Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

geneity of the components leading to the production of subjectivity.

(Chaosmosis, 4)

The process of subjectivation passes through all the effects of deter-

ritorialization and reterritorialization that are born from commun-

ication and depend on technologies that enlarge, complicate and

channel communication. Here we are at the heart of a central question

in Guattari’s thought, the process of subjectivation. This concept has a

precise sense: a universal form of the Subject does not exist, neither in

the historicist sense that Marxism inherited from Hegel, nor in the

Freudian sense of a universal topology of the Unconscious.

The unconscious is a factory, not a theatre. It is a site of singular pro-

duction, of machining processes that install singular elements follow-

ing a rule of singular functioning. Thus one must not speak of the

subject, but of subjectivation. And subjectivation depends on the webs

that weave the singularity into its relations with singular flows.

*****

The notion of subjectivity is ambiguous because it is located at the cross-

ing point from which a perspective of historicist finality, inherited from

the heavy thinking anchored to the dominant categories of the Hegelian

matrix, and a proliferating, light and creative one start to diverge.

One must be clear about this word. Guattari did not talk about sub-

jectivity, but about the production of subjectivity: this subjectivity

does not pre-exist the process of production or the psychic, aesthetic

and ideological flows that traverse it, seep through it, colour and dis-

place it. It does not pre-exist the anticipations, the desires and the fears

that shape its form.

The context within and against which Guattari elaborated his con-

ception of the production of subjectivity is that of Freudian and

Lacanian structuralism. This was a model of thought that pretended to

locate in the phenomenology of existence and desire the manifesta-

tions of a structuring psyche, of Oedipus, the unfolding of guilt and

remorse, the sudden emergence of a repressed past which remains

inscribed in the flow of language.

Guattari began his philosophical and psychoanalytical trajectory pre-

cisely by distancing himself from this structuralism and Oedipalism.

The same movement towards a polyphonic and heterogeneous com-

prehension of subjectivity leads us to consider certain aspects of

Chaosmosis 123

9780230_221192_12_cha11.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 123