Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

imposition of new refrains: the refrain of electronic speed, the refrain

of information overload, the refrain of digitalization.

My feeling of personal identity is thus pulled in different directions.

How can I maintain a relative sense of unicity, despite the diversity

of components of subjectivation that pass through me? It’s a ques-

tion of the refrain that fixes me in front of the screen, hence-

forth constituted as a projective existential node. My identity has

become that of the speaker, the person who speaks from the tele-

vision. (Chaosmosis, 16–17)

In communication, obsessive and fixated types of nuclei are deter-

mined; certain refrains thicken and solidify, entering into resonance

and producing effects of double bind. When the existential flow gets

rigidly brought back to logical, mythological, ideological or psychic

refrains, behaviour tends to become paranoid. For example, when the

money refrain becomes the structuring element of all social and com-

municative life, this engenders behavioural paradoxes, paranoid anti-

cipations, social double binds, and depression.

In the relation between the fluidity of social and communicational

existence and the fixation on obsessive refrains, the psychopathologies

of collective life are created.

In the case of neurotic identity, sometimes the refrain develops into

a ‘hardened’ representation, for example an obsessive ritual.

(Chaosmosis, 17)

In the book’s subsequent pages, Guattari reverses the analyses of

the hardening of refrains from a therapeutic perspective. What does

the task of the therapist or the analyst consist of?

Analysis is no longer the transferential interpretation of symptoms

as a function of preexisting, latent content, but the invention of

new analytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence. A singularity, a

rupture of sense, a cut, a fragmentation, the detachment of a semi-

otic content – in a Dadaist or surrealist manner – can originate

mutant nuclei of subjectivation. (Chaosmosis, 18)

The therapeutic problematic is therefore placed at the junction between

the refrain’s signifying hardening, that is, the succession of particle-

signs that proliferate in the psychochemistry of the Infosphere, and the

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