Lifepod S01E05
Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira
Air date: April 10th, 2026

Adam Greenfield: Welcome to Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire. I’m your host, Adam Greenfield. [MUSIC]

It often feels to me that we've gotten a whole lot better about discussing mental health in the course of my lifetime. Our era does actually acknowledge the psychic damage it does to us. But all too often, it does so sideways, through the concept of "self-care" — something that's individualized, even atomized, and all too frequently enacted through the small consumerist indulgences that are most of what's left to us by way of pleasure under current market conditions. We talk about "retail therapy," and we're not even joking.

But between 1967 and 1987, the experimental French collective known as CERFI, C-E-R-F-I, or the Center for Institutional Study, Research and Training, proposed something altogether different. Recognizing that the reason why so many of us feel like crap all of the time may have less to do with our own pathologies, and more to do with the structural conditions that bind us all, they developed an analysis in something closer to the Marxist sense than the Freudian one — and they insisted that this analysis be undertaken collectively, and in every aspect of our lives. Along with co-founder Félix Guattari, who will no doubt be familiar to some of you through his well-known collaborations with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, CERFI tried to enact the social, physical and psychic conditions under which its participants might realize liberation. And maybe we can still glean a trick or two from the way they went about doing that.

My guests today, Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira, have written a book called "CERFI: Analysis Everywhere," that does what I think is an exemplary job of restoring this history to light. And the subtitle of the book, "Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry" conveys something of the range of their ambition.

One of the things that I love best about "Analysis Everywhere" is the wealth of photographs, drawings, maps, diagrams, transcripts, primary documents and frame grabs it offers, by way of communicating to us the texture of a moment that might otherwise be lost to us. But even so, I can't imagine that anything might evoke that moment and its possibilities better than a conversation with the people who have immersed themselves in that headspace for the last several years. Susana, Godofredo, welcome to Lifepod. Thank you so much for sharing your time and energy and insight with us.

Susana Caló: Hi, Adam, good morning. Thanks so much for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here, share this space with you.

Godofredo Pereira: Yeah, thanks for having us.

AG: I’ve really, really been looking forward to this. As I say, I really, I found the book incredibly valuable. What I want to start with is something extremely basic: what was CERFI?

SC: [Laughter] It's not very basic at all. I think we could go on for, for a long time. Do you want to — Godofredo is usually very good at giving kind of brief historical accounts. You go first, Godofredo.

GP: OK, so I'll try. So CERFI was a research cooperative, let's say formally — in terms of, you know, an organization, recognized — was a research cooperative that brought together, mostly militants that formed themselves during — well in France, in Paris — that formed themselves as militants in support for the Algerian struggle for independence, and then went on to be instrumental in, you know, in the very rich and well-described period of leading to the May of '68 and and its afterlives, right? But it's, but it brings a particular strand of militants that were fairly disappointed with the inability of existing party structures within the left, namely the French Communist Party, but also Trotskyist and other organizations, in being properly revolutionary — and by that, it's meant, in recognizing political, important political transformations taking place and important political debates taking place in other aspects of militant life, namely at home, in your profession, in your social life, in your childcare, wherever it is, right?

And this group encountered like-minded, militant, activist, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, coming from the French institutional psychotherapy movement that — again, a long history there, I won't go into it now — but, and that encounter is mostly catalyzed by Félix Guattari, a person that, you know, navigated both worlds. He was, he arrived into, into the psy world as, because of his activist background. So it goes back and forth. He's invited into the psy world because he was an activist, and to activate and to organize within institutional therapy organizations. And he catalyzed this encounter. And out of that encounter emerged a series of organizations that ultimately lead to the constitution of CERFI as as a collective research cooperative.

AG: You touch on this a little bit, and I really want to unpack this: in the Anglophone world, at least, "institution" tends to connote something bureaucratic and impersonal, something that imposes a total regime of compliance on the human beings under its roof, in dress and conduct and bodily posture and language. And revulsion at this informs a long tradition of political action and cultural production, sweeping in everything from the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s, or Frederick Wiseman's legendary film "Titicut Follies," to the old Suicidal Tendencies song "Institutionalized." This all leaves us saddled with a clunky word like "counterinstitutions" to describe projects that are designed to undermine that way of being in the world. But as you elaborate, the people who became CERFI seem to have had a more affirmative, generative meaning in mind. What do you think they meant by the word "institution"?

SC: Well, that's one of kind of the things that we found more interesting and more striking in this kind of history of institutional psychotherapy that, you know, CERFI becomes engaged with, is particularly the use of the word institution. So for them, and it also comes from the French, when you'd say, for institution, what we call the institution with, with the capital-I would be "establishment. "So something that's already formed, someone, something that is structured, and it exerts some kind of of control over you, might modulate behaviors, right? And it's, it's finished, and it's complete, and it presents itself as such. And there's an outside and an inside. In French, the word kind of denotes much more a movement of instituting, of creating something. So "the institution" itself is not the end form, is not the complete form, but is the process of instituting.

And because institutional psychotherapy is a project of materialist, you know, and then the — subjectivity is material, and material is psychiatry — then we kind of have to think and use that medium to think subjectivity, how that is produced as well. And institutions are all these mechanisms, all these apparatuses that exist everywhere, of which we're part of and that we create. So an institution could be, you know, a research center. But meeting with a friend every Tuesday at 4AM in an old local café is also an institution. So that's, I think that's the, what we found extremely beautiful in the, in the, how you kind of are able to reengage with accounts, with that idea of practicing institutions.

GP: If I can add something in there, maybe to help understand for people less familiar with, with this debate, so institutional psychotherapy, one of the key aspects for them — and this is a movement, again, very big conversation — but let's say there are two key points, two key examples that we touch upon. One of them is St, the hospital St Albans. The other one is the clinic La Borde that was for...very formative for the entire CERFI group. In the concept of institutional psychotherapy, it is through creating institutional processes within the big, let's say, the form, the institution, that you open up therapeutic possibilities. And it's not to create ["amat eternum"?]. It is to create, and then? Well, this is to be meaningful after one day, a week, a year. It will depend. It's very pragmatic. So it's about institutional creation.

AG: Mm. That gives me a much more vivid picture of, of how to create something like that than you might otherwise get from the word. So I'm really grateful for that expansion on it. I'm going to ask you another question about language. As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that many of the things that, that, you know, many of the notes that I took as I was reading the book, and many of the things that I wanted to explore in our conversation are actually about language, which in itself, is something interesting that we might want to come back to.

But I was also struck by the thing that you opened the book with this, this quote from Félix Guattari, which says "Only desire can read desire," and how that sort of signifies something at the, the core of the CERFI project. My guess is that most people who aren't immersed in the genealogy of post-1968 Francophone theory will tend to read "desire" in its conventional erotic or commercial senses, to simply signify something that you want and, and that you don't have, and the feeling that you have when you don't get it. And I imagine that Guattari means to include both of those senses in this deployment of the notion of desire, but that he means something a little bit more besides. And in this milieu in general, that when you encounter the concept of desire, it doesn't just collapse neatly into those ordinary contexts. Can you say a little bit more about what you think desire means here and, and especially, what's connoted by this somewhat mysterious idea that "only desire can read desire"?

GP: Well, thank you. I think it's, it's a great question, because it allows us to open up a series of crucial things there. Overall, and I'll explain, I'll get to desire in the end. But I don't want to start with a concept. I want to start with very much, a very pragmatic observation that it refers to, which is very much a critique to the idea of objectivity in the modern sense of it, i.e., that you can only do proper investigation by being detached, and not touching the object of the investigation.

AG: Mm.

GP: They were not the first, but they were some of the most, you know, important theorists and practitioners at the time saying “that doesn't make any sense whatsoever,” right? And it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, because in only focusing your attention on the object of study, you're totally blind to the impact that you have in the world, right? The political, affective, personal, whatever type of impact that your own construction of objectivity leads you to ignore, right? So that's one aspect of it. You know, every research, every, every mode of engaging with the world has an impact as a consequence, right? So it cannot be detached. Not only cannot be detached, the most important thing is to actually recognize what nowadays people most often speak to in terms of your positionality, right? Your situatedness. From where are you speaking, right? And you need to address that from the beginning.

Their approach to, to research was as, as an analytical practice, and that's why we used that to reflect on ourselves in writing this book. Why do we write it with all these people that we spoke with? Why are you doing this? What does it do for you? What's at stake? So their point there was always to understand that your research is never detached from the thing. You might want to construct it, to describe it as detached — but it is really not. And so to bring to the fore, what is it? What is that connection? What is that projection that's there at stake when you try to do objective research, right? And so they're not doing objective research. They're doing research from the perspective of desire.

And so what is desire? Desire is not an individual point. What is desire for them, and particularly for Guattari, specifically, who's the person being quoted? Desire at this point is what Guattari would call the unconscious. So subjectivity is not individual. Subjectivity is something that's produced, that has individual notes, but traverses us, right? It's a collective process. Our subjectivities are traversed by upbringings, by what we eat, by, by what we read, by what...by the music that stays in our bodies long after we want to forget it, but it's still there. Unfortunately, sometimes, right? Those refrains and rhythms. So subjectivity is a collective process. The unconscious is all of that.

So desire and the unconscious are the same thing. Desire is, in a way, a way to think the energy that animates us. And it's not exclusively an individual energy, right? And so what "only desire can read desire" is only really engaging with your being aware of how you're being traversed by collective research can allow you to properly engage and enter into composition with what you're investigating, so that the subject/object relationship disappears, and what comes to the fore is something much more honest in terms of objectivity of research, which is "There's something here that traverses me," and, and it's the composition, right? It's the composition of how we become part in transforming that which we're reading, how that transforms us. And so research means entering into composition.

SC: Yeah, I really like this...

GP: I don't know if this explains it. I felt it became a bit worded, but, uh...

SC: I really liked the way you, you, you phrased it, and you thought about it. And I was thinking that, you know, desire is always transformative. It's a transformative force. So if we think that only with desire, you can read desire and, and if we apply it to our own project of research, then it needs to be, you know, you know, we just also took this material in the view of something transformative, in the view of grasping what kind of political forces are at stake with this project. And that's the way they kind of also framed research, because they wanted to, like you said, enter into composition-with. And desire is — you know, in psychoanalysis, kind of trying to grasp that, that force, that transformative force that we all have, rather than, you know, replicating things the way they are presented to us. It's kind of finding in the process something, and you enter in composition with it.

GP: Exactly, and I remember, now that I'm thinking more about it, remember at the time when we brought this quote into the introduction was also because we were grappling with the way in which we wrote this book. And we're trying, "Is this a history book? Hey, we're not historians, and we don't want to be historians..."

AG: [Laughter]

GP: And we say in the book,

SC: And we're also not very good historians.

GP: We'll be very bad historians if we try to do it properly, because we wanted something! So CERFI is much more than — the book is not a history of CERFI. A, because they're the ones writing. They write. They wrote endlessly, and their debates are published. They're constantly debating each other. So if anyone can try to write whatever it is that the history of CERFI might be, it's for them. We don't want that responsibility. So we wanted a very specific thing, and a very specific aspect that we identified. And so "only desire reads desire" is a way to first to with a nice quote, in a way, pack the fact that we want something out of this,

SC: Yeah...

GP: and that's why we're doing it.

SC: And it's gonna keep the problem alive. So it's so nice that you pick, you clicked on this because, you know, it's just so many possibilities there, you know.

AG: What a beautiful account. I mean, it really does fill in the picture for me. And this question of composition with the forces that are available to us is very important to us. You know, to me, here, at Lifepod. I mean, Lifepod is about, ultimately, accounting for the forces that are operating in our moment, and how do we compose a decent, dignified, joyful life in composition with those forces, as we find them and as we're able to transform them as they move through us, our bodies and our communities? So I'm really, really grateful for that framing.

There is another concept that the book leans on — you know, I'm not going to say "heavily," but, but often enough. And that's the the concept of transversality. And I think transversality is, again, something that might require some explication for some of us. Various CERFI associates use transversality to replace the psychoanalytic framework of transference and countertransference that they found so inadequate. And again, Guattari, I'm going to quote him directly. He says, "We had to study and make use of the link that exists between institutional psychotherapy and similar practices in other domains, pedagogy, city planning, militantism" — and when he says this, you know, I hear the echoes of so many other of the things that were going on in that moment, from the work of the great Brazilian educator and social theorist Paulo Freire, to the Sanrizuka struggle, the effort to prevent the nonconsensual imposition of Narita Airport on an agrarian community outside Tokyo. I hear all of these things in the sort of panoply of domains that he spreads out before us, and he wants to kind of cut across the boundaries between these things. He says, "It was a question of discerning a field which was neither that of institutional therapy, nor that of institutional pedagogy" — and I take it that again there he means this sort of moment of instituting things, as Susana explained it — "nor that of the struggle for social emancipation, but which implied an analytical method capable of crossing these multiple fields. This is transversality." How might, how might we put it to work?

GP: Well, it might be useful to kind of, you know, maybe, kind of explain where the concept is coming from. And you did say that it appears...it's interesting because it's also a very pragmatic concept. And this is something we, we are interested whenever we do things like this, is think about concepts as they have been used, or concepts out of a need to produce them, right? Because they no longer suit your way of doing things. And when they were — Guattari, and many others, Ginette Michaud, and all these, you know, all this, Jean Oury, everyone that is inhabiting that space, all the students at La Borde that went on to form CERFI, they were practicing, they were influenced by psychoanalysis. They had this analytical framework. But they — that what they realized is that the traditional framework where, you know, psychoaanalysis was based on language, and there was a process of transference that's located within the consulting room between two people, did not really work. Because what they interested is in thinking about the whole of the, you know, the whole, the whole of the environment as things occurring, as we know, right? And of thinking about analysis in an expanded way, in a institutional analytical way.

So rather than using the word "transference," that was connected with this field in which we imagine the relationship between, the clinical relationship that's worked on the principle of an analyst and an analysand, two people, and it's, it's mostly based on language, they really propose the concept of transversality. Because those principles of transference can apply beyond language, can apply...they occur between bodies, they occur in the way you kind of, you kind of move in space or circulate in space. And they wanted to account for that many different ways of things to affect each other, kind of different kind of logic. So the way the concept emerged was to, you know, replace the concept of transferance say, "Look, we actually need something else. So let's call it "transversality.'"

And even the history of the concept is very beautiful, because it's a collective concept. Because, although it's very associated with Guattari, because then he, he takes it and he writes and he produces quite a lot about it, it came up the first time in the work of Ginette Michaud. She was a psychoanalyst that worked at La Borde, and they had these meetings and they're discussing theory and say, "Oh, this should be called 'transversaility.'" And then she only published, you know, her book twenty years after that, that document circulated informally. But it's kind of a collective concept that emerges out of this necessity to replace another one.

It also kind of reverberates with, you know, not getting stuck into false problems — you know, disciplinary problems — and attempting kind of to circulate and then traverse different struggles and kind of bring them together. So the framework in which they were working, which is a framework of institutional analysis, is actually bringing together all these practices that sometimes are separated by disciplinary boundaries. Pedagogy, psychiatry, et cetera, and kind of finding ways in which you find a common struggle.

GP: Maybe I can add, for example, a couple examples, because I think this is — it touches on things that are also directly relevant to your own concepts of, of Lifehouse. And so if you look at La Borde, and back to that other concept that's hard to unpack in English, which is "institution." It's not hard, but it's counterintuitive, "institution," right?

AG: Certainly, yeah.

GP: …as it's dynamic instead of static, right? So we could think transversality, um, as an expansion of an analytical practice through the entire institution. So the relation that I have with the tree, you know, being able to grasp that as an analytical moment, right? Doing the laundry at La Borde — suddenly they noticed that a lot of people wanted to do the laundry. That's an analytical space, right? So laundry, cleaning, answering the phone, all of these things. Bureaucracy was really important for CERFI, not because they wanted bureaucracy, was that they refused to avoid it. They prefer to say, "Well, there's something analytical here in why someone wants to answer the phone every day," right? And it's not to be interpreted. But it's to be worked constantly. So the different positionalities — and so what they would, institutional analysis is this little invention of machines that bring these things into visibility, right?

SC: It's also kind of...

GP: And bring the doctor into answering the phone, and just the discussion of, "I don't feel I should answer the phone, I'm a doctor!" Right? Breaking down power crystallizations, spatial crystallizations. So why should the medicine only be given in the infirmary? Why should certain medicine cannot be given while you're horse-riding or taking whatever? [Laughter.] Maybe not horse-riding, might not be a good idea. But you know, that's the point: shifting the position so that you don't stay in spatial or role crystallizations, right?

SC: Yeah, and kind of hearing you speak — and thinking about your book, Adam, because in your book you speak about, you know, I don't know if you use exactly this expression, but life, spaces of life, and this is, this is a way, in each kind of unleashing life where life is, right? And all these spaces beyond, you know, language, where things are happening, is where life is also happening. You know, creating spaces for life.

AG: Ah, that's gorgeous. And that is the project, right? is to exert some kind of minimum membrane within which life can take place and, you know, expand and cultivate the connections and the energies that we need to survive this moment. And I think it has to do with both of those things, right? The, the membrane and the space within — and thinking of that as a transversal, a cutting-across operation, is really, really fruitful for me.

I hate to stick so closely to Guattari's own experience. But there is one almost biographical detail that's related in the book, kind of matter-of-factly, almost in passing, but I think it's wonderful, which is Guattari's own early involvement in the youth hostel movement in France. And not merely that, but what you describe as "the Trotskyist wing of the youth hostel movement," which to American ears, is something like describing someone as having had their subjectivity formed in the secessionist faction of the Automobile Association. [Laughter] It's just, it's, again, it's, it's something beyond counterintuitive. It really, you know, it caused me to kind of stop and be like, "Wow, what's going on here?"

When you think about it even for a second, though, it is not actually hard to see how moving through a terrestrial network of fairly basic, low-cost, shared accommodations might give rise to something like a radical politics of the commons. And it is true still, when I go on one of my long walks across the land — which is, you know, a practice that I have — I've often enough stated the properties of what is now carefully in the UK, rebranded itself as the "YHA," whose slogan is "hostels, camping and glamping." And I can tell you from that experience that you still do get into conversations and arrangements and encounters that are virtually impossible to imagine arising in commercial hospitality space, whether you want to necessarily or not. You know, it's — the space does kind of, um, it evokes those sorts of interactions. Putting to one side the notion that I don't think we really trust young people enough anymore to let them wander the land on their own, unsupervised, do you think that there's something that we might yet retrieve from this more radical conception of youth hosteling? You know, what, what are the specific practices do you think that Guattari gleaned from his involvement in hosteling? How do you think that they eventually came to inform CERFI? And what do you think we can recover from that now?

SC: Well, I mean, François Pain, which is kind of, uh, one of the members of CERFI, also, you know, someone that was studying medicine, but as soon as went to La Borde, stopped studying medicine and became interested in in film [laughter] — and lots of things like that happen in the life of the CERFI — um, he, what he did say is, like the youth-hostel movement was crucial for all of this. This is what we've learned: everything. Because they they would go, and first, he mentioned that, you know, there's, there's, there was mixicity — you know, there's, for the first time, in these spaces, they're not just a place for boys, or just for girls, but everyone was together. We used to clean our rooms. There was rotations. We used to kind of elect one person that would temporarily be the boss, and then another one would take over. And I guess this, now I'm thinking, this experience of, you know, nomadis...nomadism is quite interesting in this federative space, right? Because then all these interconnections, and you could go there as long as someone would have a space for you, and then creating these networks, I can see how that kind of resonates with, or potentially resonates with some practices today, and if you're trying to open these spaces for, for, you know, for connection between people, for nomadic practices.

GP: I think it's also because they're, you know, very simple in terms of funding, right? And so it demanded a lot, I think a lot of the, the expectations in youth hostels, by what we understand, is that it demanded a lot from, a lot of self-organizing by, by young people. And essentially they, they had a lot of responsibilities. They had a lot of animating, organizing, programming their activities, and the management of spaces and etc. Which was really formative, I suppose, for Guattari. And it relates to another aspect that we touch — not to move away from youth hostels, per se — but for example, a lot of the militants that CERFI then partners with, a slightly younger generation of militants that end up being, building the, let's say the core body of CERFI, they're also, they have very important formative organizing and self-management experiences within student union research organizations and childcare and this and that. So there's a — even though there's a lot of conceptual apparatus production, it's quite interesting, there's a lot of theoretical production taking place. It's profoundly anchored in very concrete issues of who cleans the bathrooms, what is at stake with the management of cleaning bathrooms, organizing trips, organizing buses, staying schedules, activities.

And we try to hold on to that very much, because these are the things that sometimes — you know, you come together as an activist today to organize, but once...and you come together around a certain content, and around a certain struggle, around a certain resistance. But the trick for us is how to deal with management, so to speak, with what you call the "management" in "self-management." Why? How to deal with scheduling, with money, with organizing, with the really, the boring bits of it, and they tend to present a problem because they're not the focus. With CERFI, what shifts is the other way around: no, no, they're really the key analytical thing! So CERFI was always, on the back of the youth hostel, on the back of La Borde, that was very influenced through Guattari. Right? Guattari brings a lot of youth-hostel animating practices and little machinery — organizing this, organizing that, right? And what is interesting is that not the bureaucratic, instead of being, you know, a service provision that is boring in itself, is actually brilliant analytical device, and a space of collective programming, right? So they shift it the other way around. So the content itself is the organizing. So: "Ah, how do we...?" And we try to bring that to the fore.

And I think that comes from the Guattarian side. That comes from the youth-hostel experience. And he was also part of many, so many other organizations, and is constantly producing more organizations, and from the CERFI group — so the, some of the younger groups, well, some of them also pass through the youth hostels, but let's say many of the others is through the union organizations that they created, that they were part of as well. And so this kind of, this excitement with bureaucracy, so to speak, the excitement with inventing organizations and [indiscernible], et cetera.

SC: Yeah, it's also kind of interesting to think that, you know, sometimes we get to kind of, you know, major discussion, major conceptual discussions, or, you know, contest ideas in a group. And I think that this framework of just letting go and just focusing on...it's a very kind of bare kind of way of relating, but just focus on who's going to do what, what we need to do this. And then let everything come with that: ideas and concepts and practices. Can be quite liberating for us who think, "Oh, we have to do this project, and we have to do that project, and then this is going to last two years, and then if it lasts one day, it's a failure." But that's just that moment of, you know, letting go and just being, doing with the bare can be quite useful, I think. You know?

AG: When you describe that, what, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is the adventure playgrounds that Colin Ward describes as having emerged in the, the areas of the UK that were bombed by the Luftwaffe after, after the Second World War, where, you know, really young, very young people were exposed to precisely that question of self-management: the management of their own conduct, the management of their own desires, the management of their own choices together to build and create. And I think we can see almost a continuum here of spaces or contexts like this, in which we progressively learn the means of self-management. And, and what strikes me is how bereft of spaces like that we are now, and how surveilled and policed and supervised childhood has become.

I mean, you know, I'm not a parent, so I see this only at one remove, but I can definitely see it in the lives of the children of all of our friends that — you know, even parents who are of radical proclivities and have been immersed in this, in this body of reading and thought, you know, for their lifetimes, still, you know they have such an acute sense of the risk that their children are confronted by that it's really very hard to let go of that desire to limit. And, you know, out of a concern for protection, maybe, but what gets missed is the young person's ability to work through these questions, these challenges of individual and collective, self, self-management.

GP: I think it's — the trick, though, it's that it's always a pragmatic balance, right? And if CERFI carried something from La Borde was — and back to the point of transversality, transversality is interesting because it's not, it doesn't translate to a horizontalist logic that we sometimes in, let's say, the anarchist and social-movement networks that at least we share in a way, tend to be a certain logic there. Transversality is a recognition, as well, of different energies, different speeds. And sometimes kind of expected total horizontality is a kind of a projection, right?

AG: Mm. Mm.

GP: And so La Borde, Jean Oury would say, you know — and Jean Oury, Guattari are also a very interesting pair, because they complement each other — Jean Oury would speak very much to the importance of not making it fully programmable, not making it...it's not that cannot become transparent, in the sense that you, people also need to be able to have the conditions to be isolated and spend time on a staircase looking through a window by themselves with no one, right?

AG: Lovely. Yeah.

GP: And so there's — this pragmatic balance is something that is important. And we use the term "pragmatic" not in the sense of, whatever, pragmatism, but in the sense of a kind of very material, situated understanding of these observations, and the importance of not converting them into a model. Because the model is precisely that which comes to, to take away your attention from the pragmatics of every situation, right? And with childcare, that's very much the case. And CERFI had a lot of work with, on childcare, right? A lot of their research was on childcare, and networks of childcare and networks of caring and parenting, and to understand the tensions that come with that, and, and we dedicate a small amount in the book to that.

But in their own publications, in the magazine "Recherches" and in several books, they go through, again, their expectations in terms of self-management and the, at the time in France and La Sorbonne, there was the, the, the "crèche sauvage," so the savage nursery and et cetera, and the different attempts at work. And one thing is the attempt and the expectations that come with an implicit critique, and the other thing is the day-to-day practice of that. And so crucially, what stays within CERFI at every level of engagement is not so much a model that might work in a certain way of doing things, that might work for a while in a certain situation, but is the idea and another concept that is kind of, perhaps the most important concept that we debate in the book, which is the idea of programming.

AG: Mm hmm, mm hmm.

That Guattari will say there's no programming without self-management, there's no self-management without programming. Which is that you don't just "manage" something that has two rooms, one this, one of that — no, you need to constantly program.

AG: Yes.

GP: To constantly reflect on the composing elements of something, right? Not simply to self-manage it collectively, because it might be simply replicating something that's really becoming ill. And in institutional psychotherapy, they used to say — why do they bring self-management as a therapeutic process? Well, because they used to say, "Well, before treating the patient, we have to treat the institution." The institution is ill, right? The idea itself of the institution, it's The Man that it's fulfilling, and its way of operating is ill at all levels. It's like a pathological machinery, right? And so we need to invent institutions within the institution as a thera...as a collective therapeutic process.

That applies — and that's a critique to the, they did to militant cells that they would see, that they did to the professional organizations that are part, that they did to unions that they were part — that applies everywhere. The content — the objective, revolutionary struggle in support of Vietnam, whatever — might be brilliant, but then the organization of it might be completely traversed by fascistic drives and crystallizations that prevent you to see what's happening in your own social interactions. So to constantly program the institution — so possibly invent institutions to program — is an investigative, analytical process that was crucial to them there.

SC: I just wanted to add something about — because you mentioned schools and kind of education and childhood, Adam — one researcher from the SERFI, and co-founder, Anne Querrien wrote a really nice piece of research on mutualist education. And if we think about kind of mutualist education, it's also an education that works through desire, because then what you have in a mutualist education, he says, is a group of children and kind of maybe a tutor, and then you collectively kind of self-manage knowledge and the teaching of. So you kind of learn together. So one child teaches the other something they, they, they feel most comfortable, comfortable with, and that comes with, you know, catalyzing that desire of that child as well, and that interest. And then that interest is catalyzed by teaching the others about that thing. And then the others can also do that. So the mechanism itself is, is very beautiful. It's something they were — particularly Anne Querrien did lots of research on mutualism.

AG: I think that's such an important way of framing the challenge of education, you know, in this sort of Freirian way that you're not decanting knowledge into people, but allowing them to share the knowledges that they already have, and building together, you know, a weave of different perspectives, different interests and fascinations, but really ultimately sharing those in a peer-to-peer way that, y'know, may not be purely horizontal, and that in any given moment, somebody is going to know more about something than, than another person. But if the circumstances of sharing are carefully designed, carefully programmed, we make something collective that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that doesn't allow those temporary or situated moments of hierarchy to become permanent and ossified in that way.

And I'm really also, I'm very grateful that you surfaced so much of Anne Querrien's activity. I first come across her as a footnote in, um, in the semiotext(e) edition of "Nomadology: The War Machine," the chapter from "A Thousand Plateaus.” I did this really extended, you know, very close reading of that. And she is cited once, but it's, it remains an obscurity. And so you know, to have her work brought forth in much greater depth and fullness is something that you know I really appreciate as a reader. One of my favorite parts of the book is the brief section — and it is, it's just a couple of pages long — the section that you call "Rhizomatic Friendships," where you document some of the ways in which CERFI entangled with the other currents that were active in their moment, um, y'know, notable among which were the Bolognese "free radio" station Radio Alice and the journal semiotext(e) at Columbia University in New York City, which does wind up becoming the aperture by way of which I was first exposed to a lot of these ideas, you know, in St Mark's Books in the mid-'80s, with the Foreign Agents, these, these slim little, you know, very pocketable volumes, very transmissible — I mean, what a great way of communicating this body of knowledge. And you get a sense that through these connections, you know, the book really very vividly conveys the international dimension of these conversations, which, you know, they of course, realized in a time without broadband connections, without mobile devices or websites or social media.

And I guess one of the desires that makes itself known to me when reading your book is that I want to create these kinds of situations too. I want to create these kinds of international connections. I want to create these moments in which knowledge can be shared. I want to create moments in which I can break through the, the issues that I have in common with other people, that sort of beset me with various different kinds of isolation and disempowerment. And I think it's become a truism that loneliness is, is a mental-health crisis, but I think we're quite lonely in another, more specifically political way as well, which is that many of us are all down in our doomcaves and we don't have the foggiest idea how to get started organizing small groups or, or forging connections between them. We often can't connect to people in our own backyards, let alone people who are continents away. I imagine at this point that there probably are listeners who are thinking, "Yeah, all this CERFI stuff sounds great, sign me up!" How would you recommend that they go about doing so? How do you think we strengthen whatever instinct or psychic muscle it is that allows people to first organize as collectivities and then to establish links to the others on Earth who are similarly situated, who might be responding to conditions in their own lives, concretely, pragmatically in your sense, materially? How do we go about making these first steps?

SC: [Laughter] I mean, we do Lifepods! [Laughter] Like, I mean, this is one example, isn't it? And it's so beautiful, kind of the way you describe and, you know, semiotext(e), and then that's how you become in touch with these things. And we, from the other side, we, we connected with these things maybe through the French side. So it's really nice to see that after all these years, you know, there's an ellipsis, and we kind of keep meeting?I don't, I don't have — it's very difficult to kind of, I don't have practical advices. I can share some of my experience. I think that, from my experience, first thing is to valorize little, very little things, right? The ones, the things we're already doing — like, you know, having this conversation, maybe imagining having this conversation.

But then, for example, with one collective that I had that was called Other Ways to Care, and it was a collective made of people interested in, you know, the politics of mental health and different kinds of practices of thinking about, you know, about care, we started to do these forums of groups, groups of groups, in which we organized forums in which you have collectives and clinics that come together. And what we thought worked was not to ask anyone to come and do, you know, super-duper presentation. Just come. We just cook, and people just present their ideas to each other, and maybe do something nice then, we have a piece of theater or watch a film or...And then sometimes that worked.

I'm also engaged in a different kind of attempt to, um, of an international network of free clinics, which I mentioned to you, Adam, before, and to people listening, is kind of this project that, that's an amazing group, collective in Essex, are making. They went back and on basis, based on the idea that, you know, the original Freudian theory was quite politically engaged and socially engaged — because Freud was very supportive of free clinics in the neighborhood, and psychoanalysis for all — they're going back and doing, kind of rewriting that history and bringing this idea of the free clinic to today.

But at the same time, we're creating...maybe "creating" is not the, it's not the right word, but let's say the [indiscernible] at creating this international network of free clinics on the basis of, you know, multilingual events of skill-sharing.

AG: Mm.

SC: And I say "create a network" is a really terrible thing to say, because it's one way of not, making it not work. Because you don't "create" a network — they kind of proliferate, and they're already there, and what you can do is kind of engage with some networks, and maybe catalyze that space. And mostly learn from it, right? Some, some of — so, some of my experience are those experience of, you know, connecting with people. I'm really interested in their work, catalyzing these spaces for, you know, mutual sharing, maybe connecting, you know, struggles that otherwise would not be connected, and kind of find it that space for solidarity. But maybe Godofredo has some — I'm just rambling a little bit because it's so difficult to say, "Do this and do that." It's really, I think, already making it and making it maybe more, but maybe thinking that something, uh — if something lasts a day, it's already great. It doesn't last, need to last, like, a month or two years. So it's also kind of releasing that pressure and the tension to do something that's awesome, that it's gonna last. [Laughter]

GP: I am listening to you speak because I know the way that you work. You spend a lot of time organizing and be and creating, essentially infrastructure for networks of mental-health care support beyond, let's say, the kind of medical logic of it, right? And, and weaving connections, socially, informally, through conversations, by putting people together, sometimes through creating events and et cetera. And that's a slow, embodied process of making friends and making collective that I think I really appreciate the way that you describe it, as you know, avoiding a kind of projection of, "Let's create something, whatever, mega," right? Which sometimes produces disappointment, and puts so much pressure that things don't get to realize themselves.

I come at it from, from, from a slightly different angle. So my, let's say, my main space of activism, of, of militant engagement nowadays has to do with environmental struggles, and anti-mining struggles, and, and are things that you know go for, for years and years and years and years. Either that or academic institutions, where I exist and they're also very important sites of — one sometimes forgets, right? A lot of people in academia, "Yeah, I'm organizing here," well, the academy as a site of organization is very important. But speaking in terms of, of environmental struggles, right, one way that the CERFI book was very important for us — and both of us, you know, have been thinking the book in relation to the practices, let's say, the more pragmatic friendships and struggles that are engaged with outside of academia as well — was thinking, "OK, what do we mean by bringing analytical practices into our, into our struggles?" For example, there's a lot of, um, social-media presence and cooptation, let's say — well, maybe a "cooptation" is not the correct word — but let's say there's thousands, there's a kind of pathology of multiplication of thousands of WhatsApp groups in anarchist organizations [laughter]. And literally, by the week, there's a splinter Whatsapp group, right?

AG: Tell me about it. [Laughter]

GP: What we had in the '70s, the splinter group of the group now is the splinter WhatsApp group, because...

AG: In which everybody talks about everybody else in the main group!

GP: Yeah, there's parallel groups, not to mention the Telegram and Signal version of these same groups with slightly different constituencies. If you want to think of something that's really terrible in terms of mental health, it's that. But it's also very difficult to engage with analytically, because that distance undermines the analytical moment of this bodily presence and encounter, right? And we know, I at least have imagined, that a lot of the tensions that come by someone wording something on WhatsApp in the bathroom, whatever, is, wouldn't take place in the same way when we are, for example, once a year we organize a camp in the mountain, that its aim is to bring more people to — you know, it's kind of a summer camp — but its aim is to increase the number of people engaged with, connect with other struggles that might not have been previously connected with environmental struggles and et cetera. WhatsApp undermines that. So in a way, these analytical practices that, a lot of them have to do with presence and doing things together, are really difficult in sometimes — you know, in when you're relying a lot by the fact that people are dispersed on, on social media, right? As a way to keep organizing things. So we try to contain things to say, let's keep the group simply for scheduling certain types of activities and certain types of information. But then it's sometimes quite difficult to handle when it carries the weight of keeping sociality, right? And so that's why the physical presence and being together — and one of the most important analytical spaces in this camp is the fact that, you know, summer is hot, but we have a river and go swimming.

AG: Mm. Yeah.

GP: It’s a good balance for the tensions that we sometimes have between different constituencies, right? So you're swimming, you're there, naked, whatever, barbecuing, eating, and it just allows for other types of conversations to bring other things into the fore. And so there's a very spatial, physical, bodily-presence component into bringing analysis everywhere and by other means, right, that we speak to, that is really not yet so easy to engage when the sociality is heavily dependent on social media.

SC: It's interesting because in that camp, Barroso Camp, I was listening to you speak, and it's, it feels as if that — what's permanent there is the heat and the river.
AG: Ahh.

SC: You know, it's always so hot, and you have all these conversations, and da da da da da. And then you go to the river and you just relax. And then you hang out, and you haven't planned a conversation with this friend or that person, but you just, you're just there together. And I think there's something to do with, you know, this principle of permanence as well. Because we cannot, unfortunately, be together physically constantly. We speak about this a lot of time, because for institutional psychotherapy, materialist, it has to do with, you know, walking and also being traversed by things and the problems and the textures and the, what we call the pragmatics. And often we have this discussion. But what about people that, how do we, how do you create those spaces with people that so far away. And it's something that you're actually doing here, Adam, because you created the you know, the Lifepod is an example of that.

And if it's animated, maybe these things might be animated for principles of permanence. There's this thing that's there. You don't schedule it. Maybe it happens on Wednesdays, the first Wednesday of each month, and the space is there. And we've been speaking about this as well, about having a space there in which there's no agenda…

AG: Mm.

SC: …but you're holding that space, and then it might be a monthly meeting. And people might come, or not. But it's still there. Something is holding it.

GP: That was a key device in throughout CERFI that they picked from La Borde, right? The idea of, of having a rhythm of meetings with no agenda, so they're open. So often there was simply silence. But that reading has a powerful analytical capacity, right? And they deployed it, for example, one of the, one of the pieces in the book which that we speak of is this small CERFI group go to Alma-Gare in Roubaix, and they create a — they don't create, they catalyze the emergence of a collective, popular planning atelier. So basically, there was a situation which the municipality wanted to implement a masterplan. Local organizations trying to resist with CERFI emerges together a collective analytical device, which is led by the local community, right? CERFI is just part of it. And they don't just contest, and do analysis, and say what the state is proposing is wrong. They create their, their own internal analytical device. They create weekly meetings, they create research groups about their own neighborhood, they propose their own masterplan, and they met. They win that war, and they implement their own masterplan.

So it's not just analytical of what they are, they recognize that in doing analysis of what we are, we transform ourselves. In Barroso, in the north of Portugal, where we spend so much of our time, you don't just analyze what is going to be destroyed by the mine. Is that in doing that, you transform yourself. You reconnect, you reenchant your ancestors, you reconnect, you open up other possible stories of life, right? You discover a past and a knowledge. And it's a kind of form of empowerment, right? That we identified with education in our, in the previous bit of the conversation, with mutualist education. But it's also rediscovering certain practices of land and et cetera. And so everyone there is a researcher, i.e. everyone — and that opens up a collective analytical process. "Research" for CERFI equals "analysis." "Analysis" equals "programming." "Programming" equals "self-management." But you can do, you cannot do either of those without all of the others — ah, a constant collective self-investigation process. That's militancy there.

SC: And I just want to add something, is that this process might lead to surprising things. Unheard of, or, you know, you don't plan what's going to happen.

GP: You said this beautiful thing, Susana, in regards to Lifepod. So Lifepod, at least — sorry to be suddenly theory, theorizing [laughter], but if you don't mind...

AG: Go for it, yeah.

GP: This is just pitch the Lifehouse book, right? So we could think Lifepod in terms of a rhythm, right? We were speaking in terms of distribution, and we're thinking in terms so — ah! I remember — so in, at La Borde, they think to move away from this dual relation, patient and et cetera, you need to catalyze the entire institution, not only its bureaucracy, its bureaucracy, but also its spaces, its materials. You know, the kitchen, the chickens, the horses, the driving, the — all of this — as an, and their analytical potentials, right? To go on, to be able to, to work with things that you don't speak about, because you're not used to putting those things into words, but somehow you spend a lot of time cooking, and you'd never mention that in your analysis, right? So to bring all of those things into some form of visibility that — not to be interpreted, but to be reworked, right? And so if you think life — and what it does is to allow you, they would say, we need a heterogeneity of spaces to allow for a heterogeneity of analytical potentials and possibilities. And freedom of circulation.

What does that tell us? It's a diagram around this problem that we're placing between a kind of localized, neighborhood-based social encounter, that you know that you're going to meet people, and the fact that contemporary life brings all sorts of distances into play there. And so we can think Lifepod in relation to a rhythm, right? A rhythm, a rhythm of presence in relation to distance. The analytical, how do we, how does CERFI think this? Through programming. How do we program distance? How do we program being in space, being at a distance? Well, with Lifepods, with encounters, with meetings with no agenda that no one's there speaking anything, but it's even you don't attend the meeting but you know it exists, right?

AG: Yes. Yes.

GP: The programming rhythm that allows us to compose with it and be composed by it. And that programming provides what architecture, in my sense, is supposed to provide, which is a certain consistency to modes of existence that does not overpower them and allows them to transform, right? And so there's an architecture of the idea of Lifehouse, for example, as you, as you say it in your book, as a kind of a space, right? But that space in relation to a pod, to a podcast, in relation to a rhythm of many other things, allows it not to be overdetermined. And I think programming in CERFI is allows you to keep working the pragmatics and not over invest, put all your horses in just one things, because pragmatically, that's unsustainable.

AG: No, I have a really, really vivid sense from that, and a vivid example as well. Years ago in New York City, I used to run a design practice. And by far, far and away, the best thing that came out of that design practice was a habit that we had, as you say, every Friday night for two years, at seven o'clock, we would meet for drinks, and it was open invitation generally, and we literally called it Fridays at Seven, you know, to precisely, to inscribe this idea that you know, you know come, come winter, come spring, come summer, on a Friday at seven o'clock, we would be at the stammtisch, at this regular table that we had at a bar, at a wonderful cocktail bar that has seen some changes since those times. But it was a floating population of people, you know — that some people would come literally every week. Some people would, you know, people would visit, and they'd be visiting New York City, as people do visit and New York City being one of those places where, you know, if you sit there long enough, everybody you know will come to see you. And the conversations that I was able to have as part of Fridays at Seven are still some of the most valuable things to have come out of that period of my life. For me, they were transformative. And so I really thank you for this very fructifying and almost, um — you know, it's reasonably straightforward for people to enact. I know that we weren't talking about, oh, you know, "How do you go about doing this?" But that is something that I think we can get our heads around, that we can begin to program our lives in this way, just opening, opening up this possibility for people and ideas and concepts and actions to come together, in ways that, that launch us on new lines of flight, and maybe take us out of the habits that we've developed in the course of our lives. I want to thank the both of you so much for the book and for the wonderful conversation here today. How can people get a hold of this book? If, if they they find themselves moved to do so, as I have no doubt that they will following this conversation.

SC: Well, the really good thing is that this book is published by Minor Compositions. And, you know, go and see the website, Minor Compositions website, because they have this politics of making everything accessible online. So you can buy it, you support Minor Compositions. But if you're not, you can just read, you can download it. It's also on Internet Archive. So is it minorcompositions.com?

GP: Something like.

SC: It's freely available. And I know, for Minor Compositions, always working on the side of building research commons. You know, there's around 70 available titles, I think.

AG: Oh, how fantastic. I'll make sure that's linked in the show notes. Thank you again. It's been such a pleasure. I'm sure that the conversation will continue to resonate in the minds of everybody who's heard it. It certainly will for me. Do you have any last comments, last thoughts?

GP: Just one from my side, which is to say that if there's anything that for — I think we would share this — for us was important was that CERFI produced a lot of concepts, and at that time, there's a lot of conceptual production that, unfortunately, were just seen from the side of, let's say, of a certain theory, right? But that was actually very healthy to understand that only the concepts that we know are the concepts that survived, and this has survived because they're enacted socially and produced collectively. And so what we took from there, at that aspect, was the idea that concepts are part of the constitution of your existential territories, and they're part of militancy, and avoiding this detachment between theory on one side and practical bathroom cleaning on the other side. They're really very much the same thing. And so producing concepts is a way to weave friendships, and you have to weave friendships not just around the conceptual and major struggles of the world, but around the militancy of your daily life as well.

AG: Ah, beautiful.

SC: Well, and — what can I add to that? I mean, yeah, I think that's it. And maybe saying that we've also done, obviously, we're here talking about this book, but what that we've done, we also have done it because we wanted to, and more or less the way we wanted to, you know — taking into consideration, financial circumstances, caring and all of that. And I think, you know, only this I can read, these are, you know, just go and do your own things and create an event. And those will be great.
I just wanted to have one last thing, which is really important: the way we've kind of produced this book, it would have not been possible with the CERFI member, all the CERFI members we interviewed, all the trips we've done to France and to the archives. And throughout the process, we also have learned that there is a process of transference of knowledge in us spending time with Anne Querrien, Lion Murard, Michel Rostain, François Pain, Gaëtane Lamarche-Vadel, uh, Florence Pétry — kind of all these people and more, that were members of the CERFI but that were so generous with their time, that showed us their house. Together we found archives, and the anecdotes that they told us really made this book possible. So we've learned quite a lot in the process of, of doing that as well that, you know, producing research is also producing research with others. And the concepts have a life, they have a political life. So I just wanted to finish with that, because I think that's something very important that we learned from the process of doing this book.

GP: And, and something we mentioned in the introduction, as they told us, you know, in a way, because of these conversations, it was at a certain point like the CERFI had come back to life. Because it was a very important moment for them and, and very important friendship. And there's a lot of work, it's not simply — you know, friendship is not an easy thing. Friendship demands emotionally, socially. To build friendships is a contract, you know: it's a contract to be there for the others. It's a contract in the best sense of the word, right? And so doing work like this is socially, emotionally demanding, and because of that, is incredibly beautiful, I think.

AG: Beyond that, uh, thanks to everyone who's writing in with your feedback and suggestions for guests, they're always on point, and I'm sure we'll be able to enact a good deal of them in the near future. I am generally delighted that Lifepod seems to be landing with you. Thank you so much, and we'll see you soon.

SC: Thank you so much. Adam, it was great being here.

GP: Thank you very much, Adam, it's amazing. [MUSIC]

AG: If you're interested in the sorts of things we've been talking about today, you might just enjoy my book "Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire," available directly from the good folks at Verso, at versobooks.com.

Lifepod is made with love in Newington Green, London. Like anything of value, it's the outcome of a collective effort. Editing, audio engineering and production for Lifepod are by Laurence Green. The typography and graphic design are by Chris Lee. Thanks so much to Agriculture for permission to use excerpts from their song "Living Is Easy" as our theme music. I'm Adam Greenfield. Until next time, take care of yourself. Take care of the ones who need you. And let them take care of you. Remember: we are the ones we've been waiting for.