Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

the structuring element in language, in existential behaviour, and in

history.

A child that sings in the night because of his fear of the dark tries to

reestablish control of events that are too quickly deterritorializing

for his liking and that begin to proliferate in the cosmos and in the

imaginary. Each individual, each group, each nation thus equips

themselves with a range of basic refrains for conjuring. (L’Inconscient

machinique, 109, our translation)^2

The refrain is an obsessive ritual that is initiated in linguistic, sexual,

social, productive, existential behaviour to allow the individual – the

conscious organism in continuous variation – to find identification

points, that is, to territorialize oneself and to represent oneself in rela-

tion to the world that surrounds it. The refrain is the modality of semi-

otization that allows an individual (a group, a people, a nation, a

subculture) to receive and project the world according to reproducible

and communicable formats.

In order for the cosmic, social and molecular universe to be filtered

through an individual perception, in order for it, we may thus say, to

enter the mind, filters or models of semiotization must act, and these

are models that Guattari called refrains. The perception of time by a

society, a culture or a person is also the model of a truly temporal

refrain, that is, of particular rhythmic modulations that function as

modules for accessing, awaiting and participating in cosmic temporal

becoming.

From this perspective, universal time appears to be no more than a

hypothetical projection, a time of generalized equivalence, a

‘flattened’ capitalistic time; what is important are these partial

modules of temporalization, operating in diverse domains (biolo-

gical, ethological, socio-cultural, machinic, cosmic ...) , and out of

which complex refrains constitute highly relative existential syn-

chronies. (Chaosmosis,16)

What is the fundamental passage through which the anthropological

transformation of modern capitalism is determined? This passage con-

sists in the creation of refrains of temporal perception that invade and

discipline all society: the refrain of factory work, the refrain of working

hours, the refrain of the salary, the refrain of the production line.

The postindustrial transition brings along with it the formation and

Chaosmosis 129

9780230_221192_12_cha11.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 129