prototyping social forms

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My professional activities in the field of psychotherapy, like my political and cultural engagements, have led me increasingly to put the emphasis on subjectivity as the product of individuals, groups and institutions.

Considering subjectivity from thepoint of view of its production does not imply any return to traditional systems of binary determination— material infrastructure / ideological superstructure. The various semiotic registers that combine to engender subjectivity do not maintain obligatory hierarchical relations fixed for all time.  Sometimes, for example, economic semiotisation becomes dependent on collective psychological factors — look at the sensitivity of the stock exchange to fluctuations of opinion.  Subjectivity is in fact plural and polyphonic — to use Mikhail Bakhtin' s expression. It recognises no dominant or determinant instance guiding all other forms according to a univocal causality.

At least three types of problem prompt us to enlarge the definition of subjectivity beyond the classical opposition between individual subject and society, and in so doing, revise the models of the unconscious currently in circulation: the irruption of

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subjective factors at the forefront of current events, the massive development of machinic productions of subjectivity and, finally, the recent prominence of ethological and ecological perspectives on human subjectivity.

Subjective factors have always held an important place in

the course of history.  But it seems that with the global diffusion of the mass media they are beginning to play a dominant role. We will only give a few brief examples here.  The immense movement unleashed by the Chinese students at Tiananmen Square obviously had as its goal the slogans of political democratisation. But it is equally certain that the contagious affective charges it bore far surpassed simple ideological demands. A whole lifestyle, collective ethic and conception of social relations (derived largely from Western images) were set into motion. And in the long run tanks won't be able to stop it! As in Hungary or Poland, collective existential mutation will have the last word! All the same, large movements of subjectivation don't necessarily develop in the direction of emancipation.  The massive subjective revolution which has been developing among the Iranian people f or more than ten years is focused on religious archaisms and generally conservative social attitudes - particularly with regard to the position of women (this is a sensitive issue in France, because of the events in the Maghreb and the repercussions of these repressive attitudes to women in the area of immigration).

In the Eastern bloc, the fall of the Iron Curtain didn't happen as the result of armed insurrection but through the crystallisation of an immense collective desire annihilating the mental substrate of the post-Stalin totalitarian system. This is a phenomenon of extreme complexity, since it intermingles emancipatory aspirations with retrogressive, conservative even fascist drives of a nationalistic, ethnic and religious nature.  In this upheaval, how will the populations of central

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Europe and the Easternbloc overcome the bitter deception the capitalist West has reserved for them until now? History will tell us — admittedly a Historyfull of unpleasant surprises but, why not — about a subsequent renewal of social struggles! By contrast, how murderous the Gulf War will have been! One could almost speak of genocide, since this war led to the extermination of many more Iraqis (counting all ethnic groups) than there were victims of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. With the passage of time it seems clear that what was at stake was an attempt to bring the Arab populations to heel and reclaim world opinion: it had to be demonstrated that the Yankee way of subjectivation could be imposed by the combined power of the media and arms.

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Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millénaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leit-motiv. It is not a natural given any more than air or water. How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and permanently reinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with Universes of mutant value?  How do we work for its liberation, that is, for its resingularisation?  Psychoanalysis, institutional analysis, film, literature, poetry, innovative pedagogies, town planning and architecture — all the disciplines will have to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon, and transform them into riches and unforeseen pleasures, the promises of which, for all that, are all too tangible.