genosko - introduction - félix guattari in the age of semiocapitalism.pdf

Flix Guattari in the Age ofSemiocapitalism

Edited and introduced by Gary Genosko

Twenty years after Flix Guattaris untimely passing in 1992, this specialissue of Deleuze Studies presents a series of essays that will assistreaders in bringing Guattari into the present by providing examplesof how to read him anew, perhaps even for the first time. In therecently published collection The Guattari Effect, editors Eric Alliez andAndrew Goffey introduce their project with reference to the Guattarianconcept of the collective assemblage of enunciation that operate[s] toenable novel emergences to be detected and the urgency of events tobe elaborated (2011: 1). Semiocapitalism plays a similar catalytic rolehere, with a no less experimental and urgent task of diagnosis andmicropolitical elaboration. Why semiocapitalism? Among Guattarisnumerous prescient concepts may be found a three-tined insight: capitalis a semiotic operator that seizes individuals from the inside (1996b:200, 212) and has the goal of controlling the whole of society. Thisstatement contains three closely related insights that introduce the semio-commodity; situate subjectification at the heart of a subsumption thathas turned intensive, thus marking the passage from an incorporative,formal to a real subsumption; and, pose the question of resistance withina predicament of massive control that is only superficially blamed onmachines (surveillance). Subjectification in Guattaris estimation is apolitical concept that has a machinic character defined by the invol-uted relationships between users and information technologies (thelatter emerging in great variety and with profound influence from themachinic phylum that more and more entangles human and non-humanecologies).

Deleuze Studies 6.2 (2012): 149169DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0054 Edinburgh University Presswww.eupjournals.com/dls

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Franco Bifo Berardi (2007: 76) defines semiocapital as capital-flux that coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materializing itself.This focuses attention on a middle state of coagulation that displaysreticence before materialisation. Coagulation of capital flux in semioticartefacts suggests that there are nuanced states of substantialisationthat do not yet accede, or at least immediately proceed, to hardmaterialisation; this process of slowing down and pooling, a semioticsettling, describes the immaterial factors of pre-material existencebetwixt immateriality and materiality. In a Guattarian vocabulary,then, a semio-commodity consists of the material aspects of thesemiotic affective and productive and in infotech often consists ofa-signifying part-signs whose production and passage through digitalnetworks are akin to signals perfectly adapted to the quasi-materialfluxes of their environment they precisely trigger, activate and workflush with automated processes of information exchange and do notrequire a representational dimension, which is superfluous (but mayundoubtedly exist). Guattari disliked the language of signs because ithad for too long entailed a divorce from materiality. In this context,Bifo, too, wonders why we need such a term as immaterial, anyway(2008: 157).Both Guattari and Bifo emphasise that entire circuits and overlapping

and communicating assemblages integrate that is, machinicallyenslave cognitive labour and the capitalistic exploitation of its content.Mental as opposed to manual labour involves a closing of the gapbetween execution and innovation and a deferral of materialisation:Bifos explanation contains a key qualification: The materials to betransformed are simulated by digital sequences. Productive labour(labour producing value) consists in enacting simulations latertransferred to actual matter by computerized machines (2009: 75). Inthis temporal qualification, labour does not so much have residualmateriality but is mental work on abstract signs rich in knowledge.Flexibility and fluidity are imposed on such labour by means of thereticular form that frames, captures, commands and recombines thefragments produced in and through it. Devices of recombination or part-signs are multiplying in the personal digital assistants, laptops and cellphones that accompany us throughout our entire days and nights thisis our machinic apprenticeship. For Guattari, this is an example ofhow machinic subjection enters human labour. For Bifo, labour hasbecome cellular activity: as production becomes semiotic, precariouslyemployed cognitive workers on occasional, contractual, temporarybases without guarantees or benefits engage in labour that involves the

Introduction: Flix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism 151

elaboration of a specific semiotic segment that must meet and matchinnumerable other semiotic fragments in order to compose the frameof a combinatory entity that is an info-commodity, Semiocapital (2009:89). Semio-commodities are thus: partial, combinable and recombinable;and dependent upon the digital network. Bifos re-employment ofsemiotic for immaterial, in the context of cognitive labour within anetworked environment, points to the role of technology in integratingfragments previously allocated to dedicated sites of a dramaticallyfragmented labour process. He also specifies that semiocapital dependsupon simulation of signs-in-formation (2011: 1067).There is a certain degree of overlap between the Guattarian

conception of Integrated World Capitalism, Semiocapitalism and post-Fordism. During the 1980s Guattari developed in collaboration withEric Alliez a theory of globalisation called Integrated World Capitalism(IWC). This stage of post-industrial capitalism is marked by thepreponderance of modes of machinic production and their integration(that is, by means of permanent crisis); by dominant semiotic-economicsystems in which the market becomes transnational; and the statebecomes minimal and speculative. The authors wrote: IntegratedWorld Capitalism . . . [is] based upon semiotic means of evaluationand valorization of capital which are completely new and have anincreased capacity for the machinic integration of all human activitiesand faculties (Guattari 1996a: 244). Corresponding to some of thefeatures of post-Fordism, as well as hinting at the emergence ofthe importance of immaterial labour, Guattari and Alliez announcethe emergence of semiocapitalism. Guattari clarifies: Post-industrialcapitalism, which I prefer to describe as Integrated World Capitalism,tends increasingly to decanter its sites of power, moving away fromstructures producing goods and services towards structures producingsigns, syntax and . . . subjectivity (2000: 47).In post-Fordist production, industrial labour does not disappear;

it is relocated to regions where wages are low and regulations arelax. Certain segments of cognitive activity follow along and areexternalised for the same reasons. Accompanying Bifos deferral,geographic marginalisation of the moment of hard materialisation is theautomated support of the processes of recombination so that programlanguages, data formats and robotic systems cohere and combine into alegible frame for the assembly of an info-commodity.Bifo forestalls materialisation by means of coagulation in semiotic

artefacts because he wants to underline the dependency of cognitivelabour on information fluxes in the global networks of semiocapitalism.

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He does more than suspend the manufacturing moment; he is offering avariation on the Guattarian matter-function relation. We have inheritedfrom linguistics the idea that languages give different forms to thought.Louis Hjelmslev figured the projection of form onto matter as theshadow of a net, a grid, cast onto what was for him undividedsand. This inspired Guattari to recast form as an abstract machine(irreducible to language) that constitutes and conjugates the componentsof assemblages. It is not the net but its shadow; it is not the form butits function. In Guattaris thought, an abstract machine is a functionrather than a form. A function is not yet semiotically fully formed it isa formless form that has no substance and this makes it pure Matter-Function because the matter it works is not yet formed (into stratifiedsubstance) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141).Using the conceptual language that Guattari adapted from Hjelmslev

that form as a pure matter-function maintains its independence beforethe emergence of distinct breaks that apply to itself and to whatit distributes, the conceptual indebtedness of semiocapitalism to thisreticent semiotics is perhaps obvious in the form that is distilled intoa function and does not (yet) culminate in a distinct thing, a physicallyformed matter as a stratified substance.What Bifo is suggesting is that neuro-workers plug themselves

into terminals of the net, tap into a vast pharmacological supportbattery, not to mention absorbing many ideological fictions from thecyberlibertarians of the new economy. This precipitates widespreadpsychopathologies, drug dependencies and social dysfunctionalitybecause life and work tend to bleed together, with diminishing returns.Bifo pays close attention to how the machinic arrangements of fixedcapital are evolving, and describes the semioticisation of the productionprocess in a mutating, artefactual ecology with long tendrils reachingacross the globe in which partial manufacturing may be spreadwidely, and these quasi-material fragments coordinated by computerisedassembly in another peripheral location: the process of production is inlarge part dematerialized (2008: 20). One may also say that productionis in some part still materialised but that this passage is heterogeneousand involves semiotic substantialisations with their own characteristicsthat differ in nature from an obvious end product, which is not alwaysthe destination of the coagulated part-signs.The language of coagulation suggests, then, not a direct and

immediate concreteness, but a viscous semiosis requiring attention to thedivergences of semiotic types, gradients of formedness, container effects(artefacts). Coagulation of blood is a chemical process of clogging


that requires the internal and active presence of platelets and specificproteins that become sticky. The theory of semiocapitalism counts onthe complexity of soft substantialisation, and the flutter of inactuality(not yet) that makes it impossible to exhaustively grasp, and suggests thefundamental fragmentariness of what is being combined and recombinedthrough capitalistic networks but in ways that confirm openness andmultiplicity, certainly before materialisation.Consider Maurizio Lazzaratos two-pronged statement that imma-

terial labour produces the information content of the commodity,in this way pointing to changes in workers labour processes withskills involving cybernetics and computer control; and indicatesthe kind of activities that produce this content are not normallyrecognized as work which includes defining and fixing culturaland artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and . . . publicopinion (Lazzarato 1996: 132). This remains a landmark theoreticalreformulation for understanding recent restructurings of labour andnew mutations of capitalism. As the subjectivity of workers becomesa raw material for the production of the kind of social relationsthat grow up around and persist in the immaterial dimension ofcommodities, that is, immediate sensory and more abstract affectiveattachments like excitement, fidelity to certain virtual environments,logos and cultural codes, Lazzarato asks his readers to cast off theirfactoryist prejudices in order to grasp the temporality of the cycleof production that is summoned by the capitalist for the durationof a task after which it disappears back into the networks thatmake it possible. Productive units consisting of self-employed workers,intellectual proletarians of a dispersed precariat, whose professional andmanagerial skills are exploited in the technical and semiotic labourof producing a commoditys content, and who are often required tocoordinate the immaterial labour of others, underline the significanceof labours intellectualisation and immaterialisation without eschewingeither embodiment (for the sake of a purely cognitive labour) ormateriality (in favour of completely intangible commodities).Indeed, over almost ten years from the publication of Empire to

Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Toni Negris presentation of thesignificance of immaterial labour has accumulated a number of models:where first the intangible products of immaterial labour were modelledon affective (health and entertainment sectors) and symbolic-analyticservices (computer and high-tech sectors) (2000: 2901), the mostrecent work more fully acknowledges the feminisation of labour withoutgender equality as a model for how affective labour, which is required

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of women disproportionately on and off the job, (2009: 133) has cometo assume a central place for capitalist valorisation.Acknowledging that immaterial labour processes are not entirely

cognitive but may involve manual applications, and that the productsof such labour may have material manifestations in autonomousobjects, suffices to affirm the kind of hybridity insisted upon byNegri above, and cannot be read as mere capitulation to the necessityof corporeal mediation. Together Hardt and Negri (2009: 1323)insist that immaterial factors may outweigh the material aspects ofcommodities, and the labour that produces them is both corporeal andcognitive. Immaterial labour points to a fundamental change withinpost-Fordist production in which human semiosis (general intellect)has become directly and immediately productive of value without anyimmediate material mediation.Theorists of semiocapitalism want to regain, from the capitalist

exploitation of not yet material products, by pulling out, redirectingand reapplying the latent potential coalesced in their semiotic sub-stantialisations, stealing it away from capitals semio-operations, fromevaporating in the chimerical value production of financial capital, andforging a social time distinct from capital time. Perhaps it may be putthis way: the creativity of cognitive labour harbours a potential to beotherwise that coalesces as a counter-tendency in the very process ofcoagulating semio-commodities. In this way coalescence breaks fromcoagulation.On the question of resistance, Negri (2008a: 25) writes in a

Guattarian tone:

There is no outside to our world of real subsumption of society undercapital. We live within it, but it has no exterior; we are engulfed incommodity fetishism without recourse to something that might represent itstranscendence. Nature and humanity have been transformed by capital. Fromnow on, all aspirations to alterity . . . are not only outdated but also vain.And yet: from inside this fetishistic world, the antagonism of living work isaffirming itself and resistance is building.

There are cracks in the world that practices of immanence like thehorizontal participatory multitude forms of the Occupy Movementidentified by Hardt and Negri (2011) may regain for different endsagainst the setting to labour of all of life and the equation that life equalslabour time (Negri 2008b: 214). Whatever leaks through the cracks andcannot be contained by capital, in the mutual hybridisation of materialand immaterial labour, in its control networks of television and other


mass media, is available for the creation of the common no matter howawkward the transitions.Reading together old colleagues Negri and Guattari reveals a

quandary of alterity: for Guattari, alterity is vitally important tothe collective process of subjectification that takes place before andbeyond the person, and is itself non-human, but always in relationto an alterity that is itself subjective (1995: 9), even if this is amachine, social, technical, large or small. Indeed, Guattari imagineda process that involved the detachment of semiotic segments . . . fromthe field of dominant significations (1995: 13), these part-signsserving as vehicles of autonomy and the promotion of a mutantdesire. Subjectification is for Guattari an ethico- and politico-aestheticprocess of singularisation that works in and against the dominantmodes of capitalistic subjectification, on the scorched earth of thesocial field wrought through ecological destruction, decimation ofthe public sphere by means of deregulation, and irresponsible oftencriminal financialisation. He describes this as a semio-chemical processof extraction and separation that is both poetic and precarious.There are a number of different alterities in Guattaris understanding ofsubjectification and they involve multiple interfaces: the other-machines(not only technological devices, but values possessing a specificenunciative consistency [1995: 34]); other singular subjectifications; butalso at the basis of the pathic logic/knowledge rather than rationalproduction of subjectivity, an autonomous alterity installs itself priorto the binary subjectobject relation that is not received passively, butis actively intensive and without extrinsic coordinates. In short, forGuattari there remains a choice, an ethical and political one, to be madebetween forces of normalisation that level and reduce everything, orfor richness, polyvocality, processuality and singularisation, with theproviso that taking a chance on the latter is no guarantee of escapingfrom the daily grind.For Guattari, subjectification is animated by an intensive machinic

alterity (a supplement [1995: 37]) that resists structuralisation andinitiates breakdowns, hiccups and stalling as it diagrams a virtualuniverse for other human and non-human machines to enunciate.This machinic node places a proto-subjective feature at the heartof subjectification. These two basic alterities human-machine andmachine-machine are ramified by Guattari into multiple registers:between machines and their components; alterification of internalmaterial consistencies; formal diagrammatic consistencies; differencefrom the evolutionary phylum itself; and between machines of war and

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desiring machines; as well as alterities of scale and their correspondencesacross different levels (1995: 45).In his Letter to Flix Guattari on Social Practices, (2001a: 5602)

Negri had already in the mid-1980s isolated the need for a destructivedislocation that would defeat modernisation by removing and freeingthe technical and material means for its realisation from the controlof the totality that imposed them. In this period of bitter defeat,Negri recognised the fragility of the relations of domination especiallyin the capacity to produce subjectivity. While this has increased insemiocapitalism, the liberation of independent components of radicalontological difference and the transversal assemblage of singularitieshas also increased with the emergence of the social worker andthe growing importance of his or her personal qualities that canbecome, as Negri hoped, consciousness of singularity (2001b: 573)and the communitarian, international and cooperative dimensions ofsocial production. The optimism that Negri and Guattari shared wasfocused on the potential for new subjectifications that desire ceaselesslyconstitutes, and which coalesce in the present, but also move towardsa new future. In the same way Guattari sought out multiple machinicmodalities of valorization that capital, which tries to redirect them intothe mortiferous spiral of its own law of value, could not capture andreduce, in a hopeful deduction of the determinations of the economicand juridical from an axiological complexion the maintenance of itsheterogeneity remaining vital for its survival and the condition of itsuntiring renewal (1995: 56).How did Guattari overcome the allergy to ethics that haunts

leftist politics? He valorised activist practices that engage artisticproduction towards maximising the incomparable and automodelisingtraits of mental and social ecologies with a commitment to ethicallyresponsible negotiations of collective actions and large-scale ecopoliticalengagements, since subjectivity is intimately imbricated in mutuallydependent bio- and mechano-spheres. The ethico-political articulationacross the three ecological registers would be accomplished withattention to both micro-and macro levels, by building a critique oftechnocratic solutions, and highlighting the role of artists in fosteringemancipatory eco-praxes. In short, Guattari closely linked art andecology in the production of subjectivity in a way that would assistin extracting potential for existential change and assisting in thedevelopment of new processes that are more complex, sustaining andenriching. It is the aesthetic, however, that characterises innovation insubjectification as one creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same


way that an artist creates new forms from the palette (1995: 7). Heunderlines that the most promising selection of components will resultin authentic alterifications and fructuous auto-modelisations that makethemselves available for new collective assemblages of enunciation.The first texts in this special issue show us how Guattari himself took

up writing and drama as a practice of auto-elaboration and collaborativeexperimentation, imbued with his own select heterogeneous componentsborrowed from his critical repertory. While she was a doctoral candidateat University Paris IV-Sorbonne, Flore Garcin-Marrou discovered sixplays written by Guattari between the years 198090. These playsare bursting with ribald pastiche of psychoanalysts and their belovedconcepts, not to mention sacred cows of philosophy. The play, forexample, The Moon Master (Le Matre de Lune) from 1985 ridiculesLacans objet petit a. The IMEC Fonds Guattari contains in additionto the plays found by Garcin-Marrou further theatrical dialoguesthat remain to be read for example, Parmenides filed under Ecritslittraires.In her contribution, To Be or Not to Be Socrates: Introduction to

the Translation of Flix Guattaris Socrates, Garcin-Marrou notes thefollowing plays: The Affair of the Lancel Handbag (LAffaire du sacde chez Lancel) is a political drama in the satirical cabaret style thatdates from 1979 and Nighttime, the End of Possibilities (La Nuit, la findes moyens) is Guattaris final play, and a work of childhood memory,written in 1990 and read at the Avignon Festival. Psyche Ghost Town(Psyche ville morte) displays Beckettian elements and offers a critique ofdesire. Aimed at the Black Man, Killed the White One (Visa le noir, tuale blanc) is a formal exercise displaying a tension between drama andnon-drama.The play that Garcin-Marrou introduces here in the first English

translation by Solne Nicolas is titled Socrates (Socrate). While thereis no shortage of plays bearing the name of the famous philosopher intheir titles, Guattaris homage is to a cuckolded schizosopher. Socrateswas performed in 1988 at Thtre Ouvert Paris with playwright EnzoCormann. Guattari knew Cormann from his work with director PhilippeAdrien on the production of Les Rves de Kafka in 1984 (see Genosko2009). According to Franois Dosse, of all the plays that Guattari hadsent to Cormann, Socrateswas the only one he kept because its facetioustone amused him (Dosse 2010: 430). Cormann considers his reading ofthe play together with Arnaud Carbonnier, with Flix in the wings, andthe occasional shout-outs to Flix inserted into the truncated text, tobe a good example of schizotheatre. Heavily indebted to Aristophanes

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satirical Clouds, Guattaris Socrates bounces around with madcap gleebetween conjugal breakdown, a Pythonesque postman trying to delivera parcel of what appears to be hemlock; postal jokes on Freud; cracks atGeneva School linguistics as an anti-humanitarian weapon (signifyinggases) and a Challenger we never knew from A Thousand Plateaus.Guattari crivain, to adopt a coinage from Barthes, is a new way ofreading Guattari today.Guattaris commitment to the free radio movement is often located

specifically in Italy with Bifo Berardi, Radio Alice and A/traverso. Butthere is also the equally famous example of his creation of RadioTomate in Paris (for which his son Bruno was a programmer), aswell as participation in the Minitel group 3615 Alter, with thejournal Terminal, and its notorious regulars like Eric Alliez and PierreHalbwachs (Prince and Videcoq 2005). Guattari displayed a great dealof curiosity about free radio wherever he travelled, and this is evidentin Molecular Revolution in Brazil, where he spoke at length about themovement during an interview with journalism professors and studentsat Pontifical Catholic University in So Paolo, detailing the differencesbetween molar uses of free radio by national politicians and moleculardeployments of the medium by mobile, neighbourhood militants. Ina detailed discussion, Guattari explained the hybrid significations ofmachinic orality in such broadcasting, technical limitations on broadcastrange, the effects of state interventions in the sector, and organisationalinnovation in some of the micro-stations such as Radio 93 and RadioCoeur dAcier. Circa 1982, his interlocutors underlined the degree ofmedia repression by the Brazilian state and explained to him that herenot only would a free radio station be jammed, but also those involvedcould go to jail. My question is, if Lula were to create a Workers Radio,would that lead to repression? (Guattari 2008: 1556). For Guattari,the question of post-media did two things: it superseded postmodernismand presented a quandary about whether media and singularity couldcoexist. In his contribution to this volume Guattari and Japan, ToshiyaUeno places Guattari in the headquarters of the mini-FM station RadioHomerun in Tokyo and recalls the events of the visit. Regaining pirateaesthetician Tetsuo Kogawas important contributions to post-mediatheory in Japan,1 and specifying the singular dimension of the Japanesefree radio experience, Ueno participated in the political pilgrimage thatGuattari undertook into the most troubled zones of Tokyo, including theYakuza-controlled slum of day labourers known as Sanya. Ueno opensup this discussion by finding precursors and cross-references in Japaneseletters and philosophy for Guattarian thought, focusing on the novelist


Kobo Abe and philosopher Kiyoteru Hanada. As Deleuze studies entersChina with the translation of A Thousand Plateaus (Massumi 2010) anda major conference this year, there is a tendency to forget the role thatJapanese scholars (translators), artists, architects and activists played forGuattari in furthering his understanding of the relationship betweensubjectification and global capitalism. Ueno reminds us about CoolJapan and the bubble economy of the 1980s that had both collapsedby the early 1990s. This was Guattaris Japan (Genosko 2002: 12254)and his visits are marked by strange sponsorships from the most radicalto the most conservative of hosts. There is still important work to bedone on Guattaris visits to Japan in the 1980s as his dialogue withMin Tanaka is yet to be translated from Japanese (see also the rarelyscreened film by Josphine Guattari and Franois Pain, Min Tanaka la Borde, 1986). Of course, today in the shadow of the terribleevents of Japans 3/11 (earthquake and tsunami) and the Fukushimanuclear accident, there has been an upsurge in the anti-nuclear protestmovement and large-scale, politically effective, and creative forms ofyouth agitation are integrated globally into the Occupy Movement (forinstance, Japanese activists of Shiroto no Ran [Amateur Riot] broughttheir no nukes message to the Occupy Wall Street Movement in NewYork in November 2011). Post-media radicalism, assisted by socialmedia, no longer sees mini-FM and micro-TV as adequate for socialchange in the technical cartographies of minoritarian becoming. Yet newhardware and software hacks remain vital.In my contribution to this special issue Guattari TV, By Kafka,

I consider the ambivalent role of television in Guattaris life and workwith reference to his Project for a Film By Kafka. Readers of DeleuzeStudies will be aware of Guattaris plans dating from the 1980s toproduce a film based on Kafkas oeuvre. He left many rough draftsthat survive in the archives. There is a final posthumous version, butno dialectical progression or corpus to speak of. Guattari envisaged aworkshop spread over six months in which video would be shot, scriptsdeveloped and panels of experts convened that would generate enoughmaterial for a series of television programmes. Guattari believed he coulduse high-quality video to provide continuity between workshops. Witharound twelve to twenty hours of video in hand as basic material afterthe workshops were complete, Guattari then envisaged a phase of scriptdevelopment and:

a series of TV shows, with the aim of absorbing costs . . . might result in acultural series. But it should be understood from the outset that at no point

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should the workshop be impelled by the video team towards making a show.The video team will have to submit a report, and participate in the rest ofthe work, without imposing its point of view, which would be that of thepresentation to television viewers. (Guattari 2009: 153)

Here, then, television is a means of generating revenue for a project thatwould, in its initial workshop phase, yield a broadcast-quality series,which could be purchased by a network; ultimately, a stand-alone filmwould result. Television is a stepping stone. Details about each phaseare not given in detail. Guattari even suggests that the making of ashow may not be a necessity if a producer decides to take the projecton and find a co-producer for the film project alone. The likely orderof events is relevant here as television is a proving ground for the finalcinematic version (which might again be shown on television). Manystate-run television stations have lost their production wings over thelast twenty years due to cost-cutting, but during this period many newspeciality and premium cable channels and indeed entire networks haveemerged with commissioning budgets. Networks like HBO (owned byTime Warner) have promoted themselves as TV-against-itself innovatorswith critically praised dramatic series such as The Sopranos and Six FeetUnder, and such success has elevated the television writer and producer(David Chase and Alan Ball respectively, among others) to lofty auteurstatus, whose signature vision shows through in the series format and thebureaucracy of television itself. But HBO also has a film wing that hasbeen dubbed an auteur studio (Auster 2000, quoted in Heller 2008:45). And Cahiers du Cinma recently asked its readers to savour theconsecration, by the small screen, of genuine auteurs in the guise ofChase and his colleagues (Tess 2010: 7). Guattari would have beenwell versed in French auteur TV in the halcyon days of Institut nationalde laudiovisuel commissions, and he likely modelled his project on thisphenomenon. I maintain, however, that a number of critical provisos arerequired in the course of my exploration of this claim for the tl-auteurmodel that is subject to a theoretical displacement through the theoryof affect. The transition from theatre to television and film (and, in fact,across the latter two media as the latest incarnation of auteur theoryinsists), widens the scope of media in which Guattari wanted to practise,notably in the last two decades of his life, and also complicates thereception of what is considered to be his contribution to media theory.The question of Guattaris modernism, which is evident in his

Project for a Film By Kafka, is explored in depth by StephenZepke in Art as Abstract Machine: Guattaris Modernist Aesthetics.


Guattaris modernism presents a diagram (abstract line) of aestheticsbased on painting his unpopular choices include Balthus, Pollockand Modigliani, among others. Eschewing conceptuality for materialprocesses of expression, Guattari embraced a modernism that wastransformative, producing what is to come, and fundamentally political.Zepke provocatively regains this modernism against critical tendenciesto situate Guattaris aesthetics in the anti-art tradition, which hedebunks. Zepke reminds us of the synthesiser as Edgard Varse describedit in terms of the expression of the intense complexity of materialsabstracted from their referents, and the figure of the cosmic artisan,who far from rejecting art, seeks a modernist politics in which a newfuture is summoned by means of abstraction that frees the singular. Thisapproach describes well Guattaris hopes for Kafka TV through which anew people is sought in a way that is not determined by the present, yetimmanent to it and acting on it. Here, then, art is not overtly politicalbut exudes a utopic excess.The catalogue essay Machinic Animism by audiovisual artist Angela

Melitopoulos and social and political philosopher Maurizio Lazzaratowas created as part of the curated exhibition Assemblages whichexplored the role of animism in Guattaris thought; this contributionappeared in the Animism show curated by Anselm Frank of Extra City,Antwerp, in 2010. Drawing on images from films by Fernand Delignyand Victor Renaud, as well as Franois Pain, and video interviews witha number of Guattaris friends and colleagues, the authors considerGuattaris scattered remarks on animism that are indexed to both Braziland Japan and, more generally, to the archaic and its hybrid, modernmutations. Guattari often commented about the mixture of animisticreligions, such as Shinto-Buddhism and Candombl, with contemporarymedia technologies, as offering interesting recipes for subjectificationbeyond the typical impasses capitalism makes available (1996a: 105).This reconversion of the archaic that Guattari identifies with thereinsertion of animism into contemporary life is not restricted to religion.In Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Guattaris sense of the opposingpoles of identity (individual and cultural) and subjectifications suchas Candombl, which serves as a form of resistance for the Blackpopulation of Bahia (2008: 37, 967), expresses his concern withhow fundamentally different worlds of reference like the latter act asbulwarks against capitalistic modes of subjectification. In a canny way,Melitopoulos and Lazzarato point beyond these obvious examples intomore complex ideas within Guattaris Chaosmosis in which animisticelements occupy diverse worlds from infancy to creativity as such,

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inhabiting objects, and overlapping subjectifications, that may form apowerful nucleus within an assemblage (Guattari 1995: 1012). WhatGuattari strives for is to understand how animism works as a partialenunciator with unframing effects within assemblages of enunciation(131); recall how a particle-sign might catalyse an innovative coalescenceoutside the frame of the semio-commodity. Guattari shifts from religious(from the role of orishas in ritual possessions to aesthetic extractionsfrom the real) to semiotic and machinic considerations as animismcrosses the domains of anthropology, psychoanalysis and aestheticproduction into how in its updated guises it influences subjectification.Felicity Colman pushes off from Guattaris recently translated The

Machinic Unconscious (2011) in order to investigate the molecularrevolutionary potential of the machinic aesthetics of play in Playas an Affective Field for Activating Subjectivity: Notes on TheMachinic Unconscious. Her efforts to regain play from capitalisticvalorisation work through an analysis of mediatisation and its effectson subjectification with an emphasis on how processes resistant todominant models stir in aesthetic activities. Mediatisation, Colmanargues, is open to all kinds of connections, and is not a deterministicor closed interpellation. Rather, play displays a mobile transversalityin a field that guides machinic assemblages through various media.Colman is attentive to the affects-times-speeds of how subjectificationis positioned by media platforms, demonstrating that subjectiveassemblages are embedded in the evolutionary phylum and conditionedby the machines of ones time. She picks up Guattaris example ofthe pile of stones mentioned earlier in my essay on television asmediatic modelisation of a proto-machine, a pile of stones, into awall (and its crumbling), and the political and aesthetic ends thatsuch a process entails. For Colman, mediatisation produces and occursthrough machinic interfaces, and she pursues their affective workingson the knife edge of machine and structure. We see how play is anextract that opens new universes of virtuality and options for aestheticcartographies, in this sense gathering in Melitopoulos and Lazzaratosinsistence on the animistic effects of aesthetic activities. Guattari (1995:107) specified that the aesthetic machine has the power to disclose newdimensions of finitude, alterity and incorporeality, as well as requiringresponsibility: Machinism, in the way I understand it, implies a doubleprocess autopoietic-creative and ethical-ontological (the existence of amaterial of choice) which is utterly foreign to mechanism (108).Colmans investigation of plays transversal field is conceptually

consonant with Bryan Reynolds theorisation of minor criminality as


a gateway to transversal territory: it may be entered upon exitingfrom structure and individuation and identity (subjective territory)and affords experiential alterity (Reynolds 2002: 19). Field andterritory as they are deployed by Colman and Reynolds recall Guattarisspecifications of different types and interactions of pragmatic fields(Guattari 2011: 59ff.): the individuated, for instance, is vulnerable tocapitalistic abstractions; whereas the diagrammatic finds potentialities innon-human machines and a-signifying semiotics. Play in an affective fielddisturbs the impositions of order, is less attached to abstract identitiesand attuned to more complex assemblages.Acknowledging the important contributions of performance theory

in Deleuze studies from the work of Reynolds to Laura Cull andGerald Raunig (bringing together war and theatre machines in theperformances of micropolitical agitation in Europe [Raunig 2010: 73]),Anja Kanngieser advances a concept of the performative encounterin . . . And . . . and . . . and . . . The Transversal Politics of PerformativeEncounters that does not take a theatrical form as such and ischaracterised as mobile, allusive and transversally transformative ofcollective subjectifications and enunciations. The primary cases understudy are the German Umsonst campaigns of the zero-zero decade. Justas Colman situated play and, just plain fucking about, on an affectivefield of transformation, Kanngieser underlines the playful, pleasurableand temporary characteristics of the activist encounters in her analysis,but without neglecting the anti-capitalist and movement without bossesspirit of the organisations at issue. But Kanngieser is most interested inthe role of transversality and the subjugatedsubject groups distinctionas a conceptual tool for understanding Umsonst.Regaining Guattaris early practical and theoretical innovations,

Kanngieser exposes the emergence of a theory of groups thatdistinguishes non-absolutely between subject (actively exploring self-defined projects) and subjugated groups (passively receiving directions),each affecting the relations of their members to social processesand shaping the potential for subject formation and for molecularrevolution. A subject group is best able to accept openness and roledefinition without letting it become a threat to its negotiation ofotherness, a loss of security precipitating its decay into a subjugatedgroup; a subjugated group is able to pass through the walls of itssilent retreats and subservience and find its voice. It was throughthe modification of introjects such as alienating fantasies of aleaders power, or realisation that a group was not the revolutionarysubject of history, and cleansed of the familialism and mythical

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psychoanalytic complexes, that the superego could admit new idealsand demands. The application of Guattaris group/assemblage theoryto Umsonst actions renews the richness and subtlety of the originalformulations and brings them to bear upon a post-militant, transitory,leaderless assemblage, initiating a trenchant critique of German neo-liberalism evident in the performative encounters that touched everydayissues such as public transportation that were felt most acutely bysocially marginalised groups and precarious labourers. The nuancesof Umsonst subjectifications and transversal relations are delineated inboth their micropolitical but also aesthetic dimensions, detailing thetemporary subject groups of Umsonst and their moments of affectivecomposition.In her case study Kanngieser extends the trajectory of transversality

which, within Guattaris lifetime, began at La Borde, where he developedthe grid, a double-column entry table consisting of rotating tasksand times, that redefined roles, created new groups, introduced novelorientations. From this emerged a new way to communicate involvinga specialised vocabulary, the feuille de jour (daily sheet), as well aschallenges to and parodies of supervisors, and sudden valorisationsor ghettoisations of activities and places. The grid changed over timeduring periods which saw the waxing and waning of centralisation anddecentralisation, and was modified to maximise its therapeutic effects inresponse to changing conditions in the clinic from which were extractedwhatever displayed the greatest transversal potential. Transversalitybegan as a way of diagramming the unconscious of an institution andgraduated to a descriptor of the potential for new progressive axesunleashed in processes of political depolarisation, which is also howGuattari understood the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kanngieser contributesto the renewal of the somewhat dated German reference points ofGuattaris thought.In the contribution of Adam Bryx & Bryan Reynolds, Go

Fractalactic: A Brief Guide through Subjectivity in the Philosophyof Flix Guattari and Transversal Poetics, the stakes of groupsubjectification and transversality are laid bare as the authorsextend Guattaris practices of metamorphosis in a clinical settingthrough a new conceptual vocabulary that fearlessly regains drugexperience as a key touchpoint. Passing beyond the Guattarian bestiaryand in Reynolds established vocabulary, mapping departures fromsubjective territories, Bryx & Reynolds situate unblinkering througha meditation on the tensions within wilful parameterisations ofdissident becomings. Drawing from popular literature on LSD, which,


incidentally, recapitulates key issues within psychedelic psychiatry andthe role of colourful characters like Captain Tripps (A. M. Hubbard),who was director of the West Coast-based Commission for the Studyof Creative Imagination, and whose refinements to the clinical settingwere well received by professionals (Dyck 2008), parameter settingsserve protective ends but are not fail-safe. The phantasy architectureof a good trip, just like the trappings of a romantic evening, guidesubjectifications in practical ways and expose the contours of controlthat spikes toward the unexpected while taking cover under thepredictable. Regaining The Guattari Reader as a kind of users manual,Bryx & Reynolds seize upon opportunities for reinjecting the role ofreflexive-consciousness into alterification, not as a by-product, and inorder to win it back from deferment in the name of sustainability.This emphasis generates an array of suggestive concepts that describethe dynamism of subjectification along emergent and vectorial linesas it passes into transversality: fractalactic occurrences are akin toevent-advents about to pop into place during the pauses of motored-consciousness: a combination of shifting speeds with the persistence ofreflexive consciousness.Bryx & Reynolds remind us that drugs posed intractable problems for

Guattari; his productive use of gamma OH (gamma hydroxybutyrate) inthe construction of his own subjectivity should not be taken as evidenceof an attitude of casual experimentation with illicit drugs and alcohol.It is useful to think of his use of this uncontrolled (at the time in1971) substance in terms of a controlled chaoticisation that dancedaround the rim of a subjective black hole. Many drugs, both legal andotherwise, would seem to count as substances that increase powersof action, and while Guattari supported decriminalisation of all illicitdrugs, especially marijuana in the light of Frances draconian searchand seizure legislation, he also debunked the Beat mythologisation(theatricalisation) of drug culture (Genosko 2012). In a recent essayon the meaning of pharmacoanalysis and the illusions of consciousness,Gregg Lambert (2011) leaves no room for sustainable drug experiencesin finding that all lines point to abolition and the diminishment of desire.Yet the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition (Deleuzeand Guattari 1987: 299) hangs in the balance as the recalibrations ofsubjectification have both successful and failed elements that, as Bryx &Reynolds advise, require careful parameter settings.One key challenge of how to read Guattari today is the requirement

of inventively applying his examples from the 1970s, 80s and early 90sto the heterogeneous unrests appearing around the globe against the

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1%. This is the project of Janell Watson in Culture as ExistentialTerritory: Ecosophic Homelands for the Twenty-first Century. Here itis not so much an issue of the prescience of his concepts, but rather,which features are best deployed to scrutinise contemporary issues.Watson pursues the mutating assemblages of singular subjectificationsthrough an analysis at the ethological level of affective politics, utilisingGuattaris ontological quadrant in ways that allow her to highlightthe simultaneously progressive and reactionary roles of machinicphyla and focus on the necessity of existential territories that havebecome increasing portable and mobile. Watson regains some ofthe political essays from Guattaris under-read Les Annes dhiver([1986] 2009) in order to regain his sense of what the fifth worldnationalitarianism of the twenty-first century might look like. Guattarisprediction of a reflux of archaic and residual ethno-nationalism thatwould vanquish the enemies of humanity is critically investigated byWatson who accepts certain hypotheses the contestatory dimensionof alt-modernities among second- and third-generation immigrants butpoints out that certain others have not materialised, such as the waningof religious monotheisms, the enthusiasm for which seems inexhaustible.Using a case study of the Islamic headcovering as a focal point, Watsonrefocuses critical commentary by shifting the conceptual vocabularyfrom socio-semiotics to Guattarian componential analysis and providingan intimate picture of how an existential territory opens onto universesof reference. Finally, Watson opens up what is surely a Guattarian can ofworms: culture as a deterritorialising force and how to move it beyondmass media and capitalism. Guattari once remarked that culture is areactionary concept because it prevents us from grasping the processesof capitalistic subjectification based on equivalence (value and time)and uneven distribution of assets; it is guilt ridden and animated byinfantilism: there is only one culture: capitalistic culture (2008: 33).Understanding how culture compartmentalises semiotic productions asattributable cultural expressions and spheres, makes use of scales ofmeasure to judge and classify cultural levels, and how the programmesof state agencies seek to increase cultural assets of places and peoples,are all part of a diagnosis whose treatment requires the cultivationof machinic, molecular singular becomings, processualities, and thegarnering of all even the most unlikely challenges to capitalism. Atlow points in his later life, Guattari was less than optimistic: oneis forced to admit that there are very few objective indications ofa shift away from oppressive mass-mediatic modernity toward somekind of more liberating post-media era in which subjective assemblages


of self-reference might come into their own (1996a: 98). The taskfor Guattarians today is to forge contemporary tools adequate tothe passage beyond mass media and to assemble components whoseprocessuality defies the lures of mass culture.In Institutional Schizophasia and the Possibility of the Humanities

Other Scene: Guattari and the Exigency of Transversality, MichaelEng applies Guattaris group theory to the contemporary predicamentof the humanities and the long, slow burn of the end of the Universityitself. In this innovative take on the humanities predicament or, moreprecisely, the predicament of those of us situated within the humanities,Eng writes from the perspective of a American philosopher on a deathwatch of sorts. His Guattari offers a trenchant analysis and escape routefrom the semiocapitalism of the contemporary neoliberal university withits penchant for more and more a-signifying pedagogical strategies (real-time student responses and automated performance analyses of attentiondrift and knowledge retention), precarisation of labour (sweated andhidden), and corporate research partnerships (tropes of excellence andknowledge transfer and community partnerships). But first some hardquestions need to be posed, and some even harder answers given. Isthe threat to the humanities another case of scholarly narcissism or aneffect of the corporate university? Engs argument is that defences ofthe humanities illustrate Guattaris understanding of the dependenciesof a subjugated group that is incapable of recognising the core, capitalistpurpose of the contemporary university. It is the complicity of thehumanities in the fulfilment of this purpose, that is, in their owndeaths, the orders for which are passively received, that troubles andinterests Eng and he deploys the concept of transversality as a practicalexploration of this untenable condition. What makes this approachinnovative is that Eng regains the university as an institution of concernas it did not figure largely in Guattaris thought. Of course, Guattari hadlittle interest in university life and did not move in academic circles. Butit is not exceptional.Engs analysis of the complicity of the humanities in the reproduction

of capitalistic subjectivity in the university is through a number ofgateways consumer goods, psychoanalysis, linguistics. These functionas institutional objects not easily given up, and result in a doublefailure to grasp the humanities own group fantasies and assume someresponsibility for their predicament. Engs question is not so much theneed to take a sober look at how phenomena like rank and othercomforts from anxiety shield the humanities from itself and from therealisation that only academic publications hear their cries, but rather,

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what to do about this situation with the tool of transversality in hand.How, then, to disturb the status quo? In quite different ways Colman,Kanngeiser, Bryx & Reynolds, and Eng return to transversality andGuattaris theory of groups in a search for new ways to configureresistance and innovation in the age of semiocapitalism.

Note1. See http://anarchy.translocal.jp/ (accessed 11 January 2012).

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genosko - introduction - félix guattari in the age of semiocapitalism.pdf

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