Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

ics’ without regard to the traditional opposition between mecha-

nism and vitalism. (Anti-Oedipus, 288)

The traditional opposition between mechanicism and vitalism reveals

itself as too limited to comprehend the development of microphysics.

On the sub-atomic scale, the distinction between domains of matter is

losing its meaning.

Modern humanism fixes a rigorous hierarchy of different domains of

matter because this is functional for its epistemic strategy. The domain

of inorganic matter had to be distinguished from the domain of organic

matter, and then a special place was given to the human domain.

Today we are currently oriented toward a different epistemic strategy

in which the human no longer maintains any privileged place, and

especially can no longer appeal to a sort of hierarchical separation.

We hear people talking about the post-human, and this expression

can mean many things.

Above all, it can mean the failure of rationalist humanism that has

been unable to govern the social relations between organisms of the

human kind, and today it is constrained to surrender in the face of

the unleashing of the bestial, the pulsional and the machinic.

One can speak of post-human also in the artistic sphere because

artists, who arrive more quickly and courageously than the politicians

at the inevitable but embarrassing consequences of historical failures,

have begun to stage the human body as a carnal segment in a hetero-

geneous machinic continuum in which organic matter, inorganic matter

and digital pulsations interact in the form of a bio-complex organism.

In recent years, bioengineering has generated doubts about whether

the human marks an absolute discontinuity in nature.

It is precisely because it problematized the material continuity between

the organic and the machinic that Anti-Oedipusanticipated post-human

thinking by two decades.

But it is especially A Thousand Plateaus, eight years after Anti-Oedipus,

that muddies the waters of any classificatory distinction in the material

sphere. Matter, in A Thousand Plateaus, is a flow in continuous recom-

positional becoming.

A treatise on semiochemistry^1

We can consider A Thousand Plateausto be a treatise on semiochemistry

even if, as far as I know, Deleuze and Guattari never used this term.

Signs are not (only) signifying, but also material segments, factors in

deterritorialization, viral agents, strategies of displacement.

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