Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

in the atmospheric pollution in the major metropolises and the entire

planet. After ten years of reduction of the workforce in the automobile

industry, faced with the severe recession that struck Western markets,

the capitalist economy could not even consider the hypothesis of a

reduction in automobile production. The same configuration of the

Western imaginary made it impossible even to think about an organi-

zation of civic life capable of avoiding the devastation of our planet’s

environmental resources.

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Félix Guattari taught me to see social processes as the production of

unconscious processes, and to see the unconscious as the laboratory

in which the stages for social action are produced. There is no need to

think of power as a cold machine of decision and will.

When one uses words like euphoria or panic or depression to describe

the behaviour of the stock exchange or the markets, we must not think

that this only is a question of metaphors. It is also a question of an ade-

quate description of the psychopathology that traverses the social mind

in a situation of informational overload and competitive stress.

Sometimes, for example, economic semiotization becomes depen-

dent on collective psychological factors – look at the sensitivity of

the stock exchange to fluctuations of opinion. (Chaosmosis, 1)

The increasing mental nature of production has exposed the economic

system more and more to the psychic storms that are crisscrossing the

collective mind. And on the other hand, the economy has caused com-

petitive sentiments that have been transformed into anxiety, and at times

degenerate into forms of panic. Financial and psychic flows are closely

interdependent. This is why we must study the political, economic and

social catastrophe beginning with an analysis of the social investments of

desire.

The economic finalization of desire, the harnessing of psychic energies,

the competitive acceleration of all relations become comprehensible

within the same temporal context as the media epidemic of AIDS.

Since true catastrophes never occur alone, the ideological dictatorship

of neo-liberalism in the 1980s was accompanied by the spread of AIDS.

The two phenomena are quite different, of course, but perfectly inte-

grated on the level of the social imaginary and in their effects on

behaviour.

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