7.2. Estrategias de aprendizaje
7.2.1 Clasificación de estrategias
Lacan
sCouch, Guattari
sInstitution
51such as medication or organic illness) on its periphery, psychoanalysis does its best to limit itself to the gray ellipsis, which encircles "the place of the signifier in the institution." Whereas the institution encompasses all six of the matrix's squares, including the relatively small ellipsis dominated by language, psychoanalysts instead locate their cozy consulting rooms well within the ellipsis of signification, where two subjects-analyst and patient remain happily confined within a "signifying ghetto"
(MR 92/ RM 255).
Anyone dwelling fully within the oval area must show evidence of full acces sion to the Lacanian symbolic order (land of the signifier) , and those who need help getting there must report straight to the analyst's couch. Here within the elliptical boundary line, speech or writing overcodes all other semiotic modes.
Guattari questions the therapeutic efficacy of the psychoanalytic tendency to translate patients' involvement with matter. This, for him, amounts to an attempt to subjugate patients with signifiers, in order to pull them into the elliptical space of language. For example, psychotics, as well as children, often express themselves using what Guattari calls symbolic semiologies, such as gestures, screams, or behaviors, but "Experts, technocrats of the mind, representatives of the medical or academic establishments will not listen to such modes of expression." Instead of listening to their patients' non-verbal expressivity, mainstream analysts use interpretation to translate symbolic expression into language. "Psychoanalysis has worked out an entire system of interpretation whereby it can relate everything whatever to the same range of universal representations: a pine tree is a phallus, it's of the symbolic order and so on"
(MR 168/RM 306; tID).
Guattari finds this practice repressive, because, he explains, "each time one goes from a pre signifying semiotic [symbols] to a signifying semiotic [language] , a loss of jouissance occurs"(GR 155/RM 288) . If
I understand him correctly, jouissance involves intensities, which are located in the "matter" column of the matrix. The pre-signifYing semiotic preferred by the patient may involve not only material intensities, but also physical matter. For example, "Playing with one's shit is participating in a kind of 'matter,'" writes Guattari. Most analysts would not tolerate such a mode of expression.
When an analytic intervention attempts to transform this pleasure, to transform this matter into a translatable semiotic substance, subject to interpretation according to the dominant code, it ends up mutilating or abolishing it by fixing it on a "signifying semiotic semblance" which will substitute itself for the body without organs. Normative institutions have
52
Guattari:S Diagrammatic Thought
always devoted themselves to programming individuals, conditioning them to an indefinite translatability of their desires.
( GR 155-156/ RM 288)
To find enjoyment in playing with excrement is to direct desiring energy toward flows of intensities and matter.
As
a zone of unformed fluxes or flows, Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs belongs to the column of matter, and in this sense it is of the real. To interpret, then, is to seal off the column of matter-the real-thereby disempowering desire by render ing the patient's material "praxis" into a substance which is "transmissible, indefinitely transposable."This repression of intensities, jouissance, and matter operates through the suppression of multiple substances of expression in favor of a single signifying substance: language. Psychoanalytic interpretation thus follows the semiotic logic of capitalism, "inasmuch as it is based on laws which establish the equivalence and general translatability of all semiotic expres sion"
( GR 156/ RM 289) .
Signifying semiotics enables psychoanalysis to uphold the capitalist world order. "For the psychoanalyst, it has now become a crucially important question of power: all expressions of desire mustbe
made to come under the control of the same interpretative language. This is his way of making deviant individuals of all kinds submit to the laws of the ruling power, and it is this that the psychoanalyst specializes in"
(MR 168/
RM 306; tm) .
Even though psychoanalysis successfully represses by imposing language, institutional psychotherapy cannot simply eliminate it. Since the psychiatric hospital engages all six squares of Guattari's semiotic matrix, it includes within it the signifying ellipsis as well. While it is true that psychotics lack full access to this space due to their failure to accede to the symbolic order, administrators, staff, and visitors
all
employ language (signifying significa tion) whenever they converse or write reports. At the same time, those working in a psychiatric institution cannot afford to pay attention only to the play of signifiers, because in a live-in situation, the doctor cannot domi nate the patient simply by manipulating transference. Patients and staff interact constantly, negotiating flows of nutrition, waste, and affect. Speech is not enough.Though Guattari often seems to prefer the polyvocity of symbolic signifi cation to the biunivocity of signifying signification, he in fact does not advo cate that those living under the reign of global capitalism try to live as children, psychotics, or primitives. Such a return to a Rousseau-esque state of nature, if it were even possible, would not be desirable, since the reign of symbols entails forms of territorialization that in themselves limit freedom,