Notes on Chaosmosis by F�lix Guattari

On the Production of Subjectivity

• Guattari wants to argue for the construction of subjectivity in terms of “individuals, groups, and institutions” as a means of going beyond the standard materialist / binary visions of subject production (1). Additionally, Guattari argues that the struggle over subject production is key to understanding political struggle (as though various forces at work in the sphere of the political were seeking to propagate a specific model of subject production).
• “A certain universal representation of subjectivity, incarnated by capitalist colonialism in both East and West, has gone bankrupt—although it is not yet possible to fully measure the scale of such a failure” (3). This failure marks the opening up of a renewed, more public contest of subjectivities that is propagated by the mass media as much as anything else.
• “Should we keep the semiotic productions of the mass media, informatics, telematics, and robotics separate from psychological subjectivity? I don’t think so. Just as social machines can be grouped under the title of Collective Equipment, technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects, and unconscious fantasms. Recognition of these machinic dimensions of subjectivation leads us to insight, in our attempt at redefinition, on the heterogeneity of the components leading to the production of subjectivity” (4).
• “It was a grave error of the structuralist school to try to put everything connected with the psyche under the control of the linguistic signifier!” (5). The space between this quote and the above is filled with a discussion of “a-signifying semiological dimensions that trigger informational sign machines, and that function in parallel or independently of the fact that they produce and convey significations and denotations, and thus escape from strictly linguistic axiomatics” (5).
• “We should be on guard against progressivist illusions [about machinic evolution] or visions which are systematically pessimistic” (5).
• “It is impossible to judge such a machinic evolution either positively or negatively; everything depends on its articulation within collective assemblages of enunciation” (5).
• “It is a question of being aware of the existence of machines of subjectivation which don’t simply work within the ‘faculties of the soul,’ interpersonal relations or intra-familial complexes. Subjectivity does not only produce itself through the psychogenetic stages of psychoanalysis or the “mathemes” of the Unconscious, but also in the large-scale social machines of language and the mass media—which cannot be described as human” (9). Guattari has just been describing the way that subject formation can be social in certain contexts and individual in others, that it is a force that works in both contexts, equally.