did not distinguish the work from the flow of existential events in
which it was situated. Only at times did he instead stop in a slow sus-
pension, a sort of meditative sinking, before an artwork.
I remember the visit to the Jean Tinguely exhibition held at the
Beaubourg: Félix sat down on the ground at a certain point, in one of
the rooms, and for a while, I had the impression that he had fallen
asleep. He had not done so, but rather had let himself become drowsy
by the cogwheels and the whirling rhythm. The aura was definitively
forgotten in this way of getting closer to artists’ activities. What had
the most value for him instead were the environment, daily life, urban
space and the way in which the artistic gesture put into movement
new possibilities of existential assemblages within this environment,
this daily life, this urban space. Félix took as given reality the becom-
ing true of the Dadaist revolution, its definitive realization in daily life.
But in his attitude there was none of this somewhat snobbish and nos-
talgic irritation against the effects of banalization caused by that gener-
alized aestheticization that intellectuals often have. The banalization,
the diffusion, the popularization were a given, they were taken as such
and were no longer an object of discussion, and especially not a source
of scandal. For Félix there was no nostalgia for the aura. Rather, the
problem of art for him was completely located in the possibility of
putting in motion assemblages of enunciation, housing, urbanism and
technologies.*****The aesthetic paradigm in Chaosmosiscomes to assume an essential
role in redefining the historical and social perspective, and it is fully
integrated into the problem of ecosophy.
Ecosophy, an environmental consciousness adequate to the techno-
logical complexity of late modernity, is based on the decisive character
of aesthetics in the prospect of ecology.^3
Aesthetics is the science that studies the contact between the derma
and different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic and in-
formational flows. Hence aesthetics has much to do with the modern
psychopathology of contact, and also with its psychotherapy.*****The rhizomatic vision conceptualizes the universe as a continuum of
diverse, irreducible and yet juxtaposed entities in epidermal contact34 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_06_cha05.pdf 10/3/08 11:34 AM Page 34