Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

In a certain sense, we can say that the semantics of social proximity

are the privileged object of Guattarian aesthetics. And to understand how

these social semantics are transformed, one must understand how art

acts in communication, and how communication acts on the collective

mind.

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Art is a semiotic action of a deterritorializing kind. Gestures and semiotic

signs modify the relation between the sign and its context, its func-

tion, and the conditions of common interpretation. In traditional soci-

eties that are strongly territorialized, the artistic gesture is exceptional

and sacralized. But in the twentieth century, when the inflated weath-

ervane of generalized aestheticization became unhinged, something

broke forever in the status of art. The loss of the aura is the disappear-

ance of the exceptional and unique character of the work of art. The

industrial reproduction of the artistic sign opened the door to semiotic

inflation. Cinema, sound recording, television, advertising, digital-

ization and finally the automatic creation of artworks all dispersed the

authorial aura.

With the dynamics of ‘new economy’ capitalism, the whole process

reaches its term and its reversal. We were used to thinking that art

deterritorialized and economy reterritorialized. Now we see that eco-

nomy has subsumed art as a factor of perpetual deterritorialization and

of valorization without territory. Chance, once a model of commun-

ication available only to the artist, has now become the predominant

semiotic regime. Economic values are exchanged according to rules

that change from day to day, while in the past this was granted only to

aesthetic values.

The problem that Guattari had proposed in the chapter of

Chaosmosisdevoted to the aesthetic paradigm has to be revisited

within this new framework.

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I have always been struck by the way in which Félix approached works

of art and artists. Félix followed a great number of artists through their

different efforts: Enzo Corman, François Pain, Gerard Fromanger, Jean-

Jacques Lebel, Jean-François Léaud, Annie Raati, Tonino Guerra, Laura

Betti, and many others, more or less noteworthy.^2 He was someone

who was casual in the way that he looked at a work of art because he

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