Experimental Funding Schemes and Militant Analysis: The Experience of CERFI

François Pain, Bruno Guattari, Joséphine Guattari, and others at La Borde during the filming of Min Tanaka (1986). Photo by Jean-Michel Pain, courtesy of François Pain for CERFI. Analysis Everywhere.

This article is an adapted excerpt from Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira’s new book CERFI: Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry (Minor Compositions). The Center for Institutional Studies, Research, and Training (CERFI) was a research cooperative cofounded by Félix Guattari. At the intersection of Marx and Freud, its members set out to place analysis at the center of militant practices. CERFI: Analysis Everywhere recovers this legacy and invites us to think about analysis—everywhere and by other means—as a vital tool for political transformation.

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The libidinal conditions of our collective production are at the same time its militant conditions.

—François Fourquet and Lion Murard, Recherches1

After 1968 the decision was taken to reinvent CERFI as a research cooperative from which its members could make a living. The main compromise was to do so whilst testing new types of revolutionary organization and modes of life and work that would avoid falling into the problems that CERFI had previously identified in small militant groups. This demanded a specific form of collective work, taking into account the unconscious and subjective dimensions of groups. For the members of CERFI, reinventing modes of working as a collective meant taking on experiments that were in principle similar to what they had participated in at La Borde. The intention was, as Liane Mozère wrote, to “search for a material and subjective assemblage susceptible to fight against subjection, to favor the emergence of a subjectivity and a creativity as little alienated as possible.”2 As Lion Murard told us: “To tell the truth, the extreme ambition of the project was that we were the cadres of the future revolution.”3 This is not to say that CERFI members had a shared expectation of what the professionals of the future revolution would be like. This commitment to de facto embark on a collective analytical experiment, although agreed upon by all members, evidently meant different things at the level of practice. According to Murard, “Part of the group wanted to intervene on the ground, and the other part wanted to develop research in writing.” At the same time, “[for Guattari] research was just a pretext for an attempt at schizoanalysis or group analysis, meaning that intellectual production was much less important for him.”4

Analytical Self-management

CERFI’s exploration of group-analytical processes is particularly evident in its reinvention of administrative practices as analytical devices. After 1968, CERFI reconstituted itself with a president, a general secretary, and an administrator, among other positions. These roles, however, were only formal. In reality, a core decision of CERFI was that most roles were rotational, instead of predetermined according to academic or professional training or skills. Avoiding the dangers that came with predefined roles (self-enclosure, alienation, the formation of hierarchical distinctions), CERFI members occupied roles according to their interests.

As Murard remarked: “Where the militancy was most salient, most prevalent, was indeed, around the idea of polyvalence,” which aimed at avoiding specialization, the identification of subjects and tasks, and falling into what Sartre referred to as a “serial” condition.5 This approach was influenced by La Borde’s implementation of “the grid,” a mechanism for the distribution of tasks and duties across the entire institution so as to avoid mindless repetition and identity crystallization. As we have observed elsewhere, this allowed for both transversality across the institution and a collective analytical protocol.6 In the words of Michel Rostain: “The idea that we could all adapt to many different tasks was wonderful and sometimes a bit scary. From time to time, you’d end up with someone, an individual or a group, who was incapable of doing what they wanted to do. CERFI was like that … It was remarkable that we often managed to get by.”7

In this spirit, CERFI’s approach to budgeting and pay was unusual. According to Murard, “While all the left groups in Paris rejected having anything to do with money, we were going to build up a war chest. We were going to make money, [considering that] it’s not dirty as long as we know how to redistribute it, how to manage it.”8 This aspect remained central throughout. While “permanent” members had a fixed base salary, they could request additional funding depending on projects, in the same way as nonpermanent members. Pay was not equal for all but distributed in an equitable way according to each person’s needs. This implied that a constant collective discussion of work processes in relation to pay was taking place. It was not democratic in a formal sense, but it presumed collective debate and decision.9

It also implied a different relationship with money as a means to support people in their lives. Gaëtane Lamarche-Vadel recalls how unique it was that her pay was adjusted to her needs: “After a month they asked me how much I wanted to earn. I never imagined I’d make any money in this place of militant research. I saw that people were asking for the salary they wanted, no doubt what they needed to live on.”10 This mode of budgetary distribution allowed CERFI to provide support for those in need of childcare or even of survival. Lion Murard elaborated on this aspect:

Money was not indexed or related to the amount of work or the wealth of the work produced. It was a function of needs. That’s the communist principle: from each according to their needs. So you had to say, I’ve got my partner, I’ve got two little girls, I need x per month. We had very few collective expenses because we didn’t have a secretary and so on. The equivalent of what a secretary would have cost, we put into our journal to produce it, and because we gave away a lot of money, our own salary was very low. To tell the truth, it was a time when we had very, very little money.11

Crucially, the funding that was granted for large research projects was often redistributed to other projects. In part, this had to do with solidarity and coordination across the different projects to prevent self-enclosure. Often it was a matter of providing support to projects that otherwise would have difficulties in sourcing means of existence. And with this, a far more complex research agenda could be supported, avoiding the crystallizations and serializations typical of anti-production slowly setting in within institutions. 

The practice of accounting would gain prominence as a collective analytical mechanism of sorts—as a space to argue over research, survival, and interests and libidinal investments. Due to the ambition of programming against anti-production, like everything else in CERFI accounting was rotational as a way to prevent a certain competency and the formation of hierarchical structures and bureaucracy. Because everyone would have to assume the role, accounting became a mechanism to both trace and dispute the collective intellectual, militant, and affective investments of the group.

Inspired by La Borde, the coordination of every administrative, managerial, or mundane maintenance task allowed for a therapeutic opportunity to foreground how desire permeated the institution via the different libidinal investments of its participants. This “libidinal rationality” was a mechanism that allowed CERFI to operate differently, unlike a typical professional research center. It was a different ethos of research in terms of management. Rostain tellingly remarked: “It was a very, very crazy way of managing money, which was not rational at all. I mean, it was rational in terms of eroticism, but not at all in terms of the usual management of money.”12 Although in principle the budgetary responsibility should have been rotated, according to our interviews this was not always the case because few volunteered for the role and because it was necessary to find someone that everyone was comfortable with. It is also worth noting that it was not easy for everyone to articulate their needs in such a collective way. From 1975 onwards, the formation of independent subgroups helped make the discussion about money easier to handle; it thereafter took place in a more supported way. In any case, the way money and budgets were managed at least enabled CERFI to involve, employ, and reimburse people with no formal experience in research. As Rostain explained:

In 1974, a year when there was plenty of work and cash around, there were nearly eighty people in receipt of CERFI money, which is to say probably around a hundred people who participated in our work in one way or another, or even who, having not participated very closely, still found themselves intimately brought into the network. It’s not that we were rich, not at all. I don’t know who calculated at the time that we in fact had enough money to employ twenty people full time. However, we ensured that work and money circulated differently to how they would have in state-run structures.13

Exceptional Objects / Lines of Flight

The redistribution of the research budget was core to CERFI, to the point that the group put in place a mechanism to prevent it from getting blocked by forces of anti-production, such as the demands and bureaucracies of state-funded research. As Lamarche-Vadel pointed out:

Even though other independent research groups also won contracts, CERFI's singular feature was that it redistributed the money to militant activities, to the journal Recherches, and to the development of projects that would otherwise have had difficulty finding funding, either because the subjects were risky or because the team members did not have university degrees, etc.14

CERFI supported “minor” streams of research, to which it gave the name “exceptional” research objects, sometimes also called “erotic” objects.

Anne Querrien refers to this as one of the key rules of CERFI, “creating a line of flight, the possibility of financing a project or an exceptional object.”15 Indeed, these objects varied widely. Such was the case for the Psychoclub, created by Françoise Dolto, which experimented with psychoanalysis by correspondence. In his interview with us, Olivier Quérouil mentioned how the group tried to follow a format close to that of a radio program, where people would call in (or in this case write in) with all kinds of concerns.16

One of the most powerful “exceptional” or “erotic” CERFI projects was IMAGO’s experiment, across multiple institutions, with lending film cameras to children or patients so they could film their lives and their institutions. To the question of what video can contribute to institutional analysis, IMAGO replied:

All too often, institutional analysis consists of nothing more than reports, presentations, and minutes. Video, on the other hand, deals with material that has nothing to do with the object, and we use its data to extract verbal sequences, image sequences, and institutional sequences, in order to edit them in a way that is still marked by our own particular way of seeing things … What we’re looking for is not to understand something, but to express what we don’t understand. We’re not trying to explain it in order to understand it better, but to find out if it’s a determining element, an a-signifying element, a machinic index.17

Another “exceptional” research project took place at the Pont Blanc nursery in Aubervilliers. A video monograph was produced on life in the nursery, in order to examine childcare and the evolution of the family. The researchers hoped that making the video might “lead to a real commitment on [their] part”; they also wanted to “help circulate the Pont Blanc experience elsewhere, to other nurseries.”18 The aim of using video in an exploratory rather than a documentary way was to create spaces of feedback—in this case feedback towards institutional and collective transformation. As filmmaker François Pain put it:

We received such feedback from the children and the staff. But we didn’t do anything else with these tapes, we didn’t have the means to use them. So it was something that was done in the immediate exchange through video-writing, something that could help us understand things. It gave us information. It allowed us to read something other than the spoken word. It was another way of going back over things that have happened.19

There were also training courses in institutional analysis using video. The aim was to “train staff on the observation of ‘what happens’ in the institution.” The process consisted in learning about a particular video technique, followed by immediate viewing of the video made. At the Centres Psychothérapiques de Nantes, patients were shown how to use the camera, alongside nurses and other staff. This could be seen as a reversion to the power of medical recording or of the medical gaze in psychiatric institutions. But in the absence of a “methodology,” as Thierry Rosenzweig described it, “something happened. It was by chance … The camera made people speak.”20 According to Lamarche-Vadel, “That was the vitality of CERFI. The video group’s members were less present at CERFI than the others, but they were tentacles. They made connections with other fields. Guattari understood that video could also be a political instrument.”21

In our opinion, in many ways the “exceptional” or “erotic” objects were more truthful to CERFI’s original intentions than the main research projects could ever be. It is for this reason that we have dedicated multiple pages of archival material across this book to them. We want to counteract the exclusionary tendency of writing to erase wider processes of collective semiotization. Free from the constraints of the state and its research demands—and free from the requirement to communicate polyphonic analytical processes through written language—these exceptional research lines allowed for analytical experimentation across a multiplicity of fields and situations.

As Jean-Claude Polack reminded us, the allocation of funding to exceptional objects was very much in the ethos of La Borde—providing funding for not-obviously productive activities, and thus allowing for cartographic openings and unprogrammed consequences.22