Refrains of lost time Collapse, refrain, abstract

• Published in: Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics pp. 88 - 98
• Main Author: Dewsbury, JD
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2019
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Individuated Identity; Guattari's Work; Invisible Realities; Fukushima Nuclear Disaster; Earth Quakes; Vice Versa; Significant Redundancies; Ethico Aesthetic Paradigm; MIT Medium Lab; DVD Sale; DVD; Occupy Wall Street; Abstract Machinism; Lost Time; Singularising Events; UK Border Agency; Fac Simile; Intensive Differences; Vocational Importance; Minor Aesthetics; Sensorial Foldings; Molecular Revolutions
• ISBN: 9781138183490; 1138183490
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315645827-8

A key theme of Guattari's work was in finding ways to move beyond the traditional systems of signification in order to capture the points of singularity of a situation. This chapter explores the way Guattari invents new cartographies of apprehension in the name of the abstract machinism he presents in The Machinic Unconscious. The tenor here is in valorising the movement of forces that are not yet directly locatable within the discursive frameworks, both institutional and personal, that we have available to us. The chapter spotlights Guattari's reading of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and the refrain of the 'little phrase of music' rendered through its multiple assemblages of enunciation in Guattari's "Refrains of Lost Time". Spotlighting the refrains of this phrase of music serves to highlight how abstractions always draw out the singularities of the present, scrambling both the past and the future. The machinism of these abstractions, Guattari argues, enables us to open up our thinking towards the invisible forces of desire that map out new modes of subjectivity and meaning. In juxtaposing a scientific ethos with an artistic style, I argue, Guattari presents social science with a new method for rethinking the individual that gives expression to the many invisible realities that script our collective becomings. This chapter suggests that F. Guattari sees a way of exemplifying the complexity of academics' emergence, as a project rather than as seemingly consistent entity, and yet with some consistency against the multiplicity and chaos of so many disintegrating perspectives. The vocational importance of Guattari's work is twofold; namely, first, in moving away from the traditional use of language as the only means of expression for the unconscious and, second, in refusing to structure academics' understanding of the unconscious upon signifying horizons. Music, sex, and the socius are always present on the same scene, but they are awaiting an assemblage to make them work together. It is in this regard, that Guattari would argue that In Search of Lost Time is not directed towards the past, as a kind of psychoanalytical anamnesis, "but towards a construction of things to come, towards a proliferation of the future in the act of creation".