Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

pushed to place suicidal bets on the gaming table, risking their future

existence and resources.

Thus, what appeared on the horizon at the end of the 1990s is a

form of planetary civil war that fragmented the globe into a series of

innumerable local conflicts, all incapable of putting forward any uni-

versal values.

The cultural devastation produced by neo-liberalism has upset social

investments of desire, provoking a drought in productive social creativ-

ity and determining a true emotional plague, the aggression of every-

one against everyone else, an obsessive fear of contact, a wave of

Nazism without ideology, a purely visceral racism. The fragmentary

war that has begun does not seem reducible to a political plan, and

thus risks not dissipating before having produced all the destruction of

which it might be capable.

The majority of humanity – the eighty per cent of the planet that

must be satisfied with twenty per cent of the resources – finds no

other prospects than that of a mortal conflict in which the poor grab

bread and territory away from other poor, while the centre of real

power seems to have become inaccessible, untouchable and even

unrecognizable.

But even in the rich metropolises of the world, civil war is evident, in

forms of mafia-like criminality, of armed gangs that fight over territory

and rackets, and of creeping or outright racism.

The destruction of the environment and economic

psychopathology

At the threshold of the 1980s, punk had proclaimed the abolition of

the future.

Humanity no longer had any reason for remaining together. This

was the feeling, the premonition. Nevertheless, the politicians, jour-

nalists, intellectuals of the time all hastened to declare that, with pro-

letarian and autonomist extremism finally defeated, with the workers’

political strength finally eliminated, with utopia finally stamped out,

an era of unlimited enrichment could begin.

Officially the 1980s were the years of development and freedom.

It matters little that competition was exalted as the noblest feeling,

and so violence of one against all others was thereby sanctified; it

matters little that profit became the ruling point in culture and in com-

munication. So, the arrogance of the ignorant became widespread and

promoted as a way of life and of achieving success. This decade was an

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