Words are viral agents, as are images and sounds. This does not exclude
the possibility that they ‘mean something’, that they remain within a
signifying sphere. When we look at them insofar as they have mean-
ing, they are transparent. This sign interests us because it points to a
referential sphere. But at another moment we can consider the sign as
a replicant, a mutagenic agent, an event that is assembled with other
events. In this case, we cannot seal off separately the sphere of words
from the sphere of things because words act as things through other
things, place processes into motion and create communication. They
are not limited to signifying; they communicate.
As viral agents, they produce mutations. Semiochemistry is the process
through which signs produce effects of decomposition and recompos-
ition in the social psyche, in the imaginary, in the wait for different
worlds, in desire.
This double articulation allows us to understand also how thought
functions, and the thought of Deleuze-Guattari in particular. It func-
tions, of course, as abstraction and interpretation of symbols through
other symbols. But at a certain point, the interpretative machine leaves
the field to neologisms and contaminations, and the words of philo-
sophy become pop discourse. Alongside argumentation, another kind
of functioning is revealed, one that is much more material, dynamic
and teeming with life.
There is an immediate, spontaneous proximity between the thought
of Deleuze and Guattari and real movement, the becoming-sensible of
society. Their books have recorded the subtlest and most intricate dis-
placements of social affectivity in the late-modern period not through
analyses of processes, but through the invention of concepts and terms
which were able to illuminate processes from innovative perspectives.
In the 1970s, Anti-Oedipusrecorded the proliferation of micro-
political movements and the formation of a social field of creative
work.
In the 1980s, A Thousand Plateausanticipated the proliferation of
processes of subjectivation, the decadence of the centralized and linear
model of communication. In a certain sense, A Thousand Plateausis the
most lucid anticipation of what would take form in the 1990s as Web
culture.
The homology between Web culture and rhizomatic thought is not
merely a superficial phenomenon, but it concerns the modalities of dis-
cursive proliferation through the Web themselves. Mailing lists, discus-
sion groups and hypertextual Web interactivity are nothing other than
a teeming projection of the concept of rhizome.Kafka, Hypertext and Assemblages 959780230_221192_10_cha09.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 95