Tokyo, the Proud

Félix Guattari

Introduction
Félix Guattari visited Japan on a number of occasions during the 1980s.
These visits consisted of invited lectures and a series of conversations
and collaborations with Japanese intellectuals, artists, and architects.
His collaborative writings with Deleuze, particularly the Kafka and
Rhizome books, began to appear in Japanese translation in the late
1970s. By the mid-eighties, however, Anti-Oedipus was available for
Japanese readers.1
The year 1985 saw the publication of Guattari’s conversations and
co-authored papers with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka collected under
the title of Velocity of Light, Fire of Zen: Assemblage 1985. This was fol-
lowed in 1986 with the translation of Guattari’s jointly authored volume
with Antonio Negri, Les nouveaux espaces de liberté. In the same year,
the colourful volume Tokyo Theatre: Guattari in Tokyo appeared. This
volume includes the present translation. It also contains multiple con-
tributions by leading Japanese intellectuals, especially ‘neo-academicist’
types like Akira Asada who were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy in the first two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.2
A distinction needs to be made between the translations of French
publications and the original Japanese editions of writings by, about and
with ‘Ferikkusu Gatari’. Guattari’s main translator, Masaaki Sugimura
from Ryuukoku University in Kyoto, is less-well known within the
global Deleuzian scene in comparison to Kuniichi Uno from the
University of Tokyo who was lead translator of Deleuze and Guattari’s
Mille Plateaux.3 Some of the Japanese Guattari books are cobbled
together collections of short papers, interviews, translations of older
materials, similar to the Semiotext(e) style of presentation of fragments,
out of chronological order, thematically linked, but decontextualized.
94 Félix Guattari

Turning to the early years of 1980–81, Tetsuo Kogawa (who served

during this period as an international editorial associate of the US-
based critical theory journal Telos, and would later publish on the free
radio movement and media in Japan, eventually landing at Tokyo Keizai
University) and the aforementioned Sugimara, collaborated on a book
of dialogues with Guattari titled From Politics to Signs, which was
undertaken in the fall of 1980 and the spring of 1981; this work was less
informal than those largely unedited dialogues published in Portuguese
with Suely Rolnick on the occasion of Guattari’s visit to Brazil in the
early 1980s.4
Guattari’s early 1980s visits to Japan were largely ignored by
‘orthodox’ scholars and mainstream media, neither of which had any
interest in Guattari’s efforts to bring together activism and theory. But
this changed over the course of the decade as the ‘bubble economy’
created a seemingly insatiable hunger for prestige goods, including ideas.
Japan’s bubble economy arguably extended from the mid-eighties to
the early nineties. It was driven by a large number of integrated economic
factors, but primarily formed around: real estate speculation, overpriced
stocks – especially bank stocks - a soaring Nikkei, and a wild credit
spiral. Guattari’s work was well received during the asset bubble because
it spoke directly to the problem of how to characterize, in both specific
and general terms, capitalism’s powers of deterritorialisation. It was
as a decoder of capital’s mutations that Guattari gained widespread
intellectual celebrity in Japan.
Throughout his career, beginning in the early 1980s, Guattari
developed historically-based typologies of capitalism that mapped re-
orderings of its constituent features (state, market, production) towards
a nascent theory of globalization and the rise of a networked world
economy, called Integrated World Capitalism. In an age in which infor-
mation is a factor of production and labour becomes immaterial, the
playful life-cycle of capitalism proposed by Guattari, and recalled by
Asada, was attached to economic and historical blocs: elderly or early
mercantile capitalism (Italy and France are supported by the transcen-
dental signifier Catholicism); adult or industrial capitalism (England and
the US and the self-policing, oedipalised, individual); infantile, post-
industrial capitalism (Japan and neither transcendental nor inner-
oriented persons, but those of a purely relative, child-like wonder and
passion, perfectly adapted to a placeless electronic space).
In ‘Tokyo, the Proud’, Guattari provides specific negative examples of
‘capitalistic infantilism’ in popular culture. There is a strong ‘machinic
eros’ in Japanese culture that is deeply repetitive and productive of
 Tokyo, the Proud 95

Figure 1. Tetsuo Kogawa with Félix Guattari, Tokyo, May 1981.

a subjectivity invested in getting high on machines. The problem, for
Guattari, is whether a machinic buzz connects with a productive social
outlet, like business, sending it in new directions, or vegetates stupidly
in addiction to video games, or even implodes into suicide.5 All three are
evident in Japan. For Guattari, ‘Japan is the prototypical model of new
capitalist subjectivities’6 that has produced within the high-tech miracle
ambiguous results, careening wildly from the extraordinarily creative to
the hyper-alienated.
Guattari returned to Japan in November 1989 and participated in a
rather conservative event in Nagoya, sponsored by The Japan Institute
of Architects, that included city planners, architecture critics, urban
designers, and philosophers.7 Guattari’s dialogue with Japanese New
Wave architects (a label used reticently by him) found a foothold in
the establishment with this event, and the results were impressive:
Guattari’s conversation with Shin Takamatsu was published; others,
such as Hiromi Fujii sought to account for Guattari’s ideas in the
construction of a psychiatric clinic. This influential event in Nagoya
was still, according to Kogawa, strange because of the sight of Guattari
among the suits from ‘big corporations and city offices’ - a symptom
of bubble economy-style ‘impossible planning’. However, Kogawa was
careful to note that it wasn’t Guattari who was co-opted, but rather, a
kind of ‘counter-cooptation’ took place as well.
96 Félix Guattari

Finally, at least as far as Guattari’s profile is concerned, there is the

myth of a final uncompleted work, a film. According to his son Stephen,
Félix was scheduled to shoot the film in the fall of 1992 in Japan with
photographer Keiichi Tahara (for whom he had written, in 1988, an
essay on faciality in his photographs then on tour in France). The film
was tentatively titled Les Anges Noirs.8 Sadly, Félix Guattari passed
away in August 1992.
Readers of Guattari may sense in this little text on Tokyo some of
the elegance of the original in the assembling of sentence fragments in
paragraph form, stacked like floors of high-rises, rising proudly, just like
the skyscrapers at which Guattari wondered.
Gary Genosko
Lakehead University

Tokyo, the Proud

Félix Guattari
Luminous cubes9 on top of the skyscrapers. To blaze a trail across the
sky? To interpellate the gods? Certainly, out of pride, like the medieval
towers of Bologna.
That inimitable attentiveness of your Japanese interlocutor who
suddenly makes you feel worthy of consideration and induces you into
the mimetic temptation – irresistible, though hopeless – of understanding
the other from a viewpoint imbued with a new sensitivity.
An imperceptible transgression is then followed by rejection and
abandonment on the shores of a final void. Pride, gentleness and violence
mingle in the fleeting exchange of glances [fleur de regard].
Paradoxically, female and maternal values are omnipresent yet so
rigorously circumscribed and inhibited; this makes their repression
ostentatious.
Three-tiered concrete highways span the mosaic city, legs wide apart
like the heroes of the Kabuki theatre, crushing all in their path. Each day
thousands of additional inhabitants and hundreds of conquering com-
panies are parachuted in; the absurd lamination of the urban patrimony.
I don’t know how many ‘mountaineers’ risk their lives climbing the
most inaccessible peaks of the Himalayas each year, I only recall that
more than half of them are Japanese.
What is it that drives the Japanese? Is it the attraction of wealth
and luxury, the consequences of the marked lack of iron affecting their
memories?10 Or, perhaps it is primarily the desire to be “in the thick of
things” [être dans le coup], what I call machinic eros!
 Tokyo, the Proud 97

Becoming child of Japan; becoming Japanese of our future childhoods.

Certainly do not confuse these becomings with capitalistic infantilism
and its vibrating zones of collective hysteria, such as the syndrome of
puerile cute culture (‘kawaii’), the reading-drug of Manga comics, or the
intrusiveness of loukoum music; the latter is, to my taste, the worst kind
of pollution.11
All the trends of the West have arrived on the shores of these islands
without resistance. But never has the wave of Judeo-Christian guilt
that feeds our ‘spirit of capitalism’ managed to swamp them. Might
Japanese capitalism be a mutation resulting from the monstrous crossing
of animist powers inherited from feudalism during the ‘Baku-han’ and
the machinic powers of modernity to which it appears everything here
must revert?
Externalized interiorities and rebel exteriorities with univocal
signifying reductions populate the surfaces and engender new depths
of the sort where inside and outside no longer maintain the
mutually exclusive relationship of opposition to which Westerners are
accustomed. The signalizing [signalétiques] matters characteristic of
the texture of subjectivity are found to be inextricably related to the
energetico-spatio-temporal components of the urban fabric.
Despite the cancerous tumours that threaten to suffocate it at any
moment, Tokyo in many ways reveals its ancient existential territories
and ancestral affinities between microcosm and macrocosm. This is
apparent at the level of its primary configurations, whose admirable
oneiric explorations have been presented to us by Kobo Abé’s novel The
Ruined Map,12 as well as in the molecular behaviour of its crowds that
appear to treat public spaces as so many private domains.
Is it enough to say that the ancient surfaces of Yin and Yang, raw
and cooked, analogical iconicity and ‘digital’ discursivity, still manage
to merge opposites? Or, further, that today the Japanese brain reconciles
its right and left hemispheres according to specific modalities, or any
other such unsound and harmful nonsense in which a number of
anthropologists seem to delight?
Different approaches that are less archaizing and less simplistic could
perhaps lead us to a better understanding of the present form of this
Japanese pride, a Manichean affirmation that everywhere shows through
the reigning phallocratism in a will to thoroughly exploit, sometimes to
the point of absurdity, and in the tyrannical power of shame associated
with any infringement of the exterior signs of the dominant conformity.
And what about this cult of the norm, this ‘canonism’ that is cultivated
like a fine art, and harbours a fundamental heterodoxy of secret
98 Félix Guattari

dissidences? Is it merely the façade and medium in aid of imperceptible

singularisations – at the very least from Western viewpoints?
The deterritorialised mandalas in intimate gestures of similitude; the
unmentionable pleasures in the respect for etiquette, punctuality, and
submission to rituals which dissipate vague yearnings, and circumscribe
the wandering of fuzzy intentionalities . . . . Small differences from which
proliferate – far removed from egoic harmonies – large-scale collective
undertakings [projectualités].
But trap, just as well the molecular capitalistic machineries which,
in order to temporarily divert Japanese elites from the territorialized
hedonism of the historical bourgeoisie, threaten to sink them yet again,
in a deathly will to power.
At the invitation of the ‘Aid and Mutual Action Committee’ of
Sanya,13 I travelled to the place where the Yakuzas assassinated Mitsuo
Sato,14 and paid homage to this progressive filmmaker who investigated
the Japan of the disenfranchised, precarious and rebellious.
Kobo Abé remarked on the fact that Sanya is perhaps less
representative of an absolute misery than an irrevocable refusal of the
existing order. He declared that he would like to ‘be worthy of Sanya’.
Vertigo of another Japanese way: Tokyo relinquishes its status as the
Eastern capital of Western capitalism in order to become the Northern
capital of the emancipation of the Third World.
[Dated and signed 2.1.86]

Acknowledgements
‘Tokyo l’orgueilleuse’. Fonds Félix Guattari ET02-12. 5 pps. Typescript
(French). Published in Japanese in F. Guattari, Hiraï Gen, Asada Akira,
Takeda Kenichi, Radio Homerun, et alia, Tokyo Gekijou: Gatari, Tokyo
wo yuku, UPU, 1986.
English translation by Gary Genosko and Tim Adams.
Used with the kind permission of Enfants Guattari.
Special thanks to Monsieur Jose Ruiz-Funes at Institut mémoires de
l’édition contemporaine, and to Barbara Godard (York University).

Notes
1. Rhizome, trans. K. Toyosaki (1977); Kafka, trans. A. Unami and K. Iwata
(1978); Anti-Oedipus, trans. H. Ichikura (1986) and then Guattari’s La
révolution moléculaire, trans. M. Sugimura (1988). I am grateful for the
assistance of Hiroshi Kobayashi for information concerning Japanese titles.
2. Guattari and co-author Min Tanaka, Kousoku to zen-en: agencement 85
(Shuukanbon [Weekly Book] #35 June 1985; Guattari and Negri, Jiyuu no
 Tokyo, the Proud 99

aratana kuukan: Tousou kikai, trans. T. Nibuya; Guattari et alia, Tokyo

Gekijou: Gatari, Tokyo wo yuku, photos by H. Kaji. (1986). See Pierre-Maurice
Aubry, ‘Le Phénomène A.A.’, Magazine Littéraire 216/17 (mars 1985): 40–41.
3. Sen no puratoo: Shihonshugi to bunretsusho, trans. K. Uno, A. Ozawa,
T. Tanaka, et alia. (1994).
4. These dialogues, From Politics to Signs, trans. M. Sugimura, with Kogawa
and Sugimara would not appear until the year 2000. See also the discussions
recorded in Brazil, Guattari and Rolnick, Micropolítica: Cartografias de Desejo
(Petrópelis, 1986).
5. See Guattari, ‘Machinic Junkies’, in Soft Subversions, New York: Semiotext(e),
1996, pp. 102–3.
6. Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” in The Guattari Reader, G. Genosko
(ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 105.
7. Guattari’s contribution to the seminar on urban design in the 21st century
was ‘Restoration of the Urban Landscape’, in Proposal from Nagoya (Nagoya,
1989): 85–95. I am grateful for the reflections on this event by participant Tetsuo
Kogawa (Letter from Kogawa-Genosko, January 23, 2003).
8. Mentioned briefly by Stephen ‘Deadalus’ Guattari in the ‘Pré-Texte’ to
‘Ritournelles’, La Nouvelles Revue Française 548 (jan 1999): 338–39.
9. The obvious, but misleading, reference is to Shin Takamatsu’s Kirin Plaza (1987)
in Osaka. The luminous cubes are the four patterned rectangular lanterns that
reach toward the sky from the four corners of the structure. This building is
not in Tokyo; so, any of the dazzling neon towers of Shinjuku or Shibuya will
suffice.
One is struck by the image of Guattari wandering around the nocturnal city
fixated on the bright spectacle above his head. The same sense is found in
his Ritournelles, this time with respect to the dense, hypermodern commercial
district in Tokyo, Shinjuku: “The buildings of Shinjuku traversed from top to
bottom by parallel neon bars.” (La Nouvelle Revue Française 549 Avril 1999:
337)
10. Guattari exploits here the medical link between iron deficiency and impaired
memory [manque marquée du fer dans les mémoires – marked lack of iron
affecting their memories] in a double entendre.
11. Guattari appears to be complaining about a kind of electronic music, a species of
techno known as loukoum in France and elsewhere. It is named after the sweet
‘Turkish Delight’.
12. Kobo Abé, The Ruined Map, trans. E. Dale Saunders, New York: Vintage, 1997.
Guattari was an avid reader of Abé novels and found the dream cartography of
the aforementioned detective novel particularly evocative of a marginal Tokyo.
13. Sanya is a district in Tokyo in which foreign and day labourers live.
Many are homeless and live in makeshift shelters made of found materials.
Elsewhere Guattari simply made the point that zones of disparity coexist in
the great cities, no more in terms of centre and periphery relations, citing the
concentrated wealth of Shinjuku and misery of Sanya as an example. See ‘Space
and Corporeity: Drawing/Cities/Nomads’, in Semiotext(e) Architecture (1992):
118–21; 122–25.
14. Sato Mitsuo was a Japanese documentary film director known for his social
activism. He was murdered during the making of his 1985 film ‘YAMA’, the
colloquial name for Sanya. The film follows the struggles of the district’s day
labourers to organize.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224108000020