UIQ

I suspect that most people who come to A Love of UIQ are already more or less familiar with Félix Guattari from the standpoint of his theoretical work, hands-on expertise in the realm of institutional psychiatry, dalliances with sundry radical political movements, and brief rein as likely heir to Jacques Lacan. Many are likely seeking in UIQ both the UFO and the WTF. Guattari is most famous for his collaborations with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, especially the two volumes of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. Guattari fans tend to be versed in concepts of schizoanalysis, transversality, institutionality, and groupuscules. The book contains a thorough and extremely helpful introduction from translators Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson…followed by the screenplay Guattari wrote for a science fiction film he also tried to finance and get produced (!). What is perhaps most disarming about the screenplay is that its infiltration or infestation of a kind of trash culture telegraphs that its author has thoroughly assimilated tropes and archetypes of said culture. Well, we know how much Wittgenstein loved his detective novels after all. It is not only that Guattari has written a screenplay for a science fiction movie beholden to popular templates, he enthusiastically pursues a certain level of crassness in so doing: the fundamental vapidity of much of the dramatic construction, characters reduced crudely to types, silly Hollywood-style set-pieces, and often outrageously boorish dialogue, et cetera. We might chose to borrow from the Situationists and suggest that Guattari is engaged in a kind of détournement of popular cinematographic spectacle, but as I hinted at earlier I think that this screenplay, which essentially depicts a kind of destabilizing infiltration, also fundamentally aspires to represent one. It all starts with the UIQ itself, the Infra-quark Universe, an infinitesimal universe immanent to our own; the film depicts, following a breach between realms occasioned by way of experimental happenstance, “the volatile contamination it will instigate," per the Introduction, "between the human, animal and machine realms.” A group of squatters functioning as a kind of provisional cooperative make contact with UIQ, releasing its dormant potentiality and precipitating crisis. The squatters nominally constitute an exemplary groupuscule, notwithstanding that their representation speaks to the aforementioned appropriation of crass commercial culture tropes, and the UIQ represents a collectivizing field of potentiality. In his synopsis, Guattari calls the UIQ itself “a manifold entity that calls into question the very notion of the individual.” UIQ itself puts it the following way, communicating through a screen: “You see, in what you call my Infra-quark Universe, there is no axiomatic system establishing polar distinctions of the type you-me.” UIQ becomes infatuated with one of the squatters and goes berserk. It’s the climax of the would-be film. Confronted with its own jealousy, UIQ issues the most Lacanian statement imaginable: “Jealous? Je loss?” Stratified within the human network, UIQ experiences something like the trauma of the mirror stage. In a beautiful and hilarious bit of writing that at the same time captures so much of what is self-consciously ridiculous here, the character Steve, supposedly a former NASA engineer, tries to reason with UIQ: “I don’t know how it goes down in your universe but here on planet Earth, love is always the kind of weird-ass shit that drives a motherfucker crazy.”