Félix Guattari : Conversation with Juan Luis Martínez [Excerpt]
Translation by Paula Cobo
In 1991, a year after the return of the democracy Félix Guattari visited Santiago de Chile and had an extensive conversation with the poet Juan Luis Martinez, Guattari who recognized in the writings of Martinez the absolute rhizome, and in Martinez's practice of Poetry his own Chaosmosis unfolded. In the followings lines I will display the english translation that I have been developing of this conversation.
Juan Luis Martínez : I know very well who are you ! and its very important that you are here (Chile)
Félix Guattari : Thanks
JLM : This visit to Chile has given you new perspectives about the country´s democracy, do you see any change?, did you expect to see any change?
FG : Its to soon to answer this
JLM: I personally don't see any changes at all
FG : For many years now, it has been said that this would not change, but the reality had said the contrary. The changes will be every time more fast, in an accelerated speed
JLM : You still have hope, Mr Guattari !
FG : Its a geopolitical vision
JLM : I think things will be over, which is much more important
FG : Totally true, if things continue in this way, people in Santiago will die asphyxiated, and everything is going to be over as you say
JLM : There are many ways of "ending", not just that one. Culture is what is being placed outside Occident, same over institutions. I have been working on this very intense book for 15 years now, and at that time I have been very interested in your perspective of political discourse and psychiatry. My aim is that this book will be intolerable, so if they don´t put me on the asylum it will just be pure causality
FG : I'm friend with Roberto Matta for a long time now, do you know him personally?
JLM : Ive had the intention for a long time now of sending him my book (La Nueva Novela) and I haven´t made it because I think Matta doesn´t read.
FG : Actually, yes he does not read.
JLM : Which are the poets that interest you in actuality?
FG : Ginsberg
JLM : Ginsberg is a poet of individual poems, of excellent separated poems, which don´t work with language as a totality and which I think is not compatible with your perspective. I'm surprised that you like his poetry, What do you answer to that?
FG : The problem is not set forth in literary terms. I know him so well and for me there is this schizoanalitic relationship.
JLM : I know your allusion to the work of Beckett. You qualify him of schizophrenic, now does this schizophrenic knowledge manifest on his work?, is it conscious or unconscious?
FG : It is unconscious if you have a machined conception of unconsciousness, in the sense of a poetic immersion on the unconscious, that is what I call Chaosmosis, something that you practice constantly in your texts
JLM : More that in my texts, I practice it on my little papers, encounters, in my things
FG : Is it possible to reverberate on an abstract machine which is outside the singularity of the situation and which at the same time express its problematics?. That is what Kafka makes, whom I have studied a lot, him with his neurotic personal problems, he decodes the fascist Nazi bureaucracy, way before it actually manifests.
JLM : Certainly. My experience with my book which you already know is a very peculiar experience. In that time (1977) I was in a very particular psychic situation. It is a book written in a very unconscious way, but at the same time there is a vigilance not so much about the “mode of writing” with certainly does not interest me so much, but on a certain functionality of it
FG : Allow me to bear on what you are saying: the functioning has a functionality, that is to unfold, to exist in a poetical universe as experimentation, with a very high risk that this universe does not crystallize
JLM : The difference is that on those years I didn´t had any control over that, now I encourage myself to its will. In that time I was crawled by the book. Now I believe in the autonomy of language, in the work that I'm immersed right now I had let the book to auto generate. I function as an instrument of language
FG : But at the same time, language always becomes from language
JLM : At one time, I was really engaged to understand the mechanisms you are talking about, today the theoretical part interest me less and less, I'm more interested in the specific practice. This conversation is not simple at all, on one hand I don´t want to fulfill your expectations, even though your feelings are very open and this situation places me on the position of desiring to reach an agreement, but maybe not.
FG : We have to reach a maximum accordance
JLM : I surprise myself, because I suffer an enormous antipathy with psychiatrists and psychoanalysts
FG : Me too ! But tell me, In what are you working at the moment?
JLM : I had encountered and produced this encounter with a work that could be endless, which is very risky. I have to exert a will of cut: close from some part or another. Now, my mayor interest is in the total dissolution of the author and of the work of art- the anonymity is the ideal -if I can use this word-, is to make a body of work in which no line of text belongs to me, articulating an extended net of multiple traces and fragments that connect. It is a Penélope work Although I advice you that on a conversation of this characteristics one can state things, but which may not be the most accurate ones. Everything is unstable, there are no such things as permanent judgements, tomorrow or in a while I could be thinking in another way, which is not bad. I gaze at the permanent contradiction on my work, and in this sense I would like to ask you which is the most significant difference between the work of Rimbaud and Lautréamont, in reference to authorship and the identity of the author.
FG: I answer you referring to Joyce. How would you situate him in respect to which you are asking?
JLM : If you analyze the first works by Joyce, they are far away form the order and system and the dissipation which he reaches in Finnegans Wake. Finnegans interest me way more, although if I don´t understand anything. The more I misunderstand the book, the most it interest me. I must insist in my question about Rimbaud and Lautréamont, because there is always a nexus in between the myth of Rimbaud, the interpretations of him, and then the nonexistence identity of Lautréamont.
FG : It exists a differential relation between the Cantos de Aldoror and the poetic work the rootless poetics of Rimbaud and his erring quest in the Arabic countries.
JLM : I don´t understand
FG : I have the impression that in Rimbaud there was no delusion, but delusional personality. We must distinguish the delusional discourse from the delusional mutation of personality, the delusional act from the delusional vision.
JLM : I'm trying to refer mostly to the phenomena of the lecture, the reading of a work, a work with author, with a name -a work by Félix Guattari- is read on a different way than in a work with no name. If you didn´t came with the prestige that precedes you, the conversation would be other, although you would be the same exact person.
FG : Maybe it would be better in that way. What I'm going to say here it may sound pedant, or anti-pedant, but I don´t feel at all as an intellectual, a writer.
JLM : Its so good that you intend to be a regular guy!
FG : This is easy for me, meanwhile time passes I forget everything, there is a kind of “tábula rasa” working constantly within me.
JLM : I have seen in some of your texts that you talk about the “self” (moi) and "person". Which is the difference that you establish with this two words?
FG : First place, I don´t talk about "self" (moi), rather of existential territories that integrate the "self", the body, the transitional space, the ambient space, ethnicity, ancestors, there is an immanent discursive agglomeration that makes possible the immersion to existence through diverse intensities and dimensions, but this space can also become "switch ed off" when one is sleeping or with an anguish crisis.
JLM : I think that the "switch off” never happens completely.
FG : Well it never turns off completely, but one (moi) constitutes a totality, a kind of ontological mega maniac- " I am all this"-, meanwhile "person" is other thing it has to do with a power relation, image and presence. This implies an scene of language, a social scene that produces differences between gender, differences in time, social class, etc.
JLM : This fragmentation that you make of the world in different milieus, in which way affect the self (moi)?
FG : I don´t understand
JLM : Is related with the self (moi). I'm interested in knowing if for you its a continuous thing or fragmentary and discontinuous?
FG : Both
JLM : There is a phrase by Breton that said that the history of modern poetry is the history of personal liberties that the poet has taken in respect from the self(moi).
FG : Certainly, In the industrial capitalistic societies all polysemic notion of expression has dissolved. the "self" has to be attached to the person (personality), on the contrary the poet introduces what I call Heterogenesis.
JLM : And what is its fundamental function?
FG : I would say that it is a militant function
JLM : I understand my work in that way and I try to undermine linguistically, that vertical structure, because from there you can raise perfectly up to god
FG : Do you have a scientific formation?
JLM : I read scientific books, but in a fragmentary fashion, there are few books that I read from beginning to end. I'm not interested in that type of reading. I'm a fragmentary reader and author, my guide is desire and my own satisfaction.
FG : And that is why you scatter the meters(inches)...
JLM : Yes, the steady measures, of course. In conversations I try to introduce the contradictory point of view.
FG : I think that its very important, I think that as horses have their own Protective Society, then there should be a Protective Society of Contradiction.
JLM : I'm remembering a thought of Jean Tardieu that says: "I would devotedly hug my thoughts in a contradictory fashion. I would admit that on a same time and under the same category one thing can be and at the same time not be"
FG : I have my little theory about contradiction. I think that when paradoxes are affirmed and lets remember that the first paradox of our culture is the resurrection of Christ, then in that sense if the first paradox is possible; truth -that is in function here- is a withdrawal from signification and communication.
JLM : With this statement are you manifesting that you are against contradiction?
FG : No, because the subject here is to clear up free rhythms, music, the tongue.. what places enunciation. The enunciative movement is the one that arises the possibility of transferring an object and its value. On the opposite lets take the contradiction of infantile negativism. Here they always try to affirm something, but not to affirm the contrary of the contradiction. It has to do with the right of the existential possibility of affirming "I'm here, you are here and something is happening between us".
JLM : Its one alternative, but not the only one
FG : Hopefully....
JLM : I thought that you would be more interested in poets where there is predominance over the signifier. Do you know Eric Khaler?
FG : No
JLM : He made a series of conferences at Princeton about the disintegration of the forms of art and establishes the example of the scientific that work in the Bacteriological institute of Maryland. He said that, one one side they are role model citizen, very good parents, tax payers, everything in order, and on the other side they are the controllers of the bacteriological wars. They delegate the signification to the pentagon, the military. They basically work on the manipulation of significances. The situation of many contemporary poets is that: divorce. You cannot be any longer like Eliot or Rilke, and in that way I see much better an Ezra Pound, just more irresponsible. Do you think this is correct in respect to the predominance of the signifier?