Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

system that continued in the following decades, with liberating but

also catastrophic and panic-inducing results.

*****

The becoming of communication is in a close relationship with the

becoming of social perception and of aesthetics. In Chaosmosis, Guattari

speaks of ‘the new aesthetic paradigm’ (‘le nouveau paradigme esthé-

tique’): the theme of his study is the mutation of the epidermis, of the

contact zone between bodies, of sensibility.

What is aesthetics? In contrast to the prevalent understanding of

Western philosophy, aesthetics is not only the science of an object’s

beauty. Aesthetics is also (and this is what is of greatest interest) the

science of sensibility, of perception, the science of the contact between

epidermises, and thus the science of the projection of worlds by sub-

jectivities in becoming.

There is no social question any more essential than this one, because

cognitive capitalism is an affection of sensibility more than anything

else. In the sphere of globalized capitalism, the essential site of work, of

economic exploitation, of psychic suffering and affective solicitation is

the human mind and, more precisely, the body-mind relationship

undergoing the pathogenic effects of informational overstimulation.

Capitalistic acceleration, the rarefaction of the contact between bodies,

replaced by communication, planetary ethnic deterritorialization, the

disagregation and collapse of traditional anthropological models: all

of these act on the modalities of elaboration of the social mind and,

above all, on sensibility. The emotional body is the site in which the

most delicate and extreme of battles is being waged.

The mediatic bombardment of social attention produces brutal

effects on sensibility. The imaginary is invaded by hyperfast mon-

sters, mutagenic viruses of the collective psyche. And meanwhile,

the unleashing of the mediatic epidemic taking the name of AIDS,

a contagion that is essentially spread in the human psyche, goes

hand in hand with the virtualization of relations among conscious

organisms.^1

This is the sphere of interest of schizoanalytic aesthetics: its problem

is not beauty as an object of contemplation, but the way in which

bodies perceive each other in the social field. In an era of displacement

and migrations, of contaminations and integralisms, of nationalisms

and aggression, an essential political problem is that of the semantics

of social proximity, and thus of aesthetics.

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