{"id":4293,"date":"2018-12-04T12:39:49","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T17:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/?p=4293"},"modified":"2018-12-04T12:46:30","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T17:46:30","slug":"camille-robcis-radical-psychiatry-institutional-analysis-and-the-commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/camille-robcis-radical-psychiatry-institutional-analysis-and-the-commons\/","title":{"rendered":"Camille Robcis | Radical Psychiatry, Institutional Analysis, and the Commons"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Camille Robcis<\/strong><\/p>\n

In their preface to Commonwealth<\/em>, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe their book as an \u201cethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire.\u201d[1]<\/a> Their goal, they explain, is not simply to recognize the movements and practices of the Multitude that have been able to resist Empire, capital, and neoliberalism.\u00a0 More ambitiously, they hope to provide a new political theory, a political manual in the Machiavellian tradition that will help these movements endure through time: \u201c\u2018Becoming-Prince\u2019 is the process of the multitude learning the art of self-rule and inventing lasting democratic forms of social organization.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0 The argument that follows proceeds in three steps.\u00a0 In the first part of the book, Hardt and Negri investigate various frameworks (the republic, modernity, and capital) that have \u2013 historically and conceptually \u2013 obstructed and corrupted the development of a common.\u00a0 In the second part, they explore contemporary possibilities for this common.\u00a0 Finally, they end with some reflections on what the revolution that would bring about this common could look like and what institutional processes it would require.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Since Etienne Balibar and Mikha\u00efl Xifaras have focused on the first part of this book, on the intertwining of law and capital, I want to turn to the end of the work, to Hardt and Negri\u2019s discussion of revolution.\u00a0 My first hope is to elucidate what these authors mean by \u201cinstitutions\u201d and to better understand why these are so central to their political project.\u00a0 Secondly, I want to put Hardt and Negri in conversation with institutional psychotherapy, a form of radical psychiatry that emerged in France in the second half of the twentieth century and that is the subject of my current book (which I am currently titling Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in France<\/em>).\u00a0 I want to suggest that instead of turning to Kant as they do the very beginning of Commonwealth<\/em> (albeit to a critical Kant read against the grain), Hardt and Negri could have found some theoretical solace in the notions of the unconscious, group transference, and the collective put forth by institutional psychotherapy, notions inspired by Freud and Marx and reworked by various thinkers who were deeply marked by this movement, including Fran\u00e7ois Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Frantz Fanon, and F\u00e9lix Guattari.<\/p>\n

But first, why are institutions so central for Hardt and Negri?\u00a0 As they reiterate throughout their book, the common should not be reduced to a \u201cthing\u201d: the point is not to take over the state apparatus or to acquire the means of production.\u00a0 Insurrection, they write, should not be confused with \u201ca coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, which merely replaces the existing state institutions with comparable, homologous ones.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, they continue, insurrection, \u201cin order to open the path for revolution, must be sustained and consolidated in an institutional process.\u201d\u00a0 Insurrection needs institutions, but \u201cinstitutions of a different sort.\u201d[4]<\/a>\u00a0 Unlike the social contract tradition within social theory (what they call the \u201cmajor line\u201d) which considers institutions as the mechanisms to solidify order and identities, Hardt and Negri are interested in a \u201cminor line\u201d of social theory that places social conflict at the basis of institutions (a genealogy that they trace back to Machiavelli and Spinoza).\u00a0 If institutions are conceived along the major line, insurrection will be inevitably faced with an impasse.\u00a0 On the one hand, \u201crevolts and rebellions that fail to develop institutional continuity are quickly covered and absorbed within the dominant order\u201d; on the other hand, \u201centering into the dominant form of institution, which is based in identity, functions through representation, and demands unity and concord, serves to neutralize the social rupture opened by revolt.\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0 However, Hardt and Negri contend, \u201can institutional process based in conflict\u2026according to the minor line, can consolidate insurrection without negating its force of rupture and power.\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0 The key, they write, is \u201cto discover in each case how (and the extent to which) the institutional process does not negate the social rupture created by revolt but extends and develops it.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

After setting up these preliminaries, Hardt and Negri offer us a new definition of institutions.\u00a0 First, institutions are based on conflict \u201cin the sense that they both extend the social rupture operated by revolt against the ruling powers and are open to internal discord.\u201d\u00a0 Second, institutions \u201cconsolidate collective habits, practices, and capacities that designate a form of life.\u201d\u00a0 Third, institutions are \u201copen-ended in that they are continually transformed by the singularities that compose them.\u201d[8]<\/a>\u00a0 This understanding of institutions, Hardt and Negri tell us, is different from the classic sociological one which begins with the individual and ends with identity.\u00a0 In contrast, Hardt and Negri propose to start with \u201csingularities,\u201d perpetually in flux, often in conflict with power but also with each other.[9]<\/a>\u00a0 Their notion of institutions is also different from the legal or political scientific one where \u201cinstitutions must serve as the foundation for the constituted power, that is, the constitutional order of sovereignty.\u201d\u00a0 For them, institutions form \u201cconstituent rather than a constituted power.\u201d[10]<\/a>\u00a0 In conclusion, Hardt and Negri write, \u201cthe institutional process\u2026provides a mechanism of protection (but with no guarantees) against the two primary dangers facing the multitude: externally, the repression of the ruling power, and internally, the destructive conflicts among the singularities within the multitude.\u201d[11]<\/a>\u00a0 Revolution is thus the process that extends insurrection into an institutional process and, as such, \u201cthat transforms the fabric of social being.\u201d[12]<\/a>\u00a0 This, it seems, is what Hardt and Negri mean by \u201ccommon\u201d \u2013 a political mode geared towards creation, towards futurity, an \u201cethics\u201d as they claimed at the beginning of their book.<\/p>\n

In their 2014 work, Commun: Essai sur la r\u00e9volution au XXIe si\u00e8cle<\/em>, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval return to the problem of the common and in this context, they engage \u2013 but also depart from \u2013 Hardt and Negri.\u00a0 More specifically, they argue with Hardt and Negri\u2019s understanding of revolution which, they claim, needs to ultimately give rise to a constitutional process.[13]<\/a>\u00a0 Turning to Cornelius Castoriadis (especially to his concept of the imaginary), Dardot and Laval privilege the idea of an \u201cinstituting power\u201d [pouvoir instituant<\/em>] as opposed to a \u201cconstituting power\u201d [pouvoir consituant<\/em>].[14]<\/a>\u00a0 This allows them to link praxis to creation and ultimately to contend that the institution in itself is always already praxis.\u00a0 As they put it, \u201cthe instituting praxis is at the same time the action that establishes a new system of rules and<\/em> the action that seeks to constantly relaunch this establishment in order to avoid the collapse of the instituting into the instituted.\u201d[15]<\/a>\u00a0 The instituting praxis, they continue, \u201cproduces its own subject in the continuity with an exercise that always needs to be renewed beyond the creative act.\u00a0 More exactly, it is the self-production of a collective subject in and through the continuous co-production of rules of law.\u201d[16]<\/a>\u00a0 It is at this point in their argument that Dardot and Laval turn to institutional psychotherapy as an example of what an instituting praxis could look like and how it could function.<\/p>\n

Institutional psychotherapy was developed in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban, a remote village in central France, during the Second World War.\u00a0 The context of the war brought together to this hospital several politically-engaged psychiatrists interested in reconciling Marx and Freud, intellectuals and artists who were fleeing fascism (the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, for example), others who were fighting in the Resistance (such as the historian of science George Canguilhem).\u00a0 Fran\u00e7ois Tosquelles, one of the most important theorizers of institutional psychotherapy, was a Catalan-born psychiatrist and one of the founders of the POUM, the anarchist-inspired and anti-Stalinist leftist movement that flourished in the Republican Spain of the 1930s.\u00a0 Tosquelles liked to repeat that in the course of his life he had been exposed to multiple physical and ideological \u201coccupations\u201d: as a Catalan citizen fighting Spanish imperialism; as an activist in the POUM struggling against Stalinist domination; as an opponent to fascism first in Spain and later in the Resistance in Vichy France; as a refugee incarcerated in the deplorable conditions of French concentration camps. \u00a0These various experiences had rendered him particularly sensitive to the dangers of \u201cconcentrationism\u201d \u2013 which he also called le-tout-pouvoir<\/em> [the-all-power]. \u201cConcentrationism\u201d was the potential of any institution or any group to become authoritarian, oppressive, discriminatory and exclusionary.\u00a0 As the war had made clear, \u201cconcentrationism\u201d threatened not only our modes of social and political organization: it was also a behavior, a psychic disposition. Alienation, as he put it, was always social and psychic at one \u2013 which is why Tosquelles referred to Marx and Freud as the \u201ctwo legs\u201d of institutional psychotherapy: when one leg walked, the other needed to follow.<\/p>\n

It is at this crossroad of Marxism and psychoanalysis that institutional psychotherapy was born as a tool to diagnose but also to fight against this \u201cdouble alienation.\u201d \u00a0Because institutional psychotherapy never sought to become a totalizing philosophy, it is difficult to pinpoint a general model or method.\u00a0 However, its practioners did rely on a couple of key texts and basic principles. Among these was the belief that theory and practice were inextricably linked.\u00a0 As Tosquelles and his colleagues had realized from their medical training, much of the problem with psychiatry that they were encountering stemmed from its misconception and misunderstanding of psychosis.\u00a0 On the one hand, mainstream psychiatry still considered psychosis as an exclusively neurological phenomenon located and locatable on the brain and the field as a whole remained hostile to any insights from the social and human sciences. On the other hand, most of Freudian psychoanalysis had concluded that psychosis was really outside its realm.\u00a0 As the practitioners of institutional psychotherapy observed, however, psychotics could indeed have various transferential relations but they were not one-on-one, intersubjective, as in the case of neurosis: they were collective. Social relations thus offered a privileged lens to observe the operations of the psychotic unconscious, to analyze the projection of desires and fantasies, to study identifications, and to eventually try to work with them.<\/p>\n

These were some of the theoretical premises that guided Tosquelles and his colleagues at Saint-Alban as they set up a series of concrete practices that would favor this transferential constellation: group therapies, general meetings, self-managed unions of patients (also known as \u201cthe Club\u201d), ergotherapy workshops (printing, binding, woodwork, pottery\u2026), libraries, publications, and a wide range of cultural activities (movies, concerts, theater\u2026).\u00a0 The idea was to constantly imagine and reimagine institutions that would produce new vectors of transference, different forms of identifications, and alternative social relations.\u00a0 Every hands-on experiment had a therapeutic purpose and every therapeutic intervention was also grounded in the practice, all in the hope of dis-alienating not only the patients but the collectivity as a whole \u2013 or, we could say, to produce a new common.<\/p>\n

Institutional psychotherapy was reworked by many important thinkers including Frantz Fanon who, after his medical residency at Saint-Alban in 1952-1953, implemented many of these practices in the clinics where he worked in North Africa \u2013 practices that he linked to his anti-colonial activism.[17]<\/a>\u00a0 It was also extremely important for Jean Oury who, in 1953, founded the Clinic of La Borde where Felix Guattari worked for many years.\u00a0 La Borde fundamentally shaped Guattari\u2019s philosophy, from Anti-Oedipus<\/em> (which he co-wrote with Gilles Deleuze in 1972) which Michel Foucault described as a \u201cbook of ethics,\u201d[18]<\/a> to his work on transversality, on subject groups (groupes-sujets<\/em> vs. groupes assujettis<\/em>), to his activism at the FGERI (F\u00e9d\u00e9ration des groupes d\u2019\u00e9tudes et de recherches insitutionnelles) and the CERFI (Centre d\u2019\u00e9tudes, de recherches et de formation institutionnelle).<\/p>\n

We can see, in this sense, why Dardot and Laval were interested in institutional psychotherapy as embodying the kind of \u201cinstituting praxis\u201d that could produce a new form of common or collectif<\/em> to use Oury\u2019s term.\u00a0 But perhaps, institutional psychotherapy could also help Hardt and Negri if we consider it not simply in its medical\/therapeutic potential but rather as a political theory, an ethics and a practice of everyday life that would prevent the reappearance of these political and psychic \u201cconcentrationisms.\u201d\u00a0 As Tosquelles put it, institutional psychotherapy was an attempt to cure not only the patients, not only the doctors, but an \u201cattempt to cure life\u201d \u2013 and this seems like a preliminary step to any discussion of the commons.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth<\/em> (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), vii.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid., viii.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., xiii.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., 355.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 356.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Ibid., 357.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Ibid., 358.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Ibid., 359.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun: essai sur la re\u0301volution au XXIe sie\u0300cle<\/em> (Paris: La De\u0301couverte, 2014), 425. [\u00ab\u00a0Pour \u00e9chapper \u00e0 l\u2019arbitraire d\u2019un pouvoir constituant coup\u00e9 de toute historie, pour conjurer la figure mythologique du l\u00e9gislateur rousseauiste charg\u00e9 d\u2019 \u00ab\u00a0instituer un peuple\u00a0\u00bb en lui faisant don d\u2019une constitution appropri\u00e9e, il faut faire apparaitre la pr\u00e9existence de la vie sociale, c\u2019est-\u00e0-dire l\u2019\u00e9paisseur historique d\u2019une soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9j\u00e0 institu\u00e9e, comme la condition qui seule rend possible la r\u00e9union d\u2019une assembl\u00e9e de citoyens s\u2019accordant sur les r\u00e8gles de fonctionnement des institutions politiques.\u00a0\u00bb]<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Ibid., 429.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Ibid., 445. [\u00ab\u00a0la praxis instituant et donc tout \u00e0 la fois l\u2019activit\u00e9 qui \u00e9tablit un nouveau syst\u00e8me de r\u00e8gles et l\u2019activit\u00e9 qui cherche \u00e0 relancer en permanence cet \u00e9tablissement de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 \u00e9viter l\u2019enlisement de l\u2019instituant dans l\u2019institu\u00e9.\u00a0\u00bb]<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Ibid. [\u00ab\u00a0La praxis instituante produit son propre sujet dans la continuit\u00e9 d\u2019un exercice qui est toujours \u00e0 renouveler au-del\u00e0 de l\u2019acte cr\u00e9ateur.\u00a0 Plus exactement, elle est autoproduction d\u2019un sujet collectif dans et par la coproduction continu\u00e9e de r\u00e8gles de droit.\u00a0\u00bb]<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> On this, see Frantz Fanon, \u00c9crits sur l’ali\u00e9nation et la libert\u00e9, ed. by Jean Khalfa and Roberty Young<\/em> (Paris: La D\u00e9couverte, 2015).<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Michel Foucault, preface to Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii. \u201cHow does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?\u00a0 How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism?\u00a0 How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Camille Robcis In their preface to Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe their book as an \u201cethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire.\u201d[1] Their goal, they explain, is not simply to recognize the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52428],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-5-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}