The Literary Function and Society II: Community and Subjectification

Abstract

For Guattari it is aesthetics that provides an ethics that enables a “trans-gressive” machine in the form of subjectivity or singularization.¹ The “aesthetic mode,” for Guattari, is a way to ward off the alienation and fragmentation resulting from a postmodern world. “The devaluation of the meaning of life provokes the fragmentation of the self-image” (Guattari, 1995:12). Guattari attempts to “grasp [subjectivity] in the dimension of its processual creativity” (1995:13), the result is an ethico-aesthetics. His notion of a processual subjectivity is that in creating a subjectivity one is “geared” toward the future and not the past, that is, not “ ‘ready-made’ dimensions of subjectivity crystallized into structural complexes” (1995:7). What role does the literary function play in the subjectivity born of processual creativity? How does such a subjectivity unpack from, and fold back into, territory, community, society, and so on? What are its affects—in our prior use of the term, meaning a body that is the result of an action and that does not precede the action?

The aesthetic power of feeling, although equal in principle with the other powers of thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, acting politically, seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblage of enunciation of our era.

(Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm)