Decisions, or the eternal war against the practico-inert.

Progress upon the project proper has become bogged down somewhat in the effort to change course. However it is necessary to focus on the new, as ever, and this focus now rests precisely upon the idea of the relation between political revolution, the group, and subjectivity. This is an idea which seems to be most strongly born out of my readings earlier this year of Jean Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for a Method, and which has bled across and significantly coloured my understandings of Felix Guattari's later solo works and Alain Badiou's more recent project. The question which arises is that of how significantly the blasted defeated wreckage of the CDR hangs over its successors. What was most appealing about the earlier work, rather than its arrogantly naive teleology of dialectical progress, was Sartre's interest in the relation between the individual and group, and the extremely subtle (if perhaps not entirely convincing) manner in which he sketched the structure, necessarily contingent and fragile, which holds such groups together.

Guattari's work certainly evades many of the problems which beset Sartre: his privileging of the social over the individual, the removal of the dialectic as engine of history, and his use of transversality as conceptual stratagem to continually liquidate the sticky morass of the forces of the practico inert. However whilst his work evolves against a backdrop of French intellectual life in the early 60s dominated by Sartre, and he (and Deleuze) continue to refer broadly to a similar schema of subject group versus subjugated group (which parallels group in fusion versus inert collective gathering in Sartre's own schema) I am still not entirely clear on how he is able to think the interrelation between constituent elements within a group. Sartre's own analysis rests upon his notion of reciprocity. For him any gathering of individuals (and for Sartre the individual remains primary- which is perhaps his greatest failing) the relations between members is mediated via reciprocity, itself via "the third party". In a collective gathering structured in seriality this third party is deemed to be "other", which maintains the serial nature of the collective (1+1+1+1...etc). As structurated by alterity or otherness this collective's freedom, and the freedom of each individual within it, is severely curtailed by the forces of the practico-inert. This inertia may be broken down most effectively only through group action, such groups being formed in response to an event (usually for Sartre an external threat or crisis) which engenders a praxis, this praxis redeeming the third party from alterity, suddenly shifting to being seen by each member of the collective as "mine" or "the common individual." For any analysis of the relation between the Sartrean view of the group and Guattari's, this notion of alterity is key. Beyond merely maintaining a post-Sartrean delineation of group types, Guattari holds onto the need for alterity in relation to autopoesis, as detailed in Chaosmosis. I need to make sure here that the idea of alterity is the same as Sartre's-- certainly Gary Genosko's reading of this is that this form of alterity does not imply a dialectical openness to the genuinely "alter". A closer reading of Chaosmosis will be necessary to clarify this point I believe.
Further in Guattari's earlier work on institutional psychotherapy at La Borde clinic, in his development of the idea of transversality we find further eerie echos of Sartre's work: in positioning transversality as a device to critique the operations of the institution itself, the way the object (here the mental institution itself) comes to be known is via the group's subjectivity, itself created in the space opened up via applications of transversality. There appears here to be similarities between this idea of group activity leading to the object of the activity becoming known and Sartre's own idea of the progressive regressive method within Search for a Method (and undeniable shades of the dialectic of course). What Guattari appears to add is crucial however: that subjectivity is always already a group phenomena. One question which arises from this is of the relation between dialectical reason and transversality. And of the nature of group subjectivity implied. For Sartre there is no real group subjectivity as such, no gestalt or hyperorganism is formed in the group-in-fusion. The change occurs at the level of the commonality of the third party.