Estrategias metodológicas utilizando las TIC

Deleuze once said that Guattari not only produced more ideas than anyone else he knew, but also that he "never stops tinkering with his ideas, fine­ tuning them, changing their terms. Sometimes he gets bored with them, he even forgets about them, only to rework and reshuffle them later" (Deleuze 2006: 238) . Such is the case of Guattari's thinking about the sign. The sign­ points in "D'un signe

a

l'autre" ( 1961, 1966) virtually disappear until

The

Anti-Oedipus Papers

(written 1969-1972) , where they become "power signs," which do not appear as such in the final text of the

Anti-Oedipus.32

These notions will not reach full development until the late 1970s, in a section of the

Revolution moliculaire

entitled "Semiotic Scaffolding," which brings together a thematically related group of papers, notes, and essays, and whose semiotic musings finally coalesce in

L1nconscient machinique

( 1979) and

A Thousand Plateaus

(19

8

0) .

33

In assembling his "semiotic scaffolding," Guattari pursues a "general semiology," which he characterized as a crazy dream of Sa us sure's which Louis Hjelmslev took seriously (AOP207/299) .34 He began his careful reading of Hjelmslev around 1970, and became interested in Peirce as well. Guattari tells Deleuze that they must look to Hjelmslev and perhaps Peirce in search of the key to the disengagement from structuralism

(AOP

38/52).

If

one follows Guattari's passionate pur­ suit of a general semiology to the limit of its analytic ambitions, it could be used to map practically every interaction in the universe, recalling his search 20 years earlier for a proto-sign capable of accounting for "all of cre­ ation"

(DS

38) . Guattari's aim: to unblock psychic and social constraints imposed by the dominant social order, so as to promote productive creativ­ ity in the arts, revolutionary politics, and mental health care. In pursuit of this aim, he pays increasing attention to the rapidly evolving machinic realms of scientific theory and information technology.

It may seem odd that in order to disengage from structuralism, Guattari draws what looks suspiciously like a structure, a simple six-square matrix (Figure 1.1) meant to show "the place of the signifier in the institution," the title of the 1973 essay mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Guattari begins this address given at Lacan's Ecole Freudienne by implicitly refer­ encing the context of psychiatric institutions like La Borde. He notes that the position of the signifier in such a setting is "not identifiable from the

46

Guattari:S Diagrammatic Thought

classical analytical perspective," which is a bold claim to make at Lacan's own school, given the pains with which Lacan had, as we saw above, mapped the myectory of the signifier in private, office-bound analysis

( GR 148/ RM

277) .

Guattari therefore pulls together some of this tinkering with signs in order to reformulate his old problem of importing psychoanalytic tech­ niques into the psychiatric hospital. He presents the matrix in support of the paper's central premise that "dual analysis and institutional analysis, whatever their theoretical arguments, essentially differ as a result of the different range of semiotic means that one and the other bring into play. The semiotic components of institutional psychotherapy are much more numerous"

( GR 152/ RM 283).

He finds that psychoanalysts are wrong to "have turned analysis into an exercise of the sheer contemplation of sliding signifiers" because, as he will later state in an interview, "The psyche, in essence, is the resultant of multiple and heterogeneous components. It engages, assuredly, the register of language, but also non-verbal means of communication"

( GR 153/RM 285; CY 204) .

His essay enumerates and maps these additional kinds of "semiotic component" brought into play in the institution. I characterize this drawing and essay as "metamodeling" because they take bits and pieces of other models, in an attempt to solve a specific, singular problem.

Guattari's matrix models the coming into existence of the various "semi­ otic components" which for him constitute an inventory of raw materials and spare parts used not only by language, but also by many other types of messages, signals, modes of expression, or transmissions which are essential to many processes at work in social, ecological, cellular, and atomic systems. One of the main purposes of the matrix is to demonstrate the differences among these various components, because Guattari finds that linguists tend to interpret

all

message transmission in terms of language, for exam­ ple referring to mathematics as the "language" of physics, or talking about "genetic writing." He objects that "It would be ridiculous to suggest that the same system of signs is at work at once in the physico-chemical, the biologi­ cal, the human, and the machinic fields," and so he sets out to construct a semiotics which can account for signifying speech

(parole),

scientific signs, technico-scientific machinisms, and social assemblages

(MR 133/

RM 336-337; MR 87/ RM 248) .

Encoding, transcoding, translating, com­ municating, transmitting information, expressing, speaking, writing-these acts are not

all

equivalent, are not carried out the same way in

all

domains, argues Guattari, nor do they all require language, or at least not always.

In his quest to establish differences among semiotic processes, Guattari divides semiotic components into three broad categories. The names of

In document Proyecto previo a la obtención de título de Magister en Educación mención Gestión del Aprendizaje mediado por TIC. (página 44-128)