Ecosophical Aesthetics

Ecosophical Aesthetics
Also available from Bloomsbury
Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues

Aesthetics of Ugliness, Karl Rosenkranz
Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas
The Animal Catalyst, edited by Patricia MacCormack
Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova
General Ecology, edited by Erich Hörl and James Burton
The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari
Ecosophy, Félix Guattari
Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Félix Guattari
Eco-Aesthetics, Malcolm Miles
Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Ecosophical Aesthetics
Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari
Edited by
Patricia MacCormack and Colin Gardner
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For Louise and James
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements x
List of Contributors xi
Introduction Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack 1
Part 1 Therapy/Care/Affect/Poetics: Towards an Ecosophical Ethics
1 Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s Gift to Contemporary

Clinical Practice James Fowler and Patricia MacCormack 31
2 ‘An inside that lies deeper than any internal world’: On the
Ecosophical Significance of Affect Jason Cullen 49
3 Care of the Wild: A Primer Aranye Fradenburg Joy 65
4 Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals and Invasive

Species Penelope Gottlieb 95
5 From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to Post-media Poetics: Pierre

Joris’s Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj as Processual
Praxis Jason Skeet 105
Part 2 Ecosophical Aesthetics, ‘UIQOSOPHY’ and the Abstract Machine
6 UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-Of) Graeme Thomson and

Silvia Maglioni 127
7 The Guattarian Art of Failure: An Ecosophical Portrait Zach Horton 147
8 Into the Zone: Affective Counterpoint and Ecosophical Aesthetics

in the Films of Terrence Malick Colin Gardner 173
9 The Delirious Abstract Machines of Jean Tinguely Joff P. N. Bradley 193
viii Contents
Part 3 The Shattered Muse: Ecosophy and Transverse Subjectivities
10 The Shattered Muse: Mêtis, Melismatics and the Catastrosophical

Imagination Charlie Blake 217
11 The Transversalization of Wildness: Queer Desires and Nonhuman

Becomings in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Alexandra Magearu 245
12 Doing Something Close to Nothing: Marina Abramović’s War

Machine renée c. hoogland 261
Index 277
Illustrations
Figures
4.1 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Castilleja Cruenta Standl’ 97

4.2 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Hopea Shinkeng’ 98
4.3 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Otophora Unilocularis’ 99
4.4 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Valerianella Affinis’ 100
4.5 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Elaeagnus Umbellata’ 101
4.6 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Phyllostachys Nigra’ 102
4.7 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Rosa Laevigata’ 103
4.8 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Convolvulus arvensis’ 104
7.1 Diagram of Integrated World Capitalism 167
7.2 Diagram of ecosophy as integrative catalyst 168
9.1 Jean Tinguely, ‘Sketch for the “Philosophers” ’ display in his
exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988) 195
9.2 Jean Tinguely, ‘Hiroshima’ (1963) 198
9.3 Jean Tinguely, ‘Tokyo Gal’ (1967) 202
9.4 Jean Tinguely, ‘James Watt’ (1989) 206
12.1 Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010) 263
12.2 Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010) 264
Table
7.1 Dimensions of the three ecologies 165

Acknowledgements
‘Of Being Numerous (#7)’ by George Oppen, from New Collected Poems,
copyright ©1968 by George Oppen, is reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.
The editors would like to thank Pierre Joris for his kind permission to cite
from his published works.
We would also like to thank Drew Burke at Univocal Publishing for permission
to include a revised version of Chapter 6 which previously appeared in Félix
Guattari, A Love of UIQ (The University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Copyright
by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
Many thanks to the following for permission to reproduce artworks: The
Museum Tinguely, Basel, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, for allowing us to
use images by Jean Tinguely and Marina Abramović respectively, as well as the
Artist Rights Society; and Penelope Gottlieb for providing reproductions from
her ‘Extinct Botanicals’ and ‘Invasive Species’ series.
Special thanks to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury for their
enduring support in the project.
Contributors
Charlie Blake is currently visiting Senior Lecturer in Media Ethics and Digital
Culture at the University of West London. The founding and executive editor
of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Blake is also a composer,
musician and performer in the Manchester-based post-industrial cabaret
ensemble Babyslave, who have recently released two albums Kill for Dada
and Runt on Valentine Records. He has co-edited theory collections such as
Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism, Masochism and the Philosophical Muse (2009),
Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (2012) and Immanent
Materialisms: Speculation and Critique (2017), and has published variously
on Blanchot and music, Deleuze and angelic materialism, Bataille and divine
dissipation, hypostitional analysis, death and xenosonics, art, paranoia and
parasite capitalism, the topology of serial killing, a new history of the music
of hell, and the greater politics of barnacles, bees and werewolves.
Joff P. N. Bradley is associate professor in the faculty of language studies at Teikyo

University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the co-author of Deleuze and Buddhism
(2016) with Tony See, and co-writer of A Pedagogy of Cinema (2016) and
co-editor of Educational Philosophy and New French Thought (2017) with
David R. Cole. His book Principles of Transversality in Globalization and
Education is expected to be published in 2018. Bradley is a member of the
New Tokyo Group in Japan, a committed group of language scholars working
on critical pedagogy projects in the nation’s capital and beyond.
Jason Cullen completed his PhD in 2014 and is an early career researcher.
His thesis was concerned with Deleuze’s holistic ontology and he is
currently working on building a bridge between this ontological project
and a philosophical vision of ethology. He is interested in the history and
philosophy of biology, as well as ecology, ethology and the ethics of human-
animal relations.
James Fowler holds a PhD in experimental psychology from City University

London. He began working with families of adolescents with severe antisocial
behaviour in 2006. Fowler has worked as a principal psychologist within the
xii Contributors
National Health Service in the UK, supervising a team of therapists working

with this same population; he currently works as a forensic psychologist with
violent adult offenders.
Aranye Fradenburg Joy is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

founder and former director of the English Department’s specialization in
‘Literature and the Mind’ and faculty at the New Center for Psychoanalysis,
with a private practice in psychoanalysis in Santa Barbara, California. She
received her PhD from the University of Virginia and taught at Dartmouth
College before moving to University of California, Santa Barbara. Her
particular interests are mind studies, psychoanalytic theory, and medieval
English and Scottish literary culture. She is the author of City, Marriage
Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (1991); Sacrifice Your
Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (2002); Staying Alive: A Survival
Guide for the Literary Arts (2013), and many articles on psychoanalysis,
psychosomatics, and the relationship between contemporary thought and
medieval studies.
Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the

University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the departments
of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of
Art and Architecture. Gardner has published Joseph Losey (2004) and Karel
Reisz (2006) as well as Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole
Art (2012), a critical analysis of Samuel Beckett’s experimental work for film
and television and its relation to the philosophical writings of Deleuze and
Guattari. His most recent book is Deleuze and the Animal (2017), co-edited
with Patricia MacCormack.
Penelope Gottlieb received her BFA from the Art Center College for Design
in Pasadena, and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara,
where she currently lives and works. Gottlieb’s paintings appropriate a
methodology common to both Surrealism and the Baroque, namely the
linking together of heterogeneous, diverse orders of things – in this case
the normally separate analytical syntax of Audubon and plant biology – in
the form of a representational ‘mash-up’ or ‘heterotopia’. Painting directly
over pre-existing Audubon prints, Gottlieb literally envelops the birds in a
tightly woven braid of plant leaves, tendrils and tentacles, so that what would
normally be part of the birds’ natural habitat has suddenly turned on them as
a form of domestic colonization. Gottlieb thus raises implicit issues of power/
Contributors xiii
knowledge in relation to systems of classification in addition to her more

explicit ecological critique.
renée c. hoogland is Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit,

where she teaches literature and culture after 1870, critical theory, visual
culture, cultural studies, and queer theory. She is the editor of Criticism: A
Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and senior editor in chief of Macmillan
Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender. hoogland’s most recent book is A
Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics After Representation (2014).
Zach Horton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

His research focuses on the intersection of technological mediation, ecology
and scale. His current projects include a study of the ‘cosmic zoom’ and the
development of a transdisciplinary theory of scale, as well as a cultural history
of geoengineering. Horton is also a filmmaker and camera designer.
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy in English,

Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
She has published extensively on Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot, Serres, Irigaray,
queer theory, teratology, body modification, posthuman theory, animal
rights, human extinction and horror film. Her work includes ‘Inhuman
Ecstasy’ (Angelaki), ‘Becoming-Vulva’ (New Formations), ‘The Great
Ephemeral Tattooed Skin’ (Body and Society), ‘Necrosexuality’ (Queering the
Non/Human), ‘Unnatural Alliances’ (Deleuze and Queer Theory), ‘Vitalistic
FeminEthics’ (Deleuze and Law), and ‘Cinemasochism: Time, Space and
Submission’ (The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy). She is the
author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of
The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of The
Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008) and Deleuze and the Animal (2017).
Alexandra Magearu is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Program

at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a visual artist and writer.
She specializes in postcolonial and diasporic literature, feminist theory
and phenomenologies of embodiment. Her dissertation project engages
philosophies of affect, feminist critiques of war and phenomenologies of
racialization in order to read the work of Arab-American and Franco-Algerian
female writers. Her creative work consists of video art and illustration with an
emphasis on the relationship between dreams and memory.
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xiv Contributors
Jason Skeet holds a PhD from Cardiff University on ‘Writing the Real: Deleuze
and Contemporary Poetry’. His research focuses on using the work of Deleuze
and Guattari (both solo and in collaboration) for examining and exploring
literature, particularly contemporary poetry and poetics. His publications
include ‘Netting Fins: A Deleuzian Exploration of Linguistic Invention in
Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves’ (Deleuze Studies), ‘When Will We Leave the
Twentieth Century? An Interview with Kafka’s Ape’ (Datacide) and ‘Applied
Schizoanalysis: Towards a Deleuzian Poetics’ (Word and Text: A Journal of
Literary Studies and Linguistics).
Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni are filmmakers and artists based in
Paris. Their practice interrogates potential forms and fictions emerging
from the ruins of the moving image and includes shorts and feature films,
installations, soundworks, film performances, works for radio, ‘vernacular
technologies’ and books. Their work explores new configurations of image,
sound and text, often using cinema in expanded form to reactivate lost or
forgotten archives and histories in ways that foster alternative modes of
collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics.
Thomson and Maglioni’s films include Wolkengestalt (2007), Facs of Life
(2009), Through the Letterbox (2010), In Search of UIQ (2013), Blind Data
(2013) and Disappear One (2015). Their work has been presented worldwide
at international film festivals and museums/art spaces. They are currently
working on a new film, Common Birds.
Introduction
Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack
There is a gift in the concept of transversality from Guattari that speaks to macro
and micro contemporary issues. We are designated as living in a time of crisis
which, although sounding too much like the same crises of old –what is the
self/citizen/subject/I, and what is a nation/nationality/border –Guattari offers
us deliverance from. While both posthumanism and the other fashionable
philosophical turns of the past decades (from object oriented ontology to
speculative realism; the critique of the Anthropocene to the reification of
alterity politics based on identity politics –and always about but never beyond
the sexed, raced, sexualized, economic, labouring human) seem to repeat and
reiterate the same crises with new, more cynical or more anthropocentric modes
of navigation of the borders of self and world, Guattari offers ways out that are
ethical and deeply rooted in aesthetic projects –activism as artistic practice, the
inspiration for intersectionality, eco-thought. With grace and deftness, he defies
the very concept of borders, like the rogue psychiatrist, turning the question
away from the patient back upon the regime which imposes the question itself,
and collapses the philosophical border that traditionally separates ethics from
aesthetics, while always invoking the ways in which both are lived realities and
explicitly material corporeal manifestations of thought.
Through diverse modes of semiotization, systems of representation and multi-

referenced practices, these assemblages [of enunciation] managed to crystallize
complementary segments of subjectivity. They released social alterity through
the union of filiation and alliance; they induced personal ontogenesis through
the operation of peer groups and initiations such that individuals found
themselves enveloped by a number of transversal collective identities or, if one
prefers, found themselves situated at the intersection of numerous vectors of
partial subjectivation. (Guattari 1995: 98)
2 Ecosophical Aesthetics
This form of filiation, incommensurable with filiation through assimilation or

forced homogeneity, is natural in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition
of becoming as an unnatural alliance, which follows the laws of nature in that
nature always operates against itself. Guattari invigorates and encourages the
chaos and wild, elegant and harmonious randomness of nature which modern
human subjectifying systems (capitalist and fascist, church, state, family,
psychiatry) see as having been ‘overcome’ (positing them as a problem rather
than a freedom) by human regimes of logic, science and ahistorical knowledge
or universalism.
From this we receive Guattari’s deep commitment to deep ecology and
its emergence as an ecosophy, which is philosophy without borders, the very
philosophy of relations themselves. If we do demarcate this as a time of crisis
(and we must ask which time hasn’t?), then the paradigms which underpin it
and the trajectories which return their vectors towards the same old patterns
of enunciation and imposition of power are the structures which demand
disruption, rather than content or singular manifestations of right and wrong,
blame and celebration. Guattari asks the philosopher to think deeper into and
ultimately beneath the structures by which they emerge, and forces philosophy
(through this digging up of mapped territories) to become artistic. The freshly
turned earth of semioticized subjectification of self and world is liberated from
trying to renavigate the superficial but nonetheless strangling embedded lines
of reification to benefit alterity which is an impossible and delusional project
borne of false promise and false consciousness. Thinking earth and cosmos
via anthropocentrism will never help. The raw earth of the philosopher (and
all subjects) become artist also invokes art as a way to create lines of flight and
activist, marked out areas which are emergent through relational and temporal
necessity and ready to be dismantled at any moment without scarring the
terrain to the point where thought is closed off. Thinking is the aestheticized
philosophizing which challenges the ‘paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical and
referential’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 89) operations that drive religion and are
adapted by science and economics to limit territories and modes of expansion
by demarcating knowledge as all that can be known and more importantly, how
things can be known.
Guattari posits transversality as an activist philosophy that projects possible
variant futures and immanent present tactics to counter the issue of discrete
authorized epistemes which essentially speak the same ideology that Foucault
traced in The Order of Things. Epistemic discretion is as much about access,
authorization, enunciation and power as about a perceived revelation of
Introduction 3
knowledge, which is fixed as universal through its authorization as knowledge.

Previously knowledge and its inferred immutable connection with truth had been
critiqued by post-structuralism. Now, in the age of ‘post-truth’, much Continental
Philosophy (a dubious ‘genre’ to fix as singular in itself), with its critique of
universal truth and atemporal knowledge, is being blamed for assisting the post-
truth agenda. Such critiques remain within the discrete epistemetic arboreal
structure and fail to address the multiple (but no less materially actual for being
so) truths that post-structuralism expands. In ordering things, the content is
worth less than the structure so that science, law and family speak differently
structurally but their content is essentially homogenous –productivity,
commodification of life, discretion in subjectification and conformity of
ideology.
The dissipation of a universal truth addressed and reified by diverse epistemes
that aspire to confirm the same ideological goals is not a dissipation of lived reality
but an address to the in-between and the ablated in history and contemporary
life. It multiplies speakers and speech so the singular content is unsustainable and
new spaces for speech are available, new modes of expression, new openings for
liberty, rather than an alternate content which fits within accepted discourse and
can thus be argued against or assimilated depending on the augmentive quality it
offers to dominant paradigms. In capitalism knowledge is conformity and post-
truth is too often simply disagreement. These burgeoning buzzwords –post-
truth, fake-news –are problematic because they belong everywhere –to the left,
to the right. There is no longer a demarcated enemy and the interchangeability
of insults hurled between factions shows they are ultimately working along the
same paradigmatic lines. For those activists and creators who seek to rupture
the very paradigm with its limited and limiting capacities for expression it is
easy to feel as if we have become paranoid. We believe in fake news that may be
real, in post-truths that are simply variations of a singular mode of expression,
and we do so because perception of the material and the virtual is increasingly
identical and heavily edited. In this way any ‘concerned citizen’ who seeks change
(especially those minoritarians not yet or never were considered citizens) at this
time finds themselves as the schizo-paranoid actor.
Guattari (2011: 173) suggests that deterritorializing vectors create fuzzy
smudges in stratified layers, and that our goal in transversality should be to
enjoy and exploit the inevitability of these fuzzy abstractions because ‘[n]‌o
universal cartography exists’. However contemporary modes of expression,
what he generally terms ‘media’, seduce us into believing what we have is, or
describe, a universal cartography. Guattari both disinters the ways in which
fuzzy deterritorializing information is presented as consistent logic, usually

at an alarming velocity, in mainstream media, while showing that our goals
should be similarly schizo-transversive. Instead of concealing this constellative
structure as a failure in logic, rather, we should be celebrating the critical and
adaptive attention to all information being presented thus and utilize it to create
as we deconstruct. Guattari here liberates post-structuralism from being post
anything. It is immanent and uses the tools dominant messages conceal in order
to appear true. Through transversality Guattari shows truth was never true, only
a motivated expression of an apparently immutable fact, and news was always
fake, a similarly motivated ideological abstraction to placate or irritate the mind
by overwriting the unconscious with a grid of expectation in lines of information.
It is easy currently for activists to feel like paranoid patients. Guattari offers
suggestions for modes of expression towards schizo-activism which makes this
sense of paranoia safe from turning into atrophy and despair. In a way the world
has become the traditional asylum and activism is an international strategy of
La Borde-ism.
Deleuze and Guattari (1994) shift their heavy criticism of dominant
hegemonic ideological paradigms from the intimacy they see between semiotics
and psychiatry as the destruction of the unconscious towards alternate modes
of expression that also refute the idea that Continental Philosophy is relativist or
purely virtual. Their main focus is of course the flesh, the ability for real, actual,
lived bodies to abstractly express and speak through gesture, dance and ‘liberty of
expression’ (153) as well as the absolute abstract, such as music and mathematics.
Affect, what is produced by both the material and the abstract in a pre-semiotic,
pre-personal and pre-power metamorphosis, changes all, including all three
ecologies –self, environment, relations. Minoritarianism is the only way to
access these transformative modes of affect-producing expression. Guattari, with
Deleuze through literature, and singularly through cinema especially, sees minor
art as a direct mode to altering our lived realities, our truths. Where major art
is not art but is in the service of power (Guattari 1996: 180), minor art does not
separate content from mode of expression, does not make an either/or claim on
being true or false, does not impose a singular meaning to affirm the trajectories
of obedience already beaten into the world. It both seeks and accounts for the
labyrinths it opens and creates new worlds within and between all perceptions,
while allowing hitherto unthought entities and modes of being (as expressions)
to flourish. The transversal dismantles the stratified order of things, and attends
to the way in which all things operate ecosophically. All that happens affects all,
and capitalism’s concealment of this beneath the hyper-investment in human
Introduction 5
truth and the truth about human existence has made those of us who see affect
of all lives and relations as detrimental appear the paranoid citizens in need of
intervention. Ecosophy is the schizo-therapy that can decentre the singular,
dominant and brutal psyche of capitalism, which is currently considered the
only mind of the Earth but which is simply a specularization of the traditional
dominant human psyche projected upon and at the expense of all other life.
The affective relationship between art (both major and minor) and ecology is
both tenuous and ambivalent, particularly because of art’s own precariousness
in relationship to capitalism and its general tendency to be easily appropriated
as a commodity fetish on one hand, and as a convenient inoculation on the
other. Indeed, in his groundbreaking 2014 book, Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literatures
and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change, Malcolm Miles makes a key
admission early on, stating that ‘I am cautious throughout this book as to what
art can do’ (17). This is because
[t]‌he relation between art and political, social or economic change is neither direct
nor causal. Art cannot save the planet or the whale; it can represent, critique and
play imaginatively on the problem, and picture futures not prescribed by money.
Art is itself produced in this context, too, and always reflects the conditions of its
production just as it usually goes beyond them. (3)
On this level, Miles’s book is invaluable as a catalogue of eco-activist art

interventions, ranging from exhibitions such as ‘Natural Reality’ (Aachen, 1999);
‘Groundworks’ (Pittsburgh, 2005); and ‘Radical Nature’ (Barbican Arts Centre
in London, 2009) to Liberate Tate’s 2012 infamous performance/intervention,
The Gift, whereby a giant turbine blade (bought from a decommissioned site
in Wales) was ‘donated’ to the Tate Modern’s permanent collection as a protest
against Beyond Petroleum’s (BP) sponsorship of the space and the reciprocal ‘art
wash’ the Tate gave BP in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico.
Perhaps more importantly, Miles’s account also serves as a critical analysis
of different eco-aesthetic strategies and their built-in limitations as well as their
practicalities for opening up possible, sustainable futures. At one extreme, which
is about as far from Guattari’s ecosophical agenda as one can imagine, is the
Frankfurt School’s advocacy of an autonomous art which is able to disengage
itself from dominant social and political systems, thereby creating a critical
distance so that repressive interpellations can be revealed and interpreted afresh.
Unlike Brecht, who used distanciation and estrangement (as Verfremdungseffekt)
in order to foreground the gestic qualities of theatre as an anti-subjectivist,
non-psychologizing socio-political art, Herbert Marcuse argued that art can

never become political without destroying itself. It can never succeed as direct
action (due to co-option), only as an autonomous realm in and of itself. Theodor
Adorno concurred, stressing the polar opposition of art and nature which allows
them to be mediated in each other: ‘Art and nature, then, are poles apart or are
taken as the polarities of an axis along which the work of art is done’ (Miles
2014: 53; emphasis in the original). Given his Marxist political persuasion,
Adorno’s fervent defence of the ‘autonomous avant garde’ seems incongruous,
especially as it is not that far from a traditionalist neo-Kantian immanent
critique. One explanation is that, as a composer, Adorno was less attuned
(and sympathetic) to the mimetic qualities of art forms such as cinema and
photography, famously declaring, ‘I love to go to the movies; what I can’t stand
are the images.’ Like Barthes, Adorno’s (1981–82: 202) aversion to the cinematic
image was rooted in its radical insufficiency of abstractive power in the face of
repressive codes of representation:
The photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher

intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically
autonomous techniques; this is the retarding aspect of film in the historical
process of art. Even where film dissolves and modifies its objects as much as
it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit
absolute construction: its elements, however abstract, always retain something
representational; they are never purely aesthetic values.
Instead, inspired by Schönberg’s twelve- tone technique, Adorno advocated

the immanent development of the artwork’s own formal laws whereby it is
transformed into a technically planned work. It was this immanent process
which, for Adorno, was successfully diminishing the mythical, fetishized
qualities of avant-garde production that Walter Benjamin dismissively dubbed
as ‘aura’. The autonomous product reveals how it is consciously produced and
thus has a transcending and progressive role in breaking down industrialism’s
tendency to commodify the object, something which a Brechtian politicization of
art (through its subordination to the external, popularizing force of the masses)
would forestall. Art thus acts as a negation of the instrumentalized world,
eroding it from within through its increasing technologization: ‘Only where art
observes its immanence does it convince practical reason of its absurdity’ (Lunn
1982: 155).
What Adorno conveniently ignores is Brecht’s rooting of political form less
in ideology and ideas –typified by his Marxist Lehrstücke or ‘learning plays’
Introduction 7
of the early 1930s –than in bodily affect, specifically through gest. Much of
Brecht’s work was marked by a dialectical impasse between instinct and reason.
It is the central motif of Galileo, where the Cardinal Inquisitor observes of the
astronomer that ‘[e]‌ven his thinking is sensual. He indulges in thinking bouts’.
It is also the main formal device of Brecht’s (1964) first play, Baal (1918), an
uncompromising portrait of a poet ruled by sexual and bodily appetite. ‘Don’t
overrate the head’, warns Baal. ‘You need a backside too and all that goes with it’
(32). As Deleuze (1989: 189) rightly argues,
The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which
it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges
into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that
the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us
to think what is concealed from thought, life.
It’s through the body –its attitudes and postures –that the cinema, and indeed
all art through the symbiosis it generates between singularities and the objective
world, makes its alliance with the spirit and with thought.
One obvious drawback of the ‘autonomous art’ strategy is that it too can
be easily co-opted. Indeed, Benjamin (1968: 242) vehemently opposed the ‘art
for art’s sake’ movement as a form of ‘negative theology’, ripe for use for fascist
purposes: ‘Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its
own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation
of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by
politicizing art.’ In the ecosophical context, a modern equivalent would be what
Miles calls ‘greenwash’, the ecological equivalent of a corporate appropriation-
cum-inoculation. As Miles (2014: 138–9) states the problem:
Is aesthetics greenwash? In corporate publicity it is, but I would differentiate that

use of seductive images from a critical aesthetics which exposes contradictions
and offers access to moments of wonder and glimpses of another world. But that
world is this world transformed either in an imagined alternative scenario or
practically, if as yet marginally, within the present ordering of society. Activism
and aesthetics, then are connected, not as mutually excluding opposites, but
instead as the polarities of a common axis of potentially creative tension.
A strategy far more in tune with Guattari’s three ecologies would be Nicolas
Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, where art is tied directly to political critique
and cultural discourse, which includes fashion, design, architecture, social
relations, ecology and an assortment of micro- narratives. For Bourriaud
(2002: 112), relational aesthetics is an ‘[a]‌esthetic theory consisting in judging

artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent,
produce or prompt’; while relational art is ‘[a] set of artistic practices which
take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human
relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’
(113). Central to both Bourriaud and Guattari is the process of subjectivization
in producing a new subject as a decentred singularity, a process that works, as
it turns out, in a similar way to the creation of a new art form. As Bourriaud
explains:
The pivotal position given by Guattari to subjectivity defines his conception

of art, and art’s value, from start to finish. In the Guattari order of things,
subjectivity as production plays the role of a fulcrum around which forms of
knowledge and action can freely pitch in, and soar off in pursuit of the laws
of the socius. Which, incidentally, is what defines the field of vocabulary used
to describe artistic activity. In it there is no hint of the fetishization that is
common in this level of discourse. Art, here, is defined as a process of non-
verbal semiotization, not as a separate category of global production. (88;
emphasis in the original)
In the ‘Machinic Orality and Virtual Ecology’ chapter of Chaosmosis, Guattari

(1995) makes a strong case for performance art in particular as a processual
praxis that has much in common with what Bourriaud will later call relational
art, largely because it defies conventional contexts of time and place (the confines
of the gallery setting, the ‘completed’ artwork standing in for the absent artist) as
well as the codified (i.e. fetishizing) language of the art establishment as a whole.
As Guattari (1995: 90) describes performance art, ‘[I]‌t seems to me that
this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a
forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of
engendering mutant subjectivities.’ This is an engaged art of the everyday (which
brings it close to Situationism) rather than an autonomous ‘art for art’s sake’, an
art that is able to catalyse affect and change the very nature of the subjectivities it
comes into contact with through what Guattari calls a ritornello effect. In music,
the latter (aka ritournelle) is the short return or repetition of a refrain in a work
(e.g. the reprise of a symphonic passage between arias in an opera) and is an
important motif in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of becoming-animal in A
Thousand Plateaus (1987). Bourriaud (2002: 97) also adopts the term, noting
that ‘[p]lural subjectivity here is “ritournellized”, “caught” by what it looks at,
a prelude to the formation of an “existential territory” ’. It’s a thermodynamic
Introduction 9
process, condensing psychic energy on a particular motif with a view to

generating a number of transformative actions:
Art fixes energy, and ‘ritournellizes’ it, diverting it from everyday life: a matter
of repercussion and ricochet. As a pure ‘clash between a will and a material’,
art, for Guattari, might be compared with the thoroughly Nietzschean activity
that consists in outlining texts in the chaos of the world. In other words, in the
act of ‘interpreting and assessing’ . . . The ‘existential motifs’ offered for aesthetic
contemplation, in a broad sense, catch the different components of subjectivity
and guide them. Art is the thing upon and around which subjectivity can reform
itself, the way several light spots are brought together to form a beam, and light
up a single point’. (97; emphasis in the original)
In short, the combination of Guattari’s ritournelle and Bourriaud’s harnessing

it for a relational aesthetics allows for a symbiotic relationship between art and
nature that convincingly counters Adorno’s more rigid, dialectical opposition.
Which is not to say that art and nature are equal parties, because as David
Reason rightly points out, ‘The work of art is, unlike nature, incomplete . . . [It] is
not self-sufficient, and . . . inevitably tempts word and thought. The work of art is
completed in interpretation, commentary, and criticism, not in the sense of being
finished (off), but as an electrical circuit may be completed . . . so that energy
may flow’ (cited in Miles 2014, 17).
Taking David Reason at his word –that the work of art is ‘completed’ (as
flow) in interpretation –we have organized the book into three relatively loose
sections grouped under the general headings of therapy and care, the abstract
machine and transverse subjectivities. Thus the five chapters in Part 1 ground
the ecosphere in Spinozan ethics, a speculative, practical mode of living, a joyful
auto-affection involving an enquiry into what a body (and therefore thought) can
do in terms of its ability to affect and be affected in turn. Affect, and its corollary,
care, thus become key elements in Guattari’s search for a post-media poetics that
can fully manifest an ecosophical, processual practice encompassing the three
ecologies. In their opening chapter, ‘Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s
Gift to Contemporary Clinical Practice’, James Fowler and Patricia MacCormack
apply these ethical principles to contemporary clinical psychological practice
(with its privileging of majoritarian subjects within homogeneous fields of
power) in order to encourage the uniquely machinic characteristics of all
individuals through a therapeutic reconfiguration of territories and relations
so that each can thrive (in terms of Spinoza’s capacity to ‘express freely’) as
heterogeneous singularities. Fowler and MacCormack tie this reconfiguration
directly to Guattari’s three ecologies of subject (patient to person), relation

(therapeutic hierarchy to ecosophy) and environment (the deterritorialization
of constituting territories through creative transformation).
Approaching ‘mental illness’ through the encouragement and development
of singular unique assemblages, the authors examine three different strategic
plans: Plan A, Plan N and Plan AN. From a Spinozan point of view, Plan A is
perhaps the least ethical of all as it requires no adaptation, no consideration
of the other as multiplicity and is only as successful as the subject’s ability to
thrive within an always already majoritarian system. In contrast, Plan N asks the
individual to adapt to the Nth degree in order to participate as part of a unique
machinic assemblage. The more the latter deviates from the majoritarian norm,
the more the patient needs to learn new thinking skills in order to assimilate.
However, this treatment still involves tests to determine how far a subject might
deviate from normative values, during which they often discover that they have
far more problems than they originally thought, indicating, as the authors put
it, that ‘the patient has been more intimately interwoven within the reiterative
reifying ecology of the homogenizing psychiatric territory’, a psychotherapeutic
reintegration parallel to the signifying process of Guattari’s Integrated World
Capitalism. As an alternative, the authors propose Plan AN, which is a patient-
led plan that, taking its lead from Guattari’s transversal experiments with
group subjects at the La Borde clinic, disengages the idea of problems from
the individual altogether and in the process serves to deinstitutionalize both
the symptom and the cure. It is here that aesthetics comes to play a key role,
transforming both the clinician’s relationship to power and the patient’s relation
to the symptom. Both are explored within and between the therapeutic relation
but also exoreferentially through a redistribution of schizo-intensities that serve
to rupture homogenizing structures and micro-fascistic operations.
Taking as a given the interface between capitalism and ecological collapse –
a central theme in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies –Jason Cullen draws on the
assertion of the British environmental and political activist George Monbiot that
conspicuous consumption has nothing to do with fulfilling public need. Instead,
it constitutes a fruitless attempt to fill the void and deep social disconnect
produced by an affectless, atomized culture which chooses to manipulate and
exploit the world as a collection of resources rather than recognize human
and nonhuman embeddedness within it. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy
Morton argues instead for a new way of thinking, taking into account the global
interconnectedness of things –what he calls a ‘mesh’ –as opposed to a greater-
than-the-sum-of-its-parts ‘holistic’ thought which subjugates individuals into a
Introduction 11
greater whole (in this case capitalism) that inevitably subsumes them. In his
chapter, Cullen moves beyond both traditional holism and Morton’s ‘mesh’ by
taking a detour via Deleuze’s ‘ecological holism’ that argues for a strict reciprocity
between the whole and its parts. This is grounded in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza
whereby intrinsic modalities of being are simultaneously intensive (constituting
the essence of substance) and extensive, explicating the ever-changing whole as
pure expression, pure immanence. Cullen then takes a second detour through
Deleuze’s appropriation of Henri Bergson to show how this reciprocity is
activated by affective encounters. In other words, if nature is open and reciprocal
with the subjects internal to it, it can only exist because of the inherent, ever-
changing relations between subjects and their bodily forces (the very basis of
Spinoza’s ethics). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 57) state,
We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words,
what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other
affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be
destroyed by, either to exchange action and passions with it or to join with it in
composing a more powerful body.
This affective groundwork enables Cullen to expand his reading through

Guattari’s description of modes of being as ‘existential Territories’, whereby
subjectivities constitute (and are in turn constituted by) a relational field. In
this field becomings are inextricably tied to the becomings of other beings
who share the field. This ‘gentle deterritorialization’ opens up broader, intimate
relations that encompass the nonhuman and it is here that Guattari’s notion of
ecosophy manifests itself as a science of ecosystems encompassing the three
ecologies: the material (ecology, biophysical); the social (cultural and human);
and the perceptual (human subjectivity articulated through images, sounds
and hapticity). In short, ecosophy is politically regenerative, ethical, aesthetic,
analytical and life-affirming –embracing but also generating difference. It is at
this point that affect takes on a new existential import, for as Guattari notes,
affects are not concrete entities but rather self- constituting interfaces that
generate both interiority and exteriority through affective encounters. Cullen
rightly stresses the ‘gentleness’ of such encounters in order to guarantee an equal
reciprocity between actual individuals and the natural environment (including
the nonhuman and ahuman) which they help to both constitute and transform.
Cullen explicates this reciprocity through an analysis of becoming-animal from
A Thousand Plateaus. Drawing upon Spinoza’s distinction between affectio and
affectus, he shows how affect has both virtual and actual expressions. It is defined
by what actually happens in an affective encounter (my body involved with

another body), but also a virtual expression of that encounter, in and for itself
independent of the participants themselves. It is the latter affect that constitutes
a world of sense and transforms bodily powers to the limits of their capability.
This is manifested most affectively/effectively in and through the pack, the
individual deterritorialized according to its power as an assemblage –subjectivity
reconstituted as heterogeneity, a life as Life/world, in short as immanence.
In her chapter ‘Care of the Wild: A Primer’, Aranye Fradenburg Joy builds
on Cullen’s argument by applying the principle that ethics are always affect-
laden (for good or for ill) to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in an attempt
to undo their preoccupation with a reductive, Oedipal-based cure rather than
an expressively transformative care. As Fradenburg points out, psychoanalysis
privileges what she calls ‘third-person’ ways of knowing whereby care (and
its multiplicitous corollaries such as assemblage, networking expressivity and
movement) is sacrificed for analytic ‘neutrality’ which can be reduced to a basic
analyst-analysand relationship (which Guattari, building upon his experiences
at the experimental La Borde clinic under Jean Oury, counters with a non-
hierarchical transversality). For traditionalist Freudians, care was far too affect-
laden, a kind of acting out (through transference) that hindered the analyst’s
ability to strip down the brain’s multiple connectivities to a single determining
‘symptom’. Instead, Fradenburg argues for an ethics of care that goes far beyond
a narrow theory of mind and instead expresses and exploits endless complexes of
sensations, affects, desires and ideas. In short, care is a work of intersubjectivity
and encompasses a large range of ecologies through reciprocal participation. As
she puts it, ‘The “self ” that gives and the “other” who receives are dynamic, co-
constructing processions of states of mind with histories and geographies that
go far beyond the “individual.” ’
More importantly, care is vitalistically autopoietic. According to the Chilean
biologist Francisco Varela (1979: 13),
[A]‌
n autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own
organization through its operation as a system of production of its own
components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under
conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations . . .
[F]or a machine to be autopoietic, its defining relations of production must be
continuously regenerated by the components which they produce.
Fradenburg’s intention then is to reconceive expressivity as dynamic,

transformative movement, so that thinking, acting and caring can function as
Introduction 13
co-constituting forces and powers for the sustenance of a healthy territorial

life. As a result, care’s intersubjective and transpersonal connectivity becomes
the very matrix of how embodied minds are shaped and developed, whether
through excitement, absorption, reverie or dream. For example, one of the most
powerful affects is ‘disgust’ (both those who need care and those who give it
are often deemed abject, contagiously co-determinous), which suggests that care
is far from being a ‘safe’ practice: it is always a care of the wild, ‘primordially
affective’.
In this sense, perception and expression (and their extension in and through
art) are always-already a function of organismic concern for one’s environment
(and are thus innately ethical). For Gregory Bateson, the arts practice ecological
thought because they promote and sustain shifts in awareness and perspective
and generate new material connectivities, they ‘care’ by transforming embodied
minds. Care thus becomes a means by which humans and nature materially
‘transcend’ their own boundaries to generate expressivity beyond language as
mere information. Fradenburg concludes by noting that caregiving processes
such as grooming (its tactility/hapticity negotiates both nearness and distance as
a form of healing) and gossiping are excellent examples of language as embodied
relationality. Thus, the primary function of gossip is affective circulation, not the
transmission of accurate information. It is a form of bio-power that generates an
open-ended community through an ecosophical aesthetics that enacts, protects
and preserves it against the restrictive structures of the Oedipal family, the state
machine and commodity capitalism.
Art’s ability to act as a reconstructive bio-power is central to the work of
the Santa Barbara–based painter Penelope Gottlieb, the subject of the book’s
photo spread, ‘Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals and Invasive Species’. In
her extinct botanicals series, GONE, Gottlieb recreates a series of plants on the
‘confirmed extinction’ list that have no known visual reference by reconstructing
them from often incomplete botanists’ descriptions, in effect constructing an
actual image from a virtual, textual source. On one hand, while Gottlieb uses
painting to ‘heal’ an ecological crisis by summoning the plants back to life as
aesthetic objects –as she puts it, the works are poetic investigations of loss that
suggest an overwhelmingly frenetic imperative to ‘live’ –on the other hand
the visual tropes of GONE appear as if a bomb had exploded in the proverbial
greenhouse. The plants are de-centred through the centrifugal visual vocabulary
of early Modernism, most notably Kandinsky’s animated, shard-like forms
and the Futurists’ lionization of speed and destruction. The result is a highly
ambivalent tension between pastoral and still-life painting as an objective
rendering of the natural world (eco-aesthetics as statically eternalizing) and the

more problematic nature of ecological crisis and its scientific rationalization.
Gottlieb’s implication is that Darwinian evolutionary theory is fundamentally
flawed by identifying the unit of survival under the limited aegis of natural
selection. All this produces is a destroyed environment which ends up killing
off the organism itself. Instead, as Bateson (2000: 457) points out, ‘The unit of
survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.’
In contrast, the works in the Invasive Species series are more centripetal,
underlining the fact that it is invasive plants rather than climatic change
or urbanization that constitutes one of the top three reasons for native plant
extinction. The question is: how to represent this colonization of ‘nature by
nature’ outside of the closed world of botanical expertise? How would we
begin to know one plant from another? Gottlieb’s solution is to appropriate a
methodology common to both Surrealism and the Baroque, namely, the linking
together of heterogeneous, diverse orders of things –in this case the normally
separate analytical syntax of Audubon and plant biology –in the form of a
representational ‘mash-up’ or ‘heterotopia’. Painting directly over preexisting
Audubon prints, Gottlieb literally envelops the birds in a tightly woven braid
of plant leaves, tendrils and tentacles, so that what would normally be part of
the birds’ natural habitat has suddenly turned on them as a form of domestic
colonization. Interestingly, the works take on a strong erotic overtone, alluding
directly to ‘Kinbaku’, the Japanese art of knot tying which plays a significant
role in rituals of sexual bondage. Gottlieb thus raises implicit issues of power/
knowledge in relation to systems of classification in addition to her more explicit
ecological critique. In effect, whereas the GONE series was more Batesonian in
its anti-Darwinian outlook –the survival of the fittest species is pitted against
the overwhelming odds of more cataclysmic outside forces –the new work is
more Bergsonian, referencing the French philosopher’s creative and active
notion of élan vital, a vital spirit or life force that opposes mechanistic theories
of evolution with a more fluidly affective weave of bodily forces that constantly
evolve and branch out in new, ever-changing directions. This is of course the
exact role of art itself: the ability to create new forms, spaces and species in
which the staid, studio-bound analysis of bird and plant life can suddenly take
on the erotic overtones of a perverse sexual act.
In the final chapter of Part 1, Jason Skeet reconfigures ecosophical ethics using
Guattari’s (1995: 125) three levels of processual praxis as a means of generating
a transverse ‘politics of immanence’ that is able to resist the standardized
mass-media subjectivity manufactured by worldwide capitalism in favour of
Introduction 15
a transversally singular production. It’s important to note that singularity is

not the same as individuality: it actually operates at a pre-personal and pre-
individual level and serves to activate potentialities and virtualities (Universes
of Reference) as creative heterogeneities. Thus, in Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995: 7)
calls for ‘a processual exploitation of event-centred “singularities” –everything
which can contribute to the creation of an authentic relation with the other’. This
is where the micro-political has a catalysing power, not unlike the patient who
takes up driving again after a long hiatus, allowing her to open up new fields of
virtuality, or the impact of the existential refrain in Proust (most notably, the
powerful effect on Swann of the ‘little phrase’ from Vinteuil’s sonata) whereby
the singular event exerts a re-creative affect. More importantly, in The Three
Ecologies, Guattari (2008: 35) also gives singularity an ecological function:
The principle common to the three ecologies is this: each of the existential
Territories with which they confront us is not given as an in-itself [en-soi],
closed in on itself, but instead as a for-itself [pour-soi] that is precarious, finite,
finitized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly
repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis that enables it to be made
‘habitable’ by a human project. It is this praxic opening-out which constitutes
the essence of ‘eco’-art.
Skeet connects this ‘fundamental right to singularity’ to Guattari’s call for a

post-media poetics via the radical modernism of the objectivist poet George
Oppen (2008: 166), whose Of Being Numerous depicts the post-modern era
as the ‘shipwreck /Of the singular’. Skeet uses Oppen’s poem to set the scene
for an encounter between Guattari’s work and an ongoing current of radical
modernism in contemporary poetry, a subject foregrounded by the Italian
autonomist theorist and political activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, who argued that
poetry –through its excess of sensuousness –could break open capitalism’s
stranglehold on social life by creating a dehiscence of ludic interpretation/desire,
the foundation for a ‘common ground’ of autonomous understanding that may
defy the dictatorship of the signified. With the audience now occupying equal
ground with the poet/artist, Skeet is able to connect this to Guattari’s search for a
‘new aesthetic paradigm’ whereby artistic practices are able to create ‘[u]‌niverses
of reference and existential territories’ which extend directly into the politics of
everyday life.
All that remains is to overthrow the power of the signifier as well as
the signified, whereby the shattering of language allows for the very re-
singularization of subjectivity that we discussed earlier. Skeet accomplishes
this task by bringing Guattari into direct contact with the work of Pierre Joris,
specifically his Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj as a form of
processual praxis. A critique of US imperialism during the Gulf War (and the
resultant devastation of Iraq) the Meditations was inspired by the tenth-century
Sufi poet Mansur al-Hallaj, specifically a list of forty concepts taken from his
work. Joris starts by breaking down language into fragments which are then
put into lines of movement and transformation, creating a rhizomic, ‘nomadic
poetics’ which, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, always starts from the middle
and works outwards. With this structure in place, Skeet then undertakes a
close reading of the Meditations using Guattari’s three levels of processual
practice: modular crystallizations (the set of procedures with which the poet tears
language apart, all the better to rearrange it as continuous variation); polyphonic
fabulous images (the expressive re-mix of heterogeneous components); and
existential operators (the production of new subjectivities). We thus move, via
Joris’s deterritorialization of language, from the imaginary to the real, from a
‘derealizing fabulation’ to the creation of ‘fabulous images’ that produce a post-
media poetics midway between the pragmatic and speculative trajectories of
Guattari’s politics of immanence.
‘Orality, morality!’ proclaims Guattari (1995). ‘Making yourself machinic –
aesthetic machine and molecular war machine . . . can become a crucial
instrument for subjective resingularisation and can generate other ways of
perceiving the world, a new face on things, and even a different turn of events’
(97). Ecosophical aesthetics as a form of abstract desiring machine is the subject
of the four chapters that comprise Part 2, specifically in relation to the filmic
apparatus (which, in Guattari’s case constitutes a post-media ‘minor cinema’, a
pluralist, collective enunciation analogous to his own Autonomist experiments in
free radio) and Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures. Indeed, for Guattari (2008: 43)
the machinic and environmental ecology are inextricably linked: ‘We might just
as well rename environmental ecology machinic ecology, because Cosmic and
human praxis has only ever been a question of machines, even, dare I say it, of
war machines. From time immemorial “nature” has been at war with life!’
In their chapter, ‘UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-of)’, Graeme Thomson and
Silvia Maglioni describe their discovery of Guattari’s unfilmed screenplay, Un
amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) in the Guattari archives and instead of attempting
to realize it as a produced film they opt to make a film ‘around it’ in the form of
In Search of UIQ (2013), a cinematic cartography of the script’s non-realization
in the form of a new, ever changing assemblage. Ultimately, their own film then
becomes what they call a cinebacteriological vector, a transductive catalyst for a
Introduction 17
series of ecosophical workshops or ‘seeances’ where people gather to watch and

discuss the film and the ever-absent UIQ itself. In this way a non-existent film
becomes a polyphonic soundwork where visionary voices and spaces might feed
off each other without the inevitable closure effect of a final product.
It turns out that Guattari was no stranger to screenwriting, having written
Projet de film au sujet des radios libres around 1977 in response to ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s
free radio campaign, specifically his own Radio Alice’s guerrilla disruption of
the state’s radio broadcasting monopoly during the Bologna uprisings (Guattari
would begin broadcasting his own Radio Tomato out of his kitchen in late
1980). In true ‘minor cinema’ fashion, Guattari planned to appropriate semi-
improvisational Direct Cinema techniques such as hand-held video to decentre
the authoritative enunciative power of film and mass media so that there is
no clear-cut distinction between diegesis and exegesis, sender and receiver,
creating a machinic heteroglossia of conflicting voices. As the authors note, ‘The
permeability of the schizoid body as an indeterminate zone between inside and
outside already enacts one of the conditions of collective enunciation.’ Here is an
early example of Guattari’s (2013) commitment to a post-media poetics. Indeed,
writing in 1990 he called for ‘a transformation of mass-media power that will
overcome contemporary subjectivity, and for the beginning of a post-media era
of collective-individual reappropriation and an interactive use of machines of
information, communication, intelligence, art and culture’ (27).
Guattari subsequent project –a proposed film on the Italian Autonomia
movement, Latitante –is a logical movement towards a more molecular kind
of political cinema. Harnessing tropes from microbiology and the search for a
revolutionary genetic code, he reconstitutes the autonomist ‘cells’ of free radio
into a mutant bacteriological strain, paralleling the biological contagion of the
latter with the mass-media contamination of the former. It was then only a short
step to Un amour d’UIQ (Univers Infra-Quark) where the ‘alien’ intelligence
is already immanent as a limitless, invisible, infinitesimally minute universe,
hyper intelligent yet infantile and regressive, able to ‘infect’ both the organic and
machinic. Although Guattari originally wanted to make the film in Hollywood
with Steven Spielberg’s then producer Michael Phillips, and later posited a
possible collaboration with Michelangelo Antonioni (as if to subvert both ‘major’
and art house cinema from within), the script was originally developed through
multiple drafts in collaboration with the American independent director Robert
Kramer (Guattari’s co-writer on Latitante), who is best known for his 1977
documentary, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal as well as Ice (1969)
and Milestones (1975), all of which explore the subject of group micropolitics
as creative singularities. As the script’s title suggests however, there is an added

complication: UIQ makes contact with a group of Frankfurt squatters which
allies his alien machinic presence to the radical German underground culture of
the 1980s. There UIQ comes into contact with Janice, a young DJ who teaches
this contagious entity about human subjectivity and affect, causing ‘it’ to develop
a sense of self to the point that it falls in love/merges with her and starts to
feel human traits such as jealousy (a case of the molecular becoming molar),
producing catastrophic consequences for all mankind.
As Thomson and Maglioni are quick to point out, one of the key facets of Un
amour d’UIQ is Guattari’s ability to appropriate this ‘infected’ squat scenario
in alliance with his own transversal practice, whereby the clinical, political,
philosophical and aesthetic all converge in a multilayered fabulation not unlike
the psychic economy of the La Borde clinic, whereby the dehierarchized collective
milieu acts as a territory for creating singularities out of Oedipal subjectivities.
By extension this scrambling of social and psychic codes extends to the language
of cinematic representation as a whole. Indeed, just as the Infra-Quark Universe
exists between structures at multiple scales, constantly re-composing itself as
it is driven by rhizomic patterns of desire, UIQ as a scenario defies the stable
confines of narratology, genre and auteurism. It can be classified, by turns, as
science fiction, a love story, a political tract à la Godard, an existential meditation
on the lines of Antonioni’s L’Avventura or, perhaps more pertinently, in light
of Pasolini’s essay ‘The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to Be Another
Structure’, an interactive genre of writing in its own right, one that prefers not
to be filmed but strives to transmute itself into an endless chain of desires, not
unlike Pierre Joris’s polyphonic poetry.
Complementing Thomson and Maglioni’s reading of the non-realization of
the Un amour d’UIQ screenplay as the opportunity to create an alternative, even
more creative line of flight, Zach Horton reads the film as the culmination of a
string of ‘failures’ that plagued Guattari’s entire life’s work, from his experiments
in psychoanalytic methodology at the La Borde Clinic (which led to the strictly
codified, transverse but also absolutist organizational matrix known as ‘The
Grid’), through his political activism in the abortive revolutionary events
of May 1968 and the Bologna uprisings of 1977, leading to the ‘great winter’
of the 1980s, and culminating in his final ecological project when he was the
losing candidate in the 1992 Paris elections. For Horton, however, ‘failure’ is
a dynamic rather than static mode. As one line of flight is blocked or stunted,
another opens up and forges new, hitherto unprecedented connectivities.
Horton’s source here is Judith Halberstam, who, writing specifically about
Introduction 19
Antonio Gramsci, notes that the only viable political response to ideology and
hegemony is an improvisational, performative mode as the only means of coping
with the unstable relations between dominant and subordinate forces. She links
this strategy directly to ‘failure’ (as a negation of neoliberalism) while ‘success’
is associated with interpellation (in Althusser’s sense) into dominant forms of
subjectivity. Read in this way, Guattari’s ‘failures’ can be seen as strategic markers,
creative catalysts for his ability to found new series and scales of expressive
activity. As Horton argues, the more severe the blockage, the more Guattari was
spurred to construct a new trans-modal territory to ensure a greater degree of
mobility between existential territories, producing multi-scalar lines of flight
that culminated in the founding of ecosophy itself. Thus a key component of
Horton’s argument is that he views ecosophy in specifically scalar terms, as ‘an
alternative logic of scalar integration’.
Significantly, Horton analyses ‘success’ and ‘failure’ not as dialectical or binary
oppositions but rather as interlocking machines, directly connected to concrete
struggle and the politics of everyday life. First, we have the centripetal-connection
machine, a centripetal force, usually centred on Guattari himself (his patients
at La Borde, his house as a gathering point for friends and comrades) capable
of producing new collective assemblages. Second, Guattari was a peripatetic-
disruption machine, a molecularizing, nomadic force with a deep distrust of the
molar tendencies of the first machine. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s description of
smooth and striated space, the two machines always work in tandem, although
at times one tends to disrupt and stall the other. Thus, just as transversality at
La Borde was both disruptive and connective, UIQ was both a deterritorializing
contagious virus and a destructive force within the communal, group effect of
the squat. Moreover, just as the script is about failure (as opposed to success), its
own failure to be produced can be laid at the door of the exact same diagrammatic
forces that it narrativizes: in short, far from being uncommercial, it produces too
many of Hollywood’s standardizing codes, and overloads the culture industry’s
circuits rather than by-passing them.
So what happens when the creative mutations within Guattari’s various
domains –the psychoanalytical, the political and the ecological –‘fail’ or stall
and no longer create new forms? For Horton, these blockages are a major
symptom of Guattari’s own depression towards the end of his life and ecosophy
was born as a direct solution to both the social and personal. Guattari solution
of both fronts was to jump between domains in order to keep the machines
productive. This, in effect, is the role of ecosophy, a creative process that evades
the forces of capture –that ‘monstrous system of “stimulation” that is Integrated
World Capitalism’ (Guattari 2008: 21) –by bringing all the domains together (in
and through the three ecologies) and allowing the multiple dimensions of each
to flourish. For Horton, this organized chaos (schizo-chaosmosis), by avoiding
‘holistic’ thinking, generates an alternative integrative logic, an autopoietic
system where multiple scales are able to act (and shift) together to produce new
subjectivities.
Colin Gardner’s chapter explores these new subjectivities in relation to the
cinema apparatus as a form of co-constituting machinic multiplicity. In his
account, the ecosophical relationship between the spectator and the cinema
screen takes the form of an affective encounter, what Adrian Ivakhiv, inspired
by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), has called an entry into ‘The Zone’, the
ever-shifting meeting ground of sounds, images, hapticities and affects as
they are mediated specifically by the filmic medium. Like Deleuze in Cinema
1: The Movement-Image, Ivakhiv draws upon a triadic taxonomy derived from
the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, who divided the world into
Firstness –the thing’s purely qualitative potency; Secondness –its actual causal
and existential relation with another thing; and Thirdness –first and second
mediated by a third to form an observation or logical and relational pattern.
Gardner uses this structure to highlight the dense texture of brut perceptual
response, bodily affect, memory, desire and hermeneutic acuity that we bring to
viewing a specific cinematic ‘event’.
Terrence Malick’s films, from Badlands and Days of Heaven to The Thin Red
Line and The Tree of Life, are particularly rich examples of this by-play between
connective and disjunctive syntheses, this simultaneous movement towards a
subjective, finite inside and a deterritorializing, autopoietic outer trajectory, setting
up what Carl Platinga calls an ‘affective incongruity’ between the natural and the
man-made as a unified ecological whole. Gardner thus explores Malick’s films as
a type of ‘minor’ geography (as much imagined as real) that is structured around
a journey from the striated, signifying world of everyday life –usually violent
or cruel, as in the case of the 1958 Starkweather-Fugate killing spree, the battle
of Guadalcanal or the life struggles of a young Chicago couple or Waco, Texas,
family –to the immanent, ecological space of nature in-itself, which is vicariously
beautiful, sublime, toxic, abject, catastrophic and sacred. Far from creating a
clear dialectic between subject and object, substance and representation, nomos
and physis, Malick instead creates a liminal space of relational processes and
encounters, veritable probe-heads (têtes chercheuses: primitive, pre-signifying,
pre-subjective regimes) where virtual and actual events are connected by a series
of folds and envelopments rather than clear-cut breaks.
Introduction 21
A central theme of the chapter is how the zone of cinema as an affective

and machinic body is produced by Malick’s use of various forms of what
Deleuze calls ‘the encompasser’. Usually associated with the use of landscape
in the classic Hollywood Western (most typically in the films of John Ford and
Howard Hawks), the ultimate encompasser is the sky and its various pulsations
of movement, light and shadow and subtle respiration. These envelop and
enfold the milieu and the symbiotic relationship between the protagonists and
the collective/community as a correlation between action and situation (Noel
Burch’s ‘Large Form’ S-A-S′ structure, where the (usually reluctant) intervention
of the action- hero changes the situation- in-
crisis to a more resolved and
progressive denouement). In this sense, Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven
are revisionist variations on the Western genre with the added wrinkle of an
immanent violence that the milieu is ultimately unable to contain. Far more
interesting for Gardner’s analysis however is Kenji Mizoguchi’s use of the
encompasser in films such as The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939) and
Ugetsu Monagatari (1953), which Deleuze associates with Burch’s ‘Small Form’
or A-S-A′ structure, where the situation extends and modifies the difference
between two actions. This is more typical of Malick’s Tree of Life and To The
Wonder, which start with the skeletal structure of everyday life (family crisis),
then link fragment to fragment, character to character, space to space, as we
move progressively from house to garden to landscape and ultimately to the
larger vectors of the infinite cosmos, before returning to the small form at film’s
end (while retaining the film’s heterogeneity). In this way, Guattari’s two main
trajectories, the centripetal-connection machine and the peripatetic-disruption
machine, come together in the zone of cinema as an affective body that discloses
the full extent of life’s existential territories.
In the final chapter of this section, Joff Bradley applies Alfred Jarry’s
absurdist pataphysics (the pseudo-science of imaginary solutions) to interpret
the notebooks and drawings of the Swiss kinetic sculpture artist, Jean Tinguely
(1925–91), illuminating how they function as abstract machines which diagram
the ‘techno-scientific state of things’, expressions of, by turns, the uselessness,
madness but also joy of life under capitalism. For Bradley, Tinguely’s abstract
machines (in effect, the diagrammatics of the dreams and fantasies of ‘slightly
mad inventors’) exhibit in blueprint form what Guattari describes as the ‘vital
drives of modern societies’, a collective enunciation of deterritorialized mutations.
More importantly, these singularities not only exist out of time –they are always
projections of something yet to come –but they are also undergoing constant
mutation, innately self- destructive and malfunctioning, their ‘uselessness’
serving as a mental ecology/critique of Integrated World Capitalism as a whole.

In addition, using the example of Tinguely’s Philosophe, the machines serve as
a diagram of the ethico-aesthetic and ecosophical/schizoanalytic relationship
between the image of thought and the plane of immanence. Interestingly,
Deleuze and Guattari (1994) were critical of Tinguely’s abstract portraits of
philosophers. In What Is Philosophy?, for example, they opined that ‘nothing
dances’ in the Nietzsche and the Schopenhauer ‘gives us nothing decisive’. They
even offered Tinguely sage advice: ‘Perhaps more attention should be given to
the plane of immanence laid out as abstract machine and to created concepts as
parts of the machine’ (56).
Bradley counters their critique by connecting the Philosophe collection
and Tinguely’s diagram of James Watt (1736–1819), the inventor of the steam
engine, to Guattari’s solo writings (specifically Schizoanalytic Cartographies and
The Anti-Oedipus Papers) to show how they share common ideas on issues of
movement, speed and acceleration, whereby Tinguely’s junk machines create
a kind of smooth space traversed by countless inhuman becomings, in effect
laying down their own plane of organization. Bradley cites Karl Marx’s insight
into Watt’s genius as a forerunner of Tinguely’s unique Dada-ist vision, whereby
the former’s abstract machine (a universal engine that acted as a self-fulfilling
prophecy for all heavy industry to follow) prepares the ground for the useless
machines of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Tinguely’s included. To write
lyric poetry after Auschwitz may be barbaric according to Theodor Adorno, but
to construct kinetic contraptions on a self-willed path to annihilation could be
read as a joyous (because creatively embracing one’s ‘mad fate’, in Nietzsche’s
sense) schizo-analytic antidote to a post-Hiroshima nuclear age. Bradley applies
this ‘kamikaze spirit’ (in the sense of a ‘divine wind’) to Guattari’s notion of
the collective agencement of enunciation, whereby a machine such as the SST
Concorde necessarily demands an ontological consistency through the machinic
phylum of ‘all supersonics to come’, a collective imaginary tied inextricably to the
financial markets of Integrated World Capitalism. Concorde failed commercially
because it never reached its full existential potential, which ultimately torpedoed
its global ontological consistency.
In contrast, Guattari stresses the importance of the diagram, which allows
the dreams of inventors to be incarnated in the ‘vital drives of modern societies’.
Tinguely’s machines exemplify this existential ‘flow’ because they exist in the
interstices between art and technology, aesthetics and technoscience. They are
inevitably hamstrung by exhaustion and breakdown but at the same time hint at
schizophrenic breakthrough because they constantly link up with new machines
Introduction 23
as an over- productive body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari’s non-

dialectically creative ‘and . . . and . . . and’ as a combination of connective and
disjunctive syntheses). It is here that, as Bradley puts it, ‘[t]‌he abstract machine
of Tinguely takes on consistency, in a collective assemblage of enunciation; self-
annihilating, self-immolating to accelerate the schizophrenia of capitalism’.
The book’s third and final section links ecosophy and aesthetics through
a variety of transverse subjectivities, building upon Guattari’s revolutionary
schizo-analysis from the La Borde Clinic to construct different assemblages of
enunciation (including hybrid genres, rhizomic mediations and shifting gender
identifications) and related points of singularity. In his chapter ‘The Shattered
Muse: Mêtis, Melismatics and the Catastrosophical Imagination’, Charlie
Blake fashions a ficto-critical, hyperstitional text (complete with an exhaustive
bibliography) that takes the form of an exegetical time-machine, jumping from
the classical Greek canon (Mêtis, the expression of intelligence and cunning,
derives from Orphic mythology and in later Hellenic myth was the first consort
of Zeus and mother, despite being eaten alive by her consort, of Athena), through
Guattari’s career at La Borde to a post-apocalyptic world where his visionary
legacy of ecosophy, chaosmosis and molecular insurrection pave the way for a
‘new aesthetic paradigm’. Here, crystalline series of intelligences can travel from
the finite to the infinite and back, defying both genesis and destination, genealogy
and mappable cartography. The result is an emergent catastrosophy, whereby a
combination of art and cunning begin to generate a catastrophic entity that will
enable the (post) human to manufacture at least a modicum of creativity from
these otherwise unfathomable and unrepresentable events –what Blake calls ‘a
shattered muse’.
Blake achieves this task through a series of interlocking (and we suspect,
eminently unreliable) meta-textual narrations, each producing its own arcane
literature as a means of recording an otherwise impossible fabulation, a transverse
continuity that behaves a lot like melismatics, the voicing of a single syllable
across a range of notes (‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, e.g., contains a melisma
of thirty-one notes on the ‘o’ of ‘Gloria’), whereby a machinic phylum is able,
like a musical refrain, to connect a series of otherwise disconnected fragments
without sacrificing heterogeneity. There is, of course, the overriding presence
of Blake himself (but where exactly do we position his authorial ‘voice’?); but
we also have the mysterious ‘curator’, writing from his study at Miskatonic
University’s Museum of Lost Objects in Arkham, Rhode Island, who ‘presides’
over a disjointed unbound manuscript (The Shattered Muse?), itself divided
into seven sections, which appears to be a non-linear explication of Guattari’s
teachings. This includes yet another embedded text in the form of a post-
apocalyptic lecture in the ruins of what sounds suspiciously like Goldsmiths
College in London by Zeno and Dionysia who address an audience from across
time and space via a large ‘abductional chrono-polymer screen’. Of course, this
being a world of chaos, Peirce’s ‘place of no regularity and thus no existence’,
the lecture, and the curator’s entire epistemological project, is prone to the
vicissitudes of catastrophe, complexity and contingency. Sure enough, there is
a bolt of lightning, the screen flickers, Dionysia is suddenly inaudible and a text
appears: ‘Due to inclement weather, the resurrection of FG has been postponed.’
Like a typical game of cricket, rain has stopped ‘play’. We return you to the studio
(or more accurately, the infinite dimension of the airwaves). Stay tuned.
Through a close reading of Djuna Barnes’s groundbreaking 1936 novel
Nightwood –a classic example of modernist lesbian metafiction –Alexandra
Magearu takes up Guattari’s plea for a mental ecosophy that can express the
ambivalence of desire through the transversalization of violence, which
necessitates the aesthetic re-working of phantasmagorias into quasi-baroque
renditions of different becomings, including becoming-animal. In Nightwood,
these phantasmagorias take the form of wilderness, animality and the abject,
which Barnes uses to both reveal and recuperate the queer sexualities of her main
protagonist, Robin Vote, as she undergoes a trajectory of depersonalization and
the undoing of possessive, domesticated desire towards a more deterritorialized
becoming- with- world. However, Magearu also sees Nightwood as a
the-
cautionary tale, for Robin’s indiscriminate openness to indeterminacy and the
discovery of new intensities feeds her constant need to escape from the affective
confines of her relationships, both human and animal. Her wildness thus
becomes a lack of responsibility, endurance or care, a narcissistic indulgence
that precludes the formation of a radical collective experience.
That said, part of Barnes’s strategy is to foreground the radical unknowability
of Robin’s animal becomings, which makes them less seductive for the casual
reader. Indeed, they are expressed through a fluid but highly opaque style that
flaunts its anti-representational floridity through what Magearu calls an ‘abyssal,
baroque structure’. The shattered muse in this case is designed to deliberately
disorient the reader through a series of unrepresentable gaps which stand in for
the nomadic trajectories of Robin, the novel’s central feminine presence. However,
as Magearu points out, the novel is not strictly gendered: its multiplicitous
vectors function as refusals of immediate signification, majoritarian notions of
gender difference, and the all too easy binary oppositions between human and
animal, culture and wilderness. Barnes achieves this transverse shift towards
Introduction 25
minoritarian discourse through a strategy of semi-parodic mimicry (bordering

on mockery). This allows her to open up a space for otherwise marginalized
queer sexualities to create and also exploit chaos and disorder as a means of
liberating a more machinic desire, freed from the confining field of sexuality as
an Oedipal (or even anti-Oedipal) norm. As Magearu argues, ‘In this context, the
queering of desire refers to the antinormative flow of life which carries bodies
in multiple directions and assigns them to different configurations of human,
nonhuman and inorganic actors. The process of becoming is pushed forth by
desire on its trajectory towards the minority, towards the molecular quality of
matter.’
In conclusion, Magearu argues that an ecosophical feminist aesthetics has
to overcome the majoritarian bias against nature which is intrinsic to the
sex/gender split (whereby the feminine always plays the role of physis to the
masculine nomos of law and culture) and instead establish an ethical and affective
relationship to the vitalism of matter. At the same time, as we saw in Part 1,
ecosophical aesthetics must also be constantly aware of the cultural structures
of capture and mediation that typify the agenda of Integrated World Capitalism.
In ecosophical terms, wildness would not only act as a counter to majoritarian
discourses and fantasies about wilderness but also create a series of gaps and
temporary ruptures in their planes of organization so that the indeterminacy of
the affective body could flourish as a pure singularity; spontaneous, auto-poietic
and, most importantly (Robin Vote notwithstanding), collective.
In the book’s final chapter, renée c. hoogland brings together Guattari’s
ecosophical project with the post-media poetics of Marina Abramović’s 700-
hour performance, ‘The Artist is Present’, which took place as part of her 2010
retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work is particularly
relevant to a Guattarian reading because on one level it sets up a subtle resistance
to the striating codes of the museum space but also triggers a resistance to that
resistance, necessitating a new form of praxis as a signifying rupture that might
defy easy capture. Thus the artist constructed a stage-like setting in the middle
of MoMA’s Donald Marron Atrium, creating an intrusive presence at the heart
of the building and immediately disrupting the flow of visitors across the space
and into the surrounding galleries. However, Abramović scrupulously followed
the museum’s dictates in terms of hours of operation: she entered the space at
the exact same time as her audience and dutifully left the museum at closing
time. The piece itself consisted of Abramović sitting for eight straight hours in
front of an empty table while facing another empty chair. The piece was innately
interactive as any visitor could sit opposite the artist and stay as long as they
wanted. In all, the performance lasted seventy-two days, during which 1,545
visitors sat in the chair while thousands of others observed the proceedings as
spectators or would-be ‘sitters’. The piece plays with multiple institutional and
genre tropes, not least that performance art requires the presence of the artist
and is invariably durational and spatially motivated. Moreover, Abramović
reinforced several museum parameters and strictures: the piece continued for
the full length of her retrospective, and ‘sitters’ were not allowed to touch the
artist (as if she too were an artistic commodity, ‘branded’ like the rest of the
MoMA collection as a postmodernist icon). Thus, by refusing to be precise in the
work’s exact relation to environmental, historical, political and social concerns,
Abramović, as Malcolm Miles (2014: 153) argues in another context, ‘[R]‌estates
art’s autonomy but in terms of engagement with the tensions between different
readings of a space or a situation, and of continuous critical reflection on the
work’s limits and contingencies.’
So how does ‘The Artist Is Present’ work as a pièce de la resistance? First,
hoogland reads resistance less as a politico-aesthetic strategy than as a form
of ecological praxis that proliferates across a wide variety of social and mental
ecological planes. This is particularly pertinent to Abramović’s work, which
took on new life far beyond its tenure at MoMA, whether as a major publicity
event in the form of press and blogosphere coverage, a presence on Flickr and
MoMA’s interactive website, documentation in books (most notably Marco
Anelli’s 2012 Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović, which re-mediated
the real-time contact zone between the artist and her ‘spectators’ as a series of
facialities captured by the camera) and its eventual transformation into an eight-
bit video game.
hoogland interprets this rhizomic deterritorialization of the artist’s body
from site-specific presence to a shifting, post-media matrix of intensities as a
form of war machine. Innately rhizomatic and non-hierarchical, Deleuze and
Guattari associate the war machine with smooth space, where lines no longer
delimit but instead function as nomadic vectors, intensive rather than extensive,
a processual space of distances rather than a measure of sedentary properties.
In this sense Abramović’s work acts as a ‘climate of infection’, whereby war-
as-becoming constitutes an affective encounter and multiplies itself through
its very nature as a form of contagion. It is obviously close to Spinozan ethics
and also, in this context, Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics of the ahuman subject, a
creative forging of new, transverse relations with others that both utilizes and
resists the capture of current media technologies and their organizational
matrix. However, as hoogland points out, this is also the catch: because the war
Introduction 27
machine and its aesthetic corollaries are irreducibly social in nature, ‘while not
reducible to capture by the state, [they] can –like anything else –be captured by
the state form: smooth space may transform into striated space’, so that even new
modes of becoming may engender catastrophe, as we learned all too well from
Charlie Blake’s cautionary tale that opened this section.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1981–82), ‘Transparencies on Film’, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New

German Critique, nos 24–5, Fall–Winter: 199–205.
Bateson, Gregory (2000), ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’, in Steps to an Ecology of
Mind, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 454–71.
Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction’, in
Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., New York: Schocken.
Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods
and Mathieu Copeland, Dijon: Les presses du réel.
Brecht, Bertolt (1964), Baal, A Man’s A Man, The Elephant Calf, ed. Eric Bentley,
New York: Grove Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta
Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1973), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
New York: Vintage Books.
Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and
Julian Pefanis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Guattari, Félix (1996), Soft Subversions, trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener,
New York: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix (2008), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, London:
Continuum.
Guattari, Félix (2011), The Machinic Unconscious, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York:
Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix (2013) [1990], ‘Towards a Post-Media Era’, in Provocative Alloys: A
Post Media Anthology, Clemens Apprich et al., eds, trans. Alya Sebti and Clemens
Apprich, Berlin: Post-Media Lab & Mute Books, pp. 26–7.
Lunn, Eugene (1982), Marxism & Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács,
Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press.
Miles, Malcolm (2014), Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literatures and Architecture in a Period of

Climate Change, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Morton, Timothy (2010), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Oppen, George (2008), New Collected Poems, New York: New Directions.
Varela, Francisco (1979), Principles of Biological Autonomy, New York and
Oxford: North Holland.
Part One
Therapy/Care/Affect/Poetics:
Towards an Ecosophical Ethics
1
Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s
Gift to Contemporary Clinical Practice
James Fowler and Patricia MacCormack
This chapter will explore the contribution a Guattarian ecosophical facilitation

of any individual’s unique machinic assemblage can make to contemporary
clinical psychological practice. In the spirit of extending Guattari’s clinical
experiments to current and future practices it will build in US and primarily UK
clinical therapies to suggest ways in which Guattari can assist in reconfiguring
therapeutic relations which are often still enforced. It will interrogate the
presumptions the field currently holds which privilege majoritarian subjects
within majoritarian fields of resonance, behaviour and patterns of power
while pathologizing others who exhibit identical behaviours (identified as
modes of production within their assemblages) due to the way in which
territories are made clinical or ‘free’, dependent on access to power by the
subject. Currently certain behaviours within certain individuals are seen as
‘problematic’ and this chapter seeks to develop a workable, ethical means by
which such individuals (and obviously ultimately all individuals) can have their
unique machinic assemblages encouraged in order for them to thrive (via a
Spinozan understanding of thriving as the capacity to express feely) through a
reconfiguration of the therapeutic demarcation of territories and relations. This
roughly translates to Guattari’s three ecologies of subject (patient to person),
relation (therapeutic hierarchy to ecosophy) and environment (the constituting
territories which engender clinical practice within larger social territories which
privilege majoritarian homogeneity to heterogenous singularities and alterities
in expression, leading to deterritorializations and creative transformation and
mobilization of territories).
While adamantly resistant to traditional and contemporary practices of
psychological clinical intervention, we seek to explore ways in which the
therapeutic understanding of assistance can alter territories of the normal and

the pathological, in the spirit of Guattari’s own anti-psychiatric psychiatry,
through reimagining the three ecologies of subjectivity, environment and
relation and recognizing the sickness of majoritarian homogenizing forces and
the creative liberation afforded by unique assemblages currently constituted as
needing ‘rectification’. Further, aligned with Guattari’s critique of capitalism as
its own fiercely adaptive form of homogenizing assimilation, we will explore
how identical behaviours in the pathologized subject (the ‘mentally ill’) are
proliferative, celebrated and currently forming the basis of the oppressive
regimes of political power in contemporary culture when expressed by
majoritarian individuals as leaders of capital regimes. Both micro and macro
majoritarianism behaviours which repudiate singularity, difference and unique
machinic assemblages are themselves operating through perversely oppressive
assemblages which consume all individuals that express alterity, and this form of
majoritarian assemblage can be aligned with what is currently termed ‘privilege’.
Thus the ecosophical territory constitutes the licit or illicit apprehension of
behaviour rather than the subject, yet much contemporary clinical practice
reconstitutes the ‘problem’ in the subject. Altering the ecology of power to open
up diverse and unique paths or plans for the formulation of multiple trajectories
of expression and affect can assist in fostering the workability of assemblages
within a differentiating social terrain, while challenging the homogenizing and
increasingly oppressive repeating patterns of power into which majoritarians are
forcing all alterity.
The assimilation of alternate machinic assemblages is not the purpose of a
Guattarian driven clinical practice. Rather, the deassimilation of all subjects
in (increasingly fascist) late capitalism is needed, so this chapter posits quiet
interventions or ‘soft subversions’ for all subjects and their unique assemblages
while seeking to dismantle the dominant territory and its catatonizing patterns.
The role of spectacle, media and truth as simulacrum at the expense of the
volatile and repressed creativity of the unconscious brings the ethical into the
aesthetic realm, as does the suggestion that the clinician must enter into a
becoming-artist. The teeming spectacles of alternate assemblages found in art
and imagination can also be extended to therapeutic practice, so the Guattarian
psychologist can both facilitate the art of the ‘patient’ and redress the way in
which society refuses to see certain behaviours and perceptions as themselves
unconscious artistic expressions. In the spirit of Lotringer’s schizo- culture
field of reimagining clinical practice and ‘the patient’ this chapter will offer an
example of how soft subversions can be put into contemporary clinical practice
Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship 33
in an effort to strip away toxic practice. This will be done through suggesting
ways to cross lines, complicate conceptualizations and occupy simultaneous,
multigeneous positions of availability to individuals in need without creating
need. Can we develop a reconciliation of Guattari’s (1996) paths of power,
knowledge and self- reference with systemic contexts of psychotherapeutic
intervention? Can we even say such intervention is still relevant? Each of these
paths/voices are forces driving mental ill health through systemic factors. Each
of these paths/voices can also be understood via therapeutic methodologies or
intensities within the therapeutic agent:
First: paths/
voices of power circumscribing and circumventing human
groupings from the outside, either through direct coercion of, and panoptic grip
on, bodies, or through imaginary capture of minds
second: paths/voices of knowledge articulating themselves with technoscientific

and economic pragmatics from within subjectivity
third: paths/
voices of self-reference developing a processual subjectivity
that defines its own coordinates and is self-consistent (what I have discussed
elsewhere under category of the ‘subject-group’) but can nevertheless establish
transversal relations to mental and social stratifications
. . . though inscribed in historical time and rigidly incarnated in sociological

divisions and segregations, are forever entwining in unexpected and strange
dances, alternating between fights to the death and the promotion of new
figures. (114)
As said by Guattari (2000: 35):
For its part, mental ecosophy will lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject
to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries’ of life and
death. It will lead us to search for antidotes to mass media and telematic
standardization, the conformism of fashion, the manipulation of opinion
by advertising, surveys etc. Its way of operating will be more like those of an
artist, rather than of professional psychiatrists who are always haunted by an
outmoded ideal of scientificity.
Throughout our environments lines are drawn –the line between home
and school, between school and work, between work and death. Authorities
and clinicians determine, from a system described through majoritarian-
driven psychological and psychiatric guidelines, what constitutes abnormal
behaviour –and do so by observing that the behaviour is out of line. The terms
‘developmentally appropriate’ and ‘environmentally invalid’ are rife within today’s
clinical climate. In the pharmaceutically driven United States, individuals with

behaviours not in line with majoritarian trajectories are medicated (heavily),
and from a young age. In the National Health Service in the United Kingdom
medications and psychiatric interventions are far less common, and instead of
the medical ‘solution’ to ‘problem’ behaviours, individuals are compelled (usually
through statutory, local authority powers) to have clinicians and authority figures
in their homes, often using coercive methods to ensure that problem behaviour
is corrected. Any individual unwilling to participate in that system is labelled as
‘difficult to engage’, and is often pushed deeper within the system. These same
behaviours, were they present in a board room, a sporting event or a political rally,
might be considered noble by these same authority figures. Yet, we all have mental
health in the same way that we all have physical health. If someone has a cold
one day, they are typically not labelled as physically ill forever. If someone feels
depressed one day, it is extremely common practice for that person to be labelled
as clinically depressed, which often does follow them for the rest of their lives.
These occur via the three series of subjectivization Guattari (1996: 114)
demarcates: Paths/voices of power, paths/voices of knowledge and paths/voices of
self-reference, roughly translating as the imposition of the subject’s pathologized
label, its articulation within specific technoscientific epistemic discourse and its
self-internalization by the subject who then acts according to their label. Today’s
definition of mental illness, provided by the Mayo Clinic in 2015 (in the United
States) and adopted internationally (as evidenced by the National Institute for
Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, in the United Kingdom), is ‘disorders that
affect your mood, thinking and behaviour’. This establishes in no uncertain terms
that there is a majoritarian mood, a majoritarian thought and a majoritarian
behaviour to which we must all prescribe or be perceived by those trained in
a mental health profession as mentally ill. Homogeneity is the territory upon
which the three paths/voices are inscribed. Heterogenous intensities are quashed
by these paths. The demarcation points between mentally ill and mentally stable
where behaviour is identical occurs due to the field of consistency within which
the subject is constituted. The majoritarian who creates connections along a
homogenous plane which connects business with media, capitalism with state
and religious institutes, and ablates all punctuating or ‘aberrant’ (understood
only as dissonant or disjunctive) intensities is not subjectified as in ‘need’ but
rather as facilitating the smoothness of the enforcement of the mythic universals
Guattari (2011: 32–5) critiques.
In both cases, however, the materiality of the subject as embodied, Guattari’s
first call to de-psychiatrization, is denied. For the majoritarian, intertwining
and resonating all semiotic systems with one another to create a conformity of
‘logic’, ‘common sense’ or ‘truth’ is the creation of what Guattari (2011: 35) calls
‘ “extra-human” semiotic machines’. The balance of different legitimizing systems
with seemingly different relations to truth –capital, religion, the science of
psychiatry –even out due to their identical relation with power. Their discursive
epistemic differentiation is a masquerade, as is their claim to knowledge as
‘therapeutic’. Retail therapy, redemption and clinical cure are the same thing.
Access to power is what differentiates the docile body from the ‘extra-human’
machine operating majoritarian. The majoritarian machinic assemblage is vast
and homogenous, the so-called mentally ill machinic assemblage is unique,
singular and driven by the unconscious which for Guattari, especially in his
late writings, is no longer opposed to, or differentiated from, the conscious or
preconscious but is the limitless chaosmotic cosmos of the subject and their flesh
that drives all constructed assemblages and produces new relations, assemblages
and affects –the moment where behaviour and the subject are the product of,
and available as, art rather than scientific discourse. This reflects the Semiotext(e)
cited Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression’s anti-psychiatric human
rights renegotiation of language where behaviour is exchanged for conduct, trait
is preferred over symptom and, perhaps most ecosophically important of all,
mentally ill is corrected to inmate and hospital to institute (Boston Declaration
2013: 35).
This mapping of identical behaviour along different territorial planes leads
to the unchecked privilege of the majoritarian leader destroying liberties en
masse and simultaneously for the ‘ill’ individual the pervasive and ongoing
issue of unwanted help (see the Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression
(Boston Declaration 2013: 34) for a comprehensive list of objections to imposed
psychiatric or psychological intervention). This oppression can be found in
every system one encounters from peers, family, schools, employers to corporate
(e.g. hospital or pharmaceutical) and government (e.g. social services and
police) through power of personal emotional, economic, legal and physical
leverage over individuals. It is still entirely possible to be sectioned and detained
in a hospital setting due to a display of behaviour even when that behaviour
is not a crime. When behaviour is a crime and legal measures are taken, it is
still common practice for a judicial system to sentence one to psychiatric or
psychological measures, which effectively write blank checks for clinicians to
attach any number of diagnoses to an individual in accordance with their own
majoritarian system. The specialities of the experts are neither special nor unique
to their episteme but rather resonate around the rectification and assimilation
of the individual’s unique desiring machines into the homogenous operations

of the larger institutes, which distribute power away from creativity towards
production as part of state and capital.
Covertly, Françoise Peraldi’s (2013: 22) adoption and expansion of Guattari’s
schizo-clinical practice emphasizes the role of connectivity as territory of
enfleshed subject, as it is primarily a project of displacement:
The main principle on which the functioning of the institute was based
was displacement. There were few permanent places or functions but rather
temporary preferential zones and occupations between which everybody moved
and functioned in a more or less disconnected way . . . The main point of these
‘assemblies’ was, to use Guattari’s word, to unyoke (désassujettir) the existing
groups in such a way that language and all forms of semiotic systems could
circulate through the institution independent of any hierarchical relationship.
(Emphasis in the original)
The privilege of the expert, and especially the structure within any institute –
family, court or hospital –collates all experts with one another on the upper
stratum and the object of analysis beneath, atrophying the position and thus
the subjectivity of both, to the point where the relation of knowledge as a social
corpus directly reflects the organized body which opposes the Body without
Organs. This reflects the third change for which Guattari (1996: 263) calls in his
new truths for psychiatry: transformation of ‘the wide range of mobilizations of
social partnerships’. The space or ecosophy of relation between clinician, social
arena and legislature, and patient itself is currently a signified, subjectified,
catatonic body –perhaps even its own form of ‘heavy’ facility, which is Guattari’s
first site of new truths for psychiatric transformation (263).
The reduction of relation to one of pure position in space also denies the
crucial role in assemblage making of movement, which Peraldi highlights
and which Guattari’s advocation of unyoking facilitates. Movement can occur
quietly and imperceptibly or on a grand observable nomadic level but it is still
movement because the body is not incarnated via the semiotic structuring
of institutionalized and institutionalizing language but only tactically by the
connections and circulations it makes. Here the reinvention of clinical practice
via Guattari has as much use for the way we globally think human movement,
displacement of populations and ‘migration’ as for the clinician’s office. Extending
this, the operation of ecosophy as a sensitivity to infinite interconnectivity or
deep ecology, from whence it received its inspiration, is both infinite and radical
when circulation of all intensities, affects and expressions (elements of relation
inspired by a Spinozan understanding of interaction) replaces hierarchies and

the destructive forces of anthropocentric colonization of the world, materially
and semiotically (and never extricable from each other).
In contemporary social science it is common practice to discuss the relative
ecological validity of a particular experiment, intervention or clinical practice.
This ecological validity can be scribed as the ease to which a given practice
translates, generalizes or otherwise relates to the patient or subject’s state
outside of the practice. Case in point is the heterotopic white padded room,
which does not typically exist within a patient’s ecology, and within which the
patient is placed in order to buy time for clinicians to conceptualize treatment
and for the patient to exhaust their reserve energy in a space more easily
measurable as futile than the space outside. The behaviour demonstrated in a
white padded room, and in fact any clinical progress made within that space,
is less likely to be transcribed to, resonant, persistent, adapted to liberties of
expression in the outside world than clinical progress made outside of the white
padded room. This environmental context of ecological (in)validity represents
an aesthetic disjunction incommensurable with a therapeutic relationship,
and instead signifies the therapeutic hierarchy. This hierarchy is demonstrated
easily within the physical white, padded space, but is also prevalent within any
clinical encounter in which the therapeutic relationship departs from a joining
assemblage and is reified as an exercise of power. The question of use here
diverges from traditional productivity towards reassimilation or criminal or
psychiatric exclusion, and what is sought is the usefulness defined by the willing
recipient of clinical input, rather than the use of a majoritarian assimilation or
will to enforcement of proscribed behaviour.
Use in a Guattarian (2000: 34–5) perspective refers to the creation of new ways
of living together through communicational interventions, existential mutations
to form a social ecosophy through the implementation of experimental micro-
practices and institutional level practices. Conversely the ideal treatment
environment is an ecosophically valid one, and the ideal treatment is one which
liberates the ecosophical experience of the patient within their systemic confines,
whatever they may be. Confinement via institutionalization operates the mass
media manufacture of mental illness, aberrant behaviour and consumption into
a homogenizing system. Guattari states:
At every level, individual or collective, in everyday life as well as the reinvention

of democracy (concerning town planning, artistic creation, sport etc.), it is a
question in each instance of looking into what would be the dispositives of the
production of subjectivity, which tends towards an individual and/or collective

resingularization, rather than that of mass media manufacture, which is
synonymous with distress and despair. (33–4)
It is worth positioning or operationalizing what this chapter will refer to

as mental illness –in this case a general failure to thrive –with the definition
of failure and the definition of thrive being that which pertains best to the
individual on the day from a Spinozan perspective as the capacity for expression
without affects dampening or killing off liberty. In this way mental illness
can only be defined within context. The machinic environment of structures
and systems operating around us, which Guattari (1996: 113) groups as
‘collective apparatuses of subjectiviation’, are constituted in part by aesthetic
groupings which generate contextual cues. Those cues generate physiological
and psychological states of intensity powered by the unconscious. These are
adaptable as they relate to the conscious through skill and, effectively, mental
health. The behaviour generated by one set of cues can only be scribed by the
homogenizing majoritarian as symptomatic of mental ill health if it appears
grossly out of context for that individual, and that individual’s ‘appropriate’
context is defined by the majoritarian. Mental illness can also be defined as the
lack of ability to adapt psychologically to contexts, and to thrive as a result. The
lack of a need to adapt at all could be a clinical definition of privilege. Illness is
defined by frequency and consensus not by qualitative specificity. The urgent
and imperative need to adapt within the power to do so could explain, in of
itself, a significant amount of the common labelling of individuals by mental
health professionals as ‘mentally ill’ or having mental health needs.
In this way mental illness can be approached through the trajectory of an
encouragement and development of singular unique assemblages –what for
clinical shorthand we shall call plan A. ‘Plan A’ is defined as the plan that requires
absolutely no adaptation at all in order to succeed. If plan A is to take the world
by force and ensure that it bends around a subject, then it is only as successful
as a subject’s level of majoritarianism. Plan A requires no consideration of
the other, or of ethics at all. Individuals with the privilege to be successful in
plan A will rarely be considered mentally ill, due to their great success –that
is, no failure to thrive. However, such an individual’s plan A may, through the
amount of signifying systems they control or patterns they create with which the
populace are forced to resonate, establish a homogenizing territory that imposes
its assemblage upon many to which they are forced to adapt yet through which
they cannot thrive. Yet, an individual successful at plan A may be as unable to
adapt as someone who, effectively due to a lack of privilege, would then fail to
thrive and be considered mentally ill (think, e.g., Men’s Rights Activists or All
Lives Matter proponents). Most of us find ourselves somewhere in between –a
space constantly fluctuating between successful force and necessity to adapt, this
all taking place within a vast field of behaviours within a subject and as a group
where traits and qualities become aesthetic techniques for survival that define
the multitude of drifting contexts of our lives, the openings and capacities for
creativity and the enforcement of totalizing regimes.
Multisystemic intervention
Psychiatric and psychological intervention has changed significantly over the

past forty years. Far fewer people are treated as individuals with problems in
isolation than they once were. A clear example of this progress is the spread
of Multisystemic Therapy and similar programmes. Multisystemic Therapy
represents a dramatic departure from seeing problem behaviours as isolated
within problem individuals through its defining behaviours as multidetermined
and bidirectional. Multidetermined, as a clinical term, refers to the theory that
any behaviour is a culmination of multiple driving factors. In reference to the
reconfiguration of the ecology of the subject this foregrounds the multiplicity
and/as assemblage that is the subject while also combining that subject with
their drives –a teeming multiple desiring-machine. ‘Bidirectional’ refers to
the theory that the response to behaviours from others (both through choices,
actions, intensities or other, rippling effects and affects) influences the likelihood
of another iteration of that behaviour. Therefore repetition as repetition of
relations of power, of expected outcome, of affect as an example of an atrophying
ethic produces a subject whose behaviour is not driven by an aberrant desire,
but a result of the closing off of liberty of expression through the repeating
of patterns of response that dampen any expressions of becomings into
articulations of being, closing off the BwO, closing down the unique assemblage
machine. Alterations in response open escape routes for alternate behaviours
and developments in becomings, the production of unexpected behaviours and
heterogenous trajectories of expression.
The multiple systems described in Multisystemic Therapy are the individual,
the family, the peer group, the neighbourhood, the school and the place of work –
the environment. The theory of change in Multisystemic Therapy emphasizes
that the clinician intervene within all of the systems around the individual rather
than focusing on the individual as problematic. Within Multisystemic Therapy
it is theorized that when a failure to thrive is occurring it is explained by a

systemic failure rather than an individual failure. The question then becomes,
are these systems divergent on their trajectories of responsorial affect or are
they resonant with one another and thus enforcing a homogenizing response
which risks the relation that produces reiterations in behaviour? Further,
Multisystemic Therapy operates within the community and demands that all
involved persons are living in their homes and are not required to visit offices to
receive the therapy –the clinician comes to the individual’s home, school, place
of work, community and so on. In contrast to imprisoning or hospitalizing a
patient, or even to requiring that an individual be seen for outpatient treatment
(i.e. an individual comes to an office to see the clinician, effectively removing
the individual and their ‘problematic’ behaviours and thoughts from society for
the purposes of treatment momentarily), Multisystemic Therapy is ostensibly
political in its formulation. This formulation is political through appearance
alone –as the clinician involves themself with the multiple systems around
the individual, intervening in the collective power structures surrounding the
individual, disrupting the individual diagnostic process through attributing
responsibility to powers outside of the individual and crossing lines of machinic
operation.
However, Multisystemic Therapy and similar methods of working belong
to traditional patterns of social formalization in a number of areas. We focus
on the following: (1) that the therapy is evidence-based, indicating that as part
of the therapy it works to a majoritarian standard of normative behaviour and
towards ensuring that service users (or patients) ‘achieve’ as close as possible to
normative behaviour standards by the end of treatment, measuring this success
empirically and thus for both the subject and the therapist behaviour measured
by outcomes is not a creative expression but a capital production of ‘work’; (2) the
therapy identifies systems around the individual, but only one step away (e.g.
the individual’s family, the individual’s school), rather than societal, cultural,
political or economic influences surrounding those systems; (3) the onus
for behaviour change, including systemic change, is placed on the individual
on whom the therapy is focused. In this way the individual must address the
paradox of recognizing that their difficulties are driven by multiple factors
outside of themselves while being asked to accept responsibility for that. This
reinforces the docile body in the courtroom, the prison, the confessional, the
clinic who must reintegrate themselves rather than critique the homogenizing
forces of social territories or celebrate their heterogenous escape trajectories as
artistic expressions.
The happy prisoner
What we seek in any continuation of clinical practice would be the creation of

(all) individuals and collectives who thrive on what Guattari (1996: 111) calls
their ‘existential chemistries’ –aesthetic ecologies which are non-dogmatic and
deprogramming.
Analysis again. But where? How? Well everywhere possible . . . It can be individual
for those who tend to lead their lives as if it were a work of art; dual in all possible
ways including, why not, a psychoanalytic couch, as long as it has been dusted
off. Multiple, through group, network, institutional and collective practice
practices; and finally micropolitical by virtue of other social practices, other
forms of auto-valorizations and militant actions leading through a systematic
decentering of social desire, to soft subversions and imperceptible revolutions
that will eventually change the face of the world, making it happier. (111)
Contemporary clinical practice seeks to alleviate the symptoms of majoritarian

oppression without treating the cause. An individual’s behaviour being seen as
problematic is, in of itself, a cause of the behaviour. A person struggling with
anger will continually be blamed for being angry. Factors driving that anger
include social, economic and political forces outside of the individual. The
angry patient, in the absence of the majoritarian privilege of acting aggressively,
will be asked by clinicians to adjust their thinking in order to change the way
they feel and ultimately the way they behave. This angry individual, effectively a
prisoner of minoritarian circumstance if decentred would become the creative
revolutionary in the quietest or loudest way, is being asked to be happy in spite
of their circumstances rather than happiness being seen as a distribution of
complex affects different within and between individuals.
Happiness as conformity dampens desire to enforce a belief in happiness
through conformity in too much clinical practice. The quelling of desire for
alternate modes of happiness that come from the liberty of a decentring of
power is crucial to power in order to revalorize its own importance. Happiness
comes both from the realization that one is free from the enforcement of regimes
of psychological mapping but also does not need them in the first place. The
perceived need for these forces becomes the desiring machine that produces
catatonic capitalism and contemporary media systems. In this way, just as false
democracy demands a choice between the unchoosable at the risk of non-
democracy, capitalism demands work at the risk of uselessness, contemporary
media demands belief at the risk of no information and subjectivization is
demanded otherwise you are depraved, deviant, tramp (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 159), contemporary clinical practice hides the effects of injustice.
Imagine a child being abused by a parent in their home. The parent tells the
child, ‘Don’t say anything to anybody. Act happy even if you aren’t happy. If
anyone finds out about this you’re gonna be hurt in ways you can’t imagine.’
Zones of majoritarianism from family, to state, religion, media and our own
internalized regulating systems, operate desire through the demand for a state of
affect abstracted from qualifying intensities. Majoritarian oppression abuses any
individual, and then sends in a clinician who effectively says the same thing –
be happy and content or things will be worse for you. Hitch your desire onto
us, you need us, not your desire –what Guattari (1995: 54) calls the rhizome
of reciprocal dependence: ‘Structure implies feedback loops, it puts into play
a concept of totalization that it itself masters’ (37). ‘Be happy’ has nothing to
do with the happiness Guattari calls for in the world. Both have no signified
and both are not translatable. However happiness in clinical practice is catatonic
complacency, while for Guattari it is infinite cosmic distribution of various
intensities. The former is a being that has nothing to do with the being it is, the
latter is a becoming that has no outcome or destination and is thus antagonistic to
both contemporary clinical foci on both outcome and identity as an enunciation
of normativity.
Dispersion of symptoms
How clinicians, peers, family or any encounter respond to individuals displaying

symptoms of distress will immediately influence whether the distressed
individual is able to thrive. A distressed person can in fact be thriving if that
distress is their expression and they are exercising their capacity to express.
Symptoms need not be problems but may indeed, after the Boston Declaration,
be traits or characteristics, and may only be problems if the individual defines
them as problems in the absence of a coercive influence. Symptoms spread and
intensify through encounters. If someone goes to their friend and says, ‘I’m feeling
depressed’, and the friend responds in an attempt to help, that attempt could be
restricting the depressed individual’s capacity to express, preventing them from
thriving. The help typically takes the form of ‘what can I do to make you happy’, or
‘what do you need to say to get that out of your system’, and through either activity
or catharsis the depression is expected to disperse into the aether. The cause will
not have been treated. The symptom, or the momentary intensity of that affect,
will have been dispersed through a (socially acceptable) expression or relation.

Any artistic or heterogeneous affects which could have been produced from the
expression of a trait is reorganized into a symptom of psychological mapping of
subjectivization. The trait as symptom could in fact become a distributing entity
entirely liberated from its enunciator, an existential chemicality.
This generation/transformation relation seems in my view at present to be a

particular case of the molar/molecular relation. The difference is that we no longer
come to the politics of machinic choices from the point of view of assemblages
of enunciation marked in one way or another by human components, but from
the point of view of the things themselves, so to speak. (Guattari 2011: 154)
Addressing the ecology of relation yet simultaneously doing away with

all subjectivities, patient and therapist, who are already far beyond hierarchy
in their relation of feedback exchange of expressions, Guattari apprehends
what he tentatively suggests as the metaphysics or metasemiotics of the thing
itself –the intensity, the expression, independent of speaker or hearer and thus
independent of subjectivization and perceived pathological genealogy from the
patient, power and epistemic function or designated programme of treatment
or outcome from the therapist. The question becomes ‘what can this thing
do, what can we do with it?’ demanding creativity on both sides and from the
entire world within which this metasemiosis is expressed. Thus the unconscious
former-symptom of the patient becomes a catalyst for new creative navigation of
a produced intensity let loose on the world.
Plan N
When an individual is asked to adapt to the Nth degree in order to participate,

we refer to this as Plan N. Clinicians typically utilize Plan N. This is done
through asking the patient to learn new thinking skills –to think differently in
order to feel and act differently, and to adapt. The more an individual’s unique
machining assemblage deviates from the majoritarian imposed expectation,
the more adaptation is needed in order to assimilate. We note here that the
therapeutic relationship is an intimate one between people previously unknown
to one another and as such, it is practical for a trained professional to rely on
their training to identify issues which people typically report, and then provide
solutions that typically work for others. However, this identifying of problem,
solution and evidenced result is intensely problematic to the capacity to express
or exist outside of the majoritarian schema. Plan N typically involves an

assessment in which an individual is subject to various tests which determine the
extent to which they deviate from normative values. Examples of this include the
Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (e.g. Goodman 1997), which defines
all of the Strengths (i.e. closeness to majoritarian quality) and difficulties (i.e.
deviation from majoritarian quality) of an individual in just twenty-five items
(five for emotional symptoms, five for conduct problems, five for hyperactivity/
inattention, five for peer relationship problems and five for prosocial behaviour).
It is common for someone to seek help from a mental health professional due to
distress that they would rather live without, only to find after such a questionnaire
that they have many more problems than they originally thought. In actuality
what has occurred is the patient has been more intimately interwoven within the
reiterative reifying ecology of the homogenizing psychiatric territory.
This reflects Guattari’s (2000: 47) critique of post-industrial capitalism (what
he calls Integrated World Capitalism) which ‘tends increasingly to decentre
its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services
towards structures producing signs, syntax and –in particular, through the
control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls etc –
subjectivity’. Reintegration in contemporary clinical practice isn’t even about
forming a subject able to become a productive worker or operational family
member but a signifying point within a discursive regime that evinces either
a success or failure within outcome targets and goals set by government health
authorities. Arguably the more creative and expressive the patient, the more their
creativity is destroyed and converted into despair via these totalizing discursive
imprisonments. ‘While the logic of discursive sets seeks to completely delimit its
objects, the logic of intensities or eco-logic, is concerned only with movement
and intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here only to system
or to structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution,
definition and deteritorialization’ (44).
In a tragic turn, a patient who has come into being within an exhausting
system or structure not only finds themselves atrophied into a particular kind
of clinical subject inundated with additional ‘problems’ to exacerbate their sense
of self-pathologization but also the very symptoms or traits that could have been
utilized as workings towards becomings have had their processes truncated with
an outcome goal of extrication. Thus the means of liberty found in the symptom
are also designated the reason for initial pathologization and cure is amputation
of these means. The clinician then goes about their business of utilizing this
hierarchical power dynamic to resolve these issues by delivering the patient from
their means of processual becoming by robbing the patient of the intensities which
could have (if detrimental) transformed themselves into something otherwise and
creative or remained as catalysts towards different trajectories of experience if not
detrimental. This is as true today of Multisystemic Therapy, similar community-
based systemic therapies, family therapy or individual psychotherapy as it has
ever been (see, e.g., Holmes et al. (2006: 181) for a Deleuzio-Guattarian based
critique of discourse and outcome in contemporary clinical practice. Thus the
authors state: ‘While EBHS does acknowledge that healthcare professionals
possess discrete bodies of knowledge, EBHS advocates defend its rigid approach
by rationalizing that the process is not self-serving because improved healthcare
and increased healthcare funding will improve patient outcomes.’).
Plan AN
As a soft subversion we offer plan AN, a patient-led plan which refuses to identify
problem or even consider the idea of problems within the individual. Plan AN
only seeks to provide the service to which the individual has consented to
receive before encountering the clinician. Plan AN seeks to complicate rather
than reduce the conceptualization –this is done through the repudiation of any
normative data, questionnaire or scale, and through the inclusion of patient-led
analysis and deconstruction of relationships that extend into the political strata
around the systems, the relationships between systems and the individual’s
position within the flow of power. Plan AN involves providing the individual
with thinking tools to alleviate symptoms when such a trajectory is invited by the
individual, and conversely to embrace symptoms when the individual’s machinic
assemblage is served by those symptoms coming through loud and clear –it is
then the role of the clinician to either help the individual position themselves
for the most effective presentation of their symptoms to the powers that drive
them or to help that individual opt-out in whatever way and to whatever degree
best matches their assemblage by transforming their symptoms into liberating
affects. The role of aesthetics comes both in the clinician’s relation with power,
which must be transformed, and the patient’s relation with the symptom, which
is exploited within and between the therapeutic relation, as well as beyond it in
order to distribute the schizo-intensities that remodulate the world and offer
despotic ruptures which challenge homogenizing operations.
Guattari offers the following for how to navigate any concept of workability,
from therapeutic workable assistance to the way we must work ethically and
politically in the world to afford alternatives. This quotation could not be more
timely at the moment of writing (late 2016):
The ecosophical perspective does not totally exclude a definition of unifying

objectives, such as the struggle against world hunger, and end to deforestation
or to the blind proliferation of the nuclear industries; but it will no longer be a
question of depending on reductionist, stereotypical order-words which only
expropriate other more singular problematics and lead to the promotion of
charismatic leaders. (Guattari 2000: 34)
Each age has examples of urgent objectives and the risk of such leaders. What is
interesting is that both radical protesters and the charismatic leaders are seen and
feared as mentally unstable or unsuitable for citizenship by their counterpoints.
Within this environment of oppositionality of technique of dissemination of
thought versus imposition of power, various factions form groups which express
their own micropolitical mental ‘madnesses’, from racism and terrorism to
minoritarian politics such as feminism. Madness is in everyone and the naming
of such is exerted by antagonists as a means by which any capacity for creative
mediation is disengaged. Guattari taught us to love our madness in order to
artistically recreate territories where it can be fostered and proliferate newness in
a way only the unconscious and a loosening of the will to power for a desire for
unlimited imagination can afford. Clinical practice overhauling is also an overhaul
in dialectic approaches of all kinds which theorize the in-between, the interstitial
and the desperate need we have not for exchanged politics, exchanged ideas and
exchanged mad subjects for normal subjects but rather for the possibility of spaces
which allow difference to open infinite new trajectories towards ways we don’t yet
know we can think. The therapist must become artist to elicit the artistry from
the subject ‘patient’, and in our varying roles and their varying relations of power
which alter multiply over the course of an hour, a day, a year, we must also be
citizens which exhibit the same artistry when finding ourselves in power in order
to exorcise our micro-fascisms and disassemble the hierarchical strata, and the
creative patient when faced with oppressive challenges that produce symptoms
which can so easily fall into a general social or political despair.
References
‘The Boston Declaration on Psychiatric Oppression’ (2013), in Schizo Culture: The Book,

Sylvère Lotringer, ed., New York: Semiotext(e).

Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: The Althone Press.
Goodman, R. (1997), ‘The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: A Research Note’,
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38: 581–6.
Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Baines and
Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Powerhouse.
Guattari, Félix (1996), Soft Subversions, trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener,
New York: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London:
Athlone.
Guattari, Félix (2011), The Machinic Unconscious, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York:
Semiotext(e).
Holmes, Dave, Stuart J Murray, Amélie Perron and Geneviève Rail (2006),
‘Deconstructing the Evidence-Based Discourse in Health Sciences: Truth, Power and
Fascism’, International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 4: 180–6.
Peraldi, Françoise (2013), ‘A Schizo and the Institution’, in Schizo Culture: The Event,
Sylvère Lotringer, ed., New York: Semiotext(e).
2
‘An inside that lies deeper than any

internal world’: On the Ecosophical
Significance of Affect
Jason Cullen
Introduction
In a recent piece for The Guardian, George Monbiot articulated an increasingly

common theme among those interested in environmental conservation: the
ecological crises with which our culture is currently faced are not an unfortunate
correlate of twenty-first-century capitalism; rather, the crises which confront
the Anthropocene are a direct product of the contemporary, intensified form
of capitalism that is grounded in constant consumption. This consumption,
Monbiot contends, is the expression of a bizarre belief in the possibility of
endless economic growth. From the point of view of consumers in this culture,
consumption has nothing to do with their needs; this consumption, Monbiot
argues, means ‘developing ever more useless stuff to meet ever fainter desires’.
Consumption is, thus, a way to gratify increasingly trivial desires with trinkets
that will hold the consumer’s attention only briefly. Unfortunately, trying to
respond to our desires with plastic baubles produces an ineluctable ennui which
drives continued consumption, and the cycle intensifies. As Monbiot (2014) puts
it, ‘We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless,
grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created.’
While the interface between capitalism and ecological collapse is certainly an
apropos issue –it is, after all, a central theme in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies –
this chapter is not directly concerned with describing this interface and the broad
relationship between the two. Instead, I am interested in one of the factors that
Monbiot suggests contributes to this malaise: a culture that produces atomized,
and increasingly affectless, subjects grasping at trifles we hope will fill a void
left by a deep disconnect between ourselves and our environments. Our world
becomes, to use Heidegger’s (1977: 17) phrase, ‘standing-reserve’; our world –
ourselves included –becomes seen as a collection of resources to be cultivated,
manipulated and traded, as we fail to grasp our embeddedness within it.
In keeping with this theme, Timothy Morton, in his recent The Ecological
Thought (2010), argues that, if we are to develop a way of thinking that can
respond to our current ecological crises, we can only do so if our thinking is
grounded in a global point of view on the interconnectedness of things. Thinking
from the point of view of this interconnectedness, what Morton calls a ‘mesh’
is opposed to holistic thinking which he suggests maintains that ‘the whole
is greater than the sum of its parts’ (35), and so subordinates the particular
individuals which fill out the world to a whole which subsumes them. Morton
wants to articulate the necessity for a new perspective on the interconnectedness
of things, on the coexistence of all beings. However, even as he argues against
the futility of a holism which subjugates the parts of the whole to the whole
itself, he insists that the form of coexistence he is interested in ‘means nothing
if it means only the proximity of other machines or sharing components with
other machines. Upgraded models of “post-Nature” deprive us of intimacy. The
ecological thought must think something like Georg Hegel’s idea of the “night”
of subjectivity, the “interior of nature” ’ (77–8).
I want to argue in this chapter that Gilles Deleuze’s ontology offers us a
picture of a form of holism where, rather than the whole supervening on its
parts, they are reciprocal insofar as individuals express the transformation or
modification of the whole of which they are parts; however, these expressions
are double insofar as they simultaneously express the constitution of the whole.
In short, Deleuze’s ontology is holistic in a perverse, distributive sense that
concerns ‘the “each” rather than the “all” ’ (Kerslake 2002: 13). There is a good
reason for treating Deleuze as a counterpoint to this conception of greater-than-
the-sum-of-its-parts holism; he offers a picture of the ‘interior’ of nature that
Morton gestures towards, while actively resisting the totalizing interiority and
negativity of Hegel’s metaphysical system. However, because this picture is not
immediately apparent, I will attempt to elucidate two of its crucial moments: the
first is the claim that individuals are parts of, and participants in, a whole whose
constitution they express, and, second, that affective relations are the mode of
their participation and belonging.
Deleuze initially works out the logic of this idea in his first major work on
Spinoza; in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze (1990: 38) describes
individual modes as ‘intrinsic modalities of being’. That is, following Spinoza’s
The Ecosophical Significance of Affect 51
famous portrayal of individuals as internal to God, or nature, Deleuze

characterizes the modes as facing in two directions: a mode is simultaneously
a degree of the intensive constitution of the essence of substance –a degree
of power or modal essence, to use Spinoza’s terminology –and it is also the
expression of this degree in an ensemble of extensive, material parts. Importantly,
because its essence describes, explicates, the constitution of God, or nature, a
mode is intrinsic to the latter; however, because this constitution simultaneously
complicates God, that is, the essence of God is transformed through this
expression, there is no supervening whole which catches and contains all the
parts. As Deleuze (1990: 175) puts it, ‘Things remain inherent in God who
complicates them, and God remains implicated in things which explicate him.’
The second moment concerns a shortcoming of Deleuze’s interpretation of
Spinoza that he outlines in Difference and Repetition, something of a ‘Deleuzian
companion’ text to Expressionism’s historical concerns. However, rather than
focus on Difference and Repetition’s attempts to outmanoeuvre this problem,
I will turn to the first of Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema, Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image (1986), where, among other things, Deleuze takes the lesson
from Difference and Repetition’s confrontation with Spinoza back to his reading
of Henri Bergson and describes affect, or, more precisely, affective encounters,
as the relational mode by which beings, qua parts, are not only internal to a
distributive, open whole, but reciprocal with its constitution. The lesson we
should take from this discussion is, I believe, that if we are to try and describe
subjects as internal to nature, there are two conditions we must fulfil. First, we
must conceive nature as open, transforming and reciprocal with the subjects
internal to it; that is, subjects acquire their substantive content, their power,
from their belonging to nature, but nature only exists –only is, in the strongest
sense –because of the relations between subjects. Second, these relations must
be affective; affection must be the mode of subjects’ interiority. If, as Deleuze
and Guattari (1987: 256) suggest, ‘affects are becomings’, subjects are in nature
precisely because nature is the systematicity immanent to the reciprocity and
continuity of subjects’ becomings.
Within this context, I will turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) collaborative
conception of ‘becoming- animal’ that appears in A Thousand Plateaus, in
order to consider the ecosophical significance of participating affectively
in the constitution of nature. This is particularly significant with regards to
Guattari’s emphasis on the role of environmental conditions in the production
of subjectivity. This significance is in the way the two of them pervert Jakob
von Uexküll’s gift to ecology –the discipline of ethology –into an ecosophical
project; ethology defines or characterizes an animal by counting the affects of

which it is capable. That is, ethology asks what a body can do, and treats this
definition as the basis for our entering into a transformative relationship with
that body (257).
Affective encounters with nonhuman animals
In The Three Ecologies, Guattari (2008: 35) describes the possible modes of my

being a being as ‘existential Territories’; a mode of being is not a mode of myself,
but a relational field in which my becoming is tied into the becomings of those
beings with whom I share this field:
The principle common to the three ecologies is this: each of the existential
Territories with which they confront us is not given as an in-itself, closed in
on itself, but instead as a for-itself that is precarious, finite, finitized, singular,
singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified and deathly repetitions or of
opening up processually from a praxis that enables it to be made ‘habitable’ by
a human project.
Even though Guattari asks after human projects and their potential relations with
existential Territories, I would argue that one of the most vital projects we can
undertake –a project that Guattari approvingly calls a ‘gentle deterritorialization’
(30) –is an opening up of our relationship with those lives that are, unfortunately
and reductively, called ‘nonhuman’. Too little is said to acknowledge the
possibility that the philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari
encourage a gentle –a kind, considerate or, qua Morton, intimate –approach
to those beings with whom we share our worlds; however, it is precisely that
point I wish to emphasize here. As Guattari (1995: 91–2) puts it, ‘[G]‌eneralised
ecology –or ecosophy –will work as a science of ecosystems, as a bid for political
regeneration, and as an ethical, aesthetic and analytic engagement. It will tend to
create new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a new gentleness between
the sexes, generations, ethnic groups, races’ (emphasis added).
Guattari (1995) is quite specific in his conception of affect; it is not a question
of the discursive circulation of representation and meaning, but of existence.
Even though both philosophers use affect as a noun, we must remember that
affects are not entities, ‘[t]‌hey are limitless interfaces which secrete interiority
and exteriority and constitute themselves’ (92) and, thus, the entities are
produced through affective encounters. Affective encounters are ones in which
we are ‘contaminated’ by the existential modes –the ‘aesthetic machines’ (90),

or ‘assemblages of aesthetic desire’ (92) –that synthesize the content of our
lives and constitute us as subjects. If this ecosophy is to be a positive project
(positive in the broadest sense), we must emphasize the importance of retaining
a certain gentleness in our encounters; I will argue in this chapter that an open
and amiable attentiveness to the subjectivity of the objects of our encounters is
a necessary condition for a generalized ecology that is instructive (instructive,
rather than prescriptive) as well as descriptive.
If we take the ellipsis in the above excerpt from Chaosmosis as an invitation
to broaden the discussion, I would add ‘other species’ to Guattari’s list; that
way we can frame this discussion with an encounter with a nonhuman. I am
interested in asking how I would encounter a being that is more alien to me
than it is familiar. Regarding this issue, I regularly reflect on an encounter I once
had while surveying the footpath at a bus stop when I realized that I was being
seen by a bird whose gaze alternated between me and a piece of discarded bread
halfway between the bird and my seat. At first, watching this bird’s attention flit
back and forth was both charming and fascinating. However, it soon became
unnerving because I realized that I was clearly a significant object in another
being’s world, but my significance was inaccessible to me. Faced with the gaze
of a magpie, I felt acutely aware of the presence of an alien intelligence. Indeed,
it was an intelligence that was simultaneously alien and familiar; it was familiar
insofar as I recognized the presence of intelligence, but it was alien to the extent
that I could not guess at its content. Whenever I reflect on this experience, this
tension seems crucial because, if I emphasize its familiarity I risk seeing it as a
diminishing of myself and so trivialize it as part of a world filled with diversely
diminished versions of myself. If I push too far in the other direction and
emphasize its alienness, I will fail to hear its call.
Whenever I recall this experience, I always imagine that this magpie was
trying to get the measure of me, and evaluate whether I was significant enough
a threat to deter it from trying for the bread; indeed, I have often felt that
interpretation is bolstered by the fact that it eventually snatched the bread and
flew off to enjoy the spoils of its adventurousness. But the simple fact is I did not,
and do not, know what significance I had for this being. As such, it seems that
my capacity to recognize this being as a being depends on the common ground
where I recognize this bird, and yet, the familiarity of this recognition yields a
realization of the inaccessibility of the content of its being. At no point is the
content of this bird’s alien world ever accessible to me. To think of it another
way, this bird has phenomenological content. As Thomas Nagel (2002) famously
put it, there is something that it is like for this particular bird to be the bird
that it is. Now, obviously, the phenomenology of the bird’s experience is beyond
my capacity to grasp (it would always be filtered through the phenomenology
of my experience), but this is quite a separate issue from the realization that
the bird has such an experience that I am, if only temporarily, significant for
its experience, and that this realization affects my experience of my encounter
with this bird (220). Consequently, inaccessible though the bird’s world is, it is
never merely adjacent to my world. The intensive world constituted around the
bird flows into and through my own; in the midst of an affective encounter –an
encounter in which I am affected by the bird and it is affected by me –my body
is redefined, and its boundaries are partially determined by my contact with
this bird. The issue, then, is how to think through and orient myself towards
the relations which constitute my world? How do I make sense of a world –my
world –that is constituted and transformed through relations whose participants
are so alien that they refuse reduction to the sense I make of them?
Individuals as intrinsic modalities of being
That Deleuze’s project is heavily indebted to the work of Benedict de Spinoza is

no doubt clear to any reader with a passing familiarity with both philosophers
(cf., Piercey 1996). Indeed, this debt is also a crucial element of his collaborations
with Guattari, particularly the chapter ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-
Animal, Becoming Imperceptible’ in A Thousand Plateaus, and not merely those
sections dubbed ‘Memories of a Spinozist’. There are two key themes to Deleuze’s
Spinozism that are important here. The first is the process of attribution by which
substance, God or nature is constituted in the same event that individual beings
are produced as modes, or modifications of substance. The second is Deleuze’s
famous and oft-cited insistence on the [Duns] Scotist theme of the univocity of
Being. The heart of the simultaneous constitution of the whole of nature and
the production of modes is differentiation; that is, the differentiation of power,
and the attributes through which this power is predicated of God and beings.
This differentiation, importantly, generates qualitative differences –the magpie
and myself as different species –from quantitative differences –we are both
expressions of transformations intrinsic to a common, univocal, sense of Being.
This is what Deleuze (1994: 38) means in Difference and Repetition when he
says that ‘[u]‌nivocity of being, in so far as it is immediately related to difference,
demands that we show how individuating difference precedes generic, specific
and even individual differences within being’; generic and specific difference –
the diversity among species, genera and so on –is preceded by, is grounded in,
a univocal being –a sense of Being which is common to all beings –whose
existence is constituted by the differentiation of the attributes of its essence.
The shortest route into these themes is a telling tension between immanent
and transitive causation in the first book of Spinoza’s Ethics, ‘Of God’. At
proposition 18, Spinoza (Spinoza 1994: 16) argues that God is an immanent
cause ‘of all things’; indeed, he situates this status as being opposed to transitive
causation: ‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things.’ A mere
seven propositions later at proposition 25, Spinoza appears to contradict himself
when he says that God is the efficient cause (efficient cause being, more or less, a
synonym for a transitive cause), ‘not only of the existence of things, but also of
their essence’ (18). The ostensible conflict between these two propositions is in
fact the simultaneity of constitution and production. In the first instance, God is
a substance, ‘a qualitative multiplicity’ (Deleuze 1988a: 109), which is predicated
univocally of beings, the whole whose modification they express. At proposition
11, Spinoza (1994: 7) modifies and deploys the classic ontological argument
to argue that God is a cause of himself; that is, that God’s existence follows
necessarily from his essence. And because, as Deleuze (1990: 102–103) argues,
the modes which populate the world are produced in an event simultaneous with
God’s self-causation, God is the immanent cause of all things. Key to Deleuze’s
interpretation is the nature of the world’s inherence in God: it ‘does not ground
between God and world an identity of essence, but an equality of being’ (176).
In other words, beings do not inhere in God because they share his essence;
they inhere in God because the constitution of God’s essence, the constitution
explicated by the production of beings, implies a common, univocal sense of
being –a univocity through which all beings are beings in the same sense.
This process of production accounts for the determination of the essences
of the existing modes; it does not, however, account for the fact of their actual
existence. This is why Spinoza has to posit God as an efficient cause. For Spinoza,
the essence of an existing mode is a degree of power, and Deleuze (1994)
interprets this as an argument that a modal essence is in fact a degree of the
constitution of God. While this accounts for the inherence of beings in God –
they are ‘intrinsic modalities of being’ (36) –it falls short insofar as the existence
of a mode does not follow from its essence (Spinoza 1994: 18). Consequently,
the actual existence of a mode must be accounted for. In the second scholium
to proposition 17, Spinoza argues that ‘a man is the cause of the existence of
another man, but not of his essence’. On the one hand is the obvious distinction
between the cause of existence and the determination of essence, and this
distinction follows simply from Deleuze’s interpretation. On the other hand is
a subtler point; if a being is defined by its essence, then it will not be defined as
this or that mode, for the distinction between modes is numerical, and not real.
If it is defined by the substantive content of its essence, then it is, in reality, a
degree of power which expresses the constitution of God. This is the case even
though, in fact, the being in question is an ensemble of material parts which,
taken together, correspond to that degree of power which defines it as a mode.
Of course, the degree of power is caused by God (insofar as it is a degree of the
essence of God, existence belongs to it); however, that the ensemble actually
exists at a given moment is a consequence of the beings with which it relates.
For example, if, instead of claiming a piece of bread, the magpie had
encountered a cat that attacked and disemboweled it, the ensemble of material
parts which constitute its actual existence would be destroyed. In this sense,
a being’s existence follows from the conditions in which it lives and relates to
other beings. But since the essence of this cat would also be a degree of power
which explicates God, then it can be said to be in God in the same sense that
the magpie and I are in God. Thus it is a being who is the cause of the existence
(or, in this case, the end of the existence) of another being. But because it is a
being qua modification of God who acts causally, God can also be said to be an
efficient cause.
God or nature is thus a causal agent in two senses. On the one hand, to say
that God is an immanent cause is to affirm a method of causation that is distinct
from transitive causation. That is, insofar as he is an immanent cause, God is not
a being whose causal influence is carried over from himself into the object of his
influence. Indeed, as an immanent cause, God is not so much a causal agent as a
substance from which follows modal essences qualified as this or that degree of
power. God as an immanent cause is thus the substantive content of the actually
existing modes. On the other hand, to call God an efficient cause is to affirm
that, since all actually existing beings are qualified by their expression of the
constitution of God, they are called modifications of God, or modes. Spinoza
(1994: 18) is careful to observe that the actual existence of a mode does not
follow from God qua immanent cause, insofar as its existence does not follow
from its essence. However, insofar as the modes cause the actual existence of
each other –that is, they cause the existence of the material assemblage that
corresponds to a modal essence –God is still said to be their cause in virtue of
the fact that what causes the actual existence of a mode is itself qualified as a
modification of God.
Crucial to this interpretation of Spinoza is the distinction between causation

and the determination of essence that appears at proposition 17 of ‘Of God’. The
determination of the essence of a being as this or that being follows from the
degree of an attribute’s participation in the constitution and transformation of
God; however, the cause of the existence of the material parts, which under a
determinate relation and, corresponding to the modal essence determined by
that participation, is the actual set of environmental conditions in which that
essence is expressed follows from a set of actual, environmental conditions. In
other words, a being actually exists because of its environment, but it exists as a
being with particular substantive content and significance because it expresses
the constitution and transformation of the environment that produces it.
Affection as the mode of interiority
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) issues the only substantive

criticism he ever makes of Spinoza, although it is less a criticism of Spinoza’s
own philosophy than it is Deleuze’s articulation of a shortcoming in his own
interpretation. Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza brings him right alongside
a relational ontology. Unfortunately, it does so by endangering the radical
immanence of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In short, the relational ontology of
Expressionism is holistic to the extent that all actual beings –with the qualitative
or specific diversity that characterizes them –are expressions of degrees, that
is, intensive quantities, of the constitution and transformation of the whole
of which they are parts, but it is precisely this holism that Deleuze criticizes.
Insofar as the production of the modes follows necessarily from the constitution
of substance, they are, he argues, ‘dependent on substance, but as though on
something other than themselves’ (40). That is, the degree of power which
characterizes a given mode is always a degree of the power of the constitution
of an ontologically independent identity; an identity in which the becoming of
the mode is grounded. Nature would, in this case, be a totality whose identity
precedes and transcends the existence of the parts who express this identity.
Consequently, Deleuze argues that ‘[a]‌ll that Spinozism needed to do for the
univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn
around the modes’ (304).
That these two works, Expressionism, and Difference and Repetition, were
written concurrently is crucial because, taken together, they represent different
moments in response to the same problem. Expressionism is concerned with
the relational logic of modes as intrinsic modalities of univocal being, whereas

Difference and Repetition works through the immanence and reciprocity of
the modes and being. Indeed, Difference and Repetition’s discussions of the
dialectic of problems in Albert Lautman, and the multiplicities of Bernhard
Riemann, are focused in large part towards this problem of making substance
turn around the modes. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze (1986)
suggests a transformative, ecosophically significant conception of this issue
with his conception of an affection-image. The affection-image is the subjective
experience of an environment en route to the determination of the subject’s
response to its environment. In more appropriate terms, it is the way that I am
affected by my environment, such that my environment is entangled in the
determination of my capacity to respond actively to the beings that constitute
and share my environment. In this sense, I am interested to explore the
significance of affect as the mode of the reciprocity between the becoming of
an actually existing individual, and the environment in whose constitution and
transformation it participates.
The deep connection between Deleuze’s early work, and the ontology
developed in Cinema 1 is evident in his description of the affection-image in
terms of the interrelationship between intensive series and individuation. This
interrelationship is first elaborated in Expressionism where Deleuze presents
Spinoza’s individual as the actualization of a degree of power, and it is this view
of individuals that drives his interpretation of the reciprocity of substance and
modes, of the whole and its expression in individuating events, and it returns
in Cinema 1’s description of the affection-image. Still, while there is a striking
similarity between the way attribution works in Expressionism and the way
affection works in Cinema 1, affection does not mediate the latter’s individual/
multiplicity dynamic in the way that attribution mediates the dynamic between
substance and modes. Difference and Repetition’s criticism of Spinoza would
seem to amount to the discovery of a vertical organization of substance and
modes: an organization where modes turn on an already given identity that is
mediated by the doubly expressive operations of attribution. However, while
affection has a similar, doubly expressive operation that relates the virtual whole
to actual entities, it does so by flattening the relationship such that there is a
horizontal reciprocity between a whole and particulars. Deleuze (1986) defends
this reciprocity by arguing that insofar as it is an image with two distinct but
interrelated senses, affection is bipolar. My body, insofar as it is an interval
between perception and action, is ‘filled out and extended’ (124) by an affection-
image that is simultaneously actual –that is, it is the actual state of my body to
the extent that it is entangled in an actual, affective encounter –and it is virtual –

it is the sense of this state of affection, abstracted from the actual encounter
and expressed for itself. Following on from a Humean scepticism about causal
relations, Deleuze does not suggest that the two poles of the affection-image
cause one another; however, this does not entail the claim that these two poles do
not interact. Even though it is virtual, the expression of the affect as such is still
the sense of the encounter and describes the encounter as an actual occurrence,
and thus the virtual pole of the affect is determined by the actual. Similarly,
the actual pole of the affect is determined by the virtual to the extent that the
interval, my body, produces a sensible response to the encounter in which it is
entangled.
This is why Deleuze (1986: 102) describes the two poles of the affection-image
as the two sides of the expression of a power-quality. It is not merely the case that
the interval between perception and action is occupied by an image which is
alternately an immobile receptive plate, and then the expression of a power in its
passage from one quality to another. Both senses exist simultaneously; there is
one pole of the affection-image that is a receptive facet, but its relationship with
the production of an action is a complex, double expression.
In the Cinema books, Deleuze treats cinema’s techniques as ways to consider
and describe the different types of images and their genetic conditions. Part
of the appeal of cinema is its capacity for undertaking such taxonomy from a
point of view that is immanent to the images and their relations. Such points of
view, obviously, would not be bound to human points of view. In this context,
Deleuze (1986) describes close-up shots as constituting the faces which are their
objects. These faces are not human faces; they are images wherein the two poles
of the affection-image are expressed simultaneously. The close-up abstracts its
object, the affect, ‘from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, [and] raises it to the state
of Entity’ (95–6; emphasis in the original) and, by virtue of this abstraction,
the affect is also the generation of an actual state of things. When the affect is
taken as an entity torn from spatiotemporal coordinates, the ‘affection-image
is power or quality considered for themselves, as expresseds’ and, although its
existence is not independent of the state of affairs in which it is actualized, ‘it is
completely distinct from it’ (97). It is in this sense that the second pole of the
affection-image is expressed as ‘ideal singularities and their virtual conjunction’
(102; emphasis in the original). In other words, the virtual side of the affect
circulates within a multiplicity of ideal events that is distinct from the actual
states of affairs that respond to it. The discussion of the other pole, the actual side
of the affection-image, takes us directly to the action-image; the action-image is,
after all, the actualization of a power-quality ‘in an individuated state of things

and in the corresponding real connections (with a particular space-time, hic et
nunc, particular characters, particular roles, particular objects)’ (102). Insofar
as it is the expression of a power-quality for itself, abstracted from an actual,
individual state of things, it is clear how affection is doubly expressive. Expressed
for themselves, affects are ‘ideal singularities’; that is, an affect is the intensity of a
relationship distinct from the actual situation in which this relationship occurs,
and it is the circulation of these ideal singularities that constitutes the whole of
which individual beings are expressive members.
Conclusion: affect and becoming-animal
Armed with a provisional conception of the whole of which we –the bird and
myself –are both parts, I would like to end this chapter with a consideration
of the significance of Deleuze’s holism for Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous
becoming-animal. As Deleuze (1994) puts it in Difference and Repetition, a being
is defined ecologically. That is, a living being is defined in terms of the movements
and forces of its milieux; it is defined in terms of an entire ‘kinetics of population’
(216). In our affective encounter, I experience this being in terms of the history
of its species and its development. This is not to suggest that I experience a type
of organism, of which this particular bird is a mere token. Rather, the actual
magpie and I are inseparable from the various histories that constitute the
conditions of our encounter.
Deleuze’s distributive holism is significant precisely because of its potential
for elucidating this theme; in describing the affection- image in terms of
the interrelationship between intensive series and individuation, he is, in
fact, describing the ontological reciprocity between the determination of an
individual’s action (my observation of the magpie, or its scrutinization of me),
and the transformation of the whole of which the individual is a part. The two
are reciprocal insofar as the whole determines the capacities of the individual in
any given situation (the individual is its power expressed for itself), and, yet, the
whole is constituted as the substantive content of the individual’s action (its sense
and significance), and thus transforms as the individual continues to live. It is
important to note that Deleuze is not saying that the magpie and I are reciprocal
with each other; the reciprocity here concerns the interaction between me and
the whole, between the magpie and its virtual whole, and the way our respective
wholes circulate within a broader whole –a whole that is, as Morton put it, the
nature to which we are interior –that is constituted as the expression of our

actual encounter.
In the terms of Cinema 1, my relationship with the magpie would be described
as the continuity of movement-images, and this continuity always corresponds
to an assemblage, a multiplicity, of our respective wholes. Both the magpie and
I have our own wholes (i.e. life worlds or soap bubbles, to borrow an Uexküllian
image that clearly infuses this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus) that constitute
our respective lives, and yet our lives are lived on a relational field populated
by countless other lives which, to varying degrees, are continuous with ours
and the encounter we have with each other. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image,
Deleuze (1989), using Bergson’s vocabulary, describes the whole of durée as ‘the
interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change’ (82). While there
is a career’s worth of complex, ontological argumentation in the background, we
can still gesture towards an ecosophical theme; every actual being corresponds
to a virtual world that expresses the sense and significance of its encounters,
but expresses it as a degree of power. Each being carries with it its own world,
a world that subsists in its encounters. But its every encounter implies another
world. In my encounter with a magpie, our virtual worlds form a multiplicity in
which our encounter becomes possible. It is not a world which exists before us –
One which would subsume us both –but a world immanent to our encounter,
a world which never closes, is never finalized and which transforms as other
beings come in and out of our lives.
Deleuze begins developing the logic of this conception of the whole in
Expressionism where the expression of a degree of power is an attribute’s
expression of a degree of God’s power; that is, it is the expression of a degree of the
constitution of the essence of God. This, however, is exactly why Difference and
Repetition criticizes Expressionism. Insofar as this degree of power constitutes
the essence of an individual being, this Spinozist theme means the being will
always express a degree of power that belongs to something other than itself;
where Difference and Repetition invokes mathematics (particularly differential
calculus) to resolve the logic of this problem, the two Cinema books concretize
this issue through a focus on affect. Even though it follows from a criticism
of Spinoza, Cinema’s conception of affect is profoundly Spinozist; that is, the
bipolar conception of affect owes tremendously to the Spinozist distinction
between affectio and affectus. On the one hand, the affect is what actually
happens in an affective encounter. It is the state of my body such that it involves
another body. On the other hand, an affect is also a virtual expression of that
encounter, for itself (i.e. without reference to the participants themselves), such
that it constitutes a world of sense and significance and transforms the power of
my body. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 240) mean when they say that
‘the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation
of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel’. The
pack in this case is not simply a collective noun –a group of animals; it is an
individual conceived according to its power. A pack is an ‘entire assemblage in
its individuated aggregate’; it is individuality as heterogeneity (262).
This conception of affect, and the distributive holism that informs it, shapes
how Deleuze and Guattari (1987) exhort their reader to reconsider what it
means to sympathize with an animal. They insist that we ‘not imitate a dog,
but make [our] organism[s]‌enter into composition with something else in
such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will
be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular
proximity, into which they enter’ (274; emphasis in the original). An organism
is not merely an animal or human, in a physiological sense; in Difference and
Repetition, the organism is the affect as the sense and significance of the animal’s
or human’s perceptions and actions. The organism is an idea which characterizes
the contingent assemblage of material parts that physiology calls a body (184).
In this case, it is not my body which enters into a reciprocal becoming with the
magpie at the bus stop, but my world, my power, that enters into this relation.
It is difficult to think of this discussion in A Thousand Plateaus without also
thinking of the criticism Donna Haraway (2008) makes of it in When Species
Meet. Haraway takes Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments to be characteristic of
an anthropocentrism that follows from their focus on the sublime. Because
of this focus and its ostensible abstraction, Haraway argues that Deleuze and
Guattari fail to elicit any curiosity about, or respect for, actual animals and
the encounters that people have with them. Consequently, Haraway believes
that ‘[n]‌o earthly animal would look twice at these authors’ and that their
philosophy is ‘a symptomatic morass for how not to take earthly animals –
wild or domestic –seriously’ (28–9). The crux of Haraway’s criticism appears
to be a simplistic interpretation of the distinction Deleuze and Guattari set
up between familial and pack animals. As Haraway sees it, the distinction is
between ‘competent and skilful animal[s] webbed in the open with others [and
animals] without characteristics and without tenderness’ (29). But an alien,
‘exceptional’, pack animal ‘is not merely an exceptional individual’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 243–4); that is, a pack animal is not a type of animal that is simply
opposed to familial, Oedipal animals. A pack animal is, as we have just seen, a
mode of animality, it is the individuality of the animal such that it takes account
of its heterogeneous constitution. Against Haraway’s suggestion that Deleuze

and Guattari privilege types of animal for our becomings, their insistence on
packs, exceptional and anomalous animals, is, in fact, an insistence on modes
of being that open up our own individuality to the conditions of more powerful
transformations in our relationships with our environments.
Still, I suspect we might have to concede a point to Haraway’s criticism of
Deleuze and Guattari; if the implication of species chauvinism, means that
Deleuze and Guattari privilege human concerns, or that they suggest that our
becomings-animal can never reach far enough to capture the animals who
infiltrate our becomings (little Hans’s becoming-horse will always demur when
it comes to the possibility of a becoming-Hans of the horse he fears), then,
perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is anthropocentric. But I wonder if
there is a question that we might ask in response: when considering the animals
that press upon our becomings (Haraway’s dog, my magpie), surely there must
be a point at which philosophy must fall silent, unable to speak of anything
except the need for experiential, affective, attention towards the profound
resonance of these familiar aliens upon the constitution and transformation of
our worlds.
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3
Care of the Wild: A Primer

Aranye Fradenburg Joy
Five Principles
I. Thriving and surviving are interdependent aspects of living process

(Fradenburg et al. 2013: 92–3). Though downplayed by Neo-Darwinists,
this point has been made many times in the literatures of the life sciences.
A. R. Wallace wrote in 1891 that ‘the popular idea of the struggle for
existence as entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very
reverse of the truth. What it really brings about, is the maximum of
life and the enjoyment of life’ (Dugatkin 1997: 7, citing Wallace 1889/
2007: 40). The evolutionary theorist J. Z. Young (1971: 360) points out
that art is biologically significant ‘because it insists that life be worthwhile,
which, after all, is the final guarantee of its continuance’. Not just
laboratory or zoo animals require ‘enriched’ environments in order to
thrive, prosper and work joyfully; so does homo sapiens. In promoting
‘existential values and the values of desire’, Félix Guattari (2000/2010: 43,
26) implies much the same thing –‘rhythms and refrains’, for example,
are ‘the very supports of existence’. On the level of the organism as well as
assemblage, group, milieu –and note that the evolutionary importance
of phenotypal experience is on the rise these days, versus the ‘selfish
gene’ –survival cannot be assumed to be the highest good; history is
rife with examples of those who choose passion, ideals, death, a certain
mood, over life. Recall that monkeys deprived of mothering prefer fuzzy
blankets to food dispensers even when they are starving. Experiences of
meaningfulness, of ‘freedom of expression and innovation’, of ‘creationist
subjectivity’, must be the goal of ethical action (33, 41).
II. ‘Nothing permits us to say what is needful to man’, as Marx and Bataille
have argued; nor can we say what is needful to life in general (for
discussion, see Fradenburg (1999)). Our needs are always context-
dependent; I may hunger, but what for, where from? And if –as a child,
say –I cannot fend for myself, who will feed me, and why? It is no easier to
say what is ‘useful’ to man; if ‘utility’ is ‘fitness for some desirable purpose
or valuable end’ (OED), what is the desire in question? Valuable for what,
to whom? Our thinking about care must loosen the topic’s association
with ‘needful things’ partly because we cannot divorce the satisfaction of a
need from the enjoyment attendant on that satisfaction. It is always some
kind of joy to satisfy needs, even if the process of satisfying them is never-
ending. It can even be a joy to feel need; failure to thrive in infants can
be caused by hyper-attention to their needs, not just by neglect thereof.
A lot of social and economic policy depends on the belief that we can
and should distinguish states of need from other states like withdrawal,
obsession, compulsiveness and urgency, but on what grounds are we to
justify such distinctions? We cannot easily differentiate caring for basic
needs (which we will perhaps agree to pay for) from caring for states of
mind (which we really don’t like to pay for, but which are just as vital to
our social ecologies).
III. We must reclaim the discourses of craft, skill and even utility from
their contemporary capture by capital and management, as concepts
that honour the artfulness and busy-ness of living process, and the
enjoyment(s) entailed in its ‘praxic opening-out’ (Guattari 2000/2010: 35).
Caregiving is an art and the arts are inherently careful. Now, ‘[i]‌t is not
only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and
gestures of human solidarity’; but care practices can ‘target the modes of
production of subjectivity, that is, of knowledge, culture, sensibility and
sociability’ in resisting the capitalist demand that ‘all singularity must be
either evaded or crushed’ (33, 29). Reading or writing a poem might do as
much to release us from the kinds of stress cultivated by mass media as the
work of any care organization, especially if that care organization fails to
recognize that its raison d’ être is its participation in and enhancement of
the autopoietic activities of vulnerable creatures in a vulnerable world.
IV. The notion of the ‘individual subject’ is no longer relevant. Instead, we
speak of processes and intersections of subjectivation, of ‘intersubjectivity’,
of subjectivating ‘partial objects’ and events, including and especially
expressive events. The consequences for our understanding of care
Care of the Wild 67
practices, affects and organizations are considerable, embedded as

they are in debates over competition and cooperation, altruism and
selfishness. Darwin, who extended selection to the family and the tribe,
was very aware of the importance of cooperation, but with the exception
of Kropotkin’s 1908 book Mutual Aid –A Factor in Evolution, neo-
Darwinian idolization of competition and ‘survival of the fittest’ continued
largely unabated until the 1950s, when critiques thereof appeared more
frequently, and the 1960s, when research on group selection was able
to give cooperation substantial empirical and statistical legitimacy
(Dugatkin 1997: 7). Since then, research on the topic of cooperation has
gathered considerable speed (particularly as a consequence of studies of
‘cooperative breeding’, i.e., the sharing of childcare responsibilities among
kin). But even further, if intersubjective ‘becoming’ means that the self
on whose behalf we might be selfish is always-already full of other beings
and ways of being, the distinction between altruism and selfishness on
which so much evolutionary theory depends is far from secure. A man’s
apparent selfishness might be a way of protecting his unconscious
psychical encryptment of the mother he lost at the age of 4. It does not
follow, however, that material distinctions between organisms are ethically
meaningless; rather, the porosity of the organism clarifies the importance
of the membranes, material and otherwise, that metabolize what is in us
into what is outside us, and vice versa.
V. Life begins with a sac that differentiates –creates differences between,
but never severs –an inside from an outside. Jesper Hoffmeyer (2009: 26)
writes that
skin has both an inner side and an outer side and an asymmetry is
therefore established between that which is inside and that which is
outside. The self only exists [insofar] as that which is inside contains a . . .
reference to that which is outside –an aboutness, as it is often called. But
this outward reference rests upon a corresponding inward reference.
We must understand the relations between Innenwelt and Umwelt generally

as immersed in the workings of complex, open, networked systems. From
this point of view, the importance of fragilization and integration in living
process is enhanced, not mitigated. Fragilization and integration are not
opposities (the radical binarization of inside and outside is not a biological
phenomenon) but rather intimates. Ethical thought cannot hope to secure
the one without the other.
Why care?
Care is a life-and-death matter. As a topic of inquiry, however, it has not been very
close to the forefront of recent theoretical inquiry in the humanities. Many people
who work on biopower, or globalization, or new media, for example, do not feel
that the topic of care –the abject dogsbody, it sometimes seems, of ‘precarity’ –
has anything to offer them. We associate care (and its semantic neighbours
‘concern’ and ‘solicitude’) with discourses of pastoralism, philanthropy, hospital
design, welfare, maternity and so on; more often than not, its affective burden
feels, precisely, burdensome –tiresome, counter-passional, worthy. Care is good
works, sacrifice or not care at all. Psychoanalysis has worked tirelessly to de-
idealize care, beginning with Freud’s derivation of the superego from the id, and
his critiques of Christianity (Civilization and Its Discontents (1961)) and the
legitimization of statist violence as non-partisan (‘Thoughts for the Times on
War and Death’). I hold with Freud on these points, as with Lacan’s arguments
about the aggressivity of charity in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992). As I have
argued elsewhere, sacrifice is always already a mode of enjoyment (whatever
else it may be; Fradenburg 2002: 2). But the exposure of hypocrisy is also a guilty
pleasure, and equally caught up in the logic of the superego (Freud 1961: 62–6;
Lacan 1992: 186–7). We have not understood the passional aspects of ethics if
we simply insist that ethics be scrupulously passion-free. Ethics are affect-laden,
for good and for ill. The problem with altruism is not that it isn’t pure enough;
the problem is that, despite the best efforts of psychoanalysis, the mixed nature
of altruism (like the mixed, inside-out topology of the self on which it acts) is so
often hidden, and therefore has not often enough been recognized as a principle
crucial to its theorization.
Care, like concern and altruism, emerges from complexes of sensations,
affects, desires and ideas; it is a work of intersubjectivity and the larger ecologies
in which intersubjectivity participates. The ‘self ’ that gives and the ‘other’
who receives are dynamic, co-constructing processions of states of mind with
histories and geographies that go far beyond the ‘individual’. The I that gives
is an ever-changing network of things that have (also) happened to ‘other’ life
forms (and beyond), not a simple, autonomous, unitary self that could readily
be imagined to be self-ish. In fact the notion that if ‘one’ gets pleasure from
helping ‘others’, one is selfish is intolerably naïve. Caring for can be enjoyable,
passionately so, and this potential is, so to speak, part of life –witness the
biochemistry responsible for ‘primary parental preoccupation’, paternal as well
as maternal, and the plasticizing effects of oxytocin on the brain (oxytocin,
Care of the Wild 69
released plentifully by, e.g., orgasm, enables the formation of new attachment
bonds) (Doidge 2007: 120). Care experience has profound effects on the mind,
in the forms of excitement, absorption, reverie, dream. This is because care
experience is the matrix in which embodied minds are shaped.
Biophobic responses both to the topic of care and to care practices derive
from fear of our own creatureliness –natality, mortality, vulnerability, (inter)
dependency, nonconscious mentation, abjection, helplessness, the fragilizing
power of jouissance. Our always-already post-traumatic resistance to creaturely
precariousness is currently symptomatized by the (paradoxically) ongoing
millennial fall in the value of life and living things; by the stylized carelessness
(e.g. cool indifference) of so many Westerners; by the special reluctance of the
mighty, in any field of endeavour, to care about care, especially to show that
they need it (cf. Roberto Esposito’s (2011) work on ‘immunitas’); and the
increasing relegation of care work to disenfranchised and poorly compensated
populations, like women, immigrants from poor countries, untouchables,
animals and artificial intelligences; and by the parallel sequestration of the
topic of care within the discursive fields of the academy. Feminist thinkers
have long called attention to the depreciating effects of care’s associations with
women, children, the aged, in short, the ‘weaker’ members of society; with the
prison-house of domesticity; with ‘mere’ maintenance, as though the dawn of
another day were something to sneeze at; hence with repetition and boredom;
with disturbingly mellow herbalists, culture mothers, retro-technologies and
bodily fluids. ‘Disgust’ is a powerful affect to contend with in the revaluation of
care; in the United States, those who need care are abject, and those who care
for them are also abject, ‘polluted’ by contagion (on abjection in nursing, see
Evans 2010 and McCabe 2010). The obverse of this depreciation of care is its
sentimentalization in US discourses on the family, its values, its endangerment
and so on, a sentimentalization which protects our minds from the implications
of the hostile and exploitive ways we routinely treat our caregivers, and hence
from the realization that we have much more to fear from ourselves and our
close kin than we do from terrorists. Care will not advance much as a topic for
serious consideration by the many rather than the few until we acknowledge that
‘marked’ examples thereof –infant care, elder care, nursing care, counselling,
teaching –can so readily screen our constitutive, everyday, inescapable, lifelong
dependency on others and on our environments.
Epidemiological studies show that poor health in the poorer ranks of a
population predicts poorer health in its richer ranks as well, irrespective of
how much money the affluent are able to spend on sophisticated health care
(Wheeler 2006: 108). No one prospers alone; even the most solitary habits,
efforts, individuals and species are part of larger, co-evolving environments.
Both surviving and thriving are inescapably communal activities. The funereal
bell that tolls for thee and me marks the dimension of discourse in practices of
care, for us as well as for other animals: the outcry that warns of the approach
of predators is one of the most common ‘signs’ of cooperation in the animal
kingdom. This chapter functions in part as just such an outcry. If there is
resistance to knowing care –to knowing that it is going on, that it is needed,
that it is an intelligent practice –how can we undo that resistance, and make
our wished-for interventions more clinically and politically forceful? First, by
recognizing that care is neither a safe topic nor a safe practice. Care is difficult,
both to accept and to give, not just because of its capacity to exhaust our reserves
of narcissism, but because it is one of the primary modes by which the bodies
and minds of creatures shape and re-shape one another. Care is always, in some
sense, care of the wild.
Evolution of care
The topic of care stands to benefit enormously from the increasing primacy of
holistic and ecological perspectives in the life and psychological sciences. Top-
down or prime-mover models of change have largely given way to the influence
of complexity theory. Many kinds of conjunctions and symbioses now appear
to play significant roles in bio-history. The findings of the genome project, for
example, have put genetic determinism all in doubt. Not just genetic ‘expression’
but also the biochemical processes involved in the actual creation of genes are
highly responsive to environmental conditions. The study of multicellularity
indicates that both individuation and aggregation are fundamental to living
process and interdependent rather than mutually exclusive processes. How and
why does it come about that cells, ‘separated’ from one another by membranes,
nonetheless are attracted to each other? Why do they gather together to form larger
organisms? (Is it possible that membranes complexify and intensify influence,
rather than simply limiting it?) Bio-history and its territorial expressions are
now seen to be created by mutually constitutive interactions between genotypes,
phenotypes and environmental, including social, ‘affordances’. The causality
involved is that of complexity; the ‘being’, and non-being, of ontology turns into
‘becoming’. The organism is, as Hoffmeyer (2009: 72) puts it, no longer a ‘dead
end’; its sensations and perceptions are directly creative. Evolution turns out to
Care of the Wild 71
be a history of organisms+ecologies –Bateson’s ‘organism+’ –rather than of

genes bent on self-replication.
The notions of embodied, extended and distributed cognition that have
emerged in the course of these developments have particularly important
implications for our understanding of care, owing to their reduction of now-
antiquated antinomies between mind and body, organism and environment,
and matter and thought. Mind is now understood to be ‘distributed’ well
past the brain, the nervous system and even the body, through, for example,
‘gut’ neurons, psycho-endocrinological transmissions, paralanguage and the
signifying extensions of mind celebrated long ago by John Milton and more
recently by Gregory Bateson (1972/2000: xi).1 Perhaps most importantly for
the purposes of this chapter, Giovanna Colombetti’s The Feeling Body (2014)
argues that a sine qua non of life is ‘primordial affectivity’. For Colombetti, care
is linked to meaningfulness, insofar as all organisms ‘sense’ their environments
(by whatever means) for signs of danger and plenty, familiarity and mystery,
and co-construct (with) those environments accordingly. Plant intelligence, for
example, is not a New Age fantasy, but a complex distributed and networked
phenomenon involving a wide variety of organisms and based on a wide
variety of sensory capabilities (Mancuso and Viola 2015: ch. 3). Though a
more limited formulation, Gibson’s concept of ‘affordance’ makes a similar
point about perception: perception is always-already a function of organismic
concern for (itself in) its environment, a fact which raises ethical problems
about our treatment of objects because organismic concern is also the sine qua
non of ethical awareness. Without concern, salience, value, significance, there
is neither care nor carelessness. The idea of primordial affectivity also helps
to broaden the reach of Jaak Panksepp’s (1998: 249) identification of CARE as
one of the instinctual complexes shared by all mammals, and Wendy Hollway’s
(2007) argument that the ‘capacity to care’ is our most significant developmental
achievements, neither belated nor superficial but foundational with respect
to all cognitive and affective activity. Care can no longer be thought as one of
civilization’s thin veneers over ‘nature red in tooth and claw’; it goes hand-in-
hand with sentience.
Likewise the experience of significance, of its creation as well as its reception,
is not a belated evolutionary achievement but rather is inherent in (if not
necessarily confined to) organic matter. The worlds ‘around’ as well as ‘within’
us are built by and on concern, and concern (part of the affective dimension
of care) is what generates salience and significance. Art is already ‘in’ ‘Nature’,
as Deleuze and Guattari noted long ago; ‘expression’ is a sine qua non of living
process (Nabais n.p.). Artfulness, enrichment and play are functions and forms
of metabolism; all are processes that ‘express’ the constitutive inside-outness of
the organism’s dependence for its existence on what it ‘is/not’. Improvisation,
creativity, experimentation are inherent in organismic life. As noted previously,
toys, ‘hobbies’, absorbing work are not supplemental to survival; they are
necessary to it (Jacobs 1984: 221). The lives of all organisms are experiments. The
preciousness to organic matter of transmission at all levels helps to explain why
so much of our work in and on care focuses on the ability of various rhetorics
(chemical, electrical, gestural, alphabetic) to cross boundaries and foster
relationality. ‘Beautiful words are already remedies’, writes Bachelard (1971: 31).
All artfulness requires, and aims to design and sustain, attention. It therefore
has the potential to modify sensation and the functional architecture of the brain.
The arts’ striking and broad-ranging use of sense perception (cf. synaesthesia,
ekphrasis, enargeia) suggests that the arts heal because they transmit and amplify
sentient experience, within and without the organism. Bateson (1972/2000: xi)
proposes that the arts shape and are shaped by connections between different
aspects and functions of mind, most notably consciousness and subjectivity on
the one hand, and the non-conscious open systematicity of extended mind on the
other. In his view, the arts practice ecological thought, because they invite, focus
on and potentially sustain shifts in awareness and perspective and new (material)
connectivity. The arts ‘care’ in part by changing (embodied) minds. Hence
Alfred Tomatis (2004: 26) celebrates the connective effects of singing: ‘[o]‌ne
can never sing too much. It is one of the most complete modes of expression,
involving mind, body, and emotions . . . One passes through different states
of consciousness to reach a higher level of mind-body integration’, including
integration with the (sonic) environment and the listening ear/body. Lucy Biven
and Jaak Panksepp (2012: 307) tell the story of an encounter with a camel who
had rejected her calf, but was persuaded to take her back after participating in a
ritual conducted by one of the most famous (human) singers in her region.
The ‘neoteny’ of our own species –our very long period of infantile
dependency –would be impossible without care; neoteny and care practices
necessarily co- evolve. In turn, the length of this period of dependency
mandates the acquisition of relational and semiotic skills and knowledge: the
understanding of paralanguage, metaphor and analogy; the social and affective
meanings of communication; the wider discursive contexts of particular
utterances and gestures; joint attention; theory of mind and minds. As Lacan
insisted, there is no ‘survival’ for the human infant that is not always-already
mediated by relationality, and hence by communication; we know nothing of
Care of the Wild 73
food, clothing and shelter except insofar as they are first ‘given’ to us in the
context of attachment. Lacan’s argument for the uniqueness of the human on the
score of an extended neoteny notwithstanding, I believe it is right to say that the
phenomena of attending and being attended to trump everything else in the
dimension of organic life. Care is one of the means by which nature crosses its
own boundaries, generates bounty alongside functionality, expressivity beyond
information. ‘Even’ among chimpanzees, prosocial activity is ‘mediated by
affiliative emotions rather than exchanged contingently on a tit-for-tat basis’
(Jaeggi et al. 2010: n.p.). Care takes place during the extended time of the gift,
which differs from contingent exchange chiefly because the gift favours, for
good or for ill, the formation of lasting affective bonds, and is itself a symbol of
affiliation.
Robin Dunbar claims that ‘social pressure, in the form of group size, drives
brain size evolution’; advancements in the capacity for theory of mind appear to
be more tightly correlated with enlargements of frontal lobe volume than tool
development or ecological pressures (Dunbar et al. 2010: 169–71). Theory of
mind, in turn, is necessary for ‘emulation learning’. In emulation learning, we
interpret the intentions of others (that clever animal is digging a stick into the
ground because she wants to find yummy things to eat), and we also learn how
to do things from observing the actions of others (if I dig a stick in the ground,
I may also find something yummy to eat), but even further, we must learn to put
these kinds of learning together, to find out how others further their intentions by
mentally strategizing about how best to achieve them. Tomasello (2000: 38) calls
this ‘truly cultural learning, as opposed to merely social learning’ –the sign of an
emergent ‘form of cultural evolution’. ‘The most important artifact’ produced by
this form of evolution, Tomasello claims, is language, and the ‘new forms of . . .
symbolic cognitive representation’ enabled thereby (40). (The primacy of action
in this scenario opens it to enactivist interpretation; see below.)
Among the great apes, human beings are particularly good at ‘prosocial
acts’ like food-sharing, child care, care for the sick, injured and elderly, and
teaching (Jaeggi et al. 2010: 2724). We are ‘cooperative breeders’, meaning that
the responsibility for child care does not usually fall exclusively on the mother
but is spread out to husbands, siblings, grandparents, friends and so on, with,
of course, significant variations in the ways responsibility is shared. We also
forage and hunt with a high degree of interdependence, which gives us further
reason –or vice versa –to establish and maintain cooperative reputations. The
corollary in our cognitive evolution is ‘an increased sensitivity to being watched
by others’ –a ‘concern for reputation’ and thus for audience (2725). This concern
for reputation (which depends on theory of mind) is in turn associated with

the high incidence of proactive prosocial behaviour among humans, meaning
that we respond not just to deliberate signals of need, like begging, but also to
signs of need not apparently directed at us –like difficulty completing a task,
or reaching for something hard to get, or faintness, or pallor. Once again we
see how expressivity and interpretation function as means by which ‘bare life’
generates its own bounty, in the form of relationally motivated care. Grooming,
one of organic life’s most important care activities, is generally peaceable and
sociable. Since Dunbar’s 1993 report, there has been extensive research on
grooming and its ubiquity among animal species. There are tropical undersea
spas territorialized by small fish called cleaner wrasses, who eat parasites
and scar tissue off other fish, including large predators who under different
circumstances would be eating the wrasses. ‘[I]‌n the calming atmosphere of
the cleaning station, the wrasses approach the bigger fish without fear, darting
around their teeth and even into their gills’ (Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers
2012: 165). This could be the salon in Bikini Bottom: fish settle down as soon as
they start waiting their turn to be groomed. Grooming is also one of the most
important means by which great apes, including ourselves, bind social anxiety
and otherwise manage affect. I also start settling down when I walk into my hair
salon –a well-known site of gossip, idle talk and grooming that extends from
swaddling to eavesdropping to scalp massage. Grooming is a powerful antidote
to the three most common factors contributing to self-injury, namely, stress,
isolation and boredom; it ‘alters the neurochemistry of our brains. It releases
opiates into our bloodstreams. It decreases our blood pressure. It slows our
breathing’, ‘regardless of whether we are grooming or being groomed’ (166, 174).
I am particularly interesting in thinking about grooming in relation to care
for two reasons: because of caregivers’ perennial address to the membrane of
the skin, the ‘semiotic bridge’ that co-constructs the inside and the outside;
and because popular utilitarianism construes grooming, like the arts, as
‘luxury’, failing thereby to take the full measure of its complex bio-psycho-
social significance. According to Dunbar, language evolved in order to manage
the extra grooming responsibilities brought on by the enlargement of social
groups; our species acquired a vocal tract capable of producing speech at the
same time we acquired the neo-cortical capacity for theory of mind. Though
many of his peers have raised doubts about what causes what in this complex of
relationships, the explanatory value of lineal causality has diminished somewhat
post-systems theory; and in any case few of Dunbar’s critics deny correlations
among sociability, language and grooming. So far Dunbar’s (2010) argument still
Care of the Wild 75
commands respect. Language, he proposes, is an extension of (not a replacement

for) grooming, possibly evolving out of ‘increasingly extended vocal exchanges’
and ‘chorusing’, as well as wordless humming, singing or music (176). It allows
us to offer soothing intimacies to more than one individual at a time, or while
we are doing other things, like walking or foraging; and it informs us of things
happening in our absence, which means that we can ‘track’ our lineages, and
acquire ‘a better knowledge database on a larger social network than any
nonhuman primate’ –that is to say, larger mental maps of possible alliances
and troublespots (174; cf. Slingerland 2009). Clearly grooming and gossiping
are both effective, and complementary, means of fostering relationality –which
should caution us (should we still need reminders) against overemphasizing the
differences between language and other forms of embodied communication.
Infant research on cross-or multimodal expressivity should also discourage
us from driving wedges between touch and sound, gesture and symbol: the
human infant comes into the world ready to correlate sounds, images and
textures. Human fetuses begin to hear at five months –in the United States,
apparently, they favour Mozart –and already know their families’ voices when
they are born, including the dog’s bark. The important role of the caregiving
voice in infant and child development seems now to be axiomatic; its metabolic
power derives from its capacity to be here and there, inside and outside, at
the same time. Sound waves cause vibrations that register on and in the body;
hearing is our first ‘distance’ sense, but also an intimate, ‘haptic’ experience. The
use of sound to evaluate proximity and distance is widespread in animal life;
some of our most ancient wiring is designed to help us survive the vicissitudes
of approach and avoidance.
Further, as Slocombe et al. (2001) point out, the many arguments about
whether language has its origins in gesture, or facial expression, or vocal cries,
all seem too atomistic. Not only is the language of homo sapiens ‘not modality
specific’, but ‘primate communication [in general] is inherently multimodal,
at both a behavioral and neuronal level’ (919, 923). Various brain regions,
including the auditory cortex and the superior temporal sulcus, integrate visual
and auditory signals. The brain also integrates right-and left- hemisphere
language functions –respectively, interpretation of the social and emotional
contexts of utterance, and ‘plain sense’, grammar and logic. ‘Paralanguage’ –
meaningful shifts in intonation, rhythm, facial expressivity and the like –is part
of primate multimodality; ‘[r]‌ather than representing emotional vestiges that
need to be stripped from language in order to expose the fundamental cognitive
components, these nonverbal signals are part of an important composite
message’ (923). When we add to this already rich picture the ongoing olfactory,
chemical and tactile transmissions of affect and meaning that accompany
so much primate exchange, the power of grooming and gossip activities
to integrate neuronal functions appears all the more impressive. Slocombe
concludes ‘that communicating simultaneously through a range of modalities
is the skill that truly occupies the functional niche of primate grooming, and
not the cognitive aspect alone’ (923). Language is coeval with the robustness
of human intersubjectivity, and can thus be understood as an emergence from
care practices in more ways than one. Nature’s expressivity always exceeds our
fantasies of ‘parsimony’ –and thus is dispelled our fantasy of being able to strip
care down to the level of bare life.
Dunbar’s theory about grooming, gossip and the origins of language is
consistent with modes of language acquisition in the human infant. Both
grooming and idle talk, phatic communion (communication for the sake of
bonding), chit- chat, are simultaneously pursued by infants and caregivers
during the course of language acquisition and the signification (and hence
passion) of the body. One of Dunbar’s early critics (Corballis) complains that
‘one is hard pressed to find any structural principles common to grooming and
human language’ (Corballis 1993: 697). But in infancy, vocal sounds, facial
expressions and touch are all integrated, particularly in those moments known
to developmentalists as ‘active quiet’ or ‘proto-conversation’, when infant and
caregiver exchange gazes, stick their tongues out at each other, make faces at
each other, make little noises, talk (on the caregiver’s side), babble syllabically
(on the baby’s side), play peek-a-boo games and so on. Language acquisition
is inherently intersubjective, a fact noted decades ago by Werner and Kaplan
(1963), who proposed that infants were motivated to learn language and
representation for social reasons; cognitive capacity develops within the
context of social bonds. Call sounds or ‘grunts’ more recently have been seen
as ‘a primary prelinguistic vehicle promoting the onset of language’ (McCune
1993: 716). There is significant evidence of grunt intelligibility among primates,
for example, vervet monkeys, and of the ‘coordination of grunting with tongue
and lip movements of grooming’ and McCune notes that ‘[i]‌n adult human
conversation gruntlike vocalizations persist and are among the forms that
indicate continued attention to the speaker on the part of the listener’, thus serving ‘a
“cohesive” function’ (716–17; emphasis added). Dean (1993: 699–700) questions
whether gossip could possibly be the ‘adaptation on which society rests’, since
‘much of the time [social information] “is wrong, sometimes intentionally,
possibly leading to violent misunderstanding”. Dugatkin and Wilson similarly
Care of the Wild 77
associate gossip with the “confusion” and “anarchy caused by cheaters” use of
language’ (701). But the primary function of gossip is affective circulation, not
the communication of accurate information. Proverbs like ‘where there’s smoke,
there’s bound to be fire’ would seem to promote the suspicion Dean fears:
‘[a]s has been illustrated in every manifestation of the police state’, he continues,
‘vocal contact can devolve to pure suspicion. Foucault’s discussion . . . [of the]
Panopticon . . . is relevant here’; ‘[i]n situations of decreasing job security we
have reason to be suspicious of the large numbers of people with whom we
interact daily . . . In situations where we need to talk yet say nothing, perhaps
most of what Dunbar would classify as stress-releasing endearment is simply
white noise’ (700). White noise does, however, relieve stress for many people,
and talking is significant expression irrespective of content. ‘Where there’s
smoke there’s fire’ intimates that there is always already also a question about
the validity of gossip. We have infinite cautionary tales about the bad things that
happen to us when we take it too seriously, or overindulge in its guilty pleasures.
Contemporary surveillance techniques may now occupy the functional niche
of primate grooming and gossip, but so do many other activities of bio-psycho-
social significance, including caregiving and receiving.
I believe that, in hospital, generous amounts of time should be devoted
(depending on the condition and desires of individual patients) on social
enrichment in general and grooming in particular. Nurses and technicians are
trained to minister to the hygiene and comfort of the body, to wash hair, speak
encouragingly, and massage inactive muscles, but they, like doctors, are not
trained to recognize grooming as a discourse, to recognize its intersubjective
import, so as to mitigate as much as possible the feelings associated with social
death that many critical care patients experience. Tact is of the essence here;
the patient’s readiness to let go of life must be treated with respect. But at
least when it is possible to come back to life, the social dimension of the body
must be reawakened too. In veterinary medicine, Natterson-Horowitz and
Bowers (2012: 171ff) cite the example of a gorilla who underwent a pacemaker
operation. (I am aware of the ethical difficulties attendant on the medicalization
of creatures who cannot consent to such invasive procedures). While the gorilla
was under anaesthesia, his fingernails were painted a deep shade of red, and
various trinkets and treats were embedded in his fur, so that when he woke up,
he would be so fascinated by his new ornamentation as to be distracted from
pulling out his stitches and possibly the pacemaker as well. Indeed he gazed at
his fingernails and bijoux for hours, and groomed himself until he was feeling
quite “himself ” again.
Interlude
The ‘Matter of Troy’ (the medieval literary traditions that translated, literally
and territorially, the epics of Homer and Virgil) gave the European nations
genealogies paralleling Aeneas’s founding of Rome. Brutus became the
eponymous founder of Britain. In The History of the Kings of Britain (twelfth
century), Geoffrey of Monmouth’s divine honeybee scout, the goddess Diana,
tells Brutus that ‘beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there
lies an island in the sea . . . and for your descendants it will be a second Troy’
(Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966: 65). Announcement is, of course, one of the
central functions of territorial refrain. According to the behavioural ethologist
W. J. Smith (1977: 53), ‘singing’ –meaning the full, complex song, not simpler
‘calls’ –occurs when a bird is at ‘important sites in a territory’, either the margins
or the nest site; in fact Smith refers to this as ‘advertising behavior’, especially
evident when the bird seeks a ‘high perch’ and makes himself visually as well
as sonorously conspicuous, a ‘risk’ he will take in order to be found.2 Song is a
means of ‘seeking opportunities for interaction’ (66–7). Vocal display is part of
territorial behaviour for many species, birds and people in particular; it tells you
when and whether another creature wants to ‘go out’ with you, to play, to see and
be seen, or to see where the sun sets, or whether said creature would prefer to be
left alone, with or without you. Most calls and gestures signal uncertainty, when
Care of the Wild 79
things are ‘up in the air’, ‘in process’; they are questions, requests, demands,
descriptions and solicitations of affect, not (simply) means of conveying useful
information about changes in temperature and the like.
We mark becomings. ‘I love you and want to be near you, but I don’t know
how you feel about me, so I’m approaching you, but sideways, with my neck bent
in a certain way, my gaze oblique, to give you time to signal me back, since I’d
rather we didn’t fight.’ This is a rough paraphrase of penguin courting behaviour.
‘Indecisive and vacillating behavior’ and the signalling thereof in fact make up
most displays (Smith 1977: 71). Expressivity, as we know also from human infant
observation, is as much for the purpose of being left alone as it is for the purpose
of approach. Our most ambitious narratives about the thrivings and survivings
of peoples foreground these uncertainties. In the Aeneid, Dido’s vulnerability to
the influence of Cupid’s fire and, ultimately, to rumor and storytelling and song,
is mediated by her embrace of Ascanius/Cupid, by her ‘greedy’ consumption
of his beautifully described beauty, their proximity, their inter-breathing, the
delivery of tender loving bodily care, the passional intimacy of which care is
capable and, set suggestively within this intersubjective context, Aeneas’s own
story-telling, his re-telling of a story the queen already knows, and which Aeneas
knows she knows, and she can’t get enough of it. It is phatic communion. Venus
plans to lull Ascanius to sleep and ‘hide him in my sacred shrine /on the heights
of Cythera or Idalium’, and appeals to Cupid:
‘imitate his looks by art,
and, a boy yourself, take on the known face of a boy,
so that when Dido takes you to her breast, joyfully,
amongst the royal feast, and the flowing wine,
when she embraces you, and plants sweet kisses on you,
you’ll breathe hidden fire into her, deceive her with your poison.’
Cupid obeys his dear mother’s words, sets aside his wings,
and laughingly trips along with Iulus’s step. (Vergil, Aeneid I: 680–90)
Venus takes very good care of her grandson Ascanius,

Pours gentle sleep over [his] . . . limbs,
And warming him in her breast, carries him, with divine power,
To Idalia’s high groves, where soft marjoram smothers him
In flowers, and the breath of its sweet shade. (691–4)
Meanwhile, back at the banquet, Cupid impersonates Ascanius:

[T]‌he Tyrians . . . are gathered in crowds through the festive
halls, summoned to recline on the embroidered couches.
They marvel at Aeneas’s gifts, marvel at Iulus,

The god’s brilliant appearance, and deceptive words,
At the robe, and the cloak embroidered with yellow acanthus.
The unfortunate Phoenician above all, doomed to future ruin,
Cannot pacify her feelings, and catches fire with gazing,
Stirred equally by the child and by the gifts.
He, having hung in an embrace round Aeneas’s neck,
And sated the deceived father’s great love,
Seeks out the queen. Dido, clings to him with her eyes
And with her heart, taking him now and then on her lap,
Unaware how great a god is entering her, to her sorrow.
But he, remembering his Cyprian mother’s wishes,
Begins gradually to erase all thought of Sychaeus,
And works at seducing her mind, so long unstirred,
and her heart unused to love, with living passion.
At the first lull in the feasting, the tables were cleared,
and they set out vast bowls, and wreathed the wine with garlands.
Noise filled the palace, and voices rolled out across the wide halls:
bright lamps hung from the golden ceilings,
and blazing candles dispelled the night.
Then the queen asked for a drinking-cup, heavy
with gold and jewels, that Belus and all Belus’s line
were accustomed to use, and filled it
with wine. Then the halls were silent. She spoke:
‘Jupiter, since they say you’re the one who creates
the laws of hospitality, let this be a happy day
for the Tyrians and those from Troy,
and let it be remembered by our children.
Let Bacchus, the joy-bringer, and kind Juno be present,
and you, O Phoenicians, make this gathering festive.’
. . . Iolas, the long-haired, made
his golden lyre resound, he whom great Atlas taught.
He sang of the wandering moon and the sun’s labours,
where men and beasts came from, and rain and fire,
of Arcturus, the rainy Hyades, the two Bears:
why the winter suns rush to dip themselves in the sea,
and what delay makes the slow nights linger. (712–38)
Peace is promised; new bonds are created, deterritorialization ensues and brings
on the song of the cosmos. But hospitality, another major modality of care, is
notoriously insecure, as Beowulf makes equally clear. Care is always a risk.
Care of the Wild 81
Care addresses but also enhances our vulnerability. It draws near; it is

intimate, and intimately related to the constitutive vulnerability of sensitive
organic matter, which is why it can also impinge, intrude, violate. Care is both a
mental state and an activity with the potential to confer and enhance organismic
vitality and expressivity, to work against the confining and isolating effects
of pain or helplessness or hunger. As noted, care arises from our ‘primordial
affectivity’, hence from the vulnerability that is a necessary function of sentience.
Care signifies the inseparability of vulnerability on the one hand and sensation,
sensitivity and sensuality on the other. Hence we fear those who care for us, and
those who need our care. When a population is stressed, even sometimes when
it isn’t, the spectre of infanticide haunts its young. Tragedy always invokes the
instability of care’s value and topology. Oedipus does everything he can, goes
‘outside’, to spare the life of the man he thinks is his father, but cannot save that
man from man’s mortality, or fail to encounter and assume its meaning: the child
(usually) outlives the parent. Medea has ‘a dread, not joy, to see /Her children
near’ (Euripides n.d.: n.p.). Saturn devours his children ‘newly born’ (Silvestris
1990: 100). P. B. Shelley’s (n.d.: III, 330) Giacomo puts it this way: ‘I looked, and
saw that home was hell.’ Neglect, maltreatment, early trauma, marital discord
and parental depression, insensitivity, dissociation and ‘frightening behaviour’
have all been linked to disorganized attachment in children (Van Isjendoorn
et al. 1999: 239). Not just pathology is involved: D. W. Winnicott (1953: 94)
acknowledged the ‘good-enough’ mother’s inevitable moments of hate for her
baby, moments that are part of the baby’s everyday experience. The film Misery
shows us (as Lacan might have put it) care from the standpoint of the Thing; the
film ‘screens’ the aggressivity of charity and its derivation from the necessary
interdependencies of organic life. Over-attention can lead to ‘failure to thrive’
in infants just as surely as neglect or abuse. Ethical dilemmas abound whenever
care is at stake, which, one way or another, is arguably most of the time, and
this is because care enacts and embodies –’substantiates’ –relationality and its
vicissitudes, and the inside-outsideness of sentient experience more generally.
Does psychoanalysis care?
There are striking instances of care in psychoanalytic experience and literature.

An analysand dreams about having difficulty breathing shortly before his then-
asymptomatic analyst is diagnosed with lung cancer. Another patient sighs ‘for’
his analyst, believing he can ‘air’ what he takes to be her fatigue and frustration.
Another analysand dreams of being beaten, as a child, in a trailer, but having been
beaten in a trailer turns out to have been the analyst’s (forgotten) experience.
Care is uncanny, and that is one reason why the word does not inevitably take our
cares away. But it is also one of the reasons for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy. ‘Psychotherapy, the traditional . . . treatment for extreme
self-harm’, both provides a social link and functions as social grooming, calming
and soothing the patient ‘through voice, language, response and presence’
(Natterson- Horowitz and Bowers 2012: 174). Language and paralanguage
provide haptic experience, drawing on the multimodal capacities that allow
us to link touch to voice and communication. It is crucial that ‘care’ offer the
opportunity to speak and be heard, about nothing and everything, just as it
must also offer the opportunity to disengage, fall silent, disassociate, because
the speaking and hearing, the ‘expression’ and ‘interpretation’, are always phatic
activities, whatever other acts they might be performing. Psychoanalysis is the
discourse which, in my view, has the most to offer us when we are trying out –
and trying to understand –the transformative (creative, productive) power of
expressivity.
But it is not possible to theorize and practice psychoanalysis without risk
and hence without dread and anxiety. Psychoanalysis itself is always ‘working
through’ the histories and prehistories of primordial affectivity –the experience
of concern as necessary constituent of living process. Those who work at this
edge, in the midst of the many forms of madness entailed in the transformations
of living process, are always in trouble and will, could, never not be otherwise.
The fragmentations and reconstitutions of psychoanalytic process itself are
evident in the history of its positions on care, for example, our past sequestration
of psychosis as ‘beyond transference’ and therefore impossible to analyse. In the
United States, psychoanalysts have done little to set to rights Ronald Reagan’s
dissolution of publicly funded inpatient-care facilities in the 1980s, and have
only begun to fight the often-lethal resistance of medical insurance companies
to paying for long-term hospitalization (see Lazar and Yeomans 2014, especially
Bendat 2014: 353– 75 and Lazar 2014: 423– 57). By contrast, GIFRIC, a
psychoanalytic institute and clinic in Montreal, cares for persons experiencing
psychosis not by locking them up but by locking out the impingements of
uncomprehending ‘reality’, as indeed many rehab facilities in the United States
now do. Unfortunately most of our rehab facilities are also severed from the
communities nearby or surrounding them, whereas GIFRIC focuses on building
ties with neighbourhoods and the local people who also need their services.
GIFRIC’s community work exemplifies the kind of ecological thought espoused
Care of the Wild 83
by Bateson (1972/ 2000) and Guattari (2000/ 2010) regarding the complex
networks in which all mind(s) participate.
As noted previously, Freud launched a powerful critique of caritas in
Civilisation and Its Discontents. But the critique extended itself to psychoanalytic
epistemology and technique in very equivocal ways. Psychoanalysis long
preserved a reverence for ‘third-person’ ways of knowing, and substituted
for care the fantasy of analytic ‘neutrality’. Care was seduction, acting-out,
a threat to insight, at worst an obstacle in need of clearing away by means of
deliberate reflection and analysis. ‘Transference’ was (in part) an affect-laden,
unacknowledged demand for care, and countertransference the analyst’s response
thereto. Countertransference, however, was less and less seen as disruptive, and
more and more seen simply as psychoanalytic process by another name. Heinz
Kohut (1959) changed the scene by arguing that empathy was a way of, even
central to, psychoanalytic knowing. What first-or second-person knowledge
might entail did not, however, fascinate overmuch scientistic psychology,
and many psychoanalysts responded unhelpfully to the latter’s assertions of
‘epistemological privilege’ by mystifying relationality. (This continues today in
the form of psychoanalytic squeamishness about neuropsychoanalytic research.
Hanging hats on scientistic beliefs about ways of knowing would indeed be a
mistake; but the sciences, at least the life sciences, are not as scientistic as they
once were.) As noted, dread and anxiety about the fragilizing powers of affect
and non-conscious ways of knowing isn’t just a psychoanalytic topic; it drives
the thinking of the field. We continue, for example, to find unbearable the ease
with which tenderness and the passional aspects of attachment cross over, as
is symptomatized by the diffidence of the field’s responses to the figure of the
pedophile and the phenomenon of sexual abuse. The idea of the linking of feelings
of tenderness and erotic attraction makes us anxious. This fear of connectivity is
one reason why so much affect theory prefers to focus on single affects rather than
psychodynamics. But what we have learned about connectivity in the brain –for
that matter, what we learned long ago from Freud’s ‘associational pathways’ –is
that we always feel many different feelings and think many different thoughts at
the ‘same’ time.
Object-relations theory critiqued Freud’s putative valorization of Oedipal
dynamics over pre-Oedipal experience and questioned the primacy of the
drives over the importance to the developing subject of (caregiving) objects (all
drives necessarily have objects). For Melanie Klein, pre-Oedipal experience,
in the form of the paranoid-schizoid position, was constitutively split between
love and hate, gratitude and envy, generosity and despoliation; infancy was a
state of madness, made bearable by a growing ability to tolerate the monstrous

power of feelings to fragilize the nascent subject. (Feelings can be terrible in
their power, and have terrible qualities, apart from but also in addition to the
destabilizing effects of their permutations and combinations, e.g., ‘ambivalence’).
Kristeva (1980: 133, 283) found further nuance in the Kleinian universe by
sensing the chora’s pulsations and gurglings, and joining in its psycho/socio/
biological semiotics, which made passional attachment intelligible as a form of
jouissance, and care capable of intense blissfulness, and therefore not, strictly
speaking, in need of immediate hospitalization. Michel Foucault (1988) further
assembled and disassembled care affects and practices by resituating sexuality
within long genealogies of ‘bodies and pleasures’ and their ‘techniques of living’.
Queer theory’s critique of idealizations of re/production did not, as we might
be tempted to imagine, devalue care; the insights of No Future, for example,
are affiliated with AIDS discourses/activism and their exposure of the care-less,
lethal projections of heteronormative necrophobia (Edelman 2004).
Interest in early experience and the mother-infant dyad, however, had the
salutary effect of opening new portals between psychoanalysis and feminist
philosophy, despite and because of the latter’s analyses of maternity as work and
as fantasy. Carol Gilligan’s critique of masculinist moral philosophy’s fondness
for transcendence has been taken up anew in contemporary French thinking
about care (Paperman and Laugie 2005; Brugère 2014) and also in American
political philosophy (Tronto 1993). Bracha Ettinger has advanced the concept of
‘metramorphosis’, of processes of ‘subjective distribution and diffraction rather
than production of an object-meaning’ (Pollock 2006: 19; cf. Ettinger 2011).
Most recently, Mark Leffert (2015) asserts and explores the neurocurative effects
of caring over insight in psychoanalysis as a material phenomenon; Joseph
Dodds’s (2011) environmentalization of psychoanalysis invites us to consider
a posthuman(ist) stance on extended intersubjectivity, stewardship and the
active role of material ‘objects’ in our becomings. These initiatives (and many
more) have all drawn fresh attention to the interconnectedness of all embodied
practices and experiences, opening up possibilities for thinking about care that
were tamped down both by Freudian distrust of sentimentality and the tendency
of object-relations and developmental theory to sanitize drive experience. Still,
the latter have respected the blissful intensity and intense blissfulness of which
the connectivity of care experience is capable. If there is no such thing as a baby,
only a ‘nursing couple’, the ‘metramorphic’ nature of living process may be more
readily imaginable.3 Yet we are –necessarily –still touchy about care.
Care of the Wild 85
Enacting care
Environments –including the uterus –are sonic. I am a clinical member of a

group of analysts in Los Angeles, the THRIVE Infant-Family program, which
encourages talk as a substitute for touch in neonatal intensive care units.4 The
skin of premature babies is painfully sensitive, but the haptic qualities of the
voice, especially the familial voices most familiar to preemies, can provide them
with a ‘holding environment’. The tact conveyed by so many birdcalls –‘would
you like some company, or would you prefer some alone-time’ –is enjoined
on the physician by Hippocrates. (‘Tact’ is ultimately from Latin tactus, ‘touch,
sense of touch’, from tangere, ‘to touch’.) The physician literally and figuratively
crosses the threshold of the household into intimate space, licensed to receive
confidences, hold the secrets of the family and speak sad truths when necessary,
but always, in some fashion, with one foot out the door; care depends first and
foremost on the physician’s ability to negotiate nearness and distance: ‘[i]‌nto
whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any
voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women
or men, whether they are free men or slaves. Whatever I see or hear in the lives
of my patients . . . I will keep secret’ (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_
oath.html). Tact is carefully tactile; impossibly, it holds distance. It is part of the
arts of healing and living.
Touch is taboo in psychoanalytic treatment, and like the incest taboo, its
purpose is in part to safeguard the vulnerable. Simply refraining from touching
is not an intelligent response to the instabilities of psychoanalytic process,
because haptic experience exceeds concrete acts of touching, and psychological
abuse can do just as much damage as physical abuse. We need a materialist
psychoanalysis because the mind is embodied and because semiosis itself
is a material phenomenon. But we need not be overly concrete about what a
materialist psychoanalysis might entail; recognition of the mind’s embodiment
does not enjoin upon us the laying on of hands. Our work can and should continue
to focus on the signification (paraverbal as well as verbal) of non-conscious
experience as a means of enhancing connectivity and integration. Verbalization
enables the cognitive working-through of affect; it helps us, not just to become,
but to experience becoming, and think about it; over time, it enables neuroplastic
integration of affect, cognition and sensation. Verbalization has the power to
link language and logic to the unspeakable. It enables multimodality, which in
turn enables greater complexity and creativity. Over the airwaves of tone crowd
messages from the wildness that is there but does not speak in sentences. The
arts (of living) are vital to, and always present in, psychoanalytic space: we see,
hear, smell, breathe and move. We are always already sense-making, and need
to become more aware of the wider semiotic networks within which language
functions. Somatic symptoms and other forms of paralanguage are always
signs that ‘it’ is trying to speak in any way it can, even if what it wants to say
is ‘go away’. None of this, in my view, vitiates Lacan’s brilliant treatment of the
structuration of human subjectivity through the intersubjective capacities of
language; I believe we still have before us the task of thinking through what
happens to our capacities for non-linguistic communication ‘after’ the entry into
language (cf. Lacan 2006).
The minds of infants are different from the minds of adult caregivers. Right-
brain development is primary; the left brain doesn’t begin to develop rapidly until
around the age of three. All of these developments result from interactions with
caregivers and the environment more generally. To the extent that we understand
the minds of others, then, it is because minds are always making and remaking
each other. The formation of representations and the acquisition of theory of
mind arise in the context, and as a consequence, of embodied enactment, and
cannot properly be understood apart from it. But it is not always stressed enough
that mind is enacted, especially in our early, critical years, through care and its
vicissitudes. The kinds and modes of knowledge generated by making (each
other’s) minds through caring for or about them depend on non-conscious or
preconscious patterns of connectivity, like procedural memories. The human
brain contains enormous amounts of connective fibre (e.g. the corpus callosum,
white matter), linking the archaic (brainstem) to the new (neocortex), the left to
the right hemisphere, motion to imagination. Without the regulatory activities
of the brainstem, our experience of self-hood would not be possible; without our
capacity to initiate and stylize movement, we could not develop theory of mind.
Most importantly, care is how these interconnections are made, and not just in
our early years. Care is thus, perhaps ironically, responsible for keeping aspects
of the wild alive even in the midst of self-reflection and metacognitive activity
more generally.
In this chapter, ‘wild’ thoughts and feelings are those unknowable to human
consciousness, but they are not without organization or self-regulation. All
organisms depend on metabolic processes, for starters, and the concern for
life necessarily entailed therein. Many species engage in theft, retribution,
forgiveness, trying again. Inquiries are made before intimacy is initiated. There
is display instead of bloodshed; species that rape and murder are extremely rare.
Care of the Wild 87
With those wild-ish creatures known as human infants, ‘towards’ and ‘away’ are
also very basic and socially meaningful movements, embodied enactments of
the rhythms of organismic living. ‘Active quiet’, the term given to the face-to-
face play that goes on between infants and caregivers, is followed by the infant’s
turning away, a ‘down-regulation’ of stimulation, a bit of ‘alone-time’ that is not
a harbinger of sleep. This turning away is the sign of the infant’s knowledge of
his or her difference, and when that sign is not heeded, the results, as noted
previously, can be just as traumatizing as neglect. Towards and away –here
and there, or ‘fort’ and ‘da’, in Freud’s memorable formulations –are the ‘prime’
gestures of social communication, analogous to ‘showing’ or manifestation,
and hiding. Pace Lacan, I do not believe these are mere analogies; at least they
are alternative ways of registering the power, the not-nothingness, of certain
absences.
Psychoanalysis no longer confines itself to the psychodynamic unconscious,
with its vertical splits and horizontal repressions. But it is still very much in
process of taking the measure of the many more nonhuman, ‘undomesticated’,
‘common ancestor’ forms of experience that accompany –are networked
with –the specialized functions of the human brain, including the ‘primordial
affectivity’ that is the basis of all attachment to life. ‘Autopoiesis’, in Maturana
and Varela’s (1973) usage, is another way to formulate the organismic concern
for specific ways of living, becoming and dying situated by Freud beyond the
pleasure principle. ‘Autopoiesis’ refers to the organism’s constant remaking of
itself in accordance with its particular potentialities, affordances and provisions.
‘An autopoietic machine’ –for example, a cell –is organized ‘as a network of
processes of production’ of components which, ‘through their interactions and
transformations’, ‘continuously regenerate . . . the network of processes . . . that
produced them’ and ‘constitute [the machine] . . . as a concrete unity in space’
(78–9; emphasis in the original). At the same time, these reproductive processes
constantly reproduce their own environments. Distinctive styles of living are
not cut off from their surrounds; they make distinctive contributions to their
surrounds. The animal is always on the move, seeking; for us, freedom is first
and foremost freedom of movement. Even perception is far from still; we cannot
see without performing innumerable micro- movements. Facial recognition
is now understood to rely on observation and evaluation of the entire body
and its gestural signatures. As noted, movement is critical to non-conscious
communication, especially the narrowings and expansions of distance that have
meaning in the context of predation as well as gentler intimacies. Approach and
avoidance are two of the most important organizations of mind and movement
for vertebrates; agility has wide-ranging significance not only for survival but
also for the sociality on which it so often depends.
Wildness is the principle of resistance, cellular and otherwise, not to
aggregation or multiplicity, but to the loss of specific ways of becoming. Wildness
maintains its difference, at whatever cost. Care can be frightening because it so
often is an encounter with a difference of vital import. I once attempted to care
for an injured feral cat and had to wrap both of my arms in towels to give him his
food; I needed a lot of extra skin. When my father, who did not have dementia,
lay dying, he needed to talk about his fear that being cremated would ‘hurt’, and
I could feel, in my body, something of what he was talking about. Psychoanalysts
work in this kind of matrix, trying to find the right combination of proximity
and distance, often having to betowel ourselves or ‘metabolize’ extremities of
grief and fear. Our patients all have wildness in them, and the effects thereof
are recorded in the long lists of potentially injurious kinds of transference and
countertransference to be found in the psychoanalytic literature on ‘primitive
states’ of mind: feelings of helplessness, devaluation, hatred, sadism, masochism,
weakness, incompetence. We fear the wildness in ourselves as well as in our
patients; we fear ‘wild psychoanalysis’ (Freud 1910).
And, analyst and analysand both, we will ‘walk’, or even run, in the face of too
much impingement on our styles of being/becoming. Flight is always an option,
and again, in the hope of understanding that a materialist psychoanalysis need
not be overly concrete in its formulations, if we cannot literally move, we can
dissociate. ‘Dissociation’ refers to our capacity to retreat ‘into’ the mind when
trying to outlast intolerable experiences. Heralded on occasion as the ‘best’ of
all defences, dissociation is among the most widely attested of psychological
defences among animals, especially captive ones. It is a way to run away when
one can’t run away, the defence when there is no other defence; it’s how we
find the distance we need to survive when we can’t move, and it is a regular
part of, as well as a threat to, the experience of mind. There are heartbreaking
accounts in the developmental literature of children suffering from ‘disorganized
attachment’ who display inhibited motility, walking two steps forward and two
steps back, or even spinning around, as enactment of the impossibility of finding
any kind of direction when the protector is also the predator. The ‘borderline
personality’ similarly enacts the impossibility of negotiating ‘here’ and ‘there’
by making this clear: ‘I hate you, don’t leave me’; or, ‘I’m leaving; why aren’t you
coming after me?’
These phenomena are refusals of being, at least of being out in the open. They
occur when being is too dangerous, too exposed, too difficult to make sense of;
Care of the Wild 89
when one is presented with impossible choices, when autopoiesis is almost as

dangerous to life as assimilation. We dissociate, de-animate, become-android,
in a last-ditch effort to protect the becoming of our being by negating it. But
somewhere within is the implacable enmity of the cornered animal whose
becoming has been interfered with. And somewhere in the analyst is rage
over the way the analysand disturbs the analyst’s ‘life’, and threatens his or her
livelihood even as he or she provides it. Psychoanalysis is anything but ‘safe’; but
this doesn’t mean it does not care. This is the matrix of care.
In psychoanalytic discourse, ‘enactment’ is something of a pejorative term. It
refers to ‘acting out’ –agieren –what would be better off said and considered.
But action is not without thought or deliberation; in fact, in some schools of
thought, enactivism in particular, action is thought to be thought. ‘What is
known is brought forth’: in their 1992 ‘Afterword’ to The Tree of Knowledge,
Maturana and Varela (1987/1992: 241–55) argue that we must understand
how our existence –the praxis of our living –is coupled to a surrounding world

which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our
biological and social histories . . . [We must] understand the regularity of the
world we are experiencing at any moment . . . without any point of reference
independent of ourselves to give certainty to our assumptions . . . Indeed the
whole mechanism of generating ourselves . . . tells us that our world, the world
which we bring forth in our co-existence with others, will always have precisely
that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and
shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close.
Francesca Ferri and colleagues (n.d.) have suggested that our ability to represent
to ourselves the inner feelings of our body has significant consequences for
social behaviour. By comparing empirical measurements of heartbeat and
respiratory sinus arrhythmia with subjective accounts of respiratory experience,
the researchers have shown that ‘good heartbeat perceivers’ were more
autonomically responsive in social settings than their less fortunate peers (1). By
‘social setting’ they mean an experimental protocol wherein a human hand and
not a metal stick moves in a caress-like motion at the boundary of the test subject’s
peripersonal space (estimated to be 20 cm from the latter’s hand). Degrees and
kinds of interoceptive sensitivity are operant in the recruitment of ‘different
adaptive autonomic response strategies’ on behalf of effective relationality and
interpersonal space representation (1). If a stick waving is not ‘as’ social as a hand,
it is, however, not meaningless; our willingness to grant objects agency is not
simply a mistake, because when we do so, real –material –consequences ensue.
Let us, then, attempt –however unlikely success may be or seem –to transform

our current (Western) preoccupation with cure rather than care. Our patients
can only heal if they have some luxury of time and recursion, because trauma
always involves not-enough-time to prepare. This then strikes us as extravagant
in a world of such deprivation as is our own. But thriving is the goal of all living
things –and we do not have so very many counters to trauma at our disposal that
we can afford to sacrifice any of them. Why should we not have ‘plenty’ in these
regards as well as others? We merely assume, as a consequence of class prejudice,
that therapy means little to the desperate, wherever and whoever they may be;
but had we had the experience of working at a low-fee counselling centre, we
might think quite otherwise; and it is not difficult to imagine, in however limited
a fashion, what the loss of the shaman or of elderly counsel might mean to those
who are being ‘Westernized’, even to those who are already Westernized. Is there
no point in dreaming of a therapeutic planet, in which we might do all we could
to support all life forms and their freedoms? Biopower, some will say; but I am
speaking of the open-endedness of community, and of the ecological thought
that enacts, extends and protects it, and specifically not of yielding to the family
or the state or the commodity-makers the authority to give me my life or my
way of living it, including my way of dying. The value of care is indeed unsettled.
But too many of us are sure of one thing: care is too costly, whether by that we
mean that it is a privilege that should be reserved for dominance, or should be as
cheap as possible, or is outright disabling in and of itself, or takes care away from
everything that isn’t being cared for. But it is a waste of life to worry about when,
how and where we should care. (We) just do it.
Notes
1 ‘Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to
be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a
violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them . . . We
should be wary . . . what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick
men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since
we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed . . . whereof the execution ends
not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence,
the breath of reason’ (Milton, Areopagitica). On endocrinological transmission, see
Brennan (2004:79).
2 A number of cognitive humanists have suggested that the ‘costly signal’ as an
explanation for artistic behaviour in general and poetic display in particular; cf.
Care of the Wild 91
Winkelman (2013: 156–7) and Boyd (2009: 10–11). Despite their many merits, I find
these approaches too often limited by Neo-Darwinist functionalism (costly signals
display fitness) and lack of interest in the importance of thriving in organic life.
3 Winnicott (1965: 138) refers to the baby as part of the ‘nursing couple’, and explores
the concept (and importance) of ‘mental nursing’ throughout.
4 See www.thriveprogram.org.
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4
Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals

and Invasive Species
Penelope Gottlieb
My paintings explore the subjects of ecological crisis and botanical extinction

through highly detailed, and densely rendered, paint and ink based works on
canvas, panel and paper. My current practice continues an ongoing project of
re-imagining lost species and re-appropriating existing historical imagery. In my
‘Extinct Botanicals’ project, I undertake a process of re-envisioning lost botanical
plant life through dramatic large-scale paintings based on often sparse historical
descriptions and accounts. I supplement these omissions and obscurities with
extensive research and imaginative license to recreate a sense of existence in an
attempt to retrieve loss. Often in the absence of any existing visual references for
these lost species, I engage extinction in a literal way by summoning its subjects
back to life through a series of imagined reconstructions.
My work, while charged with timely environmental anxieties and a shared
societal dread of ecological peril, is intentionally seductive and visually alluring
to establish a prolonged exchange with the viewer. Upon closer inspection, the
works reveal themselves to be more problematic and arresting than they had at
first seemed. Once the seductive veneer of lush patterning and detail is critically
eroded, the works reveal themselves to be emotive depictions of environmental
crisis. This process of engaging assumption, and of ultimately stripping it away,
is at the heart of my work.
The large-scale ‘Extinction’ paintings (Figures 4.1–4.4) are formally dynamic
and fraught with activity to convey an impression of desperate energy and
struggle. The botanicals seem to defy the confines of their own image plane and
reverberate as if untenably contained. They are poetic investigations of loss that
suggest an overwhelmingly frenetic imperative to ‘live’. Through these works,
I attempt to explore the dynamic shift in our relationship to the natural world in
its current state of conflict and compromise. My works actively resist the calm
and disinterested representation of nature we tend to associate with pastoral

imagery, historical botanicals or still life, and instead seek to activate the subject
matter as tumultuous, problematic and in need of cultural re-examination.
My ‘Invasive Species’ project (Figures 4.5–4.8) evolved from this
aforementioned re-imagining of extinct plants, and continues my exploration
of extinction and loss through appropriated, and revised, images by John James
Audubon (1785–1851). I intentionally take these historically iconic representations
of nature and attempt to alter our perception and understanding of them through
a series of interventions. ‘Invasive Species’ probes the exploitative nature of
non-native species once introduced into foreign ecosystems. In these works the
subjects, Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’, are literally bound and suffocated by the
presence of an invasive botanical growth. The creatures are visibly compromised
in these images but the aesthetic remains serene and contemplative. By retaining
Audubon’s visual language, and in fact by appropriating and emulating it
as seamlessly as possible, my revisionist additions are intended to defer the
moment of disjunctive realization. Indeed, by invading the nineteenth-century
taxonomies, the work in fact performs the exploitative relationship and attitudes
the era epitomized vis-à-vis the natural world. We are not entirely sure if the
images are beautiful or distressing, and in fact they are both.
In both projects I intend to augment and denaturalize the representation
of ‘nature’ through a juxtaposition of dissonant techniques, signs and symbols
to indicate the presence of a critical consciousness. The incorporation of
intentionally disjunctive imagery is intended to convey an awareness of the
ecological basis for the phenomena –invasiveness and extinction –and the
work in fact performs the invasions it cites. Both bodies of work are intended
to provoke a critical consideration of natural imagery in this problematic
contemporary context, and do so in direct opposition to the historical tradition
of its representation as passive and inactive.
The works unfold gradually, with several competing layers of information, so
that the elements of beauty, unease and surprise coexist and draw the viewer into
an active reading of a literally colonized image space. The titles I have given to
each of the paintings are simply the names of the invasive plant species, or extinct
botanicals, depicted. In many instances in the ‘Invasive Species’ series, I have
painted the invasive plant’s name over the original caption on the print: literally
overwriting the existing history as presented by Audubon. Through these bodies
of work, I attempt to create a sense of discomfiture and displacement in the
aesthetic experience, in order to elevate the viewer’s engagement with the work’s
subject matter.
Audubon in Bondage 97
Figure 4.1 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Castilleja Cruenta Standl’. 50 x 40

in. Acrylic and ink on panel, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.2 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Hopea Shinkeng’. 78 x 66 in. Acrylic

and ink on canvas, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.3 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Otophora Unilocularis’. 50 x 40 in.

Acrylic, oil and ink on canvas panel, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.4 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Valerianella Affinis’. 50 x 40 in.

Acrylic and ink on panel, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.5 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Elaeagnus Umbellata’. 38 x 26 in.

Acrylic and ink over John James Audubon print, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.6 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Phyllostachys Nigra’. 38 x 26 in.

Figure 4.7 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Rosa Laevigata’. 38 x 26 in. Acrylic
and ink over John James Audubon print, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4.8 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Invasive Species: Convolvulus arvensis’. 38 x 26 in.

5
From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to

Post-media Poetics: Pierre Joris’s Meditations
on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj
as Processual Praxis
Jason Skeet
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.
George Oppen
At the start of Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari (1995a: 1–2) identifies three ‘problems’

that, he argues, confirm the need for a new account of subjectivity: ‘the
irruption of subjective factors at the forefront of current events, the massive
development of machinic productions of subjectivity and, finally, the recent
prominence of ethological and ecological perspectives in human subjectivity’.
In response to these problems, and to resist the standardized, homogenized
subjectivity manufactured by the media machines of worldwide capitalism,
Guattari describes subjectivity as a singular production. Moreover, he
conceives subjectivity as a process of production at collective and personal
levels: a problem also, then, of how social organization is bound up with the
compositions of individual subjectivation (and vice versa). The schizoanalysis
Guattari developed for mapping the production of subjectivity compels a double
(and doubling) attention to critique as creative intervention, so that theory and
practice form relays connecting with and into each other. It is alongside such
creative theorization that Guattari (2013: 13) discusses an emerging ‘post-media’

age and its demand for a ‘fundamental right to singularity’.
This demand for a ‘right to singularity’ evokes the objectivist poet George
Oppen’s (2008: 166) Of Being Numerous, which depicts the post-modern era as
the ‘shipwreck /Of the singular’. This poem thus sets the scene for an encounter
between Guattari’s work and an enduring current of radical modernism in
contemporary poetry. This current has to be recognized as presaging concerns
taken up by the generation of thinkers that Guattari belonged to: the poet
and critic Charles Bernstein (1992: 144) insists that ‘poststructuralism can be
understood, but only in part, as a preliminary account of radical modernism,
après la letter’. Furthermore, Bernstein describes a generation of poets born
between 1937 and 1944 building on this radical modernism to create poetry
he characterizes as ‘an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an
extreme questioning of public forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at
authoritative/authoritarian language structures’ (210). The idea of a post-media
poetics that I want to explore is inspired by the conjunction it discovers between
this radical modernism and Guattari’s concept of processual and singularizing
subjectivity.
In what follows, the poetry of Pierre Joris provides the specific point of
contact for an encounter between contemporary poetry and Guattari’s work. This
encounter is prefaced with a rationale for bringing these two figures into closer
proximity, after which the idea of post-media poetics is developed by examining
Guattari’s (2013: 221) theory of processual subjectivity (drawing on his later solo
works), and from this moving into an analysis of Joris’s ‘processual praxis’, making
particular use of Guattari’s reading of Genet’s work. It must be emphasized at the
outset however, keeping in mind Guattari’s creative theorization, the intention
in bringing Guattari and Joris together is always to maintain their interaction.
That is, moving in one direction Guattari’s ideas expose what is at stake in the
productions of subjectivity made possible by reading a poem by Joris, so that
the concern with poetics is both a way of reading this work and through this
thinking about the wider possibilities for poetry in the twenty-first century. In
the other direction, Joris’s poetry amplifies Guattari’s ideas. Post-media poetics
therefore seeks to extend Joris’s (2009: 43) definition of poetics as resource for
writing poetry –he states: ‘I always read the books of theorists for a poetics, i.e.
for the use they can be for the practice of writing’ –so that the idea of operating
in these two directions at once underlines the exploration of Guattari’s post-
media conception as a resource for both writing and reading and, moreover, as
a relay or space between them.
From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to Post-media Poetics 107
Preface to an encounter
In his Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari (2013: 6) posits ‘three zones of

historical fracture’ each related to ‘fundamental capitalistic components’:
●● the age of European Christianity, marked by a new conception of the
relations between the Earth and Power;
●● the age of capitalistic deterritorialization of knowledges and techniques,
founded on the principle of generalized equivalence;
●● the age of planetary computerization, which opens up the possibility that a
creative and singularizing processuality might become the new basic reference.
These zones are not to be thought of merely in terms of historical periodization,

although by using the term ‘age’ Guattari does have in mind a historical
account of capitalism. They also overlap and have given rise to forces still at
work within contemporary societies. It is within the third zone that Guattari
(2000: 40) discerns an evolving post-media era, made possible by a multitude
of technological developments (Guattari refers to telecommunications and
ICT, biotechnology, new energy resources and the invention of man-made raw
materials), as a result of which the media can be ‘reappropriated by a multitude
of subject-groups capable of redirecting its resingularization’. In the domain of
poetry, the existence of small presses and independent publishing networks
exemplify such a resingularization of media. There is, therefore, a politics
involved in the distribution of poetry that is bound up with the poetics that
I argue are relatable to a post-media context.
Guattari’s highlighting of technological developments is not naïve utopianism.
A fundamental struggle is emphasized over the uses these technologies are put
to, and a shift towards a post-media period cannot be taken for granted. There
are, then, three central concerns within Guattari’s (2013: 11–15) depiction of
the post-media era: first, that it makes possible a proliferation of self-referential
and self-sustaining processual subjectivities, capable, moreover, of connecting
with wider social organization; second, it brings about a fundamental change in
the relationship between humans and their environments (both technological
and natural); third, it is associated with a politics of dissensus in contrast to
‘infantilizing’ consensual politics. We can find an elaboration of these three
components of the post-media age in the work of certain contemporary poets,
including Pierre Joris.
Joris’s literary output has encompassed a variety of activities and contexts
over the past four decades, and moving between the United States, Europe and
North Africa he has published over forty books of poetry, essays and translations.
Born in Luxembourg, Joris grew up with several languages but as a poet writes
in English. The idea of bringing Joris’s work into an encounter with Guattari
is suggested by Joris’s own drawing on Deleuze and Guattarian concepts as
elements of his ‘nomadic poetics’, in particular his use of the concept of the
rhizome. According to Joris (2003: 29), nomadic poetics aspires to a state of
continuous movement and transformation: ‘a between-ness as essential nomadic
condition, thus always a moving forward, a reaching, a tending. (I hear the need
for both tension & tenderness)’ (original emphasis).
This condition of between-ness is also a fundamental feature of language.
Joris (2003: 29) insists that language has ‘always to do with the other’ so that
‘language others itself always again’ (original emphasis). This process of language
othering itself is relatable to Guattari’s (1995a: 14–15) discussion of Bakhtin in
Chaosmosis and the idea of a ‘transference of subjectivation’ that occurs across
the text, from writer to reader, with the reader becoming a co-creator by means of
a foregrounding of language’s non-discursive materiality, especially ‘the feeling
of verbal activity in the active generation of a signifying sound, including motor
elements of articulation, gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement in which
the whole organism together with the activity and soul of the word are swept
along in their concrete unity’. Guattari’s description here is echoed in Joris’s
account of rhizomatics as the method for practising nomadic poetics. Insisting
on a fundamental difference between the rhizome and a collage ‘aesthetics of
the fragment’, Joris (2003: 38) explains how rhizomatics emphasizes movement
by means of the ‘material flux of language matter, moving in & out of semantic
& non-semantic spaces, moving around & through the features accreting as
poem, a lingo-cubism that is no longer an “explosante fixe” as Breton defined
the poem, but an “explosante mouvante” ’. This concern with movement at the
level of language and the processual subjectivity this movement produces can be
explored with respect to a particular work by Joris, his serial poem Meditations
on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj, published in 2013 and written as response
to war in Iraq.
There is a potential for intersections between Joris’s nomadic poetics and
the idea of post-media poetics. However, Joris’s focus with nomadic poetics
is the possibilities the rhizome offers for thinking about the organization of a
poem, alongside a contesting of linguistic and cultural hierarchies. The post-
media conception, and its related concerns found in Guattari’s later work, can
be used to configure points of relation between the formal dynamics of poetry
and a particular production of subjectivity. Joris (2003: 44) acknowledges the
multiplicity of selves produced alongside the ‘manifold of languages & locations’

but his nomadic poetics is the investigation of the rhizome as stimulus for the
production of poetry rather than the processual praxis of writing/reading that
post-media poetics opens up. Post-media poetics explores multiple relays in
operation between the singular dimensions or levels of the poem and productions
of subjectivity, and the particular political implications of these productions.
On the other side of this encounter, Guattari’s work calls for contact with
contemporary poetry. In Chaosmosis, referring to a production of subjectivity
that is ‘auto-enriching its relation to the world’, Guattari (1995a: 21) suggests that
poetry may ‘have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences
and psychoanalysis combined’. On the one hand, this claim can be seen in the
context of Guattari’s broader argument that art offers a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’,
since the ‘aesthetic power of feeling, although equal in principle with the other
powers of thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, acting politically,
seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective
Assemblages of enunciation of our era’ (101). On the other hand, Guattari’s
specific reference to poetry suggests that poetry could have something particular
‘to teach us’. To date, the prompting this gives for using Guattari’s work to engage
with poetry has had little take up, although a notable start at doing so has been
undertaken by the theorist and political activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi.
In his book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Berardi (2012: 168) develops
Guattari’s reference to poetry and defines the extrication of social life from the
mandates of global capitalism as a ‘poetic task’. On this basis, Berardi claims that
poetry has to be understood as ‘the excess of sensuousness exploding into the
circuitry of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite
game of interpretation: desire’ (21). Moreover, this reactivation of sensuousness –
Berardi also refers to this as a ‘singularity of enunciation’ (21) –brings with it the
possibility of ‘reactivating the social body’ (36). Berardi’s supporting examples
are taken from Rilke, in whose work he finds a subversive force of irony that
‘suspends the semantic value of the signifier and chooses freely from among a
thousand possible interpretations’ (168). Although Berardi rejects the possibility
of any ontological foundation, he nevertheless insists on the possibility of a
‘common ground of understanding among the interlocutors, a sympathy among
those who are involved in the ironic act, and a common autonomy from the
dictatorship of the signified’ (168). It is at this point, however, that Berardi’s focus
on Rilke, in contrast to an engagement with contemporary poetry, is significant.
Berardi’s faith in a ‘common ground’ avoids the problem of language exposed
and confronted by radical modernism, a contributing factor in the ‘shipwreck’
identified by Oppen. Joris highlights Paul Celan’s work in this regard. Discussing
the complex polysemous strata in Celan’s poetry, Joris (2009: 84–5) describes
how what Celan makes visible is ‘the possibility of the impossibility of the poem
itself, and that possibility of the impossibility of the poem is the only possibility
that Celan will grant the poem after Auschwitz’. This profound questioning of
language in this context is for Joris related to a certain exhaustion of Eurocentric
possibilities. Crucially, this questioning makes new possibilities arise. Oppen’s
poem was published in 1968, a year with vital significance for the rethinking of
resistance to capitalism. This year marked an important moment too for Guattari,
out of which would develop his collaborations with Deleuze, beginning with the
publication in 1972 of Anti-Oedipus and a conception of processual subjectivity
allied to an explicit political praxis. The affective force of Oppen’s (2008) poem,
then, arises from a moment of transition, an experience of concomitant losses
and gains. It announces the alarming fact that ‘[t]‌he isolated man is dead, his
world around him exhausted /And he fails! He fails, that meditative man!’
(168) at the same time sensing in the ‘bright light of shipwreck’ a new art that
Oppen terms ‘Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists!’ (167). The idea of ‘audience as
artists’ foreshadows Guattari’s identification of a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’ and
his emphasis on how artistic practices create unprecedented ‘[u]niverses of
reference and existential territories’: a creativity extendible into everyday life in
the ways that individuals resist the standardizing forces of capitalism.
We can no longer think of language as rooted in a commonality, territorial or
cultural. Language has been uprooted and torn apart, and there is no going back.
As Joris (2009: 106) puts it: ‘to speak true now is to stammer, to fragment’. We
need to incorporate into Berardi’s notion of a common ground the uncommon
operations on language invented by contemporary poetic practices: not only
to escape the ‘dictatorship of the signified’, as Berardi argues, but further, to
overthrow the power of the Signifier. The paradox that confronts us then is
that it is precisely by way of a shattering of language that resingularizations of
subjectivity are constructed. In contrast to the nineteenth-century Symbolist
poetry drawn on by Berardi, Joris’s work provides more instructive points of
convergence with Guattari’s ideas. The level at which language is broken down
and put onto lines of movement –the effects this then has on the organization of
the poem and its reading –is an aspect of the way Joris’s work demonstrates how
self-enriching productions of subjectivity occur. By bringing Joris and Guattari
into contact, then, we can explore the intersection between the pragmatic and
speculative trajectories of Guattari’s project, which is where post-media poetics
are composed.
Processual subjectivity
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 457) articulate a problem

of subjectivity along the following lines: ‘[i]‌n effect, capital acts as the point
of subjectivation that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the
“capitalists”, are subjects of enunciation that form the private subjectivity
of capital, while the others, the “proletarians”, are subjects of the statement,
subjected to the technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated’.
It is significant that this passage links language use with an examination of
how subjectivity is produced; this suggests that language carries political
dimensions and potential to contest the terms of capitalist subjectivation.
These politics of expression are pursued by Guattari (1995b: 194) throughout
his later solo works, but here the analysis of A Thousand Plateaus is extended
into a focus on how subjectivity occurs under specific conditions ‘and that
these conditions could be modified through multiple procedures in a way
that would channel it in a more creative direction’. Poetry can be understood
as a construction of certain procedures and processes capable of modifying
conditions in precisely the manner Guattari refers to. For Guattari, then, it
is not only a question of analysing how subjectivity is produced in response
to its context, but also how subjectivity outflows an initial territory so that,
as Brian Holmes (2009: 372) puts it, individuals can construct ‘original
expressions in problematic interaction with others on a multiplicity of
grounds, so as to resist, create, propose alternatives and also escape into their
evolving singularities’.
A new conceptual apparatus is needed in order to distinguish between a
conception of the individual and an account of the production of subjectivity.
For Guattari (2000: 24–5), the individual is understood as a ‘terminal’ or
junction for processes that involve multiple elements (including, e.g., economic
assemblages, technical machines, social groups) with the production of
‘components of subjectivity’ an effect of these processes. To explore the process
producing subjectivity (including the significance of language in this process),
Guattari developed his diagrammatic schizoanalytic cartographies, drawing on
three important concepts that form the building blocks for this cartographical
approach: transversality, autopoiesis and the schizo fracture.
Early in his career, Guattari (1984: 18) introduced the concept of transver
sality to counter the notion of transference in psychoanalysis: ‘[t]‌ransversality
is a dimension that seeks to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and
that of mere of horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is maximum
communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings’. In

opposition to the focus in psychoanalysis on the analyst-analysand relationship
(relegating to the background institutional context and practices), transversality
enables Guattari to address the complex, non-hierarchical connections between
disparate elements (material and immaterial) that produce subjectivity, the
distinctive value systems these linkages open onto and the social and cultural
effects generated. Moreover, countering Lacan’s principle that the unconscious
is structured like a language, Guattari maintains that, on the side of expression,
different regimes of signs, discursive and non-discursive, signifying and non-
signifying are involved in the production of subjectivity. By insisting on these
complex relationships, Guattari (1995a) opposes reductionist approaches. In
Chaosmosis he outlines what is at stake:
To speak of machines rather than drives, Fluxes rather than libido, existential
Territories rather than the instances of the self and of transference, incorporeal
Universes rather than unconscious complexes and sublimation, chaosmic
entities rather than signifiers –fitting ontological dimensions together in a
circular manner rather than dividing the world up into infrastructure and
superstructure –may not simply be a matter of vocabulary! Conceptual tools
open and close fields of the possible, they catalyse Universes of virtuality. Their
pragmatic fallout is often unforeseeable, distant and different. Who knows what
will be taken up by others, for other uses, or what bifurcations they will lead
to! (126)
Guattari’s diagrammatic cartography of subjectivity comprises four ‘ontological

dimensions’ (124):
●● material, energetic and semiotic Fluxes;

●● concrete and abstract machinic Phylums;
●● virtual Universes of value;
●● finite existential Territories.
What matters for Guattari is an awareness of the complex interactions and

feedback between the four dimensions, while discerning ‘those components
lacking in consistency or existence’ (71): that is, how these processes retain their
processuality. It is a question of creating a ‘transversalist bridge’ (124) between
diverse ontological components: social environments and territories; networks
of flows of matter, energies and signs; machinic Phylums or the ‘conceptual realm
of ideas (logic, diagrammatism, invention, reflexivity’ as Holmes (2009: 373)
puts it; virtual Universes of value, examples of which Guattari (1995a: 125)
lists as the ‘incorporeal Universes of music, of mathematical idealities, of

Becomings of desire’. Further, there is the recognition, as Guattari states, that
this transversality is never ‘given as “already there”, but always to be conquered
through a pragmatics of existence’ (125).
Crucially for a concern with poetics, Guattari (1995a: 59) insists that in the
realm of expression any assemblage of enunciation (such as a poem) is always
‘chaotically determined’. Writing and reading thus remain open to on-going
experimentation. Drawing on a term adopted from Joyce and key to Guattari’s
project, it is writing’s potentially chaosmic character that guarantees this openness.
In Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995a) refers to Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais
n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) in his discussion
of the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’. Guattari cites a section from the poem including
the line ‘From the depths of a shipwreck’ (113) –an allusion also significant to
Oppen’s poem. Mallarmé expresses modernism’s ontological crisis, which has,
according to Guattari, not only revealed the loss of any ontological ground, but
also made possible a ‘plane of machinic interfaces’ (58) so that subjectivity can
be conceived as the effect of arrangements between the interfaces that are, on
one side, discursive and actual (Fluxes and Phylums) and, on the other side,
non-discursive and virtual existential Territories and Universes of value. This
distinction between actual and virtual domains posits the need for transversalist
bridges across which virtual chaosmic components with their ‘infinite velocities’
(59) slow down into actual psychosocial arrangements. Writing is a way to
experiment with these bridges and arrangements, with interactions and feedback
between components. In this regard Guattari (2000: 26) calls for a regeneration
of radical modernism: ‘[f]‌rom now on what will be on the agenda is a “futurist”
and “constructivist” opening up of the fields of virtuality’.
A second important concept that Guattari’s schizoanalytical cartography
draws on is ‘autopoiesis’ (from Greek auto meaning ‘self ’, and poiesis meaning
‘creation’). That is, a process capable of reproducing and sustaining itself.
Guattari takes the concept of autopoiesis from the work of the Chilean biologists
Maturana and Varela, who use it to explain the self-maintaining chemistry of
living cells. The concept is used by Guattari to counter approaches that seek
to impose static, predefined stages onto subjectivity’s production. Autopoiesis
highlights a creative process that creates itself, so that what emerges is a singularity
out of complexity, irreducible to any preexisting, deterministic model. This
autopoetic conception of subjectivity helps to understand why Guattari insists
that his cartography of subjectivity keeps all elements involved in its production
foregrounded, ensuring the process of production remains open and underway.
By extending the concept of autopoesis into an analysis of human subjectivity

and social relations, Guattari can then contrast different processes of the
production of subjectivity. Capitalist subjectivity, in this regard, regulates the
precarious, finite and singular nature of subjectivity. Guattari (1995a: 104)
explains how this control is achieved through a standardization of ‘trans-
semiotic and amodal enunciative compositions’ that results in the ‘progressive
effacement of polysemy, prosody, gesture, mimicry and posture’. Thus, poetry
can be understood as a means for reclaiming and resingularizing heterogeneous
‘enunciative compositions’, resisting the overcoding power of the ‘capitalist
Signifier’, and opening up processes of the production of subjectivity in
opposition to capitalist mass media that reduce human subjectivity to ‘so many
pieces compatible with the mechanics of social domination’ (104–105).
A third conceptual component of Guattari’s schizoanalytical cartography
is the idea of the schizo fracture. This concept was already a component of
Guattari’s collaborations with Deleuze and the opposing poles they set up
between process on the one side and organization on the other. In Chaosmosis,
Guattari (1995a: 64) insists that ‘[t[he schizo fracture is the royal road of access
to the emergent fractality of the Unconscious’. The idea of the schizo fracture
is also relatable to Joris’s nomadic poetics of movement and transformation.
According to Joris (2003: 26), the poem functions as a break in the flow of
lived experience: ‘[r]‌efueling halts are called poases; they last a night or a day,
the time of a poem, & then move on’ (original emphasis). This break is not a
moment coming after experience (as reflection on experience) but rather a part
of the process itself. Moreover, Joris (2013: 92) stresses the significance within
the poem of the rupture, of how ‘it is probably in the fissures between miscounts,
recounts, etymologies, misreadings, neologisms, etc. that much of the poetic
force of language resides’. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari (2004) define
the break/flow as the first of the three syntheses of the unconscious constituting
desire as process of production. This connective synthesis works along the lines
of a binary machine constituting a coupling that produces a flow, passage or
circuiting between ‘partial objects’, or breaks the flow so as to produce other
flows (Deleuze and Guattari (1983) refer to both material and immaterial flows).
The connective synthesis is given the linguistic marker ‘and then’ as a mechanism
of attraction (5). With regard to poetry, then, procedures that break language
apart (with the poem, by extension, a break in the flow of the everyday), expose
the connective synthesis and a ‘refuelling’ of the real occurs, an opportunity to
access the ‘fractality of the Unconscious’ essential for a production of singular
subjectivity.
By way of these three concepts –transversality, autopoiesis and the schizo

fracture –Guattari (2013: 3) develops his fourfold model for schizoanalytic
cartographies, the application of which is defined as metamodelization, since
what is produced is a singular mapping of subjectivity only relatable to its own
reference points, a process of ‘self-modelling’. A singularizing and processual
subjectivity becomes its own method of analysis and cannot be generalized
or imposed on others; the metamodel provides ‘instruments for a speculative
cartography, without any pretension with regard to universal structural
foundation nor an on-the-ground effectiveness’ (5) –this is a declaration for an
encounter with the unknown that calls for a poetics!
Processual praxis
In the ‘Postface’ to his Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj, Joris

(2013: 91) explains the particular shipwreck that is background to the work: ‘I
started this sequence of poems shortly after the US invaded Iraq, somehow
wanting to ward off, or hold at bay, the utter destruction of the people and
the city of Baghdad, one of the greatest old cities in the history of humanity.’
Joris states that he could only complete the sequence once US forces left Iraq.
Guattari’s (1995a: 3) comments on the 1991 Gulf War conflict (an event he
insists on comparing with the atomic bombing of Japan) are pertinent in this
context, relating as he does the devastation of war to the manufacture of a
homogenous, molar subjectivity: ‘what was at stake was an attempt to bring the
Arab population to heel and reclaim world opinion: it had to be demonstrated
that the Yankee way of subjectivation could be imposed by the combined power
of the media and arms’. The construction of a singularizing subjectivity that
resists these molar powers can therefore be regarded as a political project.
Joris’s Meditations is inspired by the tenth-century Sufi poet Mansur al-Hallaj
and in particular a list of forty concepts taken from his work. These concepts,
Joris informs us, were found on the Internet and provided him with titles for
the poems. This points towards a feature of the post-media era as passage
beyond exclusively Western contexts. For Guattari, this involved contact with
Japanese and Brazilian culture and politics; for Joris it has included a sustained
engagement with the literature of the Maghreb. It is the presence of the desert
in Joris’s (2014: 222) work that expresses this possibility of movement outside
the West’s cultural limits, as indicated, for example, in the poem Reading
Edward Jabès:
Here, the end of the word, of the book, of chance.
Desert!
Drop that dice. It is useless.
Here, the end of the game, of resemblance.

The infinite, by the interpretation of its letters
Denies the end.
Here, the end cannot be denied. It is infinite.

Here is not the place
Nor even the trace.
Here is sand.
The reference to Mallarmé’s dice throw is significant. Rejecting the

Mallarméan idea of linguistic play within the space of the page, Joris instead
describes the poem as a ‘caravan that travels through time & things’, so that
it is the continuous verticality of reading creating rhythm that interests him
(Cockelbergh 2011: 134). The final ‘sand’ in the poem suggests that the limitless
space of the desert constitutes a physical and metaphysical presence; it is echo
too of Deleuze and Guattari’s first synthesis of the Unconscious they connect
linguistically to ‘and’, intimating that this desert is a space of primary processes.
It is just such a desert, backdrop as well to war, that Joris (2013: 13) inserts the
reader into at the beginning of Meditations: ‘what is the manner /I mean the
matter /with you standing /there in the desert?’ In this infinite desert Joris puts
into operation Guattari’s (1995a: 125) three levels of processual praxis and which
engenders what Guattari terms as a ‘politics of immanence’.
Included in Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies is an essay on Jean Genet’s
novel The Prisoner of Love. For Guattari (2013: 215), this is a book of ‘images’
and ‘margins’ that give ‘space to a singular polyphony in which the most secret
dimensions of the poet will be knotted together . . . with the “metaphysical
struggles” conducted by the Fedayeen and Black Panthers in counterpoint to
his perpetual wandering’. It is significant that Guattari describes Genet as a poet,
and that the three levels of Genet’s processual praxis incorporate a close attention
to language. These three levels are also present in Joris’s Meditations, so that
exploring them provides a way to read the work. The levels can be approached
in the same order Guattari does (they are not stages, Guattari emphasizes,
but levels operating simultaneously). Following Guattari, a level of modular
crystallizations comprises the set of procedures with which the poet tears
language apart and converts it into units to be arranged and rearranged, thereby
placing language onto lines of continuous variation. A second level of polyphonic

fabulous images maps the generation of new forms of expression through the
mixture and conjugation of heterogeneous components. At the third level of
existential operators a new production of subjectivity is made possible. Guattari’s
(2013: 221) three levels of processual praxis show the production of subjectivity
as a process moving from the imaginary to the real, from a ‘derealizing fabulation’
to ‘ “fabulous images” that produce the real’.
Modular crystallizations
At this level language constitutes an expressive materiality exceeding any
communicative function. In the Meditations sequence certain procedures are used
to create, as Joris calls it, ‘atomic constructions’ within language (Cockelbergh
2011: 129). Words inside other words are revealed, as in ‘the awe is in gawking’
(Joris 2013: 14) of the first line of the second poem in the sequence. Omission and/
or addition of single letters can transform one word into another, so ‘scares’ in the
third line of the same poem becomes ‘care’ in the fifth and ‘scars’ in the seventh.
Rhyme and rhythm also foreground the relations between words, a relation,
according to Joris, ‘that is not /in the thing or the it /but between the two /it’s the
relation a /we can be’ (14). In the fourth poem of the sequence (16), this breaking of
words is allied to a nomadic praxis that is also (paradoxically) a bringing together:
search your words for the con
of fusion. make letters
stand out even if
they shiver.
Enjambment between lines as in ‘the con /of fusion’ introduces a ‘doubleness’

into the poem, a moment for reading to stumble over semantic shifts and
double takes that are a way of ‘taking your breath away & making you stop
and making you both hesitate & hopefully crack up with that kind of quiet
laughter’ (Cockelbergh 2011: 129). However, in a further doubling (and
troubling) moment, the thirty-eighth poem in the sequence questions whether
this enjambment actually amounts to ‘rules of engagement /that invariably /
tell me to stay apart’ (Joris 2013: 81). How, then, to ‘follow /as fast as I can
/the word form /somewhere I cannot /see’ (82) so as to discover within
the poem ‘something I didn’t know, & that is a new meaning’ (Cockelbergh
2011: 193 original emphasis)? This question is tied to the fissures of Joris’s
‘atomic constructions’. These ruptures function as a problematizing in-between,
a questioning of thought/opinion/belief, a stammering of language that operates

as a refrain across the entire sequence of poems. As Guattari (2000: 37) makes
clear, this shattering of language is essential:
The crucial point is to grasp the a-signifying points of rupture –the rupture of

denotation, connotation and signification –from which a certain number of
semiotic chains are put to work in the service of an existential autoreferential
effect. The repetitive symptom, the prayer, the ritual of the ‘session’, the order-
word, the emblem, the refrain, the facialitary crystallization of the celebrity . . .
initiates the production of a partial subjectivity. We can say that they are the
beginnings of a protosubjectivity. (Original emphasis)
Joris’s ‘atomic constructions’ treat words as asignifying material, plugging

into and manipulating language as modular. As with the refraction of light
through crystal that moves in differing directions at once, this modularity
generates polysemous routes through the poetry, linking and relinking its
parts in different ways. The idea of modularity is central to Guattari’s (2013: 2)
concept of machinic subjectivity, operable across a range of domains: ‘technical,
biological, semiotic, logical, abstract’. The machinic and its fundamental
modularity is thus support for ‘proto-subjective processes’ (2); that is, building
blocks are exposed that put subjectivity onto new lines of transformation. The
modular crystallizations identified in Joris’s poem likewise place reading onto
lines of continuous variation.
Polyphonic fabulous images
According to Guattari (2013, 225), ‘fabulous images’ form through dissimilar
universes of reference colliding and (referring to Bakhtin) entertaining ‘dialogic
relations’, their convergence ‘enlarging fields of virtuality’ and producing
‘a surplus value of sense, a supplement of singularity, an existential taking
consistency’. In the Meditations sequence a notable example of this process is the
fabulous image of the pocket. Through its mixture of heterogeneous components
as it repeats in different ways across the series, the image of the pocket becomes
a component of expression ensuring poems in the series constantly echo each
other. These echoes take place across a spectrum of references generated by the
image, transversally connected. In the first poem (Joris 2013: 13), what could be
an address to the reader instructs
take your hands out
of your pockets
the desert has no manners

but many pockets
which is no excuse for your

lack of know-how
when it comes to sharing this

last pinch of
hot sand & mica
hides as lint
in the pockets of
your heart
Different universes meet: the hands in pockets of bad manners and passivity,

the desert’s enigmatic ‘many pockets’, the ‘pockets of /your heart’ as space
of compassion and care. In subsequent poems the pocket combines further
elements; poem eleven (Joris 2013: 26) uses the image to consider comradeship,
evoking Robert Creeley’s notion of ‘the company’:
we will keep standing here
our hand in your pockets
always riffing even
if some of us
are spectral
comrades now,
In poem twenty-three (Joris 2013: 45), the pocket becomes an element of

profound ambivalence towards the notion of isolation, with personal and
geopolitical levels colliding:
an I in
iso elation
plays with itself
hands in pockets
it stands, not
yet endangered
species, endangering
isolato Americano
on the corner
of any desert-
ed street between
here & here
the pocket billiards

of empire: an isolation
The final poem in the sequence proclaims how Joris (2013: 87) ‘can finish
what I began’, yet this is opposed by the disconcerting refrain ‘the troops have
left /have the troops left’ that in fact confirms how
nothing ends for keeps
except the lives of those killed by

the bullets put money into
the pockets of those who

sold you the war, those who
never had their hands in

their (own) pockets those who
never stood in any desert except

their own hearts’ alkali wastes
& the lint in their pockets soaked

through with spent blood now
pulled from pockets & flicked

onto the desert’s
face, thousands of lives

stubbed out like Camel butts
(87–8)
The fabulous image of the pocket is a collective enunciation conjugating

disparate points of reference: the collective is understood not in terms of a
social grouping but as a heterogeneity constituted by components transversally
implicated with each other. An individual is composed of such arrangements,
a collectivity that is always in production. This polyphonic arrangement is
constructed from its own singular co-ordinates that ‘anchors human realities in
finitude’ (Guattari 2013: 5). At the same time, the arrangement is universal in its
transversality, in the way in which it ‘brings about the most dazzling transversals
between heterogeneous domains’ (5). However, Guattari insists that both the
level of modular crystallization and the level of fabulous image do not yet give
the subject ‘any hold on the creative process: neither from a position of passive
contemplation nor from a position of active orchestration’ (227).
Existential operators
At this level the poem becomes a process that ‘puts in place a new type of
enunciation and, as a consequence, a new subjective production’ (Guattari
2013: 228). It is a process Guattari refers to as ‘synaptic’ since it operates at
psychic and social levels simultaneously. According to Guattari, this process
takes place in Genet’s work through the ‘narrative graft of a religious origin’ onto
the fabulous image so that it functions autopoetically, entirely for itself, making
available a surplus of ‘processual power’ (229). An existential operation, in this
regard, marks an opening to the infinite; as synapse it ‘initiates a self-enunciative
procedure through its character as a caesura, as a-signifying catalysis’ (189).
Poem thirty- seven in the Meditations sequence functions as caesura,
breaking with the condensed syntactical ‘atomic constructions’ of the other
poems. In place of the prevailing two-line stanza structure of the series, stanzas
are longer and irregular in this poem, and the linguistic procedures and fabulous
images of the other levels of Joris’s processual praxis are absent. The rupture
in the dominant syntactical style of the Meditations marks the key synaptical
operation of the series: namely, the conjugation, which is this poem’s subject,
of the so-called strong criticism of medieval Arab literature with present-day
poetic concerns, which produces an opening to the maximum of transversality
within the Meditations sequence. According to Joris, ‘[T]‌he first great Modernist
push happened with the likes of Abu Nuwas in the 9th and 10th century in
Baghdad’ (Cockelbergh 2011: 171), so that there are ways to connect cultures
across time. This is a rejection of the Western narrative of progress; Joris states,
in fact, that ‘there is no progress’ (Cockelbergh 2011: 171). The opening out
of the poem (Joris 2013: 79) onto correspondences across geographical and
chronological boundaries is the existential operation that simultaneously affirms
the timelessness of the new:
maybe this means
that poetry is the beginning
and can therefore always only be
a break with what came before
a new rule, another splendour,
a lop-sided vowel, hiatus of

breath, slippery slope of
creation, clinamen, I make a mistake
means I made something, I made no
mistake means I made nothing,
slide down the sharp incline
a universe comes into being
where breath is altered,
& criticism always late, behind
the times, the dog that barks

after the caravan has passed –
This poem functions within the sequence of poems as an existential operation

producing surplus value: attuned to the particular correspondence of cultures
across time and space that Joris draws attention to, an opening is made to the
infinite possibility of ‘a break with what came before /a new rule, another
splendour’ that affirms a power of construction, that is, the possibility to get
a hold on the process of production of subjectivity. According to Guattari
(2013: 189), the existential operator marks the point after which ‘[s]‌omething
will never return’, the crossing of a threshold and institution of an irreversibility
of the process. The poem ends by insisting on the enduring significance of
medieval Arabic conceptions: ‘if you want to know how /to evaluate the poem
beyond the rhyme word’, the poem informs us, ‘turn to this verse /(a line of
poetry!) recited by Hassan ben Thabit’ (80). Significantly, the Arabic version is
printed first followed by the caveat that, according to Joris, it is impossible to
truly translate these words. Their directive takes us back to the material force of
language as pure sound: ‘Sing all poetry you recite /for singing is the test of poetry’
(80; original emphasis).
Language produces the real: Guattari (2000: 25) insists on the inseparability
between the ‘apprehension of a psychical fact’ and the ‘assemblage of enunciation
that engenders it’. A principle of uncertainty is then integral to any discursive
system, so that the truth or reality of any discursive claim is always authorized
‘secondarily’ and via what Guattari calls a ‘pseudo-narrative detour through
the annals of myth and ritual or through supposedly scientific accounts
[descriptions] –all of which have as their ultimate goal a dis-positional mise en
scène, a bringing-into-existence’ (25–6; original emphasis). We need to recognize
how poetry brings into existence a processual, singularizing, self-referencing
subjectivity. Guattari (1995a: 19) declares that
the task of the poetic function, in an enlarged sense, is to recompose artificially

rarefied, resingularised Universes of subjectivation. For them, it’s not a matter
of transmitting messages, investing images as aids to identification, patterns of
behaviour as props for modelisation procedures, but of catalysing existential
operators capable of acquiring consistence and persistence.
The significance of such a task would not be lost on Joris. In his Notes toward
a Nomadic Poetics he issues a warning germane to the demand here for a
movement out of the twentieth century’s ecological and existential shipwrecks
into resingularizations of a post-media era. That the twenty-first century must
bring with it the development and sustainment of processual practices that
incorporate, as Joris (2003: 55) puts it, the nomadic ‘art of moving & connecting
all /contents, all languages, all machines’ otherwise this century will amount to
nothing more than ‘the tail of the 20C /tail wagged by the 19C dog’. A central
concern of Guattari’s (2000: 29) later work is how environmental devastation
occurs alongside a narrowing of the production of processual and singularizing
subjectivity: it is not only plant and animal species that are vanishing but also
the ‘words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity’. Poetry and post-media
poetics has a role to play in resisting this destruction. Taken together, the
levels of processual praxis in Joris’s poetry put into play all the components of
processual subjectivity outlined by Guattari. Through the singular movements
and moments within and across levels, each level discloses the possibility of
the in-between. Therefore, post-media poetics can also be thought of as an
articulation of Guattari’s (2000: 19–20) ‘ecosophy’ put forward in his later work,
and the emphasis this gives to the importance of moving ‘between the three
ecological registers’ of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity
(emphasis added).
References
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ (2012), The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e).
Bernstein, Charles (1992), A Poetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cockelbergh, Peter (ed.) (2011), Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-Between,
Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi,
London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004), Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Continuum.
Guattari, Félix (1984), Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary

Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Guattari, Félix (1995a), Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power
Publications.
Guattari, Félix (1995b), Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton,
London: Continuum.
Guattari, Félix (2013), Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey,
London: Bloomsbury.
Holmes, Brian (2009), Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society,
Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum.
Joris, Pierre (2003), A Nomad Poetics, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Joris, Pierre (2009), Justifying the Margins, Cambridge: Salt.
Joris, Pierre (2013), Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj, Tucson,
AZ: Chax Press.
Joris, Pierre (2014), Barzakh. Poems 200–2012, Boston, MA: Black Widow Press.
Oppen, George (2008), New Collected Poems, New York: New Directions.
Part Two
Ecosophical Aesthetics,
‘UIQOSOPHY’ and
the Abstract Machine
6
UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-Of)

Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni
Philosopher? Kind of.
Psychoanalyst? Don’t you mean schizoanalyst?
Militant? When the occasion arises.

Filmmaker? Sorry?
How many Guattaris can the universe contain? Judging from attempts to pinhole
him, fewer than one might think. Perhaps it’s better to ask how many universes
there were (are, might be) in Guattari, how they are connected, what they can
produce.
Take a simple example: a patient in the course of treatment remains stuck on

a problem, going around in circles, and coming up against a wall. One day he
says, without giving it much thought: ‘I’ve been thinking of taking up driving
lessons again, I haven’t driven for years’; or, ‘I feel like learning word processing.’
A remark of this kind may remain unnoticed in a traditional conception of
analysis. However, this kind of singularity can become a key, activating a
complex refrain, which will not only modify the immediate behaviour of the
patient, but open up new fields of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with
long lost acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, regaining selfconfidence . . . In
this, a rigid neutrality or non-intervention would be negative; it’s sometimes
necessary to jump at the opportunity, to approve, to run the risk of being wrong,
to give it a go, to say, ‘yes, perhaps this experience is important.’ Respond to the
event as the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference.
(Guattari 1995: 17–18)
I am a writer and psychoanalyst, director of a psychiatric clinic that uses methods

of Institutional Psychotherapy.
Now I would like to direct what, at least in appearance, will be a science-fiction

film. This, no doubt requires some preliminary explanation.
A Love of UIQ, the screenplay I present here, is neither an autobiographical film

nor an essay film, though it closely relates to my conception of psychoanalysis.
Years spent practising a psychotherapy of psychoses have led me to question

traditional definitions of the unconscious, which treat it as a separate realm of
the psyche, cut off from the social field or from artistic creation and accessible
only to specialists . . .
The key thing for me in an analytic procedure, therefore, is to forge an original

system of expression, a specific cartography suited to the singular figure of a
subjective problem . . .
In this film I wish to explore a theorem about the current status of subjectivity,
which posits that it consists of two kinds of components that are always
intermingled:
1) An ‘ego’ subjectivity, crystallized upon individual characters living in a kind of

commune and who, though apparently normal, might be regarded as castaways
of a new type of cosmic catastrophe, one that is at the same time present and
potential, imaginary and real, and whose current presence draws its strength
solely from its ability to empty the future of all consistency . . .
2) A machinic subjectivity –hyper-intelligent and yet irredeemably infantile

and regressive –framed in an entity called UIQ, Univers Infra-quark (the Infra-
quark Universe), that has no fixed limits and no consistent persona nor a clear
psycho-logical or sexual orientation. (Guattari 2016: 53–8)
This story is pure science-fiction, beginning with a seemingly inert object,

a file, buried in a remote archive, miles from anywhere yet harbouring strange
powers, emanating an eerie fluorescent light, an energy field that will contaminate
the few who happen to lay eyes upon it, penetrate under the skin and work its
way up into the brain, insinuate itself into neural networks and take hold of the
decision-making apparatus through sheer force of will.
At least that’s how Félix Guattari might have imagined it. This is no doubt
the effect he wanted the document to have when he presented it to the decision-
makers at the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) in 1987, hoping
for the state funding that would enable him to produce the film of which
this screenplay was the blueprint, A Love of UIQ. Of course the idea that a
militant schizoanalyst like Guattari might persuade a government funding
body to bankroll a science-fiction movie, a film that Guattari, with no previous
UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-Of) 129
filmmaking experience (in lieu of a filmography, the CV he attached to the

application contained ‘references’ to his being under police investigation during
the Algerian war, his involvement in free radio and the 1977 Bologna uprisings
and his links with the Italian Autonomia movement), was proposing to direct
himself, was in itself pure science-fiction.
To say nothing of the pitch for the film included in the document, which set out
such goals as exploring cinema’s capacities as ‘a tool for producing subjectivities’
or bringing to the screen the complex relation between ‘individualized and
machinic components’, filming the various ‘becomings’ (child, woman, animal,
multiple, invisible) undergone by a group of characters who, despite their veneer
of normality, were to be considered ‘castaways of a new cosmic catastrophe’
(Guattari 2016). A catastrophe, Guattari specifies, ‘that is at the same time
present and potential, imaginary and real, and whose current presence draw
its strength solely from its ability to empty the future of all consistency.’ The
funding commission might have been forgiven for confusing parts of Guattari’s
director’s statement with dialogue from the script itself. As though, through
a kind of semiotic seepage, Guattari the director had instead become one of
the characters. The screenplay of A Love of UIQ had reached out to engulf its
inventor, retro-fictionalizing him, casting him in the role of visionary leader of
this band of cosmic castaways.
But how are we to specifically locate Guattari’s own interests in, and
approaches to, science-fiction? How might they relate to his other published
writings and his multiple roles in post-1968 French intellectual and political
life? How can we contextualize his desire to be a filmmaker, his need to passer
à l’acte? First, it’s worth considering that before Guattari began writing the first
of several drafts of the UIQ screenplay, he had already made a couple of notable
attempts at screenwriting. In the first of these, Projet de film au sujet des radios
libres,1 written around 1977, the events shadow Radio Alice’s brief disruption of
the state’s radio broadcasting monopoly in the year of the Bologna uprisings. In
Guattari’s film, the action is shifted from Bologna to Turin, where Radio Galaxie
is broadcasting in the midst of battles between protesters and police, relaying
signals from the barricade strewn, tear-gas stained streets of the city. The film
follows the errances of Elena and her ‘schizoid’ companion Ugo as they try to
reach the station headquarters, hitching a ride with a disillusioned stockbroker
who quickly falls under the charming Elena’s spell.
One interesting aspect of this short –which Guattari imagined shooting on
video in a loose, semi-improvised style, akin to that of Alberto Grifi –is the
resonance he sets up between Radio Galaxie and the mindset of Ugo, neither
of which recognizes any clear boundary between the sender and receiver. The
permeability of the schizoid body as an indeterminate zone between inside and
outside already constitutes one of the conditions of collective enunciation. In
his director’s notes, Guattari explains how he wanted to use one of the earliest
portable video cameras invented by his friend Jean- Pierre Beauviala. This
camera, he implies, would permit a light, ‘free’ cinema shot in the midst of
events, capturing real-life processes while allowing space for improvisation and
simplifying the workflow from filming to editing.
In Guattari’s film, the radio station becomes the polyphonic mouthpiece of
a hydra-headed movement that the state must try to frame as an alien invader
to be repelled, sending tanks into the streets to crush the uprising in scenes
resembling a War of the Worlds type scenario. Free radio was a potential danger
that had to be suppressed (Radio Alice was violently shut down in a police raid
in March 1977) because it interfered not only with the official narrative of events
but with the discursive framework that assigned the positions that regulated
the speech of the social body. What was at stake here might be considered a
hegemonic struggle over definitions of the human and of the alien. One might
think of the ambivalent strategy of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre enacting
H. G. Wells’s fable as though it were actually happening, insinuating its alien
panic virus into a narcotizing stream of light entertainment by claiming to
represent the voice of the nation under attack, seemingly defenceless against
a superior power –a form of subversive mimicry that proved to be extremely
effective and would doubtless no longer be permissible. However, for Radio
Alice and the free radio movement in general, the task was much more difficult.
It is one thing to imitate or parody the state’s monologue, which ‘always has our
ear’ in the sense that we are ideologically conditioned to orientate ourselves by
its centrality. It’s quite another to reorient listeners and convince them that they
(that we) were the embodiment of an autonomous, creative ‘human life’ that is
effectively being assailed, controlled or suppressed by the cold, alien hand of
the state’s ideological and repressive apparatus –a scenario in which the army’s
armoured personnel carriers might come to be viewed as invading spacecraft
from a hostile planet.
Autonomist politics, liberating itself from a crippling representative
framework, was already a kind of science- fiction, since it concerned the
emergence and nurturing of new forms of life, ways of speaking, producing
and relating to one another. As a voice from Radio Galaxie declaims (quoting
an actual transmission from Radio Alice), in an inventive sequence where
the broadcast would be transmitted through the car radio while filming took
place in the middle of urban riots: ‘To con-spire means to breathe together
and this is what we are accused of. They want to stifle our breath because we
have refused to breathe in isolation, each in their own asphyxiating workplace,
their individualized family unit, their atomizing domicile.’2 The Bakhtinian
polyphony of Radio Alice and other free radio stations resulted both from the
fact that they were many-voiced –constituting a media platform from which
anyone could potentially speak –and that they briefly fostered modes of speech
and of DJ-ing that were multiple, gleefully trampling on the fences erected by
institutions and identitarian microfascisms between different discursive fields
and areas of expertise. Politics, poetry, philosophy, rock, history, news from the
street and from the factory floor, jokes, experimental music, erotic literature,
militant songs, children’s games, fairytales, free jazz were brought together in a
movement of what Guattari would later refer to as machinic heterogenesis.
Could cinema, still a major force in the moulding of subjectivity with its
mechanisms of projection and identification, attain a similar level of collective
enunciation? Could one make a film on free radio that would also be a ‘radio
film’, as well as a ‘radiology’ of society’s hidden, suppressed or divided forces,
without falling into the trap of a hypostatized representation? Jean-Luc Godard
had already attempted something of the sort in Le Gai Savoir (1969) and Un
film comme les autres (1968), both of which flirted with expanded notions of
radio or TV broadcasting. In these films, footage of demonstrations, accounts of
historical struggles, citations from writers and philosophers of different epochs
and recordings of present-day events are presented on a single plane of ‘current
affairs’ reporting. In the former case these are intercut with the musings of actors
(Juliet Berto and Jean Pierre-Léaud, who would become a close friend of Guattari)
set adrift like molecules of protohumanity in some pre–big bang cosmic night or
interviews with children (anticipating the format of France/Tour/Détour/Deux/
Enfants), while in the latter they form a counterpoint to protracted discussions
between workers and students on the impasses of May 1968.
Le Gai Savoir in particular, through the sonic persistence of burbling and
buzzing short-wave interference patterns, evokes the potentially intergalactic
horizons of radio signals traversing space and time, secreting within their
stochastic flux the alien tongues of revolutionary theory. However, these
experiments, when not banned from wider circulation, were quickly ghettoized
(even and especially by militant circles) as a type of eccentric and self-indulgent
intellectual posturing, destined for extinction. Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part,
they remain, like most of Godard’s experiments of the 1970s, as broken paths,
untravelled byways of the history of cinema.
Yet perhaps Guattari (1996: 262–72), a stranger to the ‘auteurial’ prerogatives

that continued to haunt Godard’s cinema even as he relinquished his own
signature during the Dziga Vertov Group period, was more tuned into the
collective dimension of enunciation to which free radio gave concrete form,
and with this short film was already projecting an alternative destiny for a
‘minor cinema’ to come, as an affective relay of what he would later call the
Post-Media Era:
An essential condition for succeeding in the promotion of a new planetary

consciousness would thus reside in our collective capacity for the recreation of
value systems that would escape the moral, psychological and social lamination
of capitalist valorization, which is only centered on economic profit. The joy
of living, solidarity, and compassion with regard to others, are sentiments that
are about to disappear and that must be protected, enlivened, and propelled
in new directions. Ethical and aesthetic values do not arise from imperatives
and transcendent codes. They call for an existential participation based on an
immanence that must be endlessly reconquered. How do we create or expand
upon such a universe of values? . . .
The suggestive power of the theory of information has contributed to masking

the importance of the enunciative dimensions of communication. It leads us
to forget that a message must be received, and not just transmitted, in order to
have meaning. Information cannot be reduced to its objective manifestations;
it is, essentially, the production of subjectivity, the becoming-consistent of
incorporeal universes . . . The current crisis of the media and the opening up of a
Post-media Era are the symptoms of a much more profound crisis. What I want
to emphasize is the fundamentally pluralist, multi-centered, and heterogeneous
character of contemporary subjectivity, in spite of the homogenization it
is subjected to by the mass media. In this respect, an individual is already a
‘collective’ of heterogeneous components. A subjective phenomenon refers to
personal territories –the body, the self –but also, at the same time, to collective
territories –the family, the community, the ethnic group. And to that must
be added all the procedures for subjectivation embodied in speech, writing,
computing, and technological machines.
In another remarkable sequence of Guattari’s free radio script, where the

car was to have become a sort of mobile camera traversing urban space –as it
does in the long driving sequences of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s
History Lessons –negotiating barricades and demonstrators struggling in a fog
of teargas, Elena gets out of the car to look for a phone to transmit a report to
Radio Galaxie. We see her silhouette from a distance, in a public phone box, as
the sound of her voice comes through the car radio. The idea is again to film
the street in real-time with the radio as its soundtrack. In this way, the fictional
scenario could potentially be insinuated directly in the flux of events, while the
‘industrial’ timescale of cinema production could be circumvented thanks to
the lightness of the equipment and a crew working outside the structures of
professionalization.
Compared to the events of 1968, a wider ‘radiology’ of 1977 would have
mapped a more disjunctive convergence of emancipatory energies. While in Italy
the Autonomia movement was reclaiming life from the Fordist factory regime,
in Britain, where molecular political shifts tend to find their most immediate
expression (and recuperation) in pop culture, punk had unleashed the dystopian
refrain of ‘no future’. As Berardi (2009: 93) writes:
The 1977 movement –in its colourful and creative Italian version and in its
British one as well, which was punk, gothic and disturbing –was founded on
one intuition: desire is the determining field for every social mutational process,
every transformation of the imagination, every shift of collective energy. It is
only as a manifestation of desire that we can understand the workers’ refusal
of the wage relation, of conforming their lives to the timing of the assembly
line, realized through absenteeism and sabotage . . . The workers’ disaffection for
industrial labour, based on a critique of hierarchy and repetition, took energies
away from capital, towards the end of the 1970s. All desires were located outside
capital, attracting forces that were distancing themselves from its domination.
Yet perhaps it is overstating the matter somewhat to say that ‘all desires’ were
outside of capital. Certainly the massive popularity in the same year of Star Wars
would suggest otherwise. As well as effectively bringing to an end the political
aspirations of the New-Hollywood auteurs, this fable of supposedly popular
rebellion against imperial domination was symptomatic of another more
sinister ‘no future’ to come, that of postmodernism and its implicit rejection
of modernism’s ‘progressive’ historical narrative. In the guise of science-fiction,
a genre for a long time allied to or foreshadowing the trajectory of modernity,
Star Wars presented a retrogressive fairytale of the triumph of US-style Western
individualism and its harnessing of the eternal, immaterial force of capital, while
the vaguely medieval aristocratic genealogy of the Jedi knights hinted at the
emerging corporate neo-feudalist aspect of its imminent restoration.
Around 1979, two years after Projet de film au sujet des radios libres, Guattari
began a collaboration with the independent American filmmaker Robert
Kramer, who was later to become an important creative partner in the genesis
of UIQ. Kramer had recently settled in France, after completing Scenes from the
Class Struggle in Portugal, and Guattari was a great admirer of his movies Ice
(1969) and Milestones (1975), both of which resonated with what he had written
on the subject of group micropolitics. While Ice posed the question of the
potential molar rigidity affecting militant movements engaged in armed struggle,
Milestones traced the mutation and dispersion of countercultural energies
towards more molecular, intimate and self-seeking roads of emancipation, while
at the same time seeking to situate US freedom struggles within a more complex
and contradictory historical framework.
Together, Guattari and Kramer sketched out an idea for a film on the
Italian Autonomia movement, Latitante, about two Italian women fugitives
with a child in tow, gone to ground in France. The outline for the film drew
upon Guattari’s ongoing involvement in helping radical Italian intellectuals
find refuge in France after being scapegoated as the cattivi maestri of the
movement. But equally important was Kramer’s desire to capture the day-to-
day reality of the Autonomists’ lived experience. With the mounting repression
of protests and the arbitrary persecution of militant figures came a need for a
more underground, molecular politics. The atmosphere of heightened paranoia,
together with a growing sense of exhaustion and ambivalence towards collective
action, not surprisingly gave rise to cinematic narratives of flight, dissembling
and disappearance. But it was also a time of great solidarity and friendship,
as a letter from a mysterious Jean in prison (possibly Genet), included in the
Latitante film dossier, testifies:
Resistance has isolation inherent in it. You are opposing yourself, your fragile
mind and delicate body, to the enormous weight of things- as-
they-
are,
conditions systematically defended by vast power. As an individual you crash
into all the traditional bonds and codes and networks that are the matrix of
things-as-they-are.
If you are alone (I’m sure we will be alone from period to period –this right now
is a lucky time!) it takes every ounce of will to survive, to stay sane, to not break
(or foolishly try to break out!).
And in this context the bonds among resisters grow and deepen. They have to, it
is the secret glue, the secret fire, it is a source of energy that unites and sustains
the strivers. Sometimes I feel the ideas as such are sitting on top of this volcano.
We cannot as yet formulate and systematize the fires raging deep inside this
land. They manifest themselves directly in the behaviour, in feelings. But the
time will come when we understand what is happening here, and see that we
have given birth to a whole, different way of seeing and experiencing things; that
we have given birth to a new body of ideas. (Guattari 2012: 295–311)
Promising an uneasy, yet alluring melding of fiction and documentary, Latitante,

which was to star Pasolini’s icon Laura Betti as one of the women fugitives, with
Guattari and Kramer themselves in supporting roles, would have an interesting
addition to the cycle of films –from Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979)
and Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981) to Godard’s great sequence of Sauve qui
peut (la vie), Passion and Prénom Carmen –that was to mark a kind of drawn-out
Schwanengesang of post-1968 political cinema in Europe. And indeed, perhaps
at this stage Guattari and Kramer’s idea of a new kind of molecular political
cinema was preparing its own flight, looking for a ‘safe house’ where it could go
to ground and regroup its forces.
In the poetically pragmatic opening notes to the film dossier (the style is
obviously Kramer’s), Guattari and Kramer lay out their proposed approach to
filming the fugitives’ world:
This movie is not an exercise in search of an interpretation. On the other hand,

its very basis is an assumption about the complexity, the very ambiguity of its
subject. We can think of our approach to the subject as that of a laboratory
technician taking samples of cells from different organs of the organism. Or as a
radiologist taking X-rays from each relevant angle:
X-rays of the chest show shadowy bones,

a ghostly heart,
all the strands of an organism of great capacity
efficiently compressed into two dimensions.
Only intimacy knows this thick blood
forcing through its channel,
livening, lightening human dreams,
the hot secret food
that carries in its spiral codes
the lessons of all our striving ancestors. (Guattari 2012: 295–311)
Immediately striking are the references to scientific investigation and experiment,

particularly in the field of microbiology, as well as the implied search for a
revolutionary genetic code transmitted down through the ages. It is under these
circumstances that we can imagine the autonomist ‘cells’ of a radio-logical film
begin to change into bacteriological ones, the chloroplasts of a mutant strain of
phytoplankton functioning as a relay to what would emerge as the Infra-quark
Universe: UIQ.
This genre shift was also symptomatic of a larger reorientation of the political
imaginary between the late 1970s and early 1980s which, following the repression
of social struggles on the ground, seemed to undergo a gradual detachment
from the world and its material conditions towards more remote horizons of the
possible. In many films of this period, the unconscious mourning and yearning
for other forms of life briefly promised by the countercultural revolution, was
re-projected in infantilizing, conservative terms of a transcendental, even
messianic, horizon of benevolent extra-terrestrial visitors and alien intelligences
(Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.) or more subversively transformed into
horrified fascination, whether with a monstrous other (Alien), viral contagion
(Shivers, Rabid) or mutations in subjectivity produced by technology and media
(Videodrome).
In A Love of UIQ, however, the alien intelligence would take the form of
an invisible, infinitely minute universe that is already immanent, present as a
potential force at the quantum level of the infra-quark –insisting as a kind of a
dark matter that simply requires an adequate relay to be able to manifest itself
and insinuate its way into the organic life and machinic arrangements of our
planet. At the beginning of the film, this universe is no more than a faint signal
in a sample of mutant cyanobacteria that chronobiologist Axel has managed to
smuggle out of a laboratory in Brussels. Wanted for acts of ‘terrorism’ (the radio
and TV interference caused by UIQ’s early signals are immediately identified as
such), he escapes to Frankfurt with the help of an American journalist. The film’s
opening scene sees their hijacked Piper Malibu touching down in a field, whose
‘blackened clumps of earth absorb the colour of the frost that covers them in
patches’. The landscape is ‘glacial, bloodless, bathed in a strange inconsistency’.
We are in the middle of the winter years. In a disco-bar on the edge of town, Axel
meets Janice, a punkish young DJ, who offers the two of them shelter in a squat
she shares with a motley crew of outsiders. They help Axel re-establish contact
with the universe he has discovered –from here on dubbed UIQ –and following
its instructions patch together a complex multi-screen interface to translate its
signals into words, sounds and images with which it can communicate.
Part of the inventiveness of A Love of UIQ lies in the way Guattari deploys the
squat scenario to recast his own transversal practice –with its mix of clinical,
political, philosophical and aesthetic components –in terms of a multilayered
fabulation. The disused factory/squat where contact is once again made with
UIQ, peopled by its odd mix of social outcasts (the aforementioned castaways
of a new cosmic catastrophe), constitutes a heterogeneous, idiorhythmic milieu
bearing certain similarities to the psychic economy of the La Borde clinic, while
the disturbances that UIQ’s signals cause in Hertzian waves slyly reference the
subversive activities of the free radio activists Guattari had met in Italy.
In several virtuoso sequences, Axel, described as an amateur acrobat ‘whose
body, when he launches it into the air, evokes the way UIQ turns towards
humanity’, slips gratuitous gymnastic feats, reminiscent of those in Blade Runner,
into his conversation in a manner that suggests a whole new possible cinematic
choreography of body, voice and language.3 Then there is the question of UIQ’s
own machinic ‘body’ and subjectivity which, having no form, no temporal and
spatial limits, nor a stable sense of identity, tends to parasite existing forms of
life and machines, infiltrating the minds and bodies of its hosts and plaguing
communications systems with its interference and scrambling of codes.
However, it isn’t long before UIQ begins to manifest itself as a disembodied
proto-facial diagram composed of three black holes, an image that haunts TV
screens and can appear indiscriminately in the sky, pools of water, the movement
of crowds or the flight of birds. The process of subjectivation it undergoes in
the squat effectively lures UIQ into adopting more human personality traits.
Though it continues to constitute a deterritorialized field of contamination,
affecting machines, communications systems and living organisms, UIQ also
acquires distinct characteristics, a bearing, a voice, a manner of speech (eerily
close to Guattari’s own). Its discovery or invention of a sense of self, thanks to the
nurturing guidance of Janice, who informs it about sexuation and identity, causes
it to fall in love with her and provokes fits of jealous rage when she occasionally
abandons her role as its teacher for more tangible physical pleasures with Axel.
As Janice steers it towards a limiting, potentially dangerous sense of hetero-
normative male self-identity, the girl becomes the object of its fatal passion, an
impossible love that will have catastrophic consequences for them both and for
the planet. Its attempts to conquer her take on a surrealistic dimension when it/
he tries to incarnate itself as a man, only to find the embodied self becoming a
physical rival for her affections.
In a sense, UIQ is nothing more than the formless betweenness that connects
its numerous botched avatars and subtly alters relationships among the
squat’s residents, many of whom develop their own singular rapports with the
universe: Manou, a precocious and highly independent child apparently without
parents; Steeve, a burnt-out computer scientist; Eric, a schizoid young man (a
development from Ugo in the free-radio script) with a penchant for washing
machines; and, crucially, Janice herself, who travels from a punkishly impertinent
university dropout and amateur DJ to a figure of tragic grandeur, a cyborg Joan
of Arc, the shell to UIQ’s ghost. Her sudden disappearance, following a raid on
the squat by an anti-terrorist task force, condemns the bereft UIQ to an infinite –
because it is bodiless –pain, and unleashes his rage in the form of a plague of
genetic mutation, turning huge numbers of people into semi-amphibians who
are in constant need of watering. Only when Janice returns and agrees to have the
UIQ virus implanted into her brain does the plague end. However, the cerebral
merger with UIQ brings with it an undesired immortality, as she discovers when
subsequently attempting suicide in the last scene of the film.
But before this, much of the central part of A Love of UIQ explores the effects
the Infra-quark Universe and the squatters have on each other and on the
outside world, an attunement process that gives rise to a bizarre choreography
of inexplicable gestures, actions and micro-events where we are never quite sure
who or what is the cause, where one will or desire ends and another begins.4
Everything seems to take place in an elastic, indeterminate space of tragicomic
burlesque where it is impossible to make any clear distinction between subjects
and objects of perception, vision or sensation. Hence the film’s bizarre, unsettled
tonality, the way it tries to release the semiotic delirium that subtends science-
fiction cinema from the signifying structures (story, psychology, clearly
individuated characters etc.) that reinforce normative patterns of desire.
A number of the film’s elaborate set-piece scenes enchain actions and affects
that veer wildly across registers and genre boundaries and that, like UIQ, seem
to have no sense of measure or proportion. A potential air disaster at a crowded
beach resort, caused by UIQ’s interferences, is envisioned with the mixture of
dreamy wonder and gleeful malevolence of a child’s game, only to then mutate
into a mixture of surreal comedy and poetic suspension, as though a scene from
Ivan’s Childhood had drifted onto the set of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.
Elsewhere, sexual decorum is radically overturned when a traumatized UIQ’s
disembodied black- hole diagram of a face, appearing on several different
screens, assists like a disgruntled baby at a primal scene of ‘parental’ congress
between Janice and Axel, and at the same time is wracked by their physical
sensations, resulting in a desperate animal cry whose unbearable intensity is
relayed through the petrified body of Eric, perched like a Greek statue on a chair,
and the antics of a screaming monkey that in the end defecates on his shirt. In a
later scene, we ‘see’ UIQ on one screen engaged in intimate dialogue with Janice,
while on another it gives precise instructions to Manou on how to prepare a
deadly cocktail to give to a tramp she is afraid of who dwells in the recesses of
the squat, distantly evoking a scene in Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero in which
Edmund’s unrepentant Nazi schoolteacher convinces him to poison his weak
father.
As the film progresses, we have the feeling of snatched intensive fragments

from an eclectic repertoire of cinéphile references, from Close Encounters to
Theorem, Blade Runner to Mauvais Sang, being re-fashioned as components of a
more unruly, deterritorializing machine, one in which the elements of voice, body
and face undergo a startling recomposition, a world where Godard, Tarkovsky
and Fellini trade ideas with Cronenberg, Carpenter and Lynch. Although we
will probably never know what form A Love of UIQ would take on screen, it’s
tempting to imagine certain sequences being close to silent cinema –which, in
Guattari’s view, was much more successful than sound cinema in expressing the
intensities of desire in relation to the social field, since the signifying script (and
with it the individualizing forces of capitalism) had not yet taken possession
of the image –even within the spectacular tropes of a sci-fi blockbuster. The
relationship between different regimes of cinematic image is by no means clear.
It is a question of how desire flows and is channelled both within and between
the regimes. As Guattari (2009: 245–6) wrote in 1977, in one of his most lucid
texts on cinema as minor art:
Desire is constituted before the crystallization of the body and the organs, before
the division of the sexes, before the separation between the familiarized self and
the social field. It is enough to observe children, the insane, and the primitive
without prejudice in order to understand that desire can make love with humans
as well as with flowers, machines, or celebrations. It does not respect the ritual
games of the war between the sexes: it is not sexual, it is transsexual . . . I must
say of cinema that it can be both the machine of eros, i.e. the interiorization of
repression, and the machine of liberated desire. There is no political cinema on
the one hand and an erotic cinema on the other. Cinema is political whatever its
subject; each time it represents a man, a woman, a child, or an animal, it takes
sides in the micro class struggle that concerns the reproduction of models of
desire.
The real repression of cinema is not centered on erotic images; it aims above all at
imposing a respect for dominant representations and models used by the power
to control and channel the desire of the masses. In every production, in every
sequence, in every frame, a choice is made between a conservative economy
of desire and a revolutionary breakthrough. The more a film is conceived and
produced according to the relations of production, or modelled on capitalist
enterprise, the more chance there is of participating in the libidinal economy
of the system. Yet no theory can furnish the keys to a correct orientation in this
domain. One can make a film having life in a convent as its theme that puts the
revolutionary libido in motion; one can make a film in defence of revolution
that is fascist from the point of view of the economy of desire. In the last resort,
what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane is not the words and
the contents of ideas, but essentially asignifying messages that escape dominant
semiologies.
In this sense the script of A Love of UIQ constitutes a somewhat paradoxical,

quasi-object. Rather than providing the coherent structure required for it to be
green-lighted for production, it opens up a problematic field that promises to
undermine the codes of mainstream spectacle while saving (or spending) the
a-signifying delirium that subtends it, which it hopes to place in the service of
another economy of desire. But because of this wild semiotic expenditure, it can
never settle upon a specific code of its own. Like UIQ itself, Guattari’s film resists
hypostatization in a stable form or identity.
This shifting, unsettled quality, figured in UIQ’s own problems of embodiment,
of finding a form it can inhabit, traverses the development of Guattari’s script,
which evolved through three very different versions. With UIQ, Guattari
invented something that surpassed, or passed under, its proposed frame of
representation, an infra-cinema that despite, or perhaps on account of, its
remaining unmade, insists by way of a kind of intermittent pulsation. In this
sense, the three successive revisions of the screenplay can almost be read as
records of an overall pattern of UIQ’s own manifestations and disappearances.
In the first version, co-written with Kramer, much of the action takes place
in a hi-tech hippie commune somewhere in the eastern United States. It appears
that Guattari originally intended Kramer to direct the film, and that he wanted
to produce it in Hollywood. The fact that Guattari sent a copy to the office of
Michael Phillips, the producer of Taxi Driver and Close Encounters who, though
intrigued by some of the ideas, deemed the project ‘too political’ for the United
States,5 shows that his aim at this point was to make the film as minor cinema
on a major scale. Perhaps he and Kramer were hoping to subvert the Hollywood
machine from within, liberating spectacular images and sounds from the
normalizing shackles of conventional narrative by pushing those narrative
devices to an absurd extreme (and with the risk of falling into parody). Their
differences in approach to the story are nonetheless striking. While Guattari
insists on the importance of the collective milieu as a territory for experimenting
with processes of subjectivation –a territory that would additionally enable
him to further scramble the codes of cinematic representation through the
insinuation of elements of performance, dance, installation and video art –
Kramer imagines the whole story taking place in flashback from the point where
UIQ has already merged with the girl’s consciousness, as a kind of fragmented,
psychogenic fugue.
A second, unfinished version of the script transfers the action to a France of
the near future, where an integrated Tativille-style complex of shopping, media,
banking, sports, entertainment and social rehabilitation facilities –all accessed
by digitally encoded personal swipe cards –sets out the coordinates of a nascent
control society amid the emerging networked infrastructures of Mitterand’s
Paris, while as we have seen, the third and final draft –the most underground
in style –set in Frankfurt, alludes to the TAZ and the squat culture of the 1980s
Germany and to the dystopian post-punk aesthetic of films such as Muscha’s
Decoder (1984) or Ossang’s L’affaire des Divisions Morituri (1985). Nonetheless,
more than to any specific cultural context or regime of representation, UIQ seems
to pertain to the realm of contagion and contamination. Its existential dilemma
lies in the continual translation of the unknown language of its universe into a
series of unstable forms, none of which can be final. In quantum terms, wave
function has it over particle, process over product.
Postscript: towards an ecosophy of the unmade
It’s often the smallest scraps of evidence that are the most intriguing. The
derisory, orphaned fragment is where desire is most likely to arise. Take this
letter from Félix Guattari to Michelangelo Antonioni that we came across in the
Guattari (2012: 319–20) archives:
Dear Sir,
I asked our mutual friend Ugo Amati to send you the outline of a science-fiction
screenplay I’ve written, A Love of UIQ. I would really appreciate it if you had
the time to read it and it would be a great joy for me if you should be interested
in becoming involved. I’ve merely unfolded some key ideas that will have to be
developed in more detail. Should the project be of interest to you I would be
more than happy to meet you to discuss it in person.
Yours sincerely,
Félix Guattari
We don’t know whether Guattari ever sent the letter, nor when it might have been
written. Why would he have kept a copy? But as Axel says in the UIQ screenplay,
‘What happens to communications isn’t necessarily the most important thing.’
So we decided to treat it as a signal, a transmission from some far galaxy to

another, possibly even more remote, that got lost in the quantum post.
One thing is more or less certain. While Guattari began working on his
screenplay, Antonioni was completing what would be his last major film for the
cinema, Identification of a Woman. In the final scene we see the protagonist,
a filmmaker navigating between a creative crisis and a stalled relationship,
facing the sun, finally relaxed, dreaming of a science-fiction film, an exploratory
voyage into the heart of the solar furnace that, he hopes, will reveal mysteries of
the universe. The idea is visually resumed in a deceptive lo-tech special effects
sequence showing the spaceship –a converted asteroid –being sucked into the
sun’s pulsing, yellow-orange deliquescence. As it recedes from view, the asteroid’s
twin engines appear to stare back at us like two slightly comical black-hole
eye-sockets that eventually solarize into what look like the slits of a settecento
Venetian half-mask. The asteroid-ship then vanishes into the sun’s yellow core
that gradually reveals itself as a ghostly impression of an eye in extreme close-up.
A meditation on the conditions, possibilities and limits of seeing and knowing,
of vision and the visible, the film might well have struck a chord with Guattari
and his ideas about an invisible alien intelligence from a subatomic realm smaller
even than quarks, though he was likely also thinking of L’Avventura and the way
its disappeared central character, the palindromic Anna, continues to dominate
the film in her absence, like a kind of affective weather.
The prospect of a collaboration between Guattari and Antonioni is
tantalizing, opening onto yet another possible avenue of UIQ’s transformation.
But fascinating as these lost horizons may be, it was the simple act of reading
the screenplay, when we discovered it in the IMEC Archives, that made the film
already exist for us, as though by a kind of contamination. And this was in a
way entirely consistent with the nature of UIQ, an entity with no clear limits in
time or space that comes into being only through its parasiting and imitation
of already existing forms of matter and energy. By the time we published the
script in France in 2012 with Éditions Amsterdam, in a volume we designed and
edited ourselves and wrote in collaboration with psychoanalyst Isabelle Mangou,
in which we also included the early film projects, as well as notes, production
documents and fragments of Guattari’s exchanges with Kramer, we had projected
the film in our heads countless times. Nonetheless the cineastes in us wouldn’t
let it lie, even if we may have felt the script was inherently unfilmable. But how
to convey something of this flickering vision and of UIQ’s own instability and
intermittence? Perhaps by finding ways to ‘produce’ the film and manifest its
universe without actually filming it.
An essay by Pasolini (1988: 187–96), ‘The Screenplay as a Structure That

Wants to be Another Structure’, suggests that an unmade screenplay can
constitute a genre of writing in its own right, one that potentially offers the
reader a more active and collaborative role than does the novel. But who is to
say that a screenplay is merely a structure, or that its desire of becoming leans
solely in the direction of the film to be? Especially in the case of a screenplay
containing an entity such as UIQ, might it not also desire other forms of being?
So instead of trying to film Guattari’s script, we set about conceiving a number
of manifestations of the Infra- quark Universe (performance, radio trailer,
installation, fabulation, rumour . . .) that would function through the years in the
manner of a relay: each partially taken up by others and given a new twist. They
eventually led to an experimental essay film, In Search of UIQ (2013), which
formed something of a cartography of this spatiotemporal continuum of non-
realization. As the title suggests, the film is a search, and as such it remains in
that zone of uncertainty, in the towardness of what Pasolini calls the note-book
film. Not towards a film.
However, the script still seemed to require further investigation, its almost
thirty years of lost time called for a more collective vision of its infra-possibilities
(and perhaps still does). In a series of workshops held in seven European cities,
to which we gave the name seeances, we extended the idea of the film as a process,
looking at Guattari’s screenplay in a way that reflected UIQ’s own predicament as
an entity whose becoming has to be negotiated through ongoing translation and
transduction. We considered how the subject of A Love of UIQ folded upon the
question of the script’s unending desire to become a film, or perhaps something
else. Transduction can refer to any process by which a biological cell converts
one kind of a signal or stimulus into another. More specifically, it concerns the
transfer of viral, bacterial, or both bacterial and viral DNA, from one cell to
another using a bacteriophage vector.6 The idea here was to make Guattari’s
film exist by a process of contamination, with the screenplay functioning as a
cinebacteriological vector, transferring the film and the Infra-quark Universe
in potentia to a community of seers or ‘envisionaries’. Rather than a cinematic
production that would reduce the indeterminate matter of UIQ to a specific set
of representations, exploitable as a spectacle, the film would come into being
through its unworking or worklessness,7 as a living process of variations.
These temporary communities (in a vague mirroring of the squat dwellers
who make contact with UIQ) gathered around the screenplay and welcomed UIQ
into their systems through the medium of the script, envisioning the film and
the universe it unveils in relation to the specific cultural, political and linguistic
context of their own existence and desires, their fabulated histories and futures,
sometimes transposing the script’s characters, actions and events to the present
day. The work of transduction added further complexity to the process by which
a written screenplay is normally translated to the screen. By conflating the roles
of writer/director/actor and viewer, the envisionary communities were able to
expand the territories of the film both from within and without, multiplying its
narrative and affective folds, blurring the borders between the actual and virtual
projection. Which also meant that the UIQ effect might have been there in the
room, with and between the participants. People would start to feel the space and
each other’s presence differently, their tone of voice would change, something
in the atmosphere shifted, though it was difficult and perhaps undesirable to
identify exactly what this consisted in.
Our sense of time, but also of purpose and of efficacy, would change during
these sessions, which became like zones of autonomous temporality in which
the unknown quantity and intensity of vision displaced and devalued the
currency of knowledge. And as we went on with the seeances, we began to
realize we didn’t need to rely so heavily on the script itself. Sometimes just the
suggestion of a situation or scene was enough to set imaginations going. Plus
there were aspects of the script that some people didn’t find particularly fruitful
or that they wanted to take in another direction, queery, alinguify, defacialize,
infrathin . . . With the sound recordings of these sessions, and bearing in mind
the screenplay and UIQ’s potential desire for other becomings, we decided to
make an invisible film by other means, a polyphonic soundwork where all the
voices, visions and spaces of gathering could co-exist, resonate, feed off and
build upon each other. In the beginning, the idea was simply to ‘recompose’
Guattari’s film through glimpses of what had been evoked or speculated upon
by the more than seventy envisionaries, but during the mixing process, when we
started to work on spatializing the voices, we and our mixing engineer noticed
another ‘film’ emerging in parallel to UIQ: the film of this scattered community
coalescing across an acousmatic plane of collective enunciation and coming into
some kind of being of its own.8
Perhaps this is what we would wish for Guattari’s film, that it keep on
keeping on, existing in a quantum space, both wave and particle, process and
crystallization, in an eternal return of nascence, but one that through its infra
dimension may continue to produce a becoming ancestral, animal, vegetal,
cosmic of the image, ‘collective entities half-thing half-soul, half-man half-beast,
machine and flux, matter and sign . . . always to be reinvented, always about to be
lost’ (Guattari 1995: 102, 116).
Notes
1 In Guattari (2012: 284–93).
2 See Collettivo A/traverso, Radio Alice – Free Radio (2007: 133).
3 As well as the obvious reference to Pris in Blade Runner, here we can see (pre)
echoes of Cronenberg’s The Fly. We can also assume that scenes like this were not
a rare occurrence at La Borde, as the documentary Le droit à la folie (Igor Barrère
1977) testifies. In this observant portrait of everyday life at Cour-Cheverny we
see the methods of Guattari and Oury at work in the perpetual self-invention of a
collective, though heterogeneous machinic ecosystem.
4 Guattari’s abiding interest in the non-linguistic components of semiotic polyvocality
is also present in another film project he briefly sketched out in the 1980s, Project
for a film by Kafka, a process in which ideas for the scriptwriting and filming,
focusing on the gestures, postures and latent sounds of Kafka’s expressive machine
rather than its more narrative elements, were to have been generated by a series of
workshops involving participants from different fields including choreographers,
actors, musicians and architects. See ‘Projet pour un film de Kafka’, in Félix
Guattari Soixante-cinq rèves de Franz Kafka, Stéphane Nadaud ed. (Paris: Lignes,
2007), 40–56.
5 See letters, Hollywood synopsis and related production documents in Félix Guattari
(2012: 215–48).
6 See Gilbert Simondon (2017).
7 See Maurice Blanchot’s (1955) development of the concept of désœuvrement in
L’éspace littéraire,.
8 The soundwork UIQ (the unmaking-of) was first installed at The Showroom Gallery,
London, in 2015 as part of our solo exhibition it took forever getting ready to exist,
co-commissioned by The Showroom and The Otolith Collective.
References
Barrère, Igor (1977), La Borde ou le droit à la folie. 60m film.

Berardi, Franco Bifo (2009), The Soul at Work – From Alienation to Autonomy, trans.
Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Blanchot, Maurice (1955), L’éspace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard.
Collettivo A/traverse (2007), ‘Radio Alice –Free Radio’, in Autonomia: Post-Political
Politics, Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds, Cambridge/MA and
London: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and
Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications.
Guattari, Félix (1996), ‘Remaking Social Practices’, trans. Sophie Thomas, in The
Guattari Reader, Gary Genosko, ed., 262–72, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
Guattari, Félix (2009), ‘Cinema of Desire’, in Chaosophy –Texts and Interviews 1972–
1977, Sylvère Lotringer ed., trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker and Taylor Adkins,
235–46, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix (2012), Un amour d’UIQ: Scénario pour un film qui manque, ed. Silvia
Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Paris: Editions Amsterdam.
Guattari, Félix (2016), A Love of UIQ, trans. and introduced by Graeme Thomson and
Silvia Maglioni, Minneapolis: Univocal.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1988), Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K.
Barnett, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert (2017), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile
Malaspina and John Rogove, Minneapolis: Univocal.
7
The Guattarian Art of Failure:

An Ecosophical Portrait
Zach Horton
The Guattarian machines
One might be justified in thinking it poor taste to highlight Félix Guattari’s failures
in a volume celebrating his success as an ecosophical thinker. There are reasons
to be wary of success, however; not least because success is a subjectivizing
technology, a reterritorialization of heterogeneous forces into an author-
function. Any success that Guattari met in his endeavours could only have been
bittersweet to a restless cartographer of new subjectivities, an escape artist forever
dodging the interpellations marshalled by the dominating and molarizing forces
of psychoanalysis, axial party politics, neoliberal capital and mass media. I will
argue in this chapter that one of Guattari’s unique attributes is his capacity to feed
failure back into processes of intersubjective, theoretical and artistic production
to ‘restart the machinery’ at new scales. Indeed, I will posit failure, along with
trans-scalar integration, as the central problematic of ecosophy.
Guattari would certainly agree with Judith Halberstam (2011: 89) when
she riffs on Antonio Gramsci, observing that ‘a radical political response [to
ideology] would have to deploy an improvisational mode to keep pace with
the constantly shifting relations between dominant and subordinate within
the chaotic flow of political life’. Halberstam has influentially linked this
improvisational, performative mode of de- interpellation with failure, the
negative to neoliberalism. Queerness, for Halberstam, is most effective when
it adopts a negative stance towards these dominating forces. To succeed is to
be enrolled into dominant forms of subjectivity. We might put it thus: if you
succeed, you aren’t trying hard enough. Yet while Guattari shares the same
project, it must be said that his means are quite different. Suspicious of negativity,
Guattari actively sought to elude binary formations, Hegelian and Marxian

dialectics, and, following Baruch Spinoza, negative affect. These refusals helped
to propel him into wildly inventive periods of creation, but also allowed him to
slip into a long, deep depression, with little prospect of being able to directly
‘use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life’
(Halberstam 2011: 4).
I am not arguing, then, that Guattari embraced the notion of failure; in fact,
failure was difficult for him to overcome in life and never directly confronted
in thought. We must not be afraid, however, that speaking of failure will paint
Guattari in a negative light. His life is his philosophy, and it is misleading to
sanitize either. Together they form a machinic assemblage that is enormously
productive in ways that either theory or praxis alone cannot be. Guattari’s
philosophy is vexed, contradictory and tactical: it is designed to be deployed in
concrete situations. This is part of what makes it susceptible to failure, and thus to
creative reapplication. In the speculative biographical sketch that follows, I will
trace several domains of activity that delineated the Guattarian territory of fluxes
that emerged from their superimposition. Each was blocked at strategic points
by failures, dead ends in which the desiring machines that comprised Guattari’s
singularity found themselves at an impasse. Each failure ultimately led to the
founding of a new series of expressive activity. As the blockages became more
severe, the Guattarian machines eventually composed a trans-modal territory
in order to enable freedom of movement between them, and thus a multi-scalar
line of flight from any potential blockage, to which he gave the name ecosophy.
In my processual reading of ecosophy, biographical narrative will prove
integral to reconstructing its conceptual assemblage and evaluating its potentia
as praxis. I hope that along the way we can dispel the suspicion, expressed by
some casual readers of Guattari and Deleuze, that this abstract philosophical
system is somehow impractical, or worse, disconnected from concrete struggle.
Taking Guattari’s life as an example demonstrates the opposite to be the case.
But what are these Guattarian machines that covered so much territory, dabbled
in so many domains and ran aground so many times? Any individual is a vast
collection of machines functioning at different scales and speeds, but I wish to
focus on two machinic systems that seem to have been the primary drivers of
the individual we know as Félix Guattari through the adventures that I am about
to recount. The first of these is a centripetal-connection machine. Guattari was a
social creature, drawn to other humans. He loved to be near his patients at La
Borde, loved to be surrounded by friends, was drawn to many lovers. His house
was, for most of his life, an active hub of friends, who would drop by at all hours;
The Guattarian Art of Failure 149
some of them would be living with him at any given time. Guattari, drawn to
others, almost manically pulled them inward, towards himself, connecting them
together in vital rhizomes. As we shall see, in every domain of his activity, he
acted as a centripetal force to produce new collective arrangements.
And yet, despite Guattari’s singular desire and ability to attract others into
new group formations, he was at his core also a peripatetic-disruption machine.
He could never stand still, never focus on only one activity at a time; he had a
compulsion to keep moving, continually swim in new currents. This machinic
desire expressed itself, in molar form, as a distrust and fear of structure, of
stable formations with fixed values or circuits of exchange. He was driven to
tackle these formations head on, to break them up, to molecularize them. This
machine is not the inverse or opposite of the Guattarian centripetal-connection
machine. Often times these assemblages worked together, producing complex
and unlikely results. At other times, as we will see, they would confront each
other head-on and stall. Neither are these privileged or universal machines;
in their actual functions, they are particular to Guattari as a singularity. Gilles
Deleuze, for example, was animated by quite different desiring machines, and
that difference is the key to both his joint compositions with Guattari and to the
lines of flight available to Guattari when facing failure.
Psychotherapy
Jean Oury founded La Borde in 1951 as an experimental mental hospital. By

1955 he had recruited Guattari, then a student of Jacques Lacan, to join the staff.
The young psychoanalyst wasted no time in getting to work. A devoted Sartrean
and Lacanian, he was eager to engage patients and viewed their maladies as the
manifestations of a desiring unconscious repressed and channelled by dominant
social institutions imposed from without –what Sartre (2004: 319) deemed
the realm of the ‘practico-inert’. Liberation, and freedom, must begin with the
individual, disarticulated from the serial forms of structure that collectivize
subjectivity from without (capital) and re-connected to an authentic, active self
capable of forming positive, non-inert collectives (what Guattari came to call
the group-subject). Guattari’s therapeutic praxis thus fused Lacan and Sartre
in a potent mix of peripatetic-disruption and centripetal-connectivity: ossified
(serial) groups were to be broken up at the same time that new groups were to be
formed along lines of collective desire. Psychosis could be treated only through
both interwoven movements. The goal was to free patients from normalizing
interpellations and open up new avenues of unconscious expression, which were

to connect them not to the individual therapist (classical Freudian transference)
but rather to other patients and the entire staff of nurses, doctors and technicians
at La Borde –and then, ultimately, to society at large.
Guattari’s institutional innovations at La Borde quickly became revolutionary.
The traditional institutional hierarchy, with the director at the top of a pyramid
that then incorporated the doctors, then nurses, then technicians and finally the
patients at the bottom, would have to be short-circuited. Guattari’s reforms were
diagrammatically expressed as ‘transversality’. This concept, one of Guattari’s
greatest conceptual inventions, was simultaneously disruptive and connective.
Rather than completely abolish hierarchy in favour of a flat social field,
transversality is opposed to both vertical structures (where commands propagate
along a narrow, linear hierarchy) and horizontal ones (where difference is
negated within a given hierarchical level by subjecting/subjectivizing individuals
according to a pregiven structure –that is as a serialized collective, or what we
might call an identity). In the clinical context, both verticality and horizontality
reinforce an inward-directed subjectivity: ‘So long as people remain fixated on
themselves, they never see anything but themselves’ (Guattari 1984: 18).
Accordingly, transversality short-circuits hierarchy rather than breaking it
down, preserving the intensities of difference but rendering them rhizomatic,
opening pathways that route around linear circuits. Its goal is to form a network
of connections among different institutional and social strata as well as through
different codes of exchange. Transversality is achieved ‘when there is maximum
communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings’
(Guattari 1984: 18). Guattari recognizes that verticality and horizontality are
social functions, but also semiotic functions. The goal of transversal formations
is to create new pathways and circuits for unconscious desire, still conceived
in a linguistic register. ‘If a certain degree of transversality becomes solidly
established in an institution, a new kind of dialogue can begin in the group: the
delusions and all the other unconscious manifestations which have hitherto kept
the patient in a kind of solitary confinement can achieve a collective mode of
expression’ (20).
Institutionally, Guattari’s connective/disruptive drive ultimately leads to a
strict codification of transversality in the form of ‘the grid’. Initially invented at
La Borde’s spin-off clinic La Chesnaie as a way of doling out communal chores,
the grid was an organizational matrix that assigned individual staff members
to particular tasks at particular times. When this method of bookkeeping and
allocation made its way back to La Borde, Guattari took charge of the allocations.
In his hands from 1957 onwards, the grid became an absolute instrument of
transversal reassignment. Every day was divided into a series of time slots on the
y-axis. Every employee was listed on the x-axis. At every gridded intersection,
a task was entered by Guattari. All workers at La Borde were forced to perform
the job assigned to them during any given slot. A transversal instrument par
excellence, the grid forced doctors to wash dishes, cleaners to attend to the
mental health of patients, administrators to clean floors and so on. La Borde’s
institutional hierarchy was driven to a state of permanent movement and
disruption, with Guattari at the helm. At the same time, new configurations
were continually coming into being as a result of the shifting matrix as Guattari
drew them together in unexpected ways. As such, the grid was in some sense the
perfect expression of the dual Guattarian machines.
As must be clear, however, this systematic deterritorialization could not
help but reify a new hierarchy, reterritorializing the forces liberated from the
institution’s serial structures onto the form of the Guattari-grid itself. Guattari
occupied a somewhat Stalinist position as the dictator of labour roles, wielding
absolute power over everyone else. ‘I was motivated by a sort of militant
centralism’, he noted later (Histoires de La Borde, 266, quoted in Dosse 2011: 57).
Here the Guattarian machines hit their first wall. The grid was a reification of
Guattari’s desire, in which an ideal dynamic was implemented in one domain
that served to disarticulate and elevate Guattari as an individual, molar subject.
The grid accomplished his tactical goals, but only at the expense of a strategic
loss that came, paradoxically, in the form of a strengthened individual identity.
For some, the grid embodied the director, the supreme ‘grid maker’, a realization
of the utopia; for others, it was a destructive steamroller crushing individuals and
their desires in the name of some common interest. Those who were subjected to
the work assignments typically overinterpreted them; they saw the grid as a way
for Guattari to attack and test this or that inhibition or phobia . . . Over the years,
the somewhat rigid system came increasingly under fire. (57)
The Guattarian centripetal- connective machine, manically drawing

others together, had turned on itself and disarticulated Guattari from those
whose schedules he dictated. The peripatetic-disruptive machine, perpetually
scrambling the occupational and social structures of others, found itself
locked into an absolute structure, walled in by its own manic activity. The grid,
then, was Guattari’s first true failure, not because it didn’t function correctly,
but because it functioned too well, reifying and negating itself. A paradox: in
content, transversal; in form, practico-inert.
The grid embodied, diagrammatically, the contradictions of early Guattarian

psychoanalysis, as well as the contradictions between Guattari’s molecular
forces and their molar reterritorializations. Ultimately, it would require a fresh
perspective, a new deterritorializing force acting directly upon the Guattarian
machines, to clear this blockage and move forward. Luckily, this was to enter
Guattari’s life in the form of Gilles Deleuze. ‘Then there was the miracle, my
meeting Deleuze, which opened the way to a whole series of things’, said Guattari
(2009a: 83) much later. Their joint project, Anti-Oedipus, would dismantle the
diagram of the grid. The principal target was Jacques Lacan, Guattari’s teacher
and personal analyst. Lacan’s structuralist interpretation of the unconscious
was central to his theoretical and practical system of psychoanalysis: the
unconscious was a linguistic system, a structure defined by lack, composed of an
endless chain of signifying elements directed towards that lack, the Other. The
Law of the Father, or the transcendent law of signification itself, governed the
unconscious just as Guattari governed the grid. The desiring subject, in endless
pursuit of wholeness, was doomed to wander the halls of language like a forlorn
Parisian after the last métro.
Guattari’s experiments at La Borde, meanwhile, had accepted this structuralist
view of the unconscious, but always revealed a remainder, a will not to wholeness
but to flight, to disintegration; not to death (thanatos), but to a re-singularized,
pluralized life. Guattari’s therapeutics did not fit in the Lacanian box, but were
packed there nonetheless. Deleuze, who ‘never took Lacan seriously at all’
(Guattari and Stivale 2009a: 166), deterritorialized Guattari’s thought, liberating
its potentials from the structuralist grid. Anti-Oedipus was ‘both a careful and
scholarly enterprise and a radical and systematic demolition of Lacanism and all
my previous references; clarifying concepts I had been “experimenting with” in
various fields, but which couldn’t reach their full extension because they were
too attached to their origins’ (Guattari 2009a: 84). Though at the time Guattari
had told himself that he was merely pushing the general impetus of Lacan’s
thought further than Lacan had dared, Lacan disagreed, and never spoke to his
protégé again after reading Anti-Oedipus (Dosse 2011: 185).
For Guattari and Deleuze, the name of structure is Oedipus. Traditional
psychoanalysis is a process of decoding, of reading semiotic patterns, of
following the threads of the unconscious back to the structure of the family
or of the Law. In the Lacanian version, this allows for infinite, never-ending
movement (this is why it interfaced so well with the Guattarian peripatetic-
disruption machine), but only within a grid of differential signifiers. The subject
never reaches the outside (the Real) directly; instead, she collapses ever inward,
self-referentially. For Guattari and Deleuze, this is backwards. Therapy should be

about reaching outward, re-interfacing with others, forging new connective lines
and enunciative assemblages. As Guattari puts it, ‘The unconscious is turned
toward the future’ (Guattari and Stivale 2009c: 177). Desire is not driven by lack
but by creativity. There is no wholeness to seek because no conscious singularity
lacks wholeness –far from being 1-, each ‘individual’ is a 1+, a multiplicity of
fluxes. ‘Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather,
the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there
is no fixed subject unless there is repression’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 26).
At the centre of desire is the machine, that which produces. Psychosis is the
blockage of desire, the unconscious turned inwards on itself, stuck in repetition
that is not symptomatic, but etiological. Psychosis is the Oedipalization of
the desiring machine into a reified subject. Psychoanalysis, then, is a further
technology of individuation, not a release or escape. A new conception of desire,
subjectivity and therapeutics is necessary. Finally expressed in all of its delirious,
de-Oedipalized radiance, Guattari’s new machinic subject is the schizo. The
process of freeing it from individuation, from Oedipalization, from the past,
from inertia, from the counterflows of capital is schizoanalysis.
In the world of psychoanalysis, which Guattari hoped to definitively disrupt
and recompose, schizoanalysis was a failure. Lacan ordered that it not be
engaged or debated within the respectable halls of French academic psychology
(Dosse 2011: 209). Few practitioners knew what to do with the concept. In the
United States, Freudianism was already dead, replaced by a behaviourism even
more reactionary, infantalizing and hostile to notions of a desiring, productive
unconscious. Schizoanalysis, as a therapeutic practice, never left La Borde.
Guattari remained there with it. Curiously, for an analyst who militated so strongly
against ‘the segregation that persists in various forms between the world of the
mad and the rest of society’ (Guattari 1984: 11), he never left La Borde, remaining
consumed by mundane, daily organization and group therapy until the day he
died (Dosse 2011: 492). Success for his patients meant getting out, producing
new assemblages in society at large, and there certainly were dramatic successes.
Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, a Parisian magician, came to La Borde in the dual role of
performer and patient of Guattari. Guattari bolstered his confidence and creative
potential to such a degree that he ended up contacting Charlie Chaplin’s daughter,
Victoria, and convincing her to start a circus with him. They ended up marrying
and weaving a wild, successful circus, curing a catatonic patient at La Borde in the
process (63–4). Only Charlie Chaplin came out behind, losing his starring actress
in his planned but never realized film, The Freaks.
Guattari, devoted to his patients, continued managing La Borde even

as he slipped into a long, deep depression during the last twelve years of his
life, a depression that schizoanalysis seemed helpless to cure. Guattari’s great
travels, great adventures, would not be within the domain of psychotherapy.
Schizoanalysis was ultimately a line of flight from psychology, leading away
from La Borde only through the back door of politics.
Politics
Driven to surround himself with others and compose endless groups, Guattari’s
proto-political organizing began in high school, when he organized a gang,
then, unsatisfied, moved on to organize an opposing gang (Dosse 2011: 24). The
centripetal-connective machine would have been well suited for party politics,
but the peripatetic- disruption machine wouldn’t have it. Decomposition,
immanent opposition and continual lines of flight were always on Guattari’s
political menu, from the postwar Youth Hostels to the Communist Party to
CERFI (Center for the Study and Research of Institutional Formation), an
organization created by Guattari that would eventually include Michel Foucault
and Gilles Deleuze. Founded in 1967, CERFI represented an attempt to create a
political group that would eschew the hierarchical structure of a political party,
organizing leftists around particular intellectual projects and the formation of
heterogeneous groups rather than homogeneous, united political action.
Like many others in France, Guattari was surprised and delighted by the
seemingly spontaneous eruption of militant action across many organizations
and social strata in May 1968. While he had little to do with the initial student
protest movement, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he played a significant role as the
protests began to spread beyond the confines of the university. Guattari helped
plan demonstrations and occupations, acting as a liaison between the various
militant networks in France, with which he had long held ties (Dosse 2011: 173).
Guattari was one of the key organizers of the occupation of the Odéon Théatre
on 15 May, which transformed the space from a state-sponsored theatre to a
radical public forum. As the movement spread to workers across the country,
Guattari called upon not only the doctors and staff of La Borde to join, but
also its patients. Despite the objections of Jean Oury, the director of the clinic,
Guattari had many of the patients shuttled on a daily basis to occupations and
protests in Paris (172). Here politics afforded a connective ligament from the
delimited space of mental illness to the large-scale engagement of social illness.
For Guattari, May ‘68 was ‘an amazing experience’ that seemed to materialize
from out of nowhere (Dosse 2011: 171). Unfortunately, it dissipated just as
quickly, having failed to convert its radical energy into concrete social change.
Guattari’s entire political life up to that point was driven by a restless infiltration,
rupturing and negotiation between various leftist groups. May ‘68 provided the
ideal milieu for the Guattarian machines to leap into action, to drive to their
limits. For this one brief moment, the latticework of French militant politics
could fully harness its various intensities in an energized series of circuits that
Guattari was uniquely situated to sail. The aftermath of this delirious two-month
period, then, was a severe let-down to Guattari. Collective Marxist energies had
finally coalesced into widespread revolutionary force, but this oppositional,
negative libido had failed to dominate and redirect the capitalist forces that had
so long suppressed it.
Postwar European leftism had been animated by Hegelian dialectics, the
energizing of the negative as the primary force for historical change, a movement
towards truth –understood as the liberation of a latent form of consciousness.
From Adorno to Sartre to Marcuse, the historical movement towards truth is
precisely the fulfilment of a subjectivity that arises in opposition to the given
(apparent, structured) reality. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2008: 79) –Guattari’s
later political ally and close friend –suggests, this ‘dynamic re-reading of Hegel
filtered into the ‘68 culture’ and provided its internal understanding of its own
energies. But by the end of 1968 this line of thought had hit a wall. The subject
had awoken, had demanded the reform of the current status quo and had quietly
dissipated. What was supposed to be the final stage of a world-historical process
had turned out to be worse than an intermediate step: it had been revealed as a
dead end. But what had gone wrong?
Guattari met Deleuze in late 1968, and the quiet philosopher, who had
participated in May ‘68 only from the classroom, held the key to a new line
of thought. It would take Guattari, however, to animate that line as a dynamic
series. In Difference and Repetition, published that year, Deleuze had directly
critiqued the Hegelian dialectic by suggesting that it was a mistake to characterize
difference as oppositional –the conceptual linchpin of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel
fails to think difference in itself, subordinating it to the identical, ensnaring
it as ‘the infinite circulation of the identical by means of negativity’ (Deleuze
1995: 50). In Hegel’s essentially theological thought, ‘difference remains
subordinated to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude
and analogy’. In contrast, Deleuze calls for a liberation of thought from the
dialectic, the production of a philosophy of difference, which would elaborate
difference as positive along Spinozan and Nietzschean lines, arising not out of
identity or opposition but as a primary force of production in its own right.
Just as Deleuze provided Guattari with a line of flight from Lacan’s
understanding of desire as lack and the unconscious as a semiotic structure,
his attack on Hegelianism cleared the way for Guattari to move beyond the
political thought of the 1960s. The machines that composed Deleuze were
quite different from the Guattarian machines: a solitary thinker rather than a
peripatetic agitator, he was a sorting and mixing machine. He was a vital reader, a
recomposer. He read thought as one might read, and then re-interpret, a musical
score. Consistency, the refrain, the circle, the rhizome: thought extended into
space as lines, shapes, rhythms and networks. The Guattarian machines were
more comfortable exploring the psyche, the forces that composed the individual
and the social body. Politics, then, were the staging ground for these machines,
the vital impulse of Guattarian creation.
As we have seen, the centripetal-connective machine necessarily made use
of the latticework afforded by contemporary intellectuals, and especially Sartre,
Lacan and Marcuse –often leaving the peripatetic-disruption machine nowhere
to mobilize but inside, in the striated spaces of the institution and home.
Deleuzean sorting and mixing had the effect for Guattari of philosophizing
with a hammer, sounding out the hollowness and circularity of Guattari’s idols.
This allowed new Guattarian forces to mobilize into a deterritorializing war
machine. The resulting surge of ideas sent Deleuzean thought in an explosion
of new directions, even as it dragged it into the realms of political mobilization
and institutional psychoanalysis. Anti-Oedipus, then, recomposed May ‘68 along
new lines, liberating its potentials for a non-Hegelian politics of the future. The
book catalysed Franco Berardi’s political career, largely because it ‘does not
interpret the consciousness that ‘68 had of itself, which was entirely internal
to the Hegelian field’, but instead carries ‘‘68 beyond its consciousness . . . Anti-
Oedipus works out this movement by abandoning the totalitarian frame within
which the twentieth-century social consciousness was determined’ (Berardi
2008: 82).
Just as the individual is to be understood as composed by both social forces
and a productive, desiring unconscious without reference to a lack or a missing
whole, so too is historical consciousness to be understood as composed by
machinic forces that have as their object only an immanent difference-for-
itself, a production of new singularities rather than a totalizing overturning of
objectifying forces. Just as the unconscious lacks nothing, difference opposes
nothing. May ‘68 was not a moment of total awakening in opposition to capitalist
alienation, but a chaotic production of intensities, of momentarily liberated

desires. The problem was that they had nowhere to go, and were dissipated when
reterritorialized as the concrete demands of higher wages, union representation
and so on. By articulating these desires to capitalist structures, they were
not unified and awakened, as the neo-Hegelian left had predicted, but rather
dissipated and co-opted in just the same way that psychoanalysis constantly
re-Oedipalized the subject. Thus, according to Guattari, ‘important things only
started happening after that revolution, which was probably the last revolution
in the old style’ (Guattari 2008b: 276; emphasis in the original). Deleuze’s
diagrammatic analyses of the underlying refrains of militant thought brought this
to light, while Guattari’s manic activism and multi-scalar engagement with the
libido energized it as a positive political program. Post-‘68 politics would need
to become a micro-politics of desire, liberated from the quantitative demands
of the capitalist subject and re-directed towards creative compositions: new
subjects and new milieus.
Anti-Oedipus had a significantly larger influence on political radicals than
it did on mental health professionals or academics. The new Italian left, in
particular, took its primary message to heart. Beginning in 1975, a popular wave
of militancy washed over the nation, the most Guattarian revolution Europe
had yet seen. One early group, calling itself the Metropolitan Indians, or simply
‘Geronimo’, moved from town to town, demanding a quotient of green space for
every citizen, the end of the nuclear family, the return of all animals held in zoos
to their countries or origin, and so on. These demands, not merely unmet but
unthinkable within capitalist logic, served to destabilize that logic rather than
negotiate for a fairer deal within its structure. One member of the Metropolitan
Indians later wrote: ‘These were the great days during which marginals,
autonomists from neighbourhood collectives and work places, footloose
mavericks of every variety united in hot pursuit of pettifogging political parties,
wresting from them any attempt to reduce the movement to a series of organs,
reflecting in miniature, the institutions themselves’ (Anon. 2015).
The influence of Guattari and Deleuze is clear: Political parties (including the
Italian Communist Party, which had recently increased its share of regional and
national seats) are unacceptable substitutes for the production of new assemblages
and group-subjects. Political action must be transversal, organizations non-
hierarchical and heterogeneous. At the heart of radical militancy is creativity,
the production of the new, starting with the body without organs as immanent
ground for production: the body that doesn’t merely house functions, and in fact
continually resists them. This body is not a container but a core, solid and whole,
directed like a wrecking ball at the perpetually colonizing marches of capital –

an “egg” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 19). This, finally, was a non-dialectical May
‘68, a Guattarian-Deleuzean revolution.
In 1976, the monopoly enjoyed by the national RAI radio station ended,
resulting almost immediately in a profusion of free, radical radio stations across
the country. Providing commentary and news, these stations brought into
being new group subjectivities capable of mobilizing massive protests almost
instantaneously. As a technological- social assemblage, free radio sang the
individual psyche into the circuits of an amorphous, virtual social body. Perhaps
the most influential station was Radio Alice, started in Bologna by Berardi, who
was determined to operationalize Guattari’s political concepts.
In September 1977, Guattari and his large gang of militants travelled to
Bologna, where 80,000 protesters filled the streets. He was greeted as a hero.
Gérard Fromanger recounts the scene: ‘When he walked down the streets
of Bologna, everyone rushed to greet him, touch him, kiss him. It was crazy.
Unheard of. He was Jesus walking on water’ (Dosse 2011: 291). Guattari’s photo
was published on the covers of the local newspapers, which identified him as the
force behind the gathering. This was the high point of Guattari’s political life, a
concretization of his vision of a transversal, schizo politics.
And yet it faded. The energies that marked 1977 were once again
reterritorialized as party politics, recognizable blocs of interest groups,
referendums and elections. Just as in May ‘68, no lasting political change
resulted. Italy slid ever more towards the right. By the time Guattari and Deleuze
had finished their magnum opus sequel to Anti-Oedipus, a mere three years
later, the Italian publishing house that had translated it decided that it wasn’t
worth publishing at all. A Thousand Plateaus deterritorialized Anti-Oedipus even
further. If radical politics were to survive, they would need to morph beyond
politics as commonly understood, into the intertwined realms of media and
aesthetics.
Media and aesthetics
Guattari always wanted to be a novelist. ‘He had an exaggerated lifelong obsession

with Joyce’, claims Marie Depussé, a staff member at La Borde and editor of some
of his writings. ‘He was born and died with Joyce’ (Dosse 2011: 51). Try as he
might, however, Guattari couldn’t sustain his fragmented attempts at dramatic
writing: flecks of novels, plays and memoirs. Depussé tried to dissuade him from
such distractions, encouraging him to write in an academic and professional vein

instead. When Deleuze met Guattari, he found him suffering from a debilitating
condition of writer’s block. As they began to collaborate on Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze set out to cure this Guattarian malady by subjecting him to a regimen of
ascetic privation. Guattari was to write alone until 4 pm each day, without seeing
anyone else, then mail his forced work to Deleuze, who would collect it and
begin to refine it over a much longer period of time (7). Guattari suffered greatly
from this forced separation from his friends: ‘He said, “We can do it together.”
For a while it wasn’t very clear to me. Naively I thought “together” must mean
“with my friends, the gang”. But that didn’t last long! I quickly understood that
it would only be the two of us. It was a frenzy of work that I hadn’t imagined
possible until then’ (Guattari 2009a: 83).
Guattari’s writer’s block was cured. How did Deleuze, unexpectedly playing
the role of doctor, do it? He forced the Guattarian machines out of alignment,
intensified their differentials. Centripetal- connective: cut-
off, locked in a
room . . . it collects ideas, takes up weaving, spins a plane of consistency.
Peripatetic-disruption: chained, rooted . . . it tears up the stationary, restlessly
recombines ideas. Together they converge to a plane while generating difference,
like a top that expends all of its radial energy differentiating itself from the
floor. Guattari as top, as gyroscope? The Body without Organs as floor, as anti-
productive surface of undifferentiated potential? Guattari’s thought is always a
prelude to mobilization, to a headlong rush into the wilderness outside.
But after Italy in 1977, Guattari’s writings are less primers for defeating
the two-headed hydra of capitalism (which always deterritorializes in order
to reterritorialize as subjectivizing structuration) and more an experiment in
thought-aesthetics: an engagement with artistic production in any potential
domain, thinking that is itself art, a diagrammatic form of creation. A Thousand
Plateaus is a deterritorialized novel (as well as an opera, a science lecture, a
painting . . .). The Guattarian machines that could never finish a work of fiction
tackled fiction itself, first with a call for ‘minor literature’ in Kafka, then with
the BwO of A Thousand Plateaus, which has become less ground for political
production and more artist’s palette. A manual for artists, this work was the
purest composition of the Guattarian and Deleuzean machines, all mashed up,
put into nearly perpetual gyroscopic production. It wasn’t clear what one could
do with this book/anything.
After A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze decamped to work out a new
philosophy of cinema. For Guattari, the need to reinvest his energies returned.
In the 1981 French presidential election, he took the opportunity presented
by a joke in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo to back the French
comic Coluche for president. Here the artistic imperative re-energized the old
political circuits that had for so long kept the Guattarian machines together
as a composition. The form of politics would give way to the expression of
theatre, of cinema. At the height of 1977, an arrest warrant had been issued
for Franco Berardi –the police had come to jail him and shut down Radio
Alice. One step ahead, he fled to France, where Guattari put him up and they
became close friends. Together, they collaborated on a book about Radio Alice
(Guattari 1977). Now, inspired by the ability of radio as machinic medium to
help compose new forms of subjectivity, Guattari decided to start his own
version.
Radio Tomato began broadcasting from Guattari’s kitchen towards the end
of 1980, in support of the Coluche campaign. Its sociopolitical programming
was confined to Monday afternoons. The rest of the programming was
cultural: film, music and theatre (Dosse 2011: 304). The Guattarian machines
were shifting gears. Centripetal-movement converging to militant collectives
became mediatized into technical-social systems aimed at drawing in an ever-
wider audience, composing it into an assemblage capable of expressing new
subjective potentials. Guattari, inspired perhaps by Berardi, began to take media
ever more seriously. The peripatetic-disruption machine ensured, however,
that all medial systems that homogenized their participants were targeted for
dismantling. Television was the principle enemy here. Guattari (2008a: 238) had
already made the stakes clear: cinema, television and the press ‘not only handle
messages, but, above all, libidinal energy . . . they participate in the elaboration
and transmission of subjective models’.
Now, however, free radio had risen up as the medial war machine, opposing
monolithic media primarily through means of collective enunciation: ‘Who is
speaking in this assemblage? The radio hosts? It’s not clear . . . It perhaps betrays,
first of all, a collective sense of being “fed up” with official media’ (Guattari
2009b: 49). But free radio, too, was easily appropriated by mass media, and when
the radio waves were officially opened in France in 1981, the result was not a
further proliferation of pirate radio stations like Tomato, but their drowning
within the newly formed ocean of commercial radio, against which Guattari’s
tiny transmitter could hardly compete. ‘On the surface of the aquarium there
are radio-loving minnows’, noted Guattari bitterly, ‘but below, there are fat
advertising sharks’ (Dosse 2011: 304–305). The neoliberal floodgates had burst,
and as the 1980s inundated Guattari’s territory, he sank deeper and deeper
under water.
According to Berardi, Guattari’s friends called his depression ‘Joséphine’,

after the young woman, a drug addict, he impulsively married in 1983.
Guattari’s tumultuous relationship with Joséphine, which lasted until his death,
increasingly isolated him throughout the 1980s. The centripetal-connective
machine stalled, shut down. Berardi (2008: 11) suggests that Guattari’s inability
to recognize and find a place for his own depression was his greatest blind
spot: ‘Félix did not pay attention to depression, neither as a philosopher, nor
as a psychoanalyst.’ He couldn’t see the negative; for him desire was always
creative, always productive, repressed only when blocked. Ironically, he began to
watch television continuously: ‘Guattari became catatonic, sitting with a pillow
pressed to his stomach as if to protect himself from the outside world, watching
television programs for days on end’ (Dosse 2011: 425).
Guattari had previously denounced television as a tool of normative
subjectivation, opposing free radio to its homogenizing reach. Even under
conditions of depression, how could he allow himself to be mesmerized by its
insipid structuration? I suggest that during the Winter Years (his appellation
for the 1980s), Guattari’s distinction between passive mass media and active,
enunciative media began to break down. If subjectivity was constituted through
the becoming and maintenance of intertwined biological, semiotic, affective and
technological circuits, then none of these domains can be taken as structurally
invariant; each is open to mutation. While it was certainly true that TV as a
medial form tended to reinforce consumptive, reactive subjectivity, it was also
true that it plugged the individual viewer into a vast network of hybridized
exchanges, a seemingly endless medial milieu for Guattari to survey. Surely
this is what mesmerized him, rather than the dull glow of the cathode ray tube.
During this period, Guattari’s desire to become a fiction writer did not abate;
he remained obsessed with Joyce, but couldn’t finish a novel, a book of poetry
or a book of memoirs. His energies turned increasingly towards mass media
production. His earliest known script was for a short film about free radio, set
in Italy in 1977 (Maglioni and Thomson 2016: 18). He shelved this project,
however, and began, in 1980, to write a screenplay titled Un Amour d’UIQ (UIQ
in Love). This project explored a fusion of spontaneous, polyvocal radio waves
and the global totality of the TV milieu.
The titular character of the screenplay, an “Infra-Quark Universe” (UIQ),
begins as a completely limitless, deterritorialized being that spans scales and
domains. However, in its connection with others, in its interfacial endeavours,
it becomes molar: it begins to feel jealousy, a desire to be materially instantiated
in the human milieu, to have a(n) (inter)face. Eventually, UIQ satisfies this
new, all-too-human need by manifesting a human form, Bruno, as an avatar

for its love interest, Janice (Guattari 2016: 166–7). The moment this form
(initially identified in the script only as ‘Stranger’) is named, the building they
occupy erupts in music: Chopin’s wedding march (168). UIQ’s tragic identity
impoverishment (reduced to petit bourgeois desires) is also a scalar capture (an
entire universe, yet smaller than a quark, re-scaled to a human body). Capable
of disrupting worldwide telecommunications and changing the human milieu
(UIQ casually suggests curing AIDS and ending global pollution as potential
courses of action), it here adopts an aggressive individualism that notably
operates without Janice’s consent: she has not agreed to be Bruno’s lover, and
isn’t even present in the scene that features “her” wedding march. UIQ, then,
is something like a scale-slippery Radio Alice, capable of signal jamming
global capitalism from everywhere at once, and yet its medial conjurings
end up confined to the manifestation of a phantasmic wedding with an
uninterested bride.
Centrally, then, UIQ is about failure: the subjective capture and scalar
reduction of its central protagonist, the failure of an alternative, radical politics
to form around UIQ (the group of squatters who develop relationships with
UIQ is ultimately disbanded by the police and seems to lose any interest in or
hope for an alternative political movement), and even the failure of individual
autonomy: in the end, millions of people are changed into mutants by UIQ, and
Janice –with intercerebral implants now delivering UIQ’s unmediated signals –
unsuccessfully attempts suicide, convinced as the film ends that UIQ is denying
her even that modicum of autonomy.
Un Amour d’UIQ’s fascinating combination of potential and failure mirrors
the techno-cultural dynamics of the 1980s, during which the emergence of new
technological potentialities of connection –new milieus –was accompanied by
the resurgence of molarity: identity politics, neoliberalism, mass media, religious
and social fundamentalism, heightened consumption and a resurgence of
aggressive individualism. To move into an open future, to catalyse the production
of mutant subjectivities, mass media itself would have to be transfigured into
a tool. Guattari’s use of the epic science fiction film as paradigm for his most
sustained and grand literary-artistic endeavour acknowledges that the medial
milieu is not about communication but rather the composition of territory itself.
All media form circuits with one another and with the biological and semiotic
systems with which they compose assemblages. Here Guattari’s depression likely
opened a space for cartography, the patient act of charting the intensities of a
deeply disappointing milieu.
Published in 1989, Guattari’s (2013: 2) difficult book Schizoanalytic

Cartographies asserts that ‘a double bridge will have been set up from human
to machine and machine to human, across which new and confident alliances
between them will be easier to foresee’. This does not imply that cartography is
a passive exercise in plotting that which is already given. The medial milieu is
characterized by ‘hyper-complexity’, the interconnected flows of the radically
different and yet inextricable domains of thought, techné, poiesis, biology and so
on. In such a milieu, ‘the map here loses its primary vocation of having to represent
the Territory’ (35). Instead, the map engenders new patterns of subjectivity by
tracing connections through and between these domains. UIQ attempts to do
exactly this, and like the catatonic Guattari, finds itself paradoxically entangled
with molar forces.
Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton (2012) has suggested that
depression or melancholia may be the most proper mode of ecological thought.
‘It is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for
depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humor theory, melancholy
is black, earthy, and cold’ (16). For Morton, ecological melancholia is not
dialectical: ‘There is no negation in the unconscious and none in evolution. Things
don’t disappear; they become vestigial or mutate’ (65). If Un Amour d’UIQ is an
experiment in articulating medial cartography to mutant subjectivity, then it is
profoundly ecological in sensibility. Like Morton, who opposes ‘dark ecology’
to happy, positive, consumption-oriented environmentalism, and Halberstam,
who opposes queer failure to the positive, normative narrative of success that
sustains neoliberalism, Guattari’s dark script traces and opens new potential
genera that it can’t concretely visualize.
Seventeen million human-amphibian mutants and counting, gills replacing
lungs . . . what dark ecological intensities will be generated in this new, emerging
milieu? Janice agrees to have electrodes implanted in her brain because UIQ
will only speak to her, directly, and ‘without intermediaries’, remaining silent
(catatonic) when faced with other interlocutors (Guattari 2016: 205), but this
direct cybernetic connection between herself and the Infra-Quark Universe has
the effect not of immediacy –the erasure of mediation –but rather of medial
multiplication, the production of a new medial substrate: Janice herself, or the
radical punk formally known as Janice. In the end her thoughts multiply into a
confused jumble, mixed with those of UIQ, while her battered body becomes a
new transduction point, colonized by her infinite lover, mirroring the cybernetic
substrate of 1980s corporate media. Janice has become schizoid, potentially
opening to connections across scales and domains, and yet she is anything but
liberated. UIQ, recapitulating in medial form the potentials that Guattari had
striven for all of his life, becomes a conduit for capitalism, the negation of those
potentials. As one character explains, referencing UIQ’s signature character trait,
jealousy ‘always leads to the worst stupidities, starting with capitalism!’ (Guattari
2016: 204).
I would like to suggest, then, that Un Amour d’UIQ is a re-working of 1980s
neoliberalism and cybernetic mediation through the lens of depression: A
machinic merging with a hybrid milieu, a retarding of the social circulation of
humans and an accompanying opening to engagement with the nonhuman,
with radical alterity. According to Morton (2012: 94), ‘[T]‌he ecological thought
is intimacy with the strangeness of the stranger . . . Intimacy is never so obvious
as when we’re depressed.’ The Winter Years marked Guattari’s engagement with
ecology in all of its strangeness. Un Amour d’UIQ, however, was never filmed.
Guattari collaborated with American director Robert Kramer, who was to direct
the film, for years, but nothing came of the project, and Guattari eventually
re-wrote the script himself. He approached Stephen Spielberg, and Spielberg’s
producer, Michael Phillips, in Hollywood, but no one wished to produce or
direct a large-budget science fiction film about an infinite being and its subjective
mutations. Perhaps, as Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson (2016: 34) suggest,
‘rather than providing the coherent structure required for it to be green-lighted
for production, it opens up a problematic field that promises to undermine the
codes of mainstream spectacle’. I think it is equally probable, however, that the
film was rejected not because it appeared too radical but because it appeared
too clichéd: UIQ’s infantilism and sterotypical character development, without
the benefit of the proper critical context, may simply have appeared to be poor
characterization. Even with the benefit of proper political context, the script’s
juvenile dialogue remains difficult to digest. This is where Guattari’s script is at
its most daring: not in its incoherence or its undermining of mainstream codes,
but in its suffocating coherence, the overloading of their circuits with exactly
those codes and no others.
UIQ is infrastructural, its enunciative apparatus literally built (in an
abandoned warehouse) out of the techno- detritus of corporate medial
technologies: computers, radios, screens, data cables, loudspeakers. The
technology of mass media enables its occupancy (channel squatting) of capital’s
amplificatory circuits, inaugurating its scalar jump from the atomic to the global,
giving it a voice. This enables signal jamming at the global scale, but also induces
feedback along those same channels. Ultimately, this playful encounter between
the codes of capital and the codes of trans-scalar alterity also enables the backflow
of information, resulting in the re-coding of UIQ as scale-fixed subject. Guattari

teases with the (always ongoing) production of mutant subjectivity, but his
screenplay is not about its success. It is entirely fitting, then, that in charting the
failures of human subjectivity and media culture, UIQ ensures its own failure as
filmic production by overloading rather than evading the circuits of the culture
industry. One and the same abstract diagram integrates the script’s diegetic
failures with its production failures. If we are to offer a postmortem of the film,
I suggest that the cause of death be registered not as monstrous mutation but as
overdose on conventions ordinarily so beloved by studio executives.
The script had little luck with independent filmmakers either, perhaps
because it appeared too much like a Hollywood blockbuster. Guattari had a
friend send Michelangelo Antonioni his script, and wrote him a letter imploring
him to ‘become involved’, but the letter was never answered, and possibly never
sent (Maglioni and Thomson 2016: 40). In any case, by the end of the 1980s, after
several re-writes, Guattari finally abandoned his great epic. He would never be
a writer like Joyce or a filmmaker like Antonioni. Instead, he would return to
philosophy and politics. This time, however, it would be ecology that served as
the linchpin for his machinic rebirth.
Ecosophy
And so we finally arrive at ecosophy! But wait: We have been discussing it

all along. Ecosophy, as I treat it here, is a general problematic of integration
across scales. It emerges as a fully articulated program for Guattari at the end
of the 1980s as an integration of his previous domains of failure and gridlock.
Psychology, politics and media-art practice become the ‘three ecologies’ of
the psyche, society and environmental milieu. Guattari calls these, variably,
‘existential Territories’, ‘types of eco-logical praxis’ and ‘ecological visions’. This
Table 7.1 Dimensions of the three ecologies
Territory Praxis Vision

(space) (liberatory procedure) (virtual horizon
Psyche Individual Schizoanalysis Mutant
Subjectivities
Social body Nation/party Politics (Cartography)
Global milieu Environment Media-art Cosmos
(Mecanosphere-biosphere)
is to say that as domains, they possess spatial, processual and virtual dimensions
(Table 7.1). None of these dimensions can be reduced to the other, though each
is a reconstitution of the domains encountered by the Guattarian machines up
to that point.
The purpose of articulating this matrix of domains and dimensions is not
to produce a taxonomy, but to produce a rhizome. As we have seen, each of
Guattari’s eventual failures within these domains was circumvented by a line
of flight to another domain. These are transversal moves from one blocked
domain to another open one, which must inevitably generate new blockages.
Guattari’s indefatigable momentum always propelled him headlong into new
territories of action, new forms of praxis and new virtual horizons. What he
formalized as ‘ecosophy’ towards the end of his life was an articulation of all of
these together into a rhizome, or non-linear circuit. Its purpose is to catalyse a
form of movement through scales and dimensions capable of circumventing not
specific blockages, but any blockage (reterritorialization and structuration from
without or psychosis from within) that could be imposed in the future.
Guattari has now named his antagonist: ‘Integrated World Capitalism’
(IWC). What he came to see during the Winter Years is that IWC already links
these domains together according to its own logics of production: ‘Within a
single world system it integrates all the different elements of class and caste
societies based on exploitation and social segregation’ (Guattari 2009b: 230).
IWC unifies and interconnects global exchanges of various sorts, thereby
stabilizing the relationships between psyche, society and milieu (Figure 7.1).
These relationships are formalized as nested scales arranged within hierarchies
of extraction-production. Late capital, then, produces endless circulation
along both vertical and horizontal structures, a kind of planetary heat engine
driven by institutionalized strategies of isolation, differentiation, sorting
and asymmetry. Psychologists, political activists and artists are generally
limited to working at one scale and within one domain at a time, and are thus
consigned to endless cul de sacs when facing a globally unified structure.
The psychoanalyst encounters psychosis in the individual psyche; the activist
encounters the social reterritorialization of group energy into useless activity
or fascist collectives; the artist encounters the aesthetics of the practico-inert
and mass media homogenization. We can also add that environmentalists face
the accelerated degradation and toxification of natural ecosystems. Guattari’s
bold claim is that these maladies are all manifestations of the same integrative
diagram, symptoms of the same disease. Our failures to combat these problems
in the domains of the commons, the psyche or the environment stem from our
Figure 7.1 Diagram of Integrated World Capitalism.
failure to integrate them within a plane of consistency as broad and trans-

scalar as capital’s.
Against IWC, Guattari wishes to mobilize an alternative logic, a transversal
set of connectives, a re-wiring of these circuits. Gregory Bateson (1972: 498)
had explored ecology via systems theory as the conjoined forces of natural
populations, technological innovation and an ‘ecology of mind’ animated by a
fundamental flaw in the Western cultural tradition: ‘Our “values” are wrong.’
This integrative approach suited Guattari’s scalar concerns, and he increasingly
looked to ‘ecology’ as the master circuit diagram within which diagnostic and
autopoetic functions could be deployed. ‘Eco-logic’, explains Guattari (2008c),
‘is the logic of intensities’, process opposed to structure. It ‘strives to capture
existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization’
(30). Ecology charts existential becomings, changes, immanent intensities as
they proliferate difference. The paradox, for all knowledge systems, is that the
virtual nature of this change, its emergent vectors, cannot be named, cannot
be ossified as objects, or their essential natures (their becomings) are elided.
Ecology, for Guattari, is the science, politics and aesthetics of change.
Ecology must be more than a discourse about objects in the world; it must be a
discourse about processes. This requires discourse itself to be rendered processual,
contingent, deterritorialized. Change occurs in social ecologies, natural
ecologies and ideational ecologies. To attend to that change is to participate in
its flows. For Guattari, this process of engagement is itself potentially catalytic.
Any engagement implies the mobilization of mental intensities; any shared
engagement implies emergent social formations. Ecology, in this sense, includes
the ‘mecanosphere’ of interconnected technological entities as well as human

social formations, the milieu of thought and ‘natural’ territories produced by
nonhuman plants and animals. ‘At the heart of all ecological praxes there is
an a-signifying rupture, in which the catalysts of existential change are close
at hand, but lack expressive support from the assemblage of enunciation; they
therefore remain passive and are in danger of losing their consistency’ (Guattari
2008c: 30). Ecology as a science of ecosystemic change defines the domain
of milieu, but ecology as a general (abstract) diagram of change-through-
integration articulates the logic of Guattari’s overall project (Figure 7.2). Thus
abstracted, ecology becomes ‘ecosophy’.
Where IWC integrates the psyche, social strata and global milieu as nested
scales of industrial extraction and production (Figure 7.1), ecosophy produces
a transversal circuit between the same domains that short-circuits this scalar
hierarchy and catalyses a continual flow between them (Figure 7.2). Because this
circuit is simultaneously spatial (it connects these spaces rather than isolating and
structuring them), processual (it is animated by practices that continually renew
these connections) and virtual (it is concerned not only with actual structures
to be analysed but also with real potentials that have yet to be actualized), it
produces continual ripples outwards towards as yet unknown integrative
functions. Guattari calls this horizon the Cosmos. The movement towards it,
through the integrative circuit of ecosophy, is ‘chaosmosis’. Chaosmosis is the
process by which ‘existential Territories’ (spaces) are composed out of chaos.
This is how new subjectivities arise (what Guattari calls ‘mutant subjectivities’),
composed of different machines at different scales. ‘The chaosmic explorations
of an ecosophy –articulating between them scientific, political, environmental
Figure 7.2 Diagram of ecosophy as integrative catalyst.

and mental ecologies –ought to be able to claim to replace the old ideologies

which abusively sectorised the social, the private and the civil, and which were
fundamentally incapable of establishing transversal junctions between the
political, the ethical and the aesthetic’ (Guattari 1995: 134).
These new subjectivities will not be confined to precisely delineated scales
such as the individual or various social groups. Like UIQ, they will exist between
structures, at multiple scales: infra. Because these subjectivities are explicitly
understood as compositions and not as preexisting objects, artistic and medial
practice remain central to Guattari’s (1995) program. The psyche, the social body
and milieus, as continually composed and recomposed domains, all possess
irreducible aesthetic dimensions to which IWC is blind. ‘My perspective involves
shifting the human and social sciences from scientific paradigms towards ethico-
aesthetic paradigms’ (10). The ecosophical aesthetic paradigm, ‘the creation and
composition of mutant percepts and affects –has become the paradigm for
every possible form of liberation’ (91). Here I think that Guattari is thinking
of the many failed forms of liberation that have come before: psychoanalysis,
which further individuates the psyche (taking it out of productive circulation
and articulating it to the past); politics, which captures group-subjectivity and
reterritorializes it to concretized, structured ends; and medial-art practice,
which tends to reinforce previously defined structures through representation
and homogenization rather than energizing a radical aesthetics of subjective
production. Liberation from the planetary plan (grid) of IWC requires that the
energies invested in these practices be liberated and catalysed in a new ‘virtual
ecology’. At the end of the Winter Years, Guattari had a newfound hope that
ecosophy ‘will tend to create new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a
new gentleness between the sexes, generations, ethnic groups, races’ (Guattari
1995: 92). A utopia, certainly. But a utopia that never rests as a static state, a
single assemblage of objects. Guattari’s ideal ecosystem is not one that has been
preserved in a pristine, past state, nor one that has been optimized in some ideal
way. It is not a wilderness, and it is not a garden. It is an Infra-Quark Universe,
forever in the process of composing itself.
Conclusion
Guattari’s ecosophy was born out of failure. This is a philosophical point, not
merely a biographical one. The Guattarian machines were particularly suited to
catalysing mutation within particular domains. Unlike the Deleuzean machines,
those composing Guattari were prone to fixation on particular structures in

thought and institutional practice. The peripatetic-disruption machine would
decompose them at the same time that the centripetal-connection machine
would concentrate forces around certain points of enunciation. This resulted
in significant mutations within the field of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, as we
have seen, the monolithic structures in place in the domain of mental health
institutions left these mutations nowhere to go but a different domain entirely;
the result was a horizontal jump to translate these intensities into political
praxis. Similarly, politics ultimately proved to be a dead end. This is not to
imply that Guattari’s productive life can be periodized in a linear fashion: he
never ceased practising his version of psychoanalysis or abandoned his political
activism; similarly, he had always nursed the dream of engaging artistic-media
production. I am arguing, however, that the creative mutations catalysed by
Guattari in these domains all failed, at some point, to continue to produce new
forms within their original domains.
It was precisely their jumps between domains that kept the Guattarian
machines productive. The great insight of ecosophy is that this creative process,
if it is ultimately to evade the forces of capture mobilized by late capital, must
explicitly articulate these domains together in a new way, with a different scalar
structure in order to sustain a non-reductive engagement with the multiple
dimensions of each. The ecological movement, which was continuing to
gain momentum in Europe even during the triumphant rise of IWC (we can
call it ‘neoliberalism’) during the 1980s, gave Guattari a model or diagram of
an alternative integrative logic. Thinking the psyche in ecological terms, as
an autopoietic system interacting at multiple scales with other systems, was
consonant with Guattari’s understanding of subjectivity. Thinking the social
body in the same terms would render its dynamics consistent with the psyche,
integrating them in thought and praxis. The environmental degradation and
pollution so evident to environmentalists seemed to Guattari to be directly tied to
a larger ecosystem that included the forces of capital and technology rather than
merely being acted upon by them. A subjective, integrated, aesthetic ecology
could act as a continually sustained line of flight from the integrating forces of
capital, a toolkit for avoiding failure (blockage) in any single domain. Ultimately,
chaosmosis provided ecosophy with a virtual horizon for the production of new
subjectivities theoretically capable of outflanking IWC by continually shifting
scales at the same time that it dismantled capital’s scalar hierarchy.
In the early 1990s, Guattari began showing signs of recovering from his
depression. He had formed alliances with the Greens and Generation Ecologie,
which were starting to pick up seats in elections from the municipal to national
levels. Though Guattari found their political objectives to be short-sighted, this
represented a line of flight from traditional political polarization, a new vector
in politics –without a past, and thus without a dangerously reactionary, oedipal
structure. One of the central paradoxes of Félix Guattari was that the great
philosopher and activist of the line of flight, of creativity and subjective production
opposed to structure, who worked so hard to liberate the multiplicitous, molecular
forces of desire, found his own desire constantly reterritorialized as monadic
cathexis and repetitive action. He could never quite escape the structures and
patterns from which his thought and action charted an escape for others.
In 1992, Guattari ran as a Green candidate in the March regional elections.
He had little support and lost. And yet this machinic being who couldn’t quite
resist molar politics was never attentive to his own bodily singularities. After two
years of neglected heart trouble, and a final ignored heart attack the day before,
his body failed on 29 August 1992.
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8
Into the Zone: Affective Counterpoint

and Ecosophical Aesthetics in the Films of
Terrence Malick
Colin Gardner
The ecosophical relationship between the spectator and the cinema screen takes
the form of an affective connection, what Adrian Ivakhiv (2013: 17), inspired
by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), has called an entry into ‘The Zone’, ‘the
meeting ground of images and sounds, as they are organized for us by cinema,
with the dense texture of perceptual response, bodily affect, and the multiple
layers of memory, desire, and the interpretive capacity that we bring to viewing
a film or artwork’. For Ivakhiv, writing in his groundbreaking book Ecologies of
the Moving Image, ‘The Zone’ bears a certain affinity to Heidegger’s definition
of ‘earth’ –‘a materiality that gives itself to us as territory, as land, as nature, as
resource, and that simultaneously takes away from us as time, as death, and as
mystery’ (25). Terrence Malick’s films, from Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven
(1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) to The New World (2005), The Tree of Life
(2011) and To The Wonder (2012), are particularly rich examples of this by-play
between connective and disjunctive syntheses, this simultaneous movement
towards a subjective, finite inside and a deterritorializing, autopoietic outer
trajectory, setting up what Carl Platinga (2010) calls an ‘affective counterpoint’
or incongruity between the natural and the man-made as a unified, albeit
constantly changing, ecological whole.
This chapter explores Malick’s films as a type of ‘minor’ geography (as
much imagined as real) that is structured around a journey from the stratified,
signifying world of everyday life –usually violent or cruel, as in the case of
Malick’s fictional recreation of the 1958 Starkweather-Fugate killing spree, the
battle of Guadalcanal, the attempt in 1608 to establish the Jamestown colony
in Virginia, the crisis of faith of an Oklahoma priest or the life struggles of a
young Chicago couple or Waco, Texas, family –to the immanent, ecological
space of nature in-itself, which is vicariously beautiful, sublime, toxic, abject,
catastrophic and sacred. Far from creating a clear dialectic between subject and
object, substance and representation, nomos and physis, Malick instead creates
a liminal ecological space of relational processes and encounters, a veritable
probe-head where virtual and actual events are connected by a series of folds
and envelopments rather than clear-cut spatial or temporal breaks. In this way,
Malick’s characters, his audience and the encompassing space of the landscape
come together in the zone of cinema as an affective body that, in Deleuze’s
(1989: 189) words, ‘forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life’.
For theorists like Ivakhiv, the foundation for this ecosophical aesthetic
approach to cinema is fundamentally process- relational, supplementing
Deleuze’s own method based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic taxonomy. For
Peirce, Firstness is the thing’s purely qualitative potency; Secondness its actual
causal and existential relation with another thing; while Thirdness mediates
Firstness and Secondness to form an observation or logical and relational pattern.
Building on this system, Ivakhiv stresses a more fluid relationship between the
inside –the way a viewer is drawn into the diegetic events as they unfold on
screen –and the extra-diegetic world beyond that experience and the way each
forms connections, encounters and foldings with the material, the social and
the perceptual. The latter ecosophical milieux are derived directly from Félix
Guattari’s (2008) seminal work The Three Ecologies, first published in 1989, where
he challenges prevailing technocratic solutions to the problem of globalization
and industrial pollution. He argues instead that ‘only an ethico- political
articulation –what I call ecosophy –between the three ecological registers (the
environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify
these questions’ (19– 20). Guattari, in turn, acknowledges his considerable
debt to the works of the English anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory
Bateson, who was the first to break down ecology into three interconnected
trajectories: the material (ecology, biophysical); the social (cultural and human);
and most importantly for our purposes, the perceptual, which treats the mind
as an interactive system characterized by an exchange of information –images,
sounds, looks and audibilities –which are transmitted within and between the
intra-and extra-filmic worlds. This allows us to transform the ecological into a
machinic, decentred paradigm that completely befits the role of cinema as, in
Antonin Artaud’s words, a spiritual automaton.
In his discussion of the action-image in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image,
Deleuze turns to Noel Burch’s formula of the ‘large form’ to extrapolate Peirce’s
Affective Counterpoint and Ecosophical Aesthetics 175
Secondness as the foundation for cinematic realism: a case of situation +

character/ action. ‘What constitutes realism is simply this’, notes Deleuze
(1986: 141): ‘milieux and modes of behavior, milieux which actualise and
modes of behavior which embody. The action-image is the relation between
the two and all the varieties of this relation’. In this form, qualities and powers
become forces within the milieu –they curve in on themselves, act on the
character, throw him/her a challenge and set up a situation in which he/she is
caught. The character then acts to respond to the situation, which in turn leads
to a modification of the milieu, the situation and the other characters. This
is what Burch calls the S-A-S’ formula, which moves us from situation to the
transformed situation via the intermediary of action. This evolutionary shift
is by no means guaranteed however, for there may be no development, as in
the case of S-A-S, where the individual ends up in the same situation as before
(e.g. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook, which presents a case of pure survival), or the
situation may get worse: S-A-S’’, manifested by the increased degradation of
the individual instead of their improvement, as in the case of Howard Hawks’s
Scarface.
For our purposes, a key corollary of this formula is the particular use of mise-
en-scène, epitomized by the use of landscape in the classic Hollywood Western.
For Deleuze, the latter is solidly anchored in the milieu as a form of ambience
or encompasser, and in this respect Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven are
revisionist variations on the Western genre. Here, the ultimate encompasser is
the sky and its various pulsations of light, movement, shadow and respiration,
which envelops the milieu and, in turn, the relationship of the protagonist
and the collective. As Deleuze (1986: 146) argues, ‘It is as representative of the
collectivity that the hero becomes capable of an action which makes him equal
to the milieu and re-establishes its accidentally or periodically endangered
order: mediations of the community and of the land are necessary in order to
form a leader and render an individual capable of such a great action.’ However,
it is important to note that different directors use the immanent qualities of
earth and sky in different ways. John Ford, for example, utilizes the encompasser
to highlight the socially bonding agency of specific collective rituals –marriage,
festivals, dances, songs –under the watchful presence of the immanent sky,
while a film such as Stagecoach uses its Monument Valley locations as both
the domain of the Native Americans –who are framed as if they were both of,
and intrinsic to, the landscape –and the terrain for the travelling probe head
(with its rag-tag assemblage of different classes and personal agendas) that is
the stagecoach itself.
At first glance the itinerant lovers Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek)
in Malick’s feature debut Badlands appear to fit two seemingly contradictory
encompassing schema, one communicated by our perception of Kit’s actual
on-screen violence, which takes place against the breathtaking vistas of South
Dakota and the Montana Badlands (actually shot in Eastern Colorado), the other
expressed through Holly’s romanticized voice-over narration. Deleuze describes
the first use of the encompasser in terms of Hawks’s functionalism, whereby
Ford’s unifying, immanent use of time and space to unite the individual and the
collective is radically deformed. Here, locations lose their intrinsic organic life,
so that far from being sanctuaries and safe havens against the outside world,
homesteads become the site of violence, as in the case of Kit’s cold-blooded
murder of Holly’s father (Warren Oates) and his desperate killing of his work
mate, Cato (Ramon Bieri). In contrast, the bucolic Eden of the Cotton Woods
acts as both a temporary communing with nature but also the opportunity to
establish a defence against outside attack. Evoking similar scenes in Vietnam
War dramas, Kit builds a network of tunnels and uses the landscape to fashion
deadly weapons, most notably a swinging bundle of spikes that can impale an
intruder at up to ten yards. The larger landscape –the Badlands themselves –are
both a means of itinerant escape (there is always another town to move on to),
but also another chance of capture as the dragnet tightens around the couple
and police helicopters swoop down from the sky like so many mechanical birds
of prey. Any grandiose action is inevitably forestalled in this purely vectorial
space: the film’s ostensible ‘heroes’ are now reduced to the role of doomed
desperados, with no advantage to be gained except for the necessity of staying
alive. As in Hawks’s Rio Bravo, the broader community is reduced to a makeshift
group –Kit and Holly –functional but no longer part of a larger organic whole.
Unlike in Ford, where violence invariably enters from the outside –the Native
Americans, the outlaw gang –it now comes purely from the interior, bursting
forth unexpectedly as the principal impetus of the film’s action, much like the
visceral brutality of Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah’s westerns.
However, Holly’s running commentary and Kit’s own self-narrativization
serve to return the encompassing role of landscape closer to the Fordian ideal.
Just as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance where the community constructs
a myth to validate the newly forged collective based on the rule of Law over
that of the gun in order to reinforce the necessary shift from S to S’, so Holly
also constructs textual illusions about herself and Kit that are belied by what
we actually see and feel affectively. ‘A community is healthy in so far as a kind
of consensus reigns’, argues Deleuze (1986: 148), ‘a consensus which allows it to
develop illusions about itself, about its motives, about its desires and its cupidity,
about its values and its ideals: “vital” illusions, realist illusions which are more
true than pure truth’. The American Dream thus draws all of its power from
the fact that it is a dream: all change takes place within an encompasser which
swaddles the protagonists with a healthy illusion –namely, the continuity of
their own progress as individuals or as a community. Thus, in contrast to the
Vietnam-like affective suggestiveness of the forest scene that evokes films such
as Apocalypse Now! and Platoon, Holly instead stresses its domestication and
routine as the perfect idyll for young lovers: ‘We hid out in the wilderness down
by a river in the grove of Cotton Woods. Being the flood season we built our
house in the trees . . . We planned a huge network of tunnels under the forest
floor, and our first order of business every morning was to decide on a new
pathway for the day.’
While Holly acts out her teenage romance fantasies like a latter-day outlaw
Emma Bovary, Kit in turn is self-consciously playing the role of James Dean,
only this time he is a rebel with a cause, mindful of his own role in constructing
the mediated myth of a doomed couple racing towards oblivion. Narrating his
confession in a dime store recording booth, he declares,
My girl Holly and I decided to kill ourselves. The same way I did her Daddy. Big
decision, you know. Uh, the reasons are obvious. I don’t have time to go into
right now. But, one thing though, he was provoking me when I popped him.
Well that’s what it was like. Pop. I’m sorry. I mean, nobody’s coming out of this
thing happy. Especially not us. I can’t deny we’ve had fun though.
If, as Deleuze argues, the action-image is marked by a big gap between the
encompasser and the hero, between the milieu and the protagonist’s modifying
behavior which is only bridged progressively and incrementally as the film
progresses, Badlands sets up a disjunctive synthesis between the two that is
never fully resolved. Kit and Holly are only equal to the Fordian encompasser in
their own self-image, not through any organic envelopment of the protagonists
by the surrounding milieu. Here violence remains arbitrary and discontinuous,
as if on a parallel track to the ecosophical connections of the rest of the film,
creating an affective counterpoint that we can only bridge mentally through
a defamiliarized critique of the mythic function of the western and road film
genres themselves.
This disjuncture is both exacerbated and ultimately bridged in Days of
Heaven, another revisionist nod to the western, this time with a more overtly
pantheistic portrayal of nature which allows Malick to more acutely examine
humanity’s uncomfortable place within the natural order of things. Structured in

a similar fashion to Badlands, the film follows Billy (Richard Gere), his girlfriend
Abby (Brooke Adams) and Billy’s young sister Linda (Linda Manz) as they flee
Chicago after Billy appears to kill his factory foreman (Stuart Margolin) following
a heated argument. With Billy and Abby masquerading as brother and sister
and with Linda’s voice-over providing an impromptu commentary that is equal
parts meandering disengagement and poetic metonymy, the trio drift south to
become migrant labourers on the land of a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard) in the
Texas panhandle. Again we have a violent protagonist (Billy), and a seemingly
indifferent nature –represented by time-lapse shots of growing wheat, extreme
close-ups of the locusts that feed on it, deer, bison, rabbits and so on –that seems
to act as a Hawksian encompasser ruled by pure functionalism. The latter is
taken to cynical extremes when Shepard’s farmer –who has a terminal illness –
takes a shine to Abby; and Billy, anticipating a quick inheritance in the event of
the landowner’s death, gives his blessing to their marriage. Unfortunately for his
best laid plans, Shepard recovers and the increasingly jealous Billy knifes him to
death in a fit of desperate panic, forcing him once again to go on the run.
However, there is far more going on here that a simple repeat of the Badlands
schema. Indeed, Days of Heaven seems to appropriate a third encompasser
matrix typified by the work of Yasujiro Ozu. Dominated by opsigns and
sonsigns –images and sounds that exist only for themselves rather than
furthering the narrative thrust –in Ozu ‘the action-image disappears in favor
of the purely visual image of what a character is, and the sound image of what
he says, completely banal nature and conservation constituting the essentials of
the script’ (Deleuze 1989: 13–14). As in Ozu’s cinema, Days of Heaven is marked
by weak sensory-motor connections, long idle periods where work, leisure,
play, love and death tend to be dehierarchized into a shared indifference and
ordinariness. In short, Malick’s mise-en-scène is a pure any-space-whatever –
disconnected, vacuous, dominated by empty spaces, where character movement
takes second place to a more cerebral encounter between ecosophical trajectories
such as the life cycle of natural forms and the seasonal nature of farm labour. As
Ben McCann (2007: 81) observes, ‘Placing the human protagonists within the
widescreen frame, the subsequent dwarfing of their proportions by the natural
surroundings is symbolic of their powerlessness against nature; the lack of
human perspective and influence within the greater scheme of things.’ Instead
of an irruption of the individual into the world of the encompasser, we have a
dynamic juxtaposition of images of the natural world intercut with point-of-
view shots of the protagonists seeing that very world –thereby cathecting nature
in ‘both protagonist and spectator’ (81). On one hand this is a very Heideggeran
notion (as is well known, Malick himself is a former Heidegger scholar and
translator), concerned with the ‘illumined, radiant self-manifestation’ of things;
while on the other it has strong associations with Guattari’s notion of mental
ecosophy, which is pre-objectal and pre-personal, much like Freud’s ‘primary
process’. ‘One could call this the logic of the “included middle” ’, argues Guattari
(2008: 36), ‘in which black and white are indistinct, where the beautiful coexists
with the ugly, the inside with the outside, the “good” object with the “bad” ’.
Here, between encompasser and subject, ‘[t]‌here is no overall hierarchy for
locating and localizing the components of enunciation at a given level. They
are composed of heterogeneous elements that take on a mutual consistency and
persistence as they cross the thresholds that constitute one world at the expense
of another’ (36).
In this case it is cinema itself –and Malick’s film in its specificity –that allows
for such creative connections to be made through the affect-and mental-images
generated by the spectator. As Guattari (2008: 38) reminds us, ‘These focal points
of creative subjectification in their nascent state can only be accessed by the
detour of a phantasmatic economy that is deployed in a random form. In short,
no one is exempt from playing the game of the ecology of the imaginary!’ More
importantly, ‘[t]‌here is a principle specific to environmental ecology, it states that
anything is possible –the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions’ (43).
Indeed, the famous scene when the farmer’s corn crop is attacked by a plague of
locusts is exemplary in this regard. On one level the workers are powerless in the
face of such a force of nature –a case of encompasser turned contagion, framing
sky re- materialized as a black cloud of immanent destruction enveloping
the earth. On another their burning of the crop and the locusts along with it
suggests a connectedness that extends far beyond particular individuals to more
collective deterritorializations that take us to the wider world and beyond. We
are also aware of the mutual enfolding of violence between the two –these are
real locusts being burned alive for the sake of cinema spectacle, giving us an
affecting relationship to the immanent connectibility of a local catastrophe to
the possibility of a global ecological holocaust. ‘Film objects of this sort are more
than just mere objects’, notes Ivakhiv (2013). ‘They become carriers of affect,
mediators of relations that both pass on an energetic quality or charge between
humans and things and represent that quality itself. They are fusions of firstness
(the things, the qualities, the feelings), secondness (the events connected by
them), and thirdness (the interpretations and meanings we give them)’ (124–5;
emphases in the original).
This series of foldings within and between Peirce’s triad is at the heart of
Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), an account of the pivotal World War II Pacific
Theater battle for Guadalcanal that defies all genre expectations. Like Malick’s
more recent films, The New World, The Tree of Life and To The Wonder, The
Thin Red Line proceeds through contrasting but ultimately complementary
world views, which Malick unfolds in accordance with different trajectories to
a broader, infinite outside rather than attempting a straightforward synthesis or
overcoming. Although the film uses multiple voice-overs as a form of dialogic
heteroglossia –often, because of the characters’ similar Southern drawls, to the
point of indistinguishability (see Rothermel 2010: 97) –Malick sets up a primary
affective distinction between the interrogative role of Pvt. Edward P. Train (John
Dee Smith) and the contrasting, somewhat self-delusory philosophies of Pvt.
Witt (Jim Caviezel) and First Sergeant Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) as a means
of counterpointing the catastrophic reality of war in the context of such serene,
natural beauty.
Haunted by the tranquillity of his mother’s death, Witt is the film’s
ostensible transcendentalist: ‘I wondered how it’d be like when I died, what
it’d be like to know this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw.
I just hope I can meet it the same way she did, with the same . . . calm. ‘Cause
that’s where it’s hidden –the immortality I hadn’t seen.’ Then, echoing Jim
Casey’s famous line in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, he muses, ‘Maybe all
men got one big soul everybody’s a part of, all faces of the same man, one
big self. Everyone looking for salvation for himself. Each like a coal drawn
from the fire.’ In contrast, Welsh comes across more like a Hobbesian realist,
resigned to man’s inexorable fate in a world that is ‘nasty, brutish and short’
and where everything is really about property, including war. However, Dennis
Rothermel (2010: 95) makes an insightful point in arguing that Welsh is more
of an affective pragmatist, for he ‘consoles his inability to save men from dying
by repeating thoughts of not caring as a kind of reverse mantra. If he could
assure himself of being divorced from attachments, he would not suffer the
pain of losing men’.
By comparison, Pvt. Train –significantly the most timidly fearful character in
the film and the least able to cope with the horrors of war –faces his condition
honestly, without illusion or self-delusion: ‘This great evil. Where does it come
from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who’s doin’ this? Who’s killin’ us? Robbing us of life and light? Mockin’ us
with the sight of what we might’ve known.’ Then as a GI heartlessly executes a
Japanese prisoner of war, Train asks, ‘Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it
help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you
passed through this night?’ As Rothermel (2010: 97) notes,
What makes Train’s central placement as the surrogate author of the film’s
reflections upon violence crucial is that he is a man who is openly afraid,
however much reception of the film will resist that association and attribute
Train’s messages to soldiers who show courage. We have, in fact, no more reason
to believe that the man who is afraid is any more susceptible to illusion and less
inclined to wisdom than is the courageous man, which is a crucial lesson to
underscore with regard to the horrors of combat.
It is his heightened sense of affect generated through fear that allows Train to
confront the very nature of being itself. In voice-over he muses: ‘One man looks
at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain, that death’s got
the final word; it’s laughing at him. Another man [On Pvt. Witt, blissfully asleep]
sees that same bird and feels the glory, [On Welsh] feels something smiling
through it.’
If one were to look for a common thread running through Train’s perspective
one could argue that he owes equal debt to Heraclitus and Spinoza, both
significant philosophical precursors to Deleuze and Guattari. Take, for example,
Train’s (and, as it turns out, the film’s) closing lines, spoken over images of his
comrades as they disembark in a troop carrier:
Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with, walked
with? The brother. The friend. Darkness and light, strife and love. Are they the
workings of one mind, the features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in
you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. [On the
wake of the boat]. All things shining.
These words –as well as the final, ephemeral image of flowing water –are
highly evocative of Heraclitus (1995: 35), particularly his dictum that ‘[o]‌ne
should see that war is common and justice is strife, and that everything is
happening according to strife and necessity’. Rothermel (2010: 98) also notes
that Train’s words echo lines from William Wordsworth’s Prelude, whereby
‘[t]he substitution of “strife and love” for “tumult and peace” and Wordsworth’s
subject of rain and wind instead of war invoke this well-known metaphysics of
Heraclitus’. Equally important is that Deleuze and Guattari associate Heraclitus
and his famous dictum that ‘[n]o man ever steps in the same river twice’ with
the absolute becoming of the abyss (what they subsequently call ‘the machinic
phylum of becoming’), which unites, without judgement, the chaos of war with
the cycle of the eternal return: ‘Even among the Pre-Socratics perhaps only
Heraclitus knew that becoming is not “judged”, that it cannot be and has not
to be judged, that it does not receive its law from elsewhere, that it is “just” and
possesses its own law in itself. Only Heraclitus foresaw that there is no kind of
opposition between chaos and cycle’. Train is thus the perfect exemplar of this
unquestioning affirmation because he is totally innocent, lacking guile and its
concomitant need for a judgemental alibi. In this sense his philosophy evokes
Nietzsche’s association of becoming with chance –the pure luck of the dice
throw –for ‘[t]he dice throw is nothing when detached from innocence and
the affirmation of chance. The dice throw is nothing if chance and necessity are
opposed in it’ (Deleuze 1983: 34).
In turn, Train’s Spinozism evokes the always already embedded quality of
both objectivity and subjectivity –where the former always precedes the latter –
which exist as a series of folds and lines of flight on a plane of immanence, thereby
providing the springboard for Deleuze and Guattari’s passive synthesis of life as
a form of joyful auto-affection that encompasses a totalizing escosophy through
different intersecting vectors of subjectification. This can only be effectively
manifested through the guarantee of a continuum between the finite and infinite
whereby the gap between them is gradually bridged as Train (and the film’s
audience) move through Spinoza’s three levels of knowledge: from imagination
(the immediate experience of effects based on crude sense perception, association
and hearsay); through reason (knowledge of the universal laws of nature and
reason through the application of ‘common notions’); and finally intuitive
knowledge (the grasp of the finite body as it inheres in nature –the infinite –an
understanding of its essence through an immanent chain of causes). It is only
the third level that produces pure joy and necessitates a move from individuality
to singularity, with its concern with pure intensities. This is why Train is able to
bridge the affective counterpoint between fear and absurdity, nature and grace
and fold the machinic horrors of war into nature’s own disinterested cycle of life.
As Ivakhiv (2013: 111) reiterates, ‘Malick’s nature shots, no matter how skillfully
arranged and carefully designed . . . are also reminders to us that there is a world
out there that, while it may serve as a bottomless source of beautiful images,
continues its autonomous existence alongside our own and ultimately dwarfs
our own by framing our lives with the conditions of our mortality.’
Train’s immanent role of becoming is appropriated, but also expanded, in
Malick’s The New World by that of Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), who acts in
counterpoint to her colonial lovers, Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and John
Rolfe (Christian Bale). As Ron Mottram (2007: 15) points out, the film reiterates
many of Malick’s ecosophical themes, most notably ‘an Edenic yearning to

recapture a lost wholeness of being, an idyllic state of integration with the
natural and good both within and without ourselves’. Malick achieves this
desire for integration by stressing the difference between the Hawksian and the
Fordian encompasser that helps to visually define the settlers, who are presented
as a filthy, bickering and alienated bunch, imbued with impulsive violence and
ready to turn on each other at the first sign of a setback; and the Powhatan, who
seem fully integrated into the natural world through their communal rituals,
dances and haptic relationship to both each other and objective reality. This is
established with Pocahontas’ first lines of the film, spoken over an upside down
reflection in a body of water followed by a low angle shot of her raising her arms
to the sky: ‘Come, spirit, help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother.
We, your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.’
It is Pocahontas, through her love for both Smith and Rolfe, who extends
this deistic world view to the Old World, enfolding both milieux into a state
of potential rebirth. Thus, of Smith, she comments in voice-over (once again
evoking Heraclitus): ‘You flow through me, like a river.’ Later, she says of
Rolfe that ‘[h]‌e is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade’, while the latter
acknowledges Pocahontas’s role as a forger of new connections: ‘She weaves all
things together.’ It is in Pocahontas’s ability to embrace new deterritorializations
that the true significance of the film’s title becomes apparent: the New World
is equally applicable to the colonists, signified by the early inter-title, ‘A New
Start’, which alludes to both Smith’s reprieve from hanging and his shipmates’
chance at a new life; but also to Pocahontas herself, as she becomes the queen
of London society following her marriage to John Rolfe, her affirmative role
as exotic ‘other’ suggesting the mutual benefits of reciprocal migrations. As
Guattari (2008: 30) points out in The Three Ecologies, ‘Ecological praxes strive
to scout out the potential vectors of subjectification and singularization at each
partial existential locus. They generally seek something that runs counter to the
“normal” order of things, a counter-repetition, an intensive given which invokes
other intensities to form new existential configurations.’
However, Guattari is also quick to warn us that such deterritorializations
need to be gentle rather than violent, so that the assemblage may evolve in a
constructive, processual fashion, a form of existential refrain that generates
continuity through a series of catalytic focal points, much like the insistent reprise
of Vinteuil’s sonata and the church bells at Martinville in Proust’s Récherche.
Unfortunately, this is far from the case in The New World as the mutual suspicion
between the colonists and the Powhatan degenerates into all-out savage combat
reminiscent of the worst carnage in The Thin Red Line. It’s significant that Malick
exploits a different form of encompasser in these two films, closer to Kurosawa
than to Hawks or Ozu. In this case it is animated by an almost asthmatic
respiration which suffocates the duels and battles by enveloping and blanketing
them in dense fog and mist, as well as a relationship between earth and sky in
which the latter is invariably shot from a low angle upwards through a canopy of
trees. This causes the sunlight to flash intermittently and strobe-like through the
gaps in the branches like so many pantheistic insights that are forever out of the
protagonists’ conceptual and affective reach.
Deleuze also notes a shift in the conventional S-A-S’ structure where the
givens of the situation (in this case the transition of precolonial Virginia into
a British settlement) are not completely disclosed but rather harbor a series of
higher, perhaps unanswerable questions which the hero must extract in order
to be able to respond actively to the situation. ‘What counts is this form of the
extraction of an any-question-whatever’, notes Deleuze (1986: 189), ‘its intensity
rather than its content, its givens rather than its object, which make it, in any
event, into a sphinx’s question, a sorceress’s question’. In the case of Kurosawa’s
The Seven Samurai, for example, the obvious question is ‘Can the village be
defended?’ In The New World it might perhaps be, ‘Will the settlement survive?’
The hidden question for Kurosawa would then be: ‘What is a samurai today, at
this particular moment of history?’ Malick’s equivalent might be, in Guattarian
terms, ‘What is the price of European expansion and its impact on the ecosophical
connectedness between contrasting worlds?’ The implied answer is that both the
Old and New Worlds have become ghosts of their former selves, and that their
reincarnation on new lines is the imperative task of both the natives and the
colonizers, while at the same time respecting their mutual differences.
Deleuze makes an excellent observation that the discovery of such hidden
questions can change the order of everything within a given situation, a
malleability that is often manifested through visions and nightmares. ‘This is
the origin of Kurosawa’s oneirism’, Deleuze (1986: 190) notes, ‘such that the
hallucinatory visions are not merely subjective images, but rather figures of the
thought which discovers the givens of a transcendent question, in so far as they
belong to the world, to the deepest part of the world’. We discover a similar
oneirism running throughout The New World (also, as we shall see, in To The
Wonder) but one largely limited to the perspective of the colonists. Thus Rolfe,
attempting to dig to the heart of Pocahontas’s identity asks, ‘Who are you, what
do you dream of?’ Smith sees the Powhatan in similar terms, noting that ‘[t]‌hey
are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting
lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They
have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream’. Later, in
England, Smith admits to Pocahontas that their whole affair now seems like a
dream: ‘what we knew in the forest. It’s the only truth’. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1987: 288) remind us,
The secret is elevated from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy. This is
the point at which the secret attains absolute imperceptibility, instead of being
linked to a whole interplay of relative perceptions and reactions. We go from
a content that is well defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a priori
general form of a non localizable something that has happened.
It is this ‘something that has happened’ that anchors both The Tree of Life
and its more sceptical companion piece, To The Wonder, cinematic theodicies
that attempt to answer the question of why a benevolent God allows for the
manifestation of evil in the material world. In this respect both films use a
disjunctive movement across and between time frames and different worlds to
create an eco-philosophical meditation on human life, divine spirit and cosmic
nature, creating an unresolved tension (but also a necessary correspondence)
between ‘cosmodicy’ –which affirms the fundamental goodness of the infinite
universe –and ‘anthropodicy’, which justifies the inherent goodness of finite
humanity. ‘Any present, any locale, has its own way of opening to the infinite’,
suggests Claire Colebrook (2014). ‘The actual world never exhausts the truth
of the world, even if truth as such is an eternal potentiality always disclosed in
concrete time’ (174–5).
In the case of To The Wonder, Malick’s theodicy starts from the premise that
human love derives from divine love, that fundamentally all things work together
for the greater good. However, the film also expresses, through the various
affective shortcomings of its characters, a strong sense of scepticism and doubt,
grounded in the notion that mankind is, by its very nature, always in revolt
against God. Malick expresses this antinomy through both secular and spiritual
relationships, represented once again by a heteroglossia of competing voice-
overs. Thus Neil (Ben Affleck), an environmental engineer based in Oklahoma,
is the love interest of both the Russian-born Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a single
mother who he brings back to the Mid West after a whirlwind romance in
Paris, and Jane (Rachel McAdams), a childhood friend and recently bankrupt
rancher. Like the encompasser role in A Thin Red Line and The New World,
Marina’s love is associated specifically with the oneiric, for as her free-spirited
Italian friend Anna (Romina Mondello) insists, ‘Life’s a dream. In dream you
can’t make mistakes. In dream you can be whatever you want.’ For Marina, this
dictum is ecosophically and spiritually related to Mont St. Michel, the island
monastery off the coast of Normandy, which has been dubbed ‘The Wonder of
the Western World’. It has obvious significance in terms of the film’s title, for it is
not only the location where Neil and Marina first cement their mutual passion
but is also the closing image of the film as a whole, taking the form of Marina’s
projected dream-like vision of immanent becoming as the abbey’s magnificent
spire creates a symbolic bridge between the materiality of the island and the
expansive vault of the heavens above. In addition, it is associated with water and
tide pools, uniting the Heraclitan world of strife and necessity with the flow of
becoming and return, for as Marina states at one point following an argument
with Neil, ‘I write on water what I dare not say.’
In contrast, Jane’s love for Neil is far more grounded in the Oklahoma soil
itself. Instead of a religious sanctuary, her relationship with Neil is symbolized
by property (the very stuff of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream) and
the desire to be a good wife, homemaker and mother. Her values are exemplified
by a magisterial shot of the couple frolicking among a herd of buffalo on the
prairie as the encompassing sky unites the human, the animal and the land in an
immanent, multiplicitous whole. Perhaps inevitably, both of Neil’s relationships
fall apart as he is too cynical and aloof to commit wholeheartedly to such an
uncompromisingly intuitive faith in love, particularly a deistic love (‘What is
this love that loves us?’ ponders Marina) rooted in the unity of God, nature and
humankind. All of Neil’s faith in the latter has been shattered by his job as a soil
inspector, which has revealed the catastrophic despoliation of the water table by
toxic lead and calcium to the point that whole communities are being uprooted
just in order to survive. In short, Neil represents the unresolvable divide between
‘cosmodicy’ and ‘anthropodicy’, and as such is unable to love ‘fully’ under the
terms of the film’s idealized theodicy. As Jane bitterly puts it after their inevitable
break-up, ‘You made it into nothing. Pleasure. Lust.’ In short, with Neil affect is
reduced to nothingness.
The film’s spiritual aporia is represented by Father Quintana (Javier Bardem),
a local Catholic priest who has undergone a serious loss of faith. Quintana is a
hands-on populist priest –he gives the sacrament to local prisoners, administers
to junkies and the homeless, who spill out onto the local streets from decaying
suburban tract homes –and this is both his saving grace (his higher calling) but
also the source, as an unresolvable theodicy, of his crisis. In voice-over, Quintana
distils the problem into an existential question of choice. In other words, in
Nietzschean terms, you must affirm the dice throw regardless of the outcome:
We wish to live inside the safety of the laws. We fear to choose. Jesus insists on
choice. The one thing he condemns utterly is avoiding the choice. To choose is
to commit yourself. And to commit yourself is to run the risk, is to run the risk
of failure, the risk of sin, the risk of betrayal. But Jesus can deal with all of those.
Forgiveness he never denies us. The man who makes a mistake can repent. But
the man who hesitates, who does nothing, who buries his talent in the earth,
with him he can do nothing.
Ultimately, all of the characters in To The Wonder find some form of temporary
solace independent of relationships either with God or each other. Quintana
moves on to another diocese in Kansas, Marina returns to Paris, dreaming of
Mont St. Michel as a Heraclitan ecosophical bridge to the divine, while Neil
is seen in a flash forward as the patriarch of a new family, albeit rooted to a
despoiled heartland which, like the Texas panhandle in Days of Heaven, will
be inevitably buffeted by a combination of man-made and natural disasters. In
effect, Malick’s characters reach for and try to embrace the heavens but inevitably
fall short because they are ‘all too human’, for as Nietzsche (1984: 266, §638) puts
it in a famous aphorism, ‘He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason
cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer: though not as a traveler to
a final destination.’ What is lacking in To The Wonder is, as Guattari (2008: 44)
argues,
A collective and individual subjectivity that completely exceeds the limits of

individualization, stagnation, identificatory closure, and will instead open
itself up on all sides of the socius, but also to the machinic Phylum, to techno-
scientific Universes of reference, to aesthetic worlds, as well as to a new ‘pre-
personal’ understanding of time, of the body, of sexuality. A subjectivity of
resingularization that can meet head-on the encounter with the finitude of
desire, pain and death.
If To The Wonder represents a cautionary critique through the defamilarizing

effect of conflicting narrative threads, then Malick’s The Tree of Life might be
seen to represent Guattari’s more affirmative corollary. Once again the narrative
is marked by the affective incongruity of competing voice-overs but is ultimately
pulled together by the present-day reminiscences of the film’s adult protagonist,
Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn), who looks back on his childhood in Waco, Texas, and
tries to make sense of the family’s defining event, the death of his brother, R.L.
(Laramie Eppler). As in most of Malick’s films, the director splits the narrative’s
world view between two main characters, in this case Jack’s authoritarian father
(Brad Pitt), and his mother (Jessica Chastain), who are loosely allied to the
contrasting difference between Nature and Grace respectively. As Mrs. O’Brien

states in voice-over,
The nuns taught there were two ways through life, the way of nature and the
way of grace. Nature is willful; it only wants to please itself, to have its own
way . . . It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it.
Grace doesn’t try to please itself, it accepts being slighted, accepts insults and
injuries . . . No one who follows the way of grace comes to a bad end.
However, it’s important to note that these are not hard and fast positions. Jack’s
father ultimately comes to question his rigid egoism, admitting that ‘I wanted to
be loved because I was great; a big man. I’m nothing. Look at the glory around
us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn’t notice the glory.
I’m a foolish man’. However, Jack’s mother is equally torn between the material
and the transcendent, addressing her questions to both a Creator –‘Where were
you? . . . Who are we to you? . . . Answer me’ –and her lost child: ‘Life of my life
. . . I search for you . . . My hope . . . my child.’ Jack would seem to have inherited
the side of Nature, accusing his God of neglect: ‘Where were You? You let a boy
die. You let anything happen. Why should I be good? When You aren’t.’
However, the film’s point of view is not necessarily limited to that of Jack or
the other members of his immediate family, for as Ivakhiv (2013: 316) rightly
points out, ‘Where Malick’s earlier films embedded their human story lines in
a world whose contours extended beyond the human –to animals, insects, and
the changing of the seasons –here that background encompasses the entire
evolutionary movement of life, from the Big Bang onwards.’ Indeed, the film
opens and closes with cosmic images of swirling gases and nebulae, and then
intercuts scenes of dinosaurs, planets and asteroids with the O’Brien family’s
domestic traumas which, like those of Neil and his lovers in To The Wonder, seem
insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. But this is perhaps Malick’s whole
point, because both micro-and macrocosm each have their part to play in what
Guattari (2008: 43) calls the broader machinic ecology: ‘The pursuit of mastery
over the mechanosphere will have to begin immediately if the acceleration of
techno-scientific progress and the pressure of huge population increases are to
be dealt with.’ As Guattari goes on to explain,
To bring into being other worlds beyond those of purely abstract information,
to engender Universes of reference and existential Territories where singularity
and finitude are taken into consideration by the multivalent logic of mental
ecologies and by the group Eros principle of social ecology; to dare to confront
the vertiginous Cosmos so as to make it inhabitable; these are the tangled paths
of the tri-ecological vision. (44)
Malick achieves this infusion of the finite with the infinite through his
adoption of a fourth kind of encompasser, that of Kenji Mizoguchi, which
Deleuze associates with Burch’s ‘Small Form’ or A-S-A’ structure, where the
situation extends and modifies the difference between two actions. As in the
case of To The Wonder, where the unifying role of the encompassing landscape is
reinforced by the film’s soundtrack –a combination of diegetic industrial sounds
(despoliation) and sublime romantic orchestral and choral music (cosmodicy) –
Malick follows Mizoguchi’s tendency to start with the skeletal structure of
everyday life. He then links fragment to fragment as we move progressively from
house to garden, from character to character and then ultimately to the creation
of a series of vectors that allows us to encompass an immensity of space, but one
that is still grounded in –and returns to –the small form: in Malick’s terms,
an envelopment of both Grace and Nature. ‘It was Mizoguchi who attained the
lines of the universe, the fibres of the universe, and who constantly traced them
in all his films. In this way he gives the small form an incomparable range,’ notes
Deleuze (1986).
It is not the line which unites into a whole, but the one which connects or links
up the heterogeneous elements, while keeping them heterogeneous. The line of
the universe links up the back rooms to the street, the street to the lake, the
mountain, the forest. It links up man and woman and the cosmos. It connects
desires, suffering, errors, trials, triumphs, appeasements. It connects the
moments of intensity, as so many points through which it passes. (194)
For Mizoguchi –echoed by Malick in the case of Jack’s mother but also Marina
and Jane in To The Wonder –there is no line of the universe which doesn’t pass
through the women or issue from them, even if the social system oppresses
them in the form of a rigid capitalist patriarchy. In this respect the film’s key
univocal message is one of love and joy, for as Patricia MacCormack (2012: 146)
points out,
The cosmic both extricates us from the world we know and the knowledge that
destroys the world while also placing us inextricably within that world, the world
become the encounter with outside as we dream, sleep and imagine. Through
managing what we have done to the earth while we live, in an attempt to further
its freedom for expressivity, not with guilt but joy, allows us accountability with
immanence and futurity rather than a constant address to the past. ‘Never forget
the place from which you depart, but leave it behind and join the universal. Love
the bond that unites your plot of earth with the earth, the bond that makes kin
and stranger resemble each other.’ (Serres 2002: 50)
This ontology of futurity is one reason why The Tree of Life’s final scene –
controversial because of its seeming sentimentality –where Jack strolls along
the wind-swept shore and encounters all the long-dead members of his family,
as if frozen in time from his childhood memories –is an extremely important
ecosophical moment (because of its implied ‘cosmodicy’) in Malick’s cinema.
Just as the primordial images of creation represent a kind of brut Firstness and
the O’Brien family’s questioning of faith in each other manifests Secondness as
a set of unstable relations, then this scene pulls tighter the entire ‘tree of life’
as a set of deterritorializing relational processes in themselves, for as Ivakhiv
(2013: 318–19) argues,
‘[N]‌nature’ is its arising as qualities and the wrestling between them when they
are actualized; ‘grace’ is the dawning meaningfulness that emerges within the
Open, the gap between one line and another, one image and another, one effort
and another. Grace, meaning, thirdness, is out of our hands, yet strangely sensed
if those hands remain poised to receive it. But it emerges out of a kernel that is
traumatic at its core.
Note
Many thanks to Dennis Rothermel for his invaluable insights into Malick’s The Thin
Red Line, particularly the philosophical references to Heraclitus, and also for helping
me clarify and identify the film’s different voice-overs. I also owe a great debt to
Silke Panse and Anat Pick for allowing me to present an early draft of this chapter
for a panel entitled ‘Screening Nature: Life, Catastrophes and Eco-sophy’, with Anne
Sauvagnargues (University of Paris, Nanterre) and Gregory Flaxman (University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) at Queen Mary, University of London, England, in
May 2014.
References
Colebrook, Claire (2014), ‘Screen Truth’, in A Critique of Judgment in Film and

Television, Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds, 167–86, New York and
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deleuze Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson,

Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta
London: Continuum.
Heraclitus (1995), Heraclitus: Translation and Analysis, ed. and trans. D. Sweet, Lanham,
MD: University Press of America.
Ivakhiv, Adrian J. (2013), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature,
Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
MacCormack, Patricia (2012), Posthuman Ethics, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
McCann, Ben (2007), ‘Enjoying the Scenery: Landscape and the Fetishization of Nature
in Badlands and Days of Heaven’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of
America, 2nd ed., Hannah Patterson, ed., 77–87, New York: Wallflower Press.
Mottram, Ron (2007), ‘All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption,
and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick’, in The Cinema of Terrence
Malick, Poetic Visions of America, 2nd ed., Hannah Patterson, ed., 14–26,
London: Wallflower Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (1984), Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans.
Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Platinga, Carl (2010), ‘Affective Incongruity and The Thin Red Line’, Projections, 4, No. 2
(Winter): 86–103.
Rothermel, Dennis (2010), ‘Anti-war War Films’, in Positive Peace: Reflections on Peace
Education, Nonviolence, and Social Change, Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, ed., 75–107,
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Serres, Michel (2002), The Natural Contract, trans. E. MacArthur and W. Paulson, Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
9
The Delirious Abstract Machines

of Jean Tinguely
Joff P. N. Bradley
Introduction
By focusing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s appreciation of Swiss kinetic

sculpture artist Jean Tinguely (1925–91), this chapter will explore –pataphysically
and ecosophically –the relation between joy, uselessness and the madness of
Integrated World Capitalism. Especial attention is given to Tinguely’s notes and
drawings to illuminate how they function as abstract machines which diagram
the ‘techno-scientific state of things’ (Guattari 2012: 142), that is to say, the
uselessness of concrete instantiations, and the futural becomings which gently
mock the threat of total annihilation (Tinguely’s Suzuki/Hiroshima 1963: see
Figure 9.2). I shall contend that the ‘initial domain’ of Tinguely’s machines
exhibit in germinal form what Guattari (2012: 142) describes as the ‘vital drives
of modern societies’. It will be seen that Guattari finds in Tinguely the passage
from a diagrammatics of the dreams and fantasies of ‘slightly mad inventors’ to
existential mutations in general (142). Functioning within concrete assemblages,
Tinguely’s hyperlogic abstract machines take on consistency, acquire a collective
enunciation, albeit in a barmy way, to designate ‘the cutting edges of decoding
and deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 510).
Despite Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 55–6) critique of Tinguely’s machinic
portraits of philosophers in What Is Philosophy?, I shall defend Tinguely on
two fronts. The first regards the mad dance of his kinetic constructions –their
creative-
destructive, function- malfunctioning tendencies. Here we find a
powerful critique –a mental ecology –of the madness under which we live. The
second looks at his Les Philosophes collection (1999) and the peculiar diagram
of James Watt in particular. The Watt diagram will be read using the conceptual
architecture of Guattari’s solo work (Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 2012; and

The Anti- Oedipus Papers, 2006) to highlight the shared common ground
regarding facets of speed and acceleration in contemporary life. ‘They know that
there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into
hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal
amortization’ (Baudrillard 1983: 46). Upon reading the latter pages of What Is
Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) one finds the somewhat surprising
claim that Tinguely’s kinetic portraits of philosophers are lacking in several
respects. Discussing portraiture’s philosophical and aesthetic sense, Deleuze and
Guattari insist what matters above all is the separation of the instituted plane of
immanence and the new concepts created. The former is key to understanding
the movement of philosophy. What I take from this is that Deleuze and Guattari
think Tinguely’s portraits do not move or ‘dance’. Nothing ‘dances’ in the
Nietzsche, something indecisive haunts the Schopenhauer, the Heidegger fails
to retain any veiling-unveiling on an unthinking plane of thought. The portraits
do not quite get to the ‘thingyness’ of the philosopher in question. They do not
quite draw the distinctive planes and concepts of each thinker.
But perhaps we can put it another way. In the piercing sounds, lightning flashes,
substances of being, images of thought of complex curved planes, in the ‘continual
whirr of machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 2), Tinguely’s machinic portraits
articulate an infinite movement, an absolute deterritorialization, a visionary even
playful eskhatos. With the rather bizarre diagram of Kant in What Is Philosophy?
continuing to confound, not least because the bepuzzlement begs the question
what a diagram has got to do with the thinking of a philosopher and the question
of what is philosophy, the above prompted a closer look at the Nouveau Realiste
art of Tinguely, especially his notebooks, drawings and sketches, in which lo and
behold diagrams do indeed dance and do get to the essence of the philosopher. In
a certain pataphysical respect, Tinguely’s drawings diagram the ethico-aesthetic
and ecosophical or schizoanalytic dimension of the philosopher. Through a kind
of absolute deterritorialization or utopian world-building they map virtualities,
they put into movement possibilities of existential assemblages and refrains. The
proviso is that they dance to a different, dissonant tune. A Tinguely abstract
machine is a singularity manifestly out of time, signalling something yet to
come, in constant variation, in perpetuum mobile, veering towards uselessness
for any absurd purpose. In the becoming-Tinguelyean of the machine and the
becoming-machine of Tinguely, a singularity pursues an ordinance of virtual
possibility. Tinguely’s diagrams are ‘piloting devices’ from which it is possible
to extract from the actual a virtuality of becoming. His numerous sketches,
The Delirious Abstract Machines of Jean Tinguely 195
jottings and diagrams point to the orchestration of factory workers by Engels,

the black soil of Heidegger, the wry smile of Bergson, the singular demand for
freedom in Stirner, the Buddha-machine of Schopenhauer, the eternal return
of difference in Nietzsche –Kropotkin’s oil canister and arching crane thinks
the future in terms of mutual aid without exploitation and greed. In his unique
note-taking style, Tinguely’s diagrams or abstract machines (see Figure 9.1) are
an event, a creation, which if manufactured into kinetic contraptions, work in
delirious connection with the plane of immanence and the collective assemblage
of enunciation.
So the critical remarks of Deleuze and Guattari are all the more perplexing
when Guattari’s lifelong preoccupation with delirious machinism, Dada and the
French avant-garde (including Roussel, Duchamp and Tinguely –see Doerr 1998;
Violand-Hobi 1990; Hanor 2003) is taken into consideration. Supporting this
Figure 9.1 Jean Tinguely, ‘Sketch for the “Philosophers” ’ display in his exhibition
at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988). 26.5 x 20.7 cm. Drawing (felt and colour
pencil). Museum Tinguely, Basel. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
ADAGP, Paris.
view, Franco Berardi (2008: 34) insists that Guattari took as given ‘the becoming
true of the Dadaist revolution, its definitive realization in daily life’. Moreover, it
can also be argued that Anti-Oedipus, a book infused with the spirit of 1968 was
equally inspired by the kinetic energies of Tinguely machines. Indeed, Tinguely’s
self-destroying machines, according to Brian Holmes (2007), influence the
overall flow of Anti-Oedipus, probably ‘more than any philosophical or scientific
source’. This is spotted too by Berardi who makes the connection with the
event of Tinguely’s kinetic art and the événements of May–June 1968. The year
1968 was Tinguelyian, Berardi (2008: 86) writes: ‘A gigantic mechanization of
Tinguelyian cogwheels that together conjure up a universe of non-necessary,
but possible events. ‘68 was in this sense the first movement without necessity,
without lack, without need.’ Entranced by Tinguely’s art at a Pompidou Centre
exhibit, probably sometime in 1988 or 1989, Berardi says of Guattari that he
discerned in Tinguely’s sculptures a metaphor of the ritournelle or refrain –
that is to say a process of creation, of new ways of living, breathing, being and
thinking. In some way, the whirling rhythms of the cosmic cogwheels hook you
into the chaosmosis (Berardi 2014: 85). Gushing through Tinguely’s spasmodic,
self-annihilating machines is a Dadaesque urge to accelerate the ripping and
tearing away of sclerotic social institutions. Schizoanalytically or ecosophically
expressed, Tinguely’s excessive and unrelenting machines deliriously desire
the terrible curettage of the socius. On this account, the Dadaesque aspect of
Tinguely’s early kinetic work is affirmed. Much like capitalism itself, Dada’s
‘only function is to have no function’, a failure or corruption of function. Like
a Rube Goldberg machine, which functions despite having no goal, or relation,
Tinguely’s machines so construed are constructed from heterogeneous parts
with zero goal. They produce nothing for any absurd purpose. Yet, in their own
inimitable Dadaist way, Tinguely’s delirious machines carry on the practice of
ecosophical chaosophy by seeking out a ‘singularity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a
fragmentation, the detachment of a semiotic content’ to engineer ‘mutant nuclei
of subjectivation’ (Guattari 1995: 18).
In Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is depicted as a machine beset on a revolutionary
journey. Its fuel is desire and with it the socius goes nuts, much like Tinguely’s
self-destroying machines. This is Mumford’s megamachine –a pointless
operation which propels itself forward –in a mad dance or trance –in elemental,
disjointed terms. Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 373) write: ‘The capitalist machine
does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and
from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality.’ And again, on the
other side of reason there is but lies, delirium and drift, according to Guattari
(2008: 36): ‘Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism

itself.’
In the avant- garde kinetic designs of Duchamp and Tinguely, Guattari
unearths a delirious machinic metamodelling (at odds with the normative
universal diagrams of Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian structuralism).
Less surreal, less Freudian, more Dada because: ‘Surrealism was a vast enterprise
of Oedipalization of the movements that preceded it’ (Guattari 2008: 104). In
Chaosophy, Guattari asks: How does one obtain a functional ensemble, while
shattering all the associations of Freudian psychoanalysis? His partial answer
is to look to Dada, Goldberg’s drawings, and the machines of Tinguely, because
in terms of the latter, Tinguely’s machines are consistent with the revolutionary
trajectory of Anti-Oedipus, which depicts desire desiring the destructive,
deterritorializing processes of capitalism. Desire acts as a violence without
purpose, or as Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 346) say, ‘[A]‌pure joy in feeling
oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes.’ This is the
joyful refrain which Guattari finds in Tinguely’s machines. With respect to this
sense of the capitalist mindset, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the deadly cycle of
repetition, those refrains which crystallize into ‘hardened’ representation, such
as obsessive ritual. They add:
Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but
for the immortality of the system . . . Placing oneself in a position where one is
thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where,
according to the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something
moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose. (346–7)
Despite the underlying serious and committed critique of the nature of capitalism,
Tinguely’s work recycles absurdity, uselessness and waste in an affirmative sense
because he makes everyday objects such as cogs, mannequins, wheels, drums
and dolls exude a joy in their very malfunction. His is a joy which teases, prods
and provokes the structural overproduction and emptiness of capitalism. His
remedy is a healthy scorn, a mocking of grand plans and big ideas, especially
that big red button to blow up the world. His machines ridicule the threat of total
annihilation (see Figure 9.2).
On the bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) by the American military, he
tells Dominique de Menil:
After all there was this fateful, extraordinary date which was 1945. After that
moment when the atom bombs started falling on this world, that changed the
world. Before or after the atom bomb, it’s different. Because it was the first time
Figure 9.2 Jean Tinguely, ‘Hiroshima’ (1963). © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ADAGP, Paris.
that human beings had the chance to commit suicide as a collective body. This
time humanity can do away with itself, if it wishes. It has the technology. (Klein
et al. 1999)
For Tinguely, his kinetic contraptions are beset on a path of self-annihilation. Yet,
even here, Tinguely’s art remains resolutely liberatory, and especially Nietzschean,
because as Nietzsche (1996: 178) says, in a letter to Peter Gast, marked 14 August
1881, on his ‘extremely, dangerous life’: ‘I am one of those machines which can
explode.’ Like Nietzsche then, Tinguely’s art explodes everything, including the
blackest melancholy. It is on this point which is important for schizoanalysis and
where his ideas resonate with Deleuze, who finds a necessary joy in creation. In
an interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Deleuze describes the essence and purpose
of art as joyous. As such, Deleuze (2004: 134) argues, following Nietzsche, that
there can be no ‘unhappy creation’: ‘There can be no tragic work because there is a
necessary joy in creation: art is necessarily a liberation that explodes everything.’
This is further ruminated upon in an interview with Jeanette Colombel (144),

in which Deleuze discusses the nature of power and philosophy itself, again
with a significant Nietzsche tone, and argues that the power of destruction in
Nietzsche and Spinoza always emanates from affirmation, ‘from joy, from a
cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would
mutilate and mortify life’. On this account, Tinguely could be distinguished
from those whom Foucault famously labelled the political ascetics, sad militants
and terrorists of theory in the preface to Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: xii), those preservers of ‘the pure order of politics and political discourse’,
or ‘bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth’. The joy in Tinguely’s
work is therefore Nietzschean. Contra the nay-sayers, Tinguely’s self-creating,
self-destroying artefacts convey a malevolent operation and activity but through
a joy less to do with the morbidity of the anarchist’s desire, harking as Nietzsche
(1974: 329) says from Book 5 of The Gay Science, from ‘the hatred of the ill-
constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy’.
Rather, the thirst for self-destruction is Dionysian, the effect of an ‘overflowing
energy’ pregnant with futural becoming.
Exhibiting the sense of ‘little joy’ found in schizophrenia qua process,
Tinguely’s notebooks diagram the nihilistic tendencies of the Cold War era
and the widespread obsession with machines. In a word his notebooks and
diagrams do ‘dance’. In the notebooks and scribbling, what inheres is a futural
diagrammatics of auto-destruction. Reading Tinguely’s diagrams pataphysically,
that is to say, in the sense of their molecular (de)construction –subject to chance,
accident, haphazard happenings, flows and fluxes, the work of clinamen –the
unpredictable swerve of atoms, tychism or absolute chance –and in thinking
his useless machines as a science of imaginary solutions (Jarry 1923), questions
arise regarding the emergent properties which come into being when logic
breaks down (Bok 1997: 99–100) –when the machine operates autopoetically
(Bolt 2004: 83). Here he is in agreement again with Deleuze and Guattari who
claim that the process of breaking down and malfunction through wear and tear,
accident and death is part of the very functioning of desiring-machines, or the
‘fundamental’ element of the machine, as Guattari says.
The processual aesthetic of Tinguely is insinuated with, and affected by,
the scientific and ethical paradigms of his day. His sculptures are traversed
by machinic phyla. To account for the machinic phyla of sculpture, we can
say the positive feedback from self-immolating machines sustains the smooth
functioning of the technical assemblage. His jarring contraptions crawl,
whistle, whine, swing, twitch, rock and pulsate. And amid this universality of
cacophonous malfunction, breakdown, collapse, confusion and crisis, machines

dissonantly burp, ping, sing, screeches, tick, cry, ache and dance frenetically –
all to the tune of an unpredictable telos. For example, in the rebirth, recycling
and ‘explosive’ detritus in Homage to New York in the Sculpture Garden of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960, what comes into being in the
mindless mayhem is the self-orchestrated suicide of the machine. The Big Apple
is designated a ‘city-machine’, with destruction, planned obsolescence deemed
the very fabric of urban life. Tinguely writes of his desire to explode the city.
Amazed by the energetic mayhem of New York, Tinguely –the co(s)mic artisan,
the homemade atom bomb (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 345) –finds in the
skyscraper a microcosm of a little machine conceived like Chinese fireworks ‘in
total anarchy and freedom’:
The skyscraper itself is a kind of machine. The American house is a machine.

I saw in my mind’s eye all those skyscrapers, those monster buildings, all that
magnificent accumulation of human power and vitality, all that uneasiness, as
though everyone were living on the edge of a precipice, and I thought how nice
it would be to make a little machine there that would be conceived, like Chinese
fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom. (Tomkins 1965: 166)
Art expresses this revolutionary aspect. Underscoring this point, in a radio debate
for Radio Télévision Belge, Brussels, on 13 December 1982, Tinguely described
art as a form of ‘manifest revolt, total and complete’ (Hultén and Tinguely 1987).
The celebration of destruction is no surprise perhaps given the intellectual
inheritance from the anarchist tradition of Kropotkin, Stirner and Bakunin, the
latter of which famously invokes the slogan ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative
urge’. This reckless spirit of destruction –contra Oedipus –is found in the
revolutionary momentum which builds up in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983: 311)
Anti-Oedipus, an imperative, a malevolent one, to abolish conservative beliefs
and theatrical scenes: ‘Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way
of destruction . . . Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the
superego, guilt, the law, castration.’ Elsewhere, for Deleuze, resistance to the
intolerable is a matter of creation. In finding a great energy from the work of
Gérard Fromanger, Deleuze concludes that the French artist loves the very world
he wishes to destroy, adding: ‘There are no revolutionaries but the joyful and
no politically or aesthetically pleasing revolutionary painting without delight’
(Deleuze et al. 1999: 76–7).
Although Tinguely’s mechanical assemblages of irrational function are ‘anti-
machines’ –intentionally set on a course of unpredictable breakdown, and
suicide –it is through their humour and irony –from thinking the involution of

man and machine, the irrational and non-functional –that his art satirizes and
mocks the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial
society. But it is from this perspective which allows Tinguely to engage in the
dynamism and poetry of life itself. As he writes: ‘I try to distil the frenzy of
our joyful industrial confusion’ (Lucie-Smith 1987: 87). Here Tinguely’s work
trundles on alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines. Tinguely’s
machines engineer difference in cycles and revolutions of repetition of which
the end and outcome is never certain. The freedom for which Tinguely searches
is precisely the escape from restrictive deadly repetitions, restrictive deadly
ritournelles.
So again his notebooks and diagrams ‘dance’ because Tinguely’s automata
perform a joyful schizo waltz to the background noise of useless, incessant
machines. His notebooks detail the senselessness of industrial world, and his
sculptures prepare for the end of the world. They blow up. Burn. We find in
Tinguely’s work, a sense of the kinetic movement of concepts –the free and
joyous mechanic contra the dogmatic, nihilistic Stalinist. In his delirious
machines, a creative spark, a joy irreducible to psychosis. As Tinguely says in a
discussion of Homage to New York: ‘The machine is an instrument that allows
me to be poetic. If you respect the machine, if you enter into a game with the
machine, then perhaps you can make a truly joyous machine –by joyous I mean
free.’ I think Tinguely would find a great dance partner with anarchist Emma
Goldman (2008 (1931), 56), who famously declared she did not believe that ‘a
Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom
from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy’. In
other words, ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’ Both,
one might surmise, would not wish to join a revolution which did not dance.
Tinguely’s dance, one imagines, would be schizoid. Unbalanced, Stumbling.
Frenetic.
We can invoke Bergson’s (1911: 11b) theory of laughter here to explain the
evocative gait of Tinguely’s Tokyo Gal in particular: ‘The attitudes, gestures, and
movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body
reminds us of a simple machine.’ The frenetic body of Tokyo Gal is hooked up to
the performance principle of ascesis and ecstasis. Like Baudrillard’s (1993: 47)
description of the machinic comportment of the jogger in The Transparency of
Evil, the body of Tokyo Gal (see Figure 9.3) is ‘hypnotized by its own performance
and goes on running on its own, in the absence of a subject, like somnambulist
and celibate machine’.
Figure 9.3 Jean Tinguely, ‘Tokyo Gal’ (1967). © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ADAGP, Paris.
The perspective of Tinguely and Baudrillard who object to the death-in-life stasis
of the frigid industrial body is shared by Donna Haraway (1999) in A Cyborg
Manifesto, who claims that contemporary machines are ‘disturbingly lively’ yet
masochistic bodies intoxicated with reification processes remain ‘frighteningly
inert’. Tinguely’s machines certainly embrace this carnivalesque-grotesque sense
of laughter. They laugh at the laugh that laughs at its uselessness. But this is not
so much a gleeful embrace of final planetary heat death as a joyful apocalypse, a
positive affirmation of the madness of becoming-other.
Ecology ‘yet to come’
Eco-aesthetically read, Tinguely’s sculptural diagrams, jottings and sketches are

bound for a new earth, people and ecology. In Deleuzian parlance, they bespeak
of a world yet to come. And that is why the notions of the abstract machine and
the ethico-aesthetic paradigm are important for thinking Tinguely’s art. Indeed, it
is vital for thinking ‘beyond the frontier of the possible,’ as Tinguely says (quoted
in Lee 2004: 97). His art aims to meet the scientist and get a little ahead of him. As
Tinguely says: ‘That’s the world I’m trying to live in.’ In listening closely to Tinguely’s
schizo-laughter, what we learn is a gentle mocking of our own schizoid lives. Such
a joyful wisdom leaps over entrenched dogma and hearsay. In a discussion on
the notion of schizo-laughter in Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring-Machines?,
Deleuze insists such revolutionary joy springs from great books. It derives not so
much from the torture of a pathetic narcissism, or the fear of guilt, but the ‘comedy
of the superhuman’, or the ‘clowning of God’. Deleuze (2004: 258) writes: ‘There is
always an indescribable joy that springs from great books, even when they speak
of ugly, desperate or terrifying things. The transmutation already takes effect with
every great book, and every great book constitutes the health of tomorrow. You
cannot help but laugh when you mix up the codes.’
This is a fabulation of the future, from which it is possible to think anew.
Indeed, in this way and just like the great aesthetic figures of thought, Tinguely
as kinetic sculpture artist produces affects that go beyond ordinary affections,
perceptions and opinions: they bespeak of a world yet to come (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 65). All engineer their craft from sensations. As they say: ‘We
paint, sculpt, compose, and write with sensations. We paint, sculpt, compose, and
write sensations’ (166). And sounding remarkably Deleuzian, Tinguely contends
(Delehanty 1981: 2): ‘everything changes, everything is modified without
cessation; all attempts to catch life in its flight and to want to imprison it in a
work of art, sculpture or painting, appear to me a travesty on the intensity of life!’
So Tinguely aims not to represent, or think with signification, but to enjoin with
the intensity of flight, to follow the matter-flow, and to contribute to its intensity.
If Tinguely’s machines are idiotic, this is of little consequence as the ‘new idiot’
turns the absurd into the highest power of thought, namely, the compulsion to
create. As Deleuze argues, those thoughts that are worth thinking always border
on the stupid. Faced with the intolerable, the idiotic contraptions playfully contest
the frustration with the encounter with the Real of capital, the event of the Cold
War, nuclear bombs and the threat of the total extinction of the human race.
Abstract machines
The abstract machines found in Tinguely’s wonderful notebooks and letters

envisage sculptures yet to come. Non-representative, and as a ‘science of the
sensible’, they entrain a transcendental empiricism of sorts, that is to say, an

empiricism that exceeds everyday experience to encounter the unknown.
His notebooks thus struggle with the unthought (Parr 2003: 35). If they
embark on an adventure of ‘disorder’ (2), to partake of ‘the wild production
of difference’ (140), perhaps we can say Tinguely’s notebooks are thought-
experiments embedded on the immanent plane of creative production,
charting malfunctioning kinetic movements, and mapping a mobile
machinic nature in constant variation. It is as if Tinguely, like Da Vinci,
traces ‘the haecceities of molds and cracks’, which are the progenitor of form
(Sauvagnargues 2013: 215). They themselves are a pataphysical solution to
the madness of industrial machines. They rail against the fascism of the Cold
War suicidal machine. In the orchestral din of machines thoroughly beset
on malfunctioning, Tinguely’s dissonant machines connect trash with other
trash to construct-deconstruct useless megamachines. These useless, joyful
contraptions disrupt the flows of consumption and overproduction. Their
overriding organizing principle is the exposure of the madness of the desiring
machines of the human unconscious and the schizophrenic leviathan under
which we toil.
Reaching an atonal screech, we can add Tinguely to Deleuze’s list of
thinkers –Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson –who share a
‘secret link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the
hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation
of power’ (Lotringer 1977). Tinguely the schizo is therefore a paragon of the
irresponsible free man, at once ‘solitary, and joyous’, who given his nature is ‘able
to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission,
a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name
that no longer designates any ego whatever’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 131).
Tinguelyian sculpture machines ultimately disrupt the flows of use-value and
perform a détournement of our own barmy desiring-machines. The task in the
next section is to show how. Tinguely, like Deleuze, Guattari and indeed Marx
himself, was fascinated by capitalism precisely because it worked by feeding back
its breakdowns and malfunctions to ensure smooth functioning and repetition.
In response to claims that his work is a dogmatic critique of capitalism, he tells
Monique Barbier-Mueller in 1993 (Perlmutter and Koppman 1999: 88): ‘How
can I reject a system that is so remarkably dynamic.’ When we consider his
finished and unfinished sketches –works which continue to inspire and intrigue
generations of artists and thinkers –we can say they constitute and name an
abstract machine (a Tinguely machine).
It is through this abstract machine that we gain access to his thought-

processes as a consequence, through the plane of immanence that links us
with the joyful, deterritorializing machines, which trundle on without rhyme
or reason. The abstract machine functions by placing variables of content
and expression in ‘continuity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 511), in constant
variation. For example, with respect to the Galileo abstract machine, Tamsin
Lorraine explains: ‘It . . . emerges when variables of actions and passions (the
telescope, the movement of a pendulum, the desire to understand) are put into
continuous variation with incorporeal events of sense (Aristotelian mechanics
and cosmology, Copernican heliocentrism), creating effects that reverberate
throughout the social field’ (cited Parr 2005: 208). To rework Deleuze and
Guattari a little, the Tinguely machine is abstract, singular and creative. It is
real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated. Somehow ‘prior to’ history, the
abstract machine does not represent the real, but rather constructs the real yet
to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 142). The abstract machine pilots the flows
of absolute deterritorialization (56). This piloting role of the abstract machine is
explained in the plateau ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’:
Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine is neither an

infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea
that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role.
The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even
something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of
reality. (142)
The Tinguely machine joins the bunch of named abstract machines: the
Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, the Galileo,
the Bach, the Beethoven and so on (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 511). The
abstract machines –not technical objects as such but diagrammatic as they
are inhabited by diagrams, plans, equations –transcend the names and dates
of the inventor and refer ‘to the singularities of the machines, and to what
they effectuate’ (511). Abstract machines have proper names and are datable
but this is not a question of possession but matters and functions. Deleuze
and Guattari write:
The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked by

a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics and
mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine, and in algebra
of a Galois abstract machine (defined precisely by an arbitrary line, called the
adjunctive line, which conjugates with a body taken as a starting point), etc.
There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract machine functions directly in

a matter. (142)
This point is expounded upon in Molecular Revolutions, in which Guattari

(1984: 154–5) claims that the blueprints for the SST Concorde relate to a mixed
semiotics, a set of essential becomings, specifications and articulations, which
activate negotiation between different semiotic and material registers. The
Concorde abstract machine –one more useless machine –‘does not belong in
some transcendent reality, but at the level of the ever-present possibility that
they may appear: the essence of the possible’ (156). On this level, the abstract
machine of Tinguely unlocks the not-yet, the emergent generative properties
operative in the ‘virtual’ critique of capitalism. Tinguely’s sketches are chaotic
and catastrophic but also contain ‘a germ of order or rhythm’ (Deleuze
2003: 102).
Figure 9.4 Jean Tinguely, ‘James Watt’ (1989). 59.3 x 42 cm. Drawing (felt aquarelle,
gouache). Museum Tinguely, Basel. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
ADAGP, Paris.
Buried in Tinguely’s sketches of philosophers and thinkers, we find the

curious inclusion of a James Watt drawing, which was unconstructed as a
kinetic sculpture. Thinking this in terms of the prism of metamodelization
(Watson 2009), the Watt sketch, opposed to mimetic representation, consists of
a cartography which does not merely illustrate, but also creates and produces.
The Watt sketch (see Figure 9.4) evokes the invention of the steam engine, which
did and continues to do so much to change the world, especially in the time
of the anthropocene. Marx too has much to say about Watt. In chapter 15 of
the first volume of Capital, Marx finds in the patents of the spinning jenny a
premonition of universal capitalism. The notebooks of Watt’s diagrams summon
forth the machine age.
In terms of Tinguely’s diagram, we can say the Watt abstract machine prepares
the useless machines of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Marx (1981: 499)
writes of the ‘greatness of Watt’s genius’: in Watt’s patent his steam engine is not
presented as an invention for specific purposes only, but as ‘a universal engine
for heavy industry’ (499). The patent is an abstract machine. A diagram charting
what is to come. On the steam engine in particular, Marx writes: ‘The steam-
engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period
at the close of the seventeenth century, and such as it continued to be down
to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary,
the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam-engines
necessary’ (496–7). This remark explicates on what Guattari designates as the
collective agencement of enunciation.
Concorde –Guattari’s (1995: 65) example of a technologically dated model –
has its ontological consistency formed through a point of constellation and
pathic agglomeration of incorporeal Universes. It comes into being through ‘a
diagrammatic Universe with plans of theoretical “feasibility” ’ (48). There are
technological Universes transposing this ‘feasibility’ into material terms. These
are as follows: industrial Universes capable of effectively producing it; collective
imaginary Universes corresponding to a desire sufficient to make it see the light
of day; political and economic Universes leading, among other things, to the
release of money for its construction (47–8). Yet, the final, material, formal and
efficient causes are insufficient because a machine such as Concorde demands
an ontological consistency vis-à-vis the machinic phylum of future supersonics,
a collective imaginary and the financial markets of Integrated World Capitalism.
Although a technological miracle, it failed in commercial terms. Why? Because
it never attained its full existential potential, says Guattari (1995: 47), who
writes: ‘The Concorde object moves effectively between Paris and New York but
remains nailed to the economic ground. This lack of consistency of one of its
components has decisively fragilized its global ontological consistency.’
Compare this to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches and plans, where we find
dreams of flying machines. While such ideas are found ‘bubbling away’ in da
Vinci’s head they have ‘no bite on the techno-scientific state of things of his epoch’
(Guattari 2012: 142). Of course, in our time, such ideas have taken on ontological
consistency in collective assemblages of enunciation. Guattari writes: ‘Across
chains of researchers, inventors, Phyla of algorithms and diagrams that have
proliferated in technological programmes, books, teaching, forms of know-
how, immense Capitals of knowledge have accumulated within institutions
and apparatuses of every kind, now assisted with a formidable efficiency by
computers’ (142). Diagramming flows from the dreams of inventors to be
incarnated in the ‘vital drives of modern societies’ (142), Tinguely machines
live interstitially between art and technology, aesthetics and technoscience.
They hint at exhaustion and breakdown but also schizophrenic breakthrough.
They present a new image of thought. His contraptions are not eschatological or
apocalyptic as such but rather joyful, and affirmative of the deterritorialization
of the machine. There is no idea of final heat death in Tinguely but rather an
endless becoming-other. In a discussion on the nature of the machinic phylum,
De Landa (1991: 132) defines it thus:
[T]‌he set of all the singularities at the onset of processes of self-organization –

the critical points in the flow of matter and energy, points at which these flows
spontaneously acquire a new form or pattern. All these processes, involving
elements as different as molecules, cells or termites, may be represented by a few
mathematical models. Thus, because one and the same singularity may be said
to trigger two very different self-organizing effects, the singularity is said to be
‘mechanism independent’.
On this reading, a mechanical contraption –let’s say a Tinguely kinetic

sculpture –reaches the level of the abstract machine when it becomes
‘mechanism independent’ because this takes place as soon as it can be thought
of independently of specific physical embodiment. Like Marx’s idea of universal
applicability with reference to Watt’s patent for the steam engine, De Landa
argues that da Vinci’s invention of geared mechanisms became available for
manifold applications when it was freed from specific embodiments. When
Tinguely dreams of delirious machines, he sketches them out, makes plans
of them. The contraption-machines bubbling away in his head collude with
the techno-scientific state of things. Aided by the ‘formidable efficiency of
computers’ (Guattari 2012: 142), they have taken on ontological consistency,

acquired a collective enunciation. Across teams of cognitive workers (immense
Capitals of knowledge), call centre staff, robots mesmerically producing mobile
phones and cars on conveyor belts in manufacturing plants, machines produce
machines for any absurd purpose. From dream, to fantasy, to the incarnation
in the useless consumption drives of modern societies, the repercussions of
Tinguely’s ‘meta-machanic’ machines have become apparent, to the point that
their ‘trees of implication’ constitute a veritable forest! (142).
It is argued now that without the ‘the slightly crazy desire’ (Guattari 1996: 126)
of US President John Kennedy, the Apollo program would never have got off
the ground. While necessary, the political will is not sufficient. It also needs the
universal dream of leaving the earth. The Apollo technical machine engages
consensual machines that are semiotic, economic, political and institutional.
Moreover, as Guattari says in an interview with Jacques Pain, before being
technical, the machine is diagrammatic (126), hence abstract. Combining with,
linking up with, coupling up with technical, chemical and biological machines
are a myriad forms of semiotic or diagrammatic, theoretical and abstract
machines, economic and political machines. It too is entrained in the passage
from a diagrammatics of the dreams, fancies and reveries of ‘slightly mad
inventors’ to existential mutations in general.
Conclusion
The movement one finds in Tinguely’s machines engineers new existential

assemblages within the world of work and reason, in everyday urban life.
Machines are driven by flows: real or virtual. Desire in full flow is a runaway
process which hurls the megamachine to its joyous end, to catastrophe. Much
like the excesses of overproduction, Tinguely makes his barren machines run
blindly, impotently: a meaningless telos. Tinguely’s Dada-machines desire the
absurd. Partial objects connect and disconnect, build and collapse with other
useless objects, the jetsam and flotsam of discarded objects. The recycled objects
are held together by the absurd desire for the constant revolutionizing of the
instruments of reproduction: a deadly repetition. Tinguely machines join with
other machines AND AND AND, producing chains of anti-machines, over-
producing machines. The abstract machine of Tinguely takes on consistency,
in a collective assemblage of enunciation; self-annihilating, self-immolating to
accelerate the schizophrenia of capitalism. Pushing the system to the limits of its
madness, forcing an amortization and excrescence of the system itself, absolute

deterritorialization calls for revolution, a new earth, a people yet to come, in
‘total anarchy and freedom’.
Let me explore the point about the suicidal tendency of the machine further.
The kinetic reproduction of Kamikaze by Tinguely in the 1969 ‘Memorial to
the Sacred Wind’ does not engineer sad affects as such but exudes joy in its
becoming. In J for Joy in L’Abécédaire, Deleuze explains the point:
The typhoon is a power (puissance), it enjoys itself in its very soul but . . . it does
not enjoy because it destroys houses, it enjoys because it exists. To enjoy is to
enjoy being what we are, I mean, to be ‘where we are’. Of course, it does not
mean to be happy with ourselves, not at all. Joy is the pleasure of the conquest
as Nietzsche would say. But conquest in that sense, does not mean to subjugate
people. Conquest is for example, for the painter to conquest the color. Yes, that
is a conquest, there is joy. (Boutang et al. 2004)
As James Bridle (2001) puts it so poetically, it is worth quoting in full:
Like a city at night, beautiful, terrible, it lies dormant, surges to life, shudders,
roars, heart-stoppingly passionate, cranks, gears, cams, shafts and axles rattle,
rotate and grind. When it moves, I feel alive, I flush, blood rushes through my
chest, my stomach flutters, vision jumps, temples throb. When it is at rest, so
am I too, but still alive, still breathing, resonant with the machine, awed by its
beauty. Having seen its power, majesty, sheer force of everything tearing itself
apart, await its resurrection. It’s every machine that’s ever been built, every wreck
and rusting heap, memorial to junkyards, destruction destructured, and yet
inspiring, uplifting, impossibly alive, shockingly beautiful and godlike. When it
moves it aches, cries out in pain, cackles with mirth, laughs loudly and at length
and then is silent again. My heart aches with it.
The Tinguely machine –Grabplatte für Kamikaze –becomes typhoon –a power

(puissance), which enjoys itself ‘in its very soul’. It is not so much it enjoys
because it destroys, but because it exists. To enjoy is to enjoy being what we are.
Nietzsche joins in: become what you are, embrace your mad fate. In Japan in
1969 Tinguely creates Memorial to the Sacred Wind or the Tomb of the Kamikaze,
a kinetic sculpture which thinks the figure of the kamikaze or ‘divine wind’, a
term which was first used in Japan to describe a typhoon in 1281, which is
said to have saved the country from invasion by the Mongol fleet headed by
Kublai Khan. Kamikaze (神風) means typhoon in standard Japanese, while
Tokubetsu kougekitai (特別攻撃隊) or Tokkoutai refers to the suicide corps.
Tinguely’s ephemeral and self-destroying machines are not sad or malicious as
such, although they are bound for annihilation, but enthuse a machinic joy, the
effectuation of a power of puissance. The work of the work of art is not memory
but rather ‘fabulation’ or ‘the power of the false’. On this point, one perhaps may
resist the claims of Emerling (2014) who argues that Tinguely’s philosophers fail
in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? Instead, we argue that in a nutshell,
and pataphysically put, Tinguely’s machines mirror the perfect reproduction of
Japanese society, following Guattari, where the Japanese populace structures its
universe and orders its emotions with ‘the proliferation and disorder of machines’
(Genosko 2002: 128). They are ‘crazy for machines and a machinic kind of buzz’
(128). In terms of schizoanalytic metamodeling, Watson (2009: 9) claims that
to build new models is in effect to build new subjectivity. So subjectivity is a
metamodeling activity, a process of singularization. Such a machinic version
of subjectivity and singularization revolutionizes the world and completely
recreates it, according to Guattari (Watson 2009: 161). This is perhaps the
pataphysic solution to the madness of industrial machines. Thinking through
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 2002 documentary Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely we can
determine that in Tinguely’s kinetic art is ‘an open, free spirit, which is the root
of all creation’ (my trans.). The kamikaze spirit of his junk machines ‘returns
a grand smoothness to movement’ in terms of smooth spaces traversed by all
manner of weird becomings.
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Part Three
The Shattered Muse: Ecosophy and

Transverse Subjectivities
10
The Shattered Muse: Mêtis, Melismatics and

the Catastrosophical Imagination
Charlie Blake
The discovery of clockwork #1
All my devices are clockwork now –even my nervous system. Even my

endocrine system. Even my brain is ticking. We realized by around 2052 that
the organic realm had been pretty thoroughly bugged or contaminated –their
tendrils, talons and tentacles were slithering and scraping everywhere by
then, flailing wantonly in the datastreams, capturing and consuming our
constellations of thought and affect, vivisecting our dreams and hungrily
sucking out the soft, liquid futures within of any art or agency. But one
realm the digital demonocracy and their fanged and feathered demonocratic
engineers didn’t have under mass surveillance was the realm of clockwork, of
the base mechanical, of the beautifully decelerated machine, of the skittering
march of the cryptomantically augmented dolls and the (ec)static tension of
the fully wound mainspring. So if we wanted to stay hidden and effective we
had to detonate our pixilated zone clouds and make a zig-zag move into the
antiquated empire of automata.
From the Diaries of K7~Kaj)1
Kairos in schizotopia: preface and enchantment
So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time,
now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and
love as soon as its maker sets it going?
Lem (1973: 204)
Félix Guattari and Franco (Bifo) Berardi were both close philosophical friends
and fellow cartographical visionaries in the often incendiary political landscape
of late-twentieth-century trans-European activism. Indeed, the title of Berardi’s
posthumous critical memoir of his friendship and intellectual collaboration with
Guattari is quite explicit about the many extra-and intra-transversal links
between them as two productive subjectivities in time and as two conceptual
constellations in flight across space and culture, as are the sometimes meandering
yet often illuminating narrations and commentaries and conversations that
follow that title to its conclusion. Central to these links and transversals made
across, between, within and around various flights and meanderings is the act
and force of connecting itself, and towards the end of that route from the title to
the provisional eternity of friendship, as we approach the conclusion of a text that
is, after all, and in fact, no conclusion at all, but rather an example of the mechanics
of what might quite reasonably be called in this context ‘Kairos in Chronos’,
Berardi (2008: 135) reflects on connections in general and how we make
them: ‘The activity of connecting –thought, creation, movement –should not be
conceived as the instauration of an order . . . In effect, the activity of connecting is
the desire, the condition of an itinerary that is invested with sense solely for
whoever undertakes the trip.’ While the metaphor of the ‘journey’ has been
somewhat exhausted of its emancipatory power of late through its interminable
iteration as cliché in both private discourse and public and post-public relations –
as an experiential enrichment for the neo-liberal subject commodified in social
media as ‘ownership’ or possession or ‘experiential property’ –it nonetheless
retains a potentially anarchaosophical emancipatory charge here as an aspect of
their occasionally shared ‘visionary cartography’ and specifically, as a provisional
record of a set of transitional maps of those fabulatory moments in which
connection and movement might be illuminated as a sudden flaring of
immanence, as a momentary perception of folds in the surface of being and more
immediately, as an immanency of the fold in the map itself –an apprehension
and grasping of which is also and by extension an apprehension and grasping of
the mechanically abstracted heart of any true ecosophical aesthetics: ‘Ecosophy,
an environmental consciousness adequate to the technological complexity of late
modernity, is based on the decisive character of aesthetics in the prospect of
ecology. Aesthetics is the science that studies the contact between the derma and
the different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic and informational
flows’ (34). Aesthetics for Guattari, Berardi elaborates a few pages earlier, is ‘the
science of the projection of worlds by subjectivities in becoming’ (32), and in this
formulation along with the quotation given above may be located the aegis under
The Shattered Muse 219
which the following themes of mêtis and melismatics, chronoplasticity and

resurrection, and the various other tropes and devices associated with the kind of
writing often now described as ‘philosophiction’ or ‘theory fiction’ are to be
deployed so as to convey the tone or mood in which the ecosophical aesthetics of
Félix Guattari will be hereby treated. It is a mood or tone which is perhaps most
swiftly conveyed at this stage by juxtaposition rather than exposition, thereby
allowing, it is anticipated (and in deference to the memory of Guattari and his
erstwhile collaborator Gilles Deleuze), the vivid lightning bolt of thought to
rupture and illuminate the otherwise smooth surface of ratiocination that the
word ‘preface’ so often portends. In keeping with this image of ‘rupture’ –so
central, as Stephen Zepke (2011: 209) has so eloquently elaborated, to Guattari’s
later aesthetic thinking) –there is a brief and notably ecstatic quotation in the
latter’s Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm where he is considering the
moment of aesthetic experience in the wake of an encounter with Debussy, Van
Gogh or jazz and extrapolating from the concept of autopoeisis that he adapts
from Francisco Varela –and in a manner that is, as Zepke has noted and
contextualized in relation to notions of rupture and exodus in modern and more
contemporary art, eminently modernist rather than conceptualist or post-
conceptualist in tone and reference (213). This is a moment where Guattari
(1995: 93) writes that ‘a block of percept and affect, by way of aesthetic
composition, agglomerates in the same transversal flash the subject and object,
the self and other, the material and incorporeal, the before and after . . . I find
myself transported into a Debussyist universe, a blues universe, a blazing
becoming of Provence’. This apparently absorptive and arguably nostalgic view of
the aesthetic encounter as such, and particularly in relation to the potentiality for
political resistance to what Guattari calls at this stage in his thinking Integrated
World Capitalism, a potential that he wishes to extract from this encounter with
figurative and performative art, might easily be dismissed as the retrospective
daydream of an ageing Gauchiste intellectual for those pre-conceptualist verities
and simplicities in which experimental art and experimental politics could easily
be entwined, were it not for the capacity for temporal dislocation and what I have
termed chronoplasticity that Guattari also explores in relation to this hypothetical
encounter via Marcel Duchamp and Michael Bakhtin, among others. This
potential for temporal dislocation is touched upon by Zepke in passing and will
be considered experimentally and otherwise in some of the scenarios encountered
below, but is at this point best served by completing the juxtaposition of
quotations indicated above through a combination of Guattari’s moment of rapt
modernist ejaculation with a short scene-setting instance at the opening of J. G.
Ballard’s dystopian novel High Rise from 1975, which can then be triangulated by
the reader so as to anticipate the mood-to-be-synthesized in the scenes of a
London-to-come in 2052, a chaotically ruined cosmoscape, a post-anthropocene
schizotopia realized –and thereby both temporally and spatially dislocated from
the ‘now’ of the activated text. But here first is the Ballardian modernist dystopia
observed through the parallax of perception that drives into our own
future(s): Each day the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant,
the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind’ (Ballard
1977: 9). Both of these quotations will now be left ‘hanging’ for the reader to
pursue as they wish (or don’t wish) within or beyond the contingencies of the
account that follows. In effect, these quotations occupy the role here that the
scholarly epigraph might once have enjoyed in a position prior to the text, but in
this case they are within the text, at least spatially, and they are there for reasons
that will, I hope, become clear as the text itself progresses to its ecosophically
(and catastrosophically) perilous and tychean conclusion. The essential element
to be retained at this point, however, as the reader enters in a moment or two
(and ideally in the manner of a dolly shot in an old black-and-white movie) the
inner sanctum of the curator of the Museum of Lost Objects, the nameless and
reluctant editor of the account that follows –its collector, collator, taxonomist
and ultimately its victim –is a certain quality close to that which the founder of
modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, once called ‘protention’ –in this
case, however, tactically extracted from its nexus of Husserlean procedures, a
mode of protention extrapolated and understood primarily as a self-generated
mood of anticipation or even prolepsis: here a mood coloured and tempered by
its unfolding affectively speaking between the quotidian ecstasy of Guattari, on
the one hand, and the almost genteel violence and faded apocalyptic alienation of
Ballard, on the other. It is a mood, effectively and affectively engineered to draw
attention to what readers of a more pre-theoretical or romantic or even occultic
tendency might once have called an ‘enchantment’ or ‘spell’ or even a ‘sigil’, a
statement of desire codified and then buried among the swirl of black marks that
make up this preface, beneath the rustling of its textual surface, and activated
unconsciously by the process of reading and thinking about what is being read,
especially now, at this precise moment of reading and thinking about what is
being read, at this moment, in this moment. Now. Can you feel it working yet?
No? Good. For it is an enchantment or spell or sigil that, once recognized and
dismissed and forgotten about, can be safely assumed to have been activated, as
is the manner of these spectral machines in both art and life. As such it will later
be quietly re-triggered –again unconsciously –at the appropriate moment(s) as
a way of opening up and slipping vertically or diagonally through the temporal

gates of the text or falling horizontally or inversely through one of its various
metafictional trapdoors so as to observe more directly, and I would hope
immersively, some of the reconfigurations of lives, loves and potential ecospheres,
as well as the aesthetic- ethical-
catastrosophical and more overtly political
interventions, that these visionary cartographers have begun to sketch out for us.
Having now rather hastily set up the scene ahead, then, and expressed also my
immersive hope to the reader, and partly because I have an appointment of some
significance for us all on a transatlantic liner that will shortly be leaving for
New York and then from there sailing to Port au Prince in the Republic of Haiti,
and partly I will concede in response to some rather unsettling ‘noises’ outside
the frame of the preface itself, I will load up the camera on its dolly track, press
the appropriate button to initiate movement and leave the remainder of this
scene and subsequent document, a little abruptly perhaps (rather as the runic
script in M. R. James’s famous tale of textual transmission and contagion is
despatched to its unsuspecting recipient), in the hands of the reader, and swiftly
depart.
Part one: mêtis and melismatics
[Varela] . . . distinguishes two types of machines: ‘allopoietic’ machines which

produce something other than themselves, and ‘autopoietic’ machines which
engender and specify their own organisation and limits. Autopoietic machines
undertake an incessant process of the replacement of their components as they
must continually compensate for the external perturbations to which they are
exposed.
Guattari (1995: 39)
The contents of the skin are randomized at death and the pathways within the
skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further transformation, may go on
out in the world in books or works of art.
Bateson (1973: 435)
Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key
thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we
can elude control.
Deleuze (1995: 175)
We live, it is often said these days, in an age of inhumanism, ahumanism,

posthumanism, transhumanism and an increasing attention to the nonhuman
and the nonhuman other or alien, the latter often considered as a kind of inverse
correlative of the non-animal-human that many of our species have, somewhat
arrogantly, identified as and with for some considerable time. Without going
into the history of this concept, the human, and its diaspora and transitions,
which has been adequately dealt with elsewhere (and without also going into
the intricate (and undoubtedly Eurocentric, phallocentric and anthropocentric),
genealogy of its invention and reinvention in the writings of, say, Albertus
Magnus of Cologne or Faustino Perisauli of Tredozio or Desiderius Erasmus of
Rotterdam on the capricious and hedonistic goddess of folly or Thomas More on
Utopia or the essays of Michel de Montaigne, or the innovations of René Descartes
in philosophy and analytic geometry or Christiaan Huygens in astronomy,
mathematics and horology, and all that has followed from their innovations in
the degenerate European consciousness), suffice it to say that for the purposes
of the collation of these strands of text from various spatial, temporal and non-
temporal or at least quasi-temporal locations, and within the constraints of our
present and chronic dispensation, some preliminary observations, at least, will
need to be made on the synchronicities and contingencies of fortune which
have led to and determined its curation here in my study at the Museum of Lost
Objects, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Rhode Island, United States.2
Having established my location and context, then, at least in the broadly
spectral sense, I will now preface my more general observations on a
meditation, at least ostensibly, on the twentieth-century activist, philosopher
and psychoanalyst –and some would say visionary –Félix Guattari, and his
invention of the concept of ecosophy, by noting certain reservations I have been
nurturing on some aspects of the document that you are about to read, as well
as narrating, I hope, and if there is time, its rather curious provenance. Of its
putative or at least potential effects on the reader I will say little here, aside
from mentioning in passing that some of the parerga and paralipomena that
accompanied the set of loose but numbered leaves when, out of the blue, they
fell into my hands from those of a passing and swiftly vanishing stranger of
indeterminate sex (accompanied by a strange, whirring noise) on the deck of
an Atlantic crossing –including marginal notes and supplements in English
and Aramaic covering the central manuscript like a palimpsest along with a
series of curiously alien hieroglyphics which are not reproduced here –would
seem to indicate that its consumption as text might possibly catalyse a delirium
which is, in actuality, a mode of operative, futural technology, generating
from there what the notes and supplements describe as a nexus of ‘chronical
disruption’. This, so far as I can ascertain from the marginal ephemera, badly
damaged as they were by age and acid rain and black oil and the carelessness
of a hasty burial between a cemetery and an ancient woodland path next to
a city on the southern coast of England3 (as I subsequently discovered),
involves what is described there as a disordering of temporal progression, a
process allowing, that is, for communication and transport between and across
decades, centuries, eras, aeons and epochs. A kind of time travel, in effect. That
this image of magical enchantment and science fictional transition is not only
absurdly fanciful but also entirely counter to the second law of thermodynamics
and its necessarily unidirectional projection of time’s arrow towards entropic
dissipation hardly needs technical elaboration here. Suffice it to say that the
notion of time distortion or chronotopical or even chronotopological rupture,
along with suggestions of the resurrection of the dead, through a style of
narrative that bears a passing resemblance both to certain aspects of medieval
Christian martyrology and the glossy and dystopian impedimenta of the so-
called cyberpunk literary and cinematic vogues of the later twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, strikes me as a rather pointless distraction from the
powerful underlying thesis that flows like a hidden river with many branching
tributaries beneath the geotraumatic fragments of text and imagery that follow.
Evidently the writer or writers of these fragments thought otherwise, but having
made my disclaimer I can move on.
So, having got that out of the way, allow me, my dear reader, to return to
more scholarly matters, specifically the terms with which the text elaborates
its conceptual and experiential landscape as coordinates in what one might
describe, in an adaptation from Guattari’s conceptual efflorescence, as an exercise
in schizotopian cartography. The document as here curated is formally divided
into seven sections (not including this preface, which may be considered as a
meta-textual or higher dimensional commentary and supplement, above and
beyond the closed set of the manuscript’s contents that comprise the sections
of the document entitled –by implication –‘The Shattered Muse’).4 Neither
does it include the title, and that precedes this preface and the brief quotation
on existence, mechanism, automata, surveillance, control and becoming-
imperceptible that rests like a hinge between the two. Nor does it include the
notes which may or may not have been appended to this document in certain
dimensions if not in others, and these are not my responsibility anyway. Indeed,
the endnotes, should they have been added to this document by the time you
reach the end, may be treated as similarly higher dimensional (though not
necessarily of the same order of higher dimensionality), as the words that you
are reading at this very moment.
Of the sections themselves, the second, fourth and sixth are essentially
discursive, though the form that this discursiveness takes moves between
narrative, the formal lecture or presentation and peripheral notes scattered like
time crystals at the end of an adventure, presumably to indicate the underlying
perspectivism required by the concept of chaosmosis, to which I shall return
in due course, if time permits. (I should, perhaps, mention at this point that
my possession of this document has led to my being threatened, I believe, by
non-locational voices and sounds, projected, I also believe –and somewhat
paradoxically, considering its almost infinite improbability –from the future, and
this is why both its digital and textual and indeed lateral dispersal is so urgent,
chronically rather than aionically5 speaking, and why I may have to depart from
this preface immediately via a trapdoor in the text if these phenomena return).
Anyway, for now I will continue by noting that these sections are interspersed
with shorter narrative fragments which may be considered as serving the same
purpose as, say, the cells on the outer frames of old tapestries or the panels at the
edges of stained glass windows: as supplements, that is, that make potentially
infinite adjustments to the stories within the central frame by virtue of the
hermeneutic mutations of the consciousness that apprehends them. Of the
broader concepts in the main title of this curation, the first Mêtis is a relatively
obscure deity from the classical Greek canon (who in Orphic mythology was
born of Night, and in more general Hellenic myth became the first consort of
Zeus and gave birth to the goddess Athena in a thunderstorm, at which point she
was swallowed by Zeus, as was his wont), as well as being a form and expression
of thought and activity. In this expanded sense, mêtis is a kind of intelligence
in design as well as a form of cunning, a notion and an activity which both
complements and subverts the more commonly known ancient Greek concepts/
activities or actualizations, techne and poiesis. Indeed, as the design strategist
Benedict Singleton has so economically expressed it in a discussion of artifice,
ingenuity and the creation of traps in relation to speculative design, as a
shorthand: ‘it’s the intelligence implied when extraordinary effects are elicited
from unpromising materials. It works with situations that are volatile, slippery,
stubborn, or some combination of the three, and it find ingenious ways to
transform their current arrangement into a new one’ (Singleton 2014: 24;
emphasis in the original).
Within this text, and I must be brief here, both Mêtis as personification
and mêtis as ingenuity in creativity (the two expressions of form treated as
interchangeable in this context depending on perspective, like Wittgenstein’s

duck-rabbit and similar optical illusions) may be considered as a kind of refrain
or ritournelle, travelling like a series of waves and reverberations through the
underground river system of conceptual, potential and virtual activism that
flows beneath the sheets of the text. It is for the reader to determine how or
when she, he or it might be operating, actively, passively or through some
rare form of abduction. Of melisma and melismatics, suffice it to say that the
general sense of melisma is of the voicing of a single syllable across a range
of notes, and was central to the Eleusinian mysteries as a way of achieving a
trance state, but I must concede that I remain somewhat mystified by the role
of melismatics in catastrosophical thinking. It seems to have something to do
with phonemic, euphonic and metonymic coincidence in that it resembles in
some ways the word ‘mellifluous’ –the honeyed sweetness of song –and this
is turn indicates apian politics, but in some newly mechanized or cybernetic
form. Catastrophe and catastrosophy themselves are terms best left to the
narrative itself, but suffice it to say that the terms bear an intimate connection
with both the idea of ecosophy and the shattered muse of our title, as they do
also to the possibility of complete human extinction as the end of art as artifice
(in both senses of the word ‘end’). Finally, and traditionally, at least in that
tradition established by Hesiod, there were nine muses, born from the union
of Zeus and Mnemosyne or memory. Our lady of the title may be taken by
extrapolation as the initially imperceptible tenth muse of this divine coupling,
‘shattered’ both in the sense of a shattering of the gauzy hexagonal mirror of
provenance and divination, memory and mimesis, abyssal time and virtuality,
and in its more delirial, intoxicated, chaotic, schizotopian and Dionysian sense
also –hence her name (or at least one of them): Dionysia. That she is a creature
also of repetition and return is a refrain or ritournelle in the fragments below
and in those texts, tapestries, etchings and stained glass windows that they
connect with across space and time will, I hope, become evident both here
and in the notes that some if not all readers may discover at the end of the
document.
Of ecosophy itself it is fair to say that before Guattari becomes characteristically
abstruse in his second consideration of the theme in Chaosmosis (1995), his
initial outline in The Three Ecologies (2008) was unusually straightforward and
developmental. Indeed, in its division between the three kinds of ecology –
existential, sociopolitical and environmental –it acts to expand upon the idea of
transversality that he began to shape at the clinic of La Borde where I first met
him back in the 1960s.
At this point the curator paused, his fingers frozen in mid-air above the antique
keyboard as, evidently alarmed, he listened to a rustling in the bushes outside his
study in the snow-covered garden illuminated by an all too pellucid moon which
sent shafts of lunar light through the window and the open curtains, a rustling
which was followed by an inexplicable thump just above and to the left of his head,
somewhere between the fireplace and the Chinese room. He stopped breathing for
a moment and looked nervously to the ornate, Venetian mirror over the library
fireplace, which appeared to be bending unnaturally in the firelight. After a few
moments and as nothing further had happened, sonically or otherwise, he resumed
breathing and continue to type.
Though I do sometimes wonder whether I was ever really at La Borde, whether
I imagined the whole thing and never actually met Félix. Fiction, fantasy and
imagination have a way of intervening in our desultory lives, after all, sometimes
as hyperstitional substantiation for sure, as a move from the imagined to the
imaginal to the actual and material, but more often, it has to be said, as pure
delusion.
He paused once again. Looked at himself in the second mirror over the occasional
table upon which he had set two silver candelabras from his Russian collection,
a pack of cards and a gun, his reflection flickering in the firelight. Looked away.
Continued.
But be that as it may, in terms of The Shattered Muse, which is undoubtedly

intended as a hyperstitional text rather than a source of passive reflection or
exegesis, what is most important is that it at least begins to indicate ways in which
ecosophy and chaosmosis and molecular insurrection can continue to be honed
as significant conceptual instruments in the production of new subjectivities in
and after the age of catastrophe. What is important also is the relation between
ecosophy, the various assemblages that evolve and mutate in response to or
ahead of ecosophical transitions, and the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’, as Guattari
describes it, that will enable creativity to organize from primal chaos new forms
of expression that both respond to and in some small way reorganize these
assemblages, travelling like angelic or daemonic crystalline intelligences from
the void to the plenum, or as Guattari prefers, from the infinite to the finite. For
as Guattari (1995: 101) notes in his chapter from Chaosmosis called ‘The New
Aesthetic Paradigm’:
Duchamp declared: ‘art is a road which leads towards regions
which are not governed by time and space.’ The different
domains of thought, action and sensibility position, in dissimilar
ways, their movement from infinity into the passage of time,

or rather into epochs capable of returning to or intersecting
each other.
In that sense, and to reaffirm or intensify my observation above, The Shattered

Muse is neither a commentary upon nor an exegesis of these themes, so much as
a demonstration of how such an aesthetic imperative might feasibly operate –a
practical, rather than a theoretical or abstract unfolding of this imperative in
the light of potential ecosophical transitions. Thus the form and expression of a
constantly mutating assemblage of script, text, montage, multiple and transversal
voices, repetitions, plagiarisms, auto-plagiarisms and sudden transitions and
interruptions, circling and swirling around the multiple questions of ecosophy
and art, but especially the around the singular question of whether oikos and
sophia can ever be reconciled in any meaningful or productive or sustainable
way in the light of ecological, socio-economic and existential catastrophe,
clearly indicates that creativity –including the generation of concepts –is more
crucial to Guattari’s ‘new aesthetic paradigm’ than a reflection on sense per
se. But now I must leave these papers in your virtual hands and vanish, as did
the mysterious stranger who dropped its contents on my lap in the midst of a
roiling ocean only a matter of weeks ago. A wheel is spinning at the heart of the
abandoned funfair at the core of the Casino of Lost Dreams which lies at the
centre of the Museum of Lost Objects, and its centrifugal force is dragging me
into an exquisite spiral, a chaosmotic vortex, upon the inner sides of which, like
the objects perceived by Alice in her descent down the rabbit hole, I can see a
framed painting of . . .
The last tree on earth
. . . was, of course, the first tree on Earth. Everybody knew that, s/he said. The
boy looked embarrassed for a moment. But was the tree in Africa? s/he asked,
tentatively. No, of course it wasn’t, s/he responded, casting him a brief, scathing
look, before returning to her ants.
Chronos versus The Crucified: London, 2052
Theodora, a beautiful woman of noble birth, was married to a rich, God-

fearing man and lived in Alexandria in the time of the emperor Zeno. But the
devil, jealous of Theodora’s holiness, caused another rich man to lust after her,
and he pestered her with a stream of letters and gifts to let him have his way.
Voragine (1998: 229)
Kleptomancy –divination by theft, whether from oneself or another. Self-

quotation to the point of infinite regress, either through pure spatial or linear
repetition or temporal transection of that repetition. Sometimes a synonym for
a déjà vu within a déjà vu (archaic).6
The University is in ruins.7
As she stepped out of the derelict concourse of what had once been New Cross
Gate station onto the weed-choked concrete and tarmac of what had once been
the New Cross Road and looked up to the shifting valences of an iridescent and
savagely transected sky, she knew at once that the weather would be changing
quite drastically before the darkness fell. She knew also, once she had checked
with virtual8 fingers the intricate Vorahnung Bedienfeld (™) that she had had
installed so painfully before leaving Cologne (after that bleached and sybaritic
summer with Zeno#5 and Dionysia#3 in Uppsala) that darkness would fall again
soon like fold upon fold of heavy, velvet cloth before the rains began once again.
The rain, beating its interminable pattern, its relentless tattoo (click, click, click,
patter, patter, patter, click, click, click) on the ever expanding narco-mondo of
the city, the savage and etiolated city with its ageing and semi-robotic infra-
tranquilized or hyper-stimulated hordes, on its migrants, vagrants and nomads,
on its low resolution markets and subterranean hostels, hotels and spas, theme
parks and prisons and conference centres, its high rise gardens and virtual
stadia and blockchain bordellos, its psycho-pimps and con-thugs, its ground
level transitory mini-cities, metro-jungles and elevated fortress communities,
its gangs of stray militia, serial data-vampires and machinic junkies and on its
translucent mycological patina spreading like a stain across the city and the sky.
But the darkness would fall first. Would swirl and spiral in from the eastern
skies and descend, then a gash would slice through those skies and spread from
horizon to horizon like a wound, before the incessant lightning flashed and the
rains themselves fell again like a vertiginous ocean crashing down from the
heavens. Dwindling in due course to the relentless patter, patter, patter, click,
click, click, patter, patter, click on the pop-up village corrugated shelters. Before
not after, that is. At least this time. At least for now. She checked the distressed
leather bag hanging from her waist and there, amid the impedimenta of her
mission and alongside her obsidian knife and tarot cards and other essentials, she
found two thin antique paperback books that she had been handed by a stranger
in the notorious Urverk bar in Uppsala the previous summer. Lifting them out
carefully with beautifully manicured fingers she felt and tested their lignin scent,
looked at the titles: Dionysus versus the Crucified and Other Stories9 by René
Girard and The Three Ecologies and the Three Fates10 by Félix Guattari, then,
putting them back in her bag and tightening its drawstrings, she straightened
her back and slowly released her voice, allowing it to slowly rise and slowly fall in
parabolic waves. ‘Hmmmm. Mmmmmmmm-hmmmm-zzzzzzz-mmmmm’ she
murmured, hummed, sang and resonated, like some falling-rising-rising-falling
mantra, some hypnotic melisma. Rising, decaying de-cadence.
Opened her eyes, more relaxed now and smiled.
Theodora (once saint and martyr of old Alexandria, now remade, remodelled,
reanimated, repurposed, reborn, like Dionysus or the Nazarene she thought to
herself, but different too, lipstick, scent and circuitry, silk and chrome and flexible
carbon boots on the cracked, black tarmac) paused, shook her head a little, just a
touch to dissipate the haze of travel and exhaustion, bit her lip, brushed a lock of
stray, golden, blue and purple hair from her eyes, eyes now of obsidian, now of
gold, now of vermillion, now of ultraviolet or infrared and now she closed those
tired, opalescent eyes tight tight shut, long dark lashes interlocking, eyebrows
furrowed and now took a long, slow, deep, endless breath, allowed her mind
to still for a moment, like a rough pebble in a mountain stream. And then,
after looking into herself and having established from this inward glance how
much time she still had available before the darkness fell, looked down deeply
into herself, into the simian wetware apparatus she was wearing, deep into the
heat and heart of the flesh and circuitry, and searched then with human digits
to check her physical and topographical coordinates, her actual as well as her
virtual location. Having calculated the distance between where she now stood
and her target, she looked up again at the mazy empyrean, at the vast abrupt.
Gazing. Thoughtful. Dreaming. Wistful.
Oh, my sweet muse. Oh, my distaff muse. Oh, my shattered muse. My sweet and
holy protectoress. My dark and holy precursor. Time-shattered crystals falling like
snow. Falling and calling from innumerable futures entagliated. Trapped though
in a singular past. Frozen now in Baltic amber. Africa. Sweet Africa. Woven in
French tapestries. Stained in English glass. Etched on quantum particles and the
aureoles of distant and dying suns. Etched in the Egyptian sand, sea and sky. Africa.
Written on swirling waters. Written on the hot, desert wind. Alexandria. Lost city.
Sunken city. So long ago. Satan’s last and listless gambit. Heat and surcease. Don’t
get distracted now. Wait! Look! Open your eyes!
There were thunderclouds on the distant horizon. Vast and gloomy battlements of
a vaporous war. Lightning flashes. Forked and flaring. Bifurcating. Catastrophic.
Splitting the tenebrous curlicues of vapour and gravity into servile precipitation.
Splitting time itself. Splitting and splicing the sky.11 Theodora looked down again.
Paused for a moment. But yes, this was really happening. It was happening now.
In this time, at this time. The lightning flashed again on the eastern horizon.
Splicing and splitting the distant sky into a tesseract of glowing multiplicities.
Yes, this was happening now. Yes. Again and again and again. But no. Wait. No.
Not yet. Not here. Not yet. Not now. Cracks in the city. Cracks in the street.
Cracks in time. Time is cracked. She checked . . .
Minutes to go. Minutes to go
It took her roughly ten of those minutes to get to the site of the ruined university
and discover its inner plot, there were obstacles to negotiate on both roadway
and rooftops and some of these obstacles were at least partially human. The
buildings, guarded by static, digital sentinels had no rooves themselves, but
had retained on fading, metallic signs in both script and braille the names
and signatures of once presumably eminent thinkers about whom she knew
nothing. She negotiated the maze that had been set up within, checking off and
whispering in one of the voices she had downloaded from the site set up by the
invisible committee the codes and passwords based on the names of the writers
she did know something of and would be engaging with this semester: Guattari,
of course, and Bataille, Girard, Haraway, Parisi, Barcelos, Callois, Ayache, de
Castro, Plant, Oresme, Wilkins, Zeno (all three), Valereto, Demesne, Singleton,
Zalamea, Icr-rina Mali Burch. Then she was there. A small arena had been
carved out of what had formally been an access road. Temporarily rooved with
tarpaulin in case of passing squalls and premonitions and seated with pews
ransacked from the cellar of a nearby church, this would stand until twilight,
after which it would be destroyed by inclement weather. In the meantime, as
before, an abductional chrono-polymer screen had been set up with spherical
floating speakers and both internal and external vector projection modules
next to a set of calibrators connected to a small, plastic time machine guarded
by sentinels near the entrance. There were approximately seventy or eighty in
the audience, which was at this point still shifting to greet friends, lovers and
acquaintances and locate their assigned positions. Over to the left she spied
Dionysia, Zeno and Tyche talking and calibrating their own linked apparatus as
a DJ hidden behind a second screen mixed weather sounds, apian buzzing and
muffled xenosonics in preparation for the lecture, a lecture in which both Zeno
and Dionysia –the first in either series, that is –would be talking to them from
separate times and locations in the past. Some words appeared on the screen for
a few moments, flickered then vanished.
Fate is harsh. Fortune is capricious. Contingency is a murderess. All is lost. All is

gained.
She walked purposefully over to her friends and linked up with them. After
greetings and connections and conjectures lightning flashed on the distant
horizon and the lighting started to change and the audience, now settled in their
positions with their subject groups, grew silent, until only the distant sirens and
a few wheeling gulls above them and the rolling of distant thunder could be
heard. They waited. After a few more moments the screen lit up in a frenzied
display of glitching and then digital blossoms and weeds, the latter two growing
and dying like something from an old, accelerated film. Suddenly the animation
stopped and the screen became blue-grey, then some more words appeared.
There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds (Bateson

1973: 459–60)12
On the screen now there were three faces, the ones on the left and the right
were clearly Zeno and Dionysia of the original series, apparently talking to one
another across the centre regardless of chronic displacement, and then at that
centre a static, black-and-white portrait of Félix Guattari who was to be the
subject, at least ostensibly and at least briefly, of the lecture they were about to
hear. Suddenly they were being addressed, interpellated by spatiotemporal proxy.
Part two: why I want to fuck the ancients
Sometimes, on those slow, lazy, hot summer afternoons that never seemed to
end, s/he would lie on s/his stomach and examine the intricate choreography
of the ant’s nest that had spread across the grass margin that marked the
southern perimeter of the detention centre. Somewhere, nearby in time and
space, in space and time (in the way that such notions of proximity had
mutated since the Great Collapse), somewhere nearby, but also very distant,
a child once again burst into flames on an alien hillside. Drones surrounded
her, buzzed around as a swarm, outnumbering the Sapien eighteen to one,
proliferating. Some were weapons, some were cameras, some were rationaters
or temporarily out of service fibrophages, the less specialized, older, pre-von-
Neumann versions, of course, were all three. They moved almost balletically
around the moment of surcease, like flies already hovering around a corpse.
But were they merely destroying, recording and rationating, the conveyor
thought, as s/he gazed up at the big screen? Or were they consuming as well?
Illegally? And if so, consuming what? Human affect, perhaps? As in those old
science fiction movies hrs girlfriend G and boyfriend T had been so obsessed
with before the Dreamcancer scrambled all their references. But in this case,
now, the cameras were pointed at the viewer rather than the content, their
points swollen and engorged in expectation of response. Inhuman machinery
enveloping affect in its digestive juices.
The horror subsided as the hyper-pixilation regrouped and the audio
connected with older forms of technology. One day she would be older. One
day s/he would make films about all this. Give lectures. Travel. Visit the cities.
Chaos and terminus: Southern Morocco, 2018
Reality is a garden of peculiarities forged from a constellation of other

peculiarities, which at the same time disperse themselves in their own universe
to the rhythm of the sap that flows and flowers.
Sepúlveda (2005: 13)
Desiring-machines have nothing to do with gadgets, or little home-made

inventions, or with phantasies.
Guattari (2009: 90)
‘Imagine’ (the face on the screen stage-right began, a slight down-curved or

possibly spiral phasing to the enunciation, like some strange transmission on
a transistor radio from the 1960s, sonic interference, pink noise, a creaking
effect on the lower modulations, a glitching to the image more generally, a
vagrant flickering at its edges, its margins, perhaps, readjustment required,
sought, accomplished) ‘that, at a certain point in the very near future of our
species’ (of your species, of we species, of they-species (indeed, do we even
really know what we mean by the term ‘species’?)), imagine that we encounter
a dark and irrevocable force that threatens to render us permanently from any
notion we might once have collectively entertained of sovereignty, autonomy
or ascendancy on the skin of the planet that we now, in this moment, at this
moment, in all the moments that we have so far gathered and connect with this
moment, call home. Our Earth. Our World. Our Planet. Initially, it takes on the
form of a dark star travelling stealthily and unobserved across our skies, etching
a raggedly sidereal and infantile script across the empyrean as we sleep, dream,
entertain, fight, play, fuck, procrastinate, make plans, make love, reproduce,
deproduce, nurture, kill, strategize, hurt, grieve, go crazy, survive and die.
An inverse star. An involuted star. An invisible star, moreover, that spins and
dissipates into a randomly dissolute and alliterative fan and farrago of force and
fear and sensation, caressing our various ecologies with its attenuated fronds
and feathers of gravitational distortion, transforming life into licence and death
into a seemingly infinite dispersal of affect and abduction. It is a sensation and a
momentum and a trajectory that acquires several names and designations in this
rapidly evolving scenario, but its more immediate consequences for the human –
for the people to come –may be said to include the following: an exponential
growth in un-herded and un-herdable distributed or swarm intelligence; a
process of grieving at the imminent demise of the noosphere around and above
us and of the slowly vanishing traces of an earlier, apparently mereotopological
vitalism scratched beneath our feet on the still living rocks like ancient but alien
hieroglyphics; an increasing attention amongst survivors to the bio-circuitries of
the extinction mechanics and geotraumatics that these traces appear to describe,
as also to the echoes of a distant and possibly cosmic phenomenophagism,13
darkly and hungrily rendered, which appears to precede, catalyse and supersede
these effects.’
Zeno closed the connection for a moment. The screen flickered and settled to the
monochrome white noise ambience of an old analogue television caught between
channels. He listened to the buzzing in the sky. It grew in amplitude for a minute or
two and then declined to a distant, collective hum. He heard a long sigh and looked
round to see Mêtis regarding him coolly from their bed by the bookcase. Long
obsidian hair streaked, sapphire, silver and scarlet, ebony skin, piercing sapphire
eyes too, their pupils narrowed to panther slits in the strong sunlight. She raised
a single eyebrow and pursed her lips, the hint of a smile. He smiled back, turned
back. Reopened the channel. Resumed. He could see only vague and shifting shapes
across time moving in front of the ruined hall’s jagged teeth.
‘In a sense, of course, this has already happened, is happening now, will always
happen and will always have happened’ (he continued, his voice enthused
now, deep and mellifluous). ‘The shaft of time’s arrow has, after all, been split
already in mid-flight to its supposed target (infinite regress) from its former
uni-directional trajectory by a lightning strike from a more divergent series,
an infinite series of divergence, and our temporalities are thus and therefore
forever flayed, transected and dispersed. We are now, it could be argued, at least
nominally, in the realm of abyssal time; neither before or after and certainly
not “now” in any classical sense of the instant or moment. And in that sense, it
could also be argued, there was never anything other than this realm of flayed
temporalities, out of which we compose disjunctive syntheses to hold together
what little we have left of psychic, corporeal, social, political and even biological
integrity.’
‘Speaking to you across time as I am now doing (in both my “now” and a
number of your “nows” too, a series of “nows” that is . . .), speaking to you as
I am now from the second decade of the 21st century (others I know are in
my own time, dispersed across the world in frayed, digital space, glitching, no
doubt, from overloaded bandwidths or faulty technologies) in a site and a plot
that was abandoned rather suddenly some years ago, haunted by an implicit
entropy like something from an early J. G. Ballard story, left vacant, before, that
is, of course, your technology, which is our technology in a different modality
or transmodality, arrived here out of the sky blue, out of the blue and vagrant
sky, and transmuted time’s arrow and its ragged feathers of temporality and
stream-capture into a hyper-dimensional nexus of kaleidoscopic flight and
lucid, spiralling kenosis. Speaking to you now as I gaze out of my window to
the still lucid blue sky beyond the swaying fronds of artificial palm around the
abandoned hotel lobby, to the west, that is, of the gathering storm-clouds, just
downwind of the barely functioning airport and beyond the derelict industrial
compound, speaking to you now as jewel-encrusted seabirds, flesh and bone
covered in a lattice of sparkling fibres as light as they air they carve, feather
and beak scintillating and iridescent as they wheel and cry above me in the
as yet still lucid sky, wheel and cry above me, in patterns nearly as old as the
Cambrian explosion and yet as new as the schizotopian wastelands and cities
we are about to enter, speaking as I am to you now, at this moment, in this
moment, the weather as yet comparatively in balance, the climate, however, on
the edge of massive phase transition, oscillating forcefully between temporarily
stable conditions, vorticular in its emergent force, brutal in its inevitable impact
upon most if not all our existent species, including our own species and its
descendants, I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago in one of the
newer colleges of the University of Oxford, a public lecture given by the visionary
theoretical physicist David Deutsch on life, reality and the apprehension of time
machines . . .’
He paused for a moment, as though lost in thought. Information –text, images,

haptics, olfactograms, hyperlinks, diagrams –began to pour into their apparatus.
Adjustment accomplished. He resumed.14
‘But I digress. For now we must retrace our steps, run back up the escalator of
history, chaosmotically speaking, anachronistically speaking (if you will forgive
my spatio-temporal conceit for a moment), to where we began, or where thought
we began, anyway. For in setting the scene for the drama that may or may not
unfold from these shifting fragments and larval strands of narrative, discourse,
image and dialectic (in the more ancient sense of the term “dialectic”), these
patches of clockwork delirium and digital deliquescence to follow, we return
to, or perhaps, rather, we redirect our collective and machinic gaze towards, a
philosopher and psychomancer whose influence on 21st century thinking was
for some time in critical suspense. Indeed, it is a curiosity of the vicissitudes of
anachronism and untimeliness and the art of a kleptomancy that seeks to corral
these reckless and recalcitrant thieves of time into significant patterns of retreat
and actualization, ascent or projection, divination and dream, that a thinker or
intellectual in the more traditional human continua, so to speak, immediately
following her or his organic demise, may often appear to belong very much to
the era that produced them and in which they were most active, and that they
have subsequently become of little interest to the conceptual engineers that
follow. And yet (and to continue this temporal-calendrical conceit for a few
moments more) some years on, what once seemed arcane and indeed “dated”
might suddenly develops a new aura, a spectral dexterity, a quality of retro
futurity that becomes increasing futural to those cresting the frozen wave of
the new era and the emergent forms and conceptualizations that characterize
the hyper-dimensional palate from which the artists of that new era will tend
to work. Thus it is that the document which precedes and follows, at least for
so long as it maintains lexical stability, looks to the later work of psychomancer,
revolutionary political activist, melancholy sybarite, compulsive traveller and
generator of philosophemes par excellence, Félix Guattari. This being for our
purposes the Guattari who, after a long spell of comparative withdrawal from
the activism and textual productivity which had characterized his intellectual
and political trajectory, and entering for a while a phase of autumnal melancholy
often characterized, wrongly I suspect, as the adjective just given suggests, as

his “winter” period, returned to his former productivity with a late and singular
drive to generate a new multiplicity of machines and assemblages involving
tranversalities linking the production of subjectivities, a more generalized
molecular politics, schizoanalytical explorations, the expansion of the term
“ecology” into a triumvirate of inter-operative concerns, post-media and post-
medialities, chaos, creativity, art and aesthetics. As a committed neologophiliac
and generator and engineer of frequently abstruse concepts and shifting
constellations of terminology, much of Guattari’s final period can nonetheless be
said to hinge especially around the two notions of ecosophy and chaosmosis . . .’
The speaker paused for a moment for rhetorical effect. Theatrically. Suddenly,
lightning shot across the sky like a series of miraculated veins and capillaries.
Suddenly, like something from an old Buñuel movie, the whole scene shifted,
rapidly, abruptly. Then, wherever they had transitioned for a moment gradually
resolved itself back to the makeshift auditorium, only now the image of Zeno
was gone and Dionysia was on the screen alone evidently speaking fast although
she could not be heard. Along with the rest of the audience they began making
adjustments to their apparatus, a sense of intense expectation in the air, like
the excitement that attended a resurrection. Another a few adjustments and
then collectively, as a crowd or a swarm they began receiving a new stream of
information, new strands of intensity and creation. The image of Dionysia began
to flicker. Then a new set of words appeared on the screen.
Due to inclement weather, the resurrection of FG has been postponed.
At this point the screen went dark and the audience could sense a greater
darkness spreading across the sky and began humming quietly in the gathering
gloom, then, like a single entity, they stopped. ‘We should disperse and head
to our shelters’, said Dionysia to her companions, ‘before the weather changes’.
Tyche, Zeno and Theodora nodded assent and quickly rose from their pews as
did the rest of the audience, as the lightning grew more brutal and abrasive by
the second and the darkness spread across the city and the sky like a stain.
The watchtowers
As s/he left the meeting, s/he noticed a group of right-wing melismatics waiting
by a burnt out car at the end of the street, humming in that drone-like way
they tended to just before they burst out into some collective-destructive
choreography. Highly coiffured, branded and hyper-cosmeticized retro-

engineered renegades from the world of early 21st century finance, silicon and
libidinal circuitry (or, of course, replicas of such), quoting their prayers from
the tracts of Californian neo-feudalism or the time twisting hyperstitional
Shanghai Nrx sinovirus of 20??, earpieces humming in synch with the mantras
that they murmured, mumbled and hymned blissfully, melismatically, as
they worked, haptically, eyelessly, tirelessly and tonelessly on the retrograde
urban streets and thoroughfares, shifting whatever capital flows or muddy,
semantic trickles and dribbles still remained accessible in the low resolution,
slow motion markets that settled and sedimented after the scaly algorithms
above had slaked and sated their affectless appetites in the intricate river
systems of data, logos and metalogos. For sure these dark melismatics were
neo-reactionary throwbacks, for sure they were, but they could be effectively
violent when the weather turned or twisted, as it was just about to, and their
circuitry –which was also their sustenance and source of future sustenance –
crashed and burned. So it was best to skirt around them, to sneak past silently,
to observe the silence and the stillness and the unobservable fluidity of the
Order for a moment. Besides, there were other, far more important matters to
attend to. Just beyond her field of vision and computation there were events
taking place, unfolding in real time and in the phenomenal world that she
couldn’t quite capture or visualize. The North African coast, perhaps? Another
catastrophe? The empty deserts of southern Australia? The reconstructed
leisure resorts of the central Antarctican plateau? A glimpse of Venetian
piazzas dancing beneath the lapping waves of the Adriatic –fungal palaces
rising in baroque extravagance from the ancient canals. Of pre-deluge Old
Shanghai resurfacing in the turbulent spray and seaspawn like a glistening
Kraken from the depths of the North China Sea. Or of the floating city of New
Adelaide drifting South and North, East and West, simultaneously, impossibly,
unless riven and bifurcated unstoppably by some local, temporal glitching
mechanism, perhaps.
She paused to regard an old observation tower rising above the ruins of an
ancient shopping mall, a few revenants shuffling here and there, but little
real activity, very little sentience. She clanked back into the crystal, into the
visionary wetware apparatus set to orphan drift and considered what she
was seeing. Whatever it was it indicated some kind of geological/geopolitical/
geomantic roulette wheel or ritournelle anyway, s/he thought, uncurling
and circling the world at the speed of Shakespeare’s elf, then uncircling and
recurling into topological form and vertical function and line as a spiral
spinning, exploding outwards like the arms of the nebula or restrained in its
tension and endlessly patient unwinding like the central spring of an ancient
clock. Destruction, though, for sure. Violence, though, for sure. Neuroplastic
and neurophantasmatic violence. Neurostrafing on a vast albeit highly
selective scale, it seemed. Drones en regalia operating on the still partially
human counters of disparate zones as casino chips conjured from the vinculum
by algorithmic servitors and symbionts for their empty and desire-less masters.
Dr. Dionysia Demesne #6, as newly replicated, traced through spectral patterns

still hanging in the irradiated air the squares and vectors of the old city and
observed and absorbed the spectacle around hrm. Xenopraxis. Xenofeminism.
Orphan drift. The endless now. From way, way, above Tyche-Fortuna gazed
down at the dirty grey-blue planet and then glanced sideways at hrs sisters, a
smile flickering across the shadow of her features on the vinculum before s/he
returned hrs gaze to the troubled world whose ecosophical fortunes were now
so very much in the balance.
Part three: in the suburbs of schizotopia (ephemera)
What is this stuff? They speak of something crawling under the net like fungal
pestilence triggering an electronic subsidence into sheer electricity, things
hiding in the power grid, some kind of quantum unlife intelligence.
Land (2011: 562)
For the Greeks, poetry arrives in the manner of an accident: a catastrophic

encounter with a transcendent agency.
Gumbert (2012: 2)
Dionysia #3 hugged her knees and watched Zeno and Theodora arranging
their space in the shelter next to hrm. As always, Tyche had disappeared, de-
substantiated, but s/he would return after the storm as s/he always did, always
had, always would. Perhaps she really was a divinity after all? –thought
Dionysia #3 to hrmself. Then, closing hrs eyes and casting hrmself back to an
earlier version of the series, Dionysia Demesne, she found herself in a small
study-bedroom sitting at a desk. Outside, the sound of traffic and orange wash
of street lights. Before her in a small yellow pool of light, a dissertation she was
evidently in process of compositing from previous drafts. She began to read

aloud, but softly.
‘In the extensive sketches drawn up by the founder of American pragmatism

and semiotics, C. S. Peirce (1965: 72), some of which were later collected as
“Notes on Scientific Philosophy,” Peirce, mulling over the themes of change and
continuity makes the following observation:
If all things are continuous, the universe must be undergoing a continuous

growth from non-existence to existence. There is no difficulty in conceiving
as a matter of degree. The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing
of themselves upon our recognition. If a thing has no such persistence, it
is a mere dream. Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity. In the original
chaos, where there was no regularity, there was no existence. It was all a
confused dream.
This is, of course, a fragment to be developed by Peirce, but one that rhymes
very clearly with his later discussion of tychism and synechism, a discussion
which has recently exercised the eminent Brazilian culturalist and philosopher
of mathematics Ferdinand Zalamea (2014: 907– 22) and a number of his
contemporary readers, such as Reza Negarestani and Robin Mackay. But before
we move on to the curious notion of tychism (adapted from the minor and
notoriously capricious Greek deity of fortune, Tyche, parts of whose temple, at
the time of writing, still stand in the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus, not far
from the coast of contemporary Turkey), it is worth pausing for a moment on
Peirce’s claim about and characterization of chaos as a place of no regularity and
thus no existence. It is worth pausing on this claim because it raises ontological
questions about the nature of chaos itself, and from there, the relation or relations
between chaos and its alliterative sister concepts: catastrophe, complexity and
contingency.’
‘For Félix Guattari, approximately a century after Peirce, chaos is like a wild,
prismatic ocean in which diagrammatic nets capture larval elements of flux and
transform them into percepts, affects, functives and concepts . . .’
She looked up, turned her head and listened to the sound of shouting and gunfire
in the street outside, then a distant and muffled explosion in the distance that
ricocheted between streets for a moment or two before fading into silence, along
with the shouts in the street. After a moment more listening she riffled through the
pages to the conclusion of her draft and began to read again, aloud again, her voice
more elevated, more forceful.
‘From ecosophy to catastrosophy –the art and politics of schizotopia versus

the Empire, multitudes versus the people, the music of the hive, but a spectral
hive, that is, a memory hive generated by the Earth for transmission out into the
Cosmos, into the Multiverse and back again. Thus it is that, in terms of the art,
literature and xenosonics of the schizotopian non-people to come the ecosophical
consciousness of the Earth becomes the catastrosophical imagination of the
World which, via the deferred ecstasy of annihilation, becomes the chaosmotic
inscription on distant stars and dying suns and quantum effects, the alien
hieroglyphics that determine both our beginnings and our ends.’
Pleromatic intensities and the sisters of Tyche
From way above the mazy sky, amid virtual lightning bolts that might or
might not actualize as lightning, cracking the sky open for the lower world
so that its sentient creatures might glimpse for a moment the digital archons
of the upper levels, those wanton progeny of the empty set in their capricious
games, from here, from this place, the Tyche-Fortuna-Mêtis-Theodora-
Dionysia series gazed down at the dirty grey-blue planet spinning in the
void as Tyche-Fortuna glanced sideways and inward at her sisters, a smile
flickering across the shadow of their features on the vinculum before they
simultaneously returned their collective gaze to the troubled world whose
ecosophical fortunes were now so very much in the balance. Reaching
forward into the Museum of Lost Objects which they had projected across the
vinculum they materialized at its core the abandoned funfair at the heart of
the Casino of Lost Dreams and located the wheel at its centre, then they set
the wheel to spin for a few billion years more as they vanished once again into
the dark Pleroma as the lightning of Kairos and quotidian singularity once
again flashed below.15
Notes
1 From Charlie Blake, The Discovery of Clockwork: A Novel of Love & Despair &
Broken Parts, being the second volume in a multivolume set provisionally entitled
Alice in Schizotopia: A Selection of Pornosophical Fairytales (forthcoming).
2 Although I can find no record of either the institution mentioned or the university
to which it is supposedly attached, and suggest this may well have been a fancy
or hallucination on the part of the curator, nevertheless, the following message
was included with the document as received and should, therefore, be appended
here: ‘The Museum of Lost Objects has recently been established by an anonymous
benefactor at Miskatonic University under the aegis of the eminent lepidopterist
and ontographer, Professor Charles Kinbote, with a mission to collect, collate and
study both anonymous and anomalous materials such as these fragments in a
more generously academic environment than was formerly possible. The following
document is, therefore, dedicated to our anonymous benefactor.’
3 The story of this discovery is related in Blake (2014: 108–109).
4 That this preface was itself prefaced was, of course, unknown to the curator at ‘the
time of writing’, and should, therefore, be viewed as a form of chiasmatic enfolding
of the operative function of the inner text as a magical and catastrosophical
document.
5 From the context it would appear that ‘aion’ is to be distinguished here from ‘aeon’,
insofar as the former spelling is generally used to signify its pairing with ‘chronos’
as Guattari’s occasional collaborator, Gilles Deleuze, deploys these terms derived
from Stoic metaphysics in his fabulatory study of surfaces, depths and (non)sense,
translated into English as The Logic of Sense (1990).
6 First mentioned in Blake (2015a: 370 and nt.5).
7 Adapted from the title of Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (1996).
8 Unless otherwise specified, ‘virtual’ is evidently intended in its general sense, rather
than the more specific sense associated with Gilles Deleuze or Henri Bergson.
9 The reference here to the title of Girard’s book is curious, in that Girard produced
essays and monographs, not stories and no such title at least currently exists, nor
is there any record it having existed in the year indicated by the subheading of
this section. In the spirit of containing the ontological slippage and ontographical
promiscuity this ‘error’ so dangerously portends, the correct title should be given as
merely ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’ (Girard 1984).
10 As with the Girard above, this would seem to be a later extrapolation from
Guattari’s original text and its translation and publication in English –possibly a
product of the so-called Dreamcancer or Great Collapse, whose viral infiltration of
digital consciousness so utterly transformed prior notions of scholarly, textual and
diacritical integrity. For the authentic version, see Guattari (2008). On the ‘Great
Collapse’ and the ‘Dreamcancer’, see Blake (2015a: 383–4).
11 An example of abduction by kleptomancy. For an indication of the cumulative
enchantment of this infinite regress, see Blake (2015a: 371).
12 This quotation is also used as an epigraph in Guattari (2008: 19).
13 An outline of phenomenophagism is to be found in Blake (2015a).
14 Presumably the information transmitted by Zeno at this point refers in some way
to Deutsch’s discussion –a discussion which turned out to be broadly correct –
of the possibility of time travel, a version of which may be found in Deutsch
(1998: 289–320).
15 On pleromatics, the dark pleroma, and ‘the true and holy path to the ecstasy of
annihilation’ as it applies to this passage, see Blake (2015b: 165–7). On the concept
of the pleroma and the history, practices and theories of Gnosticism more generally,
see Filoramo (1990: passim). For Bateson on the pleroma and cybernetics, see
Bateson (1973: 430).
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on the Ultimate Degeneration of Bios and Zoe via the Inevitable Process of
Phenomenophagism’, in The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory, Patricia
MacCormack, ed., 91–110, London: Bloomsbury.
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Serial Murder –Part One’, in Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology, Edia Connole
and Gary S. Shipley, eds, 369–90, London: Schism Book.
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11
The Transversalization of Wildness: Queer

Desires and Nonhuman Becomings in Djuna
Barnes’s Nightwood
Alexandra Magearu
Félix Guattari’s 1989 essay The Three Ecologies proposes an ethico-political

and aesthetic intervention which would re-articulate subjectivity to its own
exteriority, ‘be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic’ (2008: 19). This he terms
ecosophy, a multi-scalar articulation of the three ecological registers –human
subjectivity, social relations and the environment. Among these, the molecular
plane of subjectivity, Guattari suggests, should be conceived from the point
of view of a practice of mental ecosophy which would come to terms with
‘the logic of desiring ambivalence’ as it surfaces in and disrupts the order of
everyday life, while also encouraging ‘a true ecology of the phantasm, one that
works through the transference, translation and redeployment’ of phantasms
of aggression (38). Instead of allowing for those negative, violent or self-
destructive phantasmatic tendencies to seep into the structure of the Real and
feed back into our culture, proliferating aggression, Guattari argues for the
transversalization of violence, which entails a mode of aesthetic expression
available for the re-working of phantasmagorias into quasi-baroque renditions
of destructive desires.
Djuna Barnes’s dark and dazzling 1936 novel Nightwood can be conceived of as
one such work of mental ecology since it proceeds through the transversalization
and re-signification of fantasies about wildness, beastliness and the abject, as
well as the depersonalization, queering and re-deployment of possessive desire.
While displaying a panoply of phantasms, obsessions and anxieties surrounding
the radical unknowability of the animal body of the human, Barnes’s text
recuperates the heterogeneousness and alterity of those marginal territories of
society, theatres of non-normative performances of embodiment and sexuality.
Her novel follows the dispersion of desire, away from a logic of domesticity
towards an orientation to the world and its multiple potentials for becoming.
The heavy, yet fluid, opaque, yet abyssal, baroque structure of the novel
speaks to an anti-representational aesthetic which exults its own unreadability,
disorienting the reader, while also multiplying the unrepresentable gaps, the
indeterminacy and the unthinkability of the nomadic trajectories of its central
feminine presence, Robin Vote. Upon her first reading, Teresa de Lauretis
(2008: 118) reflects on the recalcitrant aesthetic composition of the novel by
noting that its narrative, being too weak and dispersed, does not allow for the
crystallization of stable signifiers: ‘the chain of signifiers would not halt, would
not find a resting point where meaning could temporarily congeal’. Taking a
different approach, Frann Michel (1989: 44, 46) claims that Barnes’s novel
expands on the tradition of a masculine modernist style of writing, which she
disrupts through the intrusion of an unrepresentable femininity. Contrary to
Michel, I believe that Barnes’s unique and surprising aesthetic departs from the
masculine, insofar as the masculine is described in majoritarian terms, such as in
Luce Irigaray’s understanding, as the phallocentric, coherent and rational use of
metaphysical discourse. Even if Barnes’s aesthetic bears the legacy of modernist
texts by Joyce, Proust, the surrealists and other avant-garde experiments in
style, her novel does not appear by any means strictly gendered. Its extravagant
structures function as refusals of immediate meaning, of ready-made identities
and of linear narratives.
Nightwood enacts a transversalization of unfulfilled desires for, and
fascinations with, wildness, exposing the tragic anatomy of these phantasms
especially when their balance is dependent upon the rigidity of the domesticity/
wildness binary, their idealizations of origins and their micro-aggressions.
The novel also recuperates a space for the non-normative expression of queer
subjectivities and reveals a more materially located sense of wildness in the
very few glimpses we are given of Robin’s interactions with animals and forest
environments. Other than the fact that Robin appears to be always carried
away and entranced by her nomadic flights, expressing a multitudinous desire
which cannot be grounded within the logic of the home, she also emerges as
radically open to her environment, having unlocked her potentials for becoming
and being capable of approaching nonhuman animals in nonhuman ways. Yet,
regarded from the point of view of a despairing and desolate Western civilization
and its repressed longings for transgression, for wildness, for an outside to
the norm, Robin’s figure appears to the novel’s other characters as ethereal
The Transversalization of Wildness 247
as she is exoticized, a type of wild femininity, a possessed, demonic spirit, a

transcendental, even atavistic, forgetful and blissful creature.
These different readings or explications of Robin’s a-signifying gestures refer
us to the powerful hold which an imaginary of wildness has had over the mental
ecology of Western society, a dual composition of transgressive idealism and
violent oppression. If, on the one hand, the idea of wildness has been a place-
holder for a ‘pure’ space of untouched and unshackled nature prior to or outside
the norms, repressions and regulations of civilization, it has likewise featured
in phallocentric, colonizing discourses as the manifestation of the untamed,
primitive, exotic space of the Other. In Nightwood, wildness is reconfigured
from its heavy historical roots as a majoritarian discourse marking gendered
and racialized bodies, and transversalized into a semi-parodic, performative,
minoritarian discourse of marginalized, queer subjectivities, figures of anti-
normativity, chaos, disorder and excess, in stark contradiction to the aseptic
order of society. Robin’s corporeality becomes the nodal point receiving and
redeploying these phantasms and their subsequent lines of flight, yet her body
finds itself in a highly precarious position.
Reconfiguring wildness: towards a
feminist ecosophical aesthetics
For Guattari (2008: 29), thinking transversally involves first of all acknowledging

the fact that nature can no longer be separated from culture since transversality
requires an understanding of the interconnected interactions between ecosystems,
social spheres and the realm of the individual. However, developing a transversal
understanding of subjectivity and corporeality poses a number of theoretical
issues. Feminist critics have explored at length the uneasy associations, cultural
conceptions and stereotypes affiliating female and native bodies with natural
dynamics, as well as the anthropomorphic representation and exploitation of
natural environments through feminine signification, throughout the history of
Western culture and philosophy (Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Alaimo 2000).
For certain philosophers such as Luce Irigaray (1985), the discursive
proximity of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ has provided a fertile field for the recuperation
and reconfiguration of a heterogeneous, disordered, fluid and formless feminine
imaginary poised against a discursive economy proliferated by the subject of
metaphysics. Irigaray is not concerned with the upturning or sublation of a
masculine-feminine dialectic, for this would simply entail a reversal of power.

She is employing the metonymical figuration of a feminine imaginary or style
(through her concept parler femme) not in order to refer to actual embodied
women and their relationship to matter and language, but to ‘disrupt and modify’
the phallocratic law of subjecthood and rational classification by reference
to the behaviours, pleasures and dispositions to the world which have been
historically repressed from a phallocentric logic of the same (68). Starting from
the assumption that ‘woman’ has been conceived as a speculum or a reflection
meant to bolster and sustain a masculine category of subjectivity, her project
relies on the strategic deployment of the excess which has been excluded through
the carving of philosophical categories of being. Irigaray adopts an aesthetic
position of mimicry, in which the feminine role is deliberately taken up as a
means to transform (in Guattari’s terms, transversalize) ‘a form of subordination
into affirmation, and thus to being to thwart it’:
To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place for her
exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It
means to resubmit herself –inasmuch as she is on the side of the ‘perceptible’,
of ‘matter’ –to ‘ideas’, in particular ideas about herself that are elaborated in/
by a masculine logic, so as to make ‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition,
what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of
the feminine in language. It also means ‘to unveil’ the fact that, if women are
such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function.
They also remain elsewhere: another case of the persistence of ‘matter’, but also
of ‘sexual pleasure’. (76)
Assuming the feminine role deliberately through mimicry involves circumventing

it by not simply reiterating the relations of power in place, but critiquing them
in the process of their redeployment, parodying them, disentangling and
recuperating those zones of the body and its relationships to the world which have
been expelled or used as a territory for domination (the material aspects of the
body, its embeddedness in the world, its multiple, diverging and contradictory
desires), creating a new aesthetico-political vocabulary which acknowledges the
interfolding of nature and culture. In this sense, Irigaray’s feminine imaginary
can be articulated to a Guattarian aesthetico-political transversalization of
phantasms. More specifically, a phallocratic phantasmagoria marking those
aspects of the female body as instinctual, animal, natural could be potentially
subverted through its transversalization as an aesthetic which privileges the
absurd, the grotesque, the bestial and the abject.
In a similar manner, Djuna Barnes refuses to discard those vividly material

aspects of the human body, and its moments of errantry, of wildness, of
surprising and inexplicable affective responses to nonhuman animals and to
environmental complexities. However, the process of re-signifying the body
and its movements has to account, in the process of critique, for its dependency
on and its tight relationship to discourses of domination, to enchanted and
demonic explications of reality, as well as to the cultural legacies, significations
and markings attributed to the constitution of bodies throughout the history of
Western civilization.
Irigaray’s philosophy has received numerous critiques, especially from
feminist theorists of social constructivism, insofar as it appears too close to an
essence of femininity rooted in nature in its descriptions of the way in which
the (female) body interacts with natural processes. However, for materialist
feminists, this assumption of essentialism betrays theory’s flight from nature,
since the sex/ gender binary becomes predicated upon a sharp opposition
between nature and culture (Alaimo 2000: 4, 6), while nature is understood
as a passive object, an undifferentiated and unchanging organism shaped and
thwarted by human culture (Fielding 2003: 1). There is no question that our
experience of reality is perpetually mediated by discursive socio-cultural lenses.
However, there is a marked difference between acknowledging the fact that we
have no direct access to ontology and prohibiting or dismissing any attempts
at redeploying concepts or theories which are more inclusive of nonhuman
dynamics, more attentive to the ways in which material processes impact on and
shape discourses, in addition to being shaped by discourses.
An ecosophical feminist aesthetics must then develop an ethical
relationship with the radical unknowability and unpredictability of matter,
in addition to its maintained focus on the cultural structures of capture,
deformation and mediation. Perhaps there is an intimation to this effect in
Catriona Sandilands’s (1997: 138) essay, ‘Wild Democracy: Ecofeminism,
Politics and the Desire Beyond’, which employs Lacanian terminology in order
to mobilize a call for an ecological ethics of the Real which accounts for the
‘moment of human linguistic unknowability of nature (always and necessarily
including aspects of ourselves)’. This she titles the wild aspect of reality. For
her, the acknowledgement of responsibility towards the wild valorizes not
only a non-anthropocentric conception of the limits of the human and the
limitations of the social and our modes of representation, but also points
to those nonhuman dynamics that have not yet been fully domesticated
and colonized by the human since they are always in flux, adjacent to the
movement of discourse:
The Real, the wild, is an unrepresentable kernel of human and nonhuman

existence around which language and culture are structured but which the
Symbolic can never represent much as we might desire it to do so. The Real
is discursively impossible, always something other than the language that
attempts to domesticate it. This wildness is unspeakable and calls our attention
to the limits of human speech itself; it is a barre through language, signaling the
impossibility of language to come to full representation. (138–9)
In line with Sandilands’s argument, Claire Colebrook (2008) argues that a

radical reading of Platonism through Deleuze can open up the imperceptible to
the impredictable differentiation of matter. There is a difference, for Colebrook,
between saying that there is such a thing as an enduring and forever stable
essence (Plato) and saying that essence is completely impredictable and has
the capacity to differentiate itself in obscure ways which are not immediately
accessible to the subject of knowledge/experience (Deleuze). For her, the reversal
of Platonism in Deleuze can provide ‘a new and positive notion of queerness: not
as a destabilization or solicitation of norms, but as a creation of differences that
are no longer grounded in either the subject or generating life’ (18).
The queering of desire is tied to a politics of tangibility and reflects upon the
indeterminateness of affect arguing for other modes of engaging with reality in
which sexuality is not driven towards achieving its purpose by assigning itself to
an object or an identitarian practice, but manifests itself
as the passion which fires the imagination, that defies moral imperatives
and regulatory decrees. This is not simply to invoke a wild and free space, a
deterritorialized flow, a sexuality that would be free of restraint; rather, beyond
such atopic musings we want to encourage a sexuality that may disrupt what is
expected, that is fully within the social, that functions hence as political (if not
correct). (Grosz and Probyn 1995: xiv)
Contrary to a conception of wildness as a non-place of pure, unleashed

desire, one must acknowledge both the movements of reterritorialization and
deterritorialization involved in the constitution of nomadic flights. In addition
to accounting for the ways in which wildness is captured in majoritarian
discourses and fantasies, wildness must also be reconsidered, in ecosophical
terms, as an element of temporary rupture, an intrusion of affect in the dynamics
of becoming towards a minoritarian flow.
Robin’s perspectival wildness
Through mimicry, Barnes recuperates and redeploys discourses surrounding

ideas such as wildness, animality and beastliness, by restoring a space for
those queer sexualities relegated, as elements of sexual perversion, to obscure
and secretive corners of society. Robin figures in the midst of Nightwood’s rich
prose as its elusive, intricate string which holds its disparate layers together, its
poetic monologues, circuitous nightly wanderings, contemplations and desiring
fantasies. Her strange gestures, her unpredictability, her frequent absences, her
relationship with animals and the natural world, these all generate complex
perspectival explanations of her behaviour which reveal more about other
characters’ pre-conceptions, delusions and chimeras about the wild rather than
about Robin’s own relationship with the world.
Robin’s husband, Felix Volkbein, a misfit and estranged figure, ill at ease
with his Jewish identity, adopts a false aristocratic title in order to be accepted
among European nobility. When unable to access these circles, he seeks the
company of circus and theatre performers, acrobats and sword-swallowers,
actresses, animal tamers and contortionists, since their falsification and
spectacularization of glamour, their taking of false aristocratic titles for pure
performative amusement, recalls to him a desire for mimicry, for pageantry, for
being elsewhere and someone else (Barnes 2006: 14). In Robin’s presence, he
finds a similar sense of identification, co-constitutive with the fascination of an
exoticized and eroticized Other. Upon his first encounter with Robin, he and
Dr. O’Connor discover her half-conscious body in loose attire, disheveled and
stretched, after a fainting spell, on a hotel bed, surrounded by a profusion of
exotic plants:
The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of earth-flesh, fungi,
which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of
oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had
invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and
beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a
decay fishing her beneath the visible surface . . . Like a painting by the douanier
Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room . . . thrown
in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an
unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the
strains of an orchestra, of wood-winds render a serenade which will popularize
the wilderness. (38)
In one of the very few representational passages in the book, Robin appears as
the illusion of passive vegetal life, accessible, yet submerged in an alternate world,
her flesh blending into the texture of plants belonging to a distant elsewhere,
evoking an entirely unrealistic fantasy of an Orientalized jungle such as the one
captured in Henri Rousseau’s painting Le Rêve (1910).
Rousseau’s surreal and lavish picture figures like a palimpsest of exoticism
in which relations between the forms of life it depicts, humans, nonhumans
and plant types, are rendered purely imaginary. The heterogeneity and sheer
concentration of seemingly incongruous species of animals and jungle
vegetation, the uncomfortable power binary between a relaxed, passive
feminine nude and a subservient, performing native body, almost obliterated
by the vegetation, the rich and striking colour tones, as well as the sharp and
sudden shapes and lines, these elements push the art work to the edge of
excess –an impossible phantasmagoria. The female nude, portrayed through
a distinctly masculine perspective, is comfortably sprawled on a salon couch,
her gaze indefinite, lost in the distance of a daydream, her arms wide open,
revealing the entirety of her body to the spectator, her hands open and pointed
to the spectacle of the jungle, as if trying to grasp without movement, yet her
body, with its hard lines and vivid shades of yellow and green, appears to meld
with the artificiality of an imaginary jungle vegetation. The same shade of
yellow which demarcates the leaves immediately below her reclining figure
highlights her skin, as if the female body through its striking materiality is
only an inversion of plant life, motionless, available to be taken, indifferent to
circumstances.
For Felix, the eroticized, half-awake figure of the woman functions not
only as a dream of possession over the intricate materialities of her body, but
also as a double temporal portal onto an edenic past and a future claim to the
appropriation and seizing of foreign lands and those lives inhabiting them. This
desire for appropriation, for capture and absorption of the potentials of Robin’s
body, reveals something like a tendency in Felix to fix and halt the movement of
life through an approximation of forms, the crystallization of selective meaning
through a representational gesture, a museumification of sexuality:
The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a ‘picture’ forever arranged
is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets
a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will
reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; . . . an eland coming down an aisle
of trees . . . he felt he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though
static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the
wind. (Barnes 2006: 41)
Felix is struggling to explain to himself the contradiction between thought, his

contemplation and selection of pictures of his lover at rest, and the vivid, moving,
effervescence of life, which elicits a complexity of affects, desires and memories.
Robin is shape-shifting, as if her nonhuman potentialities are simmering at the
surface of her skin, rendering her ungraspable.
For the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1944), the essential quality of
life is that it is in perpetual movement, involved in processes of becoming. The
fact that we perceive life as freeze-frames, as static constructions and as clearly
defined forms, is the result of our representation of movement according to
pre-established spatial and temporal coordinates and the use of conscious
intelligence (101). Whereas, in fact, bodies are permanently embedded,
molecular, affected by the proximity of other bodies and shaped by variations
in their condition. Robin, by virtue of seeming always in movement, always
shifting forms, even when at rest, disorients her spectator who would like
to fully visualize her, to consume her presence by incorporating her in his
body through sight. However, she appears to Felix at times as an unsettling
ancient statue, carved not through human force, but through the antediluvian
movements of wind and rain, a creature who can be fully represented only in her
absence, ‘as the recollection of a sensation of beauty without its details’ (Barnes
2006: 45). This tension between representation and movement, signification
and affect, endures throughout the novel as it demarcates Robin’s moments of
flight, her relationship to wildness and her temporary capture by majoritarian
discourses of domestication.
Perhaps the most effusive of the novel’s characters, Dr. Matthew O’Connor,
also a misfit figure who dons an imposter doctor’s garb during the day and
female clothing at night, considers Robin to be ‘outside of the “human
type” –a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin’ (Barnes 2006: 155). The
doctor’s philosophical musings betray their Nietzschean influences insofar
as he conceives of Robin’s wildness as a remainder of the primordial animal
dimension of humans, cleansed and colonized by the normative structures
of society. For Friedrich Nietzsche (2000), the meaning of all culture is to
tame and domesticate the human animal, to estrange him from his animal
instincts and from his own material body, and to proliferate the idea of the
neutral, self-sufficient ‘subject’, a sovereign being with free will and a capacity
for transcendence. The process of becoming-transcendental, the becoming
calculable of man entails the rejection and externalization of corporeality

which begins to connote the abject:
On his way of becoming an ‘angel’ (to employ no uglier word) man has evolved
that queasy stomach and coated tongue through which not only the joy and
innocence of the animal but life itself has become repugnant to him –so that
he sometimes holds his nose in his own presence and, with Pope Innocent the
Third, disapprovingly catalogues his own repellent aspects (‘impure begetting,
disgusting means of nutrition in his mother’s womb, baseness of the matter out
of which man evolves, hideous stink, secretion of saliva, urine, and filth’). (503)
The doctor, unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, however, idealizes the long-forgotten

primitive past of ‘simplicity’ and ‘innocence’, glimpses of which he thinks he has
discovered at times in the co-existence of immediacy and a sentiment of great
distance which animals and humans such as Robin exude for him. Instead of
conceiving of the animal aspects of the human body as co-existent and deeply
interspersed with cultural norms and determinations, he effects a separation
between nature and culture by segregating the body’s indeterminacy, its wildness,
as atavistic remnant, from the ‘human’ expressions of thought, remembrance
and desire. To him, animals and humans such as Robin hold zones of disordered
forgetfulness, betraying an elsewhere forever inaccessible to the human mind, a
sacralized and transcendental conception of animal nature.
Soon after leaving her husband, Robin becomes embroiled with Nora Flood
with whom she shares an apartment in New York. For Nora, Robin appears as a
terrifying and demonic creature given to nightly excesses, always slippery and
uncontainable, never to be fully possessed except in her sleep or in her death: ‘To
keep her (in Robin there was the tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself
astray) Nora knew there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong
to her’ (Barnes 2006: 63). Unlike Felix, Nora experiences an extreme corporeal
identification with her lover, and for this reason, Robin’s late night wanderings
throughout the city and her incessant visits to other people’s beds introduce
ruptures in their relationship and the logic of their domestic space, while her
returns bring the pain of other worlds, unknowable, inaccessible, distant. ‘Robin’s
homeless meanderings’, Dana Seitler (2001: 547) argues, ‘may be understood . . .
as a series of deformations, uncoupling desire from object choice, dislocating
identity from the time and space by which it is bound’. Robin’s wildness, her
radical indeterminacy and unknowability, these are strongly dissonant with all
of her lovers’ attempts to capture her shifting, formless body within the sphere of
the domestic. Her next lover, Jenny Pentherbridge, experiences the same sense
of despair as Nora once she loses grip of Robin. Not being able to comprehend
Robin’s necessity for frequent departures, her walks throughout the countryside,
her desire to sleep in the forest among wild animals, her absolute lack of self-
concern, Jenny suspects her, like Nora, of being possessed of demonic forces
inexplicable to the human mind:
Robin walked the open country in the same manner, pulling at the flowers,
speaking in a low voice to animals. Those that came near, she grasped, straining
their fur back until their eyes were narrowed and their teeth bare, her own teeth
showing as if her hand were upon her own neck.
Because Robin’s engagements were with something unseen, because in her

speech and in her gestures there was a desperate anonymity, Jenny became
hysterical. She accused Robin of ‘a sensuous communion with unclean spirits’.
(Barnes 2006: 177)
Robin’s unsettling proximity to nonhuman animals, her ability to respond to

their gestures through her becoming-animal and to relate to them on nonhuman
terms, these aspects paradoxically elicit for Jenny the anxiety of the supernatural,
the nonhuman, the abject. Julia Kristeva (1987: 6) tells us that ‘discourse will seem
tenable only if it ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent and
repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject’.
The separation between the I and the Other, the apparition of the I as another,
the human metaphysical subject disentangled from its roots within matter, can
only face absolute collapse upon the shock of the immediacy and immanence of
such bodies who have rejected their dreams of transcendence.
Becoming-Animal and the queering of desire
For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, becoming-animal is one of the modes of
rhizomatic individuation which takes place through a reconfiguration of the
speeds and slownesses of a body that will invest it with animal characteristics,
but not by resemblance, analogy or imitation, ‘for I cannot become dog
without the dog becoming something else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 258).
Becomings are by no means molar, Deleuze and Guattari warn us, the body
does not visibly shift into a different form, but it emits ‘corpuscles that enter
the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts
to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule.
You become animal only molecularly’ (274–5). All becomings in fact take place
at the molecular level and rush through woman, child, animal (becoming-
minoritarian) towards becoming-imperceptible. Becoming-minoritarian, can
be understood as a renunciation of predetermined subject positions and an
active pursuit of the potentialities inherent within and through contact with
other modalities of being or becoming, following the circuit of desire. However,
becoming-minoritarian is not an identity politics since it implies a renunciation
of all that roots us in ourselves, in our ego, in our memory, in our subjective
needs and desire. It is a micropolitics since it does not take place at the molar
level of subjectivities, yet functions on a subtler pre-cognitive molecular plane
of consistency, where affects and intensities circulate as pure potentials. This
is why becoming-minoritarian involves passing from man, ‘the molar entity
par excellence’ (291) towards becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-
animal and becoming-molecular or -imperceptible. Becoming, in this sense, is
a constant process of expansion by proximity with other bodies or haecceities
on a smooth plane of consistency where no one subjectivity takes precedence
over another, but where powers, affects and intensities are compressed in the
transition between multiplicities. The encounter between two bodies in space is
then the merging of two sets of multiplicities with one another. ‘Becoming is the
process of desire’ (272) yet desire should be here understood in its complexity,
as a field of conflicting and oftentimes mutually cancelling forces, compelled not
simply by individual lacks and libidinal attachments, but by a tangled mesh of
different potentialities, needs and affordances. As Deleuze and Guattari assert in
Anti-Oedipus (2009), desire functions at a molecular unconscious level as a flow
which links or disentangles heterogeneous desiring-machines, in other words,
provisional machinic assemblages held together by the circulation of flows and
the distribution of intensities. While desire proceeds along the line of flight
of a complexity of interdependent discourses and material concatenations, it
becomes apparent at the molar level of the subject only through a process of
severe reduction, blockage of potentials and radical breaks from the field of
desiring flows. Desire also represents the affirmative driving force of life itself,
it is not postulated upon a lack, it does not represent an absence, a castration,
a substitution or a supplement. Desire has no one-to-one relation with the
phallus, nor does it instantiate binary oppositions.
Following Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, Patricia McCormack (2012)
argues that a liberation of desire from the field of sexuality is necessary. She
conceives of desire, in its non-oppositional dimension, as a posthuman gesture
of queering: ‘While queer has been understood as coming after heterosexual and
homosexual differentiation, as a kind of post-post modern sexuality, posthuman

queer desire occurs before the separation of forms’ (101). In this context, the
queering of desire refers to the antinormative flow of life which carries bodies
in multiple directions and assigns them to different configurations of human,
nonhuman and inorganic actors. The process of becoming is pushed forth by
desire on its trajectory towards the minority, towards the molecular quality of
matter.
As Robin slides towards the formlessness and impersonality of matter, she
finds herself becoming-imperceptible, following the multiple lines of flight of
her desire. The final scene captures her most significant transformation. Circling
the countryside in search for Nora’s house, Robin eventually stops in a decaying
chapel, drawing both her former lover and her lover’s dog towards her. Yet, in
the very moment of their encounter, Robin finds herself drawn between two
modes of interaction: she can either respond to Nora and resort to conventional
signification, or take the path of becoming, sliding down, on all fours, ‘her hair
swinging, her arms held out’, reaching for the dog, taking on dog qualities,
effecting her molecular transformation:
Then she began to bark also, crawling after him –barking in a fit of laughter,
obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on
with her, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this
way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with
him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave
up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog
too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees.
(Barnes 2006: 179–80)
Robin’s engagement in a posthuman process of becoming relies on a

depersonalization, triangulation and queering of desire among the three
different fields of affect connecting together Nora’s, the dog’s and her own body.
This dissolution of molarity stages an aesthetic and figurative movement of the
dehierarchization of singularities, a levelling on a field of pure intensity. Robin
renounces her upright position and takes the form of a dog, refusing language
in favour of inarticulate barks, exchanging affective intensities with the dog,
exciting and unsettling him. The dog too seems to undergo a transformation,
as agitation ceases his body and he begins to cry, his whimpering mingling
with Robin’s own sounds, their bodies coalescing, forming a strange hybrid
creature.
An ecosophical extrapolation from wildness
There is certainly no sense of purity or innocence to be taken away from the

condition of nonhuman animals, who live their days in such inconceivably
heterogeneous ways which could never be subsumed within a logic of the same,
through their idealization as creatures of primitive blissfulness (as Dr. O’Connor
would have it), in order to dismantle the humanist subject. Yet, there is something
to be said about the limits of the human and his own socio-cultural impositions
which reduce her possibilities of becoming and his expressions of desire. Djuna
Barnes’s Nightwood illustrates the unravelling of a humanist subjectivity by
employing the notion of wildness as a discursive space of investigation of the
human’s own vulnerabilities, her anxieties and her phantasms. Following Robin’s
nomadic trajectory, wildness can be reconstituted as the indeterminacy of the
body, which, in spite of the successive movements of capture and possession,
can be oriented towards the potentialities of the world. To account for these wild
potentials, to acknowledge the movements of becoming, the draw and pull of the
nonhuman, a revaluation of our conceptual framework is necessary. For in the
making of the subject there is always a space of indeterminacy, always an errantry,
in addition to habit, repetition, submission and cultural normalization. Yet the
novel also invokes the extremes of suffering towards which a philosophy of radical
wildness might carry us: Robin’s indiscriminate openness to indeterminacy also
means radical uncaring –every detachment from a lover’s bed, from a pet, from
a landscape, is conceived of as an escape, a discharge of intensity so that another
intensity can take its place. Radical wildness, as depicted in Nightwood, also
gravitates towards lack of responsibility, endurance or care. It risks turning into
a narcissistic pursuit through the multiplication of temporary and precarious
relations and the severing of the collective. Following Dr. O’Connor’s advice
to the grieving Nora, an ecosophical thinking should enable us to ‘hold on to
suffering’ (responsibility, affection, devotion, care and their vicissitudes) ‘and let
the spirit loose’ (radical freedom and the acknowledgement of the indeterminacy
of desire and its becomings).
This requires a thinking of wildness transversally, not only at the level
of the individual psyche, but in relation to the social sphere and the larger
framework of the ecosystem which enables relations of becoming. Creating
an aesthetic platform for the transversalization of violent fantasies would not
lead to their complete sublimation, Guattari (2008) argues, nor will organized
educational or social reforms bring about change through repression and the
enforcement of law. What is necessary according to him is ‘the expansion of

alternative experiences centred around a respect for singularity, and through
the continuous production of an autonomizing subjectivity that can articulate
itself appropriately in relation to the rest of society’ (39). A critique of wildness,
insofar as it demarcates the precariousness of the category of the human, could
function across scales, articulating the realm of the individual (through the
dismantling of the sense of self as human, fixable, identifiable) to the redefinition
of social relationality (an antinormative mode of becoming- together and
belonging, as well as a queering of desire), and to an ethico-political relation to
the environment (through a reconfiguration of wildness as the forever receding
alterity of the nonhuman).
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Nietzsche, Friedrich (2000), ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, 437–600, New York: The Modern
Library.
Plumwood, Val (1993), Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and
New York: Routledge.
Sandilands, Catriona (1997), ‘Wild Democracy: Ecofeminism, Politics and the Desire
Beyond’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 18, no. 2: 135–56.
Seitler, Dana (2001), ‘Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Science of
Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes’, American Literature, 73, no. 3: 525–62.
Duke University Press.
12
Doing Something Close to Nothing: Marina

Abramović’s War Machine
renée c. hoogland
‘In the End, It Was All About You.’ ‘The Artist Is Not Present But the Brand Sure
Is.’ These are some headlines popping up when I Google the name of the so-called
godmother of performance art, currently also identified as ‘performance-artist-
turned-celebrity-inspirer-and-admirer, and successful crowdfunder’, almost
five years after the succès fou of Marina Abramović’s three-month retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Reviled in the press for the
narcissistic, exhibitionist nature of her work even at the time the show opened,
the performance artist, singled out as one of The Top 20 Art World Women of
2014 (in the good company of, among others, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Kim
Kardashian) (News, artnet 2014), today primarily figures in the earnest art-
blogosphere as the epitome of cynical capitalist sellout, a cultish self-appointed
guru, whose manipulation of impressionable young artists merely confirms her
blinding star power and the prodigious market she has constructed around her
person and her ‘brand’. Indeed, as Gilles Deleuze notes in one of his musings
with Claire Parnet (2007: 147), ‘The world and its States are no more masters
of their plane than revolutionaries are condemned to a deformation of theirs.
Everything is played in uncertain games’.
Revered, ridiculed, venerated, rejected, worshipped, colonized, resistant:
Marina Abramović’s 700-hour performance, the centre piece of ‘The Artist is
Present’, shows, perhaps more poignantly than any work of contemporary art
in recent years, that resistance is, by necessity, an uncertain enterprise: it can
always be colonized by the power it opposes and at the same time (continue to)
elude such power. Resistance –and the resistance to resistance, as testified to
by Abramović’s decades-long relegation to the margins of the dominant artistic
field –cannot therefore be seen as the overthrowing of State power by an essential
revolutionary subject. Resistance today may rather be thought in terms of war: a

field of multiple struggles, strategies, localized tactics, temporary setbacks and
betrayals –ongoing antagonisms without the promise of a final victory, yet with
the possibility of unlimited becoming.
In this chapter, I wish to explore Abramović’s longest performance piece and
its operations as a publicity event –apart from its resounding success at MoMA
itself, the frenzy of media attention it has provoked, its preservation in books, a
documentary film, on Flickr and its transformation into an eight-bit video game –
as a decidedly paradoxical phenomenon. As a performance, an actualization or,
simply, an event (accessible now only in multiple mediated forms) ‘The Artist Is
Present’ is fundamentally a form of praxis, or what Félix Guattari identifies as an
expressive ‘a-signifying rupture’, a mode of creation that depends on, as much
as it eludes, the stultifying operation of current media technologies. Precisely as
such does Abramović’s presence across a myriad of media outlets, in galleries,
news stories, on magazine covers, in blogs and so on, that is to say, as a rhizomatic
formation or moving matrix of forces and intensities, function simultaneously
as a war machine, and is thus equally capable of opening up possible worlds and
new modes of becoming as it has the potential to be appropriated by the State
apparatus and engender destruction.
‘The Artist Is Present’ constructed a stage-like setting in the middle of the
Donald Marron Atrium at the Museum of Modern Art (Figure 12.1). Abramović
entered the museum when the audience was allowed in and left it at closing time.
Her hair pulled back in a braid and dressed in a long, body-covering, dramatic
robe made of either red, white or black rather shiny fabric, the artist spent the
eight hours of the day sitting in an upright chair in front of an empty table (even
the table was at some point removed), facing another empty chair. Any visitor of
the museum could sit in this chair, and stay as long or as briefly as they wanted.
The performance lasted seventy-two days, in the course of which 1,545 visitors
sat in the chair and faced Abramović, while thousands of others observed the
sitters, either simply watching, waiting in line for their own turn, or simply by
passing from one gallery to another, which necessarily took them through the
open atrium space.
This setting in itself provoked quite fierce responses: ‘Wait, Why Did
That Woman Sit in the MoMA for 750 Hours?’ reads the title of Elizabeth
Greenwood’s piece in The Atlantic (2012), on the documentary film about
‘The Artist Is Present’, which came out in 2012.1 Neither the sexist slur nor
the fact that this freelance ‘entertainment’ writer appears to forget that
performance art tends to require the artist’s presence should go unnoticed,
Doing Something Close to Nothing 263
Figure 12.1 Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010). © 2017 Marina
Abramović, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery/(ARS), New York.
but these are regrettably predicable yet minor issues. What interests me here
is Greenwood’s and other critics’ palpable unease with the simple fact that
Abramović had the audacity, first, after forty years in the margins of a male
and money-dominated art world, to claim a space and a considerable period
of time in one of the most prestigious museums in the so-called capital (and
I am choosing the term wisely) of modern and contemporary art –obviously,
a claim to fame and/or notoriety that mainstream art criticism continues
to define as the sacrosanct domain of monied male privilege. It is no small
irony, then, that Abramović’s almost statuesque figure occupied the very same
space that Barnett Newman’s monumental (phallic) sculpture ‘Broken Obelisk’
(1967) was placed in at the re-opening of the museum in 2004. Second, and
more importantly, Greenwood’s and other critics’ barely suppressed outrage at
Abramović’s occupation of the MoMA’s centre stage suggests that, by creating
a presence in the large open space at the heart of the museum building, she
effectively transformed not only the atrium itself, but also the surrounding
galleries, and therewith changed, or at least challenged the rules of proper
museum praxis and practices (Figure 12.2).
Museum spaces, and especially the galleries that house the artworks that
visitors come in to admire and contemplate, quiet, respectfully and from a
Figure 12.2 Marina Abramović, ‘The Artist Is Present’ (2010). © 2017 Marina
Abramović, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery /(ARS), New York.
distance, are what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 474–500), in A Thousand

Plateaus, call ‘striated space’. The museum is filled with instructions: from its
sequenced spaces and arrangements of objects, to the guided tours, exhibition
flyers, the identifying plaques next to individual artworks and perhaps most
of all, the ubiquitous exhortation ‘do not touch’, museum spaces provide
both the stage set and the script for our proper being and behavior. More
abstractly: striated space is a partitioned field, determined by dimension and
metric determination, which prohibits free motion. In it, ‘lines or trajectories
tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another’ (478).
Deleuze and Guattari contrast striated space with ‘smooth space’, which refers
to an environment –however large or small –in which lines do not determine
or delimit, but rather operate as ‘vectors’: smooth space is ‘constructed by
local operations involving changes in direction’ (478). Directional rather than

dimensional, they write:
Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and
perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than of properties. It is haptic
rather than optical perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter,
in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is
an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measure and
properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without Organs instead
of an organism and organization. (479; emphasis in the original)
Deleuze and Guattari develop the distinction between smooth and striated
space –which is not one of opposition or mutual exclusion, for the ‘successive
terms of the opposition fail to coincide entirely’ –alongside that between
nomad and sedentary space, the first being the space ‘in which the war machine
develops,’ the second, the space ‘instituted by the State apparatus’ (474). With
reference to the aesthetic, the smooth is a space of ‘close vision’, as distinct from
long-distance, and ‘haptic’, rather than optical. Haptic here does not mean
‘tactile’, but, instead, suggests that the eye itself may fulfil a non-optical function
(492). The smooth, haptic space of close vision is characterized as processual: its
‘orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates
step by step’ (493). Moreover, orientations are not fixed or constant, nor are there
points of reference that can be assembled into some form of unity that can be
observed in its totality from the outside. Points of reference in the smooth haptic
space of close vision are ‘tied to any number of observers, who . . . are . . . nomads
entertaining tactile relations among themselves’ (493). The interlinkages do
not ‘imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed’, but
are rather ‘constituted according to ordered differences’ that produce ‘intrinsic
variations in the division of a single distance’ (493). If there is an absolute in the
smooth space of close vision, it is an absolute that is ‘one with becoming itself,
with process’ (494). In nomad art, this ‘absolute of passage’ is indistinguishable
from its manifestation (494).
By creating a work of art in the MoMA’s atrium and turning it into a
smooth space, Abramović challenged both the organism of the museum and
its organization, including the spatial organization of the surrounding galleries,
and that of the visitors’ optical and more generally sensual perception. Add to
this that the spatial transformation effected by the creation of the smooth within
the striated space of the museum extends into the temporal transformation
that occurs when the artwork does not simply sit on a pedestal or hangs from a
wall –fixed in both space and time –but rather enters and leaves the museum
at certain intervals, while yet stretching its duration across almost three months.
However, this would still not quite capture the perhaps most significant –and
to some critics apparently the most disconcerting –aspect of ‘The Artist Is
Present’. That is to say, the fact that the performance fundamentally violated
the conventional subject-object relations that not only inform the modern art
museum, in which the visiting subject is expected to observe the various objects
on display from a distance –something which equally holds true even for more
participatory forms of artistic events, for example, a musical concert or a theatre
performance –as much as they form the foundation of prevailing notions of
being and identity. With both the successive sitting participants and the growing
numbers of onlookers observing the performance, whether intentionally or not,
co-producing it, ‘The Artist Is Present’ developed into an co-creative event in
which a shifting configuration of bodies, forces and intensities re-invented itself
discontinuously, in new modes and constellations of ongoing variation that
left none of the preexisting entities intact, or at least, not unaffected –whether
positively or negatively. The latter would include retrospective effects, it seems,
such as the experience of art critic Alicia Eler (2013), who writes in the online
agazine Hyperallergic, a few years after the event, that she has found
artblog/-m
herself transformed from former ‘lame fan girl’ into earnest criticaster of the
‘problematic nature of Abramović’s brand, and her evolution toward celebrity’.
My interest here is not the validity of such critiques –nor do I feel the need
to either defy or defend Abamović and her work, even if I do find the gendered,
agist and ethnocentric undertones in what some of the self-defined ‘playful,
serious and radical’ art bloggers write about the artist decidedly disturbing.
For example, when Jerry Saltz (2010) opens his review of the exhibition by
identifying Abramović as a ‘63-year old Yugoslavian-born performance artist’
about whose plastic surgery ‘widespread art-world rumors have abounded’.
What does interest me is the vehemence of these reactions and responses to a
work that is essentially, as my title suggests, doing something close to nothing.
Indeed, not knowing in advance if anyone would actually take up the invitation
of the empty chair and come and sit with the artist, and envisioning that the
‘chair would often remain empty’ (Biesenbach 2012: 9), both Abramović and
the show’s curator Klaus Biesenbach were quite surprised by the overwhelming
success of what Saltz derisively calls ‘prolonged staring contests with
museumgoers’. So, what exactly did happen, and what made this performance
more than something close to nothing? At this point, I must admit that I was
not there, that I did not ‘sit’ with the artist and worse still, that I have always had
a hard time with performance art –especially since, whenever I have ventured

into a performance, it always appeared to involve the artists’ naked bodies, or
worse, their mutilated genitals. I find this kind of thing rather alarming, and
hence did not expect that when I nonetheless went to see the earlier mentioned
documentary film The Artist Is Present, I was literally blown away. Why?
Abramović herself, as well as her various critics, have talked about the impact
of the performance in terms of the feelings of loneliness and isolation that people
experience in the contemporary world, in which we text and tweet and talk on
the phone but rarely spend time facing each other ‘in real time’ –a pervasive
aspect of the postmodern human condition that is poignantly brought to the
surface by the profoundly emotional reactions provoked by the locking in of
two gazes on the gallery floor. Other comments concern the ways in which the
event forces its participants to be in time, to cut through and break away from
the ongoing attempt to keep up with it, always running behind the clock and
our calendars, and to slow down, to sink into the moment, or moments, when
there is nothing, really, to do, and nothing to distract one from being in time and
space, silently facing another human being. Yet others have foregrounded the
ways in which the performance painfully points up the poverty of interpersonal
relationships in our networked society, where we rarely look anybody in the eye,
neither in private nor in public spaces.
All of these aspects, I believe, are relevant and contribute to the intensity of
‘The Artist Is Present’, an intensity that is just as powerfully palpable, or perhaps
even more so, in the various recordings of the performance. Such intensity is
undeniably visible, or rather, sensible, in the facial expressions of Abramović
and her sitters –which can be captured in their unusual closeness only through
the lens of a camera. Hence, perhaps, the decision of the artist and the curator to
have the Italian photographer Marco Anelli, acting as a removed observer sitting
outside the line of vision of both sitters and artist, present for the duration of the
exhibition. Anelli’s (2012) comprehensive documentation of each and all of the
faces of the performers, collected in a book that was published two years after
the show closed, constitutes an a-parallel event, or even, a counterpoint to the
artist’s real-time ‘prolonged staring contests with museumgoers’.
I am referring to Anelli’s Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović as an
a-parallel event or even a counterpoint to ‘The Artist Is Present’ itself because
of the ways in which the faces captured by the photographer’s camera are
fundamentally different from the faces engaged in the artistic performance –
even if the latter are now also only accessible to us through technological
mediation. The distinction I am suggesting derives from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
writing on the face, first theorized in detail in ‘Plateau 7 –Year Zero: Faciality’

in A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the face stands at the
intersection of two semiotic systems, signifiance and subjectivation. Faciality is
not the same thing as the face itself, but a function that operates in the form of
what they call a ‘white wall/black hole system’ (167; emphasis in the original).
In this system, the ‘black hole’ or unknown zone of the face, that is, the zone in
which affective energies may be invested, is correlated with subjectivation, while
the ‘white wall’, the surface upon which signs are projected and from which they
are reflected, corresponds with signifiance. The face is ‘not an envelope exterior
to the person who speaks, thinks, feels’, Deleuze and Guattari write, for without
guidance from the face, the ‘form of the signifier in language, even its units, would
remain indeterminate’ (167), that is, without the help of the face the listener
would not be able to make her/his choices about meaning. Furthermore, they
point out, the face is not ‘basically’ individual, but rather ‘constructs the walls
that the signifier needs in order to bounce of off ’ (168), while simultaneously
‘dig[ging] the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through’ (168).
The face is thus not something that simply exists, that comes ‘ready-made’, but
rather comes into being as the effect of an ‘abstract machine of faciality’ (168). It
is this ‘abstract machine’ which engenders the face as surface: ‘Facial traits, lines,
wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map’ (170).
From the understanding of the face as ‘map’ or ‘surface’, Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) infer that the head is included in the body, but the face is not. The face
needs to be produced, is the product of a process, of facialization, the effect of
the operation of an ‘abstract machine’, an operation that is both ‘horrible and
magnificent’:
The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced
only when the head ceases to be part of the body, when it ceases to be coded
by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal
code−when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded
by something that we shall call the Face. (170; emphasis in the original)
The process of facialization is first and foremost a question of becoming legible,

recognizable, within major, or, rather, majoritarian systems of signification
and representation. Deleuze (1986: 99) writes in the first of his two books on
cinema: ‘Ordinarily, three roles of the face are recognizable: it is individuating (it
distinguishes or characterizes each person); it is socialising (it manifests a social
role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only communications
between people, but also in a single person, the internal agreement between
his character and his role).’ Facial traits acquire meaning –become a map –
in relation to the dominant (non-marked) face of ‘humanity’ (white, straight,
middle-class, male), and is thus a mapping out of a particular ‘territory’ within
the overall ‘landscape’ of privileged modes of being ‘human’, of being and identity
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 188). As a politics of homogenization, facialization
is not restricted to the head –indeed, the ‘face is produced only when the head
ceases to be part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when
it ceases to have multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code’ and has become
overcoded, subsumed by the Face. This process of overcoding is an ‘unconscious
and machinic operation’, which does not function by means of resemblance but
‘by an order of reasons’ (170). Facialization depends on the interpretive work of
the subject in its interlinkages with places, objects and others. It is the subject’s
responsibility to ‘get it right’, that is, to adjust to and consolidate privileged sets
of meaning and being and develop them into its mode of (coherent) expression.
Facialization is thus a process of territorialization –an abstract machine whose
product, that is, the particular form of a face, its actual assemblage, is concrete,
and, as such, a politics as well.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) harshest comments on the face occur in their
struggle with the question: what triggers faciality? Their answer is that the face
has a history, that only ‘certain social formations need face’, and that ‘at very
different dates, there occurred a generalized collapse of all of the heterogeneous,
polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favor of a semiotic of signifiance and
subjectification’ (180). Here lies the connection between facialization,
signification and the politics of subjectivity: ‘There is no significance without a
despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage,
and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through
signifiers and act upon souls and subjects’ (180). To escape from the despotic
power of the face, Deleuze and Guattari submit, it is necessary to ‘dismantle’ the
face, even if such dismantling is ‘no mean affair’ and may lead to ‘madness’ (188).
Significantly, though not surprisingly, they point to the ‘resources of art, and
art of the highest kind’ (187) to provide the tools for such processes of positive
deterritorialization that allow us to ‘break through the wall’ (186), to ‘get out of
the black hole’ of the face, and to be swept ‘toward the realms of the asignifying,
asubjective, and faceless’ (187).
As Ronald Bogue (2003: 105) points out, however, artists may ‘reinforce
despotic-passional encodings by producing facialized compositions’ as much
as they may ‘undermine those encodings by deterritorializing the face and
its facializations’, since the abstract machine of faciality itself ‘operates in two
directions’. As abstract machine, faciality, he continues, is immanent within

the real, but it is ‘virtual rather than actual’: the actualizations of the face do
not coincide with the ‘deterritorialized, unformed matter with unspecified
functions’ that is the abstract machine. Hence, faciality may not only codify,
capture and calcify, but also ‘points the way for a decoding of facialization
coordinates’, a ‘metamorphic undoing of the regularities of signification and
subjectification’ (105).
It is this two-pronged operation of the abstract machine of faciality, which,
I think, marks the fundamental difference between Anelli’s ‘portraits in the
presence of Marina Abramović’ and the artist’s presence itself. Despite the
fact that both works of art centrally focus on the face and on the process of
facing, Anelli’s photographs capture disembodied facial expressions outside
of the temporal and spatial dimensions in which they emerge. The orderly
presentation of hundreds of still photographs of framed faces on the MoMA
website, and, subsequently, in the pages of a book to some extent de-facializes
the individual faces of the sitters by rendering them part of a larger assemblage,
a grid, in which faces become almost interchangeable, abstractions themselves.
Yet, precisely because of the portrait’s, and especially the photograph’s long
history of indexicality (not to mention the fact that quite a few ‘celebrities’
entered the field of the photographer’s field of –mechanical –vision), these
faces suggest, and thus invite us to apply precisely the ‘ordinary’ functions of
facialized composition, that is, recognition, socialization and communication.
In other words, the photographer’s work evokes the traditional model of the face
that treats the face as a surface or map of inscriptions that require interpretation,
as something that gives us access to some hidden meaning, as an expressive
representation (of something else).
Abramović’s performance, in contrast, has nothing to do with representation: it
consists in no more (and no less) than the artist’s presence, that is, an event
in space and time that does not stand for anything else, a presentation or
actualization without underlying or ulterior reality. As such, it inscribes the
second possibility that Bogue identifies for the artist responding to the problem
of the face, that is, a dismantling or deterritorialization of the facial coordinates
that determine significance and subjectification. The faces of the artist and her
sitters do not signify or mean anything in the way of the facialized composition
of photographic portrait. Rather, their mere presence in time and space –the
actual work of the artwork –is a process of making and doing, even if their
doing is something close to nothing. The question here is not one of meaning
and being but, instead, of doing and becoming.
Bogue’s evocation of the abstract machine of faciality in relation to the

distinction actual/virtual acquires additional significance when the question
consequently becomes, not what does a face mean, but, instead, ‘what can a
face do?,’ which is the title of Richard Rushton’s (2002: 219–37) incisive essay on
Deleuze and faces. Rushton’s main concern is not the ‘dismantling’ of the face
per se, but rather the actual doings of the face, from which he does not exclude
the function of communication. In order to disconnect the subject from the face
(as in the traditional model of recognition and communication), he suggests we
need to, paradoxically, disembody the expression on the face from the one that
is doing the expressing. This allows us to take the expression on the face as an
event in-itself, something we encounter as a ‘pure quality or affect’ (224). This,
in turn, enables the question of the ‘doings’ of the face before its subsumption by
and within a system of signification and subjectification:
The face arrives from somewhere and is on its way to somewhere else. As such,
it is a phase of communicability between a here and a there. Rather than being
the matter of communication –the what that is thought, said, or felt –the face
establishes the prior level of communicability, the ‘is it possible?’ that precedes
the what of thinking, saying, feeling . . . [The face] is the encounter prior to
communication, but it is not communication as such. Following the arrival of
a face, a communication . . . can occur, but by this stage the face will no longer
be a face –for its activity of facing will now be concluded, and it will be on its
way to somewhere else, in search of another destination. (225; emphases in the
original)
The face thus does not ‘communicate’ in the traditional way, that is, sending
a message to a receiver, but rather opens up the ‘prior gridding that makes
it possible for the signifying elements to become discernible’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 180) in the first place. What the face does, then, is, in Rushton’s
(2000) words, ‘open up new and possible worlds for actualization’. The virtual
dimension of the abstract machine of facialization does not necessarily lead to
freedom, but this is ultimately what the virtual does: it opens up possibilities
upon which experiences can be actualized, ‘possibilities for new experiences,
for new encounters, for new steps to be taken’ (227). Seen in this light, the face
in ‘The Artist Is Present’ is both fundamentally different from its recording and
stabilization, whether in the form of Anelli’s photographs or any of the various
ways in which the performance has been captured in representation –both
during or after the event. From the perspective of the virtual, the face in its
actualization or presentness is potential; to cite Rushton once more, it ‘opens up
the world as an experience of possibility; it is the very conception out of which

worlds are born’ (225).
Hence, rather than personalizing and thus de-politicizing ‘The Artist Is
Present’ by identifying the artist’s face as a projection screen for the sitters’ private
emotions, and thus, as some critics have done, reducing all of the performers to
self-indulgent narcissists, merely looking for themselves, or for a moment of
fame in the limelight of the celebrity artist, I wish to highlight the collective,
impersonal or indeed pre-personal aspects of this work of art in its actualization
as, what I have earlier called, with reference to Guattari, an ‘a-signifying rupture’
in the world of meaning and being.
In The Three Ecologies (1989/2000) and its posthumously published sequel
Chaosmosis (1992/1995), Guattari unfolds an ‘ecosophy’ to counter the overall
impoverished relations between human beings and both their social and their
natural environments in a world governed by what he calls ‘Integrated World
Capitalism’. I can by no means do justice to the complexities of this ethico-
political model of the future and will therefore only mention a few of its aspects
that are most relevant to my purposes here. First, on the social ecological plane,
Guattari (2000: 34) foresees experimentations with new modalities of ‘ “group-
being” [l’être-en-group]’, both through institutional interventions, and through
‘existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity’, which should help us
respond to such problems as racism and phallocentrism, corporatization, the
commercialization and commodification of art, education and so on. Second,
alongside such micro-social and institutional practices of experimentation,
mental ecosophy should seek remedies against the standardization of human
existence through social media, the fashion and advertising industries, as well as
the manipulation of opinion through media politics and powerful public figures.
As such, new forms of being-with-others will serve to ‘reinvent the relation of
the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the “mysteries” of
life and death’. Rather than resembling the modus operandi of psychiatrists, the
ways of functioning of mental ecosophy, Guattari submits, will be more like the
‘operations of an artist’ (35).
Guattari’s (2000: 36) integrational, or ‘transversalist’, perspective on human
existence abandons any idea of the ‘subject’, and redirects our focus to the
various forces, or ‘vectors’ of its becoming. The individual should, however, not
be regarded as a site through which all vectors of subjectification necessarily
pass, but, instead, as ‘something like a “terminal” for processes that involve
human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc.’ (36).
It therefore makes little sense to assume individual interiority in opposition
to, and split off from different layers or modalities of exteriority. Rather, we
should conceive of interiority as something that is constituted ‘at the crossroads
of multiple components’ (36), while at the same time stipulating the creative
potential of the self as it comes into being in the moment of its singularity, the
actual occasion of its discontinuous transformation, in its encounter with that
which is given. By describing the operations of mental ecosophy with reference
to artistic practices, and by foregrounding the creative aspects of subjectivation,
Guattari implicitly indicates that the projected ecosophic model is not merely
ethico-political, but also profoundly aesthetic in inspiration. What he will later
come to define as ‘chaosmosis’ is hence as much an ethical as it is an aesthetic
paradigm.
Guattari assumes that a ‘psychical fact’ is ‘inseparable from the assemblage of
enunciation that engenders it’. He additionally refuses to make a clear distinction
between, on one hand, cognitive or conceptual understanding, and, on the
other, affective or perceptive comprehension, regarding the two as entirely
complementary. In trying to safeguard, or perhaps better, to rediscover and
rekindle, the creative and constructive dimensions of subjective processes, it is
necessary, Guattari (2000: 44) writes, to acknowledge that the three ecologies are
not so much governed by the logic of ordinary communication and discursive
intelligibility, as by a different logic that consists in ‘intensities’ and ‘auto-
referential existential assemblages engaging in irreversible durations’. Being only
concerned with the ‘movement and intensity of evolutive processes’, ecological
praxes thus involve that which runs counter to the normal order of things,
invoking alternative intensities to those of established discursive sets, in order to
forge ‘new existential configurations’ (45).
Guattari frankly acknowledges the risks involved in the ‘deterritorializations’
effected by such ‘dissident’ vectors of subjectification, which, in their most
violent manifestations, might bring about the destruction of the assemblage
of subjectivity per se. He nonetheless insists that more gentle forms of
deterritorialization, that is, ‘processual lines of flight’ breaking through referential
frames of expression and enunciation to operate as ‘decorporealized existential
materials’ (Guattari 2000: 45), are necessary to escape from the huge subjective
void produced by Integrated World Capitalism, so as to forge new productive
subjective assemblages, as well as to gear emancipatory struggles towards such
(micro)political and (micro)social interventions as might lead to a ‘rebuilding of
human relations at every level of the socius’ (49).
My proposal is to approach ‘The Artist Is Present’ as a form of ecological praxis
which, not only as an intervention in the normal order of things in the MoMA,
but also in its subsequent proliferation across a variety of social and mental
ecological planes, simultaneously constitutes a war machine as conceptualized
by Guattari in his collaborations with Deleuze. First, the presence of the artist’s
body in any type of performance art render its qualities qua intervention in
the modern art museum quite obvious: the artwork cannot be separated from
the animated material event of the becomings of the artist body. In this case,
Abramović furthermore blurred the boundaries between artwork and artist
by adding the aspect of duration: her bodily presence coincided with, and
was required by, the duration of the retrospective exhibition per se. Third, the
artwork could not exist outside its process of discontinuous becoming, being
driven not by the authorizing presence of the artist –even though there were
rules in place (no game can be played without rules) they were minimal: visitors
were not allowed to touch Abramović, and the performance was to occur in
silence –but constituting an experimentation with ‘group- being’ whose
‘existential mutations’ were driven by the motor of a wide variety of subjectivities
in shifting configurations.
These shifting configurations actualize themselves discontinuously in
the smooth space of the MoMA’s atrium. Earlier we have seen that Deleuze
and Guattari describe smooth space as disorganized matter, which tends to
provoke a sensual or tactical response rather than a starkly rational method
of operation or a planned trajectory. Smooth space is a texture of ‘traits’,
continuous variation of undetermined action. Instead of the metrical forms of
striated space, smooth space is made up of constantly changing orientations
and interrelations. ‘Smooth’ hence does not mean homogeneous, but rather
amorphous or formless. Striation, for Deleuze and Guattari, is negatively
motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows or varies, and it seeks
to erect the constancy and eternity of an in-itself –whether in the form of
the space of the art museum, the artwork or that of the State Apparatus. The
distinction smooth versus striated furthermore coincides with what they call
the nomadic and the sedentary. Smooth space is conducive to rhizomatic
growth and nomadic movement; it is occupied by packs and nomads: it is the
space of the war machine.
While Deleuze and Guattari consider smooth space and striated space to be
fundamentally different, they also believe that the two spaces in fact exist only
in mixture: smooth space can be folded into striated space, just as much as it
can be carved out, as a place of displacement, or a creative line of flight from
within striation. This renders the war machine, as a movement of resistance, an
unexpected interruption, a space exterior to a pregiven or higher order principle,
or an assemblage exterior to the State Apparatus, as I have suggested, equally

ambivalent. Just as Marco Anelli’s camera is capable of capturing and framing
the minute details of facial expressions that elicit identification and, to a degree,
individualization, so can these very same faces in their interaction –arriving
from somewhere and on their way somewhere else –in what they do within a
shifting assemblage marked by different speeds and intensities, that is, in their
very discontinuous transformation, open up the virtual upon which experiences
can be actualized, give rise to the emergence of ‘possible worlds’. De-centered,
rhizomatic and non- hierarchical, a war machine recreates or acts against
dominant systems of thought and social regulation. However, precisely because
it is irreducibly social in nature, a war machine, while not reducible to capture by
the state, can –like anything else –be captured by the state form: smooth space
may transform into striated space.
Whether the elevation of Marina Abramović to celebrity icon or the
appearance of the MAI ‘brand’ on the covers of serious art journals and fashion
magazines alike signify an insidious sellout to a corporate art world or mere
‘AmbraMoMAnia’ is up for discussion. Resistance can take many forms,
including the resistance to resistance, and all forms of resistance can be co-opted
by the State apparatus. That is in the nature of the war machine, which is always
social. Yet in its formless, rhizomatic operations, the artist’s presence may equally
refuse to be fully tamed. After all, we may conclude with Deleuze: ‘Everything is
played in uncertain games.’
Note
1 Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. Directed by Matthew Akers. HBO

Documentary Films, 2012.
References
Anelli, Marco and Marina Abramović (2012), Portraits in the Presence of Marina
Abramović, Bologna: Damiani.
Biesenbach, Klaus (2012), ‘In the Presence of the Artist’, in Portraits in the Presence of
Marina Abramović, 9–10, Bologna, Italy: Damiani.
Bogue, Ronald (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, New York: Routledge.
Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2007), Dialogues II (rev. ed.), trans Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press.
Eler, Alicia (2013), ‘The Artist is Not Present but the Brand Sure Is’, Hyperallergic: http://
hyperallergic.com/75766/the-artist-is-not-present-but-the-brand-sure-is/.
Greenwood, Elizabeth (2012), ‘Wait, Why Did That Woman Sit in the MoMA For 750
Hours?’ The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/
wait-why-did-that-woman-sit-in-the-MoMA-for-750-hours/259069/.
Guattari, Félix (1995), Chaosmosis, trans. Julian Pefanis and Paul Bains, Sydney: Power
Publications.
Guattari, Félix (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London
and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press.
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. DVD, 2015.
News, artnet (2014), ‘The Top 20 Art World Women of 2014 –Artnet News’, Artnet
News: http://news.artnet.com/people/the-top-20-art-world-women-of-2014–197757.
Rushton, Richard (2002), ‘What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces’, Cultural
Critique, 51, no. 1: 219–37. doi:10.1353/cul.2002.0021.
Saltz, Jerry (2010), ‘In the End, It Was All About You’, Nymag.com: http://nymag.com/
arts/art/reviews/66161/.
Index
L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Parnet) 210 Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present

abject 24, 68–9, 174, 245, 248, 254–5 262, 267, 275 n.1
Abramović, Marina 25, 261–3, 265–7, À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 183
270, 274–5 Albertus Magnus 222
‘The Artist is Present’ (performance) Algerian War 129
25–6, 261–3, 265–7, 270–4 al-Hallaj, Mansur 16, 115
Abu Nawas 121 Alien (Ridley Scott) 136
Adams, Brooke 178 alterity 2
Adorno, Theodor 6, 9, 22, 155 Althusser, Louis 19
and art’s immanent process 6 interpellation 19
The Aeneid (Virgil) 79 Amati, Ugo 141
Aesthetic(s) 1, 7, 10, 32, 52, 132, 158–9, Anelli, Marco 26, 267, 270–1, 275
166, 169–70, 187, 199, 208, 218–19, Portraits in the Presence of Marina
221, 236, 248, 257, 265, 273 Abramović 26, 267, 270
and activism 7, 158 animals/animality 24, 62–3, 65, 70, 75,
and becoming 218 87–9, 123, 157, 168, 188,
and clinical practice 10, 32, 41, 46 245–6, 251–5
as ‘greenwash’ 7 and care/co-operation 70
grotesque 202, 248 and dissociation 88
haptic 11, 13, 20, 75, 82, 85, 183, 235, and sound 75
237, 265 animal types see also Deleuze and Guattari
processual 199 demonic/wild/pack 62–3
affect(s) see also emotion 4, 11–12, 14, 18, domesticated/Oedipal 62
20, 24–6, 32, 35–6, 38–42, 46, 52, see also packs, multiplicity
58–63, 68, 74, 76, 78, 81–3, 85, 138, Anthropocene 1, 49, 207, 220
148, 161, 169, 173–4, 179–82, 186, anthropocentrism 2, 37, 62–3, 222, 249
203, 210, 219, 232–3, 249–50, 253, anthropomorphism 247
256–7, 265, 271, 273 anti-Oedipal 200
affective encounters (gentleness) 11, Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 110,
51–4, 60 114, 152, 156–9, 196–7, 199–200, 256
and animality 63 The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Guattari)
and becoming 58 22, 194
and Deleuze’s holism 50, 58 Antonioni, Michelangelo 17–18, 141, 165
disgust 13, 69 Identification of a Woman 142
and fear 181 L’Avventura 18, 142
nonhuman 249 Apocalypse Now! (Francis Ford
primordial affectivity 71, 81–2, 87 Coppola) 177
affections 51 Apollo Space Program 209
Affleck, Ben 185 Aristotle 205
ahuman 11, 26, 222 art 2, 5, 8–9, 13, 33, 35, 65, 71–2, 159, 198,
AIDS 84, 162 221, 227, 236, 252, 269, 272
Akers, Matthew 275 n.1 art for art’s sake 8
278 Index
and autonomy 6–7 Bakunin, Mikhail 200

and biology 65 ‘Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring
as bio-power 13 Machines’ (Deleuze & Guattari) 203
and caregiving 66 Bale, Christian 182
and eco-activism 5 Ballard, James Graham 220, 234
and faciality 269 High Rise 220
as liberation 198 Barbican Arts Centre (London) 5
limitations of 5 Barbier-Mueller, Monique 204
major art 4–5 Bardem, Javier 186
and mental ecosophy 33 Barnes, Djuna 24–5, 245–6, 249, 251, 258
minor art 4–5 and anti-representation 246
and/in nature 9, 71 Nightwood 24–5, 245–7, 251–8
as non-verbal semiotization 8 Baroque 14, 24
as phantasmagoria 252 and the abyss 24
as thought 159 Barthes, Roland 6
as trigger for lines of flight 2 Barrère, Igor 145 n.3
Artaud, Antonin 174 Le droit à la folie 145 n.3
spiritual automaton 174 Bataille, Georges 66, 230
‘The Artist is Present’ (Abramović Bateson, Gregory 13, 14, 71–2, 83, 167,
performance) 25–6, 261–3, 174, 242 n.15
265–7, 270–4 and care 13
assemblage see also Guattari: group ecology 13, 174
subject 1, 9, 12, 16, 19, 23, 31–2, organism+ 71
35–9, 46, 61–2, 111, 148–9, 153, systems theory 167
157–8, 160, 162, 168–9, 183, 193–4, Baudrillard, Jean 201–2
209, 226, 236, 256, 269–70, 273, 275 The Transparency of Evil 201
and (collective) enunciation 1, 23, 43, becoming(s) 2, 24, 26, 39, 42, 51–2, 58, 67,
109, 113, 122, 168, 195, 208–9, 273 70, 85, 88–9, 129, 181, 186, 210, 218,
interspecies 61 246, 250, 253, 255, 257–8, 261, 265,
and machinic connectivity 31–2, 256 270, 272, 274
and pack 62 and affect (mode of reciprocity) 58
and ‘soft subversion’ 32, 41 -android 89
see also language: collective enunciation -artist 32
The Atlantic 262 -animal 8, 11, 24, 51, 60, 63, 129, 255–6
atom bomb (Hiroshima & Nakasaki) 115, -child 129, 256
197, 203 -consistent 132
Audubon, John James 14, 96 -horse 63
‘Birds of America’ 96 -imperceptible 223, 256–7
Auschwitz 22, 110 and intersubjectivity 67
auto-affection 182 -invisible 129
Autonomia (Italy) 15–17, 129–30, -machine 194
134–5, 157 -minoritarian 256
and free radio 16–17, 129–32, 137, 158 -molecular 255
-multiple 129
Baal (Brecht) 7 -other 202
Bach, Johann Sebastian 205 and performance 274
Bachelard, Gaston 72 and relational field 52
Badlands (Malick) 20–1, 173, 175–8 -Tinguely 194
Bakhtin, Mikhail 108, 118, 131, 219 -together 259
and the dialogic 118 -transcendental 253
Index 279
as unnatural alliance 2 and ethology 52

-woman 129, 256 and facialization 268
-with the world 24 machinic 137
Beauviala, Jean-Pierre 130 and performance 274
Beethoven, Ludwig van 205 as plant 252
Behaviourism 153 schizoid 130
Benjamin, Walter 6–7 and subject 33
aura 6 and thought 7
Beowulf 80 Body without Organs (BwO) 23, 36, 39,
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 15, 17, 109–10, 133, 157, 159, 265
155–6, 158, 160–1, 196, 218 Boetticher, Budd 176
and connecting 218 Bogue, Ronald 269–71
dictatorship of the signified 110 Bologna Uprisings 17–18, 129, 158
free radio campaign 17 Boston Declaration on Psychiatric
Radio Alice (Bologna) 17, 129–31, 158, Oppression 35, 42
160, 162 Bourriaud, Nicolas 7–9
The Uprising: On Poetry and relational aesthetics 7–9
Finance 109 Bowers, Kathryn 77
Bergson, Henri 11, 14, 51, 61, 195, 201, Boyd, Brian 91 n.2
204, 241 n.8, 253 Brecht, Bertolt 5–7
affective encounters 11, 51 Baal 7
durée 61 Galileo 7
élan vital 14 gest 5–6
laughter (schizo) 201–3 Lehrstücke (learning plays) 6
Bernstein, Charles 106 Verfremdungseffekt 5
Berto, Juliet 131 Breton André 108
Betti, Laura 135 ‘explosante fixe’ 108
Beyoncé (Knowles-Carter) 261 see also Pierre Joris: ‘explosante
Beyond Petroleum (BP) 5 mouvante’
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud) 87 Bridle, James 210
Bieri, Ramon 176 Broken Obelisk (Newman) 263
Biesenbach, Klaus 266 Buňuel, Luis 236
bio-history 70 Burch, Noel 21, 174–5
bio-power 13, 68, 90 ‘The Large Form’ (S-A-S¹) 21,
gossip 13, 74–7 174–5, 184
grooming 13, 74–7, 82 ‘The Small Form’ (A-S-A¹) 21, 189
language see also Robin Dunbar 74–6
‘Birds of America’ (Audubon) 96 capitalism 3–5, 10–11, 13–15, 21, 23, 32,
Biven, Lucy 72 41, 49, 107, 110–11, 114, 132, 139,
Black Panthers 116 155–7, 159, 162, 164, 166, 170, 196–
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) 137, 139, 7, 204, 206–7, 209
145 n.3 and art 261
body 7, 11–12, 14, 33, 40, 52, 58–9, 62, 76, and conspicuous consumption 49
84, 89, 130, 132, 137, 157, 187, 248–9, and deterritorialization 107
251–2, 254–5, 257–8, 268, 272, 274 and ecological crisis 49–50
and affective encounter 58–9, 62 and language 111
and animal 253–4 machine (as madness) 196–7
and becoming 255 and poetry 15
and docility 40 and schizophrenia 23, 209
as ‘egg’ 158 and subjectivity 114
280 Index
Carpenter, John 139 Videodrome 136

catastrosophy 23, 220–1, 225, 240 cyberpunk 223
Caviezel, Jim 180 A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway) 202
Celan, Paul 110 Cyrus, Miley 261
Center for the Study and Research of
Institutional Formation Dada 22, 195–7, 209
(CERFI) 154 Darwin, Charles 14, 67
Centre National de la Cinématographie theory of evolution 14
(CNC) 128 da Vinci, Leonardo 204, 208
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm Days of Heaven (Malick) 20–1, 173,
(Guattari) 8, 15, 53, 105, 108–9, 175–9, 187
112–14, 219, 225–6, 272 Dean, David 76–7
Chaosophy (Guattari) 197 Dean, James 177
Chaplin, Charles 153 Debussy, Claude 219
The Freaks 153 Decoder (Muscha) 141
Chaplin, Victoria 153 Deepwater Horizon 5
Chapsal, Madeleine 198 de Landa, Manuel, 208
Charlie Hebdo (Paris) 160 de Lauretis, Teresa 246
Chastain, Jessica 187 Deleuze, Gilles see also Guattari 2, 4, 7, 11,
Chopin, Frédéric, 162 16, 19–23, 26, 45, 50–2, 54–63, 71, 108,
Christianity 68 110–11, 114–15, 148–9, 152–9, 169,
chronoplasticity 219 174–7, 181, 184–5, 189, 193, 196–205,
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze) 210–11, 219, 241 n.5, 241 n.8, 250,
20, 51, 58–9, 61, 174 255–6, 261, 264–5, 267–9, 271, 274–5
Cinema 2: The Time-Image Anti-Oedipus 110, 114, 152, 156–9,
(Deleuze) 59, 61 196–7, 199–200, 256
Civilisation and Its Discontents ‘Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring
(Freud) 68, 83 Machines’ 203
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 20, 51,
Spielberg) 136, 139, 140 58–9, 61, 174
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 154 Cinema 2: The Time-Image 59, 61
Cold War 199, 203–4 Différence et Répétition 51, 54, 57–8,
Colebrook, Claire 185, 250 60–2, 155
Colombel, Jeanette 199 ecological holism 11, 50, 57, 60, 62
Colombetti, Giovanna 71 encompasser 21, 175–9, 183–6, 189
The Feeling Body 71 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
Coluche (Michel Gérard Joseph 50–1, 57–8, 61
Colucci) 160 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 159
Communism 7 The Logic of Sense 241 n.5
Communist Party (France) 154 a ‘people yet to come’ 210, 233
Communist Party (Italy) 157 A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) 8,
contagion see also affect; packs 26 11, 51, 54, 61–2, 111, 158–9, 264, 268
Copernicus 205 What is Philosophy? 22, 193–4, 211
Corballis, Michael C. 76 a ‘world yet to come’ 202–3
Creeley, Robert 119 see also movement-image
Cronenberg, David 139, 145 n.3 see also time-image
The Fly 145 n.3 de Menil, Dominique 197
Rabid 136 Depussé, Marie 158
Shivers 136 Descartes, René 222
Index 281
desire 12, 15, 18, 20, 24–5, 39, 41–2, 65–6, and depression/melancholia 163
68, 109, 133, 139–40, 152–3, 157, as ecosophy 168
161, 171, 173, 196–7, 209, 218, 220, and the imaginary 179
245–6, 250–1, 253–4, 256, 258–9 mental 22, 26, 188, 193, 247
and capital 133 praxis 26, 273
desiring machines 36, 39, 41, 148–9 of relation 43
liberated from sexuality 256 ecosophy see also Guattari 2, 5, 9, 11, 14,
and poetry 109 16, 19–20, 23–5, 31–2, 36–7, 46, 51–
deterritorialization 3–4, 8, 9, 11–12, 16, 3, 58, 61, 123, 147–8, 165–6, 168–70,
20–1, 26, 31, 52, 80, 107, 137, 139, 174, 177–8, 182–4, 185, 190, 193–4,
151–2, 156, 159, 161, 167, 173, 179, 196, 218, 220, 222, 225–7, 236, 238,
183, 190, 193–4, 197, 205, 208, 210, 240, 245, 249–50, 258, 272–3
250, 269–70, 273 aesthetics 5, 13–14, 16, 23, 25, 52, 174,
gentle 11, 52, 183, 273 202, 218–19
lines of flight 18–19, 171, 247, and the affection-image 58
256–7, 274 and the constitution of nature 51
Deutsch, David 235, 241 n.14 and deep ecology 36
diagram see also vector 22, 205–7, 209 ecosophical chaosophy 196
difference 11, 32, 46, 54–5, 87–8, 150, 152, ethics 14
155–7, 159, 201, 204, 250 and feminism 25, 249
and dialectic 155 mental 33, 179, 245, 272–3
and ecosophy 11 and scalar integration 19, 165
qualitative 54 as schizo-therapy 5
quantitative 54 Einstein, Albert 205
Différence et Répétition (Deleuze) 51, 54, Eler, Alicia 266
57–8, 60–2, 155 Eleusinian mysteries 225
Dionysus versus the Crucified (Girard) Emerling, Jae 211
229, 241 n.9 encompasser see Deleuze
Direct Cinema 17 Engels, Friedrich 195
Dodds, Joseph 84 Eppler, Laramie 187
Duchamp, Marcel 195, 197, 219, 226 Erasmus, Desiderius 222
Dugatkin, Lee Alan 76 Esposito, Roberto 69
Dunbar, Robin 73–7 ‘immunitas’ 69
Duns Scotus, John 54 Essentialism 249
univocity of Being 54–5, 57 E.T. (Steven Spielberg) 136
Dziga Vertov Group 132 ethics see also Spinoza 1, 9, 11–14, 25–6,
31–2, 38–9, 46, 52, 65, 67–8, 71, 77,
Eco-Aesthetics (Miles) 5 81, 132, 169, 221, 249, 259, 272–3
eco-logic (logic of intensities) 44, 165, 167 as affect-laden 68
The Ecological Thought (Morton) 10, 50 and auto-affection 9
Ecologies of the Moving Image ethico-aesthetic paradigm 22, 26,
(Ivakhiv) 173 194, 203
ecology see also Bateson; Guattari 2, 4, 7, fragilization and integration 67
9–13, 15, 20, 26, 37, 39, 43–4, 49–53, and machinic assemblages 31
60, 70, 72–3, 82, 90, 95–6, 105, 123, The Ethics (Spinoza) 55
163–5, 167–70, 173–4, 179, 183, 188, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan) 68
218, 225, 227, 233, 236, 249, 272–3 Ettinger, Bracha L. 84
and art 72 Eurocentrism 110, 222
deep ecology 2, 36 evolution 14, 65, 67, 70, 188
282 Index
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza primary process 116, 179

(Deleuze) 50–1, 57–8, 61 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death’ 68
fabulation 23, 117, 136, 143–4, 203, transference 12, 150
211, 218 see also Klein, Lacan, Oedipality
faciality (white wall/black hole system) 26, Fromanger, Gérard 158, 200
118, 268–71, 275 Fugate, Caril Ann 20, 173
and ‘doing’ 271 Futurism 13
fake-news 3–4
Farrell, Colin 182 Galilei, Galileo 205
fascism 7, 32, 140, 166, 204 Galileo (Brecht) 7
micro-fascisms 46, 131 Galois, Ēvariste 205
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 135 Gast, Peter 198
The Third Generation 135 The Gay Science (Nietzsche) 199
Fedayeen 116 gender 23–4, 246–7
The Feeling Body (Colombetti) 71 Generation Ecologie (France) 170
Fellini, Federico 139 Genet, Jean 106, 116, 121, 134
feminism/feminist theory 25, 46, 69, 84, The Prisoner of Love 116
247, 249 Geoffrey of Monmouth 78
and ecosophy 249 The History of the Kings of Britain 78
Ferri, Francesca 89 Gere, Richard 178
filiation 2 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini) 138
Filoramo, Giovanni 242 n.15 Gibson, James J. 71
Flaherty, Robert 175 affordance 71
Nanook 175 Gilligan, Carol 84
flesh 4, 251 Girard, René 229–30, 241 n.9
as vegetation 251–2 Dionysus versus the Crucified 229, 241 n.9
Flickr 26, 262 globalization 68
The Fly (Cronenberg) 145 n.3 Gnosticism 242 n.15
Ford, John 21, 175–7, 183 pleroma 240, 242 n.15
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 176 Godard, Jean-Luc 18, 131–2, 135, 139
Stagecoach 175 France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants 131
Foucault, Michel 2, 77, 84, 154, 199, 258 Le Gai Savoir 131
episteme 2–3 Passion 135
The Order of Things 2 Prénom Carmen 135
the panopticon 77 Sauve qui peut (la vie) 135
France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants Un film comme les autres 131
(Godard) 131 Goldberg, Rube 196–7
Frankfurt School 5 Goldman, Emma 201
and autonomous art 5 Goldsmiths College (London) 24
The Freaks (Chaplin) 153 Grabplatte für Kamikaze (Tinguely) 210
Freud, Sigmund 12, 68, 83–4, 87, 150, 153, Gramsci, Antonio 18, 147
179, 197 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) 180
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ 87 Green Party (France) 170–1
castration 200, 256 Greenwood, Elizabeth 262–3
Civilisation and Its Discontents 68, 83 Grifi, Alberto 129
Fort-Da 87 Guadalcanal 20, 173, 180
‘Little Hans’ 63 The Guardian 49
primal scene 138 Guattari, Félix see also Deleuze
Index 283
Anti-Oedipus 110, 114, 152, 156–9, three ecologies (subject, relation,

196–7, 199–200, 256 environment) 7, 10, 20, 31–2, 123,
The Anti-Oedipus Papers 22, 194 165, 174, 225, 245, 273
‘Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring The Three Ecologies 10, 15, 49, 52, 174,
Machines’ 203 183, 225, 229, 245, 272
and borders 1 three zones of historical fracture 107
cartography 3, 23, 111–13, 162–3, Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) 16–18,
223 128–9, 136–41, 143, 161–5
and chaos 239 What is Philosophy? 22, 193–4, 211
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic see also ecosophy
Paradigm 8, 15, 53, 105, 108–9, see also La Borde Clinic
112–14, 219, 225–6, 272 see also processual praxis
chaosmosis 23, 168, 170, 196, 224, 226, see also processual subjectivity
236, 240, 273 Gulf War 16, 108, 115
Chaosophy 197
and creative ‘failure’ 18–19, 147–8, 151, haecceity 265
153, 164–6, 169–70 Halberstam, Judith 18, 147, 163
and ecosophy 2, 5, 147–8, 236 Haraway, Donna 62–3, 202, 230
ethico-aesthetic paradigm 22, 26, 169 A Cyborg Manifesto 202
existential operators 16, 121–3 When Species Meet 62
group subject 10, 149, 157–8, 169 Hassan ben Thabit 122
Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) Hawks, Howard 21, 175–6, 178, 183–4
10, 20, 22, 25, 44, 166–70, 193, 207, Rio Bravo 176
219, 272–3 Scarface 175
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 159 Hegel Georg F. W. 50, 148, 155–7
Latitante 17, 134–5 hegemony 19
machinic heterogenesis 131 Heidegger, Martin 50, 173, 179, 194–5
media 3 Heraclitus 181–3, 186–7
metamodelisation 115, 197, 207, 211 Hesiod 225
modular crystallizations 16, heterotopia 14
116–17, 121 High Rise (Ballard) 220
Molecular Revolutions 206 Hippocrates 85
new aesthetic paradigm 15, 23, 109–10, History Lessons (Huillet & Straub) 132
113, 226–7 The History of the Kings of Britain
polyphonic fabulous images 16 (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 78
post-media poetics 9, 15–17, 25, 26, Hobbes, Thomas 180
106–10, 123, 132, 236 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 67
Projet de film au sujet des radios libres Hollway, Wendy 71
17, 129, 133 Holmes, Brian 111–12, 196
Project for a film by Kafka 145 n.4 Homage to New York (Tinguely) 200–1
Radio Tomato (and free radio) Homer 78
17, 160–1 Huillet, Danièle 132
Schizoanalytic Cartographies 22, 107, History Lessons 132
116, 163, 194 human 24, 107, 188, 222, 249–50, 252,
series of subjectivization (power, 257, 259
knowledge, self-reference) 34 human-animal difference/
subject group 33, 107 correspondence 24, 222
A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) 8, as imaginary 252
11, 51, 54, 61–2, 111, 158–9, 264, 268 see also nonhuman
284 Index
humanism 258 Jarry, Alfred 21

see also post-humanism pataphysics 21
Hume, David 59, 204 Joris, Pierre 16, 18, 106–8, 110,
Husserl, Edmund 220 114–18, 120–3
Huygens, Christiaan 222 atomic constructions 117–18, 121
Hyperallergic (blog) 266 ‘explosante mouvante’ 108
Meditations on the Stations of Mansur
Ice (Kramer) 17, 134 Al-Hallaj 16, 108, 115–18, 121
idealism 247 nomadic poetics 108–9, 114
Identification of a Woman (Antonioni) 142 Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics 123
identity politics 162 Reading Edward Jabès 115
image(s) Joyce, James 113, 158, 161, 165, 246
fabulous 118, 121 chaosmic writing 113
photographic/indexicality 6, 267–71
see also movement-image; time-image Kafka, Franz 145 n.4
IMEC Archives 142 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze
immanence see also plane of immanence; and Guattari) 159
Spinoza 2, 4, 6, 11–12, 14, 16, 20–1, Kamikaze 210–11
51, 55–9, 61, 116, 132, 136, 156–7, Kandinsky, Wassily 13
167, 175–6, 179, 182, 186, 189, 204, Kant, Immanuel 6, 194
218, 255, 277 Das Kapital (Marx) 207
and encompasser 175–6, 179 Kaplan, Bernard 76
politics of 116 Kardashian, Kim 261
included middle 46, 179 Kennedy, John F. 209
individuality 15 Kilcher, Q’orianka 182
see also singularity Kinbaku 14
inhumanism 22 Klein, Melanie 83–4
In Search of UIQ (Thomson & Maglioni) knowledge 3, 14
16, 143 as power 3, 14
intensities 24, 26, 42, 45, 157, 167, 183–4, Kohut, Heinz 83
189, 203, 256–8, 262, 273, 275 Kramer, Robert 17, 133–5, 140,
any-question-whatever 184 142, 164
produced 43 Ice 17, 134
Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Latitante 17, 134–5
Research and Clinical and Cultural Milestones 17, 134
Interventions (GIFRIC, Montréal) 82 Scenes from the Class Struggle in
interpellation 5, 147, 150 Portugal 17, 134
Irigaray, Luce 246–9 Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) 16–18,
parler femme 248 128–9, 136–41, 143, 161–5
Ivakhiv, Adrian 20, 173–4, 179, 182, Kristeva, Julia 84, 255
188, 190 chora 84
Ecologies of the Moving Image 173 Kropotkin, Peter 67, 195, 200
process-relational methodology 174 Mutual Aid –A Factor in
‘The Zone’ 20, 21, 173–4 Evolution 67
Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky) 138 Kublai Khan 210
Kurosawa, Akira 184
James, Montague Rhodes 221 oneirism 184
Jamestown Colony (Virginia) 173 The Seven Samurai 184
James Watt (Tinguely) 193, 207 Kurylenko, Olga 185
Index 285
La Borde Clinic see also Guattari & Oury Lucretius 204

4, 10, 12, 18–19, 23, 136, 145 n.3, ludic 15
148–54, 158, 225–6 Lynch, David, 139
‘The Grid’ 18, 150–2
Lacan, Jacques 68, 72–3, 81, 86–7, 112, MacCormack, Patricia 189, 256
149–50, 152–3, 156, 197, 249 machinic 8–10, 16, 20–1, 25, 31–2, 43, 46,
desire as lack 152–3, 156, 256 111–13, 118, 123, 129, 139, 148, 153,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 68 156–7, 159–60, 163, 165–6, 168–9,
the unconscious and language 86, 112 171, 174, 182, 195–6, 199–200,
and the Real 152, 245, 249–50 204–5, 208–11, 217, 220, 236, 269
see also Freud; desire abstract machine (faciality) 268–71
La Chesnaie Clinic 150 abstract machine (Tinguely) 21–3,
L’affaire des Divisions Morituri 193–5, 202–9
(Ossang) 141 anti-machines 200, 209
language see also semiotics 8, 13, 15–16, celibate machine 201
35–6, 72–5, 82, 86, 108, 110–11, centripetal-connection machine 19, 21,
116–18, 122–3, 250 148–9, 151, 154, 156, 159–61, 170
collective enunciation 2, 16–17, 21–2, and cinema 21
120–1, 130–2, 144, 160, 170, 179, clockwork 217
193, 207 and SST Concorde 22, 206–7
and embodied relationality 13 desiring machines 16, 153, 199, 201,
and/as grooming 74–5, 82 204, 232, 256
material flux of 108 ecology 16, 174, 188
paralanguage 71–2, 75, 82, 86 modularity 118
and the Real 250 peripatetic-disruption machine 19, 21,
as sound 122 149, 151–2, 154, 156, 159–60, 170
stammering 110, 118 phylum 22–3, 112–13, 181, 187,
and subjectivity 111 199, 207–8
see also assemblage: (collective) suicide (Tinguely) 198, 200–1,
enunciation 204, 210
Latitante (Guattari & Kramer) 17, 134–5 see also unconscious
Lautman, Albert 58 Mackay, Robin 238
L’Avventura (Antonioni) 18, 142 Maglioni, Silvia 164
Léaud, Jean-Pierre 131 In Search of UIQ 16, 143
Le droit à la folie (Barrère) 145 n.3 majoritarian see also minoritarian 9–10,
Leffert, Mark 84 24–5, 31–44, 246–7, 250, 253, 268
Le Gai Savoir (Godard) 131 and the extra-human machine 35
Le Pont du Nord (Rivette) 135 privilege 32, 38
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Jacques and therapy 10, 31–44
Tati) 138 Malick, Terrence 20–1, 173, 175–7,
Liberate Tate 5 179–80, 182–4, 187–9
Life 12 Badlands 20–1, 173, 175–8
and immanence 12 cosmodicy and anthropodicy in
lifeworld (Umwelt) 67 185–6, 189–90
‘Little Hans’ (Freud) 63 Days of Heaven 20–1, 173, 175–9, 187
The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) 241 n.5 The New World 173, 180, 182–5
Lorraine, Tamsin 205 The Thin Red Line 20, 173, 180–2,
Lotringer, Sylvère 32 184–5
and schizo-culture 32 To the Wonder 21, 173, 180, 184–9
286 Index
The Tree of Life 20–1, 173, 180, Milestones (Kramer) 17, 134

185, 187–90 Mille Plateaux see A Thousand Plateaus
Mallarmé, Stéphane 113, 115 Milton, John 71
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le mimesis 6, 248
hazard 113 and cinema 6
Mangou, Isabelle 142 mimicry 25, 248, 251
Manifest Destiny 186 mind/theory of 71–4, 85–6, 88
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance embodied 85
(Ford) 176 emulative learning 73
Manz, Linda 178 and language 74
Marcuse, Herbert 6, 155–6 minoritarian see also feminism;
Margolin, Stuart 178 majoritarian 3–4, 24, 31, 41, 46,
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present 247, 250
(Akers film) 262, 267, 275 n.1 minor cinema 16–17, 132, 139–40
Marx, Karl 22, 66, 148, 204, 207–8 minor geography 20, 173
Das Kapital 207 minor literature 159
Marxism 6, 155 Misery (Rob Reiner) 81
Maturana, Humberto 87, 89, 113 Mitterand, François 141
autopoiesis 113 Mizoguchi, Kenji 21, 189
The Tree of Knowledge 89 The Story of the Last Chysanthemum 21
Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax) 139 Ugetsu Monagatari 21
May 1968 18, 110, 131, 133, 154–8, 196 Modernism/modernity 13, 113,
Odéon Théatre occupation 154 133, 218–19
Mayo Clinic 34 masculinist 246
McAdams, Rachel 185 radical modernism 106, 113
McCann, Ben 178 see also Guattari: post-media poetics
McCune, Lorraine 76 molar/molecular 18–19, 25, 43, 62, 115,
Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al- 134–5, 147, 149, 151–2, 161–3, 171,
Hallaj (Joris) 16, 108, 115–18, 121 199, 226, 236, 245, 253, 255–7
melismatics 23, 219, 225, 236–7 Molecular Revolutions (Guattari) 206
Memorial to the Sacred Wind or The Tomb Monbiot, George 10, 49
of the Kamikaze (Tinguely) 210 Mondello, Romina 185
mental illness 10, 34, 37–8 Montaigne, Michel de 222
as failure to thrive 38 Mont St. Michel 186
Plan A 10, 38 More, Thomas 222
Plan N 10, 43–5 Morton, Timothy 10–11, 50, 52, 60,
Plan AN (patient-led analysis) 10, 45–6 163–4
Mercury Theatre 130 The Ecological Thought 10, 50
Metropolitan Indians (‘Geronimo’, the mesh 10–11, 50
Italy) 157 Mottram, Ron 182
Michel, Frann 246 movement-image see also time-image 61
micro-biology 17 action-image 59–60, 174–5, 177–8
micro-fascism 10 affection-image 58–60, 179
micro-narrative 7 any-space-whatever 178
micro-politics (group) 15, 46, 133, 157, close-up 59
256, 273 realism 175
Miles, Malcolm 5, 7, 26 Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely
Eco-Aesthetics 5 (Teshigahara) 211
‘greenwash’ 7 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 75
Index 287
multiplicity 10, 20, 24, 39, 55, 59, 61, 88, nonhuman 11, 25, 52–3, 87, 164, 168, 246,
109, 111, 153, 171, 230, 236, 256, 265 249–50, 252–3, 255, 257–9
qualitative 55 ‘Notes on Scientific Philosophy’
Mumford, Lewis 196 (Peirce) 239
Muscha (Jürgen Muschalek) 141 Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics
Decoder 141 (Joris) 123
Museum of Modern Art (New York) 25–6, Nouveau Realisme 194
200, 261–3, 265, 270, 273–4
Mutual Aid –A Factor in Evolution Oates, Warren 176
(Kropotkin) 67 object-oriented ontology 1
object-relations theory 83–4
Nagel, Thomas 53 Oedipalisation see also anti-Oedipal,
Nanook (Flaherty) 175 Freud 12–13, 18, 25, 81, 83, 152–3,
narratology 18 157, 171, 197, 200
National Health Service (UK) 34 pre-Oedipal 83
National Institute for Health and Care and Surrealism 197
Excellence (UK) 34 Of Being Numerous (Oppen) 15, 106
Natterson-Horowitz, Barbara 77 Oppen, George 15, 106, 110, 113
nature 2, 6, 9, 11, 13–14, 16, 20, 25, 50–1, Of Being Numerous 15, 106
54, 56–7, 71, 73, 76, 96, 173–4, The Order of Things (Foucault) 2
176–9, 182, 185–6, 188, 190, 247, 249 Orphism 224
and art 6, 9 Ossang, F. J. 141
and culture 247–9 L’affaire des Divisions Morituri 141
gendered as female 247, 249 Oury, Jean see also La Borde Clinic 12,
and grace 188 145 n.3, 149, 154
and life 16 Oxford University 235
post-nature 50 Ozu, Yasujiro 178, 184
the subject in 51
see also the wild/wildness packs/swarms see also assemblage,
Negarestani, Reza 238 multiplicity 12, 62, 274
Neo-Darwinism 65, 67, 91 n.2 Pain, Jacques 209
neoliberalism 19, 147, 162–4, Panksepp, Jaak 71–2
170, 218 Parnet, Claire 261
New-Hollywood 133 L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze 210
Newman, Barnett 263 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 18, 135, 143
Broken Obelisk 263 ‘The Screenplay as a Structure that
new media 68, 107 Wants to be Another Structure’
The New World (Malick) 173, 180, 182–5 18, 143
Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 22, 156, 182, Passion (Godard) 135
186–7, 194–5, 198–9, 204, 210, 253–4 pataphysics 193–4, 199, 204, 211
the dice throw (chance and necessity) patriarchy 189
182, 186 Peckinpah, Sam 176
eternal return 182, 195 Peirce, Charles Sanders 20, 24, 174,
The Gay Science 199 180, 239
Nightwood (Barnes) 24–5, 245–7, 251–8 and chaos 239
No Future (Lee Edelman) 84 ‘Notes on Scientific Philosophy’ 239
nomadism 19, 24, 26, 36, 108, 123, 246, Penn, Sean 180, 187
250, 258, 265, 274 Peraldi, Françoise 36
and sedentary space 26, 265, 274 displacement 36
288 Index
performative/performance art 8, 25–7, The Prisoner of Love (Genet) 116

219, 251, 261–2, 266–7, 274 probe heads (têtes chercheuses) 20, 174–5
Perisauli, Faustino 222 processual
phallocentrism 222, 246–8, 272 aesthetic 199
phenomenology 53–4, 220 assemblages 183
Phillips, Michael 17, 140, 164 becomings 45
Les Philosophes (Tinguely) 22, 193–4 discourse 167
philosophy 2, 63, 84, 131, 148, 155, 159, ecosophy 148, 166, 168
165, 182, 194, 199, 222, 247, 258 exploitation of singularities 15, 107
as artistic 2 and the face 268
Continental Philosophy 3–4 lines of flight 273
and movement 194 power 121
of relations 2 praxis 8–9, 14–16, 52, 106, 109, 116–17,
‘philosophiction’ (theory fiction) 219 121, 123
Pitt, Brad 187 space 26, 265
plane of consistency/immanence 22, 159, subjectivity 33, 106–8, 110, 115, 123
166, 182, 194–5, 205 Project for a film by Kafka (Guattari) 145 n.4
plane of organisation 22, 25 Projet de film au sujet des radios libres
Platinga, Carl 20, 173 (Guattari) 17, 129, 133
affective counterpoint/incongruity 20, Proust, Marcel 15, 183, 246
173, 177 À la recherche du temps perdu 183
Plato 250 psychiatry 4, 9, 32
Platonism 250 psychoanalysis/psychotherapy 9, 12,
Platoon (Oliver Stone) 177 31–46, 68, 70, 81–90, 109, 111–12,
play/ludic see also Bateson 72, 87 127–8, 147, 152–4, 156–7, 166,
and metabolism 72 169–70, 197
Pompidou Centre (Paris) 196 and art 35
Pope Innocent III 254 and assemblage 12
Portraits in the Presence of Marina and care 12–13, 66–90
Abramović (Anelli) 26, 267, 270 and cure 12, 35, 90
post-humanism 1, 23, 84, 222, 257 dissociation 88
and intersubjectivity 84 enactment 89
post-modernism 15, 26, 106, 133, 267 materialist psychoanalysis 85, 88
as ‘shipwreck of the singular’ 106 and ‘mental illness’ 10
post-Nature 50 and need 65–6
post-structuralism 3–4, 106 Multisystemic Therapy 39–40, 45
post-truth 3 transference 12, 82–3, 88, 111–12
power 2, 4, 6, 9–10, 12–14, 17, 31–7, 39– the uncanny 82
41, 44, 46, 51, 54, 56–9, 61–2, 121, verbalization 85
199, 269 ‘wild’ psychoanalysis 88
differentiation of 54 punk movement (UK) 133
power-quality (affection-image) 59
pre-power 4 queering/queer theory 84, 147, 163,
and signification 269 245–6, 250–1, 256–7, 259
see also bio-power see also sexuality; subjectivity
Powhatan 183–4
Prelude (Wordsworth) 181 Rabid (Cronenberg) 136
Prénom Carmen (Godard) 135 race 169
Pre-Socratics 182 racism 46, 272
Index 289
Radio Télévision Belge (Brussels) 200 Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari) 22,

Reading Edward Jabès (Joris) 115 107, 116, 163, 194
Readings, Bill 241 n.7 schizoanalytic cartographies (model of)
The University in Ruins 241 n.7 111, 113–15, 128, 218
Reagan, Ronald 82 autopoiesis see also Francisco Varela
Real see Lacan and Humberto Maturana, 12, 20, 25,
yet to come 205 66, 87, 89, 111, 113–15, 121, 167, 170,
Reason, David 9 173, 199, 219
refrain see also territory 15, 23, 65, 118, schizo-fracture 111, 114–15
127, 156, 183, 194, 196, 225 transversality 1–4, 9, 12, 15, 18–19,
and birdsong 78 23–4, 26, 33, 111–13, 115, 118,
relationality/relational field 1, 4–5, 8–11, 120–1, 136, 150–1, 157–8, 166–9,
13, 15, 20, 26, 31–3, 36, 43, 45, 51–2, 218–9, 225, 227, 236, 245–8,
54, 57–9, 61–2, 72, 75, 81, 83 258, 272
and grooming 75 schizo-chaosmosis 20
reterritorialisation 147, 151–2, 157, 159, Schönberg, Arnold 6
166, 171, 250 twelve-tone technique 6
Le Rêve (Rousseau) 252 Schopenhauer, Arthur 22, 194–5
rhizome 16, 18, 23, 26, 42, 108–9, 149–50, ‘The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants
156, 166, 255, 262, 274–5 to Be Another Structure’ (Pasolini)
and reciprocal dependence 42 18, 143
Riemann, Bernhard 58, 205 Seitler, Dana 254
Rilke, Rainer Maria 109 semiology see also language 140
Rio Bravo (Hawks) 176 Semiotext(e) 35
ritornello/ritournelle 8–9, 196, 201, Semiotic(s) 4, 36–7, 72, 85–6, 112, 114,
225, 237 117, 129, 138, 140, 145 n.4, 150, 152,
Rivette, Jacques 135 156, 162, 196, 206, 239, 268–9
Le Pont du Nord 135 and clinical practice 4, 35–6, 72,
Rossellini, Roberto 138 150, 152
Germany Year Zero 138 fluxes 112–13, 148, 153
Rothermel, Dennis 180–1 and Kristeva 84
Rousseau, (le Douanier) Henri 251–2 pre-semiotic 4
Le Rêve 252 sensations 203
Roussel, Raymond 195 The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa) 184
Rushton, Richard 271 sexuality see also desiring machines,
phallocentrism 24–5, 187, 245,
Saltz, Jerry 266 250–2, 256
Sandilands, Catriona 249–50 museumification of 252
‘Wild Democracy’ 249 as political 250
Sartre, Jean-Paul 149, 155–6 queering/queer politics 24–5, 245,
and the ‘practico-inert’ 149 251, 257
Sauvagnargues, Anne, 297 Shakespeare, William 237
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard) 135 Sheen, Martin 176
Scarface (Hawks) 175 Shepard, Sam 178
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal Shivers (Cronenberg) 136
(Kramer) 17, 134 The Showroom Gallery (London) 145 n.8
schizoanalysis 22–3, 36, 105, 153–4, 194, signification 253
196, 198, 200, 211 simulacrum 32
schizo-intensity 10, 46 Singleton, Benedict 224
290 Index
singularity 8–9, 15, 18, 32, 105–6, 110–11, History Lessons 132

113, 115, 127, 148–9, 152, 171, 183, Strengths and Difficulties
187–8, 194, 196, 205, 208, 211, 257, Questionnaire 44
259, 273 subjectivity and subjectification 1–2, 8–9,
and autopoiesis 113 11, 15–17, 19, 20, 38, 43, 66, 72, 105,
re-singularization of media 107, 123 108–9, 111–17, 121–2, 128–9, 131–2,
right to 106 150, 155, 160–3, 168–70, 179, 183,
see also Guattari 187, 196, 211, 218, 226, 236, 245–8,
see also individuality 256, 259, 269–74
Situationists 8 and art 9, 72
Slocombe, Katie E. 75 and cinema 20, 129, 131, 179
Smith, John Dee 180 and ecology 105
Smith, W. John 77 ego 128
smooth/striated space 19, 22, 25–7, 211, and faciality 268–70
264–5, 274–5 and free radio 160
Spacek, Sissy 176 gendered 247–8
species 14, 53–5, 60, 63, 66, 70, 72, 74, 78, intersubjectivity as care 12, 66–7
86, 95–6, 119, 123, 222, 232–3 machinic (molecular/fragmented/
see also Guattari, chaosmosis nomadic) 105, 118, 128, 137
see also Life, lifeworld (Umwelt) mutant 168
speculative realism 1 as production 8, 38, 105, 113–14, 122,
speeds and slownesses 255, 275 129, 132
Spielberg, Steven 17, 164 protosubjectivity 118
Close Encounters of the Third Kind 136, queer 246
139, 140 transference of 108
E.T. 136 see also Guattari
Spinoza, Baruch 9–11, 26, 31, 37–8, 50–1, sublime 62
54–7, 61, 148, 156, 181–2, 199, 204 Surrealism 14, 197, 246
affectio and affectus 11, 61 Suzuki/Hiroshima (Tinguely) 193
affirmative ethics 9–11, 26 Symbolism 110
The Ethics 55
modes of being (intensive & extensive) Tarkovsky, Andrei 20, 139, 173
11, 50–1, 54–8 Ivan’s Childhood 138
substance 51, 54–8 Stalker 20, 173
three levels of knowledge 182 Tate Modern (London) 5
Stagecoach (Ford) 175 Tati, Jacques 141
Stalin, Josef 151, 201 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot 138
Stalker (Tarkovsky) 20, 173 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese) 140
Starkweather, Charles 20, 173 television 160–1
Star Wars (George Lucas) 133 territorialization 269
State machine/apparatus see also war and faciality 269
machine 262, 265, 274–5 territory see also refrain 9, 15, 31–2, 111,
Steinbeck, John 180 162, 269
The Grapes of Wrath 180 existential, 8, 11, 15, 19, 21, 52, 110,
Stirner, Max 195, 200 112–13, 165, 168, 188
Stoics 241 n.5 and faciality 269
The Story of the Last Chysanthemum and language 111
(Mizoguchi) 21 and mass media 162
Straub, Jean-Marie 132 map-territory differentiation 163
Index 291
and singularity 9, 15 The Transparency of Evil (Baudrillard) 201

terrorism 46, 69 The Tree of Life (Malick) 20–1, 173, 180,
Teshigahara, Hiroshi 211 185, 187–90
Moving Sculpture: Jean Tinguely 211 The Tree of Knowledge (Maturana &
Theorem (Pier Paolo Pasolini) 139 Varela) 89
thermodynamics 223
Thierrée, Jean-Baptiste 153 Uexküll, Jacob von 51, 61
The Thin Red Line (Malick) 20, 173, ethology 51–2
180–2, 184 Ugetsu Monagatari (Mizoguchi) 21
The Third Generation (Fassbinder) 135 Un amour d’UIQ (UIQ in Love) (Guattari
Thomson, Graeme 164 & Kramer) 16–18, 128–9, 136–41,
In Search of UIQ 16, 143 143, 161–5
thought 86, 89 unconscious see also machinic,
and enactment 89 Oedipalisation 4, 32, 35, 38, 43, 46,
unthought 204 67, 87, 112, 114, 116, 128, 149, 152–3,
and the wild 86 156, 256, 269
‘Thoughts for the Times on War and fractality 114
Death’ (Freud) 68 molecular 256
A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) and the social field 128
(Deleuze and Guattari) 8, 11, 51, 54, and structuralism 152, 197
61–2, 111, 158–9, 264, 268 Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard
‘1730: Becoming-Intense, (Mallarmé) 113
Becoming-Animal, Un film comme les autres (Godard) 131
Becoming-Imperceptible’ 54 universes of value 112–13, 132
‘Year Zero: Faciality’ 268 The University in Ruins (Readings) 241 n.7
‘On Several Regimes of Signs’ 205 The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance
The Three Ecologies (Guattari) 10, 15, 49, (Berardi) 109
52, 174, 183, 225, 229, 245, 272
THRIVE Infant Family program (Los Van Gogh, Vincent 219
Angeles) 85 Varela, Francisco 12, 87, 89, 113, 219, 221
time-image see also movement-image allopoesis 221
opsigns 178 autopoiesis 12, 20, 25, 87, 113, 219, 221
sonsigns 178 The Tree of Knowledge 89
Tinguely, Jean 16, 21–3, 193–211 vector see also diagram 3, 16, 21, 24, 26,
Homage to New York 200–1 167, 171, 176, 182–3, 189, 265, 272–3
James Watt 193, 207 Videodrome (Cronenberg) 136
Grabplatte für Kamikaze 210 Vietnam War 176–7
Les Philosophes 22, 193–4 violence 21, 24, 68, 176–7, 179, 181, 183,
Memorial to the Sacred Wind or The 197, 220, 238, 245
Tomb of the Kamikaze 210 Virgil 78
Suzuki/Hiroshima 193 The Aeneid 79
Tokyo Gal 201 virtual 3, 4, 11–13, 15, 20, 58–61, 112, 113,
Tokyo Gal (Tinguely) 201 118, 127, 144, 158, 165–8, 174, 194,
Tomasello, Michael 73 206, 209, 225, 227–9, 240, 241 n.8,
Tomatis, Alfred 72 270–1, 275
totalitarianism 156 and actual 11, 20, 58–9, 61, 144, 174,
To the Wonder (Malick) 21, 173, 270–1, 275
180, 184–9 and affect 58–9
transhumanism 222 and becoming 194
292 Index
ecology 169–70, 174 Werner, Heinz 76

existential territories 113 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and
and the machinic 209 Guattari) 22, 193–4, 211
and social body 158 When Species Meet (Haraway) 62
universes of virtuality 112 Wilson, David Sloan 76
vitalism 25 the wild/wildness 13, 24–5, 70, 86–8, 245–
see also affect 7, 249–51, 253–4, 258–9
von Neumann, John 232 as uncaring 258
‘Wild Democracy’ (Sandilands) 249
Wagner, Richard 205 Winkelman, Michael 91 n.2
Wallace, Alfred Russel 65 Winnicott, Donald Woods 81, 91 n.3
war machine see also State machine 16, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 225
26–7, 156, 262, 265, 274–5 Wordsworth, William 181
War of the Worlds (Wells) 130 Prelude 181
Watson, Janell 211
Watt, James 22, 207–8 Young, John Zachary 65
Webern, Anton 205
Welles, Orson 130 Zalamea, Ferdinand 230, 239
Wells, H. G. 130 Zeno of Elea 24, 230
War of the Worlds 130 Zepke, Stephen 219

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Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues

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Introduction Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack 1

Part 1 Therapy/​Care/​Affect/​Poetics: Towards an Ecosophical Ethics

1 Schizosemiotic Apprenticeship: Guattari’s Gift to Contemporary

3 Care of the Wild: A Primer Aranye Fradenburg Joy 65

4 Audubon in Bondage: Extinct Botanicals and Invasive

5 From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to Post-​media Poetics: Pierre

Part 2 Ecosophical Aesthetics, ‘UIQOSOPHY’ and the Abstract Machine

6 UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-​Of) Graeme Thomson and

7 The Guattarian Art of Failure: An Ecosophical Portrait Zach Horton 147

8 Into the Zone: Affective Counterpoint and Ecosophical Aesthetics

Part 3 The Shattered Muse: Ecosophy and Transverse Subjectivities

10 The Shattered Muse: Mêtis, Melismatics and the Catastrosophical

11 The Transversalization of Wildness: Queer Desires and Nonhuman

12 Doing Something Close to Nothing: Marina Abramović’s War

4.1 Penelope Gottlieb, ‘Extinct Botanicals: Castilleja Cruenta Standl’ 97

7.1 Dimensions of the three ecologies 165

Joff P. N. Bradley is associate professor in the faculty of language studies at Teikyo

James Fowler holds a PhD in experimental psychology from City University

National Health Service in the UK, supervising a team of therapists working

Aranye Fradenburg Joy is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the

knowledge in relation to systems of classification in addition to her more

renée c. hoogland is Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit,

Zach Horton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy in English,

Alexandra Magearu is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Program

Through diverse modes of semiotization, systems of representation and multi-​

This form of filiation, incommensurable with filiation through assimilation or

knowledge, which is fixed as universal through its authorization as knowledge.

fuzzy deterritorializing information is presented as consistent logic, usually

On this level, Miles’s book is invaluable as a catalogue of eco-​activist art

non-​psychologizing socio-​political art, Herbert Marcuse argued that art can

The photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher

Instead, inspired by Schönberg’s twelve-​ tone technique, Adorno advocated

Is aesthetics greenwash? In corporate publicity it is, but I would differentiate that

(2002: 112), relational aesthetics is an ‘[a]‌esthetic theory consisting in judging

The pivotal position given by Guattari to subjectivity defines his conception

In the ‘Machinic Orality and Virtual Ecology’ chapter of Chaosmosis, Guattari

process, condensing psychic energy on a particular motif with a view to

In short, the combination of Guattari’s ritournelle and Bourriaud’s harnessing

directly to Guattari’s three ecologies of subject (patient to person), relation

This affective groundwork enables Cullen to expand his reading through

by what actually happens in an affective encounter (my body involved with

Fradenburg’s intention then is to reconceive expressivity as dynamic,

co-​constituting forces and powers for the sustenance of a healthy territorial

rendering of the natural world (eco-​aesthetics as statically eternalizing) and the

a transversally singular production. It’s important to note that singularity is

Skeet connects this ‘fundamental right to singularity’ to Guattari’s call for a

series of ecosophical workshops or ‘seeances’ where people gather to watch and

as creative singularities. As the script’s title suggests however, there is an added

A central theme of the chapter is how the zone of cinema as an affective

serving as a mental ecology/​critique of Integrated World Capitalism as a whole.

as an over-​ productive body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari’s non-​

minoritarian discourse through a strategy of semi-​parodic mimicry (bordering

Adorno, Theodor W. (1981–​82), ‘Transparencies on Film’, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New

Part 1 Therapy/Care/Affect/Poetics: Towards an Ecosophical Ethics

5 From ‘Shipwreck of the Singular’ to Post-media Poetics: Pierre

6 UIQOSOPHY (or an Unmaking-Of) Graeme Thomson and

Through diverse modes of semiotization, systems of representation and multi-

On this level, Miles’s book is invaluable as a catalogue of eco-activist art

non-psychologizing socio-political art, Herbert Marcuse argued that art can

Instead, inspired by Schönberg’s twelve- tone technique, Adorno advocated

co-constituting forces and powers for the sustenance of a healthy territorial

rendering of the natural world (eco-aesthetics as statically eternalizing) and the

serving as a mental ecology/critique of Integrated World Capitalism as a whole.

as an over- productive body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari’s non-

minoritarian discourse through a strategy of semi-parodic mimicry (bordering

Adorno, Theodor W. (1981–82), ‘Transparencies on Film’, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New

Miles, Malcolm (2014), Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literatures and Architecture in a Period of

second: paths/voices of knowledge articulating themselves with technoscientific

production of subjectivity, which tends towards an individual and/or collective

This generation/transformation relation seems in my view at present to be a

we are ‘contaminated’ by the existential modes –the ‘aesthetic machines’ (90),

the extent that it is entangled in an actual, affective encounter –and it is virtual –

after all, the actualization of a power-quality ‘in an individuated state of things

Conclusion: affect and becoming-animal

nature to which we are interior –that is constituted as the expression of our

be a history of organisms+ecologies –Bateson’s ‘organism+’ –rather than of

Environments –including the uterus –are sonic. I am a clinical member of a

how our existence –the praxis of our living –is coupled to a surrounding world

Let us, then, attempt –however unlikely success may be or seem –to transform

Kohut, Heinz (1959), ‘Introspection, Empathy and Psychoanalysis –An Examination of