Towards

a Post-Media Era

Félix Guattari

Translated by Alya Sebti and Clemens Apprich,

with additional modifications by Neinsager
The junction of television, telematics and informatics is taking place before
our eyes, and will be completed within the decade to come.
The digitisation of the television image will soon reach the point
where the television screen is at the same time that of the computer and
the telematic receiver. Practices that are separated today will find their
articulation. And what are passive attitudes today may perhaps begin to
evolve. Cabling and the satellite will allow us to zap through 50 channels,
while telematics will give us access to countless image databases and
cognitive data. The element of suggestion, even hypnotism, in the present
relation to television will vanish. From that moment on, we can hope for
a transformation of mass-media power that will overcome contemporary
subjectivity, and for the beginning of a post-media era of collective-individual
reappropriation and an interactive use of machines of information,
communication, intelligence, art and culture.
Through this transformation the classical triangulation – the expressive
chain [chaînon expressif], the object of reference [l’objet référé] and the meaning
[signification] – will be reshaped. For instance, the electronic photo is no longer
the expression of a univocal referent but the production of a reality among
others. The television news was already composed of several heterogeneous
elements: the figurability of the sequence, the modelling of subjectivity
according to prevailing patterns, normalising political pressure, the concern
to keep singularising ruptures to a minimum. At present such production of
immaterial reality takes precedence in all fields, ahead of the production of
physical connections and services.
Should one be nostalgic about ‘the good old days’ when things were as
they were, regardless of their mode of representation? But did these ‘good
old days’ ever exist anywhere other than in the scientific and positivist
imaginary? Already, during the Paleolithic age – with its own myths and
rituals – expressive mediation had distanced itself from ‘reality’. In any case,
all prior formations of power and their particular ways of shaping the world
have been deterritorialised. Money, identity, social control fall under the aegis
of the smart card. Far from being a return to earth, the events in Iraq made
us lift off into an almost delirious universe of mass-media subjectivity. New
technologies foster efficiency and madness in the same flow. The growing
power of software engineering does not necessarily lead to the power of Big
Brother. In fact it is way more cracked than it seems. It can blow up like a
windshield under the impact of molecular alternative practices.

Copyright © Félix Guattari, 1990. Unpublished text of October 1990, published in the
journal Chimères, n.28, spring-summer 1996.

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