Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

of the sphere of relations, and the quantity of available information. At

the same time, social relations are becoming virtual; the relation

between bodies in space is partially being substituted by relations

between disembodied speakers, semiotic actors without immediate

social contact. Virtual deterritorialization, the transfer of the locus of

political decisions in a sphere that has no contacts with social daily

life, produces violent reactions from those members of residual (but

not minoritarian) sociality who feel themselves disenfranchised and

marginalized. In response, effects of massive reterritorialization are

unleashed and become manifested with the reemergence of strongly

territorial identities.

There is a profound relationship, but one difficult to decipher,

between communicational globalization, cultural homogenization,

the generalized transparency of forms of life, and the aggressive

reaffirmation of tribal, ethnic and religious forms of identity that

seemed buried in archaism. On the psychic plane, phenomena of

informational overload act as a cause of anxiety, panic, and as a

disturbance of the concrete emotional sphere. The background

noise produced by the proliferation of informational emissions of

every kind overpowers the voice of the father as head of the family,

who feels dispossessed of his sole, miserable power, as well as the voice

of the lover, who feels overwhelmed by other fantasmatic, distant

lovers.

*****

Guattari was not able to see the unfolding of the telematic web as a

planetary anthropological phenomenon, since the year of his death

was also the year in which the World Wide Web began its diffusion.

But he had foreseen all its possibilities and potential consequences,

and had conceptually anticipated its dynamics.

Should we keep the semiotic productions of the mass media,

informatics, telematics and robotics separate from psychological

subjectivity? I don’t think so. Just as social machines can be grouped

under the general title of Collective Equipment, technological

machines of information and communication operate at the

heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intel-

ligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fan-

tasms. Recognition of these machinic dimensions of subjectivation

leads us to insist, in our attempt at redefinition, on the hetero-

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