Date:         Sun, 29 May 94 21:57:18 EDT
From: CJ Stivale <CSTIVAL-AT-CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>
Subject:      Guattari/Autopoiesis bis
To: technology-AT-world.std.com



The essay "Machinic Heterogenesis" by Felix Guattari in the Verena
A. Conley collection, _Rethinking Technologies_, currently under
discussion underwent some peculiar, but finally minimal, truncations
in the translation process. I had considered providing a list of all
the variants (I count 7 in all, all occurring between pp. 13-16 of
the Creech translation, ranging from omission of a phrase or
sentence, to the omission of a paragraph and end of a paragraph),
but finally they really do not necessarily illuminate the already
dense text any further.

However, one truncation that I wish to address, and rectify, occurs
at the end of the translation, p.27, that omits two (long)
paragraphs with which Guattari's chapter (in _Chaosmose_) end. I
provide these here, without the elegance that Creech provides.
Following translation's final sentence [As such, . . . machinic
revolutions that are causing out time to burst apart at every
point.], comes:

"Rather than adopting a timorous attitude regarding the immense
machinic revolution that is sweeping the planet (at the risk of
carrying it away) -- and rather than grasping hold more firmly to
systems of traditional values, upon which some will pretend to
discover transcendence anew--, the movement of progress, or if you
prefer, movement of process, will seek to reconcile values and
machines. Values are immanent to machines. The life of machinic
Flows is not only manifested through cybernetic retroactions; this
life is also correlative to a promotion of incorporal Universes
starting from an enunciative Territorial incarnation, that is, from
a valorizing introduction of being [prise d'etre valorisante].
Machinic autopoeisis asserts itself as a non-human for-self
[pour-soi] through nuclei [foyers] of partial protosubjectivity, and
it (autopoeisis) deploys a for-other [pour-autrui] through the dual
modality of a "horizontal" ecosystemic alterity (machinic systems
positioning themselves in rhizome relationship of reciprocal
dependence), and of a phylogenetic alterity (situating each actual
machinic stasis at the encounter point of an outmoded filiation
and an eventual Phylum of mutations). All value systems --religious,
aesthetic, scientific, ecosophical, and so forth -- are introduced
at this machinic interface between the necessary actual [l'actuel
necessaire] and the possibilistic virtual. The Universes of value
thus serve as the incorporal enunciators of abstract machinic
complexes [complexions] simultaneously occurring with discursive
realities. The consistency of these nuclei of protosubjectivation is
thus assured only insofar as they take form, with more or less
intensity, in nodes of finitude, in Territories of chaosmic
"grasping" [in English in French text], that guarantee, moreover,
their possible recharging [recharge] with processual complexity. A
dual enunciation, therefore, finitely territorialized and
non-finitely incorporal.

"However, these constellations of Universes of value do not
constitute Universals. The fact that these constellations are joined
in singular existential Territories confers on them, in fact, a
power of heterogenesis, that is, of opening up onto irreversible
differentiation processes, both necessary and singularizing. How
does this machinic heterogenesis, that differentiates each color of
being (for example, that creates from the plane of consistency of
the philosophical concept an entirely different world from the plane
of reference of the scientific function or of the plane of aesthetic
composition), how does it then find itself flattened out upon the
capitalistic homogenesis of generalized equivalency? The result is
all values equaling each other, all appropriative Territories being
referred to the same economic gauge of power, and all existential
wealth falling under the blade of exchange value. To the sterile
opposition between exchange value and use value, we must oppose an
axiological complex including all the machinic modalities of
valorization: the values of desire, aesthetic values, ecological and
economic values, and so forth. Capitalistic value, that generally
subsumes the entirety of these machinic surplus values, proceeds by
a reterritorializing forced takeover, based on the primacy of
economic and monetary semiotics, and corresponds to a sort of
general implosion of all existential Territorialities. In fact,
rather than being estranged from other systems of valorization,
capitalistic value constitutes their fundamental heart [coeur
mortifere], corresponding to passing across the ineffable barrier
between a controlled chaosmic deterritorialization -- under the
aegis of social, aesthetic and analytical practices -- and a
vertiginous toppling into the black hole of the aleatory,
specifically of a paroxystically binarist reference, that implacably
dissolves all firming into consistency of Universes of value that
would seek to escape capitalistic law. It is only abusively that
economic determinations have been placed into the primary
relationship vis-a-vis social relations and productions of
subjectivity. Economic law, like juridical law, must be deduced from
the aggregate of Universes of value, against which this law never
ceases to labor. The reconstruction of this law, on the combined
ruins of planified economies and neo-liberalism, following new
ethico-political (ecosophical) finalities calls, in return, for an
untiring reformation of consistency of machinic assemblages of
valorization."

Having provided this, I don't know if it necessarily clarifies
anything that preceded. What might do so, however, is the chapter
that precedes "Machinic heterogenesis" (ch. 2) in _Chaosmose_,
entitled "On the production of subjectivity," 41 pp. in length in
the French (by comparison, the 31 pp. of French text is reduced in
translation to a 14 pp. chapter).