Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

and material secretion. The molecular dimension is that in which each

semiotic agent metabolizes and assembles the real and semiotic flows

that it produces.

Metabolizes and assembles, decomposes and recomposes.

The molecular is not opposed to the molar, but tells its true story.

The molar are institutions, languages, states, recognized hierarchical

structures.

They are the forms of power and ideology, of consensus and

representation.

Under these forms and their disputes there swarms an infinity of

organic, psychic, mechanistic, cybernetic, technological segments that

are in continuous recomposition.

The fragments are assembled according to principles of heterogeneity

(as ‘Rhizome’ will later explain, the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus

that was published eight years after Anti-Oedipus).

What is the meaning of this distinction between two regions: one mol-

ecular and the other molar; one microphysical or micrological, the

other statistical and gregarious? Is this anything more than a metaphor

lending the unconscious a distinction grounded in physics, when we

speak of an opposition between intra-atomic phenomena and the

mass phenomena that operate through statistical accumulation, obey-

ing the laws of aggregates? But in reality the unconscious belongs to

the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are

not metaphors, but matter itself. (Anti-Oedipus, 283)

Anti-Oedipus: microphysics and micropsychic

In the molecular dimension we can perceive the continuity between

organic and inorganic material and the becoming of the psyche as an

assemblage of semiotic fragments from a brain incessantly redefining

itself with respect to its neuronal material, the infinite speed of its cog-

nitive potentiality, and even the informational flow by which it is

inundated, drenched and confused.

Desiring machines are not reducible to any totalization or any foun-

dational truth. These machines

... represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly

what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in

themselves. Desiring-machines work according to regimes of synthesis

that have no equivalent in the large aggregates. Jacques Monod has

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