I
From the earliest texts collected in Psychoanalysis and Transversality (1972) to Chaosmosis (1992) the writings of Félix Guattari put forward an ongoing, in fact constantly-revised-from-one-piece-to-another, theoretical and pragmatic approach to the production of subjectivity; one that de-centres “the question of the subject,” traditionally conceived as “the ultimate essence of individuation, as a pure, empty, pre-reflexive apprehension of the world, a nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity – the unifier of states off consciousness,” onto “the question of subjectivity”(⦼) in terms of its “machinic “production, reproduction, and re-singularisation. Like elsewhere in Guattari (and Deleuze) the expression “machinic” stands for non-algorithmised or controlled; hence it must not be taken as a synonym of “mechanic”: modern mechanicism (and its offshoots, e.g. Pavlovian conditioning in psychology) aims at reducing reality’s complex interplay to unilinear causality.
One of the key ideas behind such approach is that there are multiple and heterogeneous “strata of subjectivation”(⧀) unconsciously and machinically produced, in the sense that the fabric in which the production of subjectivity takes place is the unconscious understood as polymorphic productive desire, hence as something not only populated by “images” (Freud) and “words” (Lacan) but consisting, more fundamentally, in all kinds of infra- and supra-individual (i.e. pre-subjective and social) affective connections that extend “machinically” throughout the social body (or what Guattari calls “socius”):
[T]he unconscious works inside individuals in their manner of perceiving the world and living their body, territory, and sex, as well as inside the couple, the family, school, neighborhood, factories, stadiums, and universities… In other words, not simply an unconscious of the specialists of the unconscious, not simply an unconscious crystallized in the past, congealed in an institutionalized discourse, but, on the contrary, an unconscious turned towards the future whose screen would be none other than the possible itself, the possible as hypersensitive to language, but also the possible hypersensitive to touch, hypersensitive to the socius, hypersensitive to the cosmos.(⧁)
The concept of the “possible” is indeed crucial in Guattari. But it does not stand against the given merely in logical terms, i.e. as that which is not but could be. Nor does it oppose the given as that which is not, whose hypothetical being would thereby imply a cero degree of growth at its outset (in terms of that which starts being only at some point). It rather implies bifurcation: “[T]he possible doesn’t exist as a purely logical matter; it doesn’t start out from nothing, either,” writes Guattari; “[i]t is organised in the form of quanta of freedom, in a sort of system of valences, the differentiation and complexity of which gives nothing away to the chains of organic chemistry or genetic codes”; plus “[i]t puts into play matters of expression that are differentiated […] [as per] their degree of deterritorialisation” (⊕). Conceptually speaking, therefore, the notions of the “possible” and “deterritorialisation” (which is originally a Guattarian term later developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus [1980]) stand in reciprocal presupposition: deterritorialisation (qua movement: the movement of breaking through any given territory by breaking off its codes and boundaries) puts at play new “quanta of freedom,” and thereby opens new possibilities or “new world(s) of possibles,” to use Guattari’s own words in the subtitle to Lines of Flight (2016).
II
Overall Guattari’s idea is that while in the modern capitalist world subjectivities are moulded, at the very least, in perceptual, affective, libidinal, and cognitive terms, it is nonetheless possible to escape their dominant encoding. As Stefan Kristensen underlines, “Guattari wrote against the generalised algorithmisation of the world.”(⊗) For, in the last instance, it is subjective – especially libnidinal – algorhythmisation that defines capitalism. Indeed capitalism is not only a mode of economic production based on dissymmetrical relations of production which allow the exploitation of the majority by a minority through the extraction of labour force from our minds and bodies and the exploitation of nature through the extraction of energy and resources from it. It is also a semiotic operator whose tentacles extend through the social tissue and which encodes what we think, feel, perceive and, above all, desire. Put otherwise: capitalism captures all libidinal energy, that is to say, it expropriates and encodes our desire, which should be able to express freely and creatively under normal conditions but is instead encoded to connect itself to objects, actions, states of being, and representations of various kinds: such and such commodities, notions like progress, personal success, wellness, etc. As Margaret Thatcher famously said back in the 1980s in respect to her (and Reagan’s) neoliberal policies, ““Economics is the method; the object is to change the heart and the soul.”(⊛)
Once deterritorialised from its “‘original’ territories, […] from its territories that are not yet subjected [assujetties] by capitalist flows,” once “fix[ed] new aims […] and put […] to work,” once “adapt[ed] […] to hierarchies and systems of exchange, and all of that by means of a particular semiotic technology”,(⦶) desire becomes docile, i.e. re-inscribed in a functional way. And for this to happen it must pass through a transitory “black whole”(⦷) whereby it loses its freedom, as shown in the diagram below:
How, then, can one escape the capitalist encoding of the libido? To begin with, it is never an “I,” or a “We” consisting in many “I”s, who rebels. It is always “something in us,” something that exceeds us qua subjects – something, be it preindividual or collective, which has not (yet) been fully captured in the biopolitical capitalist fabric. There is a moment in which, despite all rules and norms, someone, for instance, laughs too loud and inconveniently, or runs naked on the grass caring very little about the neighbours, or packs her stuff and breaks with her former life to join a shamanic revival in Siberia… In short, sooner or later what Guattari calls a “line of flight” cuts through the predictable and its “empty redundancies”,(⦿) rendering possible the otherwise. The following diagrams display the dynamics at stake in the heterogenesis of the subjectivity against its serialised reproduction and picture how this affects what I would like to call here the game of the possible:
In other words, the reproduction and counter-production of subjectivity (A) take place on asemiotic board(C) in a given pragmatic area (B). The former (C) includes the signaletic and meaningful options in which life consists. The latter (B) amounts to a section of the semiotic board (C). Thus, for example, the willingness of an indigenous tribal group to fight capitalism back is expressive of specific flows of desire:
Our ancestors […] were truly happy […] . Their mind was not set elsewhere. The white people’s words had not made their way among them[…] . [Today] [t]he forest has lost its silence[…] . Our mind is constantly attracted by white people’s merchandise. We are too often thinking about obtaining machetes, axes, fishhooks, pots, hammocks, clothes, guns, and ammunition. Young people play soccer all over the house’s central plaza while the shamans are working there[…] . They struggle to babble the white people’s ghost talk while sometimes dreaming of leaving the forest[…] . If they continue on this dark path, they will wind up drinking cachaça and become as ignorant as the white people can be[…] . Today our ears are too often set far from the forest, elsewhere […] . [W]e […] know that all the white people’s words could only disappear from our mind if they stopped invading and destroying our land. Then everything would be quiet like it used to be and we would live alone in the forest again.(⊙)
Yet, at the same time, such willingness also draws on the group’s stored knowledge or repertoire of ideas, which provides them information on what we may call their traditions (or what has managed to survive from them), their encounters with missionaries and other white men, etc. And it is limited to a concrete spatial-temporal situation with its own set of problems, which therefore constitute a specific pragmatic area (notice that indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin and Papua New Guinea do not face exactly the same problems, and that each local community deals with a specific set of issues). On this always complex board, and within pragmatic areas that are never static, for they change over time, the game of the possible(D) is played once and again, but each time with different results (= ?). There are two reasons for this. First, there are normative encoding channels (E) with their semiotic rules and dominant representations which are enforced by a given configuration of power (e.g. what such or such State expects the colonised indigenous people living within its borders to do on a daily basis). Secondly, there are always, by contrast, certain quanta of freedom, certain rebellious libidinal intensities, certain amount of “demonic” energy that can precipitate things in totally unpredicted ways. Therefore, against those who, reading him very poorly, fancy that Michel Foucault made all escape from power impossible, there are actually many things one can do, many existential options to explore, in short many ways of positioning and/or repositioning ourselves inside the pragmatic areas we inhabit — with each possible move delimiting a self-referential territory in connection to the specific flows of desire, repertories of ideas, and universes of values (F1, F2) that frame the semiotic board. Abstractly speaking, four disparate scenarios may be distinguished. The subjectivity in question can do what the power configuration in question expects everyone to do by aligning its movement with, and submitting its desire to, the dominant rules of the game — the triumph of the necessary is secured in this manner (G1). It can also block itself and drift towards self-redundancy, i.e. not move at all (G2), which can mean two different, in fact diverging, things: submissiveness to a command that requires identitarian enclosure (a hypothesis, then, not different from G1) or defiance towards command without allowing any sort of existential repositioning (e.g. remaining Maoist in the 21st century). Alternatively, a spontaneous revolutionary movement can take place as well and a “line of flight” break through the possible. It may succeed (G3) or not (G4) depending on its consistency (H), but it is safe to say that, whatever its magnitude, the space-time thus created is a hole on the dominant net’s surface. Hence in the latter case one can speak of subjective resingularisation and of the triumph of the possible, whereas G1 and G2 denote subjective reproduction and G3 an aborted resingularisation. In turn, the amount of demonic energy which is needed to short-circuit the dominant rules of the game, i.e. to provoke a semiotic cut, must be located among the expressive components that nurture all possible counter-dominant languages, ideas and behaviours, including song, dance, mime, nonsense, somatised feelings, etc. To be sure such components can be infiltrated and controlled by the dominant languages, representations, and behaviours of the despotic regime. Yet their existence makes subversion not only a distant possibility, but also an inevitable fact regardless of its intensity, proportions, and endurance.
(⦼) Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 22.
(⧀) Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader(ed. Gary Genosko; Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 197.
(⧁) Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2010, p. 10.
(⊕) Félix Guattari, Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 148.
(⊗) Stefan Kristensen, La Machine sensible (Paris: Hermann, 2017), p. 290 (our translation).
(⊛) Margaret Thatcher, May 3, 1989 interview in The Sunday Times.
(⦶) Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 36.
(⦷) Ibid., p. 44
(⦿) Ibid., p. 124
(⊙) Davu Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 159-60.