CERFI: Four Remarks
By Anne Querrien
CERFI (Centre d’études, de recherches et de formations institutionnelles) was founded in 1965. The opposition between the French communist party and the leftist students concerning their attitudes during the Algerian war for independence had underlined that the honeymoon between intellectuals and the Communist Party was nearly over. The party would not allow the intellectuals to have any autonomy in the definition of their activist agenda. In the Soviet Union, the Chrustjev period was over and the communist world would not tolerate any new criticism. Many militants identified themselves then with the peripheries of communism, becoming Maoists, Guevarists, Castrists, and demonstrating in favor of the Vietnam’s independence.
A few of us in Félix Guattari’s milieu were beginning to think that the difficulties inside communist organizations were directly linked to the big changes taking place within global capitalism, and that the theoretical framework of our struggles had to be rebuilt. We felt that we lacked the right resources to rebuild. We were of course familiar with all the existing theories — as well the new ones in the fields of psychoanalysis, ethnology, sociology, and history — but one needs real-world experiments in order to develop the theories themselves, and these experiments would have to be nothing less that what we do and what we. So Félix insisted that his circle of friends do more than get involved in international business abroad, but rather begin to “internet” their own life projects and build a kind of common platform, a common place to converse, and several affinity groups linked to various activities: architecture, teaching, women, ethnology, psychiatry (this group existed already as Groupe de psychothérapie institutionnelle), cinema, music. All these groups gathered around a new journal, Recherches, which edited texts written by group members, or by interesting people outside the group, in a rather loose manner. Félix himself was co-managing the La Borde mental clinics with Jean Oury, and it was his own field of experimentation, a field open to everybody for learning through a very fluid system of short-term training periods.
1. How did we become commissioned?
At first we did not think about any commissioning and paid ourselves simply for the small necessities of life. One of us had a little house in Paris she got from her family, with three big rooms, and, very few comforts (bad heating for instance). We met there, or in one another’s houses — like any militant group. The idea of commissioning came from outside the group. Consultants from the Department for Social Affairs and Health were commissioned to examine how La Borde was managed: with around 150 beds for the mentally ill, La Borde was able treat the same number of people as a hospital with 2000 beds. So La Borde could perhaps give an economical model to the Department and help them save money! The study of the two consultants was discussed with an ad hoc group from CERFI consisting of architects, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, patients, and anyone else interested. All of our groups were always open to any person concerned for any reasons, all groups were always public.
The consultants discovered the poor conditions in which we met and said: but with your brilliant ideas why not sell them and make money? Why not? We did not know how to do that. One thing we did with our ideas was publish a big issue of Recherches called “Architecture, programmation et psychiatrie,” which contained the consultants’ report about the importance of having small urban mental hospitals instead of big rural hospitals, as well as the best of the discussion we had around it. Two years later a woman came to our place with this issue in her hands saying: I am from the Urbanism, Housing and Transports Department, we are beginning a big social science research program, would you agree to come in and be paid to work on your ideas? We were really astonished, but why not? Of course “why not” would wouldn’t be the way we always reacted, but we would of course not say No before checking it out.
At that time, two years after the events of ‘68, the French government was searching for an explanation for what appeared to be a complete collapse of the policy it had for 30 years. All independent leftist intellectual groups were brought into large social research centers and projects built by the government. All of us needed money to live, and we used to earn it by doing odd jobs. We dreamt of being able to gather together and work on one big project. We were given a chance to do just that. It was the first aspect of the offer that struck us. This first commission was really liberal in the American sense: allowing freedom. We were told to say precisely what we thought about the following questions: 1) How should the introduction of mentally ill people in new towns be organized? 2) How do we understand the term “urban”?
2. What did we mean in our earlier Recherches issue when we said that the State cannot know the social demand of the time, but rather knows only an obsolete one?
Seen in retrospect, the openness of those questions seems incredible. We were just taught to be ourselves. Neurotic feelings exist in all groups, and within CERFI, even people who are friends would not believe such an opportunity to be real. They constantly tried to see whether some sort of ruse was at play: perhaps the reinforcement of Félix Guattari’s power over them, for example? Félix, president of CERFI, negotiated all this, with me as his assistant. CERFI’s production would have been much better without all those neurotics. At first the negative power, the ineffectiveness, came from the within. It was as if we had been changed by magic into real scientific researchers, and could not manage because we didn’t have the right training to write reports, books, papers — aside from a few of us (around five out of maybe thirty).
It was only Félix and I who shared the results with the commissioners. Some of our other friends relayed aspects of our work to people they met in the field, that is, at a micro level, which respected hierarchies and could not effect much change. The main hypotheses of Félix and I was that our commissioners — persons at the middle and even high levels of the State and other bureaucracies — were as schizoid as we, and that our schizo-analysis needn’t stay limited to the room of the psychoanalyst, or the walls of the hospital, or within our group. Those people wanted to speak to us, and were willing to pay for that; thus we would speak with them; and when they would no longer pay, we would no longer communicate with them. That’s all. We were not commissioned to answer highly specific questions, but rather could reformulate any questions we received in precisely the terms we wished. For our “commissioners” it was the question itself which they didn’t know how to formulate; the solution, of course, was their responsibility. From 1971 to 1974 it was idyllic; we produced our best texts, the ones quoted here.
Reunion of Cerfi in Etretat, 1974.
So we were neither within power structures, nor without. Rather, we had a schizo-analytic relation with a few people from within power structures who themselves had such relations with one another. On their side the collective was transversal, in the sense given to this word by Félix: horizontal and hierarchical at the same time — in the Urbanism, Housing, and Transportation Department, the highest civil servant, in direct relation with the Prime Minister, had called for such a group. Young civil servants at a high level were in the group; hope for the renewal of the country was placed in them. We were a schizo-analytic consultant to this group. But we were expelled as soon as Chaban Delmas was replaced as Prime Minister by Chirac after the election of Giscard d’Estaing as president. This highly placed civil servant group had its last gathering with the researchers at the beginning of 1977.
Most of them then made good careers in the State bureaucracy, most of the researchers were integrated into Universities or the National Centre for Scientific Research. CERFI was not the only group with a commitment to social science, but it was the only one to refuse integration.
What did we teach those civil servants during their few years? And what did we learn from them? We learned that the State was crumbling and that nobody knew where to turn for the best remedy. Globalization was not yet the best general explanation. States have for years, even centuries, taken measures, created rules, to make the population homogeneous, and have failed. Old legends, old languages, newcomers, American movies, French philosophy, new industries, Internet, anything can suddenly appear and tear down the nice state social construction. Most of the research that was commissioned merely told the State how to prevent failure, and proposed few concrete reforms of any kind, and thus you have a proliferation of studies, of consulting groups, of research structures. Confronted with chaos one generally follows one’s “line of flight.” Nobody dares speak of Chaosmos, as Felix did.
3. Was it resistance?
In a way, to create CERFI was to resist our own proclivity towards becoming either civil servants, on the one hand, or bureaucrats in Trade-Unions or Parties, on the other. It is the way all our friends (and we ourselves, later on) conducted their lives. Our lives seen from the mainstream could be seen as failures, but also as short testimonies that this mainstream could be resisted. Power is something you serve from your own will as La Boétie and Kafka have described. With CERFI we tried to speak to the anti-power desire existing among those who actually participated in institutions of power. The scale of our attempt was too small to be sustainable. Global forces rebuilt the power structures, but our “intellectual guerrilla” perhaps helped reinforce countertendencies. Anyhow, our hypothesis is that bio-power is the bottom, the core, the body-without-organs of society. It is before, after, behind, under, everywhere, and the only thing to do to resist power is to graft your desiring machine on it. Resistance is a vertiginous allergy to power, so vertiginous that it may lead you to become powerless, hopeless. Resistance is not a battle, but a rebellious cancer eating the politic body from inside.
My ideas about resistance are less linked to my experience in CERFI (where this word was not used so much) than by the story of my companion, born in 1925, who went into the French resistance in 1940, was in the Dachau concentration camp from June 1944 to May 1945, was excluded from the French Communist Party in 1950, was put in jail by the French in 1960 for aiding and abetting Algerians, and, around 1970, become someone who just resisted in a general way, someone no longer interested in power. Resistance is the mood of the nude living body, says Giorgio Agamben. Michel Foucault calls bio-power the confrontation with this nude living body. This nude living body invaded CERFI in 1972 with the arrival of a few homosexuals from the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire. L’’Anti-Oedipe was the story they needed to tell their own stories. They had no objections to getting commissions with any departments whatsoever. Together, we produced an issue of Recherches: “Trois milliards de pervers, Grande Encyclopédie des Homosexualités.” With them, CERFI became what we had desired, and feared, from the beginning, in 1965, a place of gathering resistances, of interweaving oddities. The general assembly on Tuesday became a happening. The money disappeared bit by bit; the space had to be restricted. The old group managing CERFI as a research center and as an editorial board scattered, since the former commissions were gone. Having lived for several years in CERFI was good training.
4. The women groups
In 1965 a first group grobofega (groupe des bonnes femmes de gauche, group of leftist women) combined cultural discussions about sexuality and militancy with free abortions and contraception. This militancy was not only theoretical, but practical. A network of young women was organized through the local sections of the Mutuelle Nationale des Etudiants de France in all university towns. As those practices were, bizarrely enough, illegal, the open discussion in the group was precious for the women involved, in order for them to be able to evaluate what they were doing.
In 1970 the Woman Liberation Movement was founded in Paris, with some ideas coming from the United States, as well as a strong presence of psychoanalysis, especially the Lacan school, a strong presence of wives of militants from leftist movements, a strong presence of women writers and artists, and a strong presence of lesbians. In this movement the few women from CERFI found new friends, or rediscovered old ones, but, in any event, did not experience difference. In CERFI the presence of male power was heavy; you had to love CERFI first, before anything else, like in any activist group. The way men produce theory is astonishing for me till now. Rivalry with others is generally the only thing which will motivate you to make a long, engaged, theoretical discourse; women are assumed to be able to make only small, disconnected bits to sew together as a patchwork. To work together with such different relations to production is rather difficult.
The demand for “research on the research” had been made by Michel Conan, the head of the research department commissioning us. As I explained above, this demand was expressed only to Felix and me, as a demand to go ahead in the specification of our schizo-analytic approach, in which this particular civil servant wanted to be involved too. We had promised to do it and to experiment with this double capture. I tried it by writing a diary which was shown only to Felix and him and has since been lost: my rhizome, said Felix. The other friends from CERFI completely rejected this extra charge, this quasi-pornography. But given that the situation of writing was really unbearable to women, this particular issue, “research on research,” appeared as an opportunity to demonstrate. My own feeling about it is that the strength is poor in comparison with what was expected by the moral contract with the “commissioner.”
At that time I did not feel like a woman, but rather as a human being in a female body which did not have the right to do the studies she wanted because of this body (I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but at that time the school was for men only). The only strategy for me was simply to strive for equity, to try to find out how females could be seen as good at work to the same degree as men, to reject the notion that men would be always be better, always be right. It was a completely derivative and a failure. So I had rather a human strategy that was to follow anything which came into view; for instance I spent six months with Guy Hocquenghem making the special issue “Trois milliards de pervers.” At that time I identified with transsexuals, or with what in France we call Folles, that is, homosexuals with feminine attitudes and, indeed, any borrowed sexual attitude that can be good.
Men in CERFI were of course very liberal, militant for free abortion and contraception, but their centrality in the space of thought was not under discussion. Women in CERFI were between 25 and 30 years old, thinking about becoming mothers, or already being mothers. For them the question of time was crucial. Most of their partners were not inside CERFI, and did not participate in this way of living. The position of women was really strange: women were the new value of the social movement, the “becoming-woman” of Deleuze and Guattari, but the general feeling was that this becoming was thought for and by men, and, as usual, placed women under the desires of men.
Liane Mozère, who used to be one of the Passionarias of the Communist Student Union, was the prominent feminine figure in CERFI, and a well-known figure in the woman’s movement too. She did research with a group of mostly women on institutions or professionals looking after children. For example, she observed some kindergartens in the suburbs and became a national and international specialist on childcare. I felt like it was simply an engagement with a field ordinary devoted to women, and I couldn’t go along with this. Indeed, I have never seen CERFI as a success for women.
In conclusion: CERFI lives now by its products, the issues of the journal Recherches. The journal was seen by us as a window, a link with outside, but without the consciousness that it will last after us. The edition of new points of view about CERFI is the best thing that can happen. Somebody may say perhaps that those women points in our issue no. 13 were not so bad, that they design some collective figure. The anti-woman from those times will surely learn from new readers about becoming the woman a little girl promised.
Anne Querrien is a sociologist and urban theorist. She was the general secretary of CERFI, and taught at the University of Paris 1 and 8. She is a currently a member of the editorial board of revues Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, Chimères, and Multitudes.
