, one street, one factory, one school”? How does he (240-241) think that “[m]anagers, policemen, politicians, bureaucrats, professors, psychoanalysts” who’ll join forces to stop it cannot stop it, regardless of how “they sophisticate, diversity, miniaturize their weapons to the nth degree”? Well, this revolution that he is (240-241) explaining in his essay is a molecular revolution that cannot be stopped because you can’t really stop it:
“[T]hey will never regain control of that massive movement of escape, the multitude of molecular mutations of desire that have now been let loose.”
It’s like, okay, you can put your finger on it, like to cover a leak, and then fix that leak, but there will always be more, and more leaks. It’s only a matter of time. That’s what he means. That’s why you can’t stop it.
He (241) exemplifies this with how the station was closed. It’s like, okay, that’s done. It’s all good now. Except it isn’t. There’s no guarantee, of anything.
Why did I read and go through his essay? Well, simply out of curiosity, there’s that, but that’s only what got me started. As I kept reading, I kept thinking about social media. Now, I don’t mean that a guerrilla radio made me think of social media, but rather what it could be like.
I think I’ve mentioned this in the past, but yeah, I think Guattari would have been fascinated by the internet, as well as social media, because it is or, rather, could be, revolutionary. Why isn’t it revolutionary? Well, because it’s all, the platforms that people actually use, run by corporations that, well, aren’t interested in any kind of revolutions. It’s all about the money for them.
Does it mean that it’s all futile then? Well, no. That’s exactly what Guattari ends up pointing out. Okay, you can make it all the same, homogenize and standardize it all you like, but that revolutionary potential is always there. No matter how you police it, how you keep a lid to it, yeah, it’s going to appear somewhere, somehow. It’s always only a matter of time.
References
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Guattari, F. [1974] (1984). Millions and Millions of Potential Alices. In F. Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (R. Sheed, Trans.) (pp. 246–241). Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin Books.