‘The “Grid”’

Félix Guattari Translated by Susana Caló and Gary Genosko

I would like to try to pose questions regarding the grid, that is, questions
that concern the integration of staff in the institution.1
In the beginning, the team at La Borde attempted to develop, in the
context of a relatively small private establishment, methods that had
been tested at the hospital in Saint-Alban, in Lozère, where Jean Oury
had worked. Even before the start of La Borde, a limited experiment
had been initiated by a small group at Saumery’s clinic, which is about
15 kilometres away from here. The group there was fairly unified,
it might be said, and consisted of people who were familiar from
the youth hostelling movement, or from Oury’s suburb – La Garenne-
Colombes – to which a number of friends were added. All this is to say
that problems concerned with internal organisation were thus dealt with
rather amicably. Questions about schedules were hardly ever raised.
When the clinic moved here to La Borde, Oury having moved out
from Saumery with some of the patients – a heroic period if ever there
was one! – this same frame of mind continued to exist. Under the
circumstances, shortages were an issue. There was only one car then – it’s
amusing now when we see how congested the roads are! And, for a
while, things continued in this way. People possessing no qualifications
were recruited locally, and some were added to the team from the former
experiment.2
After a trial period – and sometimes even of crisis – the methods
of so-called Institutional Therapy were implemented much more
systematically, in particular with the Therapeutic Club incorporating
workshops and cultural and sports activities.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies 16.4 (2022): 496–507

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2022.0491
© Enfants Guattari. Used with the kind permission of Emmanuelle Guattari.
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs
 ‘The “Grid”’ 497

‘Framing’ the Disruption

For my part, I have been totally immersed in this experiment since 1955,
although I did participate in it in a fairly consistent manner following the
preparatory phase at Saumery. And it was during this period that major
problems emerged, which were to mark the subsequent development.
The clinic quite rapidly increased its capacity to sixty patients and, a
few years later, reached its current capacity. Correlatively, the numbers
of staff also increased and the old methods of consensual, symbiotic
organisation could obviously no longer work the same way. After
I arrived, I began to organise activities and workshops. I helped
to set up quite a few institutions that were to be maintained in a
sustainable – albeit still evolving – way. But, fairly quickly, I became
occupied with management problems. In previous years, there had
been pronounced differences in salaries, for largely contingent reasons,
due to arrangements made with new staff members as they arrived.
In other words, a situation developed that was rather unclear and
uncontrolled. One of the first difficulties I faced was the budget
for the workshops when they were introduced in a more systematic
way, with the setting up of the Club. The administrator at that time
categorically refused to provide financial support for the workshops,
and I had to replace her. Besides that, Oury was always very suspicious
of something found in most public institutions, namely, the existence
of specialised occupational therapists or socio-therapists who operated
independently from the rest of the staff and who, moreover, had to
later acquire a special qualification. This did not seem desirable to us;
on the contrary, we wanted at all costs to avoid activities becoming
stereotypical, closed in on themselves. For us, the goal was not for
a particular activity to become stable. Its operation only interested us
insofar as it made it possible to enrich social relationships and promote
a certain type of responsibility among residents [pensionnaires]3 and
staff. So, we did not look too favourably on the implementation of
standardised workshops (basketry, pottery, etc.) with the routine of
the person responsible coming to do his little job year-round, with
residents regularly in attendance, in a somewhat mechanical manner.
Our aim with institutional therapy was not to produce objects and
nor was it to produce ‘the relationship’ for itself, but to develop new
forms of subjectivity. Then, henceforth, all kinds of problems arrived
from a different direction: we realised that in running workshops or
developing activities the most important thing was not the qualifications
of the nursing staff (i.e. registered nurses, psychologists, etc.), but the
498 Félix Guattari

skills of people who may have worked in the agricultural field, or as

linen makers, cooks, etc. Naturally, however, in order to be able to
sufficiently free these people from their duty, their function, and in
order to be able to engage them with the work of the workshops and
activities of the Club, it was necessary to invent new organisational
solutions. Otherwise, the services would be destabilised. In fact, that
was not self-evident from any point of view, either in the minds of
the caregivers or those directly concerned. It was therefore necessary
to institute a system, we could say, for the disruption of the ‘normal’
order of things, the so-called ‘grid’ system, which consists of creating an
evolutionary organigramme where everyone has their own place based
on: (1) regular tasks; (2) occasional tasks; and (3) ‘rotations’, i.e. of
collective tasks that are not to be restricted to a particular category of
staff (for example, night shifts, early morning shifts that start at 5 a.m.,
dishwashing, etc.). The grid is therefore a double entry table that enables
the collective management of individual assignments in relation to tasks.
It is a kind of device for calibrating the necessary institutional disruption,
so that it becomes feasible and, that being the case, can remain in
the ‘frame’.
During the first period of the grid’s history, many duties were put
into rotation and, it must be said, sometimes in an overly systematic
way. It would be interesting to trace why it came to this. In reality,
not for dogmatic or abstract theoretical reasons, but because of a
particular contextual trajectory, which led us to approach problems as
they presented themselves to us. For example, if we wanted to relieve
someone from the laundry duty who was interested in participating
in the printing workshop, then the person in question had to be
replaced and, consequently, another member of the nursing staff had
to agree to take on tasks, let us say, more material ones. So, it was
like this that, little by little, various duties were called into question,
in particular the night guard. At the time, there was only one person
working the night shift, who did her work with great seriousness and
focus, to the point that she ended up falling ill. Well, since she was
very effective at night, she could also be effective during the day!
And why let a person confine herself to the night-time, when she
was capable of establishing transferential relationships that could be
‘capitalised’ during the day in a broader, more fruitful way? Hence,
the idea of a ‘night rotation’. In retrospect, this phase appeared a little
like the idyllic period of the grid, the perfectly rational, perfectly logical,
period.
 ‘The “Grid”’ 499

Linguistics and Local Language

But the idyll could not continue indefinitely, because at a certain point
during the ‘putting into rotation’ of activities that permit a mixing
of material and social tasks, including tasks relating to occupational
therapy etc., not to mention a few bureaucratic tasks, there arose
a form of resistance that, as far as I am concerned, and somewhat
naively at the time, I had not seen coming. At times this resistance to
‘rotations’ came from those whom, one might think, could take the most
advantage, by extricating themselves from standardised activities. And,
paradoxically, the resistance came less from nurses whom were asked
to undertake supplementary physical tasks. But, nevertheless, certain
among them retorted: ‘I was hired as a nurse, and not to clean the place!’
However, this type of objection was relatively easy to overcome since
it was evident that housekeeping could also be imbued with what we
called a ‘therapeutic coefficient’, after holding a number of meetings,
etc. Oury, for example, invented the term ‘laundristics’4 [lingistique], as
if doing the laundry was comparable to that of a local linguistics. At
the time much was made of linguistics, and one of our friends, Claude
Poncin, spoke of situemes [situémes] in comparing intra-institutional
relations to the relations between phonemes (that is, to the smallest
sound units of language). It was said: you are not in the laundry, you are
doing laundristics and, however, you do not actually do less washing
up. Which signifies that you are in a structure that can assume much
psychological significance, to the same degree as the relation between
linens and human life (in particular during the period of infancy). The
same themes are at work in the area of the kitchen, maintenance, etc.
In the end, everything went quite well. Given the climate during this
period, members of the team understood perfectly that it could be just
as interesting, if not more so, attaching importance to the laundry or
cooking rather than working with the patients in a workshop or staying
in the infirmary giving injections, or things such as that.
There was another, more important, form of resistance, about which
I said at the time came much as a surprise to me (without doubt as
a result of a certain idealism). It appeared among a number of staff
members who had been recruited to the clinic in order to carry out
housekeeping, laundry, cooking, etc., and remained extremely reticent
about taking on, beyond a certain point, caring tasks. This problematic
was decisive in the historic crystallisation of the working methods at
La Borde. These persons, regardless of their willingness, would display
500 Félix Guattari

reticence due to fear and timidity, saying, ‘I would never have come here
. . . ’ Obligatory negotiations ensued, and it was said: ‘Well, listen, you
will not have to work nights, but only take on equivalent rotations.’
There were then coefficients of rotations and, in this system, a certain
number of tasks were no longer considered permanent assignments.
There were, for example, night shifts, or others required coming on
duty at six in the morning, or, on the contrary, starting later in the
evening, etc. It was a question of avoiding a rigid system, like that known
as the ‘three-eight’, three eight-hour shifts, as in hospital rotations,
and we did not prevent the adjustment of schedules so as to cover
the totality of night- and daytime tasks. Dishwashing, cooking, and
laundering clothes, etc., also came under the system of rotations. This
did not prevent certain tasks from remaining assigned in a fixed way
to several staff members. There were always regular cooks or service
staff, but even those had a partial regime of rotation. They participated
partially in rotations without being completely plugged into the machine
of the grid. The remainder of the kitchen staff could apply themselves
to other activities, such as gardening, and the like. Over the years, this
machine of rotations eventually assumed a central place in the life of
the clinic. This was a time of development; the years of apprenticeship
in La Borde, an apprenticeship both individual and collective, so that
different cultural and human approaches could link together in the
same institution. There were people who had, until then, lived in the
country and were accustomed to undertaking material tasks; they came
to rub shoulders with those that had other kinds of concerns. Inversely,
caregivers came into contact with certain material tasks to which they
were not accustomed. A very long, very slow, fermentation! Getting used
to attending meetings; an apprenticeship in responsibilities. Sometimes
there was a collective refusal by staff to attend these meetings (‘It’s
useless and a waste of time, it’s better to do things directly . . . ’). At
other times the distinction between monitors and non-monitors was
called into question (‘The monitors always lag behind, chatting away
. . . in the meantime, who is doing the work?’). These divisions were
worked on collectively, and constantly revisited. We would end up
saying: ‘Well, since you know so much about it! Go ahead, organise
them, the Club’s meetings! – No way, I don’t want to, I don’t know
how . . . ’). An entire set of institutional transferences and existential
attributions thus developed according to its own logic. Yes, it could
be said that these were the years of apprenticeship for the initial team
which led to modifying relationships with work and, thereby, evidently,
 ‘The “Grid”’ 501

the relationship between the institution and mental issues, and to the raw
material of psychosis, and to all related matters to be dealt with here.
During this introductory period there was also a collective elaboration
focusing on what we then called cursorily the relation of care-giver
to–receiver. We were compelled to open up the notion of medical
secrecy. Certainly, some measure of it remained minimally with regard
to the relationship between the attending physician and resident. But as
far as all the necessary information relating to a resident’s life in the
institution, including one’s familial and professional relations, etc., the
‘record’ was as much as possible open to the entire staff. There were
meetings devoted to examining problems of new arrivals. Doctors were
present to explain the elements that appeared to them to be indispensable
in correctly knowing what we faced. Conversely, it was equally necessary
to take note of the manifold and nuanced information provided by the
staff. Therefore, not only were transfers of knowledge and technique
implemented between material and ‘social’ tasks, but a genuine collective
apprenticeship into psychopathology also occurred. A common language
was being built, containing specific psychiatric terms but revised and
corrected in accordance with local usage. There was also quite a
jargon connected to activities. There were acronyms like S.C.D.L./Sub-
Commission for Daily Living [S.C.A.J. Sous-commission d’animation de
la journée) or O.M.C./Office of Medical Coordination [B.C.M./Bureau
de coordination médicale] that took on various significations over the
years. People from outside sometimes said: ‘But what is this tribe that
speaks such jargon?’ However, this was not completely gratuitous; it
was the history of the local language! That language demonstrated a
certain active relation of the staff not only to the collective organisation
but also to the conception of work that, I repeat, did not depend upon
an organigramme fixed once and for all. This was not, once again,
evident at the outset. I remember a friend of the Oury family, who was a
consulting engineer. He came to La Borde and was completely appalled
by our methods of organisation! He said: ‘You are nuts! What are
all these complications? Why waste so much time endlessly discussing
things in meetings?’ He had proposed a new organigramme with a
slogan that really shocked us: ‘Organising a clinic is exactly the same as
organising a shoe factory.’ Needless to say, he had to beat a hasty retreat!
It is very important that the assignment of someone to a task must be
negotiated through speech. There is no point in parachuting someone
into a role – above all if it is strategic – without their agreement, without
knowing how it sits with them, at a particular time of day, with respect
to the remainder of their daily schedule, and above all in terms of what
502 Félix Guattari

they are really interested in. Therefore, it is essential that a living local
language exists through which these problems may be expressed.

Affects and Assignments

It is also desirable that the institutions, meetings, activities and
workshops should not be too fixed, and that the system should be truly
evolutionary, unlike an organisation chart of the P.T.T.5 I do not know
if the organigramme of this administration changes often, but if so it is
certainly not according to the same logic. There are all kinds of reasons
at play here. First of all, there are the assessments of the importance of
a task, which will result in so much time, so many people, and so on,
being assigned to it. If we notice that in the course of its use there is an
evolution, we must be able to adapt. There was a time when we used to
think you had to spend a whole day at the dispensary. Then we realised
that it was possible to intersperse a different activity in between two
and four hours. These sorts of things can’t be calculated in advance; it
depends on a lot of factors. For example, the distribution of medications:
everything changes if you do it in the bedrooms or in the dining room.
An organigramme drawn up once and for all cannot accommodate
such changes. Already, the simple registration of ‘technical’ change is
important. But it’s not just that. There are also subjective, more or less
affective, rearrangements. Some tasks appear to be valued and others
devalued without it being clear why. There are certain activities that
are valorised and even over-valorised, while others are devalorised, and
this is not self-evident. Sometimes the kitchen works well and there is
no problem making the grid. At other times, nobody wants to do it
anymore – which is not the case now, by the way. At one time, the
laundry room was a special place, now it has become a kind of ghetto; go
figure! Institutional psychotherapy is thus confronted with some singular
questions: what can be done to avoid the formation of a demoralising
climate of encirclement and loneliness in such a place? Is it appropriate
to ask the very dynamic elements, currently in the dispensary, to take
care of the laundry? Will this help to liberate certain people who
are in a laundry rut in order to assign them to tasks they would
rather enjoy?
It happens that some monitors become enthusiastic about an activity,
a workshop, the Club, different types of rooms. Then, after six months,
they say, ‘Look, I’m in over my head, I can’t do it anymore, I’m going
around in circles, I’m bored, can we change?’ The grid is then an essential
instrument to establish an analytical relationship between the different
 ‘The “Grid”’ 503

institutional dimensions, and individual and collective affects. Affects

and assignments: the grid is intended to articulate these two dimensions.
In an ideal perspective! In practice, this is a complex problem because,
once you renounce the rigidity of technocratic organisational charts, you
come up against a multitude of difficulties; the simplest things become
complicated. What we can say to technocrats is that with a few notes of
music you can make very simple music, for example modal music, and
as much as an infinitely rich music. To do that, you have to change the
reference scales, use polyphony . . . With an institution, it’s the same.
You can do plainsong where everyone remains subjected to a monodic
line. But, we can, on the contrary, develop baroque compositions of
great richness. We realised that with a population of one hundred
residents and eighty staff members, we could do things with an incredible
complexity. This is not for the sake of sophistication; rather, because it is
necessary to produce another kind of subjectivity. We can also conceive
of systems of a much more monastic type, where each one finds its place
to the rhythm of the canonical hours. But it must be recognised that it
may be necessary to compose institutional polyphonic and symphonic
music if we are to try to grasp more precisely the unconscious subjective
problems relating to the world of psychosis. It’s astonishing what you
can do: you have to be in it to believe it! Sometimes we ask ourselves in
good faith if all this isn’t a bit gratuitous. But this gratuitousness, just as
in artistic creation, has been calculated with a sliding caliper.
One meeting more or less can disrupt everything in the complex
balance between Club meetings, meetings to study patient files, ‘control’
meetings for staff members (discussed collectively), meetings about
material problems, facilitation meetings, etc. To intertwine all these
elements, it is not enough to decree: ‘You will do the night shift
from such and such an hour to such and such a time every working
day until you retire. And then you, you will do the laundry, and
so on.’

‘Griddesses’ and the ‘Grid Strike’

When we wish to consider together every one of the heterogeneous
finalities specific to these intersecting institutional objects, we cannot
accept a system of fixed assignments. If we want to take into account
transformations both material and psychological, then the grid becomes
a hyper-complex operator. And it is necessary never to forget that,
effectively, there always exists some risk of deterioration, perversion of
the system, when the grid becomes too rigid. This is what happened
504 Félix Guattari

during certain periods. The grid became a kind of mill that rotated
people into activities without any continuity, without allowing them to
invest in it. Another type of perversion: the fact that certain monitors
made use of the grid like a smoke-screen, a kind of decoy. . . Some
things are noted, but don’t amount to anything. And given that there
is no personnel officer exercising control, they are swept under the rug.6
Another type of problem: those authorities managing the grid who can
abuse their power. At the outset, it was just one physician or myself,
with the assistance of two or three monitors. Then, progressively, the
system evolved: a collective was put into place, we called it ‘the gridders’;
rather, it was ‘the griddesses’, because the masculine elements, in the
beginning, were inclined to withdraw when faced with this kind of
responsibility. Subsequently, the system became more sophisticated. To
the day-to-day grid was added a weekly, then a monthly, grid. Presently,
we set the broad lines of the grid at six months with regard to certain
important assignments. It’s a bit like a clock with its small hands pointed
at the everyday grid, its medium hands indicating the weekly grid,
and the big hands on six months (for example, the constitution of the
team that itself runs the grid, or the Bureau de Coordination Médicale
[B.C.M]/Office of Medical Coordination [OMC]; certain functions like
those we called ‘RAMBO’, that is, monitors who are more consistently
in morning care: these duties ‘rollover’ every three or four months).
‘Making the grid’ under these conditions is to find ourselves at the
crossroads of things that are simple in appearance but with often
complex implications. Can we tomorrow substitute someone for this
or that practical reason? A decision should be made whether or not a
person continues working in the dispensary, taking into account that she
has already been there for several months. That will open up discussion
and debate at different levels, with sometimes sharp conflicts. ‘Why do
you say that to me? You are pissing me off! You are the same as me
here; you don’t have any power over me!’ Conflicts of power; conflicts
of superiority. It is obviously not pure reason that succeeds in every
case! All kinds of passionate factors need to be taken into account as
well as all kinds of factors under what we call the psychopathology
of the everyday life of the institution. Relations between men/women,
young/old, new/experienced persons interfere with one another. Not to
mention accusations that are more or less paranoiac. The grid brings
into contact a number of affective and ‘suggestive’ elements of the
staff. To such a point that on different occasions, in the long course
of its history – one would need hours to attempt to retrace it – the
grid experienced many kinds of implosions: fiery, phobic, and those
 ‘The “Grid”’ 505

marked by a collective refusal. There have been genuine grid strikes. The
designation of a new grid-making team was always a very significant
matter, perceived as the putting into place of an executive for the
comprehensive organisation of work. At first, we too often reverted
to the same people: this was poorly received. During the era when
we elected ‘central collectives’, there were other difficulties and other
conflicts. Certain ‘gridders’ were in the position of being too hard on
some, and on the contrary, too easy on others, including on themselves.
For a few years, the situation stabilised: we renounced the electoral
system. The grid became a technical organism among others. There was
no longer any basis upon which to refuse to do it; consequently, an
adequate number of monitors deemed it to be feasible and desirable.
And, in any case, it no longer fell to the team of gridders to settle
highly acute conflicts. They concerned themselves with what could be
worked out amicably. Henceforth, when something arose of a more
litigious nature, the question was referred to other institutions, in
particular, to a seminar that took place every Thursday in the office of
Jean Oury.

Singularising Institutional Trajectories

The aforementioned brings me to a more general reflection on the goals
of the grid. Sometimes we thought that this system had been instituted
with a view to self-management and democracy, etc. In reality, as
I noted at the outset, the objective of the grid is to render articulable
the organisation of work with subjective dimensions which could not
exist in a rigid hierarchical system. The complication is not for its own
sake, but to ensure that certain things will emerge, that certain surfaces
of inscription exist. For example, that some staff members can partake
in the activities that interest them, whereas in a fixed organigramme,
this would not be possible. These modifications of assignments depend
on the capacity of the grid to become an articulatory system. Such
a system is tied to the invention of a new language, with its mode
of designation specific to different tasks, and a rhetoric that belongs
to it, that would prove on its own capable of dealing with certain
problems. This work of the grid, this collective analytic discursivity,
does not necessarily move towards a democratic ideology. This does
not mean that it is anti-democratic! But questions of democracy and
self-management, evidently, cannot be answered in the context of a
unique establishment! Attitudes are shaped by habits acquired on the
outside. We cannot decree one day that henceforth: ‘Now, everyone will
506 Félix Guattari

function in a purely democratic mode, independent of what occurs in

the rest of society!’ Our objective is thus not to experiment with a new
force of democracy and self-management, but to work in a way that is
the most efficacious for ‘treating’ psychotic patients, and correlatively,
the staff who live with them. Anti-hierarchical references, the putting
into discursivity and into speech of roles and tasks, are not purely
ideological. How to succeed in preventing people who live and work
at La Borde from being caught in identificatory systems, ‘massifying’
their subjectivity, and to save them from becoming prisoners of little
bastions of paranoia? It is a theme to which Oury often returned. To
see to it that the kitchen does not become an isolated place. All sorts of
fantasms can be tied to it: the all-powerful mother, the ogre, even Père
Lustucru.7 The individual who wields power in the kitchen, whether
he wants it or not, plays on very ambiguous registers. Transferential
potentiality is lost if residents are prevented from entering the kitchen.
They must be able, on the contrary, to access it, in order to ask for
something or even to work there. Conversely, for structural reasons, it
follows that the cooks are able to leave the kitchen. If they can enter it,
it is necessary that those who are there can leave it! Some institutional
poles (workshops, garden, maintenance, laundry room) present other
analytic possibilities. Circulation does not therefore concern only people
but also fantasms and transferences. We often paralleled the shattered
body of the psychotic and the multiple articulations of the institution.
But, in order for it to have an analytic processuality, a transformation
of subjective positions and structures of personality, we must create a
milieu in which people are not frozen, as if in snowdrifts, in the midst of
everyday tasks.
In conclusion, this system of rotation is not based on an abstract
principle of social justice, but attempts to singularise each person’s
participation, so that it can compose and recompose, including collective
constraints, its particular trajectory. This is possible only if sufficient
degrees of freedom are in place. The cook will only be able to invest
in the garden, the bar or show interest in a psychotic, if the system
of organisation and above all the collectivity encourages him to do so.
It is therefore crucial that he can be provisionally replaced in order to
explore this singular potentiality. This perspective of resingularisation is
fundamental but difficult to achieve. The teams of the grid that attempt
to live with such a system in which, at the same time, the entirety
of different posts must be filled and access to individual desires must
be taken into account, constitute analytic operators that are altogether
specific to Institutional Psychotherapy.
 ‘The “Grid”’ 507

Notes
1. Presented during the training course at La Borde, 29 January 1987. Copyright
‘Enfants Guattari’. Used with the kind permission of Emmanuelle Guattari.
2. Translators’ note: Reference to the Clinique de Saumery in the Loir-et-Cher
region where Jean Oury was director from 1949 to 1953. Oury left after
disagreements with the owners, taking the patients with him to La Borde.
3. Translators’ note: Original ‘pensionnaires’. This comes from the French tradition
of living in a ‘pension’ or being a ‘pensionnaire’ which refers to a state of being
housed and fed in someone else’s home for a remuneration. The use of the term
‘pensionnaires’ and not ‘patients’, which we translated as ‘residents’, denotes that
such persons were not defined by being ill, but by inhabiting a certain collective
place.
4. Translators’ note: Suggested by Iloe Ariss, member of the Guattari Research
Group Toronto (GRG-T).
5. Translators’ note: P.T.T – Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones.
6. Suggested by Iloe Ariss (GRG-T).
7. Translators’ note: Père Lustucru is a promotional mascot advertising pre-made
egg pasta in France from the early twentieth century forward.