Guattiview

Notes on: Stivale, C. 'Pragmatic/Machinic: Discussion with Felix Guattari' , 19 March, 1985. Online: http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/Guattari/Pragmatic-Machinic_chat.html

Dave Harris

CS: Why has your name often been replaced in the collective works with Deleuze? Is it just the situation you mentioned where a proper name becomes a common noun? [Presumably, as with a 'signed concept'? The reference is to Molecular Revolution, which might be this tome]

FG: Some people think that I have distorted Deleuze by introducing political and analytic issues, and obliterating my name is a way of denying my existence, as political malice. It is also the case that the name has become a common noun referring to all those who contribute to 'Deleuze-thought'. Foucault's phrase about this century being Deleuzian was partly humorous, but it could also mean that a characteristic assemblage of theoretical activity will dominate, including its relation to 'university institutions and power institutions'.

[Then a bit about how he has now fallen out with the people who run the College International de Philosophie, because they were conventional in terms of philosophy and wanting to work in university institutions. Guattari wanted develop new forms of collective and interdisciplinary reflection, with some applications to urbanism, education and psychiatry. The people who ran the College were too territorialized and centralised, however].

CS: Are there molecular revolutions taking place in Europe?

FG: Molecular revolutions address the 'becomings of subjectivity'. It does relate to the culture of the sixty's. It looks as if everything is now returned to order conservatism, but the movement still continues. 1968 was an awakening, and much has occurred afterwards, such as the women's movement, the struggles for liberation in Brazil. In France, the issues develop around migrant culture and the consequences for subjectivity. There are reactionary developments, but another sensitivities developing with young people, 'another relationship with the body, particularly in dance and music'. There are also green and pacifist movements. Can all these movements be joined together without incoherence? We have to remember that molecular revolutions do not constitute the programme, but develop towards diversity, 'a multiplicity of perspectives'. The point is to create 'the conditions for the maximum impotence of processes of singularization'. It is not a matter of agreement or consensus, we have to retain a vital field, and see movements as 'different branches of this phylum of molecular revolution'. There is a break with arborescent logic in conventional movements.

Theoretical and practical questions remain, however. Theoretically, the point is to explain the correspondences between diverse movements, their 'elective affinities', and we need new analysis and concepts here to grasp transversality, 'the crossing of abstract machines that constitute a subjectivity and thus are incarnated… In very different regions and domains', and can even be antagonistic. Practically, we need new forms of practice and intervention, at the molar level in order to avoid things like the repression of autonomism in Italy, partly the results of the link between terrorism and stake repression, or complicity. We have to respect diversity and particularities, while building 'antagonistic machines have struggled to intervene in power relations'. We are only at the beginning, we are experimenting, but this is not just a dream or formula. The German greens are closest to the model: they are in touch with daily life, but also concerned with the environment and peace: they can develop relations with conventional parties; they can intervene in the third world or elsewhere in Europe. They are not just a central apparatus...The greens work with all strata , including artistic and philosophical strata.

CS: What about current French politics under Mitterand? You criticised the socialists for not criticising existing institutions, and for attempting to cope with contradictory tendencies in the party by developing modern management techniques, pretty much indistinguishable from those of Reagan?

FG: There is a methodological resemblance. There seems to be only one possible political and economic approach. However, world capitalism now does dominate all productive and social activity, worldwide. The eastern state countries have been incorporated, and third world capitalism occupies a peripheral place. However, the logic of markets and of 'economic semiotizations'are identical. The old oppositions between imperialist and colonise countries have disappeared: imperialism is now a multi centred. Some specific differences do persist, though, for example Japanese capitalism is different. The main objective for capitalism now is not again immediate profit, but to integrate systems, to 'capture subjectivities from within'. This is done by producing a standard subjectivity, developing those 'semiotic chains' which represents the world to us, which develops 'forms of sensitivity, the forms of curriculum, of education, of evolution', tailored to different age groups and different categories. The process is like putting computer chips in cars. Yet this subjectivity can be differentiated according to the requirements of production, and in order to accommodate itself with other divisions, like those between the races or the sexes. Differentiation is better at reproducing power and bringing on board existing elites which may be capitalistic but also traditional.

This can be seen as a double movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, stripping away all but the basic dimensions of subjectivity when it comes to production, but reintroducing aspects than a sign people to their place and control them 'to block their circulation, their flows'. This is how we are to understand measures ranging from unemployment to racism. Religious guilt was once useful, but that didn't work very well 'which explains the collapse of theories like psychoanalysis' [?]. It's no more systematic, to establish 'systemic poles' to distribute functions and 'systematic endangering', including fear of imminent unemployment, and the lack of guarantees.

So what should a socialist government do? At the moment, the French government thinks it can change everything, from television to relationships with immigrants. However, it is being continually bureaucratized and hierarchized. There is no new production of subjectivity, so nothing can be done. Look at the public outrage caused when Jack Lang criticised U.S. cinema.

CS: You said the issue was to assemble new collective modes of enunciation—which ones did you foresee?

FG: We organized the free radio movement 1977 to 81. About 100 new stations were developed, and we wanted to offer a new mode of expression, unlike what happened in Italy. The socialists initially supported us but then infiltrated and the movement collapsed. Private capitalists and large newspapers also killed them. They would have done better under a right wing government! There are other 'pedagogical and educational renovations', but these are also under threat. They included an experimental high school run by Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. The Mitterrand government was very conservative thing cultural terms. The legal campaign against alternative psychiatry was launched. So there were some new practices and assemblages, but these were all 'systematically crushed': the socialists 'didn't realise what they were doing, that's the worst part!'

... Intellectual failures are even more spectacular, with the development of new philosophy, postmodernism and the rest, especially the notion of social implosion. All these discouraged political commitment.

The socialists were not responsible for that. But there has been a decline, for example of French cinema compared to German cinema. Again, assemblages of enunciations remained traditional, as they did in publishing or in classical productions of art.

CS: What happened to [the journal] Change International?

FG: It was supportive at first, but it lacked the resources. It is still producing, but it is not developed as hoped. Socialists supported alternative journals.

CS: A critic [Grisoni] has argued that Thousand Plateaus shows that [politicised?] desire has disappeared and Deleuze dried up. What remains of see the schizoanalytic enterprise? Which of the two volumes seem to be most valid?

FG: 'They're not valid at all! Me, I don't know, I don't care! It's not my problem! It's however you want it, whatever use you want to make of it. Right now, I'm working'[on some directions for schizoanalysis]… If people don't care about it, that's their business; but I don't care either, so that works out well. Single quote

CS: Deleuze said exactly the same yesterday—people don't care about my work because I don't care about theirs either [ooh! Touchy]... We discussed a book by Aron, and he likes Anti-Oedipus. He did raise the issue about the place of Lacan though. You do not particularly argue for a rupture with Lacan.

FG: We vary in what we say in both AO and TP. Deleuze never took Lacan seriously, but I decided to try and clarify the work instead. It was an event for me to meet him, and his seminar was rich and inventive by comparison with the others. Lacan had guts, and a sense of freedom. He had a dadaist sense of humour, which was occasionally cruel and harsh. Deleuze did not have to break into freedom in this way, because he never followed any one. I needed a model, because although leftwing, I was still traditionalist in many ways, for example admiring Sartre on Marxism. Lacan helped me break. His reading of Freud opened possibilities for me, although it was a reading 'entirely in bad faith'.

As examples, all the work on the signifier breaks with Freud, whose categories are actually closer to schizoanalysis, as a kind of delirious development, as with the work on dreams or phobias. There is a sense of theatre, myth, which is opposed to structuralist and mathematical systems. There is also a difference in that Freud and his contemporaries wrote monographies [about actual cases], whereas the Lacanians engage in textual exegesis, meta meta theorizing. The cases are given too much autonomy, in a process that could be considered as 'the modeization of subjectivity'. This is often what happens with apostles. Exegesis buries the original Freudian impulse to relate to patients, which is 'nearly incestuous', and this has been domesticated.

CS: What do you make of Foucault and his work? Deleuze said that Foucault at least managed to stop 'imbeciles from speaking too loudly', and now that he's dead, 'the imbeciles will be unleashed'.

FG: 'I was never influenced by Foucault's work'. Foucault did have an authority and impact [and might have checked some right wing machinations].WE

CS: What about Americanization? There is even a French version of Dallas. ['It's not bad either'FG adds] Sometimes you seem to romanticise America [especially in Rhizome, now the first chapter of TP]—home of nomadism, displacement, deterritorialization [and various authors like Burroughs and Ginsberg, FG adds]. The American culture has penetrated even France, 'the plastification, the fast Food Restaurants' [Youth have also adopted slang and American rock, FG adds]. So how do the two concepts of America relate?

FG: That's complicated. I don't know America that well. We have never been too romantic. Americans are too pragmatic, sometimes dumb, no cultural background, or rather functionalist. That has helped us 'pass into this a-signifying register' [develop computer language?], leading to a fabulous creation in technical-scientific areas. The Americans are like that, 'they don't look for complications'. I met an American once, and we discussed the liquidation of the big psychiatric hospitals. He gave a presentation with lots of charts and diagrams, but had to admit that the programme had not worked and he wanted to do something else. This is 'the marvelous a-signifying freedom', where you can go on to something else. It might be this that characterises American invasions. The Japanese by contrast have a background of mysticism and religiosity.

CS: You overestimated nomadism and the universality of deterritorialization?

FG: Sartre wrote about a trip to America that stressed the deterritorialized cities. What this means is that instead of obstacles or borders, there are 'lines, trains, planes, everything crossing, everything sliding, demographic flows sliding everywhere'.There are also reterritorializations, shown by authors like Miller or Faulkner. They seem to have made themselves into a little territory, 'a body without organs' in the middle of American 'mishmash'. Look at the diversity displayed in shop windows—'extraordinary poetry', accumulations of vistas.

CS: I can see what you mean about cities sliding between city and suburb, but American cultural invasions of other countries looks like deterritorialization of the same kind, overcoming boundaries invading everything.

FG: But is this not also the occasion for reterritorializations? The Japanese can reterritorialize on their ancient civilisations, but Americans have to reinvent everything, such as 'creating music with just anything, like that, with these piles of metal'. When it succeeds its fantastic. Take the American mystery novel—it consists of 'deterritorializing trivia', yet at the same time creates warmth, intimacy, suspense and subjectivity. These are not traditional tales. The American cinema does the same, to produce 'are more than tolerable and comfortable subjectivity, warm, passionate, exciting, in this pile of metal, this heap of shit, this load of stupidities'. This is a feat of the creation of subjectivity. Jazz has had a similar world impact.

CS: Yes, but there is a lot of stupidity, for example exploitation and amenities, and poor music.

FG: Yes, 'when one hears the classical music that people listened to in the United States, it's overwhelming' [!] [His examples are Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky!]

CS: 'I was really thinking about popular music'. Americans reterritorialized English popular music. Perhaps it is my fault for not being able to see the abstract machine which you are outlining. However, one criticism of TP is that you have misunderstood American nomadism, so 'the general schizoanalytic experience' is only 'a utopic dream without any future'.

FG: All dreams are necessarily utopic. The America we describe is our dream, and obviously not yours. American writers dreamed about Europe, or Greece, and Europeans would see that as misperceived. The point is to ask whether the dream is useful. I saw America as a deterritorialized contrast to Europe, especially in the work of Miller and his vision of Paris. Our vision of the USA is obviously not as useful for you.

CS: I have a friend is working through your work in terms of the sociological effects of communication. This is more cynical, which sees any critical thought as a mere utopic dream.

FG: But that's reactionary, a new Restoration. Other generations will not see it that way. There is still a 'potential America, an America of nomadism'. There is still radical theatre, even though they are marginalized.

CS: But there is still a danger that your work has been recuperated by the right, as a recent article by Noir shows. So there is a double reproach—some people see it as utopic, others see it as a thought without any ideological specificity, so that any political position can make use of it. This arises from the metaphor of the toolbox. You said earlier that it doesn't matter what people do with schizoanalysis, that they can take it or leave it—but the European neoliberals use it. Does that matter to you?

FG: I do not know it [scans the article]. All that has happened is that our name is being hooked on to this argument. There is an emerging left-right split in politics, but it's not so clear 'on the level of thought'. Take schooling, for example: I am in favour of free schools, but not those run by priests. Is this the theme of right or left? [who do you think he's going to benefit most, you jerk!]. The same goes for my support of the decriminalization of drug use: someone said it was identical to the views of Milton Friedman [Gosh! How amusing!]. [The whole thing badly needs some sociological analysis of actual power relations]

[Notes follow, with detailed referencing. Note 18 says that despite when he says here, Guattari addressed a conference in homage of Foucault, addressing the notion of the toolbox, where theories should be judged by the power they have to render services in specific fields. He intended to adopt the same approach to Foucault, and he said no doubt Foucault would agree.]

There seems to be another section to the interview, or maybe another interview, with an identical introduction

CS: Is a minor literature necessarily a form of deterritorialization?

FG: Take Kafka's language. It is at the 'limit of a huge aggregate' [the German language?], and he deterritorializes, introduces a note of sobriety in language. It is the same with Beckett. It is an impoverished language, but also 'an intensification of expression'. So you could say that whenever a marginality becomes active and develops 'word power', and develops processual becoming, 'it engenders a singular trajectory that is necessarily deterritorializing', a minority subverting a majority, a great aggregate. Marginalized minorities can proliferate [citing Prigogine and Stengers], amplify, shifting a totality, detotalizing it. The progress of the German greens from a few marginals to an active group is another example. They rotate every two years in defiance of parliamentary conventions, and they have brought ecology into the mainstream, upsetting the conventional relationships. 'And this is what I call the process of singularization: what was ranked as being ordered, coordinated, or referenced, no one no longer knows: what is the face, what are they doing, what is the reference. The system of values is inverted.' May '68 was like that, with singular elements that broke out from their enclosures and turned into disruptive explorations, 'the producing probe, precisely engendering systems of auto-reference… producers of new types of reference, they are themselves their own referential, until the moment when they are rearticulated, recoordinated'.

CS: [Evidently struggling manfully with the bullshit]. So minor literature is an auto production, the production of new territories. Haven't earlier writers also done this?

FG: Yes, we are more familiar with recent examples though. Rousseau might qualify, Artaud probably will in the future. It's a matter of a nascent state really.

CS: [These questions relate to the materials prepared by Guattari for eventual publication in Schizoanalytic Cartography {?}. This material seems to relate to TP]. Can you discuss faciality and haecceity? How do they fit rhizoanalysis, and 'to what regime of signs' do they correspond? For example, how does faciality relate to black holes, and haecceities to the cartographic process?

FG: That is a big question. There are two logics at work in speculative cartography, 'a cardologic, i.e. the logic of discursive aggregates, and an ordologic, the logic of bodies without organs' in the first case, there are discursive systems, connected aggregates that produce a meaning effect by referring to other meaning effects, as in double articulation. The former logical content can articulate with semantic content, for example, and double articulations can then be triple. At the same time, there are deeper structures of meaning, 'primary modules of enunciation' that are not discursive, but correspond to an 'ordological aggregate'. These still compose subjective agglomerations, though but do not express themselves as discursive differentiation. Instead, they produce 'a phenomenon of counter-meaning, which at one moment is the statement, for example the dream… Which is caught in paradigmatic coordinates, in energetic coordinates… [while] the statement also serves... as an enunciator'[clear as forking mud! Maybe it means that things like dreams produce meanings but not in conventional forms, as pre-discursive, and they have to be decoded as metaphors?]

Enunciation has three subdivisions when it comes to referents, including auto-referents. One goes towards discursivity and its logic, cardologic, or we can analyse these without considering 'the problematic of enunciation'. When a statement acts as an organiser of the enunciation, it uses different logical norms, since the point is to agglomerate meaning, 'to juxtapose primary enunciators', and this follows ordologic. The statement can work in both directions, towards discursive aggregates and also in the direction of 'what I call "synapses"' [and the third dimension, you bluffer?]. The cardologic further subdivides into material or 'signaletic' flows and machinic phyla, but the ordologic divides into 'existential territories' and 'a-corpor[e?]al universes'

With faciality, the face is there under the machinic phylum, in the synapses, and they can be situated in different paradigmatic coordinates—its big, white or whatever, so that you can do a content analysis. However, certain traits of the face can be detached and made to function in ordologic, so that the father's mustache [in Little Hans' case] becomes the superego, or a grimace becomes the gaze of Christ. These function to develop a mask, a constellation or coagulation, to become subjective enunciators. It is like a generalised function of the object in Lacan. This is the object you find in dreams or delirium. It functions in two registers, an aesthetic unconscious and a machinic unconscious. Haecceity, [similarly?] is a fact-like event, but 'when it emerges it has always - already been there, it is always everywhere', like the smile of the Cheshire cat [desperate bluffing here!].

So an event is specific, articulated as a sign-function, but the sign has a double importance, as 'a "point - sign" entity"', producing 'a surplus-value of meaning that emerges from this relationship of repetition', and also 'a point of materialization of enunciation at the same time', something that 'is going to catalyze an existential constellation'. It is the usual [!] Argument that significations have formal functions, but also material functions, when they act like a release mechanism, as with threshold phenomena. The point is that semiotics does produce release effects, when a sign passes into act, but this is already inscribed in machines and in release mechanisms. There is 'a semiotic energetics'[with another reference to an upcoming seminar on Prigogine]

CS: Translate into political terms? [Good man! Pin the bastard down again!]

FG: The issue is that we can ask what statements, images, or faces escape from our discourse, and become existential, crystallising 'an effect of subjectivity', and not only as representation, but as enacting. 'That's when saying is existing', not just doing or coming into existence. There is a particular political use of language, where a mode of politics seems completely 'aberrant'when it comes to meaning, like rituals. We have to ask ourself whether this would be compatible 'with a perspective of desire... If it's a way to construct an a-subjective subjectivity'[entirely speculative theoretical and cultural politics again].

CS: What about becoming-woman? Is it still relevant? Certain feminists do not rate it.

FG: American ones? In France too? I didn't know this.

CS: The objection is that it seems to involve a kind of progression—becoming-woman, becoming animal, becoming child, becoming molecular and then becoming imperceptible. Why does becoming-woman come at the beginning? What are the implications for women and their bodies?

FG: It is not a rigorous dialectic but a path away from binary power relations, phallic relations, 'the promotion of a new kind of gentleness, a new kind of domestic relationship', or break with the conjugal unit. It is on the side of women and children. It involves new values and a new semiotics of the body and sexuality. This passes through women, although it could pass through becoming a homosexual. Becoming-woman seems to be necessary if you want to be a writer [see his commentary on Proust]. Homosexuality might offer this too, only if it breaks with masculine power values. Masculine binaries produce phallic power, 'surface - depth power', affirmation, and vice versa. Becoming-woman can still be recuperated into a new form of masculine power, however, whereas other forms of becoming are 'much more multivocal', liberated from 'bi-univocity' and binaries. Hence the other becomings. Kafka for example explorers these intensities and sensitivities going beyond binary alternatives, although he does offer 'binary machinic alternatives' [instead of the obvious Metamorphosis, Guattari cites Blumfeld, which I have not read]. In this sense, becoming-woman 'has no priority over any other becoming', but is just a direction towards another logic, machinic or existential logic, 'no longer a reading of the pure representation, but the composition of the world, the production of a body without organs in the sense that the organs there are no longer in any relationship of surface - depth positionality, do not postulate a totality'. In this sense, they do not enter into [macro] relations with other totalities are especially 'forms of power'. These are intensive forms, exactly like art 'that constructs coordinates of existence at the same time as they live them'.

CS: The BWO continues to cause problems, though, as in the relevant plateau. There you invoked Castenada and the relation between the '"Tonal" (the organism, significance, the subject that is organized and organizing in/for these elements)' and 'the "Nagual" (the whole of the Tonal in conditions of experimentation, of flow, of becomings, but without destruction of the Tonal)'. But this correspondence seems inconsistent, because you are also talk about the general plane of consistency and its relation to the plural bodies without organs. How do these plural bodies relate to the general BWO?

FG: I am not going to develop a taxonomy of bodies without organs. It is more a matter of cartography which equates existential territory with its representation, the map with the territory. This means there can be no translatability and no taxonomy. The issue here is the production of existence. Why do we use general terms, then? There is a difference between a speculative cartography and 'the instruments of direct modelization, i.e. a concrete cartography'. The speculative ones should be 'as far away as possible' from any concrete ones, quite unlike the activity of science which attempts to semiotize to account for practical experience. 'For us it's just the opposite!' We want to move away from concrete cartographies, including those of Castenada or of psychotics, in order to profit from speculative cartography. It is just like the difference between aesthetics and the recipes to make a work of art. The total disconnection is necessary. Speculative cartography is not there 'to provide an inventory of these different modes of invention of existence'[so why is it there? Guattari is switching back to philosophical criteria to defend his approach now, having used political ones earlier!]

CS: In Molecular Revolution {which could be this volume?] you talk about different modes of coding, and the third one is 'a-signifying semiotics', where signs produce directly at the level of the Real. You chose physics as an example, but how does this connect with what you just said about science? [Keep at him! Presumably the issue is that in the example above, Guattari argues that science just models the real, whereas before he said it actually produces it. It all depends what you mean by science, presumably—engineering or cosmology]

FG: The same semiotics material can function in different registers. It can be paradigmatic, involved in a chain of signification as in cardologic, and also 'function in an a-signifying register' as in ordologic. In one case, we are talking about discursive aggregates, a logic of representation, and in the other, participation in 'an existential machinic, a logic of bodies without organs'. In the latter case it's not a matter of representation but of enunciating, especially existential enunciation, or production of subjectivity and new coordinates. In cardologic there is always a referent, a Peircian third term. In ordologic it's the same mechanism that asserts itself on different levels. So as well as speech acts in enunciation, there are also science acts or art acts. In [cosmology], there are terms that connect with disparate events, but there are no necessary existential referents or denotations. Terms [in cosmology] create their own universes of reference with their own logic. Similarly, musicians who invent new forms of music produce new universes and also catalyze 'an entire series of machinic phyla for the future of music'. Sciences is as creative as art, although this is sometimes underestimated in the work of people like Kuhn.

CS: I am still unclear about 'a-signifying semiotic'

FG: There our chains of signs that are meaningful, because they represent something. Particular articulations can take on particular subjective importance, but we have lost a particular 'surplus-value of power' to depict other fields of the possible. Musicians invent new scales to write their own music, but this also produces other possibilities, a new musical logic with 'trees of implication [then rapidly correcting himself] rhizomes of implication' that were unforeseen and can even transfer to other fields of activity. Particular articulations are in this sense arbitrary, just as in Saussure's arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, and we need to get to the 'coefficients of the possible'. If we stick to rigidly to a particular articulation, we lose creativity, especially transversality. As soon as we realize this is arbitrary, we open up all sorts of possibilities.

An example would be a particular musician [Aperghis ], who uses gestures to create music. In this, he is showing us how to detach gestures, just as you might detach 'faciality out of faces'. There is deterritorialization of scenes. If I must talk about popular music, which are generally reterritorializations, break dancing is an example, helping us to see 'completely unforeseen traits of corporality'. Chicago blues also use 'elephantine instruments like the bass' to produce lightness and richness. There is also a mix by Bonzo Goes to Washington.

CS: Yes, developed from Reagan's statement on the radio that he was ready to bomb the Russians... [They listen. Reagan says in a slowed-down bass voice that he's going to bomb the Russians, then there is rhythmic music, with lyrics made up from the various syllables in his statement forming a song]

[Then they continue their discussion]

CS: What about the concept of war machine? It doesn't seem to be about war as in current usage, but as a war of resistance, including resistance to militarism.

FG: We are not talking about the power formation but of 'machinic, deterritorialized elements' that are put into operation in a social situation—it could be a military situation, but also a scientific one or an aesthetic one. There is even 'courtly love [as] a kind of war machine of "woman-becomings"'. The war machine is the 'abstract, mutational name' of machinic phyla. There is a struggle by the state or capitalism to capture all the machines, so we are accepting the ambiguity. There is even an irony that the most potentially creative and deterritorialized elements are found 'at the heart of armies, of state machines, of oppressive powers, just as fascism is really an example as equally at the heart of desire'[Another dangerous lack of ideological specificity]

CS: And what of smooth and striated space?

FG: Striated space refers to the structuring role of energetic or spatial temporal coordinates. It is numbered space under the cardologic, but the numbering domain under ordologic, so it is not just a simple space, or rather the issue is the degree of smoothness. So subjectivity is on a continuum, ranging from your own to the whole world, so it cannot be numbered and yet it still 'maintains differential relations of intensity'[sounds like Leibniz here]. With material signaletic flows, modules of primary actuation are involved, and these then develop 'deep and pseudo-deep structures'. With ordologic, we are talking instead about machinic phyla and the way they generate modules of surplus-values that help us produce 'a space of coordinates of differentiation'. There is a 'total phenomenological flattening': we only know about existence insofar as we are in 'the field of existential, and even imperialistic, relationships'[some Grade A bullshit here. The machinic phyla contain the synapses, 'the points of reversal in which the module, instead of going in the direction of differentiation, goes from a differentiated point towards points which are non-differentiatable, there and there (under the ordologic)'. There are no deep structures, only a series of parentheses. With existential territory it is a matter of visual perception [and also, curiously, 'the sex']: as Sartre says 'I had a sexual appreciation of the charismatic leader, I exist [in?] it/him. I can't put him in the same coordinates, it's the same object that hands him over to me, this idea of existential "grasping"'.

CS: Are the synapses faciality as well?

FG: No, that was only one example. They can also be partial objects, a haecceity, a refrain [translated here as the ritornello]. My notion of the machine was a generalization of Lacan's petit-a notion. Similarly, the machinic phylum refers to the double play of the machine, located in mechanical coordinates, but also acting as life itself 'both for most mechanical and the most living', the source of the fields of the possible as well as particular existential agglomerations.

[More notes follow, many of them referencing a range of articles in French. Note 25 says that the term cartography is a way of breaking with Freudian and Lacanian models of the unconscious and their psychic agencies, in order to minimize terms such as subjectivity, consciousness and meaning {signifiance}. Instead it is a matter of considering intersections of assemblages with their own coordinates, which can gain or lose linking power.

Note 26 refers us to the Machinic Unconscious where concrete cartography is the same as 'generative schizo-analysis' aiming at developing new machinic meanings or directions. This is molecular politics in action. 'Transformational schizo-analysis' is the more general or speculative cartography, based on analyzing the machinic nuclei that detach assemblages and reconnect them to the whole machinic sphere. The term synapses means interconnections between particular positions on the phylum that produce concrete existence, and a more general plane of consistency of the abstract machine: the latter is also the ordologic. Machinic kernels or nuclei have to connect these two dimensions, so that abstract machines can manifest themselves, while the most concrete machines can be [dereified and] resemiotized. Later work abolishes the binary distinction between cardologic and ordologic.

Note 29 tells us that we should use the term deterritorialization to understand what happens with consciousness and the unconscious, when it produces an apparently unified person or consistent view of the world. This is 'a founding myth of capitalist subjectivity', ignoring the real diversified processes of coming to consciousness, produced by diverse existential territories which have to be deterritorialized before they can be grasped in consciousness. For people to become existential monads {I think this would work just as well if we substituted the term nomads}, our consciousness has to deterritorialize once more so that it can develop a discourse about its activities.

Note 31 refers to Guattari on the institutional object '(or "object-c")'to go along with the other part-objects, the object-a and Winnicott's object-b. Stivali quotes Laplanche and Pontalis {we have heard of them somewhere else—in What is Philosophy? Logic of Sense? } who define part-objects as 'the " type of object towards which the component instincts are directed without this implying that the person as a whole is taken as love object… [They are usually]… parts of the body, real or fantasized… and their symbolic equivalents"'. The transitional object in Winnicott refers to '"a material object with a special value for the suckling and young child, particularly when it is on the point of falling asleep (e.g. the corner of a blanket or napkin when it is sucked"'. Guattari sees this as showing the activities of a signifying machine '"which predetermines what must be good or bad for me and my peers in a given area of consumption"', a form of group subjectivity which moves beyond repeated alterity {alterity like this offers 'grids of language' which 'capture the "object - a"'}. The object-a produces individual phantasy which anchors desire to the surface of the body, but Guattari's object-c offers group phantasy, as a kind of substitute for the fantasized others [I may not have this right -- it is very dense], and this underpins his group practice [about introducing and managing alterity] and permits 'collective enunciation of group subjectivity'. This is a prerequisite for individual subjectivity.

Note 32 makes the link with Duns Scotus on the haecceity as a' mode of individuation distinct from that of a person, a thing or a subject'. It is a whole assemblage appearing in an individuated aggregate. It is defined by longitude, and latitude {in the 17th century sense, see the book on Spinoza?}, speeds and effects, 'independently of forms and subjects which belong to another plane'. It is the animal itself, as event rather than subject, in localized assemblages. There are no beginnings or ends, origins or destinations, not points but lines -- '" It is rhizome"'{referenced to TP}.

Note 33 on energetic semiotics starts out by refusing to accept thermodynamic notions, and credits Freud with the notion of semiotic energetics.

Note 34 cites as critics of becoming-woman Jardine's Gynesis, Massumi and the User's Guide, Grosz in Boundas and Olkowski ]

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