Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

imposing an inalterable order of things and concepts. They write: ‘The

plane of consistency knows nothing of difference in level ...’ (A Thousand

Plateaus, 69).

While a difference of level exists between the biological and the noo-

logical spheres, for example, there can always be a plane of consistency

that selects segments with biological valence or segments with cultural,

spiritual, or ideological valence. Then we could define the plane of consis-

tency as a particular, singular slice that operates through a constellation

of events, signs, or affects. Any essentialism, then, gets definitively dis-

solved because beings are no longer definable as belonging to an arche-

typical series; there is no reference to the essence of the event or of the

aggregate. Events, aggregates and signs do not belong to any series that

reduces them to any sort of archetype. They are to be considered rather as

singular constellations, singularities composed by traits that have been

borrowed, copied or even ripped out from other singular constellations.

Like in the Democritean conception, phenomena are considered as

aggregates of entirely provisional elements.

With the expression ‘molecular revolution’, Guattari synthesized his

way of thinking about politics and social becoming. Modes of social

behaviour, imaginary stratifications, desires and obsessions conjoin

molecularly and not in identitarian form. There is no constituted

subjectivity bearing positive values that would be opposed to a social

subject defending negative values. There is no dialectical contraposition,

but the continuous dislocation of imaginary fragments that can be put

together either according to identitarian, aggressive rules, or to desiring,

dispersive and politically libertarian rules.

The compositional elements (let’s call them pure atoms, molecules,

or better yet, viruses, contagious signs as messengers of information)

are not significant in themselves. They acquire semiotic power in their

composition with other elements:

Lines of signifying decoding, composed of discrete figures – binariz-

able, syntagmatizable, and paradigmatizable – 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 different when we consider the actual texture of these

Universes of reference. They are always marked with the stamp of

singularity. (Guattari, Chaosmosis, 38)

What we call reality is therefore the projection (or rather the innumer-

able successive projections) of a functional or semantic continuity on

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