Abstract
This chapter presents a detailed commentary and analysis of Félix Guattari’s opening chapter “On the Production of Subjectivity” in Chaosmosis. Guattari’s opening moves in this chapter can only seem fraught with difficulties. Once he places ICTs at the heart of a machinic subjectivity, it becomes hard to see how, if the analysis of the semiotic and economic composition of semiocapitalism is correct, this could offer an exit from the crushing of polyvocity by “the subjectivity of generalized equivalence,” since it seems to lead to further refined versions of the very kinds of problems Guattari wants to challenge and overcome. Yet Guattari offers in these pages a resistant strategy by invoking the power of art making to reshape experience and bring new territories and universes into existence. What, then, should we make of his lingering attachment to interfaces and hypertext? Doesn’t the pre-selected, organized, synthesis established by a live web link limit the idea’s ontological value? The publication date of Chaosmosis is crucial as Guattari succumbs to some of the promises of the early web such as hypertext links, which generated critical enthusiasm within the media community as well as in postmodern literature, while at the same time trying to keep his distance from the emerging cyber-enthusiasm.
Key issues addressed are his ambivalent relationship to phenomenology; his technological borrowings from early web culture; the role of concrete analogue machines such as portable cassette recorders in his art and psychoanalytic writing, specifically those on Mony Elkaïm and David Wojnarowicz; the decentring of the human and its implications for the retention of concepts such as intentionality, together with some version of animism; his reformulation of the problematics of subjectivation; his shift into a pathosophical perspective on non-discursive experience; and finally, his critique of temporalisation as capitalistic from the perspective of the refrain, generative and pathic temporalities.
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Genosko, G. (2022). The Quandaries of Machinic Subjectivity in Félix Guattari’s Chaosmosis. In: Das, S.S., Pratihar, A.R. (eds) Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88809-1_4
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