Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

Chaosmosis
an ethico-aesthetic paradigm
Felix Guattari
translated by
Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS
English translation© 1995, Power Institute, Paul Bains, and Julian Pefanis
Chaosmosis was originally published in French as Chaosmose. © 1992, Editions Galilee
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guattari, Felix.
[Chaosmose. English] Chaosmosis : an ethico-aesthetic paradigm I Felix Guattari ; translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-253-32945-0 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-253-21004-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis-Philosophy. 2. Subjectivity. I. Title. BFl 75.G81313 1995' 95-31403 194-dc20
1 2 3 4 5 00 99 98 97 96 95
On the planking, on the ship's bulwarks, on the
sea, with the course of the sun through the sky
and the ship, an unreadable and wrenching
script takes shape, takes shape and destroys
itself at the same slow pace - shadows, spines,
shafts of broken light refocused in the angles,
the triangles of a fleeting geometry that yields
to the shadow of the ocean waves. And then,
unceasingly, lives again.
Marguerite Duras
The North China Lover
Contents
1 On the production of subjectivity 1
2 Machinic heterogenesis 33
3 Schizoanalytic metamodelisation 58
4 Schizo chaosmosis 77
5 Machinic orality and virtual ecology 88
6 The new aesthetic paradigm 98
7 The ecosophic object 119
1 On the production of subjectivity
My professional activities in the field of psychotherapy, like my
political and cultural engagements, have led me increasingly to
put the emphasis on subjectivity as the product of individuals, groups and institutions.
Considering subjectivity from the point of view ofits produc
tion does not imply any return to traditional systems of binary
determination - material infrastructure/ideological super
structure. The various semiotic registers that combine to
engender subjectivity do not maintain obligatory hierarchical
relations fixed for all time. Sometimes, for example, economic
semiotisation becomes dependent on collective psychological factors -look at the sensitivity of the stock exchange to fluctu- _..,/
ations of opinion. Subjectivity is in fact plural and polyphonic - to use Mikhail Bakhtin's expression. It recognises no domi
nant or determinant instance guiding all other forms according to a univocal causality.
At least three types of problem prompt us to enlarge the def
inition of subjectivity beyond the classical opposition between individual subject and society, and in so doing, revise the mod- t: els of the unconscious
currently in circulation: ,the irruption of \
2 Chaosmosis
subjective factors at the forefront of current events, the massive
· development of machinic productions of subjectivity and, final
ly, the recent prominence of ethological and ecological perspec
tives on human subjectivity.
Subjective factors have always held an important place in

the course of history. But it seems that with the global diffusion
of the mass media they are beginning to play a dominant role.
We will only give a few brief examples here. The immense
movement unleashed by the Chinese students at Tiananmen
Square obviously had as its goal the slogans of political democ
ratisation. But it is equally certain that the contagious affective
charges it bore far surpassed simple ideological demands. A whole lifestyle, collective ethic and conception of social rela
tions (derived largely from Western images) were set into motion. And in the long run tanks won't be able to stop itl As in
Hungary or Poland, collective existential mutation will have
the last word! All the same, large movements of subjectivation
don't necessarily develop in the direction of emancipation. The
massive subjective revolution which has been developing
among the Iranian people for more than ten years is focused on
religious archaisms and generally conservative social attitudes
- particularly with regard to the position of women (this is a
sensitive issue in France, because of the events in the Maghreb and the repercussions of these repressive attitudes to women in
the area of immigration).
In the Eastern bloc, the fall of the Iron Curtain didn't hap
pen as the result of armed insurrection but through the crys
tallisation of an immense <.Q!lec1i\Te desire annihilating the
mental substrate of the post-Stalin totalitarian system. This is a
phenomenon of extreme complexity, since it intermingles
emancipatory aspirations with retrogressive, conservative - even fascist - drives of a nationalistic, ethnic and religious
nature. In this upheaval, how will the populations of central

On the production of subjectivity 3
Europe and the Eastern bloc overcome the bitter deception the
capitalist West has reserved for them until now? History will
tell us - admittedly a History full of unpleasant surprises but,
why not - about a subsequent renewal of social struggles! By
contrast, how murderous the Gulf War will have been! One
could almost speak of genocide, since this war led to the exter
mination of many more Iraqis (counting all ethnic groups)
than there were victims of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. With the passage of time it seems clear
that what was at stake was an attempt to bring the Arab popu
lations to heel and reclaim world opinion: it had to be demon
strated that the Yankee way ofsubjectivation could be imposed
by the combined power of the media and arms.
Generally, one can say that contemporary history is increas -� ingly dominated by rising demands for subjective singularity !1 quarrels
- over
language, autonomist d;�;,-�sues of �ation-'.i :I alism and of the nation, which, in total ambiguity, express on·
the one hand an aspiration for national liberation, but also
manifest themselves in what I would call conservative reterri- •·
t9riallsations of subjectivity. A certain universal representation._
of subjectivity, incarnated by capitalist colonialism in both East
and West, has gone bankrupt - although it's not yet possible ..
to fully measure the scale of such a failure. Today, as everyone
knows, the growth of nationalism and fundamentalism in Arab ,
and Muslim countries may have incalculable consequences not
only on international relations, but on the subjective
economies of hundreds of millions of individuals. It's the whole
problematic of disarray as well as the mounting demands of the
Third World, the countries of the South, which are thus
stamped with an agonising question mark.
As things stand, sociology, economic science, political sci ence and legal studies appear poorly equipped to account for
4 Chaosmosis
this mixture of archaic attachments to cultural traditions that
nonetheless aspire to the technological and scientific modernity
characterising the contemporary subjective cocktail.
Traditional psychoanalysis, for its part, is hardly better placed
to confront these problems, due to its habit of reducing social
facts to psychological mechanisms. In such conditions it
appears opportune to forge a more transversalist conception of
subjectivity, one which would permit us to understand both its
idiosyncratic territorialised couplings (Existential Territories)
and its opening onto value systems (Incorporeal Universes)
with their social and cultural implications.
Should we keep the semiotic productions of the mass media,
informatics, telematics and robotics separate from psychological
subjectivity? I don't think so. Just as social machines can be
grouped under the general title of Collective Equipment, techno
logical machines of information and communication operate at
the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and
intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious
fantasms. Recognition of these machinic dimensions of subjecti
vation leads us to insist, in our attempt at redefinition, on the
heterogeneity of the components leading to the production of subjectivity. Thus one finds in it: 1. Signifying semiological com
ponents which appear in the family, education, the environ ment, religion, art, sport . .. 2. Elements constructed by the media industry, the cinema,
etc., 3. A-signifying semiological
dimensions that trigger informational sign machines, and that function in parallel or independently of the fact that they pro
duce and convey significations and denotations, and thus
escape from strictly linguistic axiomatics. The different currents
of structuralism have given neither autonomy nor specificity to
this a-signifying regime, although authors like Julia Kristeva or
Jacques Derrida have shed some light on the relative autonomy
of this sort of component. But in general. the a-signifying econo-

my of language has been reduced to what I call sign machines,
to the linguistic, significational economy of language. This ten dency is particularly clear with Roland Barthes who equates the
elements of language and narrative segments with figures of
Expression, and thus confers on linguistic semiology a primacy
over all other semiotics. It was a grave error on the part of the
structuralist school to try to put everything connected with the
psyche under the control of the linguistic signifier!
Te�hnological transformationa oblige us to be aware of both
qniversalising and reductionist homogenisations of subjectivity and of a heterogenetic tendency, that is to say, of a reinforce
ment of the heterogeneity and singularisation of its compo
nents. Thus "computer-aided design" leads to the production of
images opening on to unprecedented plastic Universes - I am
thinking, for example, of Matta's work with the graphic palette
- or to the solution of mathematical problems which would
have been quite unimaginable a few years ago. But then again,
we should be on guard against progressivist illusions or visions
which are systematically pessimistic. The machinic production
of subjectivity can work for the better or for the worse. There
exists an anti-modernist attitude which involves a massive
rejection of technological innovation, particularly as it concerns
the information revolution. It's impossible to judge such a
machinic evolution either positively or negatively; everything
depends on its articulation within collective assemblages of
enunciation. At best there is the creation, or invention, of new
Universes ofreference; at the worst there is the deadening influ
ence of the mass media to which millions of individuals are cur
rently condemned. Technological developments together with social experimentation in these new domains are perhaps capa
ble of leading us out of the current period of oppression and into a post-media era characterised by the reappropriation and resin
gularisation of the use of media. (Access to data-banks, video

6 Chaosmosis
libraries, interactivity between participants, etc.)

The same movement towards a polyphonic and heterogenetic
comprehension of subjectivity leads us to consider certain aspects of contemporary research into ethology and ecology. Daniel Stern, in The
Interpersonal World of the Infant, 1 has
notably explored the pre-verbal subjective formations of
infants. He shows that these are not at all a matter of "stages" in the Freudian sense, but of levels of subjectivation which
maintain themselves in parallel throughout life. He thus rejects
the overrated psychogenesis of Freudian complexes, which have been presented as the structural "Universals" of subjectiv
ity. Furthermore, he emphasises the inherently trans-subjec
tive character of an infant's early experiences, which do not
dissociate the feeling of self from the feeling of the other. A
dialectic between "sharable affects" and "non-sharable affects"
thus structures the emergent phases of subjectivity. A nascent subjectivity, which we will continually find in dreams, delire, creative exaltation,
or the feeling oflove ...
Social ecology and mental ecology have found privileged sites of exploration in the experiences of institutional psy
chotherapy. I am obviously thinking of the clinic at La Borde,
where I have worked for a long time; everything there is set up
so that psychotic patients live in a climate of activity and
assume responsibility, not only with the goal of developing an
ambience of communication, but also in order to create local
centres for collective subjectivation. Thus it's not simply a mat ter ofremodelling a patient's subjectivity - as it existed before a psychotic crisis - but
of a production sui generis. For exam ple, certain psychotic patients, coming from poor agricultural
backgrounds, will be invited to take up plastic arts, drama,
video, music, etc., whereas until then, these universes had been
unknown to them. On the other hand, bureaucrats and intel-

lectuals will find themselves attracted to material work, in the
kitchen, garden, pottery, horse riding club. The important
thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of
expression, but the constitution of ��lllJ?l�,xespf s.ubjectivatic;m: multiple exchanges between igdividual-group-machine. These
complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recom
posing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repeti- . tive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise them-
'
selves. Grafts of transference 0perate in this way, not issuing
from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystallised into
structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates
a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of
subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms
from the palette. In such a context, the most heterogeneous components may work towards a patient's positive evolution:
relations with architectural space; economic relations; the co
management by patient and carer of the different vectors of
treatment; taking advantage of all occasions opening onto the

outside world; a processual exploitation of event-centred "sin
gularities" - everything which can contribute to the creation
of an authentic relation with the other. To each of these com
ponents of the caring institution there corresponds a necessary
practice. We are not confronted with a subjectivity given as in
itself, but with processes of the realisation of autonomy, or of autopoiesis (in a somewhat different sense from the one
Francisco Varela gives this term2).
Let us now examine an example of the use of the psyche's etho
logical and ecological resources in the domain of family psy chotherapy. We are borrowing this example from a movement
which, around Mony Elkaim, is attempting to free itself from
the grip of systemic theories that circulate in Anglo-Saxon
countries and in Italy. 3 Here also the inventiveness of treat-

8 Chaosmosis
ment distances us from scientific paradigms and brings us clos
er to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Therapists get involved,
take risks and put their own fantasms into operation, creating a
paradoxical climate of existential authenticity accompanied by
a playful freedom and simulacra. Family therapy produces sub jectivity in the most artificial way imaginable. This can be
observed during training sessions, when the therapists impro
vise psychodramatic scenes. Here, the scene implies a layering
of enunciation: a vision of oneself as concrete embodiment; a
subject of enunciation which doubles the subject of the state
ment and the distribution of roles; a collective management of
the game; an interlocution with observers commenting on the scene; and finally, video which through feedback restores the
totality of these superposed levels. This type of performance
favours the relinquishment of a "realist" attitude which would
apprehend the lived scenes as actually embodied in family
structures. This multi-faceted theatrical aspect allows us to
grasp the artificial and creative character of the production of
subjectivity. It should be emphasised that the video is always
within sight of the therapists. Even when the camera is
switched off, they develop the habit of observing certain semi
otic manifestations which would escape normal observation.
The ludic face-to-face encounter with patients and the accep
tance of singularities developed in this sort of therapy distin
guishes it from the attitude of the traditional psychoanalyst
with an averted gaze, and even from classical psychodrama.
Whether one considers contemporary history, machinic semi

otic productions, the ethology of infancy, or social and mental
ecology, we witness the same questioning of subjective individ uation, which certainly survives, but is wrought by collective
assemblages of enunciation. At this stage, the provisional defin ition of subjectivity I would like to propose as the most encom-
passing would be: "The ensemble of conditions which render
possible the emergence of individual and/ or collective instances
as self-referential existential Territories, adjacent, or in a delim
iting relation, to an alterity that is itself subjective." We know
that in certain social and semiological contexts, subjectivity
becomes individualised; persons, taken as responsible for them
selves, situate themselves within relations of alterity governed
by familial habits, local customs, juridical laws, etc. In other
conditions, subjectivity is colledive - which does not, howev
er, mean that it becomes exclusively social. The term "collec
tive" should be understood in the sense of a multiplicity that
deploys itself as much beyond the individual, on the side of the
socius, as before the person, on the side of preverbal intensities,
indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of delimited sets.
The conditions of production sketched out in this redefini
tion thus together imply: human inter-subjective instances
manifested by language; suggestive and identificatory exam
ples from ethology; institutional interactions of different
natures; machinic apparatuses (for example, those involving
computer technology); incorporeal Universes of reference such
as those relative to music and the plastic arts. This non-human
pre-personal part of subjectivity is crucial since it is from this
that its heterogenesis can develop. It would be to misjudge

Deleuze and Foucault - who emphasised the non-human part
of subjectivity - to suspect them of taking anti-humanist posi tions I That's not the issue. Rather, it's a question of being
aware of the existence of m�shL�es of s11bjectivatio� which
<!o_n_'t simply WQrk within the "the f&culties of _!_ht:i �oul," inter
personal relations or intra-familial complexes. Subjectivity does
not only produce itself through the psychogenetic stages of psy
choanalysis or the "mathemes" of the Unconscious, but also in the large-scale social machines of language and the mass
media- which cannot be described as human. A certain bal-

1 0 Chaosmosis
ance still needs to be struck between structuralist discoveries - which are certainly not unimportant - and their pragmatic
application, so as not to flounder in the social abandon of post-

"____ -.,_ --"-- ,modernism.
With his concept of the Unconscious Freud postulated the existence of a hidden continent of the psyche, where instinctu
al, affective and cognitive options in large part would be
played out. Today we can't dissociate the theories of the Unconscious from the psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic,
institutional and literary practices which make reference to it. The Unconscious has become an institution, "Collective
Equipment" understood in a broadest sense. One finds oneself
rigged out with an unconscious the moment one dreams,
delires, forgets or makes a slip of the tongue ... Freudian dis coveries - which I prefer to call inventions - have undoubt
edly enriched the ways we can approach the psyche. I am cer tainly not speaking pejoratively of invention! In the same way
that Christians invented a new form of subjectivation (courtly
chivalry and romanticism, a new love, a new nature) and Bolshevism a new sense of class, the various Freudian sects
have secreted new ways of experiencing - or even of produc ing - hysteria, infantile neurosis, psychosis, family contlict,
the reading of myths, etc. The Freudian Unconscious has itself
evolved in the course of its history: it has lost the seething
richness and disquieting atheism of its origins and, in its struc turalist version, has been recentered on the analysis of the self,
its adaptation to society, and its conformity with a signifying
order.
My perspective involves shifting the human and social sciences
from scientific paradigms towards ethico-aesthetic paradigms.
It's no longer a question of determining whether the Freudian
Unconscious or the Lacanian Unconscious provide scientific

On the production of subjectivity 1 1
answers to the problems of the psyche. From now on these
models, along with the others, will only be considered in terms
of the production of subjectivity - inseparable as much from
the technical and institutional apparatuses which promote it as
from their impact on psychiatry, university teaching or the
mass media ... In a more general way, one has to admit that
every individual and social group conveys its own system of
modelising subjectivity; that is, a certain cartography - com
posed of cognitive references as well as mythical, ritual and
symptomatological references - with which it positions itself
in relation to its affects and anguishes, and attempts to manage
its inhibitions and drives.
Psychoanalytic treatment confronts us with a multiplicity
of cartographies: that of the analyst and analysand, and of the
family, the neighbourhood, etc. It is the interaction of these
cartographies that will provide regimes to the different assem
blages of subjectivation. None of them, whether fantasmatic,
delirious or theoretical, can be said to express an objective

knowledge of the psyche. All of them are important insofar as
they support a certain context, a certain framework, an exis tential armature of the subjective situation. Our question here
is not simply of a speculative order, but is posed in very practi
n
us o 'the
cal ways: how appropriate are concepts of the Unconcious, �ffered to psychoanalytic "market," to actual condi tions of the production of
subjectivity? Should they be trans
formed, should new ones be invented? This question of modeli
sation (more exactly of psychological metamodelisation) leads
to an evaluation of the usefulness of these cartographic instru
ments - these concepts from psychoanalysis, systems theory,
etc. Do we use them as a grid for an exclusive universal read
ing, with scientific claims, or as partial instruments, in combi
nation with others, the ultimate criterion being of a functional
order? What processes unfold in a consciousness affected by the

1 2 Chaosmosis
shock of the unexpected? How can a mode of thought, a capaci
ty to apprehend, be modified when the surrounding world itself is in the throes of change ? How are the representations of an
exterior world changed when it is itself in the process of chang
ing? The Freudian Unconscious is inseparable from a society
attached to its past, to its phallocratic traditions and subjective
invariants. Contemporary upheavals undoubtedly call for a
modelisation turned more towards the future and the emer
gence of new social and aesthetic practices. The devaluation of
the meaning of life provokes the fragmentation of the self
image: its representations become confused and contradictory.
Faced with these upheavals the best attitude would be to envis
age the work of cartography and psychological modelisation in
a dialectical relation with the individuals and groups con
cerned; the crucial thing is to move in the direction of co-man
agement in the production of subjectivity, to distrust sugges
tion and the attitudes of authority which occupy such a large
place in psychoanalysis, in spite of the fact that it claims to
have escaped them.
A long time ago I renounced the Conscious-Unconscious
dualism of the Freudian topoi and all the Manichean opposi
tions correlative to Oedipal triangulation and to the castration
complex. I opted for an Unconscious superposing multiple stra
ta of subjectivation, heterogeneous strata of variable extension

;and consistency. Thus a more "schizo" Unconscious, one liber \ated from familial shackles, turned more towards actual praxis r;t:han towards
fixations on, and regressions to, the past. An \pnconscious of Flux and of abstract machines rather than an pnconscious of structure and
language. I don't, however, con �ider my "schizoanalytic cartographies"4 to be scientific theo hes. Just as an artist borrows from his precursors
and contem
poraries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to
take or reject my concepts freely. The important thing is not the

final result but the fact that the multicomponential cartograph
ic method can co-exist with the process of subjectivation, and
that a reappropriation, an autopoiesis, of the means of produc
tion of subjectivity can be made possible.
Of course, I am not equating either psychosis to the work of art or the psychoanalyst to the artist! I am only emphasising
that the existential registers concerned here involve a dimen
sion of autonomy of an aesthetic order. We are faced with an
important ethical choice: eithe� we objectify, reify, "scientifise"
subjectivity, or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the dimen
sion of its processual creativity. Kant established that the
judgement of taste involved subjectivity and its relation to the other in a certain attitude of "disinterestedness."5 But it is not
enough to designate the categories of disinterestedness and
freedom as the essential dimension of the unconscious aesthetic
without clarifying their active mode of insertion into the psy
che. How do certain semiotic segments achieve their autono
my, start to work for themselves and to secrete new fields of ref
erence? It is from such a rupture that an existential singularisa
tion correlative to the genesis of new coefficients of freedom will
become possible. This detachment of an ethico-aesthetic "par
tial object" from the field of dominant significations corre
sponds both to the promotion of a mutant desire and to the
achievement of a certain disinterestedness. Here I would like to
establish a bridge between the concept of a partial object (object
"a" as theorised by Lacan) that marks the autonomisation of the components of unconscious subjectivity, and the subjective
autonomisation relative to the aesthetic object. At this point we
rediscover a problematic highlighted by Mikha'il Bakhtin in his first theoretical essay6 of 1924: the function of enunciative
appropriation of aesthetic form by the autonomisation of cogni
tive or ethical content and the realisation of this content in an aesthetic object - what I wil1 call a partial enunciator. I am
1 4 Chaos mos is
attempting to draw the psychoanalytic partial object that is
adjacent to the body - the point of coupling of the drive -
towards a partial enunciation. The expansion of the notion of
partial object, to which Lacan contributed with the inclusion of
the gaze and the voice in the object "a", needs to be followed
up. This entails expanding the category to cover the full range
of nuclei of subjective autonomisation relative to group sub
jects, and to instances of the production of subjectivity (machinic, ecological, archictectural, religious, etc.). Bakhtin ]described a
transference of subjectivation operating between \the author and the contemplator of a work of art- the "spec ;/tator" in Marcel Duchamp's
j
sense. According to Bakhtin, in . this movement the "consumer" in some way becomes co-cre \ator; the aesthetic form only achieving this
result through the
device of an isolating or separating function of such a kind that
the expressive material becomes formally creative. The content
of the work of art detaches itself from its connotations that are
as much cognitive as aesthetic: "isolation or detachment
relates not to the material, not to the work as thing, but to its
significance, to its content, which is freed from certain neces
sary connections with the unity of nature and the unity of the
ethical event of being. "7 There is tbus_a c_ertain tyIJe Q[frag ment of content that "taJrns possession ofthe author" to engen
der a certain mode of aesthetic enunciation. In music, for example, as Bakhtin emphasises, isolation and invention can
not be axiologically related to the material: "It is not the sound of acoustics that is isolated, and not the mathematical number
of the compositional order that is made up. What is detached
and fictively irreversible is the event of striving, the axiological
tension, which actualises itself thanks to that without any
impediment, and becomes consummated."8 In the domain of
poetry, in order to detach itself, autonomise itself, culminate
itself, creative subjectivity will tend to seize upon:

1. the sonority of the word, its musical aspect; 2. its material significations with their nuances and variants; 3. its verbal connections; 4. its
emotional, intonational and volitional aspects; 5. the feeling of verbal activity in the active generation of a sig
nifying sound, including motor elements of articulation,
gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement in which the
whole organism together with the activity and soul of the
word are swept along in the�r concrete unity.
And it is this last aspect, declares Bakhtin, that encompasses all
the others.9
These penetrating analyses can lead to an extension of our
approach to partial subjectivation. Equally, we find with
Bakhtin the idea of irreversibility of the aesthetic object and
implicitly the idea of autopoiesis - notions truly necessary to
the analysis of Unconscious formations, pedagogy, psychiatry,
and more generally to a social field devastated by capitalist sub
jectivity. Thus it is not only in the context of music and poetry
that we see the work of such fragments detached from content,
fragments which I place in the category of "existential
refrains." The polyphony of modes of subjectivation actually
�orresIJonds to a multiplicity of ways of "keeping time." Other
1'-.__,, ---,,, --" �
.
rhythmics are thus led to crystallise existenUal assemblages,

which they embody and singularise.
The simplest examples of refrains delimiting existential
Territories can be found in the ethology of numerous bird
species. Certain specific song sequences serve to seduce a sexual
partner, warn off intruders, or announce the arrival of preda tors.10 Each time this involves marking out a well-defined func
tional space. In archaic societies, it is through rhythms, chants,
dances, masks, marks on the body, ground and totems, on ritu al occasions and with mythical references, that other kinds of
collective existential Territories are circumscribed.11 One finds
1 6 Chaosmosis
these sorts ofrefrains in Greek Antiquity with the "nomes" that
constituted, in a way, the "signature tunes" the banners and
seals for professional associations. But we all familiar with such
crossings of subjective thresholds triggered by a catalysing tem
poral module that plunges us into sadness or indeed, into an ambience of gaiety and excitement. What we are aiming at
with this concept of refrain aren't just massive affects, but
hyper-complex refrains, catalysing the emergence of incorpore al Universes such as those of music or mathematics, and crys
tallising the most deterritorialised existential Territories. This
type of transversalist refrain evades strict spatio-temporal
delimitation. With it, time ceases to be exterior in order to become an intensive nucleus [foyer] of temporalisation. From
this perspective, universal time appears to be no more than a
hypothetical projection, a time of generalised equivalence, a
"flattened" capitalistic time; what is important are these partial
modules of temporalisation1 operating in diverse domains (bio
logical, ethological, socio-cultural, machinic, cosmic ... ), and
out of which complex refrains constitute highly relative exis
tential synchronies. /�o illustrate this mode of production of polyphonic subjec- . tivity, where a complex refrain plays a dominant role, consider
the example of televisual consumption. When I watch televi sion, I exist at the intersection: 1. of a perceptual fascination
provoked by the screen's luminous animation which borders on the hypnotic,12 2. of a captive relation with the narrative content of the program,
associated with a lateral awareness of
surrounding events (water boiling on the stove, a child's cry, I \ the telephone ... ), 3. of a world of fantasms occupying my day � j dreams. My
feeling of personal identity is thus pulled in differ- l ent directions. How can I maintain a relative sense of unicity, I despite the diversity of
components of subjectivation that pass l!hr9�ugh me? It's a question of the refrain that fixes me in front
of the screen, henceforth constituted as a projective existential
node. My identity has become that of the speaker, the person who speaks from the television. Like Bakhtin, I would say that
the refrain is not based on elements of form, material or ordi
nary signification, but on the detachment of an existential
"motif" (or leitmotiv) which installs itself like an "attractor"
within a sensible and significational chaos. The different com
ponents conserve their heterogeneity, but are nevertheless cap
tured by a refrain which couples them to the existential
Territory of my self. In the case of neurotic identity, sometimes
the refrain develops into a "hardened" representation, for
example, an obsessive ritual. If for any reason this machine of
subjectivation is threatened, the whole personality may
implode; this occurs in psychosis where the partial components
move off on delirious, hallucinatory lines .... The paradoxical
concept of a complex refrain will enable us, in psychoanalytic
treatment, to refer an interpretive event, no longer to Universals or mathemes, nor to preestablished structures of
subjectivity, but rather to what I call a constellation of
Universes. This does not involve Universes of reference in gen eral, but incorporeal domains of entities we detect at the same
time that we produce them, and which appear to have been
always there, from the moment we engender them. Here is the
real paradox of these Universes: they are given in the creative
moment, like a hecceity freed from discursive time - nuclei of
eternity lodged between instants. What's more, over and above the elements of the situation {familial, sexual, conflictual), they
involve accounting for the projection of all the lines of virtuali ty opening up from the event of their appearance. Take a sim ple example: a patient
in the course of treatment remains stuck
on a problem, going around in circles, and coming up against a
wall. One day he says, without giving it much thought: "I've been thinking of taking up driving lessons again, I haven't dri-
1 8 Chaosmosis
ven for years"; or, "I feel like learning word processing." A
remark of this kind may remain unnoticed in a traditional con
ception of analysis. However, this kind of singularity can
become a key, activating a complex refrain, which will not only
modify the immediate behaviour of the patient, but open up
new fields of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with
long lost acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, regaining self
confidence .... In this, a rigid neutrality or non-intervention
would be negative; it's sometimes necessary to jump at the
opportunity, to approve, to run the risk of being wrong, to give
it a go, to say, "yes, perhaps this experience is important. "
Respond to the event as the potential bearer of new constella

tions of Universes of reference. This is why I have opted for
pragmatic interventions orientated towards the construction of
subjectities, towards the production of fields of virtualities
which wouldn't simply be polarised by a symbolic hermeneutic
centered on childhood.
In this conception of analysis, time is not something to be
endured; it is activated, orientated, the object of qualitative
change. Analysis is no longer the transferential interpretation
of symptoms as a function of a preexisting, latent content, but
the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating
existence. A singularity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a fragmenta
tion, the detachment of a semiotic content - in a dadaist or
surrealist manner - can originate mutant nuclei of subjectiva
tion. Just as chemistry has to purify complex mixtures to
extract atomic and homogeneous molecular matter, thus creat
ing an infinite scale of chemical entities that have no prior exis
tence, the same is true in the "extraction" and "separation" of
aesthetic subjectivities or partial objects, in the psychoanalytic
sense, that make an immense complexification of subjectivity
possible - harmonies, polyphonies, counterpoints, rhythms

and existential orchestrations, until now unheard and
unknown. An essentially precarious, deterritorialising com
plexification, constantly threatened by a reterritorialising sub
sidenGe; above all in the contemporary context where the pri
macy of information fluxes that are machinically engendered threaten to lead to a generalised dissolution of old existential
Territorialities. In the early phases of industrial society the
"demonic" still continued to flower, but since then mystery has
become a rarer and rarer commodity. One need only evoke the
desperate quest of Witkiewicz to grasp an ultimate "strange
ness of being" which literally appeared to slip between his fin
gers. In these conditions, the task of the poetic function, in an
enlarged sense, is to recompose artificially rarefied, resingu
larised Universes of subjectivation. For them, it's not a matter
of transmitting messages, investing images as aids to identifica
tion, patterns of behaviour as props for modelisation proce
dures, but of catalysing existential operators capable of acquir
ing consistence and persistence.

This poetic-existential catalysis that we find at work in the
midst of scriptural, vocal, musical or plastic discursivities
engages quasi-synchronically the enunciative crystallisation of
the creator, the interpreter and the admirer of the work of art,
like analyst and patient. Its efficiency lies in its capacity to pro
mote active, processual ruptures within semiotically struc
tured, significational and denotative networks, where it will put emergent subjectivity to work, in Daniel Stern's sense.
When it is effectively triggered in a given enunciative area -
that is, situated in a historical and geo-political perspective -
such an analytico-poetic function establishes itself as a mutant
nucleus of auto-referentiality and auto-valorisation. This is why we must always consider it in two ways: 1. as a molecular rupture, an imperceptible
bifurcation capable of overthrowing
20 Chaosmosis
the framework of dominant redundancies, the organisation of the "already classified" or, if one prefers, the classical order. 2.
in the way that it selects certain segments of these very chains of
redundancy, to confer on them the a-signifying existential func
tion I have just evoked, thereby "refraining" them and producing
virulent, partial fragments of enunciation operating as "shifters"
of subjectivation. The quality of the base material matters little
here, as one can see in repetitive music or Butoh dance, which, as Marcel Duchamp would have wished, are turned entirely
towards "the spectator." What does matter is the mutant rhyth
mic impetus of a temporalisation able to hold together the het
erogeneous components of a new existential edifice.
Beyond the poetic function, the question of the apparatuses
of subjectivation presents itself. And, more precisely, what
must characterise them so that they abandon seriality - in
Sartre's sense - and enter into processes of singularisation
which restore to existence what we might call its auto-essen
tialisation. With the fading antagonisms of the Cold War, we
enter a period when serious threats, posed by our productivist
society to the human species, appear more distinctly. Our sur
vival on this planet is not only threatened by environmental
damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social solidarity
and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be re
invented. The refoundation of politics will have to pass through
the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three
ecologies - the environment, the socius and the psyche. We
cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere
and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the
problem of population control, without a mutation of mentali ty, without promoting a new art ofliving in society. We cannot
conceive of international discipline in this domain without
solving the problem of hunger and hyperinflation in the Third
World. We cannot conceive of a collective recomposition of the

socius, correlative to a resingularisation of subjectivity, with
out a new way of conceiving political and economic democra
cies that respect cultural differences - without multiple molec
ular -revolutions. We cannot hope for an amelioration in the
living conditions of the human species without a considerable
effort to improve the feminine condition. The entire division of
labour, its modes of va:lorisation and finalities need to be
rethought. Production for the sake of production - the obses
sion with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market
or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The
only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a
subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a
continuous fashion. The productive apparatuses of subjectivity
can exist at the level of mega poles as easily as at the level of an
individual's language games. And to learn the intimate work
ings of this production, these ruptures of meaning that are
auto-foundational of existence - poetry today might have
more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences
and psychoanalysis combined.
That contemporary social transformations happen on a
large scale by a relatively progressive mutation of subjectivity,
or in the moderately conservative fashion one sees in the
Eastern bloc, or in the clearly reactionary, indeed neo-fascistic manner in the Middle East, and that, at the same time, such
changes can take place on a molecular level, microphysical in
Foucault's sense, in political activity, in analytic treatment, in
establishing an apparatus changing the life of the neighbour
hood, the way a school or psychiatric institution functions -
the synergy of these two processes calls for a departure from
structuralist reductionism and a refoundation of the problem atic of subjectivity. A partial subjectivity - pre-personal, poly
phonic, collective and machinic. Fundamentally, the question
of enunciation gets decentered in relation to that of human

22 Chaosmosis
individuation. Enunciation becomes correlative not only to the
emergence of a logic of non-discursive intensities, but equally to a pathic incorporation-agglomeration of these vectors of par
tial subjectivity. Thus it involves rejecting the habitually uni

versalising claims of psychological modelisation. The so-called
scientific content of psychoanalytic or systemic theories (as
well as mythological or religious modelising, or even the
mythological models of systematic delire ... ) are essentially valuable for their existentialising function, that is, for the pro
duction of subjectivity. In these conditions, theoretical activity
is reorientated towards a metamodelisation capable of taking into account the diversity ofmodelising systems. In particular it
involves situating the concrete incidence of capitalistic subjec
tivity (the subjectivity of generalised equivalence) within the
context of the continued development of the mass media,
Collective Equipment and the information revolution - a sub jectivity which seems likely to blot out, with its greyness, the
faintest traces and last recesses of the planet's mysteries.
So we are proposing to decentre the question of the sub
ject onto the question of subjectivity. Traditionally, the sub
ject was conceived as the ultimate essence of individuation,
as a pure, empty, prereflexive apprehension of the world, a
nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity - the unifier of states
of consciousness. With subjectivity we place the emphasis
instead on the founding instance of intentionality. This involves taking the relation between subject and object by the middle and foregrounding the
expressive instance (or
the interpretant of the Peircean triad). Hereafter, this is
where the question of Content will reside. Content partici
pates in subjectivity by giving consistency to the ontological
quality of Expression. It is in this reversibility of Content and
Expression where what I call the existentialising function
resides. Thus, we will start with the primacy of enunciative

substance over the couplet of Expression and Content.
I believe I've found a valid alternative to the structuralism
inspired by Saussure, one that relies on the Expression/Content
distinction formulated by Hjelmslev,13 that is to say, based pre cisely on the potential reversibility of Expression and Content.
Going beyond Hjelmslev, I intend to consider a multiplicity of
expressive instances, whether they be of the order ofExpression
or Content. Rather than playing on the Expression/Content
opposition which, with Hjelmslev, still repeats Saussure's signi
fier/signified couplet, this would involve putting a multiplicity of components of Expression, or substances of Expression in
parallel, in polyphony. There is a difficulty in that Hjelmslev
himself used the category of substance in a tripartite division
between matter, substance and form relating on one hand to Expression and on the other to Content. With Hjelmslev, the
connection between Expression and Content is realised at the

level of the form of Expression and form of Content, which he
identified with each other. This common and commuting form is a bit strange but it represents, in my opinion, a brilliant intu
ition, posing the question of the existence of a formal machine,
transversal to every modality of Expression and Content. There is then, a bridge, a transversality between on one side the
machine of phonemic and syntagmatic discursivity of Expression proper to language, and on the other, the division of
semantic unities of Content (for example, the way classification
of colours or animal categories is established). I call this com mon form a deterritorialised machine, an abstract machine.
The notion of an abstract semiotic machine isn't new: we find it in Chomsky who postulates its existence at the root of lan
guage. But this concept, this Expression/Content opposition -
as well as the Chomskian concept of the abstract machine - remained too bound up with language. For our part, we would
24 Chaosmosis
like to resituate semiology within the scope of an expanded,
machinic conception which would free us from a simple lin guistic opposition between Expression/Content, and allow us to
integrate into enunciative assemblages an indefinite number of
substances of Expression, such as biological codings or organi
sational forms belonging to the socius. From this perspective,
the question of enunciative substance should also be outside
the framework of Hjelmslev's tripartite division, matter-sub stance-form (form casting itself "like a net" over matter, there
by engendering the substance of Expression and Content). It
would involve shattering the concept of substance in a pluralis
tic manner, and would promote the category of substance of
Expression not only in semiology and semiotics, but in domains
that are extra-linguistic, non-human, biological, technological,
aesthetic, etc. The problem of the enunciative assemblage
would then no longer be specific to a semiotic register but
would traverse an ensemble of heterogeneous expressive mate
rials. Thus a transversality between enunciative substances
which can be, on one hand, linguistic, but on the other, of a
machinic order, developing from "non-semiotically formed
matter," to use another of Hjelmslev's expressions. Machinic
subjectivity, the machinic assemblage of enunciation, agglom
erates these different partial enunciations and installs itself, as
it were, before and alongside the subject-object relation. It has,
moreover, a collective character, it is multi-componential, a
machinic multiplicity. Finally, it includes incorporeal dimen sions, which perhaps constitutes its most problematic aspect,
and one that Noam Chomsky only touches on in his attempt to
make use of the Medieval concept of Universals.
Expressive, linguistic and non-linguistic substances install
themselves at the junction of discursive chains (belonging to a

finite, preformed world, the world of the Lacanian Other) and
incorporeal registers with infinite, creationist virtualities

(which have nothing to do with Lacanian "mathemes"). It is in
this zone of intersection that subject and object fuse and estab
lish their foundations. It concerns a given that phenomenolo
gists have addressed when they demonstrate that intentionali ty is inseparable from its object and involves a "before" in the
discursive, subject-object relation. Some psychologists have
focused on the relations of empathy and transitivism in infancy
and psychosis. Lacan, in his early works, when still influenced
by phenomenology, evoked the importance of this type of phe
nomenon. Generally, one can say that psychoanalysis is born
at this point of object-subject fusion that we see at work in sug
gestion, hypnosis and hysteria. It is an attempt at reading sub
jective transitivism that is at the origin of Freudian theory and
practice. Moreover, anthropologists, since the era of Levi Bruhl, Priezluski, etc., have shown that in archaic societies, there was what they call
"participation," a collective subjectivi
ty investing a certain type of object, and putting itself in the
position of an existential group nucleus. In studies on new
forms of art (like Deleuze's on cinema) we will see, for example,
movement-images and time-images constituting the seeds of the production of subjectivity. We are not in the presence of a
passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectiva
tion. We are actually confronted by a non-discursive; pathic
knowledge, which presents itself as a subjectivity that one
actively meets, an absorbant subjectivity given immediately in
all its complexity. We can trace this intuition to Bergson, who
shed light on the non-discursive experience of duration by
opposing it to a time cut up into present, past and future,
according to spatial schemas. It is true that this pathic subjec
tivity, before the subject-object relation, continues to self-actu
alise through energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates, in the
world of language and through multiple mediations; but what
allows us to grasp the force involved in the production of sub-

26 Chaosmosis
jectivity is the apprehension through it of a pseudo-discursivity,
a detournement of discursivity, which installs itself at the foun dation of the subject-object relation, in a subjective pseudo
mediation.
This pathic subjectivation, at the root of all modes of subjec
tivation, is overshadowed in rationalist, capitalistic subjectivity

which tends to systematically circumvent it. Science is con
structed by bracketing these factors of subjectivation, which
achieve Expression only when certain discursive links are put
outside of signification. Freudianism, although impregnated
with scientism, can, in its early stages, be characterised as a
rebellion against a positivist reductionism which tended to do
without these pathic dimensions. In Freudianism the symptom,
the lapsus or joke are conceived as detached objects allowing a
mode of subjectivity, which has lost its consistency, to find the
path to a "coming into existence." The symptom through its
own repetitiveness functions like an existential refrain. The paradox resides in the fact that pathic subjectivity tends to be
constantly evacuated from relations of discursivity, although
discursive operators are essentially based on it. The existential
function of assemblages of enunciation consists in this utilisa
tion of links of discursivity to establish a system of repetition, of
intensive insistence, polarised between a territorialised existen
tial Territory and deterritorialised incorporeal Universes - two
metapsychological functions we can describe as onto-genetic.
The Universes of referential value confer their own texture on
machines of Expression articulated in machinic Phylums.
Complex refrains, beyond the simple refrains of territorialisa
tion, restates the singular consistency of these Universes. (For
example, the pathic apprehension of harmonic resonances
based on the diatonic scale deploys the "foundation" of consis
tency of polyphonic music, just as in another context the
apprehension of the possible concatenation of numbers and

algorithms deploys the foundation of mathematical idealities.)
The abstract machinic consistency which is thus conferred on
assemblages of enunciation resides in the layering and ordering
of partial levels of existential territorialisation. What's more,
the complex refrain functions as an interface between actu
alised registers of discursivity and non-discursive Universes of
virtuality. It is the most deterritorialised aspect of the refrain, its
dimension of incorporeal Universes of value which takes con
trol of the most territorialised strata. It does this through a
movement of deterritorialisation that develops fields of the pos
sible, tensions in value, relations of heterogeneity, ofalterity, of
becoming other. The difference between these Universes of

value and Platonic Ideas is that the former do not have a fixed
character. They involve constellations of Universes, within
which a component can affirm itself over others and modify the
initial referential configuration and dominant mode ofvalorisa
tion. (For example, we can see throughout the course of
Antiquity the primacy of a military machine based on metal
weapons affirming itself over the despotic State machine, the
writing machine, the religious machine, etc.) The crystallisa
tion of such constellations can be "overtaken" during the
course of historical discursivity, but never wiped out since it is
an irreversible rupture in the incorporeal memory of collective
subjectivity. Thus we are situated totally outside the vision of a
Being moving unchanged through the universal history of
ontological formations. There are singular incorporeal constel
lations which belong to natural and human history and at the
same time escape them by a thousand lines of flight. The
moment mathematical Universes started to appear, it is no
longer possible to act as though the abstract machines which
support them had not always existed everywhere and for all
time and as though they do not project themselves onto future
possibles. We can no longer act as though polyphonic music

28 Chaosmosis
had not been in vented for the rest of time, both past and future. Such is the first stratum of ontological consistency of this func
tion of existential subjectivation, which is situated within the
perspective of a certain axiological creationism.
The second is the embodiment of these values in the irre
versibility of the being-there of existential Territories, which
confer their character of autopoiesis and singularity on to the
zones of subjectivation. In the logic of discursive ensembles
which dictates the domains of Fluxes and machinic Phylums,
there is always a separation between the poles of subject and
object. The truth of a proposition answers to the law of the
excluded middle; each object appears in a relationship of binary
opposition with a "foundation." Whereas in pathic logic, there
is no extrinsic global reference that can be circumscribed. The
object relation is destabilised, and the functions of subjectiva
tion are put into question. An incorporeal universe is not sup
ported by coordinates embedded in the world, but by ordinates,
by an intensive ordination coupled for better or worse to these

existential Territories. Territories which claim to encompass, in
a single movement, the sum of everyday existence but which
are in fact only based on derisory refrains, indexing if not their
vacuity then at least the degree zero of their ontological intensi
ty: thus Territories never given as object but always as inten
sive repetition, as piercing existential affirmation. And I repeat,
this operation is effected through the borrowing of semiotic
links, detached and diverted from their signifying and coding
tasks. Here, an expressive instance is based on a matter-form
relation, which extracts complex forms from a chaotic material. The logic of discursive sets finds a kind of desperate fulfil
ment in Capital, the Signifier, and Being with a capital B.
Capital is the referent for the generalised equivalence between
labour and goods; the Signifier the capitalistic referent for semi-
ological expression, the great reducer of ontological polyvocality.
The true, the good, the beautiful are "normalising" categories
for processes which escape the logic of circumscribed sets. They
are empty referents, they create a void, they install transcen
dence in the relations of representation. To choose Capital, the
Signifier or Being, is to participate in a similar ethicopolitical
option. Capital smashes all other modes of valorisation. The
Signifier silences the infinite virtualities of minor languages
and partial expressions. Being is like an imprisonment which
blinds us to the richness and multivalence of Universes of value
which, nevertheless, proliferate under our noses. There is an
ethical choice in favour of the richness of the possible, an ethics
and politics of the virtual that decorporealises and deterritori
alises contingency, linear causality and the pressure of circum
stances and significations which besiege us. It is a choice for
processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation. On a small
scale, this redeployment can turn itself into the mode of entrap
ment, of impoverishment, indeed of catastrophe in neurosis. It can take up reactive religious references. It can annihilate itself
in alcohol, drugs, television, an endless daily grind. But it can
also make use of other procedures that are more collective,
more social, more political ...
In order to question dualist oppositions, such as Being-being or
Subject-Object, and systems of Manichean bipolar valorisa
tions, I have proposed the concept of ontological intensity. It
implies an ethico-aesthetic engagement with the enunciative

assemblage, both in actual and virtual registers. But another
element of the metamodelisation proposed here resides in the
collective character of machinic multiplicities. There is no per son o logic al totalisation of the different components of
Expression, or the self-enclosed totalisation of Universes of ref
erence, either in the sciences, the arts or in society. There is an

30 Cha osmosis
agglomeration of heterogeneous factors of subjectivation.
Machinic segments refer to a detotalised, deterritorialised
mecanosphere, to an infinite play of interface. There is no Being
already installed throughout temporality. This questioning of
dual, binary relations (Being-being, or Conscious-Unconscious)
implies a questioning of semiotic linearity - which always
seems to be beyond question. Pathic expression is not placed in a
relation of discursive succession in order to situate the object on
the basis of a clearly delimited referent. Here we are in a register
of co-existence, of crystallisation of intensity. Time does not exist
as an empty container (a conception which remains at the root
of Einsteinian thought). The relations of temporalisation are
essentially those of machinic synchrony. There is a deployment
of axiological ordinates, without the constitution of a referent
exterior to this deployment. Here we are before the relation of
"extensionalising" linearity, between an object and its represen
tative mediation within an abstract machinic complexion.
Will we say of the incorporeal and virtual part of assem blages of enunciation that it is in voce according to a "termin
ist," nominalist viewpoint, which makes semiotic entities the tributaries of a pure subjectivity; or will we say that they are in re within the
framework of a realist conception of the world,
subjectivity being only an illusory artefact? But maybe it's nec
essary to affirm both these positions concurrently: the domain
of virtual intensities establishing itself prior to distinctions
being made between the semiotic machine, the referred object
and the enunciative subject. It's from a failure to see that
machinic segments are autopoietic and ontogenetic that one
endlessly makes universalist reductions to the Signifier and to scientific rationality. Machinic interfaces are heterogenetic;
they summon the alterity of the points of view we might have
on them and, as a consequence, on the systems of metamodeli
sation which allow us to account, in one way or another, for the

fundamentally inaccessible character of their autopoietic nuclei.
We need to free ourselves from a solitary reference to technolog

ical machines and expand the concept of machine so as to situ
ate the machine's adjacence to incorporeal Universes of refer
ence. Note that the categories of metamodelisation proposed
here - Fluxes, machinic Phylums, existential Territories,
incorporeal Universes - are only of interest because they come in fours and allow us to break free of tertiary descriptions
which always end up falling back into dualisms. The fourth
term stands for an nth term: it is the opening onto multiplicity.
What distinguishes metamodelisation from modelisation is the
way it uses terms to develop possible openings onto the virtual
and onto creative processuality.
1 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Basic Books,
New York, 19 85. See later pp. 65-6.
2 Francisco Varela, Autonomie et Connaissance, Le Seuil, Paris, 1989.
[This is a revised French edition of Principles of Biological
Autonomy, North Holland Press, New York, 19 79 .]
3 Mony Elkaim, If You Love Me, Don't Love Me, Basic Books, New
York, 1990.
4 Felix Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Galilee, Paris, 1989.
5 "Of all these three kinds of delight (in the agreeable, the beautiful,
and the good), that of taste in the beautiful may be said to be the
one and only disinterested and free delight; for, with it, no interest,
whether of sense or reason extorts approval." Immanuel Kant, The
Critique ofludgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1982, p.49 .
6 MikhaYl Bakhtin, "Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art," in
Art and Answerability: Eary Philosophical Essays by M.M.Baktin,
edited by Michael Hoquist and V adim Liapunov, University of
Texas Press, Austin, 1990.
7 Ibid., p.306.
8 Ibid .. p.307.
9 Ibid., p.307.
32 Chaosmosis
10 Felix Guattari, L'Inconscient mac/1inique, Recherche, Paris, 19 79.
11 See the role of dreams in the mythical cartographies of Australian
Aborigines. Barbara Glocewski, Les Reveurs du desert, Pion, Paris,
19 89.
12 For a re-examination of hypnosis and suggestion, see Leon
Chertok and Isabelle Stengers, A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason:
Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan, trans.
Martha N Evans, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 199 2 .
1 3 Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis
J. Whitfield, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969);

Language: an introduction, Wisconsin University Press, Madison,
1 9 70; Bssais linguistiques, Minuit, Paris, 1 97 1; Nouveaux Bssais,
PUF, Paris, 1 98 5.
2 Machinic heterogenesis
Common usage suggests that we speak of the machine as a sub
set of technology. We should, however, consider the problemat
ic of technology as dependent on machines, and not the inverse.
The machine would become the prerequisite for technology
rather than its expression. Machinism is an object of fascination,
sometimes of delire, about which there's a whole historical "bes
tiary." Since the origin of philosophy, the relationship between
man and machine has been the object of interrogation. Aristotle
thought that the goal of techne was to create what nature found
impossible to accomplish. Being of the order of "knowledge" and
not of "doing," techne interposes a kind of creative mediation between nature and humanity whose status of intercession is a
source of perpetual ambiguity. "Mechanist" conceptions of the
machine empty it of everything that would enable it to avoid a simple construction partes extra partes. "Vitalist" conceptions
assimilate the machine to living beings; unless it is living beings
that are assimilated to machines. The "cybernetic" perspective
developed by Norbert Wiener1 envisages living systems as par
ticular types of machines equipped with the principle of feed
back. More recent "systemic" conceptions (Humberto Maturana

34 Chaosmosis
and Francisco Varela) develop the concept of autopoiesis (auto
production), reserving it for living machines. Following
Heidegger, a philosophical fashion entrusts techne - in its
opposition to modern technology - with the mission of
"unmasking the truth" that "seeks the true in the exact." Thus it nails techne to an ontological plinth - to a grund and com
-
promises its character of processual opening.
Through these positions, we will attempt to discern various levels of ontological intensity and envisage machinism in its
totality, in its technological, social, semiotic and axiological
avatars. And this will involve a reconstruction of the concept of
machine that goes far beyond the technical machine. For each
type of machine, we will pose a question, not about its vital
autonomy - it's not an animal - but about its singular
power of enunciation: what I call its specific enunciative con
sistency. The first type of machine we are going to consider is
the material apparatus. They are made by the hand of man -
itself taken over by other machines - according to conceptions
and plans which respond to the goals of production. These dif
ferent stages I will call finalised, diagrammatic schemas. But
already this montage and these finalisations impose the neces sity of expanding the limits of the machine, stricto sensu, to the
functional ensemble which associates it with man. We will see
that this implies taking into account multiple components:
- material and energy components
- semiotic, diagrammatic and algorithmic components (plans,
formulae, equations and calculations which lead to the fabrica tion of the machine);
components of organs, influx and humours of the human body; - individual and collective mental representations and infor
mation;
-investments of desiring machines producing a subjectivity
adjacent to these components;

Machinic heterogenesis 35
- abstract machines installing themselves transversally to the
machinic levels previously considered (material, cognitive,
affective and social).
When we speak of abstract machines, by "abstract" we can
also understand "extract" in the sense of extracting. They are
montages capable of relating all the heterogeneous levels that they traverse and that we have just enumerated. The abstract
machine is transversal to them, and it is this abstract machine
that will or will not give these levels an existence, an efficiency,
a power of ontological auto-affirmation. The different compo-
• nents are swept up and reshaped by a sort of dynamism. Such a
functional ensemble will hereafter be described as a machinic
assemblage. The term assemblage does not imply any notion of bond, passage, or anastomosis between its components. It is an
assemblage of possible fields, of virtual as much as constituted
elements, without any notion of generic or species' relation. In
this context, utensils, instruments, the most basic tools and the
least structured pieces of a machine acquire the status of a
pro to-machine.
Let us take an example. If we take a hammer apart by
removing its handle, it is still a hammer but in a "mutilated"
state. The "head" of the hammer - another zoomorphic

metaphor - can be reduced by fusion. It will then cross a
threshold of formal consistency where it will lose its form; this
machinic gestalt works moreover as much on a technological
plane as on an imaginary level, to evoke the dated memory of
the hammer and sickle. We are simply in the presence of metal
lic mass returned to smoothness, to the deterritorialisation
which precedes its appearance in a machinic form. To go
beyond this type of experiment - comparable to the piece of
Cartesian wax - let us attempt the inverse, to associate the ham mer with the arm, the nail with the anvil. Between them they main
tain relations ofsyntagmatic linkage. And their "collective dance"

36 Chaosmosis
can bring to life the defunct guild of blacksmiths, the sinister
epoch of ancient iron mines, the ancestral use of metal-rimmed
wheels ... Leroi-Gourhan emphasised that the technical object
was nothing outside of the technical ensemble to which it
belonged. It is the same for sophisticated machines such as
robots, which will soon be engendered by other robots. Human
action remains adjacent to their gestation, waiting for the
breakdown which will require its intervention: this residue of a
direct act. But doesn't all this suggest a partial view, a certain
taste for a dated period of science fiction? Curiously, in acquir
ing more and more life, machines demand in return more and
more abstract human vitality: and this has occurred through
out their evolutionary development. Computers, expert systems
and artificial intelligence add as much to thought as they sub
tract from thinking. They relieve thought of inert schemas. The
forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes ofreference.2
It is, then, impossible to deny the participation of human
thought in the essence of machinism. But up to what point can
this thought still be described as human? Doesn't technico-sci
entific thought fall within the province of a certain type of men
tal and semiotic machinism? What we need here is a distinction
between on the one hand semiologies that produce significa tions, the common currency of social groups - like the
"human" enunciation of people who work with machines -
and on the other, a-signifying semiotics which, regardless of
the quantity of significations they convey, handle figures of
expression that might be qualified as "non-human" (such as
equations and plans which enunciate the machine and make it
act in a diagrammatic capacity on technical and experimental apparatuses). The semiologies of signification play in keys with
distinctive oppositions of a phonematic or scriptural order which transcribe enunciations into materials of signifying
expression. Structuralists have been content to erect the
Signifier as a category unifying all expressive economies: lan guage, the icon, gesture, urbanism or the cinema, etc. They
have postulated a general signifying translatability for all forms
of discurt'ivity. But in so doing, have they not misunderstood
the essential dimension ofmachinic autopoiesis? This continual
emergence of sense and effects does not concern the redundan
cy of mimesis but rather the production of an effect of singular
sense, even though indefinitely reproducible.
This autopoietic node in the machine is what separates and dif

ferentiates it from structure and gives it value. Structure
implies feedback loops, it puts into play a concept oftotalisation
that it itself masters. It is occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a princi
ple of eternal return. It is haunted by a desire for eternity. The
machine, on the contrary, is shaped by a desire for abolition. Its
emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe - the
menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of
alterity which it develops in different forms. This alterity differ entiates it from structure, which is based on a principle of
homeomorphism. The difference supplied b y machinic
autopoiesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtu
al Universes far from equilibrium. And this doesn't simply
involve a rupture of formal equilibrium, bu.t a radical ontologi
cal reconversion. The machine always depends on exterior ele
ments in order to be able to exist as such. It implies a comple
mentarity, not just with the man who fabricates it, makes it
function or destroys it, but it is itself in a relation of alterity with other virtual or actual machines - a "non-human" enuncia
tion, a proto-subjective diagram.
This ontological reconversion dismisses the totalising scope
of the concept of the Signifier. Because the signifying entities

38 Cha osmosis
which operate the diverse mutations of the ontological referent
- that makes us move from the Universe of molecular chem
istry to the Universe of biological chemistry, or from the
acoustic world to the world of polyphonic and harmonic music
- are not the same. Of course, lines of signifying decoding,
composed of discrete figures - binarisable, syntagmatisable
and paradigmatisable - sometimes appear in one Universe or

another. And we can have the illusion that the same signifying
network occupies all these domains. It is, however, totally dif
ferent when we consider the actual texture of these Universes
of reference. They are always stamped with the mark of singu
larity. From acoustics to polyphonic music, there is a diver
gence of constellations of expressive intensity. They involve a
certain pathic relationship, and convey irreducibly heteroge
neous ontological consistencies. We thus discover as many
types of deterritorialisation as traits of expressive materials. The
signifying articulation hanging over them - in its indifferent
neutrality - is incapable of imposing itself as a relation of
immanence to machinic intensities, to this non-discursive,
auto-enunciating, auto-valorising, autopoietic node. It does
not submit to any general syntax of the procedures of deterrito
rialisation. No couplet - Being-being, Being-Nothingness,
being-other - can claim the status of an ontological binary digit. Machinic propositions elude the ordinary games of dis
cursivity and the structural coordinates of energy, time and
space.
Yet an ontological transversality does nonetheless exist in
them. What happens at a level of the particulate-cosmic is not
without relation to the human soul or events in the socius. But not according to harmonic universals of the Platonic type (Sophist). The
composition of deterritorialising intensities
is incarnated in abstract machines. We should bear in mind
that there is a machinic essence which will incarnate itself in a

technical machine, and equally in the social and cognitive
environment connected to this machine - social groups are
also machines, the body is a machine, there are scientific, theo
retical and information machines. The abstract machine passes
through all these heterogeneous components but above all it heterogenises them, be,yond any unifying trait and according
to a principle of irreversibility, singularity and necessity. In this
respect the Lacanian signifier is struck with a double lack: it is
too abstract in that it makes heterogeneous, expressive materi
als translatable, it lacks ontological heterogenesis, it gratu
itously uniformises and syntaxises diverse regions of being,
and, at the same time, it is not abstract enough because it is
incapable of taking into account the specificity of these
machinic autopoietic nodes, to which we must now return.
Francisco Varela characterises a machine by "the set of
inter-relations of its components independent of the compo

nents themselves." 3 The organisation of a machine thus has no
connection with its materiality. He distinguishes two types of
machines: "allopoietic" machines which produce something
other than themselves, and "autopoietic" machines which
engender and specify their own organisation and limits.
Autopoietic machines undertake an incessant process of the
replacement of their components as they must continually
compensate for the external perturbations to which they are
exposed. In fact, the qualification of autopoietic is reserved by
Varela for the biological domain: social systems, technical
machines, crystalline systems, etc., are excluded. This is the
sense of his distinction between allopoiesis and autopoiesis. But
autopoiesis, which uniquely defines autonomous entities -
unitary, individuated and closed to input/output relationships
- lacks characteristics essential to living organisms, like the fact that they are born, die and survive through genetic
phylums. Autopoiesis deserves to be rethought in terms of

40 Cha osmosis
evolutionary, collective entities, which maintain diverse types
of relations of alterity, rather than being implacably closed in on themselves. In such a case, institutions and technical
machines appear to be allopoietic, but when one considers
them in the context of the machinic assemblages they consti
tute with human beings, they become ipso facto autopoietic.
Thus we will view autopoiesis from the perspective of the onto
genesis and phlyogenesis proper to a mecanosphere superposed
on the biosphere.
The phylogenetic evolution of machinism is expressed, at a
primary level, by the fact that machines appear across "genera tions," one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete. The fil
iation of previous generations is prolonged into the future by
lines of virtuality and their arborent implications. But this is
not a question of a univocal historical causality. Evolutionary
lines appear in rhizomes; datings are not synchronic but hete
rochronic. Example: the industrial "take off" of steam engines happened centuries after the Chinese Empire had used them as
children's toys. In fact, these evolutionary rhizomes move in
blocks across technical civilisations. A technological innova
tion may know long periods of stagnation or regression, but
there are few cases in which it does not "restart" at a later date.
This is particularly clear with military technological innova
tions: they frequently punctuate long historical periods that
they stamp with the seal of irreversibility, wiping out empires

for the benefit of new geopolitical configurations. But, and I repeat it, this was already true of the most humble instruments,
utensils and tools which don't escape this phylogenesis. One
could, for example, dedicate an exhibition to the evolution of
the hammer since the Iron Age and conjecture about what it will
become in the context of new materials and technologies. The
hammer that one buys today at the supermarket is, in a way, "drawn out" on a phylogenetic line of infinite, virtual extension.
It is at the intersection of heterogeneous machinic
Universes, of different dimensions and with unfamiliar ontolog
ical textures, radical innovations and once forgotten, then
reactivated, ancestral machinic lines, that the movement of
history singularises itself. Among other components, the
Neolithic machine associates the machine of spoken language,
machines of hewn stone, agrarian machines based on the selec
tion of grains and a village proto-economy. The writing
machine will only emerge with the birth of urban mega
machines (Lewis Mumford) correlative to the spread of archaic
empires. Parallel to this, the great nomadic machines constitut
ed themselves out of the collusion between the metallurgic
machine and new war machines. As for the great capitalistic
machines, their foundational machinisms were prolific: urban
State machines, then royal machines, commercial and banking
machines , navigation machines, monotheist religious
machines, deterritorialised musical and plastic machines, sci
entific and technical machines, etc.

The question of the reproducibility of the machine on an
ontogenetic level is more complex. Maintaining a machine's
operationality - its functional identity - is never absolutely
guaranteed: wear and tear, fine balance, breakdowns and
entropy demand a renewal of its material components, its ener
gy and information components, the latter able to be lost in
"noise." Equally, the maintenance of a machinic assemblage's
consistency demands that the element of human action and intelligence involved in its composition must also be renewed.
The man-machine alterity is thus inextricably linked to a machine-machine alterity which operates in relations of com
plementarity or agonistic relations (between war machines) or
again in the relations of parts or apparatuses. In fact, the wear
and tear, accident, death and resurrection of a machine in a new copy or model are part of its destiny and can become central to
42 Chaosmosis
its essence in certain aesthetic machines (the "compressions" of

Cesar, the "metamechanics," the happening machines, the
delirious machines of Jean Tinguely). The reproducibility of the
machine is not a pure programmed repetition. The scansions of
rupture and indifferentiation, which uncouple a model from
any support, introduce their own share of both ontogenetic and
phylogenetic difference. It is in this phase of passage to a dia
grammatic state, a disincarnate abstract machine, that the "supplements of the soul" of the machinic node are distin
guished from simple material agglomerates. A heap of stones is
not a machine, whereas a wall is already a static proto
machine, manifesting virtual polarities, an inside and outside,
an above and below, a right and left ... These diagrammatic vir
tualities take us beyond Varela's characterisation of machinic
autopoiesis as unitary individuation, with neither input nor
output; they direct us towards a more collective machinism
without delimited unity, whose autonomy accommodates
diverse mediums of alterity. The reproducibility of the technical
machine differs from that of living beings, in that it is not based
on sequential codes perfectly circumscribed in a territorialised
genome. Obviously every technological machine has its own
plans for conception and assembly. But while these plans keep
their distance from the machine, they also move from one
machine to another so as to constitute a diagrammatic rhizome
which tends to cover the mecanosphere globally. The relations
of technological machines between themselves, and the way
their respective parts fit together, presuppose a formal serialisa
tion and a certain perdition of their singularity - stronger
than that of living machines - correlative to a distance
between the machine manifested in energetico-spatio-temporal
coordinates and the diagrammatic machine which develops in
more deterritorialised coordinates.

This deterritorialising distance and loss of singularity needs to be related to a reciprocal smoothing of the materials constitu
tive of the technical machine. Of course, singular rough patch
es belonging to these materials can never be completely abol ished but they must only interfere with the machine's "play" if
they are required to do so by its diagrammatic functioning. Let
us examine these two aspects of machinic separation and
smoothing, taking an apparently simple machinic apparatus - the couple formed by a lock and i�s key. Two types of form, with
ontologically heterogeneous textures are at work here: 1)
materialised, contingent, concrete and discrete forms, whose

singularity is closed in on itself, embodied respectively in the
profile Fl of the lock and by the profile Pk of the key. Fl and Pk
never quite coincide. They evolve through time, due to wear
and oxidation, but both forms must stay within the framework of a separation-type limit beyond which the key would cease to
be operational; 2) "formal," diagrammatic forms, subsumed within this separation-type, which appear as a continuum
including the whole range of profiles Fl, Pk, compatible with the effective operation of the lock.
One quickly notices that the machinic effect, the passage to
the possible act, is entirely concerned with the second type of
form. Although ranged across the most restrained separation type limit possible, these diagrammatic forms appear infinite in
number. In fact, it is a matter of an integral of forms Pk, Fl.
This infinite integral form doubles and smooths the contin gent forms Fl and Pk which only have value machinically inas
much as they belong to it. A bridge is thus established "above" the concrete, authorised forms. I call this operation deterritori
alised smoothing and it applies as much to the normalisation of
the machine's constitutive materials as it does to their "digital"
and functional description. Ferric ore which has been insuffi
ciently worked, or deterritorialised, retains irregularities from

44 Chaosmosis
the milling of the original material, which would distort the
ideal profiles of the lock and key. The smoothing of the material has to remove excessive aspects of contingence from it, and
make it behave in a way that accurately moulds the formal
imprints extrinsic to it. We should add that this moulding - in a way comparable to photography- should not be too evanes
cent and should conserve a properly sufficient consistency.
Here again we find a separation-type phenomenon, putting
into play a theoretical diagrammatic consistency. A lead or
golden key risks bending in a steel lock. A key that is changed
into a liquid or gaseous state immediately loses its pragmatic
efficiency and departs from the field of the technical machine.
This phenomenon of a formal threshold can be found at all
levels of intra- or inter-machine relations, and in particular
with the existence of spare parts. The components of the tech
nical machine are thus like the units of a currency, and this has
become more evident since computers started to be used in
their conception and design. These machinic forms, these smoothings of material, of a separation-type limit between
parts and their functional adjustments, would suggest that
form takes precedence over consistency and over material sin
gularities - the technological machine's reproducibility
appearing to dictate that each of its elements fit into a pre
established definition of a diagrammatic order. Charles Sanders
Peirce, who described the diagram as an "icon of relation" and assimilated it to the function of algorithms, proposed a broader
vision that is worth developing further in the present perspec
tive. Here, the diagram is conceived as an autopoietic machine which not only gives it a functional and material consistency,
but requires it to deploy its diverse registers of alterity, freeing it from an identity locked into simple structural relations. The
machine's proto-subjectivity installs itself in Universes of virtu
ality which extend far beyond its existential territoriality. Thus

we refuse to postulate a formal subjectivity intrinsic to dia
grammatic semiotisation, for example, a subjectivity "lodged"
in signifying chains according to the well-known Lacanian
principle: "a signifier represents the subject for another signifi
er." For the machine's diverse registers, there is no univocal
subjectivity based on cut, lack or suture, but there are ontologi
cally heterogeneous modes of subjectivity, constellations of
incorporeal Universes of reference which take the position of
partial enunciators in multiple domains of alterity, or more pre
cisely, domains of alterification.
We have already encountered a certain number of these
registers of machinic alterity:
- the alterity of proximity between different machines and
between different parts of the same machine; - the alterity of an internal, material consistency;
- the alterity of formal. diagrammatic consistency;
- the alterity of the evolutionary phylum; - the agonistic alterity between machines of war, whose pro-
longation we could associate with the "auto-agonistic" alterity
of desiring machines which tend towards their own collapsus
and abolition.
Another form of alterity which has only been approached
very indirectly, is the alterity of scale, or fractal alterity, which
establishes a play of systematic correspondences between
machines at different levels. 4 We are not, however, in the
process of drawing up a universal table of forms of machinic
alterity because, in truth, their ontological modalities are infinite.
They organise themselves into constellations of incorporeal
Universes ofreference with unlimited combinatories and creativity.
Archaic societies are better equipped than White, male, capital
istic subjectivities to produce a cartography of this multiva
lence of alterity. With regard to this, we could refer to Marc

46 Chaosmosis
Auge's account of the heterogeneous registers relating to the fetish object Legba in African societies of the Fon. The Legba
comes to being transversally in:
- a dimension of destiny;
- a universe of vital principle;
- an ancestral filiation;
- a materialised god;
- a sign of appropriation;
- an entity of individuation;
- a fetish at the entrance to the village, another at the portal of
the house and, after initiation, at the entrance to the bedroom ...
The Legba is a handful of sand, a receptacle, but it's also the
expression of a relation to others. One finds it at the door, at the
market, in the village square, at crossroads. It can transmit
messages, questions, answers. It is also a way of relating to the
dead and to ancestors. It is both an individual and a class of
individuals; a name and a noun. "Its existence corresponds to
the obvious fact that the social is not simply of a relational
order but of the order of being." 5 Marc Auge stresses the impos
sible transparency and translatability of symbolic systems. "The Legba apparatus [ ... ] is constructed on two axes. One is
viewed from the exterior to the interior, the other from identity
to alterity. Thus being, identity and the relation to the other are
constructed, through fetishistic practice, not only on a symbol
ic basis but also in an openly ontological way. "6
Contemporary machinic assemblages have even less stan
dard univocal referent than the subjectivity of archaic societies. But we are far less accustomed to the irreducible heterogeneity,
or even the heterogenetic character, of their referential compo
nents. Capital, Energy, Information, the Signifier are so many
categories which would have us believe in the ontological
homogeneity of referents (biological, ethological, economic,
phonological, scriptural, musical, etc.)

In the context of a reductionist modernity, it is up to us to redis
cover that for every promotion of a machinic intersection there
corresponds a specific constellation of Universes of value from
the moment a partial non-human enunciation has been insti
tuted. Biological machines promote living Universes which dif
ferentiate themselves into vegetable becomings, animal becom
ings. Musical machines establish themselves against a back ground of sonorous Universes which have been constantly
modified since the great polyphonic mutation. Technical
machines install themselves at the intersection of the most

complex and heterogeneous enunciative components.
Heidegger, who turned the world of technology into a kind of
malefic destiny resulting from a movement of distancing from
being, used the example of a commercial plane on a runway:
the visible object conceals "what and how it is." It unveils itself
"only as standing-reserve inasmuch as it is ordered to insure
the possibility of transportation" and to this end, "it must be in
its whole structure and in every one of its constituent parts on
call for duty, i.e., ready for take-off'. 7 This interpellation, this
"ordering" which reveals the real as "standing-reserve" is
essentially operated by man and understood in terms of a uni
versal operation, travelling, flying ... But does this "standing
reserve" of the machine really reside in an already-there, in
terms of eternal truths, revealed to the being of man? In fact the
machine speaks to the machine before speaking to man and the
ontological domains that it reveals and secretes are, on each
occasion, singular and precarious.
Let us reconsider the example of a commercial plane, this
time not generically but using the technologically dated model
baptised as the Concorde. The ontological consistency of this
object is essentially composite; it is at the intersection, at the
point of constellation and pathic agglomeration of Universes
each of which have their own ontological consistency, traits of

48 Chaosmosis
intensity, their ordinates and coordinates, their specific
machinisms. Concorde simultaneously involves: - a diagrammatic Universe with plans of theoretical "feasibility";
- technological Universes transposing this "feasibility" into
material terms;
- industrial Universes capable of effectively producing it;
- collective imaginary Universes corresponding to a desire suf-
ficient to make it see the light of day;
- political and economic Universes leading, amongst other things, to the release of credit for its construction ...
But the bottom line is that the ensemble of these final, mater
ial, formal and efficient causes will not do the job! The Concorde
object moves effectively between Paris and New York but remains nailed to the economic ground. This lack of consistency of one of its components has
decisively fragilised its global onto
logical consistency. Concorde only exists within the limited
reproducibility of twelve examples and at the root of a possibilist
phylum of future supersonics. And this is hardly negligible!
Why are we so insistent about the impossibility of establish

ing the general translatability of diverse referential and partial
enunciative components of assemblage? Why this lack of rever
ence towards the Lacanian conception of the signifier?
Precisely because this theorising which stems from structural
linguistics forbids us from entering the real world of the
machine. The structuralist signifier is always synonymous with
linear discursivity. From one symbol to another, the subjective effect happens without any other ontological guarantee. As
opposed to this, heterogeneous machines, as envisaged from our schizonanalytical perspective, do not produce a standard
being at the mercy of a universal temporalisation. To clarify this point we should establish some distinctions between the
different forms of semiological, semiotic and coded linearity: - the codings of the "natural" world, which operate on several
spatial dimensions (for example those of crystallography) and
which do not imply the extraction of autonomised operators of coding;
- the relative linearity of biological codings, for example, the
double helix of DNA which, starting from four basic chemical
radicals, develops equally in three dimensions;
- the linearity of pre-signifying semiologies, which develop on
relatively autonomous, parallel lines, even ifthe phonological
chains of spoken language appear to always overcode all the
others;
- the semiological linearity of the structural signifier which
imposes itself despotically over all the other modes of semiotisa
tion, expropriates them and even tends to make them disappear
within the framework of a communicational economy domi nated by informatics (please note: informatics in its current
state, since this state of things is in no way definitive);
- the superlinearity of a-signifying substances of expression,
where the signifier loses its despotism. The informational lines
of hypertexts can recover a certain dynamic polymorphism and
work in direct contact with referent Universes which are in no
way linear and, what is more, tend to escape a logic of spa
tialised sets.
The indicative matter of a-signifying semiotic machines is con
stituted by "point-signs"; these on one hand belong to a semi
otic order and on the other intervene directly in a series of material machinic processes. Example: a credit card number
which triggers the operation of a bank auto-teller. The a-signi fying semiotic figures don't simply secrete significations. They
give out stop and start orders but above all activate the "bring
ing into being" of ontological Universes. Consider for a moment
the example of the pentatonic musical refrain which, with only

a few notes, catalyses the Debussyst constellation of multiple
50 Chaosmosis
Universes: - the Wagnerian Universe surrounding Parsifal, which
attaches itself to the existential Territory constituted by
Bayreuth;
- the Universe of Gregorian chant; -that of French music, with the return to favour of Rameau
and Couperin; -that of Chopin, due to a nationalist transposition (Ravel, for
his part, appropriating Liszt);
- the Javanese music Debussy discovered at the Universal Exposition of 18 8 9;
- the world of Manet and Mallarme, which is associated with Debussy's stay at the Villa Medicis.
It would be appropriate to add to these past and present
influences the prospective resonances which constituted the
reinvention of polyphony from the time of the Ars Nova, its
repercussions on the French musical phylum of Ravel, Duparc,
Messiaen, etc., and on the sonorous mutation triggered by
Stravinsky, his presence in the work of Proust ...
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspon
dence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depend
ing on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional
machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality,
the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these
dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle
and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we
criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its
diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing onto
logical thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, onto
logical and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of het
erogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be
expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms.
What fractal machines traverse are substantial scales. They

traverse them in engendering them. But, and this should be
noted, the existential ordinates that they "invent" were always already there. How can this paradox be sustained? It's because
everything becomes possible (including the recessive smooth
ing of time, evoked by Rene Thom) the moment one allows the
assemblage to escape from energetico-spatio-temporal coordi
nates. And, here again, we need to rediscover a manner of
being of Being - before, after, here and everywhere else -
without being, however, identical to itself; a processual, poly

phonic Being singularisable by infinitely complexifiable tex
tures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual
compositions.
The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astro
physical or axiological sense) is only possible through the medi
ation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to
exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any
being or any modality of being. Outside of this
machine/Universe coupling, beings only have the pure status
of a virtual entity. And it is the same for their enunciative coor
dinates. The biosphere and mecanosphere, coupled on this
planet, focus a point of view of space, time and energy. They
trace an angle of the constitution of our galaxy. Outside of this
particularised point of view, the rest of the Universe exists (in
the sense that we understand existence here-below) only
through the virtual existence of other autopoietic machines at
the heart of other bio-mecanospheres scattered throughout the
cosmos. The relativity of points of view of space, time and ener gy do not, for all that, absorb the real into the dream. The cate
gory of Time dissolves in cosmological reflections on the Big
Bang even as the category of irreversibility is affirmed. Residual
objectivity is what resists scanning by the infinite variation of

52 Chaosmosis
points of view constitutable upon it. Imagine an autopoietic
entity whose particles are constructed from galaxies. Or, con
versely, a cognitivity constituted on the scale of quarks. A dif
ferent panorama, another ontological consistency. The
mecanosphere draws out and actualises configurations which
exist amongst an infinity of others in fields of virtuality.
Existential machines are at the same level as being in its intrin
sic multiplicity. They are not mediated by transcendent signi
fiers and subsumed by a univocal ontological foundation. They
are to themselves their own material of semiotic expression.
Existence, as a process of deterritorialisation, is a specific inter
machinic operation which superimposes itself on the promo
tion of singularised existential intensities. And, I repeat, there is
no generalised syntax for these deterritorialisations. Existence
is not dialectical, not representable. It is hardly livable!
Desiring machines which break with the great interpersonal

and social organic equilibria, which invert orders, play the role
of the other as against a politics of auto-centering on the self.
For example, the partial drives and perverse polymorphic
investments of psychoanlysis don't constitute an exceptional and deviant race of machines. All machinic assemblages har
bour - even if in an embryonic state - enunciative zones
which are so many desiring proto-machines. To clarify this
point we need to extend our transmachinic bridge and under
stand the smoothing of the ontological texture of machinic
material and diagrammatic feedbacks as so many dimensions
of intensification that take us beyond the linear causalities of
the capitalistic apprehension of machinic Universes. We also
need to abandon logics based on the principles of the excluded
middle and sufficient reason. Through this smoothing there
appears a being beyond, a being-for-the-other which gives con
sistency to an existent beyond its strict delimitation, here and

now. The machine is always synonymous with a nucleus con
stitutive of an existential Territory against a background of a
constellation of incorporeal Universes of reference (or value).
The "mechanism" of this turning around of being consists in
the fact that some of the machine's discursive segments do not
only play a functional or signifying role, but assume the exis
tentialising function of pure intensive repetition that I have
called the refrain function. The smoothing is like an ontological
refrain, and thus, far from apprehending a univocal truth of
being through techne - as Heideggerian ontology would have
it - it is a plurality of beings as machines which give them
selves to us the moment we acquire the pathic and cartograph
ic means of reaching them. The manifestations - not of Being,
but of multitudes of ontological components - are of the order
of the machine. And this, without semiological mediation,
without transcendent coding, directly as "being's giving of
itself," as giving. Acceding to such a "giving" is already to par ticipate ontologically in it as a full right. The term right does
not occur here by chance, since at this proto-ontological level it
is already necessary to affirm a proto-ethical dimension. The
play of intensity of the ontological constellation is, in a way, a
choice of being not only for self, but for the whole alterity of the
cosmos and for the infinity of times.
If there's choice and freedom at certain "superior" anthropo

logical stages, it's because we will also find them at the most
elementary strata of machinic concatenations. But the notions
of elements and complexity are susceptible here to being brutal
ly inverted. Those that are most differentiated and undifferenti ated coexist within the same chaos which, at infinite speed,
plays its virtual registers - one against the other and one with the other. The machinic-technical world, at the "terminal" of
which present-day humanity structures itself, is barricaded by

54 Chaosmosis
horizons of constants and the limitation of the infinite velocities
of chaos (the speed of light, the cosmological horizon of the Big
Bang, Planck's constant and the elementary quantum of action
in quantum physics, the impossibility of going below absolute
zero ... ). But, this very same world of semiotic constraints is doubled, tripled and infinitised by other worlds which under
certain conditions seek only to bifurcate out of their Universes
ofvirtuality and engender new fields of the possible.
Just as scientific machines constantly modify our cosmic frontiers, so do the machines of desire and aesthetic creation.
As such, they hold an eminent place within assemblages of
subjectivation, themselves called to relieve our old social
machines which are incapable of keeping up with the effiores
cence ofmachinic revolutions that shatter our epoch.
Rather than adopting a reticent attitude with respect to the
immense machinic revolution sweeping the planet (at the risk
of destroying it) or of clinging onto traditional systems of value
- with the pretence of re-establishing transcendence - the movement of progress, or if one prefers, the movement of
process, will endeavour to reconcile values and machines.
Values are immanent to machines. The life of machinic Fluxes
is not only manifested through cybernetic feedback; it is also
correlative to a promotion of incorporeal Universes stemming from an enunciative Territorial incarnation, from a valorising
consciousness of being. Machinic autopoiesis asserts itself as a
non-human for-itself through zones of partial proto-subjectiva
tion and it deploys a for-others under the double modality of a
"horizontal" eco-systemic alterity (the machinic systems posi
tion themselves in a rhizome of reciprocal dependence) and
phylogenetic alterity (situating each actual machinic stasis at
the conjunction of a passeist filiation and a Phylum of future
mutations). All systems of value - religious, aesthetic, scientif
ic, ecosophic ... - install themselves at this machinic interface

between the necessary actual and the possibilist virtual. Thus
Universes of value constitute incorporeal enunciators of

abstract machinic complexions compossible with discursive
realities. ,The consistency of these zones of proto-subjectivation
is then only assured inasmuch as they are embodied, with more
or less intensity, in nodes of finitude, Territories of chaosmic
grasping, which guarantee, moreover, their possible recharg
ing with processual complexity. Thus a double enunciation:
finite, territorialised and incorporeal, infinite.
Nevertheless, these constellations of Universes of value do
not constitute Universals. The fact that they are tied into singu
lar existential Territories effectively confers upon them a power of heterogenesis, that is, of opening onto singularising, irre
versible processes of necessary differentiation. How does this
machinic heterogenesis, which differentiates each colour of
being - which makes, for example, from the plane of consis
tency of a philosophical concept a world quite different from the
plane of reference of the scientific function or the plane of aes
thetic composition - end up being reduced to the capitalistic
homogenesis of generalised equivalence, which leads to all val ues being valued by the same thing, all appropriative territories
being related to the same economic instrument of power, and
all existential riches succumbing to clutches of exchange value? The sterile opposition between use value and exchange
value will here be relinquished in favour of an axiological com
plexion including all the machinic modalities of valorisation:
the values of desire, aesthetic values, ecological, economic val
ues ... Capitalistic value which generally subsumes the ensem
ble of these machinic surplus values, proceeds with a reterrito
rialising attack, based on the primacy of economic and mone
tary semiotics, and corresponds to a sort of general implosion of
all existential Territories. In fact, capitalistic value is neither
separate nor tangential to systems ofvalorisation; it constitutes

56 Cha osmosis
their deathly heart, corresponding to the crossing of the ineffa
ble limit between a controlled, chaosmic deterritorialisation -
under the aegis of social, aesthetic and analytical practices -
and a vertiginous collapse into the black hole of the aleatory,
understood as a paroxysmically binary reference, implacably
dissolving the whole consistency of Universes of value which
would claim to escape capitalistic law. It is thus only abusively
that one could put economic determinations in a primary posi
tion with respect to social relations and productions of subjec
tivity. Economic law, like juridical law, must be deducted from

the ensemble of Universes of value, for whose collapse it contin
ually strives. Its reconstruction, from the scattered debris of
planned economies and neo-liberalism and according to new
ethico-political finalities (ecosophy) calls for, in contradistinc
tion, an untiring renewal of the consistency of machinic assem
blages ofvalorisation.
1 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or, Control and communication in the
animal and the machine, Technology Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1948.
2 Cf. Pierre Levy, Les Technologies de l'intelligence, La Decouverte,
Paris, 1 990, Plissefractal. Ideographie dynamique (memoire d'habili
tation a diriger des recherches en sciences de !'information et de la
communication) et L 'ideographie dynamique, La Decouverte, Paris,
1 9 91 .
3 F. Varela op. cit.
4 Leibniz, in his concern to render homogeneous the infinitely large
and the infinitely small, thought that the living machine, which he
assimilated to a divine machine, continued to be a machine in its
smallest parts until infinity (which would not be the case with a
machine made by the art of men), in Monadologie, pp. 1 78-9,
Delagrave, Paris, 1962.
5 M. Auge, "Le fetiche et son obj et" in L'Objet en psychanalyse, pre
sented by Maud Mannoni, Denae!, "L' espace analytique," Paris,
1986.
Machinic heterogenesis 7 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell,
Harper, San Francisco, 19 77, p.298.

57
6 Ibid.
3 Schizoanalytic metamodelisation
Psychoanalysis is in crisis; it is bogged down in routine prac
tices and ossified conceptions. Social movements are also at an
impasse due to the collapse of communist regimes and the con
version of social-democrats to liberalism. In each case, individ
ual and collective subjectivity lack modelisation. And it is quite
obvious that neither Freudianism, even when revisited by
structuralism, nor Freudo-Marxism, have anything worth

while to offer at this level. In fact, an immense site of theoretical
recomposition and invention of new practices has opened up. I
have tried to show that questioning subjectivity's foundation
on personological Universals, structural mathemes, biological
or economic infrastructures, involves a redefinition of machin
ism. From now on the machine will be conceived in opposition to structure, the latter being associated with a feeling of eterni
ty and the former with an awareness of finitude, precarious
ness, destruction and death.
Beneath the diversity of beings, no uni vocal ontological
plinth is given, rather there is a plane of machinic interfaces.
Being crystallises through an infinity of enunciative assem
blages associating actualised, discursive components (material

Schizoanalytic metamodelisation 59
and indicative Fluxes, machinic Phylums) with non-discursive,
virtual components (incorporeal Universes and existential
Territories). Thus the singular points of view on being, with
their precariousness, uncertainty and creative aspects take
precedence over the fixity of structures so distinctive of univer salist visions. In order to establish an intensive bridge between
these actual and virtual functions we are inclined to postulate
the existence of a deterministic chaos animated by infinite
velocities. It is out of this chaos that complex compositions,
which are capable of being slowed down in energetico-spatio
temporal coordinates or category systems, constitute them
selves.
Rather than beginning with automatic systems of articula
tion between a plane of Expression and a plane of Content, we
will stress the partial operators of their assemblage. For exam ple, the mechanical aspect of the linguistic double articulation
between signifying, monemic unities and non-signifying,
phonemic unities will be replaced by abstract machines which
traverse these two heterogeneous registers and are capable of
bifurcation and the production of new associations. It is not
evident that Universes of value function in concert with semi
otic machines, or that semiotic machines combine with con
crete machines, that existential Territories cut out points of
view on the world .... By making assemblages of enunciation
open, chaotically determined, the concatenation of the four
ontological functions of Universe, machinic Phylum, Flux and
Territory, preserve their pragmatic processuality. The struc
turalist mode wanted to bracket out the problematics of the sig

nified, the icon, the Imago and the imaginary, to the advantage
of syntagmatic articulations. Attention was focused on interac
tional, structural mechanics, which supposedly animated the
phenomenal landscape. Thus the points of ontological crystalli
sation emerging from this landscape were lost from sight. The
60 Chaosmosis
phonological. gestural, spatial, musical...discursivities, all annexed by the same signifying economy, had to have absolute
control over the contents they were supposed to divide into dis
crete paradigmatic figures. But what gives consistency to these
discursive systems, what authorises the erection of enunciative
monads should be sought on the side of Content; that is, on the
side of this existential function which, taking support from cer
tain discursive links, diverts them from their signifying, denota
tional and propositional incidences, making them play the role
of a refrain of ontological affirmation.
The assemblage of the four ontological functions.
Expression Content actual virtual enunciative nuclei (discursive) (non-discursive)
U incorporeal
possible <I> machinic discursivity
=
=
complexity
F energetico-spatio- T chaosmic
real = =
temporal discursivity incarnation

The functions F, <I>, T, U have the task of conferring a dia
grammatic, conceptual status (pragmatic cartography) on the virtual enunciative nuclei stuck within manifest Expression.
Their matricial concatenation should preserve, as much as pos sible, their radical heterogeneity, which can only be sensed
through a discursive, phenomenological approach. They are
described here as metamodelisers to indicate that their primary
purpose is to take account of the way in which the diverse
existing systems ofmodelisation (religious, metaphysical, scien
tific, psychoanalytic, animistic, neurotic ... ) nearly always skirt
around the problem of self-referential enunciation. Schizo analysis
does not thus choose one modelisation to the exclusion of
another. Within the diverse cartographies in action in a given
situation, it tries to make nuclei of virtual autopoiesis dis
cernible, in order to actualise them, by transversalising them,
in conferring on them an operative diagrammatism (for exam
ple, by a change in the material ofExpression), in making them
themselves operative within modified assemblages, more open,
more processual, more deterritorialised. Schizoanalysis, rather
than moving in the direction of reductionist modelisations
which simplify the complex, will work towards its complexifica
tion, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its
virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards
its ontological heterogeneity.
The location of nuclei of partial life, of that which can give an
enunciative consistency to phenomenal multiplicities, is not a matter of a pure objective description. A monad's knowledge of
being-in-the-world, of a sphere of for-itself, implies a pathic

apprehension which escapes energetico-spatio-temporal coor
dinates. Knowledge here is first of all existential transference,
non-discursive transitivism. The enunciation of this transfer
ence always occurs through the diversion of a narration whose
primary function is not to engender a rational explanation but
to promote complex refrains, supports of an intensive, memori
al persistence and an event-centred consistency. It is only
through mythical narratives (religious, fantasmatic, etc.) that
the existential function accedes to discourse. But this discourse
is not a simple epiphenomenon; it is the stake of ethico-political
strategies of avoidance of enunciation. The four ontological
functions, like safety barriers or warning lights, have the task
of making visible the stakes of these strategies.
For example, the incorporeal Universes of classical Antiquity which were associated with a polytheistic compro-
62 Cha osmosis
mise relating to a multitude of clanic and ethnic Territorialities,
underwent a radical reshaping with the trinitary revolution of
Christianity, indexed on the refrain of the sign of the cross,
which will recentre not only the ensemble of social, existential
Territories, but also the corporeal, mental, familial assem
blages, on the unique existential Territory of Christie incarna
tion and crucifixion. This extraordinary attack of subjective
subjection obviously goes far beyond purely theological consid
erations! The new subjectivity of guilt, contrition, body mark
ings and sexuality, of redemptive mediation, is also an essential
piece of the new social apparatuses, the new machines of sub jection which had to construct themselves from the debris of
the late Roman Empire and the reterritorialisations of feudal
and urban orders yet to come.
Closer to us, the mythico-conceptual narrative of
Freudianism has effected a reshaping of the four ontological
quadrants. A whole dynamic and topical machinery of repres sion governs the economy of the Fluxes of the libido; while a
zone of enunciative nuclei (that the clinical approach had bypassed) - of an oneiric, sexual, neurotic and infantile order
relating to the lapsus and jokes - invades the right hand side
of our picture. The Unconscious presented as a universe ofnon
contradiction, of the heterogenesis of opposites, envelops the
manifest Territories of the symptom, whose tendency towards
autonomisation, autopoietic, pathic and pathogenic repetition
threatens the unity of the self. And this will reveal itself more
over during the history of the analytical clinic to be increasing

ly precarious, indeed fractalised. Freudian cartography is not
only descriptive; it is inseparable from the pragmatics of trans
ference and interpretation. In any event, I would argue that it
should be disengaged from a significational perspective and
understood as a conversion of expressive means and as a muta
tion of ontological textures releasing new lines of the possible

- and this from the simple fact of putting into place new
assemblages of listening and modelisation. The dream, as an
object ofrenewed interest, recounted as a story concealing keys
to the Unconscious, put through the screen of free association,
undergoes a profound mutation. Just as after the revolution of
the Ars Nova in Fourteenth Century Italy music will no longer
be heard in the same way within the European cultural atmos
phere, so too the nature of the dream and oneiric activity will
intrinsically change within their new referential assemblage. And, at the same time, a multitude of psychopathological
refrains will no longer be lived, and consequently modelised, in the same way. And the obsessive who washes his hands a hun
dred times a day exacerbates his solitary anguish within the
context of a profoundly modified Universe of reference.
With the invention of the analytic apparatus, Freudian modeli
sation brought about a clear enrichment in the production of
subjectivity, an enlargement of its referential constellations, a
new pragmatic opening. But it quickly encountered limits with
its familial and universalising conceptions, with its stereotyped
practice of interpretation, but above all with its inability to go
beyond linguistic semiology. While psychoanalysis conceptu
alises psychosis through its vision of neurosis, schizoanalysis
approaches all modalities of subjectivation in light of the mode
of being in the world of psychosis. Because nowhere more than
here is the ordinary modelisation of everyday existence so
denuded; the "axioms of daily life" stand in the way of the a-sig
nifying function, the degree zero of all possible modelisation. With neurosis, symptomatic matter continues to bathe in the
environment of dominant significations while with psychosis the world of standardised Dasein loses its consistency. Alterity,
as such, becomes the primary question. For example, what
finds itself fragilised, cracked up, schizzed, in delire or halluci-

64 Chaosmosis
nating when confronted with the status of the objective world,
is the point of view of the other in me, the recognised body in

articulation with the lived body and the felt body; these are the
normalised coordinates of alterity which give their foundation to sensible evidence.
Psychosis is not a structural object but a concept; it is not
an irremovable essence but a machination which always starts
up again during any encounter with the one who will become,
after the event, the psychotic. Thus here the concept is not an
entity closed in on itself, but the abstract, machinic incarnation
of alterity at the point of extreme precariousness; it is the indeli
ble mark that everything in this world can break down at any
time. The Unconscious is intimately connected with the con
cept: it too is an incorporeal construction which takes posses
sion of subjectivity at the point of its emergence. But it is a con
cept which at every moment risks becoming clogged up, and which must be constantly cleared of the cultural scoria which
threatens to reterritorialise it. It requires reactivating, rnachinic
recharging, due to the virulence of events which set subjectivi
ty into action. The schizo fracture is the royal road of access to
the emergent fractality of the Unconscious. What could be
called the schizo reduction goes beyond all the eidetic reduc
tions of phenomenology - it leads to an encounter with the a
signifying refrains which give back to the narrative, which recast in artifice, existential narrativity and alterity, albeit
delirious ones. Note the curious chasse-croise between psycho analysis and phenomenology: while the first essentially lacked
psychotic alterity (in particular, because of its reifying concep
tions about identification and its incapacity to think intensive becomings), the second, although having produced the best
descriptions of psychosis, did not know how to bring to light, through it, the foundational role of narrative modelisation, the
medium for the uncircumventable existential function of the

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Chaosmosis

Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS

Chaosmosis was originally published in French as Chaosmose. © 1992, Editions Galilee

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

On the planking, on the ship's bulwarks, on the

sea, with the course of the sun through the sky

and the ship, an unreadable and wrenching

script takes shape, takes shape and destroys

itself at the same slow pace - shadows, spines,

shafts of broken light refocused in the angles,

the triangles of a fleeting geometry that yields

to the shadow of the ocean waves. And then,

unceasingly, lives again.

The North China Lover

1 On the production of subjectivity 1

6 The new aesthetic paradigm 98

7 The ecosophic object 119

1 On the production of subjectivity

My professional activities in the field of psychotherapy, like my

political and cultural engagements, have led me increasingly to

Considering subjectivity from the point of view ofits produc

tion does not imply any return to traditional systems of binary

determination - material infrastructure/ideological super

structure. The various semiotic registers that combine to

engender subjectivity do not maintain obligatory hierarchical

relations fixed for all time. Sometimes, for example, economic

At least three types of problem prompt us to enlarge the def

subjective factors at the forefront of current events, the massive

· development of machinic productions of subjectivity and, final

ly, the recent prominence of ethological and ecological perspec

tives on human subjectivity.

Subjective factors have always held an important place in

of the mass media they are beginning to play a dominant role.

We will only give a few brief examples here. The immense

movement unleashed by the Chinese students at Tiananmen

Square obviously had as its goal the slogans of political democ

ratisation. But it is equally certain that the contagious affective

Hungary or Poland, collective existential mutation will have

the last word! All the same, large movements of subjectivation

don't necessarily develop in the direction of emancipation. The

massive subjective revolution which has been developing

religious archaisms and generally conservative social attitudes

- particularly with regard to the position of women (this is a

the area of immigration).

pen as the result of armed insurrection but through the crys

tallisation of an immense <.Q!lec1i\Te desire annihilating the

mental substrate of the post-Stalin totalitarian system. This is a

phenomenon of extreme complexity, since it intermingles

nature. In this upheaval, how will the populations of central

tell us - admittedly a History full of unpleasant surprises but,

why not - about a subsequent renewal of social struggles! By

mination of many more Iraqis (counting all ethnic groups)

lations to heel and reclaim world opinion: it had to be demon

strated that the Yankee way ofsubjectivation could be imposed

by the combined power of the media and arms.

the one hand an aspiration for national liberation, but also