Guattari, F.

( 1995) Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic
paradigm. Trans. Paul Baines and Julian
Pefanis.Power Publications: Sydney.

[Guattari’s  last book.  A good discussion of modern forms

of subjectivity, including machinic and ‘a – signifying’
forms, which can be used retrospectively to make more
sense of Thousand Plateaus.  An emphasis on politics of
subjectivity, and how to develop autonomous subjectivity,
so a continuation of the politics as well.  Surprisingly
neglected in the educational world!  Riddled with
Deleuzian terminology and the usual elitist allusions,
unfortunately]

[Incidentally, see Rancière's discussion of radical cultural

politics as a critique]

Chapter one On the production of subjectivity

Subjectivity is really important, as his professional practice

in psychotherapy has shown.  We should be thinking of
new ways to understand it as a combination of ‘various
semiotic registers’ (1), including collective ones, not just
the old opposition between subject and society.

Subjectivity is more important than ever, as in Tiananmen

Square and the demand for a new lifestyle, and in a more
regressive way in the religious revival in Iran.  Collective
desire broke the iron curtain in a complex mix of
emancipatory and conservative threads, including
nationalism and religion.  The Gulf War as can be seen as
imposing Americans forms of subjectivation.  We can see
this in terms of emancipation vs. conservative
‘reterritorializations of subjectivity’ (3).

Conventional social sciences, including psychoanalysis,

find it difficult to understand these mixtures of archaic
culture and modernity.  We need instead ‘the more
transversalist conception of subjectivity, one which would
permit us to understand both its idiosyncratic
territorialized couplings (Existential Territories) and its
opening on to value systems (Incorporeal Universes) with
their social and cultural implications’ (4).  This will include
the effects of the mass media and IT and their ‘semiotic
productions’, which affect memory, intelligence, sensibility
and ‘unconscious phantasms’.  Modern subjectivity is
heterogeneous, with: the usual semiological components
from the family and other social institutions; elements
from the media industry; ‘a-signifying semiological
dimensions that trigger informational sign machines’ (4),
which cannot be understood using linguistic semiology.  It
was a mistake on the part of structuralism to prioritise
natural language which avoids technology.  For example
computer aided design has leads to new developments in
both art and mathematics.  We should neither celebrate
and critically nor reject totally these innovations
—‘everything depends [the] articulation within collective
assemblages of enunciation’ (5).  [pretty much like
Habermas arguing that public value rationality ought to
control science and technology?].  In particular, there is a
potential for ‘reappropriation and resingularization of the
use of media’—access and interactivity.

There are implications for ‘ethology and ecology’ too

(6).  Infants develop subjectivity through levels of
subjectivation which run in parallel, rather than classic
Freudian stages.  Early subjectivity also always involves
considering the feelings of the other, the relation between
shareable and non shareable affects.  This demolishes the
claim of Freudian complexes to be universal.  There are
implications for psychotherapy of the kind Guattari
pursued, which focuses on ‘collective subjectivation’, a
production, encouragement of ‘multiple exchanges
between individual – group – machine’ (7) [through the
development of new skills and interests]. This offers a
chance to break out of blocks and resingularise, by
following an ‘aesthetic paradigm’ [doing things for
fun?].  All sorts of heterogeneous components are
involved, ‘everything which can contribute to the creation
of an authentic relation with the other’ (7).  He is after
autonomous subjectivity, or ‘autopoeisis (in a somewhat
different sense from the one Francisco Varela gives this
term)’ [fuck me, could be Seel at the Change Academy].

Another example can be found in developments in family

psychotherapy, which break with science and develop ‘an
ethico - aesthetic paradigm’ (8).  Apparently this involves
therapists themselves acting out various phantasms, via
psychodrama, with others participating and commenting,
and videoing the results for subsequent
commentary.  There is no attempt to reconstruct the
actual family dramas, but to focus on how subjectivity is
produced.  It leads to a ‘ludic face to face encounter with
patients and the acceptance of singularities’.

This leads to an all encompassing definition of subjectivity

[and it is a beauty]: ‘The ensemble of conditions which
render possible the emergence of individual and/or
collective instances as self referential existential
Territories, adjacent, or in a delimiting relation, to an
alterity that is itself subjective’ (9).  In some conditions,
this becomes individualised, such as when appearing in
families or before the law.  Another conditions, it is
collective, but in the sense of being the product of a
multiplicity, sometimes incarnated ‘on the side of the
socius’ (9). There are also ‘incorporeal Universes of
reference such as those relative to music and the plastic
arts’.  The non human and pre- personal elements are
useful, since they can lead to heterogenesis and
autonomy.

‘It would be to misjudge Deleuze and Foucault—who

emphasized the non human part of subjectivity—to
suspect them of taking anti humanist positions!’ (9).  They
just wanted to make us aware of non human aspects, or
‘machines of subjectivation’, which have an affect in
addition to the normal social and unconscious processes. 

Freud’s theory of the Unconscious can no longer be

distinguished from the institutions and apparatuses which
promote it.  Freudians did invent new forms of experience
or production, such as hysteria or psychosis, but it is now
become institutionalised, especially in its structuralist
version, which stresses conformity to the signifying order.

We should not think of these approaches as scientific, but

as accounts of the product of subjectivity, together with
the apparatuses which they have developed.  There are a
number of systems of ‘modelising subjectivity’, which
include cognitive as well as mythical and other
references.  Psychoanalysis has developed a number of
interacting models of relations, but none of them  ‘can be
said to express an objective knowledge of the psyche’ (11),
despite their importance.  We need to evaluate them
pragmatically against the new forms of subjectivity
developing, indulging in ‘psychological metamodelisation’,
to examine how they can use to explain effects, how they
are themselves modified by external changes.  The
Freudian unconscious clearly relates to society of the past
which was phallocratic: its authority now depends on
particular institutions. 

Contemporary changes fragment the self image.  The old

oedipal mechanisms must be replaced by a notion of
‘multiple structure of subjectivation’, ‘a more “schizo”
Unconscious’, uncoupled from the family, focusing on
current practice.  ‘An Unconscious of Flux and of abstract
machines rather than an Unconscious structure of
language’ (12).  This is not intended to be a scientific
theory, and ‘I invite those who read me to take or reject
my concepts freely’—the point is to work towards the
production of an autonomous subjectivity.  [The same kind
of bargain Deleuze makes—take it or leave it, but I am
moving in the right direction, so there].

Aesthetics are important here, since they can also involve

autonomy.  We’re interested in creativity not reified
systems.  Aesthetic categories, even Kant’s, must be
inserted into the psyche.  Why are some ‘semiotic
segments’ capable of developing an autonomy and new
fields of reference?  This relates to personal freedom.  We
need to examine this ‘ethico – aesthetic “partial objects”’
(13), and how they manage to achieve autonomy, how this
links to ‘mutant desire and to the achievement of a certain
disinterestedness’ [the reference to the partial objects
tries to connect up with Lacan on the emergence of the
partial object in the development of autonomous
subjectivity].

Bakhtin discussed how aesthetic objects can express

ethical or cognitive autonomy, acting as ‘a partial
enunciator’ (13).  How might this be related to the
psychoanalytic partial objects?  We need to extend Lacan
to include other objects with psychic effects, objects which
will lead us to the various other processes of subjectivity
discussed so far.  In Bakhtin’s terms subjectivation
somehow or transferred between the author and the
contemplator or spectator of a work of art, so the
spectator becomes a cocreator.  This requires the
expressed material to incorporate some creative potential,
to detach itself from constraining contexts, to open up
connotations, especially those which alludes to ‘the unity
of nature and the unity of the ethical event of being’
(14).  This might be found only in fragments of content,
which reveal the attempts of the author to enunciate this
creative potential. 

[This is still Bakhtin] In poetry, elements which are likely to

be able to detach and autonomise themselves, and lead to
creative subjectivity are:

‘The sonority of the word, its musical aspect; its material

significations with their nuances and variants; its verbal
connections; its emotional, intonational and volitional
aspects; the feeling of verbal activity in the active
generation of a signifying sound, including motor elements
of articulation, gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement
in which the whole organism together with the activity
and soul of the word are swept along in their concrete
unity’ (15), with the last general process including all the
others. [Could this be what others refer to as
'epiphanies'?]

These suggestions will help us analyse unconscious

formations in pedagogy and psychiatry, and even new
possibilities in capitalism.  Creative fragments like this are
found not only in music and poetry, but can take the form
of ‘”existential refrains”’ (15), embedded in assemblages
of various kinds.  Birdsong can be seen as an example of
her refrains mark out territories.  In ‘archaic societies’, it
will be various marks, totems and rituals.  We are all
aware of ‘crossings of subjective thresholds’ between
periods of sadness or happiness.  We can extend the
notions to include relations with all sorts of incorporeal
universes, such as mathematics, and all sorts of
deterritorialized existential locations, in the form of a
‘transversalist refrain’ (16).  We can escape limited notions
in capitalism of space and time, and try to explore ‘ highly
relative existential synchronies’ (16).

Television constructs subjectivity, through its fascination

with the luminous screen, its dominating narrative
content, awareness of surrounding events, such as water
boiling on the stove, the phantasms and daydreams in our
heads.  These components can pull in different directions,
but they can be controlled by a refrain, a  ‘projective
existential node’ (17)—I can identify with the speaker on
the screen, for example.  Again we can relate to Bakhtin’s
view that some ‘detached existential motif’ is acting as an
attractor, which leads to a connection ‘to the existential
Territory of myself’. 

This can take pathological forms -- obsessive ritual in

neurosis, or implosion of the personality, where the
components move away on delirious or hallucinatory
lines.  The complex refrain can be used in psychotherapy,
instead of looking for underlying structures.  It can congeal
in the form of ‘a constellation of Universes’ which have
been produced in the way we have described, but which
appear to be permanent: are they too arise from a
creative act, as a ‘haecceity freed from discursive time’.  In
one example, a patient suddenly announces a new
interest, say in learning to drive, and this must be seen as
a sign of a singularity, producing a new refrain, and
opening up new possibilities, say of contacting old
friends.  Such offhand announcements should be taken
seriously as ‘potential bearer of new constellations of
Universes’ (18).

Time becomes active.  Analysis is not just a matter of

interpreting symptoms to get a latent content, but events
like the ones above can be seen as potentials, ‘mutant
nuclei of subjectivation’ (18), akin to the detachment of
objects in surrealism.  It leads to new understandings of
subjectivity as complex, ‘harmonies, polyphonies, counter
points, rhythms existential orchestrations, until
now  unheard and unknown’ (18-19).  These processes are
constantly threatened by reterritorialization, especially
where all existential territorialities are under threat [with
a hint of disenchantment, 19] with rationalised
communication.

We still find potential in art of all kinds, to first of all

disrupt existing semiotic and significational networks, then
to release emergent subjectivity.  In particular ‘enunciative
areas’, such disruption will initially appear as mutant, self
referring and self valuing.  Some of the segments of the
old networks can be retained and refrained—anything will
do as long as they are directed towards the creative
spectator.

We’re not interested just in poetry, but in

singularisation.  There are serious threats to human
survival, and degeneration in social solidarity and psychic
life. A new politics will have to pursue creative subjectivity
in ‘the environment, the socius and the psyche’ (20).  We
have to change our mentality, if we are to bring about
democratic and ecologically sound policies, and restore
the real point of it all—‘the production of a subjectivity
that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a
continuous fashion’ (21).

Social transformations can begin with transformations of

subjectivity, as we have seen.  In learning about these
transformations of subjectivity ‘poetry today might have
more to teach us than economic science, the human
sciences and psychoanalysis combined’ (21). They can also
take place at the micropolitical level.  [Then some real
Deleuzian stuff on enunciation and how to decentre it, to
stop it producing new universal psychological or
mythological models.  We need to aim at metamodels
capable of dealing with diversity, and these must include
machinic and informational developments affecting
subjectivity.].  It is a focus on subjectivity not the subject,
previously seen as ‘the ultimate essence of
individuation’.  It is the expressive instance that makes
content important, content as ‘enunciative substance’
(23).

We can now go beyond Saussure and structuralism, and

the distinction between expression and content [which
apparently repeats the distinction between signifier and
signified].  The components of both can operate in
parallel.  We can reconceptualise Hjemslev [oh good] to
see every modality of expression and content as the
product of a transversal machine. So we have a discursive
machine, which is ‘phonemic and syntagmatic’ and relates
to expression, connected to a semantic machine which
deals with categories of content, rather like Chomsky’s
notion of deep grammar.  Semiology could be seen as the
workings of these connected machines, making
enunciation as a combination of substantive expression,
including ‘biological codings or organisational forms
belonging to the socius’ (24), to include extra linguistic
domains, even non human ones.  This would offer a form
of machinic subjectivity, which is collective and
‘multicomponential, a machinic multiplicity’.  It would
even include incorporeal dimensions.

So there are familiar discursive chains, but also incorporeal

registers ‘with infinite creationist virtualities’ (25).  Where
these intersect, subject and object fuse.  We can also
explain intentionality, which is also something which
bridges subject and objects.  It can explain ‘subjective
transitivism’ in psychotherapy [investing objects with
subjective meaning?] which is at the heart of Freudian
analysis [Deleuze in LofS is good at this]  [another example
is collective ritual investing objects with some important
existential function].  Deleuze on the cinema also shows
how subjectivity is produced through things like
movement images and time images, beyond mere
representation.  These can evoke ‘a non discursive pathic
[passive?] knowledge which presents itself as a
subjectivity that one actively meets…[which is]...given
immediately’ (25).  [Another rendition of the apparent
immediate connection with images in film, shared by
Deleuze and also Benjamin, more effective because it
escapes the constraints of discourse].  This kind of
subjectivity still has to be actualised, but we can still grasp
its force, behind the ‘pseudo discursivity’ (26).

This pathic subjectivation is the basis of all modes of

subjectivation.  It’s covered over by a capitalist
subjectivation, and bracketed in science.  Initially,
Freudianism rebelled against ‘positivist reductionism’
which simply excluded these dimensions, which persisted
in the Freudian lapse or joke.  Pathic subjectivity is
constantly excluded from official discursivity, although it is
the basis of it.  Official discursivity goes on to develop a
whole existential territory, although this is still opposed by
deterritorialized incorporeal universes—the two can be
[falsely] connected in a system.  Sometimes these
incorporeal universes are alluded to by ‘pathic
apprehension’ [the examples given are in music and
mathematics] (26). 

Consistency depends on assemblages of these

layers.  Complex refrains can connect them, by
deterritorialising and pointing to heterogeneity, and
‘becoming other’ (27). Incorporeal universes are universes
of reference, which also offer values, and once they are
invoked and connected, this can lead to revalorisation [an
obscure example shows how the military machine,
developing through technological advances, can affirm
itself over a despotic state machine]. The crystallizations
that result can produce irreversible changes in collective
subjectivity, and are stored in incorporeal memory.

This is how being changes.  These incorporeal

constellations ‘belong to natural and human history’ (27),
for example the development of mathematical universes,
the development of polyphonic music, both of which are
irreversible.  These values can also be embodied in
existential territories which then develop autonomously
and singularly and react back on  subjectivation.  The
formal binary logic of official discursivity is accompanied
with ‘pathic logic’ (28) which has no ‘extrinsic global
reference that can be circumscribed’.  [In other words, the
incorporeal universe is intensive not extensive, but it is
coupled to the extensive?].  However, existential
territories claim to be complete and general, and they
feature bare repetition and existential affirmation, to
cover up their lack of ontological grounding.  They are
justified by borrowed semiotic links which help
domesticate difference [maybe, 28]: ‘an expressive
instance is based on a matter – form relation, which
extracts complex forms from a chaotic material’ (28).

Conventional logic of discourse has led to the priority of

terms such as capital, the signifier, and ‘Being with a
capital B’ (28).  Capital refers to the equivalence between
labour and goods, the signifier reduces ‘ontological
polyvocality’ (29).  Other categories such as the true, the
good and the beautiful also domesticate processes and
confine them to ‘circumscribed sets’.  These categories
tends to destroy others, but it is still an ‘ethicopolitical
option’ to operate with them.  [Incidentally Being,
presumably as in Heidegger, also reduces the richness of
universes of value].  We must choose the richness, the
possible, the virtual that deterritorializes.  There are
dangers here because it might go wrong and end in
religiosity, self-annihilation ‘in alcohol, drugs, television,
an endless daily grind’ (29), but there are collective social
and political options.

‘Ontological intensity’ is designed to question dualist

categories.  It involves both ethical and aesthetic
engagement with enunciation, in actual and virtual
registers.  This engagement is collective, not
personalized.  The collective is sometimes broken into
machinic segments, but these should always refer back to
a ‘deterritorialized mecanosphere’ [sic] (30).  There is no
immovable Being, with its usual binary opposites [like
being or consciousness]: these are developed under the
influence of ‘semiotic linearity’ [compare with Deleuze
in D&R on the linguistic basis of contradiction] .  We
should stress pathic expression, which resists the attempts
to equate an object with a referent.  There is always
coexistence.  Time is not just an empty container, but a
matter of ‘machinic synchrony’, a notion of
‘”extensionalising” linearity between an object and its
representative mediation’ (30).

Are these incorporeal and virtual parts of assemblages of

enunciation purely subjective?  Or is it that there is a
realist conception of the world which subjectivity has
illusions about?  Or both?  Virtual intensities are prior to
semiotic distinctions, objects and enunciating subjects. It is
in the virtual that autonomous machinic segments
emerge: they are also ‘ontogenetic’.  Without realizing
this, we are left with a universal semiotics or scientific
rationality.  Machinic interfaces are heterogeneous, other
than how we perceive them usually [he means actual
machines here?], and relating to incorporeal universes of
reference.  We must avoid descriptions which fall back
into dualisms.  He prefers four terms in his metamodels
—‘Fluxes, machinic Phylums, existential Territories,
incorporeal Universes’ (31) – because the fourth term
prevents reduction but opens on to a multiplicity and
‘creative processuality’ (31) [this is also the reason for
introducing the meta dimension into metamodels].

Chapter two Machinic heterogenesis

Technology depends on machines not the other way

around.  The nature of machines has long been a topic for
philosophy.  There are mechanistic and vitalist
conceptions: the latter include cybernetics or the dreaded
Maturana and Varela and autopoiesis.  Techne, in
Aristotle, meant accomplishing something which nature
alone could not accomplish, but in Heidegger it has come
to mean unmasking the truth, something ontological and
grounded.
We mean to look instead at machinism in its totality, ‘in its
technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars’
(34).  It is not just technical machines, but enunciating
machines.  First, material apparatus is made by human
beings and can be taken over by other machines,
connected to the goals of production and thus already
conceivable as a functional ensemble which includes
human beings.  Such machines have ‘material and energy
components, semiotics, diagrammatic and algorithmic
components’; components of ‘organs influx and humours
of the human body’; desiring machines which generate
subjectivity attached to these components; abstract
machines which operate transversally across the machinic
levels above (34-5).  Abstract machines are things which
relates heterogeneous levels transversally: they can
provide the different levels with existence or
autonomy.  Together, the different components form a
machinic assemblage, where assemblage relates to
‘possible fields; a virtual as much as constituted elements,
without any notion of generic or species relation’
(35).  Individual components of a machine at the most
basic level can be seen as a protomachine [The example is
a hammer which can be taken apart or deterritorialized.  It
can have imaginary relations, as with hammers and
sickles.  It can also be associated with human arms, nails
and anvils, which further links to blacksmiths, iron ore
mines, the iron age and so on]. [See DeLanda on the war
machine]

Robots have displaced human action to the periphery,

intervening only if there is a breakdown.  Intelligent
machines ‘add as much to thought as they subtract from
thinking’ (36) [with a reminder that they replace dull
routines of thinking as well] .  Computer generated forms
of thought can become mutant and relate to other
universes such as music.  So do we have a distinct kind of
non human thought?  Can non human thought still be
grasped by semiotics?  We may need to develop ‘a-
signifying semiotics as well, to relate to Significations and
expression that machines have [the example is ‘the
equations and plans which enunciate the machine’,
36].  We will have to dethrone the structuralist emphasis
on human language and the signifier: machines produce a
‘singular sense’ (37).

Autopoiesis in the machine is what makes it valuable.  In

human communication, feedback loops ‘make the
structure function according to a principle of eternal
return’ (37) [blimey].  Machines however desire abolition,
breakdown [certain it looks like that but can he mean this
seriously?].  Machines have a ‘dimension of alterity’
instead of structure – it involves disequilibrium, a radical
potential arising from being able to be joined to other
machines in a ‘”non-human” enunciation’ ( 37) which
debases the claim of the human signifier to be universal.
Machines use different forms of signification to mutate in
this way, not using binaries, syntagms or paradigms.
Human constellations are singularities and express pathic
relationships, but nothing of this can be used to
understand machinic constellations - -the potentials, the
virtual bits, are not the same.

 The same lines of signification can appear in different

Universes, which can provide the illusion that they are
universal.  However, each universe of reference is singular,
at different levels of expressive intensity, or ‘irreducible
heterogeneous ontological consistencies’ (38).  It follows
that there are as many types of
deterritorialization.  Particular forms of signifying
articulation are neutral, but are immanent to machinic
intensities.  There are no ontological binaries.  There is
ontological transversality (not harmonic universals as in
Plato), and this is how human beings or social events get
affected.  This takes place via the notion of the abstract
machine, and remembering that social groups are also
machines, so are bodies.  In each case, there is an abstract
machine behind actual heterogeneous components—that
abstract machine is responsible for heterogeneity.  This is
not the Lacanian signifier, which is both too abstract (too
uniform), and not abstract enough (cannot see the link
between specific machinic codes).
Varela sees machines as interrelated components,’”
independent of the components themselves”’
(39).  Autopoietic machines reproduce themselves and
their own organisation, while allopoietic ones to produce
something other than themselves.  Varela sees only
biological machines as autopoietic.  This is unsatisfactory
and we will want to extend the concept.  It is also an
unsatisfactory definition of living organisms which evolve
‘through genetic phylums’ (39).  If we consider collective
and evolutionary entities, which reproduce not just one
type but diverse types related together, we can correct
these problems.  But particular, machines have a relation
with human beings, in the form of assemblages, and these
assemblages ‘become ipso facto autopoietic’ (40): the
mecanosphere cannot be separated from the biosphere.

Machines appear across generations, and it’s possible to

prolong their development into the future, as long as we
remember that evolutionary lines are rhizomes.  Machines
developed in one era can become really significant in
another, such as the steam engine, originally developed as
a child’s toy in China.  Technological innovation stop and
start, military technology in particular [compare with
DeLanda on the war machine].  However, even humble
technology and tools display such phylogenesis [the
example is the hammer].  History displays intersections of
machinic universes, innovations, stops and starts.  From
early days, technological machines related to language
machines and social machines.  War machines were
particularly nomadic.  Capitalist machines emerged from
urban machines, royal machines, banking machines,
navigation, religious, scientific and technical machines.

If that is phylogenesis, there is also

ontogenesis.  Machines have to be maintained and
repaired, and their relations with human beings have to be
renewed as well.  The art of this is coping with the
inextricable alterity between man and machine and
machine and machine.  Disrepair and rediscovery is the
destiny of the machine.  [With some odd examples from
art machines as well, 42].  The reproducibility of the
machine is not a simple one, but one which includes
difference [this is the notion that underpins so much of
Deleuze’s blatherings about eternal return in my view].  As
a result, a disembodied abstract machine can be
identified, ‘diagrammatic virtualities’ (42).  Thus the
reproducibility of technical machines really depends on
more collective mechanisms, including the action of
humans.  Technological machines are not coded like
human beings, and relate to plans or diagrams, again
conceived as rhizomes, producing a particular actual
serialisation.

Thus deterritorialization detours through the abstract

machine.  Of the abstract machine separates and smooths
[eliminates minor rough patches].  The example is the lock
and key.  We can understand this in terms of the relation
between specific locks and specific keys and how they
interact, for example through wear.  Or we can
understand it in formal diagrammatic ways which describe
a whole range of possible locks and keys, potentially
infinite in number.  The infinite form both ‘doubles and
smooths’ the contingent ones (43).  This is
‘deterritorialized smoothing’, and it helps us make better
machines, acting as a mould, although having to remain
within certain limits.

The emergence of the notion of an abstract machine or

‘formal threshold’ is likely whenever machinic relations
are considered, or even when we philosophise about
spare parts [all the time,mate. I wish we had philosophised
about the Olympic torch and whether 'it' stays the same
when it is transferred] —these help us think beyond the
empirical limits and suggest a diagrammatic
order.  [Apparently Pierce was on to this with his notion of
an icon of relation as a diagram].  Here, it is the diagram
that is autopoietic, with the added requirement of having
to actualise particular different versions of itself—the
‘machine’s proto-subjectivity’ (44), a virtual component.

Thus subjectivity is not confined to human semiotics and

their diagrams.  Machines do not have Aa ‘univocal
subjectivity’, but they do have ‘heterogeneous modes of
subjectivity’: they make ‘partial ‘ enunciations ‘in multiple
domains of alterity’ (45).  We can see such alterity in terms
of relations between different parts of the machine, in
terms of internal consistency, in terms of relation to the
diagram, in terms of evolution through the phylum.  War
machines have a particular ‘”auto agonistic"’ alterity which
lead to their own collapse.  There is also alterity of scale,
as in fractals.  Beyond that there are infinite modalities.

[Strange anthropological example follows, 46, showing

how a particular African society charted the possible
alterities of a particular fetish object—as a materialised
god, a universal principle, a marker of different rooms,
interiors and exteriors, and a relation to other people].

Normal definitions of the components of machines give a

misleadingly homogeneous implication—‘Capital, Energy,
Information, the Signifier’ (46) suggest that their referents
are equally homogeneous.  It is necessary to oppose
reductionism and to insist that each ‘machinic
intersection’ corresponds to ‘a constellation of universes
of value’ (47).  Biological machines correspond to the
entire biosphere, musical machines to ‘a background of
sonorous universes’, technical machines to ‘complex and
heterogeneous enunciative components’.  The empirical
dimensions should be understood in terms of whole
ontological domains.

[An example of the Concorde ensues, 47 F.  It is at the

intersection of different universes: diagrams of feasibility,
industrial universes which might produce it, collective
imaginary universes, political and economic universes.  In
this case, the political and economic universe has
prevented the rest of it from emerging consistently].

[Back to Lacan].  The structuralist signifier only operates

linearly, from one symbol to another.  Machines, however,
‘as envisaged from our schizoanalytical perspective’ (48)
do not produce a ‘standard being’.  For example, the
coding is of the natural world operator on different spatial
dimensions, even the linearity of DNA operates in three
dimensions, ‘presignifying semiologies’ operate in parallel,
only the despotic tendency of the structural signifier
conceals this, the informational lines connecting different
referent universes are not linear.

Instead, ‘a-signifying semiotic machines’ produce ‘”point –

signs”’ (49).  These sides also control actual material
processes, for example a credit card number.  [Getting all
drama queen about it] these activate ontological
universes.  [an obscure her musical example follows, 50 F,
where a particular refrain brings into being all sorts of
musical universes, Wagner, Gregorian
chant,Debussy].  With machine semiotics, we are far from
‘the logic of the excluded middle [where something must
be either one thing or the other]…  [And]…  ontological
binarism’ (50).  Machinic assemblage is a consistent by
crossing thresholds, including ontological ones.  Fractal
machines transverse substantial scales.  Such machines
escape from the coordinates of energy, space and
time.  They point towards being as ‘processual,
polyphonic…  Singularisable…  [With] Infinitely
complexifiable textures…  Infinite speeds’ (51).

We can only understand this relatively, however, through

the mediation of machines.  Machines stabilize ‘a zone of
self belonging’, which we can grasp cognitively: outside,
everything is virtual (51).  We can get some sense of this
by conceiving of other virtual machines.  This is not
relativism in the sense that nothing exists outside our
conceptions—for example the conventional notion of time
has some reality in the form of the Big Bang [weak
argument -- only science is not relative?].  There is some
'residual objectivity' outside all the points of view [which is
your point of view,mate] .  We can imagine other
machines, made out of galaxies, perhaps.  Existential
machines themselves are not just mediated, for example
by ‘transcendent signifiers’ (52).  Instead, 'Existence, as a
process of deterritorialization, is a specific intermachinic
operation which superimposes itself on the promotion of
singularised existential intensities' (52).  There is no
general syntax, no dialectic, no conventional
representation.

Desiring machines play the role of the other for the self.
They are not confined to Freudian drives All machinic
assemblages have enunciative zones 'which are so many
desiring proto machines' (52).  We can see this by
extending the notion of machine, including abstract
machines which smooth.  In particular, smoothing
produces the appearance of ’a being- for- the- other’,
something beyond the here and now.  The machine as a
nucleus implies a whole constellation of universes of
reference, some segments have a specific role in
producing repetition, as in refrains.  Smoothing is an
ontological refrain.  Machines point to that, not to some
underlying simple truth of nature, but to 'multitudes of
ontological components' (53).  We do not require
semiological mediation or transcendent coding, but we do
have to expose herself to what being is giving: this is also
ontological and ethical—we are choosing to become part
of 'the whole alterity of the cosmos and...the infinity of
times' (53).

This grand philosophical choice can also be found in

machines, although they can look inverted.  Everything
belongs to chaos and its operation, but certain local
horizons and limits produce the world we know.  Semiotic
constraints can be more easily overcome than physical
ones [maybe, 54].  Our machines, technical and machines
of desire, expand our frontiers, and thus are central to
subjectivation, and help us to break the limits of our old
social machines.  There is no split between mechanism
and values—'Values are immanent to machines'
(54).  Machines allude to and ‘promote ‘ [!]  incorporeal
universes.  Machinic autopoiesis takes the role of the
other for humans, alluding to ‘zones of partial proto-
subjectivation’, [interesting -- the computer as other] and
machines' progression through a phylum challenges the
notion of stasis [maybe...  The original says:

Machinic autopoiesis asserts itself as a non-human-for-

itself, and it deploys a for-others under a double modality
of a "horizontal" eco-systemic alterity (the machinic
systems position themselves in rhizomes of reciprocal
dependence) and phylogenetic alterity (situating each
actual machinic stasis at the conjunction of a passéist
filiation and a Phylum of future mutations) (54).

[This is ontology by hyperbole. Mundane insights are

dramatised into world movements. More examples follow
in the next chapter where a kitchen becomes a laboratory
for collective enunciations etc.I am sure you can make it so
for therapeutic purposes, but there is an undoubted whiff
of the old tactic of talking up banality --making a cup of tea
becomes 'interacting effectively with modern technology
to realize the value of internationally-traded commodities'
etc. Having said that, the pedagogical technique looks very
much like that found in UK boarding schools -- wait until a
kid shows interest in something --anything -- then build
from there. ]. After lots of philosophical writing, machines
are both ‘finite territorialized and incorporeal, infinite’ (55)

We’re not talking about universals in the Platonic sense,

but singular existential territories displaying
differentiation.  Machines are heterogeneous, for example
philosophical concepts differ from scientific
functions.  Capitalism attempts to reduce them to an
equivalence, subjected to the one system of value—‘all
existential riches succumbing to clutches of exchange
value’ (55).  Simple binaries between use value and
exchange value also need to be replaced by machinic
modalities—‘the values of desire, aesthetic values,
ecological, economic values’ (55). Capitalism attempts to
deterritorialize these assemblages and then reterritorialize
them based on economics.  In this respect, it is a form of
value that leads to collapse of all the other universes of
value.  It is an abuse.  The capitalist value system actually
belongs to the whole ensemble of universes of value, and
its reductionism is to be consistently opposed.

Chapter Three Schizoanlaytic Metamodelisation

[Warning –bullshit ahead! This takes on Freud and Lacan

as offering limited models and thus conservative
practices].

Psychoanalysis has become ossified and routinized.  Social

movements are also deradicalised.  We need a new
understanding of subjectivity and practices that might
develop to extend it.  The machinic metaphor is crucial,
and can be used to oppose structuralism's 'eternal' quality.

Empirical diversity conceals not some universal ontological

base, but ‘a plane of machinic interfaces’ (58).  The actual
is produced by infinite ‘enunciative assemblages’
[expression] associating discursive components [content]
with ‘non discursive virtual components (incorporeal
Universes and existential Territories)’ (59).  Structural links
are replaced with ‘singular points of view on
being’.  Underneath these associations we can ‘postulate
the existence of a deterministic chaos animated by infinite
velocities’, producing complex compositions which then
get slowed down into extensive forms.  Abstract machines
produce these associations since they traverse both
planes.  This will give a better explanation than relying on
the usual semiotic machines.

Open and flexible assemblages of enunciation arise from

the interaction of ‘the four ontological functions of
Universe, machinic Phylum, Flux and Territory’ (59).  These
interactions are pragmatic rather than just
syntagmatic.  There is in fact an interaction between
expression and content—the latter gives consistency
discourse, authorises it, turns into existence, following ‘the
role of the refrain of ontological affirmation’ (60).  Then a
diagram:
NB -- the 'energetico-spatio-temporal discursivity' is
presumably what Deleuze calls the extensive, the actual,
the empirical etc

The ontological functions outline a pragmatic cartography

for the enunciative nuclei to follow.  Their
interrelationships or ‘concatenation’ preserve their
heterogeneity.  They metamodelise, explaining the
diversity of existing models, such as religiosity,science,
psychoanalysis: typically, these are unable to perform ‘self
referential enunciation’ (60).  Schizoanalysis tries to
explain how autopoiesis occurs at the virtual level,
through diagrams, how links are transversal, avoiding
reductionist models and showing how complex or
ontologically heterogeneous these processes actually are.

The notion of an enunciative nucleus, at the heart of

‘phenomenal multiplicities’ [in the sense of perceived
multiplicities, or possibly intuited ones] can also be
grasped through pathic apprehension, escaping empirical
limits.  This turns on narrations which promote complex
refrains: classically these will be mythical narratives.  Such
discourses include ‘ethico-political strategies of avoidance
of enunciation’ (61), and these strategies have to be made
visible, through the four ontological functions.

Thus the ‘incorporeal Universes of classical antiquity’ were

polytheistic and pluralist.  Christianity transformed them
via ‘the refrain of the sign of the cross’ (62), with new
‘corporeal, mental, familal assemblages’, and a new
subjectivity of ‘guilt, contrition, body markings and
sexuality…  Redemptive mediation’.  The social bases were
established from the ruins of the Roman empire and the
emerging reterritorialization of feudal and urban societies.

Freudianism has had a similar affect, imposing a notion of

repression and psychic economy, and developing a new
‘zone of enunciative nuclei’ relating to dreams, neurosis,
infantile sexuality and the like.  Pathological behaviour
was seen as symptoms,  traceable to the Unconscious, and
thus not autonomous and destructive.  Further levels of
practice were developed to include the crucial ‘pragmatics
of transference and interpretation’, involving ‘assemblages
of listening and modelisation’—for example dreams were
listened to differently, and interpreted as stories about the
Unconscious.  Freudianism changed the whole ‘referential
assemblage’ (63), but this also had the effect of banishing
alternative ‘psycho pathological refrains’.

Freudian models clearly extended the whole notion of

subjectivity and offered a pragmatic method to grasp it,
but it also prematurely universalised the mechanisms of
neurosis.  SchizoanaIysis works with wider conceptions of
psychosis, which offers a particularly reduced conception
of every day life.  Neurosis is easier to treat as a matter of
symptoms related to dominant significations, whereas
with psychosis, ‘alterity as such becomes the primary
question’ (63)—what is lost or confused is the ‘point of
view of the other in me’.

Psychosis can be seen as the effects of a machine, a

concept.  It describes a particularly fragile machinic
construction of alterity, showing that everything can break
down.  The Unconscious is still a useful concept, as long as
we can preserve it from colonisation from the dominant
culture.  Schizophrenia shows the complexity and fractality
of the unconscious.  It reveals the ‘a-signifying refrains’ at
work (64).  [An aside says that these notions were implicit
in phenomenology].

Schizo modelling works with the notion of the lack of fixed

coordinates, openness to universes of alterity.  Stern has
done much to explain the development of the infant in
these terms and how they involve ‘transversalist
entities’.  For example, in the preverbal phase, family
characters are still seen as ‘multiple, dislocated and
entangled, existential Territories and incorporeal
Universes’.  These entities are seen autopoietic, and the
infant is to develop a sense of self along with this sense of
the other.  An emergent self is already apparent at birth,
capable of developing a Universe of perceptions and
intensities, which go on to be embedded in the actual
perceptual registers.  This self has no oppositions of
subject and  object, self or other, masculine or
feminine.  It is not involved in oedipal triangulation.  It is
not incorporated entirely in the classic phases such as the
oral phrase, but persists in parallel with these formative
processes, and lasts into adult life.  It cannot be reduced to
the usual terms of drive and goal, but remains as ‘a partial
nucleus of subjectivation, actively machinic, opening on to
the most heterogeneous Universes of reference’
(66).  Thus infants' relations to the mother involve
relations to ‘cosmic becoming...  Processual emergence’
[Jungian formulations are denied].

Between two and six months, the self relates to its body
and to corporeal schema, with sensory motor
activity.  This implies actual territories and actual locations
of affect and personal history.  This is still a fragile notion
and can be broken leading to catatonia, hysterical
paralysis, paranoia and the notion of the decomposition of
the body.  Between seven and 15 months, work is done on
affects, to attune and establish which ones are
shareable.  This is still ‘protosocial and still preverbal’ and
here cultural traits are incorporated.  There is a
permanent identity, as in the mirror phase, at about 18
months.

The verbal self appears from about two years of age, and
language can be shared with others.  We also find the
usual developments of identity, families and their
interactions, forms of discipline and prohibition, then
school assemblages’, puberty and genitality and then to
adolescents and the professional self.  All these universes
of reference are agglomerated existentially, although
single ones can be foregrounded and the others made
latent: they are not simply aligned with drives or
images.  Things like Freudian slips do not arise from
repressed conflict, but are positive, the ‘indexical
manifestation of a Universe trying to find itself, which
comes back to knock at the window like a magic bird’ (68).

Schizoanalysis does not mimic schizophrenia, but uses it to

explore non-sense and open up reified models, seeking
‘pragmatic entrances into unconscious formations’
(68).  Autism can be treated in ways which do not depend
on it being seen as an infantile regression: the autistic
inhabit a ‘chaosmic universe’ with many more Imagos
beside those of the personological mother’ (68) [I learn
from Wikipedia that an imago  is a composite imaginary
figure, usually a parent], and with lots of becomings.  It is
this more general universe that needs to be investigated
not just the particular psychotic complex.  Psychotherapy
should work with an expanded view of transference,
involving parts of the body, or individuals, groups,
institutions, machinic systems, semiotic economies.  It is
driven by ‘desiring becoming, that is to say, pathic
existential intensity’ (68).  The point would be to
recompose that patients territories using a wide range of
means and their accompanying ‘multiple semiotic
vectors’—gesture, posture, faciality, spatiality [all of them
apparently specified by Stern].  The psychotherapeutic
institution attempts to find the semiotic vectors of the
patient’s subjectivity and make them work differently.

The example is drawn from Guattari’s own La Borde Clinic,

and how they use the kitchen for therapy.  There are
potentially all sorts of social and functional dimensions in
kitchens, and the point is to avoid the usual stereotyped
attitudes and behaviour.  The kitchen becomes in effect an
opera, with people dancing, playing, demonstrating social
relations and so on.  The preverbal components of the
patients are particularly important.  The kitchen must be
open to other [symbolic] areas, have a high ‘coefficient of
transversality’ (69), and even permit the acting out,
‘semiotisation’ of fantasies [the example is the chef acting
out a character in an advertisement].  There has to be
good articulation with other ‘partial nuclei of
subjectivation’ in the institution, such as the various
organisational committees.  In this way, patients can
establish contact with ‘Universes of alterity’ (70).  They
take part not so much as a voluntary decision, but as the
result of an ‘unconscious collective assemblage’ into which
they are inducted.  The collective here does not just refer
to the social group, but to all sorts of other components
including prepersonal and intersubjective ones, even non
human formations such as machines.  In other words it is
‘equivalent to heterogeneous multiplicity’.  The barrier
between carers and patients recedes in favour of
deploying: a knowledge of psychiatric theory; social
activity in collective territories; pathic understandings of
existential differences.  The knowledge preserves a
suitable analytic distance, while the application to
existential situations makes it all more ‘intimate and
enigmatic’.  People were trained at the Clinic to articulate
these different dimensions, as a form of return to
normality after the ‘chaosmic submersion in psychosis’
(71) [training for patients or therapists or both?].

Psychotics engage in ‘Universes which are disconnected

from the dominant assemblages of sociality’.  They need
to be offered mediations which first of all make
components of these universes consistent, and then
connected to other components, including artistic or
culinary ones which,ideally, were previously
unknown.  The therapist needs to map the relevant
components.  This seems precarious and lacking in
theoretical support, dependent on a constant recognition
of ‘a-signifying singularities—unbearable patients,
insoluble conflicts’ (71).  It is clear that it is not individuals,
but particular groups and settings that act as analysts, with
the psychotherapist as only a link: it is generalised
transference not individual transference that is
encouraged.  Since it is subjective individuation that has
gone wrong, it needs to be restored by a machinic process
of subjectivation. The procedure can also be applied to
any one who breaks with normal subjectivity.  There are
implications as well for pedagogy, neighbourhoods,
dealing with the retired. 

It is necessary to reject the universalist claims of

psychoanalysis which limits the possibilities too
drastically.  In particular, Lacan's Signifieris inadequate,
since it colonises the different semiotic processes in a
fundamentally linear way, instead of seeing how they
agglomerate.  It ignores the ‘pathic, non discursive,
autopoietic character of partial nuclei of enunciation’ (71).

The Freudian example of the fort – da game [what is in

English is called peek-a-boo] illustrates the differences
with Lacan.  Freud thought that this was a replaying of the
departure and return of the mother, a way of dealing with
rejection, and an example of the pleasure of
repetition.  This notion of repetition would appear again in
the later work on adult malfunctions including the
majority of neuroses.  Repetition expressed the extension
of conflict and tension, the [abnormal] discharge of
excitation.  It was also a way of blocking the pleasure
principle, since a disagreeable state had to be repeated:
for Freud, this was the triumph of the death drive over the
pleasure principle.  For Lacan, the game is a linguistic
matter, and the tension while waiting for return is simply a
way of provoking two different exclamations, as an
example of the early discovery of phonemes and their
dichotomy and synchrony.  The extinction involved is an
example of what produces the eternal desire of the
subject.  In this way, the signifier dominates the whole
process, and the infant experiences the symbolic order for
the first time.

Guattari prefers to see the game as an encounter with

unforeseen universes.  The fort-da refrain does not involve
frustration, nor an encounter with a signifying order, but is
a desiring machine, ‘working towards the assemblage of
the verbal self’ (74), together with other assemblages.  It is
really about encountering and mastering objects
verbally.  We can see this in the way it gets transferred to
other behaviours, including games where the child
experiments with its own image in a mirror.  The machine
is heterogeneous and open, although it can of course be
applied to Freudian and Lacanian examples.  Freud’s death
drive is better understood as ‘the desire for destruction
that inhabits all desiring machines [as a way of managing
chaos and complexity]…  fort is chaosmic submersion, da
the mastery of the differentiated complexion’ (75).  The
conservative and harmful associations of the repetition
reflects ‘a [chronic] loss of consistency of the assemblage’,
appearing as fatality or a sense of bad luck in
neurotics.  Chaos lurks everywhere, and produces
bereavement, jealousy and ‘cosmic vertigo’, while the
attempts to manage it can become ‘refrains of fixation,
reification, tenacious fidelity to pain or unhappiness’ (75).
Chaosmic immanence [in neurotics?] is managed by
‘deathly negativity’.  This is exacerbated by a capitalist
reduction of language to linear paths and binaries which
squash polysemy into simple referents.  Schizoanalysis
aims to restore heterogeneity and oppose disenchantment
as in Weber [sic] (76).

Chapter four Schizo Chaosmosis

So, we can challenge conventional notions of normality by

looking at the operations of délire, combine technical logic
and Freud, and move towards chaos to rescue
conventional subjectivity, to analyse subjectivity’s ‘virtual
lines of singularity, emergence and renewal’ (77).  But
where will this lead—to ‘eternal Dionysian return’, or to a
renewed animism?  Madness always haunts ordinary
apprehensions, but we need to pursue the path into full
blown chaotic vertigo in order to understand subject –
object relations, to grasp the implications of psychosis.

Psychosis, and other psychic states features a subjectivity

which is penetrated by ‘ a real “anterior” to discursivity’
(77).  This can be seen as the source of pathology, or as
something always present.  Guattari sees it as an ‘open
virtual reference’, lying behind the production of singular
events.

Structuralists reified the complexity of the process

whereby semiotics arises from ‘a multiplicity of imagined
Territories’, and reduced the variety of semiotic
enunciations—in dreams, delirium, or aesthetics.  It also
underestimated the autopoiesis of these enunciations,
which moves them beyond any sort of articulation or
determination, once thresholds have been crossed:
autopoiesis that makes it such activities ‘nuclei of partial
subjectivation’ (78).  [They appear as something other
which can help us develop].  The forms of expression they
display cannot be reduced to one form. 

Psychoanalysis in practice [but not in Freudian theory

alone] shows the variety of ‘multiple, real or virtual’, even
incorporeal and immaterial, states and how they are
agglomerated.  A variety of transferences can take
place.  Exploring these complexities sheds light on ‘normal’
forms of production of subjective worlds.  Psychotics have
the complexity of their worlds limited by factors such as
repetition which insist on preserving particular existential
states.  For the rest of us, this stasis can be glimpsed
through ‘avoidance, displacement, misrecognition,
distortion, overdetermination, ritualization’ (79). 

In psychotics, pathic identification is limited and cannot be

grasped in or modified by conventional
representation.  This leaves only ‘paranoiac
délire’.   ‘Passional’ délire [Wikipedia tells us the people
Guattari mentions,like Sérieux and Capgras, investigated a
particularly interesting form of psychosis – délire
d’interpretation, which is translated as  ‘chronic
interpretive psychosis’. Deleuze is a sufferer? The De
Clérembault cited analysed ‘erotomania’, an obsessive
delusion that someone is in love with you] is different, and
can partially manage exposure to alterity, control
chaosmosis [maybe, 79].  Neurotics classically present
with avoidance, the most classic of which is phobia or
hysteria, and ends with obsessional neurosis, a kind of
everyday différance as in Derrida [nice!], ‘an indefinite
procrastination’ (80).  All display an awareness of
‘chaosmic immanence’, and all suggest that psychosis does
not always mean complete mental breakdown.

These examples show the differences in ‘reconciling chaos

and complexity’, building on Freud and the dream
work.  In each case, we have to take very diverse materials
and somehow dedifferentiate them to produce a
consistent world [compare with Deleuze on the operations
of common sense?] In this way, chaosmosis always
includes a nucleus which produces connectivity.  It is
autopoietic which provides consistency when relating
different territories and universes.  The oscillation
between consistency and chaos is located ‘before space
and time, before the processes of spatialization and
temporalization’ (80).  Thus chaos is included at the very
moment of the development of empirical [subjective
only?] complexity, providing a residual ‘modality of chaotic
discomfort’ in the middle of functionality (81).

This cannot be explained in terms of the Freudian eternal

antagonism between life and death.  Originary
intentionality takes place in chaos.  Chaos is not just a lack
of difference, but is inhabited by ‘the virtual entities and
modalities of alterity which have nothing universal about
them’ (81). In psychosis, it is not Being in general that
breaks through into subjectivity but ‘a signed and dated
event’.  However, psychotics can grasp something of the
texture of being, for example when they [apparently]
oscillate ‘between a proliferating complexity of sense and
total vacuity’.

The process of ‘ontological petrification’ [the stability

described above] affects all subjectivation, but as freezing
the frame.  This makes the process of subjectivation more
like a degree of intensification rather than some neutral
starting point, and explains how it releases  ‘processual
creativity’ (82).  Even psychotics can experience ‘the
richness of ontological experimentation’ involved.  The
‘paradigm’ case is the delirious narrative.  We find the
stabilisation of chaos in philosophy, including Pascal's
wager [maybe] and Descartes’ management of radical
doubt: there is even a sense that the thinking subject
escapes from chaos.

The threat to sense arises from the recognition of ‘a

signifying links of discursivity’ which are involved in the
creation of an ontological autopoietic reality, as in an
‘event centred rupture’.  After such a rupture, delire is free
to develop, and the old oppositions and semantics are left
behind.  The transversal actions of abstract machines
become apparent [with a hint that this process of
philosophising is forced, by ‘an intolerable nucleus of
ontological creationism’ (83).  There is also a suggestion
that conventional notions of complexity have to be
dismantled first, complexity released more fully in every
state, in a process of ‘schizo homogenesis’ (83)].  This can
provide the strange capacity of schizophrenics to be able
to ‘read the Unconscious like an open book’ [?]. 

Conventional categories should not be used to simplify

psychotic and neurotic states.  They reflect different forms
of alterity, different components of enunciation which
break with conventional notions of identity.  Psychosis can
be seen as an attempt to reintegrate these different
nuclei, at least to make an understandable world—an
‘extreme pathic – pathological homogenesis’ (83),
compared to the ‘normal’ processes.  Non psychotics are
aware that they have to stop themselves before they get
that far.  Schizo analysis reduces the particular ‘colours’ of
these operations, but also permits alterification, away
from the conventions of having to reproduce the barriers
of the self.  The role of the other emerges fully as in
Levinas [apparently] as a part of creativity.  We must avoid
making schizos heroes of the postmodern, we must not
underestimate the non subjective elements.

There is a connection with social stratification, which can

be seen as avoiding ‘disquieting strangeness’ stemming
from chaosmosis (84).  This strangeness is dangerous and
can lead to drugs, madness, or ‘the vertigo of the body
without organs’.  Dominant groups recognise the dangers,
but do not see them as rooted in chaosmosis.  The media
in particular operate instead with ‘an imaginary of
eternity’ [where everything is just natural?], with no past
or present, somehow capable of generating complexity,
but representing ‘a profoundly infantile adult world’
(84).  Only when chaosmosis produces despair or
depression instead of creativity, should we be considering
intervention via ‘social welfare and institutional
pragmatics' [is this still the preferred option of the
dominant classes, or Guattari’s
recommendations?].  Psychotics are not treated as heroes,
nor institutionalized these days,  but become ‘bruised
wrecks…  eaten away by chemotherapy’ (85).  Guattari’s
understandings ‘cannot be put on the same level as those
well socialised systems of defence such as games, sports,
the mania supported by the media, racist phobias’, but
they are essential to modern psychotherapy.

So we have to identify the positive and creative aspects of

chaosmosis amidst all the ‘banalities, prejudices,
stereotypes’.  We can discover and use them through ‘the
lapsus, symptoms, aporias, the acting out of somatic
scenes, familial theatricalism or institutional structures’
(85).  Chaosmosis is not confined to the individual
psychotic, but found in group life, machinism, the
‘incorporeal Universes of art or religion’.  In each case,
what is required is a new form of narrative, beyond
conveying information or communicating,  more like ‘an
existential crystallization of ontological heterogenesis’
(85).  We need to build on the insights produced by
ruptures of sense and emerging alterity.  It is true,
however that therapists operate with  ‘an essentially
ethical duplicity’ (86)—they tried to remodel existential
territories and develop new semiotic components, but
they can only claim pathic access to chaosmosis by
recreating and reinventing themselves as ‘bodies without
organs receptive to non discursive intensities’ (86).  In
other words, they must first submerge themselves in
‘homogenetic immanence’.

There is a proliferation of categories, cartographies and

textures, languages, modelizations—‘délire, the novel, the
television serial’, none of them with any strong epistemological
claims.  This shows us a  variety of roles, points of views and
behaviours, some of which will be liberating.  This issue now is a
pragmatic one—how to develop complexity and creativity.  It
can no longer depend on the earlier modelisations such as
those of psychotherapy.

Chapter five Machinic orality and virtual ecology

Orality is an interesting operation at the intersection

between the outside and inside worlds: it involves both
eating and speaking, so it both simplifies and
complexifies.  Freud showed us that simple objects ‘like
milk and shit’ can index complex universes.  Lacan showed
how speech is not just simple communication but
something ‘which engenders being – there’ (88).  Speech
has always been disciplined by various official semiologies,
including instructional ones, but ordinary speech always
displays a minimum of additional, non verbal semiotic
components—‘intonation, rhythm, facial traits and
postures’ which defy despotic control.  However, social life
is increasingly controlled, for example in the
predominance of consumerism which requires only simple
exchanges of information.

Can orality remain as a basis for a polyvocality, the

emergence of complex relations of subjectivity?  The
scriptural tends to overcode the oral, although it has not
entirely replaced it.  Better instead to start with the ‘blocks
of sensations formed by aesthetic practices’ before they
are spoken, written or painted (89), which therefore
remain as signifying, although mostly the common and the
trivial.  Deterritorialising from these commonplaces will
lead away from standard discourses and notions of the self
and lead to more mutant and open forms of subjectivity.

Performance art can deliver some clues about how to

proceed from the every day to the strange: it
demonstrates how being and forms develop, before they
can be described conventionally.  Yet this form is
premature in its ‘forward flight into machinations and
deterritorialized machinic paths’ (90): it is too artificial and
constructed.  Instead, we have to see the potential for
every form of expression to suggest a deconstruction of
structure and code, and an eventual recomposition.  This
involves us in a search for enunciative nuclei beyond
artistic forms.

Aesthetic machines do offer the best models to extract

meaning from empty signals.  Underground art does this
sometimes, but there is a whole subjective creativity in the
population at large [sounds like Willis at his most
populist].  This is what provides for liberation, more so
than science or Freudianism.  The mutations which could
emerge could not be managed by contemporary
capitalism, or at least not ‘in a way that is compatible with
the interests of humanity’ (91) [the old claims for artistic
politics going back at least as far as surrealism].  Capitalism
already is torn between ruin and renewal, and it is
important to rethink values.  ‘An ecology of the virtual is
thus just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world
(91).  The arts have a crucial role both to preserve
endangered species and develop new and unprecedented
forms of subjectivity, spilling over into politics and creating
new systems of values, including ‘a new taste for life, a
new gentleness between the sexes, generations, ethnic
groups, races…’ (92).

These new virtual machines promising to produce ‘mutant

percepts and affects’ are not easily available, especially in
‘the usual marketplace for subjectivity and maybe even
less at that for art’.  They cannot easily be described
conventionally.  They are best understood as becomings or
‘nuclei of differentiation’, found in each domain and also
between them [the example is a musical one—notions of
childhood expressed in Schumann connect with childhood
memories ‘so as to embody a perpetual present which
installs itself like a branching, or play of bifurcation
between becoming woman, becoming plant, becoming
cosmos, becoming melodic’—pseud!].  Such assemblages
are not found in extensive locations, but can be grasped
only through a heightened ‘awareness of ontological,
transitivist, transversalist and pathic consistencies’ [only
available to the right sort of chap, I suspect]. 

We experience these ‘through affective contamination’

(93), despite ourselves.  [In other words the elite habitus
works to identify what is proper art?].  The relevant
categories are given all at once, somehow before they
emerge in conventional representation: ‘a block of percept
and affect, by way of aesthetic composition, agglomerates
in the same transversal flash the subject and object, the
self and other, the material and the incorporeal…  Affect is
not a question of representation and discursivity, but of
existence.  I find myself transported [into various
universes]…  I have crossed the threshold of
consistency…  I am swept away by a becoming other,
carried beyond my familiar existential Territories’ (93).

This is not just some gestalt operating to grasp good form

[no--the habitus is a better mechanism to explain it] .  It’s
something more dynamic.  It is machinic not mechanical
[with another aside about Maturana and Varela and how
we need to extend their notion of autopoiesis to include
social machines language machines and aesthetic
creation].  Jazz can be autopoietic, constantly renewing
itself. [so the apparent autopoeisis of the practice
somehow means it cannot be just subjectively generated
as 'good' - -but this apparent autonomy of art has always
been one of the categories of elite taste - -and it only
appears because the elite disdain any vulgar sociological
analysis?]

We have described ‘an incorporeal ecosystem’ (94), which

operates with alterity, but also engenders it, which runs a
risk of routinization, sometimes arising by accidental
encounters, or by a decline in ‘enunciative consistency’.  It
has to reproduce itself through singularities.  The whole
thing operates through ‘ontological pragmatics’, emerging
from chaos as ‘the power of eternal return to the nascent
state’ (94).  [I assume this is comparable to Deleuze’s idea
of the virtual individuating itself, then explicating and
implicating further stages until we get to the empirical
haecceity—Guattari seems to develop the machinic
metaphor rather more].

This corresponds to the notion of the partial object in

Freudian theory, in various formulations, and its role
positioned between subjectivity and alterity, both at an
early stage.  But Freudians saw this in causal or ‘pulsional’
terms, instead of seeing it as multivalent, opening up
existential territories and machinic creativity.  Lacan
deterritorialized a bit, moving away from the precise
objects like the breast or penis, to consider the voice and
the gaze, but he never got as far as postulating desiring
machines [which apparently he had initially discussed]
operating in virtuality [the discussion goes on to consider a
desiring machine as an ‘object – subject of desire, like
strange attractors in chaos theory…  an anchorage point
within a phase space’ (95), remembering that strange
attractors are not points but fractal lines, leading to the
notion of a fractal ontology, whereby ‘the being
itself…  transforms,  buds and transfigures itself’].  In the
case of infants, the relevant existential territories are ‘the
body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space,
refrains of the mother tongue, familiar faces, family lore,
ethnicity’, with none prioritised.  So there is no causal
structure in the psyche like sublimation, but an
interweaving  relationship between sensation and ‘the
material of the sublime’: there are no fixed icons for the
child to identify with, but rather ‘a becoming other,
ramified in becoming animal, becoming plant, becoming
machine, and, on occasion becoming human’.

So how do actual compositions get embodied, say in music

or art?  ‘In a compulsional manner’ [as outlined above]. An
act can make an incorporeal universe appear, and as a
result other universes, constellations of
universes.  Everything begins with ‘singular ontological
orality’, where something is absorbed and made
meaningful, and then deterritorialized.  When we absorb a
work of art, we crystallise it, recognise it as ‘an
alterification of beings – there’ (96).  [The subject?—
Guattari uses the first person] makes being exist
differently and with new intensities, not splitting things
into binaries again, but heading towards a multitude of
alterities, heterogeneity of components.

The tendencies are exaggerated with new technology,

‘new electronic representations’, the proliferation of
points of view.  ‘Informatic subjectivity distances us at high
speed from the old scriptural linearity.  The time has come
for hypertexts in every genre’ (96-7).  These machinic
mutations which ‘deterritorialise subjectivity’, should be
seen as positive.  They’re not the same as ‘the mass media
stupefaction which 4/5 humanity currently experience’
(97).  Their creative potential arises as a ‘perverse counter
effect’, which might permit interactivity, even a return to
machinic orality [Guattari thinks that everything will be
speech operated in future].  However, it all depends on
the society changing and permitting escape from ‘the
shackles of empty speech’ following the spread of
capitalism.

Aesthetic machinery, and making yourself machinic can be

progressive—‘look at how important Rap culture is today
for millions of young people’ (97).  It can allow for
‘objective resingularisation...  Other ways of perceiving the
world’ [usual oscillation between advocating total
revolutions based on desire and a clear admission that
nothing actually will change. Come back Hindess and Hirst,
and calculational politics!]
Chapter six The new aesthetic paradigm

[This begins with a reworking of the stuff in Anti

Oedipus on how culture is first of all despotically coded,
then deterritorialized and decoded, only to be
reterritorialized in capitalism and made fully abstract and
dominant.  Then we get on to some classic claims made
for artistic politics as revolutionary. There is an intention
to ground creativity in ontology, to make it not just
speculative. That seems to argue that the current relations
between semiotisation and actual events is a reduction of
complexity on both sides -- there are more semiotic
possibilities especially if we allow for transversal
connections between incorporeal universes; there are
more potentials and elements in the actual that appear at
first sight to empiricism. Then behind the complexities on
both sides, there is a chaotic process that constantly
refreshes and renews complexity. Focussing on named
events as creative nuclei can lead to radical dereification.
OK -- but the ontology of chaos just looks like the usual
defensive circularity to make sure nothing contradicts
earlier claims --  and science fiction. I don't think it would
look very different if you said the actual materialises in a
Star Trek transporter, and that we don't know how it all
works, but it must transport matter, otherwise it would be
impossible to travel such distances.]

Art has only become autonomous fairly recently: it was

territorialized, associated with  ritual and group
life.  Subjectivity was different then as well, much more
licensed and integrated, so even alterity was provided by
social norms.  Individuals had whole ‘transversal collective
identities’ rather than single identities, with the psyche
distributed socially rather than in the form of interior
faculties.  Individuals even had multiple names.  It is
almost impossible to understand societies like that from
the modern perspective—Renaissance princes did not buy
works of arts, but associated themselves with prestigious
painters, rock painting was probably technical and social
rather than aesthetic as such.  Exhibitions which show the
links between primitive arts and, say, cubism ignore the
important and different social contexts in favour of a
modern exoticism. Gradually, subjectivity became more
autonomous, and the aesthetic mode developed
separately.

Science philosophy and art rely on specific codes and

knowhow to manipulate specific materials.  The relations
between the actual and virtual in each case are also
different.  Philosophy has its own conventions, involves
textual reference and tends to generalise from finite
argument to make key concepts apparently autoconsistent
[I am vulgarising quite a bit]; science brackets out
subjective aspects and all references to the virtual; art
works the other way around and takes specific materials
to produce decentred percepts and affects, and thus to
head towards the intensive and the virtual.  These
activities were combined in different ways in different
epochs—in the Middle Ages, theology, philosophy and
music were in a constellation.  Development in one
practice can ‘transversally contaminate many other
domains’ (101)—the effects on arts of the printing press,
mathematical colonisation of the physical sciences.

Aesthetics, feeling, might be becoming dominant within

current assemblages of enunciation.  In earlier
territorialized assemblages [of aesthetics?] , there was
only a loose coupling with the social and political
formations.  We still find residues of earlier assemblages
with their ‘polysemic, animistic, trans-individual
subjectivity’ found in the worlds of ‘infancy, madness,
amorous passion and artistic creation’ (101).  It is the
process of creativity that we are interested in, rather than
institutional forms.  This operates ‘perpetually in advance
of itself’, before actualisation and extensivity (102).[NB I
use the term 'actualisation' to replace a number of long-
winded alternatives such as 'the crystallisation of finitude'
etc]

Thus extensive space is already ‘globally aesthetised’:

actualised productions are therefore able to constitute
other qualities, including alterity, and ‘the soul, a
becoming ancestral, animal, vegetal, cosmic’ (102).  The
result is a powerful sense of attachment to territory and
clan.  What is produced are ‘objectitities-subjectitities’,
and they can interact among themselves, and carnate
themselves as a nucleus, or a collective entity [actually
close to a haecceitiy in the examples].  There is a division
between interior and exterior, but not a radical separation
[since exterior factors are connected at the virtual level].
Territorialization is really collective subjectivity, acting as
does hegemony [sic—but this is more like total
colonisation, 102], working through ritual refrains.

So extensive space and time must be produced by

subjectivity, as in rituals, chants and dances.  Every
attempt to materialise forms involves immaterial entities;
every drive towards deterritorialization involves ‘the
movement of folding on to territorialized limits’
(103).  [With some strange aside about jouissance
developing in the emergence of collectivity—still in archaic
societies I assume. As in Durkheim on ecstasy? ].

Deterritorialized assemblages can develop ‘a transcendent

autonomous pole of reference’ (103), such as logical
Truth, the moral Good.  This often accompanies a
particular subdivision of subjectivity into faculties such as
Reason, Understanding.  This segmentation leads to
reterritorialization but at an incorporeal level.  Activities of
valuing become bipolarised and hierarchised: dualisms can
cancel each other out and this tends to lead to a recourse
to some transcendental agent such as God or Absolute
Spirit, or even The Signifier.  This replaces the awareness
of the interdependence of the old values and the need to
constantly renew them and refresh them.  Given an
omnipotent transcendent, subjectivity ‘remains in
perpetual lack, guilty a priori…  Or in a state of “unlimited
procrastination”’ (104).  Values no longer emerge, but are
decreed, reified, universal, arborescent, not negotiated.

This can be seen as capitalistic, stripping values from their

context and subordinating them to the one system of
value, and thus to binary and linear relations.  Subjectivity
itself is standardised, and language becomes instrumental,
controlled by ‘scriptural machines and their mass media
avatars’ (104).  Modern communication is mere digital
information.  The notion of an existential territory is lost,
and the old existential divisions of the self become ‘so
many pieces compatible with the mechanics of social
domination’ (104-5) [roles?] .  The Signifier overcodes all
the other notions of value.  Resistance is possible
nevertheless in aesthetics, although it faces constant
threats of colonisation. Capitalistic deterritorialization is
also not confined to particular historical periods.

There may be a new assemblage emerging currently,

appearing only in ‘traces and symptoms’ (105).  Aesthetics
and transversality are the key, and represent a new
challenge instead of a demand to return to precapitalist
forms [like communities].  The aim is to avoid such
reterritorializations, but to head towards a more general
type of reenchantment, not a return to magic.  Existential
territories are not to be rehomogenised, and
heterogeneity is to be celebrated.  There is to be no
retreat to myth, but an incessant challenge of established
boundaries.  Even the sciences no longer see themselves
as working towards some ultimate truth. Art is not the
only way to do this, but it does have considerable
potential to invent extreme challenges.

Challenges will need to pass a threshold to become ‘auto

affirming as existential nuclei, autopoietic machines’
(106).  Aesthetics now is in a position to challenge
ideological structures.  Psychoanalysis has everything to
gain by recasting itself as aesthetic and processual, to
regain its creativity and wildness.  It should be helping to
produce a new subjectivity, free of the older models which
were aimed at adaptation to society.  All of these
examples show a new ‘ontological heterogeneification…  a
new abstract machinic transversality [which articulates all
the interfaces] in the same hypertext or plane of
consistency: a multiplication and particularization of nuclei
of autopoietic consistency (existential Territories)’
(107).  Aesthetics will join with scientific and ethical
paradigms.  It is not hostile to technoscience and its
potential creative machines, although we have to change
our mechanist notion of machines first, to include all the
dimensions, including social and aesthetic ones.  Aesthetic
machines seem to be best at sketching out these different
dimensions, especially the production of ‘proto-alterity’,
and its ‘incorporeal genetic affiliations’ (107). [NB
hypertext seems to refer to some world of possible texts,
not the old hypertext as we know it? French reference,
unfortunately -- but I have found some translations. It is
Pierre Levy who sees hypertext as some superlanguage, a
universe of language in Guattari's terms of which the
actual text is one realization]

There are ethical and political implications too in

celebrating creativity, or responsibility for what is created
and its implications for the status quo.  This no longer
depends on some transcendent entity—ethical values
emerge from enunciation itself [apparently, we see this
with scientific enunciation, which has collective,
institutional, machinic ‘heads’].  Such differentiation leads
to individuation of subjects and ‘fragmentation of
interfaces’, posing problems for universes of
values.  These can no longer be general or territorialized,
but can only appear ‘in singular and dynamic
constellations which envelop and make constant use of
these two modes of subjective and machinic production’
(108), remembering that machines are to be understood
in non mechanist ways.  [Not at all clear here, but
something to do with discussing the value, both ethical
and political, of creations as they emerge, even those that
seem to come from technology, 108].

So we have a history of collective territories,  transcendent

universals, and now, processual Immanence, with three
types of subjectivation.  The new conception in particular
should break the distinction between mind and matter,
humans and machines.  We can suggest that there are
virtual entities inhabiting both domains, not so much
classic Being, but rather ‘an identical processual
persistence’ (109) [so a machinic departure from
Deleuze?].  These virtual entities ‘appear like a machinic
hypertext’, not just a support for actual forms, but a part
of the very process of creation.  There are no primary
substances, no a prioris of existence: ‘Being is first auto–
consistency, auto–affirmation, existence for–itself
deploying particular relations of alterity’ (109).  The
notions of for-itself and for-others is not confined to
human beings, but appear everywhere that machinic
interfaces produce disparities.  Being can no longer be a
transcendent like the Signifier, but is seen as emerging
from generative praxis, heterogeneity and complexity.

There is a normal phenomenological notion of being as

‘inert facticity’, but this is a function of limit experiences
such as depression.  Awareness of machinic being is
spreading instead.  Machinic entities operate both in the
actualised world and the incorporeal universes [what—by
definition?], linking a body of semiotic propositions with
various non discursive states, forming enunciative
nuclei.  This linkage is still problematic.  [The example from
Pascal invokes points which move everywhere at infinite
speeds, 110].  Infinite speed must be involved if we are to
link limited referents and incorporeal fields of the
possible.  But we also need something positively creative,
not just ontologically homogeneous, more ‘active and
activating folds’, which are doubly articulated.

‘An initial chaosmic folding’ relates chaos to higher orders

of complexity, producing bodies which are heterogeneous
and complex, yet homogenised within the same
process.  Such differentiation involves ‘a continuous
coming and going at an infinite speed’ (110).  The chaotic
zone is always present.  Folding involves establishing an
interface between existential territories and universes of
reference, between ‘a finite world of reduced speed’, and
the intensive infinite universes where heterogeneity
dominates.  All machines operate at the junction of the
two, between complexity and chaos. [Just restating the
problem really-- the virtual is linked to the actual because
the virtual is folded --ie linked to the actual in a particular
way]

There is no fundamental dualism between these two

zones, but an ontological consistency in two types.  Each
depends on the other and constitutes the
other.  However, we have still not pinned down
actualisation, ‘”freeze framings” of complexity’ (111), and
how the finite world persists without being constantly
dissolved back into chaos.  There is a fleeting complexity
[the prat keeps calling it 'complexion']which emerges from
chaos and returns to it, but this itself permits more
permanent reduced speeds [philosophical science fiction
again here], and helps develop finite states.  The first stage
clearly inhabits chaos, but makes possible, manifests, the
finite components and enunciative
assemblages.  Chaosmosis does not simply oscillate
between the two states but continues to affect states of
things and the nuclei of deterritorialization.  There is a
‘relative chaotisation’ confronting states of
complexity.  This explains the infinitely rich virtual and
immanent forces behind normal finitude, existing before
creativity is actually applied to works.  These forces appear
as creative intensities.  There is a constant process of the
conversion of virtual into possible, reversible into
irreversible, ‘deferred into difference’ (113).  Virtual
universes and possible worlds are examples of the same
multiplicities [then a bit of poetry, unreferenced, about
throwing dice, 113].

The irrruption into finitude, the autopoietic fold, can only

be consistent if there is some ‘memory of being’, a
position on ‘axes of ordination and reference’ (113).  This
produces two processes—‘appropriation (or existential
grasping) and trans–monadic inscription’.  The grasping
itself assumes  transmonadic exteriors and others, not in a
relation of precedence [did he write this in a legal state of
mind?].  Grasping holds together the autonomous
complex and the ‘chaosmic umbilicus’, and their
combination. [Seems to be arguing that an awareness of
the link between the actual and the virtual cqanbe
grasped dimly by normal humans in the paradoxes and
creative potentials of existence? Especially if confirmed by
or demonstrated in others?]

The example is the Kleinian partial object again—those

objects like breasts and penises which crystallise identities
but also inextricably link with otherness [which is a
synonym, apparently, of the pompous
'transmonadicity'].  [Apparently, we are to see this double
development of self and other as a general example of
how an encounter with transmonadic lines is implicated in
any existential grasping, and how this encounter reduces
finite speeds, 114] Before this encounter, things remain
‘aleatory and evanescent’.  Nevertheless, the autopoietic
nucleus still lies at the heart of the complex event, but
‘Everything really begins when transmonadism enters the
scene to inscribe and transform’ (114) [just an eccentric
rendering of Deleuze on the other-relation?]

Monads appear to be able to dissolve diversity to achieve

a distinctive identity, but other monads are always
involved, even if they are other things being dissolved—in
a ‘trail of nihilation’.  How does this turn into actualisation
and deterritorialization?  [Difficult stuff again, but I think
the argument is that the general, theoretical even
business of dissolving and reaffirming selves allows the
crystallization of incorporeal complexity].  It [interaction
with others] introduces difference, and thereby limits the
appearance of the actual [maybe, 115].  ‘There is
something left over, a  remainder, the selective erection of
semblances and dissemblance’ [the old grain of sand in
the oyster argument found in Deleuze], permitting the
emergence of finite compositions, enunciative
assemblages.  Linearity, the basis of ordination, can
appear as ‘an existential stickiness’.

So nihilation and intensive deterritorialization provides

‘corporeal consistency’, as a type of ‘linear and rhizomatic
distancing’, producing a complexity which slows down
discursively, and remains indivisible. This produces ‘an
irreversible facticity enveloped by a proto-temporality that
can be described as instantaneous and eternal’, and this is
how we normally grasp the world.  It is transmonadism
that develops spatial coordinates and other extensities
‘within the primitive chaotic soup’, and a series of
bifurcations and mutations [that Guattari wants to call
‘ontological “sexuality”’, 115]

Autopoietic creativity appears from this first chaosmic

fold: its inherent passivity remains as the limit or framing,
or refrain to control complexity.  Ontological
heterogeneity turns into alterity.  This initiates the whole
actual network, as ‘a necessary and sufficient accident in
the extraction of a fold of contingency, or a “choice” of
finitude’ (116).

Crystals of finitude have precipitated, ‘attractors of the

possible’ have appeared.  Together they produce limits of
territorialisation [which seem to explain some of the
boundaries of natural science, ‘limits’ that scientific
assemblages will semiotise into functions, constants and
laws’ (116)].  But transmonadism persists as an active
force, pursuing a line of flight which works like attractors
do, giving chaos a consistency [a permanent relation
between actualisation and ‘processual recharge’], the
basis of a permanent creativity and novelty.

So the new aesthetic paradigm is based on ontology and

process.  It shows how enunciative assemblages straddle a
number of divides, including that between the active and
passive, and thus are creative, not at all like the ‘catatonic
or abstract [bases of] capitalistic monotheisms’
(116).  There is the basis for a permanent resistance to
conservative reterritorialization, and the possibility of a
constant renewal of ‘aesthetic boundaries’, and the
apparatuses in science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as
well.  Steering a path towards production of creativity, and
the conservative hold of convention requires ‘the
permanent promotion of different enunciative
assemblages, different semiotic resources, an alterity
grasped at the point of its emergence—non xenophobic,
non racist, non phallocratic’ (117).  We must develop a
new ‘politics and ethics of singularity’, breaking with
consensus and with the passivity of dominant subjectivity,
and operations which dogmatise the link complexity and
chaos [the example is being able to distinguish between
democratic chaos which implies resingularization and
social creativity, and neoliberal conceptions enshrining the
market economy—or managerial versions of chaos theory,
I reckon].

He thinks that this has made the notion of transversality

and inter monadic relations more than speculative [!], and
provided a basis for questioning disciplinary boundaries,
and the closure of universes of value [so this provides a
university politics?].  One project would be to redefine the
body to permit therapeutic assemblages.  In this
conception, the body consists of a ‘partial autopoietic
components, with multiple and changing configurations,
working collectively as well as individually’ (118).  This will
extend the more conventional notion of the self, and
investigate some of the influences or refrains at work.  The
individual would become seen as a series of existential
territorialities, linked by chaosmosis, a series of nomads,
structured across ‘fractal ascents and descents’, requiring
a whole range of analytical approaches, including delirious
or aesthetic ones.  Such an approach would show how
even the most autistic still remains in contact with
different social constellations, a machinic Unconscious,
and ultimately with ‘cosmic aporias’ (118).

Chapter seven The ecosophic object

[Bullshit flying thick and fast at this point. And the ususal
procrastination about politics]

The world threatens our mental coordinates, with

geopolitical change, the media, the destruction of the
biosphere and economic crisis.  All this is ‘masked by the
sensationalist (in fact banalising  and infantilising) imagery
that the media concoct’ (119).  All these crises, including
the ecological one ultimately arise from an out of control
productivism, and require a change of mentalities and
social practices.
It might be worthwhile to reconstitute old collective forms
of communication and action [not what he said above],
perhaps using the new communication technologies.  But
what’s required is a new creativity, from pockets of
awareness in ‘new collective assemblages of enunciation’
(120).  This would build on links between different
modalities of being rather than new cognitive spheres as
such.  This must take the form of a new political
praxis.  [But will it?  How do we move from creativity to
praxis?].

Science and technology tended to polarise social groups

into progressive and conservative, but now  liberalism and
social democracy seems general.  Will the old divisions
into left and right disappear?  Will the social itself
disappear as in postmodernism?  Guattari hopes for a new
progressive polarisation, more complex and federalist, and
tolerant.  The old parties are too much incorporated into
the state and fail to involve the citizens.  As a result,
political contests are largely ‘mass media manoeuvres’
(121).

There was a kind of ‘collective chaosmosis’ in the eastern

bloc to overthrow totalitarian systems, but liberal regimes
are also in crisis—there is economic growth at the cost of
ecological devastation, permanent polarisation with the
third world, and no effective solutions to the problems
that still prevail in the eastern bloc such as ‘the bloody
interethnic ordeals’ (122).  [And he wrote this before the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan].  There is still some view that
adopting a market system will dissolve problems ‘as if by
magic’ (123), but Africa and South America are still faced
with hyperinflation or austere control by the IMF [still the
case today in 2012].  Sector markets are actually
competing among themselves, through force and power
rather than through some unified regulatory market.

We need a new ‘ecological power formation’ [Guattari

seems to think one is appearing].  New artistic
assemblages must make sure they are not delivered to the
financial market.  ‘The education market cannot remain
absolutely dependent on the State market’ (124)
[dangerous ground here—he seems to be supporting
privatisation, although I’m sure he means something more
like net based open access stuff, maybe even MOOCs?].

We can propose a complex ‘ecosophic object’ with:

‘material energetic and semiotic Fluxes; concrete an
abstract machinic Phylums; virtual Universes of value;
finite existential Territories’ (124).  The concept of fluxes
preserves the notion of interaction and feedback, but also
transversalism between ontological strata, such as the
social, mechanical, musical, mathematical and other
‘Becomings of desire’ (125) [so not just a matter of access
to these different strata?].  These must be analysed as
above, with links to chaos, working on immanence,
building schizoanalytic cartographies to overcome
dogmatism.

There are no ‘preestablished schemas’ (125): cartographic

representation itself brings about ‘existential production’,
territorialisation, embodiment—and these become
autonomous.  They escape conventional discourse.  They
are effected by the pursuit of various open-ended
narratives, including theoretical ones.

This is the real impact of Marx and Freud, not to found a

new science, but to produce the [legendary by now] nuclei
of subjectivation, however partial.  Guattari’s own attempt
at metamodelling should be seen in the same light—it
obviously cannot be immediately represented
objectively.  It did lead to ontological issues, discovering
textures transversal to fluxes and machines, an ‘entity
animated by infinite velocity’ preceding space and time,
which has to be slowed down for actualisation to occur
(126).  Existential grasping and transmonadism were seen
to be prerequisites for conventional representation and
the development of the usual object–subject relation.  In
this way, liberty and ethical vertigo has an ontological
grounding, ‘at the heart of eco-systemic necessities’.

Ontological dimensions are fitted together in complex

circular ways, not divided into base and superstructure,
for example.  It’s not just a matter of vocabulary, because
certain concepts are open fields of the possible—‘Who
knows what will be taken up by others, for other uses?’
(126) [the old appeal not to criticise but to go ahead and
use the concepts].

We should go beyond ‘the conceptual productions to

which the University has accustomed us’ (127).  [A hint of
the academic politics attached to the project?].  Our
project is more modest, in not claiming some universal
applicability or authority, and more ‘audacious’ in openly
taking sides against capitalist colonisation and engaging in
innovative practices, ‘opening up ethico-political options’
at the micro as well as a social level.

Cartographic activity can appear in family therapy

sessions, institutional analysis, professional networking,
neighbourhood collectives.  Verbal expressions seems to
be the most obvious common factor, but speech is not the
only form [as we saw, all the stuff about postures, and a-
signifying productions, including this time relating to
monetary exchange].  Speech should be seen rather as ‘a
support for existential refrains’ (128).  The point is to
produce whole assemblages of enunciation, crossing fields
such as those relating to analysis and those relating to
political activity, the public and private.  The aim is to
break with common sense.  Conventional political
movements often fail to do this—like the French ecological
movement which focuses exclusively on environmental
politics, avoiding, for example, the problems of the
homeless, and failing to see how dogmatism can arise
from the activities of small groups.  The movement wants
to avoid conventional left – right politics, but it should be
interested instead in developing progressivism differently
and transversally.  Otherwise, recuperation awaits.  ‘To my
mind, the ecological movement should concern itself, as a
matter of priority, with its own social and mental ecology’
(129).

The old public intellectuals in France are less important

compared with a new immanent collective intellectuality,
embracing teachers, social workers and technicians as
well.  Promoting individual intellectuals can be
harmful.  Creativity has become democratic, specific,
generating singularity [Guattari is urging us to ignore, or
democratise, cultural capital!].  Intellectuals and artists
should confine themselves to producing ‘toolkits
composed of concepts, percepts, and affects, which
diverse publics will use at their convenience’ [MOOC ish
again—hopelessly optimistic and assuming a universal
interest in analysis].  We don’t want intellectual setting
themselves up as leaders of movements.

Morality has long been territorialized, and values can be

universal only in a limited sense of being supported by a
territory.  This makes values particularly liable to
recuperation, as in the rise of the French right—the
success [then] of Le Pen shows the weakness of the left in
promoting heterogeneous values and subjectivity.

Artistic cartographies have also become specialised and

even corporate, although they remain vital in the
production of subjectivities.  Art has to compromise with
social convention, but this makes it vulnerable—artists
usually only work on segments of the real, to make them
partial enunciators, addressing a subset of the world.  A
common and limited mode of responding to arts involves
‘an identificatory seriality which infantilises and
annihilates [its enunciative potential]’ (131) [in other
words we collect it?].  But it should be a matter of
unframing, challenging sense through proliferation or
impoverishment which leads to new notions of the
subject.  It can still operate if it has a suitable existential
support, which both reterritorialises [through refrains] and
resingularises to generate fields of the possible far from
everyday life.

The existential function of aesthetics is to split with

conventional signification and denotation, and this will
obviously challenge conventional aesthetic categories,
which no longer really matter [because they are
formal].  The particular forms of art act as a ‘surplus value
of subjectivity’ (131), which is challenging banality
continually resingularising.  The growth in consumption of
art reflects urban uniformity, although it can resist it [his
example is 'rock culture', 132]: the choice for artists is to
go with the flow or challenge aesthetic practices, ‘at the
risk of encountering incomprehension and of being
isolated by the majority of people’ [just like Thousand
Plateaus does, mate!].

It is hard to turn artistic experimentation into political

change, and the current social formation is pretty
unfavourable towards experimentation of this
kind.  However, it is in crisis, and this may lead to people
rethinking convention.  This will ‘drift towards aesthetic
paradigms’ [the example here is Prigogine and Stengers on
the necessity of narrative in physics.  Typical ‘evidence’ for
a philosopher!]

Modern capitalist societies have to innovate, and this risks

a new aesthetic awareness, a split with common sense,
and the possibility of autonomous practices.  As an
example, schools are now being questioned: ‘How do you
make a class operate like a work of art?  What are the
possible paths to its singularisation, the source of a
“purchase on existence” for the children who compose it?’
The reference is to a French work on pedagogy by Rene
Lafitte].

The University still tends to hold to scientific objectivity at

the expense of subjectivity.  This came to a peak with
structuralism which excluded the subject.  We now need
to think of machinic productions as new materials of
subjectivity.  In the Middle Ages, experimental work was
confined to the monasteries and convents—perhaps
artists are the equivalent today, to ask new existential
questions about fields of the possible and the
reconstruction of subjectivity.  We do not need to live
under the current regime of infantalisation and ignorance
of alterity.  We need to aim at a workable creativity, or the
production of subjectivity, 133.  The schizoanalytic
approach to value becomes political, providing an
ontological base for a new subjectivity.  Chaosmic
explorations in ecosophy, ranging across all the old  fields,
ought to replace ideologies which divided the social, the
private and the civil, and the political, ethical and
aesthetic.

The new aesthetics would not just aestheticise the existing

social, but would transform works of art too.  Guattari
oscillates between ‘mechanical confidence or creative
uncertainty’ on whether the world can be rebuilt.  The
ecological and demographic crises are not predetermined
by biology, but are economic and political, and these in
turn depend on the form of subjectivity.  The third world
should also renew subjectivation to avoid internal social
and economic polarisation.

In any event, the question of subjectivity is central.  We

need to think about producing and enriching it, to make it
‘compatible with Universes of mutant value’
(135).  Liberation involves resingularisation, and that
should be pursued in a new interdisciplinary effort to ward
off barbarism and produce instead ‘riches and unforeseen
pleasures, the promises of which, for all [the pessimism]
are all too tangible’ (135).

back to Deleuze page