The Machine at the Heart of Desire:
Felix Guattari's Molecular Revolution [excerpt 3 of 4]
_Works & Day_ 2.2 (1985): 63-85
Charles J. Stivale
Wayne State University
3. Molecular Politics
This anti-Oedipal and political offensive is evident in other
essays of the 1970s: an autobiographical rejection of Oedipus,
"Sepulchre for an Oedipus Complex" (1972; MR, introduction); an
attack on the British anti-psychiatric community in "Mary Barnes,
or Oedipus in Anti-Psychiatry" (1973; MR section 1); the
ambiguity of the political distinction between left and right
from the perspective of desire, in "The Micro-Politics of
Fascism" (1973; MR, section 3), originally entitled
"Micro-politique du desire" in _Psychanalyse et politique_
(Paris: Seuil, 1972); an interview originally published in _Le
Magazine litteraire_, "Anti-Psychiatry and Anti-Psychoanalysis"
(1976; MR section 1), in which Guattari explains the anti-Oedipal
stance; finally, "Social Democrats and Euro-Communists vis-a-vis
the State" (1977; MR section 3), an analysis of the collusion of
European socialism and communism with the State structure.
However, the most challenging direction which Guattari's writing
takes following _Anti-Oedipus_ is his research into developing an
extensive semiotic foundation for "schizo-analysis." Even an
essay from the early writing, "Causality, Subjectivity and
History" (1965; MR section 3) begins with a section in which
Guattari poses "the problem of a subject... as one enunciating
discourses and actions relating to history, rather than
envisaging it simply as the subject of statements which are given
to us" (my translation; cf. MR 175). This constitutes a political
attack on the "structuralist impasse" from which one can escape
"by recognizing that an effect of meaning only has repercussions
at the level of the signified in so far as potentialities of
subjective action are liberated, once there is a breach in the
signifier" (MR 182). To affect such a signifying breakthrough,
Guattari opts for a glossematic conception of the sign derived
from Hjelmslev's linguistics, and maintains, with Deleuze, that
in constituting "a decoded theory of language,... he only
linguistics adapted to the nature of both capitalist and the
schizophrenic flows," Hjelmslev's conception is preferable to
Saussurian syntagmatic linguistics because Hjelmslev's purely
immanent theory of language, Deleuze and Guattari assert, is one
"that shatters the double gaze of the voice-graphism domination;
that causes form and substance, content and expression to flow
according to the flows of desire; and that breaks these flows
according to point-signs and figure-schizzes" (AO 242-43). \10
A few years later, in the lengthy final section of _La Revolution
molecaire_ entitled "Semiotic Scaffoldings,"\11 the importance of
Hjelmslev's linguistics becomes quite clear, as the basis on
which Guattari can propose a science of machinics, "a system of
assembling machinic propositions which is not reducible to
logical/mathematical statements and to phenomenological domains"
(my translation; cf. MR 146). Guattari seeks to discuss machinic
propositions in terms of a linguistics which is neither
hierarchizing, nor transcendental. Thus, in this final section's
opening essay entitled "Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire"
(1975; MR section 1), Guattari objects that "structuralist
analyses try to mask the basic duality between content and form
by attending only to form, setting the content in parentheses,
believing it legitimate to separate work relating to content from
work relating to form," thereby ignoring the "specific political
and social order that moulds" chains of signifiers, and thereby
avoiding "questioning the operations of power that control the
social sphere at every level" (MR 82). Since any analysis, be it
anthropological, economic, linguistic, or psychoanalytical, must
attend to the "multitude of micro-political levels" of power
which structure all contents, Guattari rejects analysis which
opposes content to form and instead invokes Hjelmslev's
linguistics in order to propose an analysis which would 'find
connecting points (_points d'articulation_), points of
micro-political antagonism at every level" (MR 83).
Then, offering theoretical physics as an example of a
non-signifying semiotics in which _sign-particles_, unlocalizable
in time, space and existence, undermine the sign-referent
relationship, Guattari proposes to counter passive acceptance of
effects of signification "with a generalized micro-political
struggle that can. undermine it from within, in such a way as to
enable all the intensive multiplicities to escape from the
tyranny of the signifying over-encoding. What this means is
unleashing a whole host of expressions and experimentations
-those of children, of schizophrenics, of homosexuals, of
prisoners, of misfits of every kind - that all work to penetrate
and eat into the semiology of the dominant order, to feel out new
escape routes (_lignes de fuite_) and produce new and unheard-of
constellations of a-signifying particle-signs" (MR 84). By
unleashing such cultural expressions, we pass beyond a particular
semantic field of interactions (for example, political
overcoding) onto an abstract plane of irreducible kernels, or
sign-particles (for example, Capital or Power) as means to blur
reifying denotations and connotations of the Imaginary. \12
To emphasize the necessity for this struggle, Guattari first
examines the role of psychoanalysis in the "dominant order," a
politico-religious movement which "should be treated in the same
way as all other movements that have proposed models of behaviour
for particular times and contexts," whose object is "collective
paranoia," that is, "bringing into operation everything that
militates against any liberation of schizo desire in the social
situation (_le socius_)" (MR 86). Guattari opposes a "politics
of interpretation which keeps going over and over the past in the
realm of unconscious phantasy" with a "politics of
experimentation that takes hold of existing intensities of desire
and forms itself into a desiring mechanism in touch with
historical social reality." Such a duality is revealed by "a
fundamental political dilemma within one and the same semiotic
whole":
"Students of semiotics are already divided into those who relate
semiotics to the sciences of language, and those who consider
language merely one among other instances of the functioning of a
general semiotic. It seems to me that the result of this debate
is that, in the first case, desire gets bogged down in the
Imaginary by becoming invested in a system of significant flights
(_fuites signifiantes_) which I shall call paradigmatic
perversion, whereas, in the second, it partkipates in
a-signifying semiotic engagements (_agencements semiotiques
a-signifiants_), involving signs as well as things, individuals
as well as groups, organs as well as forces or machines." (MR 87)
\13
Guattari proposes examples of the first form of semiotics, the
"paradigmatic perversion", in criticizing behaviorist
communication (`a la Bateson), syntactics, semantics and
pragmatics a la Carnap and Morris), structuralist anthropology,
and other semiotic "mergers": he refers to R.D. Laing as having
combined "a linguistic dominated by diachronic phonology and
Lacanian psychoanalysis," to Althusser as having merged "the
epistemological tradition and Marxism," and to Benveniste as
affirming the pre-eminence of linguistic semiology even for
nonlinguistic systems (MR 90). Although he does not develop this
critique, Guattari suggests that each of these theorists shares a
common strategy, "the idea that one must discover a univocal
reference point, a transcendant invariable, not itself
significative, whereby to explain the sum of the significative
arrangements" (MR 89), a position which Guattari sees as
tantamount to remaining enmired in the "mystery of
signification," remaining prisoners of "a signifying semiological
cogito." Since this trap results in defining a mechanism which
constrains all possibility for developing new "intersections"
with other regimes of signs, it would "provide a reassuring
feeling of having at last got hold of something quasi-eternal in
the human science" (MR 90), thereby constituting a methodological
imprisonment which effectively inscribes the researcher in a new
formalism whose scientific rigor" absolves him/her from
involvement in the political realm.
In order to distinguish between the various semiotic machines,"
Guattari proposes and subsequently defines four modes of
encoding:
1) non-semiotic "natural" chains of encoding, not involving "a
specific semiotic stratum," for example, genetic coding (MR 90);
Two modes of semiologies of signification:
2) those involving a multiplicity of strata, for example, "the
expression of primitive societies, of the mad, of children" (MR
91);
3) semiologies with only two strata: one "on which contents are
formalized," another "on which expression is formalized"; this
illusion of a double articulation is achieved through "flattening
out this multiplicity of intensities on the signifying machine by
using the fiction of a level of representation," that is,
intensities first fitting "signified contents," then fitting "the
signifier, whose despotic ambition is to put everything that
could represent it through a process of repetition that always
brings it back to itself.... The intensities can now only be
noted, connoted as having to remain outside the semiotic sphere,
which means, in the last resort, outside the political sphere"
(MR 92). This results in "the programme of linguistic
Oedipalization":
first, the production of "subjectivity detached from the real,
empty and transparent, a subjectivity of pure signifying that
responds perfectly to Lacan's formula: a signifier represents it
[subjectivity] for another signifier. This subjectivity has to be
accounted for under two heads - the subject of the statement and
the subject of the utterance of the message. By the effect of a
kind of meaningless echoing back and forth, the subject of the
message has become the echo of the subject of the utterance.
Every utterance must cease being polyvocal and, reduced to a
bi-univocal mode, be made to fit the subject of the statement"
(MR 92-93);
second, "formalizing the subjectivation of statements according
to an abstract encoding of the I-you-he type, which 'provides the
speakers with a shared system of personal references' (cf.
Benveniste, _Problemes de linguistique ge'ne'rale_) and makes
them able to adapt to the exchangeability, the transposability
and the universality of a given number of roles that they will be
called upon to fill within the framework of an economy of
de-coded fluxes" (MR 93); \14
4) collective assemblages of a-signifying semiotics, or the
dissociation of machinic information from structural
representation through "diagrammatization" or "transduction": "No
longer are there two levels and a system of double articulation;
there is only a constant return to the continuum of machinic
intensities based on a pluralism of articulations." The result is
the transformation of points of subjectivation as privatized and
Oedipalized jouissance" into "subjective residues, a
deterritorialized jouissance, adjacent to the fundamental process
of machinic assemblage," permitting escape from "the terrain of
signification, as correlate of subjective individuation, for the
terrain of the machinic plane of consistency, which authorizes
the conjunction of meaning and matter by the articulation of
abstract machines which are ever more deterritorialized and ever
more locked into material flows of all kinds.... In short, the
equation 'signified + signifier - signification' occurs from the
individuation of fanstasies and from subjugated groups, whereas
the equation 'collective arrangements of enunciation - machinic
meaning - non-meaning (sens - non-sens machinique) occurs from
group fantasy and from the subject-group" (my translation; cf. MR
95 96). \15 Guattari argues then that the scientific, artistic,
and political realms are linked in a lattice-work of sign
machines which form a direct conjunction with material fluxes. He
articulates the bask project of schizo-analysis (as opposed to
psychoanalysis and other semiologies of signification) as
necessarily developing and practicing modes to release signifying
chains from univocal (or bi-univocal) subjectivation and thereby
to unleash polyvocal flows of primal intensities in abstract
machines.
But Guattari proceeds even further by maintaining that the very
"capacity of human societies to escape from alienations
territorialized in the ego, the person, the family, the race, the
exploitation of labour, distinctions of sex and so on depends on
a conjunction between the semiotics of consciousness and those of
deterritorializing machinisms" (MR 98; my emphasis). For
Guattari, this semiotics of consciousness is at the very heart of
all human activity, and as he did in his earlier essay "Machine
and Structure," Guattari is suggesting that the machine passes
into the heart of desire:
"Human beings make love with signs and all kinds of 'extra-human'
elements - things, animals, images, looks, machines and so on -
that the sexual functioning of primates, for instance, had never
encoded. With its shift to non-signifying semiotics, the
subjectivity of the utterance comes to be invested in an
organless body (_corps sans organes_) connected to a multiplicity
of desiring intensities. That organless body oscillates between
an anti-production that tends to become reterritorialied in
residual signification, and a semiotic hyper-production that
opens itself to fresh machinic connections. The collective
apparatus of utterance (_l'agencement collectif d'enonciation_)
can thus become the centre of immanence for new desiring
connections, the point where, beyond humanity, there is
production and jouissance by the cosmic fluxes that run through
machinisms of every kind." (MR 98)
In other words, Guattari describes, if ever so abstractly, the
practical method for introducing lines of flight, of rupture, of
liberation into daily life. This method,the conjunction of
semiotic, signifying, encoding consciousness with subjective,
decoding multiple connections, consists in recognizing and
finding ways to express the incessant oscillation between
reterritorialization, or reinscription by the psychic and social
processes of signification (anti-production), and the
complementary, deterritorializing swing toward new connections,
toward uninscribed production, pleasure, orgasm, the body
expressed in the bodyless, the realization however fleeting and
sporadic) of liberating rupture in some collective mode of
utterance. Guattari's seemingly far-out, galactic discourse of
"cosmic fluxes" is nothing less than an attempt to describe modes
of analysis, of politics, of aesthetics, which as yet have no
basis for description since their practice is in the very process
of creation.
The title of the following section, "Semiotics with _n_
articulations," suggests the important function played in
Guattari's project by multiplicity, or "intensive
multiplicities," which signifying semiotics opposes by reducing
these multiplicities to the form/substance couple. To propose an
alternate semiotic politics, in which he can "determine under
what conditions certain semiotic areas - in sciences, arts,
revolution, sexuality, etc. - could be removed from the control
of the dominant representations" (MR 100), Guattari develops
various terminological distinctions from Hjelmslev's linguistics:
1) a transposition of Hjelmslev's triple division (form,
substance matter) in order to define semiotic strata:
a) abstract machines, or form considered independently of
substance;
b) the coupling of substance/form as the mode of actualization of
the abstract machines' power to deterritorialize;
c) matter, "considered independently of its signifying semiotic
formation," as corresponding henceforth to machinic meaning
(rather than to signification), to material intensities (rather
than to the signifier as a category in itself), to collective
arrangements of enunciation (rather than to individuation of
subject based on the primacy of the statement), all of which
eliminate the content/expression distinction (MR 100);
2) three types of synthesis previously developed in
_Anti-Oedipus_:
a) connective syntheses, or a mode of "polyvocal connections
among machinic fluxes";
b) disjunctive syntheses, controlling, organizing, disciplining'
the connective syntheses, both as machinic deterritorialization
and structures of re-territorialization;
c) conjunctive syntheses which 'define the status of
subjectivation" (MR 101).
Guattari suggests that "with the a-signifying semiotics, one
breaks through the impasse belonging to processes of signifying
encoding, an impasse which consisted 1) in cutting off production
from representation; 2) in isolating and neutralizing the
continuum of 'material productions,' by alienating it into two
formalisms of signifying representation: the formalism of content
and the formalism of expression. The double articulation sort of
sandwiches (_prend en quelque sorte en sandwich_) the intensive
multiplicities" (my translation, RM 268; omitted from MR).
Guattari claims therefore that the "expression of machinic
meaning" through the "expressive duality -- matter/abstract
machine" replaces the old subjectivizing couples
signifier/signified and substance/form: "We are abandoning the
formal classifications of semiotic components in order to
consider, above all, the connection (_montage_), the assemblage
that they constitute as function of particular regimes of
deterritorialization of flows.... The assemblages of
deterritorialized flows of electrons, of flows of signs, of
experimental combinations, of logical machines, etc., combine to
give a full expansion of deterritorializing conjunctions and
liberate the abstract machines from the imperialism of signifying
strata" (my translation; cf. MR 102). Guattari thus proposes a
"semiotic option," the "logical" result of liberating signifying
semiotics from the despotism of signifiers and of unleashing
"intensive multiplicities" through a semiotics of _n_
articulations. This liberated semiotics may be enacted through an
interconnecting, stratified grid of different signifying regimes
in the seemingly endless process of decoding/recoding, of
deterritorialization/reterritorialization, a transversality
through which these machinic conjunctions will find their
"meaning."\16
Finally, after examining the ideological impact of this new
semiotic assemblage of enunciation (in the section entitled "The
Power Relationships within the Utterance"), Guattari concludes
this opening analysis with "The Role of the Signifier in the
Institution." This essay is an ambitious attempt to sum up
Hjelmslev's categories in terms of the tripartite classification
already suggested.\17 In contrast to institutional analyses,
Guattari defines the goals of "schizo-analysis": "It seeks to
foster a semiotic poly-centrism by assisting the formation of
relatively autonomous and non-translatable semiotic substances,
by equally welcoming the sense and the non-sense of desire, by
not seeking to adapt the modes of subjectivation to the dominant
significations and social laws.... I wish to condemn
psychoanalysis only on behalf of a different kind of analysis, a
micro-political analysis which would never - at least never
deliberately - let itself be cut off from the real or the social.
On behalf, in other words, of a veritable practice of analysis"
(my translation; cf. MR 78).
Guattari presents examples of institutional strategies - the use
of psychotropic drugs, the care of the psychotic child - to show
how they tend "to reduce the horizon of desire to the control of
the other, the appropriation of bodies and organs," whereas
"schizo-analysis, on the other hand, rejects the 'will to
identity,' and all signifying personological specifications,
especially those relating to the family" (MR 80). Having again
denounced the "psychoanalytic politics of emasculation of desire"
which properly belongs to "power formations," to a "capitalism"
which prescribes the dominant norm for accession to jouissance
(for example, Kafka's bureaucratic perverts), Guattari concludes
by opposing the two options in the economy of desire (a
conclusion omitted from MR: a guilty jouissance, "desire having
no other direction than to invest itself on its own movement of
flight, and on a system of indefinite translatability which
constitutes desire's most deterriorialized modality," in short,
"a black hole effect" which entirely absorbs desire; and "a
collective economy of desire" which schizo-analysis initiates, an
economy which "reabsorbs the points of individuation of the
libidinal economy, the points of guilt-producing
responsibilization, the exclusive transfers which throw desire
back on persons, on roles, on the hierarchy and all that is
organized around points of significance of power" (RM 289-90).
For Guattari, this economy consists of assuring that the
"a-signifying semiotic components" continue to produce intensive
multiplicities, the machine production of deterritorialization/
reterritorialization which prevents the ultimate domination of
flows of desire by the avatars of signifying semiology.\18
Notes
10/ Deleuze and Guattari also argue that "Louis Hjelmslev's
linguistics stand in profound opposition to the Saussurian and
post-Saussurian undertaking. Because it abandons all privileged
reference. Because it describes a pure field d algebraic
immanence that no longer allows any surveillance on the part of a
transcendent instance, even one that has withdrawn. Because
within this field it sets in motion its flows of form and
substance, content and expression. Because it substitutes the
relationship of reciprocal precondition between expression and
content for the relationship of subordination between signifier
and signified. Because there no longer occurs a double
articulation between two hierarchized levels of language, but
between two convertible deterritorialized planes, constituted by
the relation between the form of content and the form of
expression. Because in this relation one reaches figures that are
no longer effects of a signifier, but schizzes, point-signs, or
flow-breaks that collapse the wall of the signifier, pass
through, and continue on beyond. Because these signs have crossed
a new threshold of deterritorialization. Because these figures
have definitively lost the minimum conditions of identity that
defined the elements of the signifier itself. Because in
Hjelmslev's linguistics the order of the elements is secondary in
relation to the axiomatic of flows and figures. Because the money
model in the point-sign, or in the figure-break stripped of its
identity, having now only a floating identity, tends to replace
the model of the game" (AO 242).
11/ The distribution of this group of essays is the most
disturbing aspect of MR. Although Guattari did in fact publish
these articles over several years (between 1973 and 1977) and in
different publications, their arrangement together in La
Revolution moleculaire certainly indicates an important attempt
by Guattari to consolidate the disparate elements of his
theoretical work. In MR, however, the reader has no inkling of
the connection between these texts given their seemingly random
dispersion as well as several omissions. The following order is
established by Guattari in RM, with each essay's location in MR:??
1: "Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire" (six sections in RM): in
MR, five of the six sections appear as the final essay in part 1,
with the sixth section, "The Role of the Signifier in the
Institution," published as an independent essay preceding the
ensemble of essays at the and of which it appears in RM;
2: "La valeur, la monnaie, le symbole" (Value, Money, Symbol):
omitted from MR;
3: "Meaning and Power": published as the seventh and final essay
of MR part 2;
4: "The Plane of Consistency: published as the second essay of MR
part 2;
5: "La conscience diagrammatique" (Diagramatic Consciousness):
omitted from MR;
6: "Intensive Redundancies and Expressive Redundancies":
published as the third essay of MR part 2;
7: "Subjectless Action" (original title: "Il et moi-je"):
published as the fourth essay of MR part 2;
8: "Machinic Propositions": published as the fifth essay of MR
part 2;
9: Concrete Machines": published as the sixth essay MR part 2;
10: "Millions and Millions of Potential Alices": published as the
fifth essay of MR part 3.
12/ In chapter three of _L'inconscient machinique_, Guattari
defines the fundamental machinic coordinates for assemblages of
utterances and situates the concepts of abstract machines and
sign-particles as the third of three general types of
"consistency" from which assemblages emerge, the first being
molar, the second molecular (43-73; see below, note 22).
13/ Guattari explains the operation of this "paradigmatic
perversion": "The politics of the signifier lead to a sign
machine marking out the territorialized fluxes - by means of a
limited collection of discrete, 'digitalized' signs - and
retaining only fluxes of information that can be decoded. The
role of that sign machine is to produce, in Hjelmslev's term,
'semiotically formed substances', that is to say strata of
expression which form a connection between the two domains
formalized at the level of expression and that of content; for
linguistic analysts, this operation produces an effect of
signification. The totality of intensive reality is then
'processed' by the formalizing duo, signifier/signified; the
totality of fluxes is held in the 'snapshot' ("flash") of
signification which places an object facing a subject; the
movement of desire is sterilized by a relationship of
representation; the image becomes the memory of a reality made
impotent, and its immobilization establishes the world of
dominant significations and received ideas. This operation of
controlling all the intensive multiplicities constitutes the
first act of political violence. The rela-tion between the
signifier and the signified (which Peirce sees as con-ventional,
Saussure as arbitrary) is at root merely the expression of
authority by means of signs" (MR 87-88).
14/ In "Subjectless Action," Guattari develops in detail his
objections to structuralist linguistics; in "Value, Money,
Symbol," he expands on the modes of encoding in terms of exchange
value, use value, and intensive values of desire (RM 291-96); and
in "Meaning and Power," he examines the modes of encoding in
light of the semiotics of clinical psychiatric practices. See
Seem in regard to modes of encoding.
15/ In "The Plane of Consistency," Guattari defines the "machinic
phylum" as a continuum, and then examines it in terms of 'the
mathematical-physical complex, technical innovation and the
military machine" (MR 121).
16/ In "The Diagrammatic Consciousness," Guattari raises
questions about the Lacanian "subject-object system" in terms of
the processes of machinic deterritorialization of the "modern"
consciousness (RM 329-31); in "Intensive Redundancies and
Expressive Redundancies," he discusses stratification of the
modes of encoding as well as various forms of
deterritorialization; and in "Concrete Machines," he proposes
different strata for abstract machines.
17/ In "Machinic Propositions," Guattari sums up the
nonhierarchizable propositions of a science of machinics.
18/ In "Millions and Millions of Potential Alices," Guattari puts
this collective economy of desire into practice on behalf of the
Italian "free radio" movement.
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