Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

the constant becoming of constellations, on the incessant deterritorial-

izations of a-signifying segments.

In a talk at a meeting on ‘Psychoanalysis and Semiotics’ held in Milan

in 1974, Guattari spoke about signifying semiologies and a-signifying

semiotics:

My opposition between despotic signifying semiologies and a-

signifying semiotics remains highly schematic. In reality, there are

only mixed semiotics which belong to both in varying proportions.

A signifying semiology is always shadowed by a sign machine, and,

conversely, an a-signifying sign machine is always in the process of

being taken over by a signifying semiology. But it is certainly useful

to identify the polarities represented by the two, in other words the

signifying semiology as a paranoid-fascist ideal, and a non-signifying

semiotics as the ideal of schizo-revolutionary diagrammatization, of

getting beyond the system of signs towards the plane of consistency of

particle-signs. (‘Subjectless Action’ in Guattari, Molecular Revolution,

140)

Guattari uses here the notion of the particle-sign. This is his way of

molecularizing semiosis, of seeing it as an activity of projecting psycho-

chemical agents. We can speak of signs as material agents of semiotic

mutations. This has nothing to do with ethereal messengers of meaning,

but instead with viral agents in Burroughs’s sense who, in fact, spoke of

language as a virus: signs not as pure representations, but propagating as a

signifying contagion, transforming the semiotic ecosphere.

*****

What does planetary becoming have to do with the Body without

Organs?

There is no planetary becoming, Deleuze and Guattari would reply.

There are only ‘becomings’. At the start of Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari

writes that in the miasmas and nebulae at the end of the twentieth

century, in the middle of the frightening progress of processes of fascis-

tic reterritorializations that seem to dominate our era, we can find a

line of flight residing uniquely in the possibility of a creationist chaos-

mos that is emerging from a multifaceted planetary becoming.

Creationist chaosmos means precisely this: a planetary becoming does

not exist; there is no consistency between one state of the world and

another because in any process in which we enter, what is interesting is

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