Stefan Kristensen

FLESH AND THE MACHINE: TOWARDS A TRANSVERSAL

ONTOLOGY WITH MERLEAU-PONTY AND GUATTARI

Mon problème, c’est de repartir de la position de l’être-au-

monde à l’état naissant. Mais l’état naissant, ce n’est pas quelque
chose que l’on trouve tout fait devant soi. C’est quelque chose
qu’on construit et qu’on travaille.
Félix Guattari1

Flesh and Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Thinking

There is a risk of misunderstanding Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh by

equating it to Nature. Indeed, his use of expressions such as “wild being,”
“brute being,” and “prehuman world” suggest that flesh has something to
do with a world uncontaminated by the presence of humans. For example,
in the first chapter of Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty famously criticizes the
formalism and technicism of contemporary scientific practices; he sets this
“sort of absolute artificialism”2 in contrast with the sovereignty of the painter’s
production. The painter, he writes, is “without any other ‘technique’ than
the one that his eyes and hands are given by means of seeing, by means of
painting.”3 And if we turn to the last chapter of The Visible and the Invisible,
the very idea of understanding vision through the description of touching is
also an invitation to “detechnologize” the approach. These passages, among
others, suggest a stance against technological enhancements and a reliance on
the naturally inherited structure of the sentient body. In this sense, one might
easily build the image of a philosopher eager to show a return to nature and a
rejection of scientific and technical innovations on the ground that they might
turn us away from and diminish our perceptual capacities.
But this would be a misreading. First, Merleau-Ponty presents his description
of the painter’s world as a “world almost mad” because it is only visual,
vision itself considered separately as “delirium.” Painting, he also writes, is
“magic” because it conveys all the other sensorial dimensions through visual
means alone. As such, painting “aims at this feverish genesis of things in our
body.”4 And in fact, when he begins to question the way this whole system of
vision works, he mentions a technical device as a well-suited model for the
reversibility and reciprocity of perception characterizing the carnal relation

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with the visible experienced by many painters: the mirror. In these last lines
of the second chapter, Merleau-Ponty mentions a passage by Paul Schilder,
where he observes that we have the sensation of the heat of the surface of the
pipe not only on our fingers, but also in the merely visible space, in the mirror.5
It is not by chance that Schilder appears in the midst of his argument about
the painter’s body; indeed Schilder’s notion of the body schema and Merleau-
Ponty’s appropriation of it lead us to think about the unity of the sentient body
as an unlimited, possibly technically extended or enhanced body. As I have
shown elsewhere, and as Emmanuel de Saint Aubert also explains in his latest
book Être et chair,6 the notion of the body schema is absolutely central to the
very formation of the concept of the flesh and thus also to Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology.
As Schilder himself explains at the beginning of the third part of his
Image and Appearance of the Human Body, “The body-image expands
beyond the confines of the body. A stick, a hat, any kind of clothes, become
part of the body-image.”7 Since the body schema is nothing but the overall
unity of our perceptual capacities (of our being-towards-the-world), the link
between perception and motility, between the senses, is the principle of the
unity of subjectivity as such. But it is open to any modification by technical
means: the famous example of the blind man’s stick is the simplest and most
straightforward example. Actually, the formulation of the very notion of the
“postural schema” by the English neurologist Henry Head at the end of the
nineteenth century relies on this fact:

It is to the existence of these “schemata” that we owe the power of projecting our
recognition of posture, movement and locality beyond the limits of our own bodies
to the end of some instrument held in the hand. Without them we could not probe
with a stick, not use a spoon unless our eyes were fixed upon the plate. Anything
which participates in the conscious movement of our bodies is added to the model
of ourselves and becomes part of these schemata: a woman’s power of localization
may extend to the feather of her hat.8

When Merleau-Ponty writes in Eye and Mind that the painter “takes his body
with him,” that his body is all he has, we should understand the body in the
sense of this peculiar being as able to extend its structure indefinitely beyond
its organic structure. In the same chapter, he states that “every technique is a
‘technique of the body,’”9 quoting the famous article by Marcel Mauss. This
reference to Mauss invites us to revise our conception of technique: rather than
a structure aimed at being a substitute of an aspect of the living body, technique
is a means of modifying and extending the sensitivity of our bodies. This means
that machines actually play a crucial role in the very formation of meaning in
human life. But this connection between the body and the technical forms must
be examined more systematically: how is our corporeality to be interpreted if
it is always already intertwined with machines? What would the consequences
of this fact be for our understanding of nature and culture? Merleau-Ponty only
scarcely asks those questions, or says anything about the role machines play in

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the birth of meaning. He does, however, show the pre-reflective character of
the body schema, as well as its non-coincidence with the limits of the organism.
And also, in some working notes and lecture notes quoted and commented
upon by Saint Aubert, he emphasizes the originary intertwining of my body
schema and the body schema of the others and thus points to the fundamentally
social dimension of individual subjectivity. As Saint Aubert summarizes, “the
body schema reveals itself as an intercorporeal schema.”10 But since the social
world is always already traversed by machinic procedures and behaviors, or as
Mauss puts it, since technique can be defined as “an action which is effective
and traditional,”11 this intercorporeal schema must also be integrated into the
broader context of inherited modes of production and power relations.

The Body Schema and the Unconscious

The body schema is thereby a double being: it is on the one hand the ground
on which the perceptual field becomes visible, and on the other hand it is
open to virtually any kind of extension or enhancement as long as it can be
integrated into the perceptual and behavioral habits of the body. In order to
perform its task, it has to remain unconscious in the sense of a tacit condition
of the appearing of the perceptual field, in the sense of a necessary pre-
reflective condition of visibility, itself invisible. As Merleau-Ponty writes in
an unpublished working note quoted by Saint Aubert, “What is called a body
is an apparatus capable of such encroachments (annexation of the instruments
of action through habit).”12 Merleau-Ponty refers to this in his late texts as
a “carnal generality.”13 This generality refers to the adjustment of the body
schema to the world, as well as to the relation with other humans (and perhaps
also to other animals) that Schilder calls the “libidinal body.”
The famous sentence in the summary of the last lecture on nature, “Nature
and Logos,” characterizes the unconscious from the point of view of a
philosophy of the flesh as “contrary to the interpretations of the unconscious
in terms of ‘unconscious representations,’” and instead as “le sentir lui-
même.” Here, Merleau-Ponty points to a conception of the unconscious in
terms of an ontological generality on the prepersonal, or preobjective, level.
In this sense, Lacan was quite right in noting the “irreducible distance”
separating his own endeavor from that of his philosopher friend.14 Lacan’s
loyalty to the Freudian project amounts to a conception of the unconscious in
terms of meaning structures whereas Merleau-Ponty’s conception is centered
on the preverbal dimension of bodily life. My claim here is that this is exactly
(among other aspects) the issue at stake in Guattari’s opposition to Lacan,
who was in many respects his master: although Guattari never wrote directly
about his relation to Lacan, we can identify one major disagreement on the
very conception of the unconscious, namely the idea that it is not a realm of
meaning structures, but much more a realm of constant creation, of power
relations and bodily manifestations, in short an unconscious in reference to

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psychosis rather that neurosis, as Guattari and Deleuze write somewhere in
Anti-Oedipus.15 With all this, we already have the core of the notion of the
machine as Guattari develops it through the 1970s until his death in 1992.
The main sources of the following paragraphs are from his Anti-Oedipus,
written with Gilles Deleuze, his Machinic Unconscious, and his last, and
perhaps most readable book in spite of its title, Chaosmosis, as well as
numerous shorter texts and interviews, many of them recently published in
a volume entitled Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?.16 In the introduction to The
Machinic Unconscious, Guattari explains why he uses the term machine, or
machinic: it is, he writes, “to stress that [the unconscious] is populated not
only with images and words, but also with all kinds of machinisms that lead
it to produce and reproduce these images and words.”17 This sort of definition
is halfway circular, but it nevertheless hints that the machine in Guattari’s
sense is the energy of production that lies behind all sorts of meanings. This
productive/generative dimension is what characterizes the notion throughout
his work. In other words, there is the idea that the realm of meaning alone
does not suffice to explain how meaning changes, transforms. Or as he also
writes a few pages below, “chance and structure are the two greatest enemies
of freedom.”18
As it is well known, the key problem in Guattari’s and Deleuze’s thinking
is the force driving the formation and transformation of social structures,
psychological figures, and more generally all meaningful configurations in the
world, including biological organisms. This implies a very broad (and for this
reason quite puzzling) notion of the machine as a primary unit of production,
of transformation of forms. They write in this sense at the beginning of the
second chapter of Anti-Oedipus that “The earth is the primitive savage unity
of desire and production … While the ground [le sol] can be the productive
element and the result of appropriation, the Earth is the great unengendered
stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common
appropriation of the ground.”19 This role of the earth as the primary producer
of social bonds and appropriable means leads to the label “territorial machine,”
opening the possibility of a social system of power in line with what Lewis
Mumford called the “megamachine.”20 They name the earth a machine because
it performs two tasks: it codes the flows, and it has an immobile motor. They
write, “the primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is
already a social machine, a megamachine, that codes the flows of production,
the flows of means of production, of producers and consumers: the full body
of the goddess Earth gathers to itself the cultivable species, the agricultural
implements, and the human organs.”21 As is perhaps obvious in these two
passages, the machine is not merely a matter of guiding the flows of already
existing elements/substances, but the flowing is also a process of forming the
bodies involved, and thus also of forming the ways of perception. On this
argument, one last quote from Anti-Oedipus is particularly illustrative: “The
primitive territorial machine codes flows, invests organs, and marks bodies.
To such a degree that circulating – exchanging – is a secondary activity in

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comparison with the task that sums up all the others: marking the bodies who
are from the earth.”22
Deleuze and Guattari oppose the unity of the body founded on the needs of
the social machine to the phenomenological account of the body: they insist
on the precariousness of individual subjectivity considered from the point of
view of production whereas Merleau-Ponty and Schilder assume the point of
view of the individual. In either case, there is the claim that the meaningful
structure of the sensitive body does not coincide with the boundaries of the
individual organism. For example, when Schilder highlights the continuity
between the neurological and biological aspects and the psychological and
social aspects of the body schema,23 this resonates quite strongly with the
transversality of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach. In sum, I am suggesting
that the phenomenological direction of research into the social and libidinal
dimensions of the body schema are not only compatible with, but also
complementary to, Deleuze and Guattari’s development of the primitive
machine. This claim is based on the extension of the unity of the sentient body
beyond the boundaries of the physiological body and on the idea that this very
structure of the moving and sensing body is continuous with the technical
means of modification and/or enhancement endowed by the traditions in which
the individual life unfurls.24

The Power of the Tradition and the Notion of Machinic Phylum

Since the productive dimension of flesh, or the machine in Deleuze and

Guattari’s terms, never comes from nothing, it must always be based on a
previous situation, which in turn is based on a previous one, and so on. Deleuze
and Guattari call this temporal dimension of the machine the “machinic
phylum,” a notion much broader than the ordinary notion of tradition. The
notion is taken from biological taxonomy and refers to the fact that collective
and individual structures, body habits, modes of relations, and power structures
are inherited from history in a way analogous to the manner that physiological
structures of the animals are inherited from evolution. In the chapter on
“Nomadology” in A Thousand Plateaus, they define the machinic phylum
as “materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in
movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits
of expression.”25 Such a configuration is both natural (biological) and artificial
(man-made); it is in movement, constantly changing and triggering changes,
and this movement is a production of singularities. It is also a production of
“traits of expression,” a type of phenomenon at once creator of territories and
addressed towards others. The example they give after this definition is the
relation of the craftsperson to the wood; the craftsperson has no choice but
to follow the lines in the matter while working on a piece of wood, to follow
the path leading to the right type of wood in order to produce his pieces.Thus
the “machinic phylum” is the very movement of the matter (in this case the

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wood) from the forest to the craftsperson and further towards the consumer.
To follow this flow then is equivalent to forming one’s body, individually, in
order to be able to do the right movements and produce the right effects on
the given matter, and also collectively, in order to capture the flows of matter
(if it is produced elsewhere and must be imported) and be inserted into them
so as tobe able to produce the given objects. The craftsperson is then “the one
who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a machinic
phylum.”26 In other terms, a technological lineage is inseparable from the
inheritance of bodily habitus, shape, and characteristic movements, and also
from the processes allowing individuals to acquire a determined view of
themselves (that is, a sense of identity). The use of the phylum in the crafted/
industrial context is one of the most evident uses; it is quite easy to describe
the flows defining one particular type of matter such as wood or iron in terms
of a phylum. The issue at stake here is that Deleuze and Guattari understand
the phylum as a movement, as a flowing matter, and not as a static structure.
When they use the notion of phylum in a broader context, such as artistic
production (painting and music) in the chapter “On the Refrain” (ritournelle),
the phylum is the dimension of force behind a pictorial or musical production.
The political powers, they argue, are much keener to control the effects of the
“musical machinism” since the rhythmical and musical phyla are much more
powerful in this case than in the case of painting; this is because the political
force resides in the phyla that can be mobilized against the existing structures.
The individual action in this context consists, for the artist, in choosing the
right phylum in order to bestow more power upon his creation; it can never be
calculated, it can only be a bet.
The machinic phyla can be described according to two complementary
notions: faciality and the refrain. Guattari devotes two chapters of his Machinic
Unconscious to those notions, and one can also find two distinct chapters in
A Thousand Plateaus devoted to the same topic.27 In Guattari’s treatment of
these notions, the specificity of capitalist assemblage is at the center, whereas
the chapters written in common with Deleuze are more general. At first glance,
faciality refers to the visual features of a certain political/ontological/cultural
configuration; more precisely, it refers to the normative picture in relation to
which, or in contrast to which, a singular image might be perceived and trigger
a change in the overall configuration. The refrain refers to the auditory and
moving features of a given configuration. The notion is taken from studies
in animal behavior, where one can observe that, for example, a bird’s dance
or song has at least two closely linked functions: it delineates a territory
and it regulates the relations with the others. From an ontological point of
view, the dialectics of the machine and the preexistent configuration (what
Guattari and Deleuze name “agencement” (assemblage)) is prior to the action
of subjectivity. As they write in A Thousand Plateaus, “Machines are always
singular keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory.”28 In other words,
a machinic effect is the disturbing of a given assemblage. Individual action in
this respect is, as I just mentioned, an effect. The individual performance is

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an act of following, of choosing the best solutions in order to follow the flow
inherited from previous generations. The more ancient the flow (the machinic
phylum) is, the more powerful it is; if the artist has to create a phylum anew,
as the painter whose task is to recreate a new phylum for each new canvas,
she will be less influential in the social and political sphere; if on the contrary
the artist relies and reuses an already existing phylum, her creation will be
stronger.29
This is why faciality and the refrain are part of the “unconscious economy
of the socius,”30 as Guattari writes. They are mostly themselves unseen and
unmarked, since they pervade both the bodily habitus and modes of production,
the ideological set of values and the available paths of subjectivation.
Concerning the specifics of capitalist faciality, Guattari writes:

The empty and the invisible are masked and populated with simulacra which
will convey all kinds of proper names and will be tied up in deathly familial
and castration complexes. (On the side of refrains, temporalization will tend to
break down in a compulsory repetition which collides with infinity in an abstract,
eternal, punitive and absurd time). It is with this tangent of the black hole of the
individuated enunciation that Capital and the Libido establish their points of
junction (on condition of understanding the latter as the most deterritorialized result
of the set of the modes of semiotization of power formations and accepting the idea
that faciality and refrains can constitute themselves from essential components in
the unconscious economy of the socius).31

Capitalist faciality, the way the visual culture in the broadest sense is
structured, is characterized by a visual recognizability. On the machinic
unconscious:

Under the guise of making the observer and the observed communicate […] and
proposing a model of the machinic unconscious which encompasses the most diverse
components, am I not about to predict a generalized invasion of the scientific field
by “micropolitics” and the “subjective”? To this I will respond that the question
is not one of knowing “if spirit clarifies matter” but on the contrary to seek to
understand the operation of human subjectivity via the light of the machinisms of
molecular choices, such as we can see them at work on all stages of the cosmos. The
subjectivity here in question has nothing to do with a speech that inhabits the world,
with a transcendental and symbolic formalism that would animate it for all time.
Neither archetypal, nor structural, nor systemic, the unconscious such as I conceive
it arises from a machinic creationism.32

These long and at times cryptic passages from Guattari’s writings are quoted
in order to show the challenge of a creative and progressive use of the machinic
phylum in our late capitalist societies. As he notes together with Deleuze, there
is a “potential fascism” in music33 precisely owing to its more powerful and
more strongly rooted phyla. This might perhaps explain the difficulties in
which Guattari found himself in the 1980s, particularly concerning the fate of
his activism.34

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 Ecosophy and the Technical Machines

But Guattari soon managed to (somewhat) overcome his depression and

wrote a series of texts in the second half of the 1980s laying the ground for
the foundation of political ecology in France. One of the core ideas in this
endeavor was to show how “natural” ecosystems are in continuity with human
technologies (what he calls the “mechanosphere”), and how one can imagine
a use of those technologies in line with the needs and boundaries of biological
systems. He thus develops the idea of three ecologies (natural, social, and
mental) with reference to Gregory Bateson and his Ecology of the Mind.35

Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to
comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the
social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think “transversally.”
Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television
screens are populated, saturated, by “degenerate” images and statements. In the
field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely,
like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic
City; he “redevelops” by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor
families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent
of the dead fish of environmental ecology.36

In this passage, Guattari bundles together political, social, psychological

and even perceptual issues. This is not to say that individual behaviors are
the only causes of environmental destruction, nor does it suggest the contrary,
that the political structure determines everything; it is rather to point to the
intricacy of the two levels. And more importantly for my argument here, at
stake in this passage is the proper articulation of the “mecanosphere” (that is,
the human ecosystem) and “other ecosystems.” This articulation can only be
found if we strive to master the mecanosphere and become aware of the way all
sorts of machines actually direct and limit our capacities for action:

We might just as well rename environmental ecology machinic ecology, because

Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines, even, dare I
say it, of war machines. From time immemorial “nature” has been at war with life!
The pursuit of mastery over the mechanosphere will have to begin immediately if
the acceleration of techno-scientific progress and the pressure of huge population
increases are to be dealt with.37

This idea is not very far from David Abram’s call in The Spell of the
Sensuous for a renewed awareness of the way one fundamental machine,
the alphabet,38 influences our perceptual capacities. But in order to be able
to master the mechanosphere (neither refuse it nor accelerate it), Guattari
proposes a conception of technology as depending on the greater machine, a
conception sketching out a chiasm between the living and the machinic. As he
explains to John Johnston in June 1992,

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 For me, technè is but one aspect of the machinic phyla. There are many other
machinic phyla than the technological phyla […]; we have to articulate the phyla
of technics, of the sciences, of mathematics, but also of poetry, of the socius, of
the desiring machines, etc. We then have a machinic heterogenetic intertwining
[imbrication] that is the opposite of this death bringing [Heideggerian] vision of
technics.39

This intricacy, or intertwining, between the different machinic phyla is here

founded on a peculiar conception of autopoiesis: as it is well known, Varela
and Maturana define the notion as the property of an organism able to renew
its components by itself. Guattari remarks that Varela forgets the fact that
organisms are born and that they die, which entails that they need other beings
in order to come into existence, their existence is embedded in genetic phyla,
in sedimented (instituted) forms. In other terms, no being is autopoietic in the
full sense, even biological organisms are allopoietic with regard to their birth,
death, and the very way they maintain their life; conversely the allopoietic
machines become to a certain extent autopoietic when they are connected
to the human body, which is why Guattari can speak about an “autopoietic
node in the machine,” or a “proto-subjectivity of the machine.”40 Our body
is formed, as body schema, in the use and interaction with machines (as
Merleau-Ponty himself often underlines, as for instance in the Phenomenology
of Perception with the example of the typist), and is thus a crucial part of what
makes machines function. The human body, in the sense of an organic unity,
would then play the role of a hinge, or an interface between the biosphere and
the mecanosphere. The issue of ecology in this perspective is in the mastery
of the mecanosphere in the precise sense of another power relation between
machinic phyla: a priority of the aesthetic over the political.

Ontology and the Aesthetic Paradigm

The problem in this attempt at articulating Merleau-Ponty’s and Guattari’s

views on the machine is to understand the meaning of ontology. Guattari is
critical of phenomenological ontology: as he says to the Japanese philosopher
Kuniichi Uno, he is interested in the “conditions of possibility of an ontological
approach,” but this “cannot be a phenomenological approach and is necessarily
a meta-modelizing approach.”41 Such an approach is an “ontological pluralism”
that focuses on the dimension of production and differentiation, and not on the
definition of what being is. In another interview, with Toni Negri, Guattari
explains that he likes the word ontology, and even that he tends to use it too
much to speak about all the “sites of autopoietic affirmation, repetitions,
insistences, intensities,” all of which pertain to a “somehow animistic vision.”42
Just before the sentence about ontology, he talks about the Husserlian notion of
the life-world, pointing to the necessity of delineating new horizons for social
struggle and change. From this and many other passages in Guattari’s own
texts, we can understand that ontology is the name for the multiple processes

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of subjectivation conceived as conditions of possibility of the creation of new
forms in the world, which looks very similar to David Morris’s reading of
Merleau-Ponty’s reception of evolutionary biology.43
Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s ontological project shares this very concern, if we
read in The Visible and the Invisible the passage where he describes being
surrounding us as “a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity
and generality, brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and
antinodes of the same ontological vibration.”44 I would like to argue for a
reading of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology where the very notion of “being” is not
univocal but considered as the source of a constant diversification of beings.
He explains what he understands by the expression “nature at the first day”
(“La nature est au premier jour”) in a working note of The Visible and the
Invisible dated November 1960: “This does not mean: myth of originary
indivision and coincidence as return.”45 He strongly argues against an ontology
of the originary as being in a temporal distance, in a remote past, insisting
on the endless productivity and diversification of being in the present. From
such a point of view, the question of how new forms and things emerge is
obviously the central question, as it is also in Guattari’s meta-modelization
project. Guattari’s specific project is characterized by at least three aspects:
1. the political dimension present throughout all levels, that is, an attention
towards the constraints in which a particular subjectivity is emerging; 2. an
approach to subjectivation that places complexity already at the core of all
processes; 3. his grounding of subjectivation processes infour “ontological
factors:” flows, machinic phyla, existential territories, and incorporeal
universes. These factors are four in order to avoid any reductionism. They are
aimed at explaining the processes of singularization; they are all transversal
across the traditional divide between mind and matter. The three latter ones can
find phenomenological equivalents: the machinic phyla are instituted forms
opening up horizons of the emergence of novelty; existential territories are
landscapes, fields of possibilities as they are presented in front of a subjectivity;
and the idea of incorporeal universes is quite close to the Proustian “sensitive
idea,” an incarnate generality.
Guattari coins this approach the “aesthetic paradigm” in Chaosmosis, his
main book from that period, which was published shortly after his death in
1992. To speak about an “aesthetic paradigm” means essentially two things:
it means that being is considered from the point of view of creation, of the
emergence of new forms, and it means that artistic creation plays the role of a
model for this. As he writes about this last point,

Patently, art does not have a monopoly on creation, but it takes its capacity to
invent mutant coordinates to extremes: it engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and
unthinkable qualities of being.46

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 This paradigmatic position of art is quite familiar to Merleau-Pontians – what
is less familiar perhaps, although not opposed to phenomenological thinking,
is the ethical and political consequences of the aesthetic paradigm: “because to
speak of creation is to speak of the responsibility of the creative instance with
regard to the thing created, inflection of the state of things, bifurcation beyond
pre-established schemas.”47 The role of responsibility towards the created thing
is also the general principle of his political project, “ecosophy,” that he defines
as “a responsibility towards being as creativity.”48 So I’ll end with the following
suggestion: doesn’t this sentence echo with Merleau-Ponty’s reflection in the
first chapter of Eye and Mind about the responsibility of the artist, and with his
suggestion that painting is the most political art form in spite of the tendency
of many a painter to withdraw from the social world?

Stefan Kristensen
stefan.kristensen@bluewin.ch

NOTES :

1 Kuniichi Uno and Félix Guattari, “Entretien: Chaosmose, vers une nouvelle sensibilité,”
Inter: Art actuel 72 (1999): 18-21.
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted
Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 352.
3 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 353.
4 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 358.
5 Here is the relevant passage: “The mirror emerges because I am both seeing and visible,
because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that
reflexivity. Through it, my outside becomes complete. Everything that is most secret about
me passes into that face, that flat, closed being of which I was already dimly aware, from
having seen my reflection mirrored in water. Schilder observes that, smoking a pipe before
a mirror, I feel the sleek, burning surface of the wood not only where my fingers are but
also in those glorious fingers, those merely visible ones inside the mirror.” Merleau-Ponty,
“Eye and Mind,” 359. The reference to Paul Schilder is in his Image and Appearance of the
Human Body, (London: International Universities Press, 1950), 223-24.
6 Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Être et chair. Du corps au désir: L’habilitation ontologique
de la chair (Paris: Vrin, 2013).
7 Schilder, Image and Appearance, 213. The example of the stick as well as the typing
example appear also in the Phenomenology of Perception.
8 Henry Head and Gordon Holmes, “Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions,”
Brain 34 (1911): 102-254, 188.
9 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 359. Marcel Mauss’ lecture was first published in
Journal de Psychologie XXXII, no. 3-4 (1936) and an English translation was published
in Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70-88.
10 De Saint Aubert, Être et chair, 130.
11 Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 75.
12 De Saint Aubert, Être et chair, 107.
13 Ibid., 105.
14 See his Second Seminar on The Ego in Freud’s Theory and the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 77. This judgment
about Merleau-Ponty is given on the next day of a lecture by the philosopher at the
“Société psychanalytique de Paris,” January 1955. There are no known traces of a

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 transcript of this lecture.
15 See for example Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983), 122.
16 Félix Guattari,The Machinic Unconscious , trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2011); Chaosmosis, An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bain
and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Qu’est-ce que
l’écosophie? (Paris: Lignes/IMEC, 2013).
17 Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, 10.
18 Ibid., The Machinic Unconscious, 14.
19 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 140-41.
20 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1, Technics and Human Development
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). Deleuze and Guattari refer to chapter
9, “The Design of the Megamachine,” which was translated into French under the title
“Le Première Megamachine,” in the journal Diogène 55 (1966): 3-20.
21 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 142.
22 Ibid., 144
23 Saint Aubert, Être et chair, 40.
24 See above my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s quotation of Mauss’ sentence “every
technique is a technique of the body,” and his subsequent definition of technique as
tradition or habitus.
25 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 409.
26 Ibid.
27 In The Machinic Unconscious see chap. 4, “Signifying Faciality, Diagrammatic
Faciality,” and chap. 5, “The Time of Refrains.” In A Thousand Plateaus see chap. 7,
“Year Zero: Faciality,” and chap. 11, “1837: Of the Refrain.”
28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 334.
29 Ibid., 348: “Painters, at least as commonly portrayed, may be much more open socially,
much more political, and less controlled from without and within. That is because each
time they paint, they must create or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on the
basis of bodies of light and color they themselves produce, whereas musicians have at
their disposal a kind of germinal continuity, even if it is latent or indirect, on the basis
of which they produce sound bodies.” This claim should be put in discussion with
Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the little political relevance of music in “Eye and Mind,”
which is a task for another paper.
30 Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, 93.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 155.
33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 348.
34 He used to talk about the 1980s as the “winter years” and this was not only due to the
external political situation.
35 The term “ecosophy” was actually introduced by the Norwegian thinker Arne Næss,
but to my knowledge, Guattari never quotes him.
36 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The
Athlone Press, 2000), 43.
37 Ibid., 43.
38 See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996),
chapter 4: «Animism and the Alphabet.
39 Guattari, Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?, 325.
40 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 37.
41 Uno and Guattari, “Entretien,” 18.
42 Guattari, Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?, 294.
43 In his recent essay on “Being as Creativity”, presented at the Fortieth Annual Meeting
of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, October 1,
2015.

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44 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 105.
45 Ibid., 267.
46 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 106
47 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 107.
48 Guattari, Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?, 326.

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