Author: ricardo dominguez --- Date: 2/2/97 --- Copyright: ThingReviews NYC

SOFT SUBVERSIONS

by

Felix Guattari

Semiotext(e), 1996

"Through a systematic decentering of desire, micropolitical analysis will lead to soft subversions and imperceptible revolutions that will eventually change the world."

--Felix Guattari

Now that the perforations of death have woven between the singular becoming of Deleuze and Guattari (the Lewis and Martin of theory)-- the element which has remained below the surface has begun to float onto the pathways of critical culture. For more than twenty years only a few bits and bites of Guattari's words have been translated into english--only one book of essays, "Molecular Revolutions." The rest came to us as part of the regime of a double signiture. Deleuze had top billing on the translation scene--some 12 to 15 of his philosophical works are now available. Guattari's was an echo of the schizoanalytic silence he spent most of his life investigating. So this semiotext(e) edition of his essays, along with last years "Chaosophy," adds a much needed element to the archive of our understanding of this strange attractor.

Unlike, Deleuze, this part of the rhizome was always/already a Net Borg, the line of flight that skids into the zones of post-media networks as early as 1975. Post-media for Guattari is a drive to become part of, "highly elaborated assemblage of deterritorialized machinics." For him minor networks were ready to drift into imperceptible tunnels, like those used in Vietnam against the nomadic bunkers of U.S, towards a future that is no longer dependent on the economies of lack in late-capital or the narratives of dialectical materialism. The silent and invisible would seek lines of flight in the bifurcations of autonomy and machinic flows--where the body and its habits would become part of a choasmosis of links and options deep in the micro-flaws of pan-captitalist desire. A movement towards micro-systems, "that create the possibiltiy of a collective appropriation of the media," by "minor becomings" that will invent new subjective modes, self-management functions, "and the fulfillment of the singularities of desire" as hypernetworks of post-media assemblages.

For Guattari we are paralogical fractures that cross from nano-second communities to pico-second bodies-without-organs. Soft subversions that can no longer reside within the history of rationalism(s), the prision of the soul, or the economies of blockage--resistance for him is always elsewhere, already on the side of the machinic becoming it's Other in flight.

ricardo dominguez

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