09 2025

Déconnage. Feet Drive Thinking

Angela Melitopoulos

Because what counts, like Vallon would say, is the act. The thought comes after the act.
That is to say that muscular contraction, attitudes, postures, etc. precede thoughts.
  (François Tosquelles in Déconnage)[1] 

This text refers to my dissertation WAYS OF MEANING Machinic animism and the revolutionary practice of geo-psychiatry,[2] which looks at the concept of ‘machinic’ animism and Felix Guattari's interest in non-Western cosmologies in Brazil and Japan. In collaboration with the philosopher, sociologist, and activist Maurizio Lazzarato, four video installations were realized as parts of this work between 2010 and 2013.[3]

One of these, the video installation Déconnage, focuses on the influence of the Catalan revolutionary psychiatrist François (Francesc) Tosquelles on institutional psychotherapy in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole during the Second World War. In particular, the installation examines the relationship between milieu, environment, political resistance, and the role of migration and mobility in the production of subjectivity. Déconnage was conceived as an experimental, audiovisual survey, a connective archival study. The installation was shown for the first time in 2011 as part of the exhibition ANIMISM curated by Anselm Franke in Vienna and Berlin, subsequently at the Gallery of the Psychiatric University Hospital in Geneva  (HUG), and for the first time in Catalonia in 2012 in the exhibition curated by Carles Guerra at the MACBA in Barcelona.[4] Ten years later, Carles Guerra, together with Joana Masó, developed the comprehensive exhibition Francesc Tosquelles. Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field for several museums in France and Spain about Tosquelles’s political life and the therapeutic practices of institutional psychotherapy. 

In the present paper, I am focusing on Tosquelles’s analysis of psychomotor skills as a form of diagnosis that opposes the by then established methods of diagnosis in psychiatry. Tosquelles’s analytical methods of non-verbal diagnosis and the idea of the geopsyche have been called a kind of “migrant work.”[5] I am interested in non-verbal expressions, gestures, and vocal melodies that lie in the speech act and precede thought. That’s why I relate these ideas to the political notion of the autonomy of migration, thus proposing the migrant work of geopsychiatry as a contemporary activist and artistic practice of visual cartography.

At the time of the making of the installation Déconnage, publications about Tosquelles’s were sparsely distributed and translated into German or English. Also in France, he was on the brink of becoming forgotten outside the world of institutional psychotherapy, such as at La Borde.

The notion ‘déconnage’ can be interpreted as a simultaneous (and foolish) interruption and connection. Therefore, the video work itself is an audiovisual act of association and dissociation. The active speaker interrupts and connects with the previous speaker through an audiovisual editing act, or, to say it simply, through deployment of the Stop and Go function during a recorded speech act. 

The archival survey is based on a videotaped interview by psychiatrist Danielle Sivadon, psychoanalyst Jean-Claude Polack, and filmmaker François Pain with Francois Tosquelles in 1987. The interview took place over the course of three days. Alongside his book publications, in particular his thesis Le vécu de la fin du monde dans la folie: Le témoignage de Gérard de Nerval, this conversation was a very important attempt to record and successfully trace his knowledge.

Déconnage expands Tosquelles’s interview with new comments in the following way: in 2011, the philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow[6] and the psychiatrist Jean-Claude Polack[7] were shown a 45-minute video excerpt edited from the raw footage of Tosquelles’s interview from 1987. While listening to this pre-edited speech, they could use the pause button on the video player to interrupt his narration whenever they wanted. During these spontaneous pauses, they could start speaking and interjecting their thoughts or comments between the ideas Tosquelles was expressing and elaborate on them. These three voices are then further interlinked in the montage. The interview from 1987 is thus updated and positioned in a time-shifted perspective of deferral through a side-by-side montage. In the installation, a luminous projection screen flickers with abstract, colored light and complements the composed image with the three speakers on the screen above. The light on the luminous projection screen moves with the same rhythm as the corporeal movement of the speakers. The luminous image is rendered through a single enlarged pixel from the image of one speaker’s face. Thus, the flickering rhythm of the light field abstracts the movements of the speaker’s face. Under the glowing screen is a shelf containing a selection of twenty-two books chosen by Elisabeth von Samsonow, Jean-Claude Polack, Maurizio Lazzarato, and me. The books are part of the archival survey.

Thus, the installation is composed of three linked interviews presented on the same visual and temporal surface (Samsonow, Tosquelles, Polack). The setting resembles a virtual philosophical-psychoanalytical session that is triggered by the psychomotor reactions of the present speakers.

The aesthetic concept of Déconnage deepens and reflects Tosquelles’s extra-analytical intervention in psychotherapy as a form of non-verbal association and intervention. It represents a popular culture of exchange for a digital cartography of a deferred conversation.

The video begins with Tosquelles’s way of reflecting on his own “family novel.” Another part refers to Emilio Mira y López’ psychometric research and therapy in the psychiatric clinic in Reus, Catalonia. These ideas became fundamental in the milieu of institutional psychotherapy in Saint-Alban. 

In Déconnage Tosquelles describes the institutional role of a psychiatric hospital within a cultural and territorial understanding of its locality. Often, his plea for mobility and vagrancy, and his theories between social (Marx) and psychic (Freud) alienation form his narrative about the institutional revolution of Saint-Alban during the war that surprises through its situatedness and complexity.

Déconnage as an artistic project refers to the editing processes of time-based images and sounds, which can be controlled by psychomotor skills during process-based editing. The act precedes the thought. In this sense, the psychometric possibilities of editing (gestures of working the timelines with a computer) have to do with a psychometric embodied reaction resulting in an animistic thinking that promotes pictorial worlds which see everything as being linked. These are not merely theoretical views, but cinematic or even kinetic languages emerging from artistic practices of montage, including temporalities of listening and acting that constantly defer the signification of the filmic result. 

The image techniques of montage are often understood as analytical tools for deepening the extra-linguistic connections that arise in speech acts and gestures. The link, the click, the record, and the cut can thus become a cartographic narrative. In Déconnage, the cuts are signposts that lead transversally from one point in history in an archive to other images in other times in another conversation, and so on. This processing of images, their spontaneous calls for (speech) action, forms the movement of our thinking when watching this archival survey. The interruptions and elaborations by the other speakers into the records of Tosquelles’s speech create new material connections. These doings join Tosquelles’s geopsychiatric categories. They begin to unfold through the experimental materiality of a contextualization of the listening to Tosquelles’s voice.

The migrant work of institutional psychotheraphy

“PART 6 – Feet”[8] 

François Tosquelles: “You have been about the world a bit. I don’t know how you have managed with everything, but one gets around. What counts is not the head, but the feet. Knowing where you put your feet. It is the feet that are the great readers of the world, of geography. Going forward is not something you do with the head. If you want to find a needle that way, you will spend years. That is why you must know where you put your feet. Do you understand? That’s all. It’s the foot that is the apparatus or the location of reception of what then becomes the tonus. That’s why all mothers tickle the feet of their babies; to make them stand up, for initiating a distribution of the tonus that allows you to go somewhere. But you get there with your feet and not with your head.” 

     Jean-Claude Polack: “That is confrontation, a direct attack on psychoanalysis; one cannot hear it any other way. In effect, for an analyst one faces the world firstly and above all with one’s ears. It is what one hears that is most important. Because at the start the baby is completely immobile, in a state of absolute distress, depending totally on the other, so it can only face and receive all kinds of things from the world. So, it faces it with its eyes and ears; it is connected to images on the one hand and signifiers on the other. But he insists a great deal on it, saying that it is first of all a matter of posture.” 

Polack interprets Tosquelles’s statement about the primacy of the body over thought as an attack on Lacanian psychoanalytical theory. The relationship of dependence of an embryo in the utero determines the lines of flight of hearing. Pre-oedipal, non-verbal perception develops from the necessity of a physical dependence, which gains in value but is not positively connoted or even negatively evaluated as a schizogamous bond to the mother. For the philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow, who comments in Déconnage on the role of the mother and the drama of birth, the schizogamous (body-to-body, mother to embryo) relations are subsumed to patriarchal cultural techniques of devaluation. In opposition to this, Samsonow empowers schizogamous relations and interprets them differently: schizogamous growth, for example, is for Samsonow a continuation of the living, which also exists without sexual reproduction. She sees the sexualized role of reproduction not as the only factor in a world economy. Growth (e.g., through the photosynthesis of plants) also takes place beyond sexual reproduction. The reproduction of bodies through a matrixial continuum – Samsonow calls it a marginalized relation from the mother to the girl – is thus economically devalued by patriarchal cultural techniques. Consequently, in patriarchal psychoanalytical thinking, the drama of birth becomes supra-significant and is even seen as a form of liberation from the state of dependence from the mother. 

The non-oedipal starting points that Tosquelles criticizes in his family novel begin also with the role of the “multiple fathers”[9] and the pre-individual reaction of the baby to the glances of eyes of the mother that are “like stars.” It corresponds to Samsonow’s categories of schizogamous becomings and pre-individual forms of existence. Furthermore, the understanding of psychomotor positions in a milieu are extended beyond the body-form to rhythm, pulse, and elementary connections (for example H2O in bodies connecting to the H2O in other bodies). 

Seeing and hearing does not presuppose a separation of the senses. These connectivities are shared with Daniel Stern’s study on The Interpersonal World of the Infant, in which he emphasizes the inherently transsubjective character of an infant’s early experiences, which do not dissociate the feeling of self from the feeling of the other. 

The physical levels of hearing voice and speech is embedded in vision; it does not reduce hearing to the ability to speak. The a-significant levels of sound, its musical and rhythmic qualities, become a material context. If we do not understand language in the preoedipal phase, we cannot speak of foreignness, but rather of a lively openness in the making of world views. In other words: it is instructive to be foreign and not to be preloaded by canonized concepts of meaning. At various points in Déconnage, Tosquelles repeatedly emphasizes his role as a migrant, as a stranger who grasps the world “with his feet,” who describes his knowledge as a form of re-iteration, as a constant encounter and as real thinking of movement.

François Tosquelles’s migration biography is often re-told and historicized today. Nevertheless, I would like to point out a few facts. Tosquelles was a syndicalist-anarchist psychiatrist and resistance fighter at the same time. He grew up in the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist society that fought against Franco’s ultra-nationalist dictatorship in the 1930s. It may be difficult to imagine Barcelona before the Spanish Civil War, when the syndicalist-Marxist movements were thinking of changing all of society’s institutions. Thus, health systems, cooperative work systems and even scientific research emerged in a historical-materialist way from socialist-cooperativist organizations. Militant cooperativism and research in the field of psychiatry were financed by the workers’ health organizations in Catalonia. It was a milieu supported by a political understanding in which the non-hierarchical organization of work and many social forms of cooperation were not subsumed solely under the aspect of monetary capitalization. This became a key to the institutional psychotherapeutic movements from Saint-Alban to La Borde and beyond.

Tosquelles began his studies of myokinetic psychodiagnostics with Emilio Mira y López at the Institut Pere Mata in Reus. In contrast to the scientific studies of psycho-engineering in the 19th and 20th centuries, which saw the human body as a machine or a ‘human motor’ controlled by the brain, Mira y López’s myokinetic studies understood the muscle movements of contraction as a movement that preceded thought and therefore the psychic event. Myokinetic research evolved into a new practice of psychodiagnostics that did not rely on language because, as Mira y López says, “language became a tool for feigning feelings and thoughts.”[10] He referred to the term myopsyche, which takes “those dispositions that are the base for an instinctive, psychomotor adaptation to the environment” as proof that it is the body that perceives the world first and before language.[11]  

Mira y López's myokinetic psychodiagnosis investigated the muscular movements of the body, the psychomotor reactions of the body in different states—for example the bodily reactions that pilots can experience in stressful situations. Experimental setups with drawings of blindfolded patients showed that the mental reaction became recognizable in the drawings through the muscular reaction before thinking. For Tosquelles, it is ultimately the bodily positionality in a milieu that then expresses thought. The position in a field (e.g., in a football match organized for the patients at Saint-Alban) or in other words, the relationships we assume through our position in the milieu are constantly changing and not essentially categorizable. 

“PART 5 – body-parts”

Tosquelles: “Thus, rather than knowing whether I was a good analyst or not, I would say that on the basis of my training with Mira, everything is based on the problem of the game of football: the attitudes, the attitudes of one to another, the postures, the conflicts, the oppositions... and how they are played out in the muscular tone, in the distribution of muscular tone. Afterwards one might reflect and say that there is a group strategy to make... but all that is secondary. It is thought retroactively.”[12] 

Thus, the psychic relation was analyzed as a result of how actors took their position in the field. Tosquelles’s experimental approach understood geography as a form of human geography: all psychic symptoms emerge as a result of a socio-spatial relation. His psychiatric model was based on the idea of non-hierarchic cooperation and on the freedom of movement. A mind is never a fixed position in a structure, but rather a constantly changing position in a spatial assemblage. Our mind follows our body while passing through a moving ensemble of human and non-human enunciations and actions. If the body acts prior to the mind, it becomes clear that the freedom to movement is an essential human right, namely the human right to wander free. Any fixation would only lead to a pathological state of the mind.

“PART 8 - Saint-Alban and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy”

     Tosquelles: “Man is a creature that goes from one space to another; he cannot stay all the time in the same space. If you wanted to stay in your cradle all the time, you would never have started walking and arrived here. You had to leave your cradle, and they even forced you out, to go somewhere, to get different things. That’s to say, that man is always a pilgrim, a creature who goes elsewhere.”[13]

The archival survey of Déconnage posits the concepts of a collective assemblage of enunciation in relation to the aspects of animism and totemism that also emerge in a contemporary, nomadological condition in migration. The right of vagrancy is set in relation to the autonomy of migration referred to in the book Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos.[14] These thinkers elaborate a political theory of the autonomy of migration, which demonstrates and philosophically anchors escape routes from the society of control within a capitalist history of globalization and neo-imperialism. The lines of flight that Tosquelles demands as a “human right” to vagrancy are recognizable in the autonomy of migration, historically unraveling the right to mobility in labor movements as a key for turning away from conditions of slavery. The historical study of the autonomy of migration by Yann Moulier-Boutang[15] has influenced the migrant struggles of minorities in Germany and France in the 1990s. Likewise, the autonomy of migration proceeds from lived experiences of migration. Tosquelles reminds us not only of the Marxist foundations of the struggle against capitalism, the proletarianized, destitute, vagabonding masses. Whereas Tosquelles always lets thinking follow the foot, he also proclaims a political manifesto against the mind–body dichotomy in modernity. 

A landscape, as opposed to a territory, is not an objective or measurable plane but rather a formation of information embedded in the material expression of the milieu. The “outside” is not a set of geographic measurements determined by Western science, but it is continuously transforming, a moving formation between humans, non-humans, animals, plants, skies, underworlds, seas, and landscapes in which we live and store our knowledge. This moving formation is relational, dynamic, and psychic. 

For institutional psychotherapy mobility was not just a human right but also a medical right. Without mobility, without vagrancy, or at least the free choice deciding where we can ‘put our foot,’ where we can direct our meaning, our mind is fixed. Without mobility we are repeating patterns of thought which symptomize a psycho-pathological condition, namely that of fixity. Escape routes are both physically and mentally fundamental for the re-construction of our subjectivities against identity politics and fixing machines of the modern nation states.

For Tosquelles geographic location played a significant role in treating traumatized soldiers at the warfront during the Spanish Civil War. He was convinced that trauma was less likely to become chronic if the soldiers were healed at the war front where the trauma occurred. After fleeing to France, he was interned in the French concentration camp of Septfonds. where many refugees from the Spanish Civil War were incarcerated. These camps were deadly due to their extreme neglect. Here the term Je-m’en-foutisme (killing by extreme indifference and neglect) was coined. In this extreme condition of imprisonment Tosquelles created a medical service for the inmates. He created therapies against their resignation and for activating and reconstructing one's own possibilities for action. His ideas for institutional psychotherapy stem from a political practice against lethal camps and concentration-based prison systems in World War Two.

For institutional psychotherapy in Saint-Alban and later in La Borde, the patient’s freedom of movement within the clinic was a central possibility for healing. Without mobility, without vagrancy, without the freedom to decide where to ‘set our foot,’ where to direct our mind, our thinking is fixed and the healing of mental problems, which lead to catatonic stasis, is hindered. The freedom of movement in Saint-Alban meant that a patient could redefine and choose his position, change the relation to patients and doctors. This organization of institutional psychotherapy necessitated an open time structure in the present time, namely the time of the event, a non-chronological time that allowed for new organizational principles and connections. His political and therapeutical work goes hand in hand with a form of action against oppressing systems of incarceration through diagnostic categorization and for a process-based analysis and autonomy on all levels of the institution.

In Jean-Claude Polack’s words, Tosquelles constructed a methodology of analysis that “transposes his position of someone who is a stranger” to the land to a “diagnostic analytical habitus”[16] that analyzes the psyche in relation to the environment as extra-analytical, contextual information within the verbal level of communication in psychoanalysis. The experience of foreignness, according to Elisabeth von Samsonow, is a condition for minoritarian subject groups in general.[17] 

Samsonow’s feminist critique in Anti-Electra. Totemismus und Schizogamie contains a significant displacement from Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Schizogamy is a biological term defining body growth of specific organisms without sexual reproduction. Samsonow critiques Freud’s interpretation of Greek myths through psychoanalysis as a form of cultural oblivion, a cultural war fact introduced with the modern renaissance of classical theatre (Freud’s narrative of Electra), which in the Minoic and Athenian culture emerged as a canonizing tool for the new patriarchal order of the Greek war-society. Electra’s deliberate disempowerment speaks of a mnemotechnical neutralization of Uterocracy. According to Samsonow, Freud has bracketed off the pre-Oedipal continent as a wordless and conceptless sphere, which therefore withdraws itself from the construction of theory, from the construction of psychoanalytical models. However, the mother–daughter relation, Samsonow claims, is schizogamic, a body–body relation that “illuminates the empire of plasticity,”[18] a transiting, changing corporeity, a metamorphosis based on metabolism inherent in the potential of the “creation of humans,” as schizogamous, non-reproductive production of body through bodies, which dwells in the technical world of the labyrinth, which is the place of the unborn, which inspires imagination of the daughter in her plastic, technophile desire. According to Samsonow, schizogamic exogamy becomes nowadays a desiring machine that drives our technophile actions in the world. It is founded on polyvalent relationality and relational matrixiality, in which the subject’s identificatory Oedipal arrangements are becoming irrelevant. For Samsonow the “position of the girl” who remains liberated in her incompleteness assumes a key position in our techno-allied society, from which she observes and comments. The “position of the girl” is not only biologically connected with the sex of the bodymaker-mother, but first and foremost through the mnemotechnical cultural construction of our history. 

Through the schizosoma, we are connected to the pre-Oedipal, primordial world or mother Earth, who “is some kind of omnipotence and omnipresence, insofar as it is the first known creature and is equated with ‘world’, with ‘nutrition’, with ‘love’.”[19] 

The political relevance of this polyvalent rationality contains for Samsonow the potential of a non-tragic, schizogamous economy that is distributed across all forms of life, and which could take effect beyond the expropriating power abuse of Oedipal, patriarchal modernity. Anti-Elektra’s anti-Oedipal order contains the law of the animal-human, the transplants instead of reproductive systems, the ambient beings, and reads like an animist (totemic) proposition. “Being-human”, according to Samsonow, “does not only mean one derives from other humans, especially from the genitor or father, but means to establish and maintain a relation to everything that is not human. To be humane, as Giambattista Vico believed, could also somehow come from humus, so to be connected with a logic of the earth that is urgently waiting to unfold.”[20] 

The non-verbal role of voice-melody, gesture, and rhythm—as an extra-analytical feature is addressing alliances with landscapes, plants, animals, things etc., means making oneself a part of a larger assemblage, or in different terms, a part of a human–non-human subject group. We clearly see the schizo-analysis figuring in that context.

Mikhail Bakhtin considered the speech melody and rhythm to be the reservoir of communication in popular cultures.[21] The volatility in the vocal speech-act, the qualities of the speech-genre channel our imagination. The volatile attractors give ways to an image (a-significant elements of channeling images). Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea adds another direction of meaning to Tosquelles because he shows how verbal enunciation and the volatility of the voice take part in the circulation of bodies as a materialist quality. The circulation of voices is not abstract or due to an effect of the a-significant level, but rather, it is real because with the mobilities of the body, voices are moving, too. Thus, the volatilities in voices act as directional channeling element that condition communications and that are part of a non-verbal cultural code of location. This would mean for me that as long as human’s mobility cannot be delimited, the circulation of the voice, and therefore the circulation of the phonemes that create the material of the voice, cannot control the freedom of movement which is principally our power for autonomy. 

There is a wealth and potential to trace our mobilities that transversally and dividually act in our relations to the world. Geo-psychiatry is a practice of recognizing the schizogamous multiplicities as a condition of place in our existence, analyzing our mobilities and thus our exo-planes (relations to what we conceive as outside of us) by means of recording a-signifying dynamics. 

Today control technologies like surveillance via GPS data can become a totalitarian ‘eye of the master,’ because they can act as a machinery of control. For migration movements they render mobility from the perspective of the enemy’s eye. The cultural practices in struggles of migration often work with the bodily, physical extension of micro-media (GPS) within our society of (auto)control. This means that our movements can become subjected to information control. Cartography is used to calculate our mobility as consumers before we are conscious of it ourselves. This development of media and mobile technologies differs significantly from Guattari’s hope that micro-media would become a tool for emancipatory practices of alter-subjectivities. Topological forms of ‘noopolitics’[22] that record all activities of users threaten us with becoming completely subservient to the ‘megamachine.’ But this is only true if we forget that all thought is an afterthought. That what comes first is escape!

The transnational politics of post-liberal society respond to the autonomy of migration as a continuous creative force within social, cultural, and economic transformations with ever-new regimes of mobility control. Therefore, the political aggregate of the post-liberal, porocratic (porous) state is defined by migration flows.[23] ‘Escape comes first! People’s effort to escape can force the reorganization of control itself; regimes of control must respond to the new situation created by escape.”[24] This effect of escape doesn’t address politics as opposition to the state, but as production machine of a new subjectivity. New strategies of perception are tested. These strategies are understood as subversive and invisible politics through which the regulatory regimes of national sovereign governments, who must follow them, are infiltrated, and they must follow them. Escape comes first. Thus, where we put our foot becomes the matter of state politics.

Tosquelles conceived of situatedness and complexity as limits of dialectical materialism. In doing so, his work points toward our futures, encouraging us to think within a damaged environment and milieu that urgently needs healing.