Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

that can be found in any Parisian cigarette shop. Machines, gadgets,

assemblages and bodies without organs were at the centre of his thought;

they were the code informing his language, the surrealist décor of his

imaginary.

European critical thought has always had problems in its relations

with technology. Benjamin was able to introduce a philosophical per-

spective regarding the techno-communication machine, and he could

recognize that the industrialization of culture modified the very condi-

tions of aesthetics. But the main current of critical thought has always

considered communication technologies to be an instrument of social

culture’s subjugation to the dominant ideology or as messages induc-

ing consumerist and conformist forms of behaviour.

Not Guattari. His lookout post had always been the net, even when

the word did not have the meaning that it has for us today, even

before the World Wide Web existed and the Internet started making

newspaper headlines.

In a small pamphlet entitled The Holy Fools, Richard Barbrook insults

Deleuze and Guattari’s thought in the name of labourist and statist

orthodoxy, arguing that rhizomatic thought is akin to Californian ideo-

logy, that is, to the kind of neo-liberalist thought that sings the praises

of high-tech capitalism.

Rhizomatic or techno-nomadic thought does, in fact, have one thing

in common with the apologies of high-tech capitalism: it takes a per-

spective of becoming and not one of conservation, and thus it succeeds

in understanding the logic of mental labour typical of network tech-

nology and of pan-capitalism, in seeing things from the inside and

not from the viewpoint of the State, national sovereignty and past

identities.

Deleuze and Guattari’s techno-nomadic thought analyses con-

temporary capitalism as a semiotic flow and situates the task of

critical thought on this plane. Thus if today we wish to reason in terms

of the molecular self-organization of neo-labour against capital-

flow, we need to refer to schizoanalytical – not Marxist-Leninist –

concepts.

Techno-nomadic thought is the determined and specific subversion

of high-tech ideology, a kind of thought that is able to spread out along

the same lines and same rhythms of semio-capital.

Félix Guattari wrote:

The democratic chaos [...] conceals a multitude of vectors of re-

singularization, attractors of social creativity in search of actual-

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