Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

The telematic web is woven from organic brains, human thought,

wires and electrons, ether and silicon. It’s the flow that connects all

of this.

We can speak of this interchange in terms of a general semiology

as if the world were the locus of signs, but we can also speak of it in

terms of a generalized biology that penetrates machines, connects the

intelligent and the inorganic, transforming connectivity into a self-

replicating mechanism of a bioartificial order.

But we can also speak of it in terms of a general geology because

in the organic is the inorganic and in the noetic is the inorganic-

organic.

But above all, we can speak of it in terms of Mechanology, that is,

the science of assemblages.

What is a machine? A machine, Guattari answers, is an aggregate

that functions independently of the consistency and the meaning of

the elements that contribute to its constitution. A machine is the semi-

otic functioning of a-signifying fragments that acquire their signifying

valence from the fact of entering into connection.

On the one hand, desire is the machinic creation of the elements

that remain a-signifying as long as they are fragmentary, distinct, and

on the other hand, we cannot consider the concept of the Body

without Organs defined in a truly conclusive way.

You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you

are forever attaining it, it is a limit. (A Thousand Plateaus, 150)

It is useless to tire oneself too much by attempting to find a definition

of the concept of the Body without Organs. It is an indefinable notion

precisely because it concerns the theme of indefinability, of indeterm-

inacy, and of dis-identity.

The Body without Organs is the condition of possibility of becoming

other; it is the presence of everything in everything that seems to be a

consequence of the eternal transmigration of heterogeneous particles

from one organism in composition-decomposition to another.

This is why I find that there is something in the notion of the Body

without Organs that can be understood from the perspective of the

Buddhist mahajanabetter than from the perspective of ontology or

psychoanalysis.

In Méditation et Action, Chogyam Trungpa says that there is nothing

that corresponds to the word ‘I’ or to the sentence ‘I am’. There are

sensations, perceptions, impressions, imaginations and hypotheses

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