Fˇlix Guattari (1995), Chaosophy, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext[e].

'When I was a child, I was, so to speak, in pieces; really a little schizo around the edges. I spent years trying to put myself back together again. My only thing was, I would pull myself along different pieces of realities in doing it.' (1995: 7) 
Guattari considers such a systematic disorganisation an important part of understanding subjectivity in an individual and collective sense (and is drawing together the disciplines of psychoanalysis and politics, later with more philosophy from Deleuze). For Guattari, subjectivity is manufactured, according to social and economic conditions - it is a thoroughly political issue (but this also goes beyond Althusser's ideological apparatuses). Here he is breaking with structuralism that would see language and communication forming subjectivities (and by extension also Lacan's psychoanalytic structuralism) as well as orthodox postmodernism that would see technological progress as encouraging a '"schiz" in relation to desire and creativity. On the contrary, I think that machines must be used - and all kinds of machines, whether concrete or abstract, technical, scientific or artistic. Machines do more than revolutionize the world, they completely recreate it.' (1995: 19). 

This is where new ways of understanding these processes involves disorganisation and chaos. [what we tried to do in the Sarai text] He contends:
'It is obvious that the mechanics of semiotic and institutional management in the flux of production and circulation correspond less and less to the evolution of productive forces and collective investments. Even the most narrow-minded economists are stunned to discover a sort of craziness in these systems and feel the urgent need to find alternatives.' (1995: 22) In this 'flux' describes the action or process of flowing. Flow is shape plus change, motion plus form - and might be applied to changes in economics or history, and clearly Guattari has chaos in mind (drawing upon 'flow theory' perhaps). 

Alternatives to the unified subjectivity of the 'New World Order' (or what Guattari also calls 'World Integrated Capitalism') may be difficult to imagine under such conditions but important to imagine all the same. There is a collective aspiration from disorder to order - what Guattari calls 'singularisation' - and new ways need to be imagined that do not automatically reinforce hierarchies and oppressions but that utilise 'life itself and collective desire' (1995: 25) to good effect and clearly in addition to an understanding of the political economy and the Freudian unconscious. To Guattari, 'Capitalism mobilizes everything to halt the proliferation and the actualization of unconscious potentialities' (1995: 49). These psychic antagonisms are political - both individual at the level of desire and then collective and social. Rather like Zizek (but without Lacan or Lenin), he sees the reorganisation of better social relations as no more complex than other scientific or aesthetic endeavours - no more difficult to 'solve than questions of quantum physics or the manipulation of genes' (1995: 46). Central to this, is that change does not simply happen on a large scale socio-economic level or in ideology but increasingly from mutations at a micro scale molecular level. The possibilities for liberation lie in the combination of these effects in the 'machinic integration' of the processes of production, circulation and information. For instance, 'a mutation like that introduced by microprocessors changes the actual substratum of human existence and, in reality, opens up fabulous possibilities for liberation' (1995: 47-8; note: generally meant as a criticism of Marxism, although Lenin did talk of the little screw in the big machine as metaphor, according to Pierre Rose, in Guattari, 1995: 114). In other words, there is a dynamic between micro-politics and politics in general - integrating life and politics or art if you prefer. Guattari sees this as moving from 'dream to social reality, from poetry to science, from the most violent social reality to the most tender daily relations' (1995: 50).   

In forging new ways of conceptualising these issues that combine analytical and political action, Guattari calls himself an 'idea-thief', using second-hand concepts as well as inventing neologisms where necessary. Of particular interest is the concept 'concrete machine' that does not integrate different ideas from different domains but articulates 'singularities of the field under consideration to join absolutely heterogeneous components' (1995: 40). This is somewhat related in method to other concepts such as 'intradisciplinarity', not interdisciplinarity, the capacity to traverse different fields - most notably expressed in the bringing together of capitalism and schizophrenia. These concepts are tools not universal ideas, but ideas in flux that are complex (or more inclusive than that, 'arrangements') and 'rhizomic,' open to influence from other fields of interest. The idea is to suppress all possible duality. This happens necessarily in what he sees as 'rhizomic organisation' - akin to chaos - that avoids old dualistic formulations and hierarchies that are based on conditions of exclusion and domination. 

The capitalist machine is both rational and irrational, a rational framework under an irrational impulse. Guattari says that 'Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself' (1995: 54). Capital is simply insane or demented to someone like Guattari with a psychiatric training - at a 'terminal stage'. In these terms, it is a repressive system that organises power to hide desire, that goes beyond an understanding of ideology as the predominant analytical mode (such as in Marxism). In fact, to Deleuze and Guattari, all ideologies mask desire, or repress it, and it is desire that requires liberation - and the point is that you cannot liberate desire by ideological imposition (of, for instance, a new alternative apparatus of State). But how then? Deleuze and Guattari advocate an oscillation between the spontaneity of anarchy and the hierarchical structure of party organisation to liberate desire - escaping the 'impasse of private fantasy' that the capitalist desiring machine has protected from social expression (1995: 62-3; an 'intradisciplinary' mix of Hakim Bey and Antonio Negri's ideas in connection to my notes perhaps). The failure of social revolutions is that they have failed to liberate desire sufficiently - merely a project of replacing one repression with another. (Surely, the negation of negation is designed with this in mind?) 

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