Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

A certain universal representation of subjectivity, incarnated by cap-

italist colonialism in both East and West, has gone bankrupt –

although it is not yet possible to fully measure the scale of such a

failure. (Chaosmosis, 3, translation modified using the Italian

version)

The disturbance into which the planet entered at the start of the

1990s after the brief hope for peace following 1989 was of a new sort,

having little or nothing in common with past economic crises. First of

all because this exploded in conjunction with the rapid and apparently

uncontainable spread of planetary civil war, of a tribal war waged with

ultramodern weapons by everyone against everybody else.

The traditional categories of economic analysis say nothing about the

factors that appear to be decisive in today’s world: the social investments

of desire, their psychopathology, the intersection between economic and

semiotic flows, the disturbances occurring in certain fundamental cog-

nitive functions because of the mutation of the natural and infospheric

environment.^1

In order to understand what happened in the politics and economy

of the 1990s, it is indispensable to make use of the conceptual instru-

ments of psychopathology and of schizoanalysis, since the crisis is above

all an incompatibility between the fantasmatic projections of different

social, cultural and national formations.

What were the innovative traits of this extraordinary abyss? The

1980s and 1990s were a period of great economic innovation and of an

enormous increase in global productivity and wealth. But these were

simultaneously the years of the systematic destruction of the natural

planetary environment and of the psychic environment in which

humanity lives and communicates.

Admitting that the concept of neo-liberalism might be adequate for

understanding the complex dynamic that subjects the internal mental

and material system of production to the dictatorship of immediate

private profit, one can then say that in the transition period between

industrial and post-industrial phases, neo-liberalism legitimated a

process of destruction not only of actual but also of future resources.

This process occurred by frenetically stimulating debt, overconsump-

tion and competition, and by forcing the collective psyche to undergo

a competitive stress, the effects of which produce depression, panic

and aggression.

In the course of the 1980s, states, communities, corporations and

individuals, in order to participate in the game of competition, were

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