Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

an enormous displacement of productivity from the human workforce

toward electronic automation. This provokes the liberation of increasing

amounts of labour time. This is an effect of deterritorialization to which

the 1990s culture (both capitalist and labour-centred) is unable to react

except in the form of panic and anguish. We have not succeeded in out-

lining the politics of redistributing the work schedule, nor in undertaking

processes for the liberation of social time. Consequently society has not

succeeded in semiotizing the reduction of labour time except in terms of

unemployment, impoverishment and marginalization. This has unleashed

a powerful movement of reterritorialization, reactionary and impotent,

but nonetheless enraged. The workers’ struggles of the 1980s (the occupa-

tion of Fiat in autumn 1980, the Union Miners’ struggle in 1983, the agita-

tion of French and Italian steelworkers) were all losing battles because they

barricaded themselves in the position of defending forms of labour which

are obsolete, useless, difficult and depressing all at once.

On the ethnic and cultural plane: the great global migration from

the South to the North that began in the 1980s and 1990s produced an

effect of cultural, aesthetic and sexual contamination that enormously

enriched the possibilities of experience, production and exchange. But

this movement of deterritorialization provoked reactions of dismay

and disorientation in the majority of the population. This changed the

urban landscape, behaviours, semantic relations, the rituals of daily

life, and this gave rise to desperate reactions: the reaffirmation of an

identity that is just as imaginary and fictitious as any other originary

claim. But it is precisely the fragility and the illusory artificiality of this

claim that mobilized aggressive nationalist and racist energies.

Sociology, economic science, political science and legal studies appear

poorly equipped to account for the mixture of archaic attachments to

cultural traditions that nonetheless aspire to the technological and

scientific modernity characterizing the contemporary subjective cock-

tail. Traditional psychoanalysis, for its part, is hardly better placed to

confront these problems, due to its habit of reducing social facts to psy-

chological mechanisms. In such conditions it appears opportune to

forge a more transversalist conception of subjectivity, one which would

permit us to understand both its idiosyncratic territorialized couplings

(Existential Territories) and its opening onto value systems (Incorporeal

Universes) with their social and cultural implications. (Chaosmosis, 3–4)

On the techno-communicational plane, the diffusion of digital techno-

logies opens unthinkable possibilities for connections, the expansion

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