Guattari: Chaosmosis

Transversality occupies a central place in Guattari's thought, appearing in his early writings on institutional analysis and on through to his final work, Chaosmosis. Transversality is thus particularly pertinent to understanding Guattari's critique of semiocapitalism and his goal of re-imagining forms of institutional subjectivisation as a way to free the unconscious from structures of lack and the desire for punishment, the very structures upon which capitalism relies for its reproduction. If there is one institution that has taken advantage of semiocapitalism's (...) ability to mask its role in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity, however, it is the contemporary neoliberal University. This essay thus brings transversality to bear upon the question of the University in semiocapitalism, focusing on the discourses that speak in defence of the humanities. Though defences of the humanities are intended to argue for the humanities’ usefulness in contemporary society, transversality exposes such discourses as the speech of a ‘subjugated group’ whose only effect is to reinforce existing structures of lack and punishment. (shrink)

Introduction: contemporary conditions and diagrammatic trajectory -- From joy to the gap: the accessing of the infinite by the finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson) -- The care of the self versus the ethics of desire: two diagrams of the production of subjectivity (and of the subject's relation to truth) (Foucault versus Lacan) -- The aesthetic paradigm: from the folding of the finite-infinite relation to schizoanalytic metamodelisation (to biopolitics) (Guattari) -- The strange temporality of the subject: life in-between the infinite and the (...) finite (Deleuze contra Badiou) -- Desiring-machines, chaoids, probeheads: towards a speculative production of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari) -- Conclusion: composite diagram and relations of adjacency. (shrink)

Abstract The philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari and Levinas are taken up in an effort to advance the ethical, political, and technological implications of how we interpret, inhabit, and territorialize the Earth. The difference between their views on the relation between immanence and transcendence and their respective analyses of the face and faciality are brought to bear in addressing the questions of ethics, politics, and values in relation to the constitution and liberation, or resingularization, of subjectivity. The contemporary world has produced (...) to a historically unprecedented degree a tension between machinization and wildness—both of which are expressions of the inhuman. Somewhere in between this difference, transversing the borderlines between the human and inhuman, lies a possible way for rethinking the relation between subjectivity, identity, difference, and singularity. (shrink)

The mass popular dissent which has marked the early twenty-first century, from al-Qaeda to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, can be read as expressions of collective, subjective, existential mutation. This reading is inspired by Félix Guattari, who described the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations as demands for subjective singularisation. In each of these examples of social discontent, past and present, demands vary widely even within the same movement, spanning economics, lifestyle, (...) religion and politics, and ranging from cries for liberation to conservative returns to ancient tradition. In order to perform a schizoanalysis of such amorphous movements, Guattari developed a four-part ecosophic object, composed of existential Territories, Universes of value, material-energetic Flows and machinic Phyla. Assemblages can be dynamically mapped along these four dimensions. Of crucial importance in the age of extreme deterritorialisation is the existential Territory, which could potentially take the form of a homeland based on poetry or music rather than on ethnicity or even place. Such portable homelands would characterise the dissensual processual post-media era for which Guattari longed. (shrink)

Explains how the work of Deleuze and Guattari speaks to feminism and other progressive movements.

In this paper the authors seek to contribute to a new ontology of an embodied, desiring subject through an exploration of their own subjectivities and of the ways in which subjectivities are produced and transformed through affective attachments to place. Using the method of collective biography and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and territorialization they examine their affective responses and attachments to place: Australia and the Czech Republic. As a point of departure for their analysis, the authors (...) ask: What does it mean to be homesick for a place which is not one’s home? What does it mean to desire a place? What of the other place is inscribed in the body? In asking this, the authors show the extent to which place is a zone of immanence in which a continual play of de- and re-territorialization occurs. (shrink)

The essay consists of three parts: the first argues that Deleuze's moral philosophy in The Logic of Sense provides an ethical model of counter-actualisation; the second shows how three different practices of art therapy offer a means to effect this counter-actualisation and thereby demonstrate the restorative power of art; the third explores how such a power might form part of what Guattari calls the ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari 1995).

This article offers two commentaries on two of Félix Guattari's essays from Chaosmosis: ‘The New Aesthetic Paradigm’ and ‘Schizoanalytic Metamodelisation’. The first commentary attends specifically to how Guattari figures the infinite/finite relation in relation to what he calls the three Assemblages (pre-, extant, and post-capitalism) and then even more specifically to the mechanics of this relation – or folding – within the third ‘processual’ Assemblage or new aesthetic paradigm of the essay's title. The second commentary looks at what Guattari has (...) to say about this paradigm in relation to subjectivity, that is, the schizoanalytic programme or practice of metamodelling. Here the focus is on the turn to asignifying semiotics – but also the importance of signifying material and indeed the actual material scene of encounter – in any programme for the production of subjectivity (it is here also that the symptom makes its appearance). (shrink)

In this article, I’d like to account for my debt towards Guattari’s thought, by tracking the main phases of our exchanges related to my fieldwork in Australia. Guattari is often cited by English-speaking anthropologists but he is often ignored, or rejected, by a certain generation of French anthropologists. The articulation of existential territories with different systems of valorization and of ontological self-affirmation is in my view an important key in our effort to analyze from an anthropological point of view processes (...) of re-singularization and re-location in our current universe of globalized interactions. (shrink)

When Guattari defines the unconscious in terms of production rather than representation, when he speaks of enunciative agencement and when, in his latest writings, he approaches it from the point of view of « chaosmosis », he radicalizes the relation between the unconscious and its outside, and he provides a new conception based on proliferation, molecularisation and infinitisation.

For Martin Heidegger the death that comes singularly for each of us summons us to exist on our own and speak in our own name. But Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari argue that it is a specific social machinery that summons us to speak in our own name and answer for what we do and are. This summons is a death sentence. They enjoin us to flee this subjectification, this subjection. They do recognize that the release of becomings in all (...) directions can become destructive and self-destructive. There are several weaknesses in their conception. (shrink)

This paper explores the interconnectedness of persons with disabilities, technologies and the environment by problematizing Western notions of the independent, autonomous subject. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of the static subject as active becoming, prevailing discourses valorizing independence are critiqued as contributing to the marginalization of bodies marked as disabled. Three examples of disability “dependencies”—man-dog, man-machine, and woman-woman connectivities—are used to illustrate that subjectivity is partial and transitory. Disability connectivity thus serves a signpost for an expanded understanding of subjectivity (...) and suggests a radically altered ethics that is no longer premised on individual rights. (shrink)

Information and control technologies are not only on the order of the technosciences, but also intervene in the production of subjectivity. One cannot separate these transformations from the political upheavals that are underway. The primacy of information as a new category alongside that of energy accentuates the production of new subjectivities and may transform society into a society of communication. But this concept is not enough, unless it is associated with an « existential function » that can account for the (...) overall disorientation of subjective coordinates. The problem of subjective recompositions should be posed by a reorientation of the processes of information, telematization, etc., according to other value systems on the level of mental ecology, all the way to planetary scales. We are copilots with nature in context. The amazing aspect of this symbiosis is the radical transformation of the relationships between the two. Ecology is a great turning-point, on the condition that it be joined to the social and economic dimensions, along with every form of otherness, to create a soft ideology that leaves room for new knowledge. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal elaborar uma crítica do sistema sexogênero,tal como ele foi construído e sustentado pelo modelo tradicional dadiferençabinária edipiana entre os sexos. Para isso recorre-se prioritariamenteaalguma categorias dos pensamentos de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, taiscomoas de devir e multiplicidade, as quais permitem fundamentar uma outravisãodas sexualidades, que recusa o modelo da identidade. Taisproposições,articuladascom o conceito de intervenção proposto por Judith Butler,possibilitamainda a formulação de uma política radical de subversão nãoapenasdos gêneros identitários, como também da identidade (...) molar dassubjetividadescomo um todo.This article aims to elaborate a critical vision of the sex-gender system as itwas constructed and sustained by the traditional model of binary Oedipaldifference between sexes. To do so, it preferentially runs over some categoriesof Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thoughts, as becoming and multiplicity,as they permit to ground another vision of sexualities, which refuse theidentity model. These propositions, linked with the concept of agencyproposed by Judith Butler, enable the formulation of a radical policy ofsubversion not only of genders identities as well as subjectivities’ molaridentity in general. (shrink)

Deleuze e Guattari understands the ideas of Ethics and Moral as movements that produce psychosocial reality or ways of production of the psychosocial life. We try to understand how the ways of psychosocial functioning produce senses and can be caught in the ethical and moral psychosocial practices. We aim to demonstrate, from kafkian literature, the ways of ethical and moral subjectivation.Deleuze e Guattari entendem as idéias de Ética e Moral como movimentos produtores de realidade psicossocial ou sentidos de produção da (...) vida psicossocial. Buscamos entender como os modos de funcionamento psicossociais produzem sentidos e podem ser captados nas práticas psicossociais éticas e morais. Nossa intenção é demonstrar, a partir da literatura kafkiana, os modos de subjetivação ética e moral. (shrink)

Deleuze e Guattari entendem as idéias de Ética e Moral como movimentos produtores de realidade psicossocial ou sentidos de produção da vida psicossocial. Buscamos entender como os modos de funcionamento psicossociais produzem sentidos e podem ser captados nas práticas psicossociais éticas e morais. Nossa intenção é demonstrar, a partir da literatura kafkiana, os modos de subjetivação ética e moral.

The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies. In this paper I draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore what happens to the drug using body when it is rethought as a machinic assemblage. Following an exploration of how the body of the drug user is put together and (...) stratified as a subject, and a careful manoeuvre through the bleak conception of the ‘drugged body’ provided by Deleuze and Guattari, I begin to map out some ethical alternatives. I argue that a body should, ultimately, be valued for what it can do , and that assemblages should be assessed in relation to their enabling, or blocking, of a body’s potential to become other. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns the affects, defined as bodily intensities and as pre-personal productive or creative feelings. Here, the affects are not simply passions; they precede the distinction between activity and passivity. These definitions correspond to the intuition expressed in philosophies of time and experience, that something is always happening in or to bodies. According to this intuition, events and processes always pertain to bodies, and what happens to bodies is experienced as affects: corporeal intensities, blocks of lived timespace, which can (...) also be called duration-location . These definitions likewise interlace with the contentions of some recent continental philosophers according to whom our subjectivities are produced within relational networks of power and desire. The importance of these redefinitions is twofold: first, the affects are constitutive of subjectivity and not the inverse. Psychological or private personal emotions are derivative of a larger circulation of affects. Secondly, the constitution of subjectivity by the affects, here denominated a production of subjectivity, implies that social forms are inherently plastic and in process. Thus there is always an opening to other forms of individual and group subjectivity, and along with this conclusion comes the corollary: how to engage that opening most fruitfully? The ontological productivity of desiring intensities in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, presented with an exemplary mixture of philosophical and political concerns, serves as the starting point for this redefinition of the affects. Here the affects are seen in the context of extreme experiences, powerful hallucinations of our participation in history. In Spinoza's Ethics, especially Parts 2 and 3, a detailed analysis of the relation between affections and affects allows us to see the ramifications of a systematic philosophy which makes affective modification its primary logic. Guattari's later writings, especially Cartographies Schizoanalytiques and Chaosmosis, develop in a very different sense the possibility of a logic of intensities or of affects, using it as the basis for an examination of the production of subjectivity in determinate social and historical systems, and proposing the possibility of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm of enunciations beyond the current desingularization of subjectivity. The entire project rests under the sign of a double Spinozist affirmation: of speculative thinking , and of the power of the affects. (shrink)

This thesis presents a social ontology. It takes its problem, the emergence of social structure and order, and the relationship of the macro and the micro within this structure, from social theory, but attempts a resolution from the perspectives of contemporary French philosophy and complexity theory. Due to its acceptance of certain presuppositions concerning the multiplicity and connectedness of all life and nature it adopts a comparative methodology that attempts a translation of complexity science to the social world. It draws (...) both this methodology and its inspiration from the work of Michel Serres. After explaining this methodology, it presents a critique of the work of those prominent philosophers of multiplicity who have written on the social: Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Manual DeLanda. Having argued for the need of a ‘non-unit’ of social organisation, it then unsuccessfully surveys the work of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Tarde in search of such a ‘non-unit’. It produces one by extracting elements from different theorists and then proceeds to offer a novel explanation of how these expectations first emerge from the ‘social noise’ and then go through a complex process of self-organisation to produce social structure. Apart from complexity theory, this explanation draws on the temporal ontologies of both Serres and Deleuze. In doing so, it argues that the social replication necessary for this self-organisation cannot be achieved through direct imitation. Instead, it draws on an idea from Stuart Kauffman and argues that this is achieved through autocatalysis. Finally, it argues that social structures and what is perceived to be social order are the effect of the codification, to varying degrees, of these emergent expectations. It concludes that this structure is at its most creative when on ‘the edge of chaos’, when at a point of social chaosmos. (shrink)

Harm minimisation approaches to illicit drug use have proven extremely successful in reducing drug-related harm and improving health outcomes for those using drugs, their families and the broader community. Despite these successes, however, many harm minimisation programmes face strong community opposition, and many others are limited in their effectiveness by their reluctance to acknowledge the complex ways in which drug using contexts, social relationships, desire, pleasure and aesthetics are involved in the production and reduction of drug-related harm.[NP] Deleuze and Guattari’s (...) ethico-aesthetic philosophy offers a conceptual framework through which to begin to grapple with the sensory and affective elements of illicit drug use and their implications for an embodied ethics. Following an introduction to their key concepts, this thesis explores the implications of their ontology for understandings of injecting drug use across four inter-related dimensions: the drug using body; urban spaces of injecting; public overdose memorials; and drug referenced, ‘heroin chic’ advertising imagery. It argues that aesthetics and ethics are complexly intertwined, and that ethically positive responses to drug use require an active appreciation of the ways in which aesthetics affect bodies and their capacities to form relations with others. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have arguably gone further than anyone in contemporary philosophy in affirming a philosophy of creation, one that both establishes and encourages a clear ethical imperative: to create the new. In this remarkable undertaking, these two thinkers have created a fresh engagement of thought with the world. This important collection of essays attempts to explore and extend the creative rupture that Deleuze and Guattari produce in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. The essays in this volume, all (...) by leading thinkers and theorists, extend Deleuze and Guattari's project by offering creative experiments in constructing new communities - of ideas and objects, experiences and collectives - that cohere around the interaction of philosophy, the arts and the political realm. Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New produces new perspectives on Deleuze and Guattari's work by emphasising its relevance to the contemporary intersection of aesthetics and political theory, thereby exploring a pressing contemporary problem: the production of the new. (shrink)