back to diagram

in his bookChaosmosis, Félix Guattari develops a general ecosophy; a project that is informed by a curious feedback loop. In the 80s, Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome had served as a metaphor for net- and hypertexttheoreticians. In Chaosmosis [and thus in the 90s] one can observe a folding back of the concept of the rhizome onto Guattari’s thought. Guattari now reverts back to hypertext – as a rhizomatic network – to describe new structures of thought. Thus, the new hypertext theory now functions, after it has been rhizomized, as a diagram and matrix for the inventor of the original metaphor, who thus seems to inspire himself. In this context, Guattari sees in a hypertextual tought a possibility to regain multiplicity: “The informational lines of hypertext can recover a certain dynamic polymorphism and work in direct contact with referent Universes which are in no way linear” (49).¶In the 90s, however Guattari goes again a step further than the hypertext theoreticians. In a very bold move, he once more align the levels of linear vs. non-linear that had been so carefully separated by Aarseth. Guattari does so by crossing hypertext theory and complexity. The non-sequentiality of a continuous text [on the level of the signifier] is supplemented by a non-linearity, for instance in the choice of foldings [and this means a mathematical non-linearity]. In this context, one might also have a closer look at the term ‘ergodic’ from within the field of complexity theory].¶The hypertext architecture, in which – as in a rhizome - every point can be connected to every other point [that is, in which every point can be folded onto every other point] and in which the user is able to travel from one textual attractor (on the level of the signifier, the signified or both) to another through a short series of non-linear foldings stands for a different cognitive diagram than the one figured by printTexts: [ => a dynamic network of synapses. The related question of course is: in how far are there rhizomatic synapticarchitectures in the brain? Is the brain a hypertext?]¶Guattari’s demand that “the time has come for hypertexts in every genre, and even for a new cognitive and sensory writing that Pierre Lévy describes as ‘dynamic ideography’” (96-7) has to be understood against this background. According to Guattari, thought will change qualitatively in the new medial surroundings: “the junction of informatics, telematics, and the audiovisual will perhaps allow a decisive step to be made in the direction of interactivity, towards a post-media era and, correlatively, an acceleration of the machinic return of orality” (97). The basis for this change is, as with hypertext, the ‘becoming’ [the dynamics or kinetics] of the structure. The [textual]subject is understood as an endless becoming or emerging: “a processual, polyphonic Being singularizable by infinitely complexifiable textures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual compositions”